Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?

by Bill McKibben

  Like so many politicians, he turned out to be unwilling to relinquish the power that oil represents. In the spring of 2017, Trudeau told a cheering group of Houston oilmen that “no country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and just leave them there.” And yet, just leaving them there is exactly what he’d have to do if he were even slightly serious about taming climate change. If we burn that 173 billion barrels of oil, the carbon dioxide will take us 30 percent of the way to the 1.5 degree target that Trudeau had insisted on in Paris. That is, one nation with one-half of 1 percent of the planet’s population is laying claim to a third of the atmospheric space between us and disaster.

  If a leader such as Justin Trudeau can’t manage more bravery, then what hope is there? Especially given that time is so short. Unlike the other issues that politicians deal with, this one can’t proceed via the slow zigs and zags that Obama described. Climate change is not a normal political negotiation between different interests, where compromise makes obvious sense. Climate change is a negotiation between human beings and physics, and physics doesn’t compromise. Past a certain point, there’s no more room for maneuver.

  That point is clearly upon us: it’s not a good sign that the largest physical structures on our planet, its ice caps and barrier reefs and rain forests, are disappearing before our eyes.

  So: problem from hell. Governments prefer to evade it. Human psychology is not designed to cope with it. It’s happening too fast.

  * * *

  And yet, one can’t help but think, We’ve faced problems from hell before.

  In the twentieth century we faced Hitler. Most Americans initially wanted to deny the threat he represented—the U.S. Chamber of Commerce argued against lending ships to the British to fight him. The eventual effort cost more money than anything anyone had ever done; millions and millions of people had to upend their lives; four hundred thousand Americans had to die (and ten million Soviet soldiers)—but we did it. So why haven’t we taken on the similar-size crisis of our time?

  True, that generation had Pearl Harbor to push them into the fight against the Axis. But we’ve had Katrina and Sandy and Harvey. And it’s not as if we’ve had no alternatives—by this point, as we’ll eventually discuss, sun and wind are the cheapest way to generate power on planet Earth. No one has to die in this fight. As a task, it would be a far easier one than fighting a world-spanning war.

  So, yes, climate change is a very hard problem. But there’s something more going on here than the usual inertia.

  7

  There should be a word for when you commit treason against an entire planet.

  In July 1977, one of Exxon’s senior scientists, a man named James F. Black, addressed many of the company’s top leaders. Speaking at the oil giant’s New York City headquarters, he flipped through slide after slide showing some of the earliest research under way on what was then called the greenhouse effect. He concluded: “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.”1 A year later, he spoke to a larger pool of the company’s executives. Independent researchers, he said, estimated that a doubling of the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere would increase average global temperatures by 2 to 3 degrees Celsius (3.6 to 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) and as much as 10 degrees Celsius (18 degrees Fahrenheit). Rainfall might get heavier in some regions, and other places might turn to desert.2

  That is to say, ten years before James Hansen’s Senate testimony made climate change a public issue, Exxon, the world’s largest oil company and, indeed, in those days, the world’s largest company period, understood that its product was going to wreck the planet. We know this because of extraordinary reporting, first from a Pulitzer Prize–winning website called InsideClimate News, and then from the Los Angeles Times and the Columbia Journalism School. What they discovered, through deep dives into company archives and interviews with former employees, is the most consequential cover-up in human history.

  Fossil fuel corporations had worried at least a little about climate change for a long time. As early as 1959, at a symposium called “Energy and Man,” organized by the American Petroleum Institute to mark the centenary of the global oil business, the physicist Edward Teller told the industry’s most important executives, “Carbon dioxide has a strange property. It transmits visible light but it absorbs the infrared radiation which is emitted from the earth.” The temperature, Teller predicted, would rise, and when it did, “there is a possibility that the icecaps will start melting and the level of the oceans will begin to rise.”3 But these kinds of warnings were easily ignored. Rachel Carson had yet to begin knocking the shine off modernity; her book Silent Spring would come in 1962. More important, global warming was mere speculation, because nobody had the computing power to model something as complicated as the climate. It’s true that as early as 1968, the president’s science advisor warned the annual meeting of the nation’s utilities that changes in carbon dioxide “might produce major consequences on the climate—possibly even triggering catastrophic effects such as have occurred from time to time in the past.”4 But it’s also true that nobody knew for sure.

