by Naomi Klein
Unlike today, political parties had not yet split into completely opposite camps. It really seemed as if the stage was set for politicians all over the world to come together and save what Time had called our “Endangered Earth.” In fact, in 1988 hundreds of scientists and political advisers met in Toronto, Canada. At the historic World Conference on the Changing Atmosphere, they talked for the first time about targets for lowering emissions. Toward the end of 1988, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—the leading source of scientific information on the climate threat—held its first session.
When I look back at the climate news from 1988, it really did seem that a major change had been within reach. Now, though, I see that year as a turning point, because tragically, the chance for change slipped away. The United States abandoned international climate agreements that it had helped negotiate. The rest of the world settled for rules that had no real penalties if countries failed to live up to them. And predictably, they didn’t.
What happened to the urgency and determination that so many people had felt about climate change at the end of the 1980s? In his 2018 article in the New York Times, Rich put forward a theory: “All the facts were known, and nothing stood in our way. Nothing, that is, except ourselves.” Human beings, he wrote, “are incapable of sacrificing present convenience to forestall a penalty imposed on future generations.”
In other words, people who are comfortable today aren’t willing to change their way of life, even if it will harm everyone in the future. We are wired, Rich said, to “cast the long term out of our minds, as we might spit out a poison.”
This is the “human nature” explanation of why governments have failed so spectacularly to take big, meaningful action against climate change. It says that we let our best chance to tackle climate change slip by because the harmful effects were in the future and did not seem as urgent as our need to continue our way of life. This explanation says that even when our survival may be at stake, we cannot cope with big, complicated problems that require all of us to work together.
But “human nature” is not to blame. Not everyone in 1988 threw their hands into the air and said, “Oh, well, there’s nothing we can do.” Political leaders in the developing world were calling for legally binding action. So were Indigenous Peoples.
Everything pointed toward real progress against climate change in 1988. So what went wrong? If human nature is not to blame, what is?
An epic case of historical bad timing.
Just as governments were getting serious about setting limits on fossil fuels, another global revolution went into overdrive, rearranging economies and societies. It grew out of the principles you read about in chapter 3—the ones that had contributed to weakening New Orleans’s preparations for a hurricane. Governments and societies that adopt these principles are generally against regulations that limit or control what companies can do. They see the “free market”—the buying and selling of goods and services—as the solution to most problems. A related idea is that everyone in the world should adopt a way of life based on rapid consumption, such as fast food, fast fashion and electronics, and private cars rather than public transit and bicycles. Even though we know this way of life produces a lot of waste, it is thought to be good because it drives profit and economic growth.
These views eventually remade every major economy on the planet. They clashed with climate science, which told us that certain unregulated industries were heating the planet. They clashed with the idea that governments should then regulate those industries and companies for the public good. They also clashed with the idea that we all need to find less wasteful ways to live.
To meet the climate challenge, governments would have had to set stiff regulations on polluters so that the flow of greenhouse gases would be slowed. They would have had to invest in large-scale programs to help all of us change the way we power our lives, live in cities, and move ourselves around. But that would have meant a head-on battle with the economic ideas that had grown so strong. Meanwhile, countries signed trade agreements that made sensible climate actions—such as favoring local green industry, or refusing oil pipelines or other polluting projects—illegal under international law because they interfered with business.
Our planet was the victim of bad timing. At the very moment when James Hansen presented the world with clear evidence of climate change, corporations had grown so powerful that governments refused to do what was necessary to halt the warming.
And before long, scientists and activists had to fight more than just business interests in the battle against climate change. They soon faced claims that the problem didn’t even exist. This claim is called climate change denial. In spite of all the scientific evidence, some people deny that climate change is real.
DENIERS AND LIARS
When climate change began to make news, the corporate think tanks that had promoted the crusade for unregulated free markets saw the news as a threat to their ideas and projects. If “business as usual,” based on burning fossil fuels, really was driving us toward climate tipping points that could threaten civilization, then that crusade would have to come to a screeching halt. The ideas behind the drive for unregulated free markets would lose their grip.
Our global economy would have to stop relying on fossil fuels. Pollution-creating activities would be widely banned, with big fines for violations. New government-funded programs would be created around the world to reshape industry, housing, and transportation. Funds would go toward green-energy projects such as wind farms and electric trains, for example, rather than toward benefits such as tax breaks for fossil-fuel companies. Properties and services that had once been run by governments but had been sold or leased to private industry, such as utility companies, railroads, and printing offices, might return to government control. And most threatening of all to a market-based economic system, we would all have to question the idea that endless consumption is good for us and can be sustained forever.
The very idea of climate change terrified some people. They called it a plot to “turn America socialist.” (It isn’t.) Some even claimed that those who warned of climate change secretly wanted to turn the country over to the United Nations. (They don’t.)
