The Time America Almost Stopped Climate Change
First and foremost, thank you so much for taking that little trip down memory lane with me. It's easy to forget that there was a time when the greenhouse effect wasn't politically controversial, and Exxon was the world leader in climate science. There's probably a good utopian novel about what would have happened if a few things had gone differently. Oh well.
The Road Not Taken by Inside Climate News is a fantastic source of information.
RUN DON’T WALK to Amy Westervelt’s Drilled podcast. It is truly one of the greatest resources on the disinformation campaigns the fossil fuel industry perpetrated.
Our Changing Climate’s video is great.
Second thought has a good one about this topic.
Sources & Citations
The Revelle and Seuss paper from 1956 that establishes a lot of the carbon dioxide recording.
Humble Oil (now Exxon) by Brannon et. al references Seuss' work extensively and establishes their understanding of the CO2 concentration increase and the GHG properties of CO2. They’re more hopeful the ocean will be able to act as a CO2 sponge for a little while, so … fingers crossed!
The report that started it all for Rafe Pomerance back in 1977
Internal Exxon memo from James Black 1977 (though it’s dated 1978 because that’s how goddamn long it took for things to get digitized back in the day).
The speech that Dr. E. E. David Jr. (President of Exxon Research and Development) gave in 1982
America Misled is a phenomenal piece by John Cook, Geoffrey Supran, Stephan Lewandowsky, Naomi Oreskes, Ed Maibach, and it details some of the more devious uses of climate misinformation.
Although it doesn’t have as much coverage of fossil fuel disinformation, Losing Earth by Nathaniel Rich is a great read. He dug so far into old records they’re still picking pieces of him out of the microfiche, but it was worth it.
I also got a lot of good clips from the Frontline piece about this topic. Here’s another Frontline, this time in text form.
Exxon’s Own Research Confirmed Fossil Fuels’ Role in Global Warming Decades Ago
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