  By the late 1970s, though, when Exxon took on the issue, the greenhouse effect had moved from vague possibility to something much more ominous: “Present thinking holds that man has a time window of five to ten years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical,” James Black told the assembled Exxon executives. Two years later, the company’s scientists, in a document given wide distribution among senior executives, said “there is no doubt that increases in fossil fuel usage and decreases of forest cover are aggravating the potential problem of increased CO2 in the atmosphere.” The American Petroleum Institute assembled an industry task force, with representatives from Exxon, Texaco, Shell, Gulf, and others, to “look at emerging science, the implications of it, and where improvements could be made, if possible, to reduce emissions.”5 Exxon decided to spend millions of dollars on the research effort—after all, its product was carbon, and it needed to understand it. Among other things, it outfitted an oil tanker, the Esso Atlantic, with carbon dioxide detectors in an effort to measure how fast the oceans could absorb excess carbon, and it hired mathematicians to build more sophisticated climate models. By 1982, it had concluded that even the company’s earlier dire estimates were probably too low. That year, in a corporate document marked “not to be distributed externally” but given “wide circulation to Exxon management,” the company’s scientists concluded that heading off global warming would “require major reductions in fossil fuel combustion.” Otherwise, it concluded, “there are some potentially catastrophic events that must be considered.” Delay, it warned, was dangerous. “Once the effects are measurable, they might not be reversible.”6

  We know that Exxon executives took these warnings seriously. Internal documents show that the company (and other oil giants) built their new oil drilling platforms with higher decks to compensate for the sea level rise they now knew was coming. In the Arctic, a team assigned to investigate the effects of warming concluded that “global warming can only help lower exploration and development costs” in the Beaufort Sea. As the team’s leader told an industry conference in 1991, “greenhouse gases are rising due to the burning of fossil fuels.… No one disputes this fact.” As a result, the team predicted, drilling season in the Arctic would lengthen from two months to as much as five months, which is in fact what has happened.7

  It wasn’t just Exxon that knew. In the autumn of 2018 new documents emerged showing that Shell scientists had predicted in the late 1980s that carbon dioxide levels could double as early as 2030, and predicting an increase in “runoff, destructive floods, and inundation of low-lying farmland.” All in all, Shell’s experts said, “the changes may be the greatest in recorded history.”8 Take a minute to think through the implications of these exposé
s. By 1988, when James Hansen made global warming a public issue, the oil companies knew that he and the other researchers were right. They were, in fact, using Hansen’s NASA climate models to figure out how low their drilling costs in the Arctic would eventually fall. So, imagine what would have happened if they had merely told the truth. Imagine, in July 1988, after Hansen told the U.S. Senate that global warming was very real and very dangerous, that the CEO of Exxon had simply said, “Our research bears this out. It appears to be true.” That seems the least that any system of morality would demand. And it would not have been necessarily economically destructive. Indeed, with their advance knowledge, companies such as Exxon would have had the early inside track on building the energy economy of the future. As early as 1978, one manager at Exxon had said, “This may be the kind of opportunity that we are looking for to have Exxon technology, management and leadership resources put into the context of a project aimed at benefitting mankind.”9

  Had Exxon and its peers taken that course, history, geological history, would have been very different. No one would have said, “Oh, Exxon is just being alarmist.” Everyone would have acknowledged the depth of the trouble, and gotten to work. It wouldn’t have made the work easy—all the obstacles I described in the last chapter, from inertia to human psychology, would still have existed. Thirty years later, climate change would not have been solved. But as with the hole in the ozone layer, we would have taken large strides. We’d be on the way to a solution; the crisis would be abating.

  * * *

  But that’s not what happened, of course, because this wasn’t the hole in the ozone. In that case, the culprit was a small class of gases for which the manufacturers had available substitutes. Now the culprit was fossil fuel, the most lucrative substance on earth. And so, a month after Hansen’s testimony, Exxon’s public affairs manager recommended in an internal memo that the company “emphasize the uncertainty” in the scientific data about climate change.10 Thus began the most consequential lie in human history. Within a year, Exxon, Chevron, Shell, Amoco, and others had joined together to form what they called the Global Climate Coalition, “to coordinate business participation in the international policy debate” on climate change. The GCC hired veterans of earlier fights against the tobacco industry; it even hired the company that had spearheaded the attack in the 1960s against Rachel Carson. It coordinated with the National Coal Association and the American Petroleum Institute on a “grassroots letter and telephone campaign to prevent a proposed tax on fossil fuels” and produced a video insisting that more carbon dioxide would “end world hunger.” It also ginned up opposition to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the first global effort to do anything about climate change.

  Two months before the Kyoto meeting, Lee Raymond (Exxon’s president and CEO, and the man who had had oversight responsibility for the science department that in the 1980s produced the unambiguous findings about climate change) gave a speech in Beijing at the World Petroleum Congress that belongs on the short list of the most irresponsible speeches any American has ever delivered. He insisted that the Earth was cooling, said that the idea that cutting fossil fuel emissions could have an effect on the climate “defied common sense,” and declared that, in any event, it was “highly unlikely that the temperature in the middle of the next century will be affected whether policies are enacted now, or twenty years from now.” Remember, Exxon’s own scientists had shown each of these premises to be wrong; Exxon itself was basing its own corporate decision making on that science. It knew the Beaufort Sea was melting; it was building its drillings rigs high enough to take on a rising sea. It just wasn’t telling the rest of us.

