The New York Times Magazine has published an entire issue devoted to a single investigative piece on climate change, which observes that by the late 1970s and early 1980s, “everybody knew” it was happening.
The conclusion is a major blow to climate activists, who have spent years engaging in a political campaign targeting energy companies for supposedly covering up the risks of climate change, and thus preventing global action.
The author, Nathaniel Rich, writes that from 1979 to 1989 humanity had the best opportunity it has ever had to solve global warming and that “nothing stood in our way – nothing except ourselves.”
Rich even goes as far as to say that “[a] common boogeyman today is the fossil-fuel industry,” but during the time when “everybody knew,” oil companies “including Exxon and Shell, made good-faith efforts to understand the scope of the crisis and grapple with possible solutions.”
This lengthy report shreds the narrative put out by anti-oil and gas activists in recent years. As Rich told PBS NewsHour:
“By 1979, there was a strong consensus within the scientific community about the nature of the problem. The fundamental science hasn’t really evolved since then. It’s only been refined really. There was no politicization of the issue throughout the decade. A number of prominent Republicans were leading the charge to insist on a major climate policy, and industry, which we now blame for much of our paralysis, had not turned against science or truth and if anything, especially in the early part of the decade, was engaged in trying to understand the problem and determine solutions…
“By the mid-50s, you had top government scientists speaking about the issue. You had major articles in Life Magazine and Time. So it wasn’t just industry that was following it. It was at the highest levels of government. Lyndon Johnson sent a special message to Congress in 1965 that discussed the problem.” (emphasis added)
If all of humanity was informed of the dangers of climate change in the 1970s and agreed that something needed to be done, how can activists lay the blame for global inaction at the feet of the industry and political partisanship? As Rich writes,
“The rallying cry of this multipronged legal effort is ‘Exxon Knew.’ It is incontrovertibly true that senior employees at the company that would later become Exxon, like those at most other major oil-and-gas corporations, knew about the dangers of climate change as early as the 1950s. But the automobile industry knew, too, and began conducting its own research by the early 1980s, as did the major trade groups representing the electrical grid. They all own responsibility for our current paralysis and have made it more painful than necessary. But they haven’t done it alone.
“The United States government knew. Roger Revelle began serving as a Kennedy administration adviser in 1961, five years after establishing the Mauna Loa carbon-dioxide program, and every president since has debated the merits of acting on climate policy. Carter had the Charney report, Reagan had ‘Changing Climate’ and Bush had the censored testimony of James Hansen and his own public vow to solve the problem. Congress has been holding hearings for 40 years; the intelligence community has been tracking the crisis even longer.
“Everybody knew. In 1958, on prime-time television, ‘The Bell Science Hour’ — one of the most popular educational film series in American history — aired ‘The Unchained Goddess,’ a film about meteorological wonders, produced by Frank Capra, a dozen years removed from ‘It’s a Wonderful Life,’ warning that ‘man may be unwittingly changing the world’s climate’ through the release of carbon dioxide. ‘A few degrees’ rise in the Earth’s temperature would melt the polar ice caps,’ says the film’s kindly host, the bespectacled Dr. Research. ‘An inland sea would fill a good portion of the Mississippi Valley. Tourists in glass-bottomed boats would be viewing the drowned towers of Miami through 150 feet of tropical water.’ Capra’s film was shown in science classes for decades.
“Everyone knew — and we all still know.” (emphasis added)
This conclusion – that #EveryoneKnew – is even supported by activists, though they haven’t yet followed their arguments to their logical conclusion.
Groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists and Greenpeace were quick to follow #ExxonKnew with #ShellKnew and #UtilitiesKnew, blaming every company they don’t like while failing to acknowledge their own amnesia on climate change.
The idea that energy companies “knew everything there was to know about climate change,” as Bill McKibben likes to say, and that the rest of us didn’t know about it until James Hansen testified before Congress in 1988, “is one of the worst examples we have of the cultural amnesia of this country and especially around this issue,” Rich told NewsHour.
Confirming that Rich’s narrative is a direct threat to the multi-million-dollar campaign they have waged in recent years, anti-energy activists intensely criticized the report before it was even released.
