The Petroleum Papers: Inside the Far-Right Conspiracy to Cover Up Climate Change | Geoff Dembicki
Burning fossil fuels will cause catastrophic global warming: this is what American oil executives were told by scientists in 1959. They chose to ignore that warning. Instead they went ahead in developing one of the largest, most polluting oil sources in the world – the oil sands of Alberta, Canada.
In The Petroleum Papers, Geoff Dembicki documents how specific oil companies such as Exxon, Koch Industries and Shell had an early awareness of the relationship between climate change and fossil fuels but then deliberately made efforts to discredit the climate science and prevent government regulation.
The Petroleum Papers covers the history of the oil and gas industry in Canada; the warning given to political leaders and oil company executives in 1959 by Edward Teller; and the climate science undertaken by Exxon in the 1970s, when the company measured ocean carbon dioxide levels.
In addition to studying the impact, oil companies also researched potential solutions. In 1991, Exxon subsidiary Imperial Oil concluded that starting an emissions trading scheme and a carbon tax could help curb climate change. The book documents that the companies did everything that they could to ensure solutions were not implemented. Funding of front organisations and think tanks by the Koch brothers and others, was done via intermediaries. Strategies to prevent solutions being implemented shifted from discrediting science to greenwashing and lobbying against government policy to limit emissions.
