Blame. Who Knew What When? 249

This fall on a warm pleasant evening I sat outside visiting my new neighbor. We were looking around grateful to live in the UP and appreciative of nature’s beauty. I guided the conversation to climate change and the problems we must deal with to protect nature and man.

“You know”, he said, “your generation is the one who has done nothing, leaving us to fix this climate mess.”

At 71 I am quite aware my generation, the Baby Boomer Generation, will be remembered as the generation who let the climate slide to the dire state we find it in today. It is easy to lay blame on the Baby Boomers. At one time I was very critical of my generation until I did research into psychology and propaganda.

What I found was nearly everyone (me included, as I have been conned) is subject to being misled. The psychological reasons we are susceptible to a scam or to a con are many and varied. The bottom line is we easily convince ourselves of things that are not reality. We are especially vulnerable if people skilled at deceiving others are employed to misinform us.

My reply to my friend was, “Yes, we are the generation which did not respond to climate change when we could have stabilized it. In our defense, there is no generation in the history of man, not even the Germans who were deluged with Nazi propaganda prior and during WWII, that have been subject to such advanced disinformation. If you want to know more”, I recommended, “watch the Frontline Documentary, “The Power of Big Oil”, or Netflix’s Documentary, “Black Gold”, or the documentary, “Merchants of Doubt.” Hitler’s chief of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, would blush with envy at the sophistication of the propaganda leveled at my generation.”

Science Magazine, January 13^th, 2023 issue, brought part of this deception to the forefront. The oil giant Exxon was advised, by their own scientists, in the late 1970s about the consequences of burning their primary energy source, oil. Recently journalists and scholars have been digging deeper into the oil behemoths records to see just how accurate their scientists were. In short, they were as accurate as independent scientists who worked in academia or the government. In fact, their work and warnings preceded other scientists. Their work was especially accurate and skillful when it came to the projected rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide and the resultant rise in the earth’s temperature.

Their warnings were often explicit. Fossil fuel products could lead to, “dramatic environmental effects before the year 2050.”

This essential investigation of coal, oil, and gas archives by journalists and academics is especially relevant today as we scramble to find the money to transition to clean energy and fund adaptation measures needed to survive. Dozens of cities, counties, and states are suing oil and gas companies to fund survival strategies. All this could have been avoided if the science findings by scientists employed by oil companies had not been suppressed for decades.  In fact, they did not only suppress the science, but “Exxon Mobil worked to deny it—including overemphasizing uncertainties, denigrating climate models, mythologizing global cooling, feigning ignorance about the discernability of human caused warming, and staying silent about the possibility of stranded fossil fuel assets in a carbon constrained world.”

Here is the link to the full magazine article: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abk0063  

If you suspect petroleum industry may have known even earlier about the damage fossil fuels could do to the climate here is a portion of a speech warning the American Petroleum Industry, API, in 1959. It was made by the guest speaker and esteemed scientist, Edward Teller who was a Hungarian-American theoretical physicist who is colloquially know as the father of the hydrogen bomb:

“I am to talk to you about energy in the future. I will start by telling you why I believe that the energy resources of the past must be supplemented. ... And this, strangely, is the question of contaminating the atmosphere. ... Whenever you burn conventional fuel, you create carbon dioxide. ... Carbon dioxide has a strange property. It transmits visible light but it absorbs the infrared radiation which is emitted from the earth. Its presence in the atmosphere causes a greenhouse effect. ... It has been calculated that a temperature rise corresponding to a 10 per cent increase in carbon dioxide will be sufficient to melt the icecap and submerge New York. All the coastal cities would be covered, and since a considerable percentage of the human race lives in coastal regions, I think that this chemical contamination is more serious than most people tend to believe.”

We know who, we know what, and we know when.