Many corporate think tanks did not necessarily buy into these extreme ideas, but they did decide to champion the notion at the heart of them all: that climate change isn’t real. Or, if global warming is real, they said, it’s a natural process that has nothing to do with human activity. They promoted this message by unleashing a flood of books, articles, and free “teaching aids” for schools.
Some of these publications claimed that climate change is a hoax. Others tried to pick holes in the science of climate change. The evidence for global warming is wrong, they said. They sometimes focused on an example of scientists changing their projections when they gained new data, as if that meant that the whole idea of climate projections was wrong. They even simply pointed to a severe snowstorm and said, “See, global warming is a hoax,” ignoring the fact that despite its name, global warming can make severe snowstorms more likely.
Some scientists have supported these views, but they are a very small minority. As of 2019, more than 97 percent of the world’s climate scientists agree that climate change is real and that humans are either causing it or making it significantly worse.
Other pro-business publications about climate issues pretended to take the concerns seriously, but took a softer, friendlier approach to solving them. You may have come across this approach in videos or written materials directly aimed at schools and kids like you. Does this sound familiar—a vision of science and industry peacefully tackling environmental problems together? It would be great if that were true, but often such visions involve only surface-level changes.
Such nonsolutions are sometimes called greenwashing. An example would be a power company that spends $7 million to pass out booklets about energy-saving tips for families—but still gets 95 percent of its power fr
om burning fossil fuels. That doesn’t mean that the tips are useless, but it does mean that they’re not enough to solve the biggest problems.
An energy company painted its oil-storage tank in Los Angeles to honor the twentieth anniversary of Earth Day in 1990—a classic example of greenwashing.
In the same way, kids are often taught about environmentalism not in terms of how whole industries and economic systems cause climate change but in terms of things individuals can do, such as recycling and riding a bike instead of driving a car. These actions are important, and we all need to do our part. But unless they are combined with bigger changes, they won’t really rock business’s boat—and therefore they won’t make a significant impact on climate change. For this reason, it’s a good idea always to check the sources of information. Are they believable? Do they have a track record of honesty? And, perhaps most important, does the source of the information have something to gain from what it is telling you?
WHO KNEW, AND WHEN DID THEY KNOW?
No matter what they said in public and in the propaganda they spread, behind closed doors the corporate bosses and scientists working at energy companies knew the truth. Links did exist between fossil fuels, greenhouse gas emissions, and climate change. We now know that the energy companies covered up the truth and spread misinformation. In 2015 a prize-winning news organization called InsideClimate News published reports about what the energy industry knew, and when.
InsideClimate News showed that the Exxon Corporation knew about the link between fossil fuels and climate change decades ago. (Today the corporation is called ExxonMobil. It is the world’s largest oil and gas company.) An Exxon scientist told the company’s executives in 1977, “There is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels.” In other words, Exxon’s own product was warming the planet.
A year later the same scientist wrote a more detailed report for Exxon’s scientists and managers. It warned that changes in energy planning and use would soon become necessary.
At first the corporation did not deny climate change. Instead, Exxon launched a serious research program to better understand it. Company scientists studied the effects of carbon dioxide emissions on the atmosphere and the planet. Exxon even fitted an oil tanker with scientific equipment to look into the question of whether the oceans were getting warmer because of increased greenhouse gases.
Exxon scientists also helped develop new software programs to model climate change. Some of the research that the company did or paid for was even published in scientific journals in the early 1980s.
But two things changed Exxon’s approach to the issue. First, oil prices worldwide dropped in the mid-1980s, and the company’s profits went down. It laid off many employees, including some climate researchers. Second, in 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen warned the US Congress about fossil fuels and climate change. During that hearing, Senator Tim Wirth of Colorado said, “Congress must begin to consider how we are going to slow or halt that warming trend.” This alarmed the energy industry. The comment suggested that the government might enact new regulations that could affect business more than whatever the companies might voluntarily do.
Suddenly Exxon, like all the other big energy companies, started to say that the science of climate change was not clear or certain. They argued that it would be foolish to take drastic action without “more information.” In 1997 the chief executive of Exxon said, “We need to understand the issue better, and fortunately, we have time. It is highly unlikely that the temperature in the middle of the next century will be significantly affected whether policies are enacted now or 20 years from now.”
But the energy companies knew this was not true. A science team from Mobil had written a report in 1995 that was shared with the other energy companies. It said, “The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied.”
Still, the energy companies launched a major effort to create a fog of climate doubt, if not outright climate denial. Their goal was to keep governments from setting stricter limits on greenhouse gas emissions or making new rules about the extraction of oil, natural gas, and coal in the future. At the same time, these companies worked to give their public images a green shine. From 1989 to 2019, the five biggest oil companies in the world spent $3.6 billion on advertising that boasted about their efforts to help the environment. Exxon, for example, talked about how it was buying solar power and wind power in Texas. What it didn’t say was that it used that power to drill for more oil. In spite of their greenwashing, the oil companies continued to place profits over people and the planet.
