Corruption of Fossil Fuel industry
The fossil fuel industry knew that their products are dangerous to human health and safety, and would create unnatural global heating that would result in climate and ecological breakdown that is dangerous to human health, safety, and survival. They are making record profits while ignoring climate activists and lobbying governments to subsidize and protect them.
Read a roundup of the headlines:
“Capitalism is not designed to look several generations down the road. It is not designed to sacrifice for the greater good. It is designed to maximize profits. To pump every last barrel of oil on Earth, sell it, take the money and build a luxurious space ship to leave the planet that has been destroyed by burning all of that gas is a perfectly rational course of action according to the logic of capitalism. As long as there is a trillion dollars a year to be made, the fossil fuel industry will take the money. It is enough money to build a nice villa far, far away from the wars and droughts and floods and wildfires that fossil fuels are causing.
These profits are illusory. They are plagued by an externality large enough to outweigh a trillion dollars a year – the costs that the climate crisis will impose on billions of people who are alive now and many generations to come. The fact that capitalism is unable to properly price a barrel of oil to account for all the pain it will cause to your grandchildren whose home is wiped out by rising seas is proof that the whole idea of an impartial system of costs and rewards for labor and risks is a big sham.”
The Guardian, The world is ablaze and the oil industry just posted record profits. It’s us or them
“Oil and gas companies are betting on a future in which their production pushes global heating beyond 2.5C, a new report reveals.
Shell, TotalEnergies and Chevron are among the majors which recently approved $166 billion (€157bn) of investment in new oil and gas fields over the next decade, according to financial think tank Carbon Tracker.
But more than a third of this total (€55bn) is going towards sites that will only be needed if demand for the fossil fuels grows to a point where the world tips over the 2.5C threshold.”
Euro news, Major offenders: These oil and gas companies are tipping the world toward climate catastrophe
“The head of the United Nations has accused the world’s biggest fossil fuel companies of refusing to abandon a business model at odds with human survival despite knowingly putting the world on course for a climate meltdown decades ago.
Speaking at the Davos summit of business and political leaders, the UN secretary general, António Guterres, launched a strong attack on the world’s leading oil companies, many of which are represented at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting at the Swiss resort.
Guterres said recent revelations that ExxonMobil knew back in the 1970s that its core product was “baking our planet”, made “big oil” similar to the tobacco companies that knew smoking led to cancer.
“Just like the tobacco industry, they rode roughshod over their own science. Big Oil peddled the big lie … And like the tobacco industry, those responsible must be held to account,” he said.”
The Guardian, UN head accuses fossil fuel firms of business models ‘inconsistent with human survival’
“Climate projections reported by ExxonMobil scientists between 1977 and 2003 were accurate and skillful in predicting subsequent global warming and contradicted the company's public claims, a new Harvard study shows.
In the first ever systematic assessment of the fossil fuel industry's climate projections, researchers at Harvard University and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research have put a number on what 'Exxon knew' decades ago about climate science: that fossil fuel burning would lead to 0.20 ± 0.04 degrees Celsius of global warming per decade.
The findings, published in the peer-reviewed journal Science and summarized by a single chart displaying every global warming projection reported by Exxon and ExxonMobil Corp scientists between 1977 and 2003, are based on statistical analyses of never-previously reported data buried in the company's own documents.”
Phys.org, New study puts a number on what 'Exxon knew' decades ago about climate science
More Reading
Union of Concerned Scientists, The Case Against ExxonMobil, Chevron, and other Fossil Fuel Companies