  Environmental pressure eventually forced the Global Climate Coalition to disband. BP and Shell left after European green groups mounted savage campaigns, and many of the American companies eventually dropped out. But it was a pyrrhic victory: by then, the damage had been done. I remember lurking on the edge of the Kyoto convention center the morning after a long night of negotiation had finally produced a tentative accord. Imperfect and limited though that accord was, it seemed to me that the momentum had swung in the direction of actually fighting climate change. But I was standing next to a lobbyist who had been coordinating much of the fight against the accord, and as delegates cheered and clapped, he turned to me and said, “I can’t wait to get back to Washington, where we’ve got this under control.” Many of the Global Climate Coalition hacks went to work inside the George W. Bush administration. Nine days after Bush was inaugurated, Lee Raymond came for a visit with his old friend Vice President Dick Cheney, who had just stepped down as the CEO of oil-drilling giant Halliburton. Raymond apparently helped persuade Bush to abandon his campaign promise to treat carbon dioxide as a pollutant, and within the year, Bush’s pollster, Frank Luntz, had produced an internal memo that canonized the strategy the GCC had hit on a decade earlier: “Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community,” Luntz wrote. “Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate.”11

  The strategy worked, exactly as well as they needed it to. As late as 2017, pollsters found that almost 90 percent of Americans didn’t know there was a scientific consensus on global warming.12 Lee Raymond stepped down in 2006, taking a retirement package worth $400 million, after the company posted the greatest corporate profits in history. His successor, Rex Tillerson, was slightly less confrontational, and willing at least to grant that climate change might be real, though, at shareholder meetings, he continued to downplay the threat. (“What if it turns out our models are lousy and we don’t get the effects we predict?” he asked in 2015.)13 And the company continued to fund climate change deniers and front groups. One, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, put out a TV commercial titled “Carbon Dioxide: They Call It Pollution, We Call It Life.” Another, the Heartland Institute, which Exxon had helped found back in the 1990s, erected billboards comparing climate scientists to famous serial killers such as the Unabomber and Charles Manson. Exxon also signed a $500 billion deal to explore for oil in the Russian Arctic (exploration that was possible only because the area was rapidly melting), and for his billions, Tillerson was officially awarded the Russian Order of Friendship in a ceremony at Vladimir Putin’s villa. No matter the danger posed by fossil fuel, Exxon was never going to let anything change. As Tillerson told his last shareholder meeting, the planet “is going to have to continue using fossil fuels, whether they like it or not.”14

  Tillerson eventually went to work, of course, as the U.S. secretary of state, and his boss, Donald Trump, was the perfect example of just how well the company’s PR strategy had succeeded. Trump, his news diet centered on the Fox News cable network that the climate deniers had so assiduously cultivated, believed that global warming was a “hoax invented by the Chinese” to cripple American manufacturing. (He further believed that polar ice caps “are at a record level.”)15 As a result, he pulled America out of the Paris climate accords, meaning that the nation that had poured the most carbon into the planet’s atmosphere was now the only country not willing even to pretend to take action to stop the crisis. Meanwhile, at Exxon, business continued as usual. Tillerson’s successor, Darren Woods, fended off shareholder pressure by agreeing to have his executives write a report disclosing the company’s “climate risk.” When that report was released in the winter of 2018, it found that Exxon faced no need to change at all. The team at InsideClimate News, which had broken the original story about Exxon’s lies, summarized the company’s statement: “Exxon insists it would be able to produce all the oil in its existing fields and to keep investing in new reserves.”16

  It’s by no means clear that this three-decade campaign of deception and obfuscation is illegal. Exxon has always insisted that it has “tracked the scientific consensus on climate change, and its research on
the issue has been published in publicly available peer-reviewed journals.”17 In any event the First Amendment preserves one’s right to lie, though in the fall of 2018 the New York attorney general, Barbara Underwood, filed suit against Exxon for lying to investors, which is a crime. In January 2019, the Supreme Court ruled the company had to turn over millions of pages of internal documents to the Massachusetts attorney general, Maura Healey, so we will learn more.

  What is certain is that this disinformation campaign cost us the human generation that might have made the crucial difference in the climate fight. Alex Steffen, an environmental writer, coined the term predatory delay, “the blocking or slowing of needed change, in order to make money off unsustainable, unjust systems in the meantime.” Climate change, and the behavior of the oil companies, is the prime example. “Had we begun cutting global emissions in 1990, we could still have tackled the climate crisis with confidence,” he writes. “The back of the envelope take is that we could then have cut emissions by something on the order of one quarter per decade and kept within our CO2 budget.” It “wouldn’t have been child’s play,” but “well-understood incremental regulatory reforms and well-designed carbon trading or pricing systems” would have done the trick. But now, rushing up on 2020, and after three decades of soaring carbon emissions, meeting even the modest targets of, say, the Paris climate accord has become nearly impossible. “The path now is steep as hell—the new curve we’re on demands downright disruptive emissions cuts” of as much as 50 percent a decade. As the geophysicist Michael Mann put it, “what would have been a bunny slope was now a double black diamond.” That means, Steffen explained, that “climate action can no longer be orderly, gradual, or even continuous with our expectations.”18 By early 2018, the view from the analysts calculating transition efforts around the world was stark. “It’s not fast enough,” said one. “It’s not big enough. There’s not enough action.”19