The loudest rebuttal came from Hunter Cutting, a director of strategic communications for Climate Nexus, a project of the Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.
The Rockefellers have funded every aspect of the #ExxonKnew campaign, and are no doubt alarmed by the New York Times contradicting the very basis for their campaign.
The activist group 350.org also condemned the story shortly after it was published.
.@NYTmag's #LosingEarth argues that thanks to "human nature," we've lost the climate fight.
Maybe news to NYT, but a movement millions strong knows who's really to blame—fossil fuel billionaires. And we sure as hell haven't lost yet. #RiseForClimate https://t.co/3zrSvXR42v
— 350 dot org (@350) August 1, 2018
For several hours after the report was released, the umbrella group for the #ExxonKnew campaign dedicated its Twitter page to criticizing Rich’s narrative and retweeting others who were scrambling to control the damage.
Rich’s story ultimately concludes that it’s too simplistic to point your finger at one company, industry, or political party for inaction on climate change, which is a complex global problem.
The issue was receiving mainstream media attention and was the subject of multiple Congressional hearings in the 1970s and 1980s, long before the supposed “disinformation campaign” that environmental activists cite ever began.
It may not have been the intent of New York Times Magazine to throw cold water on a fringe environmental activists campaign, but the damage has clearly been done. The attempt at damage control from the #ExxonKnew campaign is only beginning.
Read more at EID Climate
So, everyone knew about global warming in the 1970’s, the decade of the big new age ice scare. This doesn’t make sense.
There was action that could have been taken in 1970 that would have kept emissions to 50% the level that they are now. Since 1970 the population has doubled. If it had been kept flat and immigration into the industrial nations wasn’t aloud, that 50% level would have been achieved.
Of course, who knew about anthropological global warming is a silly question because it doesn’t exist.
I see and hear about these eco-wackos ranting on about CLIMATE CRINIMALS and ROBERT KENNEDY Jr and his mindless banter then Bill Nye the FAKE SCIENCE GUY and the leaders from various Eco-Wacko groups living in their fancy mansions who not about to give up their lifestyles while they demand we all live as one with nature Their the typical DO AS I SAY NOT AS I DO liberals
The “who knew ” campaign is a Hail Mary shot as the clock runs out and the climate crooks know it . Tax payer funded , tax payer risk and a great big pot of gold for contingency lawyers hoping some shame gold will fall out of big oils pockets . Sorry kids … the game is over . It was a man made lie , gross exaggeration and a well orchestrated fraud that didn’t just cost tax payers $trillions world wide , it costs
tens of thousands of people their lives .
The real ” who knew ” lawsuit and criminal proceedings should be against the lying /misleading con-men that pulled the job off . They knew exactly what they were doing . Look to the founders of Climate Exchange , look to those who edited and doctored UN / IPCC reports to create a fake /misleading narrative , look to climate scientists who purposely exaggerated climate model methodology , look to the
management of the EPA that did the bidding of their activist/political masters .
The global warming fraud was a carefully planned con job and a gang rape of tax payers .
What I find ludicrous about the article’s claim that we could have done something about “Global Warming” back in ’79-’89 is there was no way back then to cut out our burning of fossil fuels then given that forty years later with advances in wind and solar power as well as electric vehicles we still are no closer to being “carbon-free”. The only way to do it is to destroy the global economy, kill 90+% of the human population and go back to living in mud huts with short and brutal lives. These people live in some kind of fantasy land.
I can still remember all this poppycock over 40 years ago when i was in High School of wearing Gas Masks or cities under giant domes It seems the earth is not as fragile as we have been lead to beleive and al this TEN(10)YEARS TO SAVE THE PLANET way back in the 1980’s and 1990’s and still they blabber this hogwash Paul Ehrlich and his fellow doomsayers False Prophets
And here we are 3-4 decades later and I’ve yet to see what the planetary destruction from this global warming. In fact global temperatures have flatlined for most of that time. So guess it’s good we didn’t totally destroy our economies for something that surely doesn’t look like much of an issue.