Can anything be done to rein in the powerful fossil-fuel industry? One answer may be seen in what happened to the powerful tobacco industry in the 1990s. By that time, the scientific evidence about tobacco was clear: it is seriously harmful to human health. But evidence showed that the industry had known about tobacco’s harmful effects, such as lung cancer, for a long time. The tobacco companies had covered up that knowledge because they’d wanted people to keep smoking or start smoking so that the companies could continue to profit.
So Congress investigated the tobacco industry. The congressional investigation led to tighter regulation of tobacco sales. It also led to lawsuits against the tobacco companies and huge payouts by those companies.
Will what happened to Big Tobacco also happen to Big Oil? After investigative journalists uncovered documents about the oil and gas industry’s suppression of its climate change knowledge, Congress took a step toward investigating the industry in October 2019. A committee held a hearing on Examining the Oil Industry’s Efforts to Suppress the Truth about Climate Change. One committee member, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, questioned a climate scientist who had worked with Exxon in the 1980s. She asked about an Exxon memo from 1982 that had come to light. It contained a prediction that global temperatures would increase by 1°C by the year 2019—which they had. “We were excellent scientists,” the scientist said. He knew their prediction had come to pass.
The congressional investigation is still going on, but one thing is clear: Exxon knew. And it was not alone. Shell is a major international energy company headquartered in the Netherlands. In 2020 the head of the Shell corporation told a reporter, “Yeah, we knew. Everybody knew. And somehow we all ignored it.”
As activists rallied under the banner #ExxonKnew, the State of New York sued Exxon, claiming the company had given its investors false or misleading information about the costs and risks of climate change. In late 2019 that case ended in a victory for Exxon, but the energy industry’s legal battles were just beginning.
These young “Exxon Knew” marchers in 2015 also knew—that Exxon had covered up the truth about fossil fuels and climate change.
Exxon, BP, Chevron, and other companies are facing dozens of lawsuits. Some of these lawsuits accuse the companies of deceiving the public. Others accuse them of contributing to the losses that cities and states have suffered because of climate change. Some lawsuits ask the companies to pay part of the cost of adjusting to climate change, such as building seawalls in coastal communities threatened by rising tides.
People in other countries are bringing legal challenges to the industry too. In the Netherlands, for example, seventeen thousand citizens have filed a lawsuit against Shell.
The question of how much harm the energy companies did by concealing information, and what price they ought to pay for it, will be argued in courts around the world for years.
Activists against Big Oil
While lawsuits against the major energy companies work their way through court systems, protesters are not waiting. They are taking direct action to call the public’s attention to Big Oil’s role in the climate crisis.
In September 2019, Greenpeace activists hung streaming cloth bann
ers and their own bodies (in safety harnesses) from a bridge over a channel in Houston, Texas. The red, orange, and yellow banners represented “the sun setting on the age of oil,” said Greenpeace.
The channel is part of a major shipping route for oil tankers. About 12 percent of the oil that is refined in the United States passes through this channel. The activists’ blockade partially closed the channel and prevented ships from passing through for eighteen hours. They had made a statement.
But Texas had passed a new law that made it illegal to protest near pipelines or any other feature considered important to the gas and oil industry. More than a dozen people were arrested. A number of other states have passed similar laws to keep protesters quiet. Lawmakers often claim that these laws are meant to keep protesters safe by keeping them away from possible hazards such as fuel leaks. Activists say that the laws show that business interests carry more weight with some governments than individual rights and the health of the planet.
But young activists are undaunted. At a football game between two of the most elite universities in the United States, hundreds of students and former students from Harvard and Yale left the stands to protest their schools’ investments in fossil fuels. They rushed onto the field and delayed the game for an hour, chanting, “Hey hey! Ho ho! Fossil fuels have got to go!”
A few months after that, students from Harvard Law School demonstrated at an event put on by a law firm that has represented Exxon. With a banner that read “#DropExxon,” the protesters encouraged young lawyers to follow their example and refuse to work for any company that has taken money from corporate polluters. Like many other activists today, they live-streamed their protest on the internet to make sure their voices were heard.
Then in Scotland in early January 2020, the environmental and climate group Extinction Rebellion carried out a series of “actions focusing on the fossil fuel industry and its driving role in the climate crisis.” Protesters, including many young people, blocked the entrance to Shell’s headquarters in Aberdeen in what police called a peaceful protest. Other protesters climbed aboard an oil-drilling rig that was moored in the harbor at Dundee. The rig was scheduled to be towed out to sea for use by Shell. Seven people later appeared in court to face charges for occupying the rig.