Exxon Knew About Global Warming 7 Years Before Everyone Else, Funded Deniers Anyway

A newly discovered email shows that Exxon knew about climate change at least 7 years before the rest of the world learned about the issue, and continued to pay people to deny its existence for the next 30 years.

The Guardian reports that an email sent in 1981 by Lenny Bernstein, a company scientist, not only shows the company knew of climate change, but that it used this knowledge in order to justify not developing a massive oil and gas field in southeast Asia called the Natuna field. If the company had developed the field, it would have been the single largest source of greenhouse gasses on the planet.

The amount of greenhouse gas released into the atmosphere would have been so great that the scientists who wrote the email described it as a "carbon bomb." At the time, if it had been developed, it would have been equal to 1 percent of the world's total greenhouse gas emissions.

The company felt that if the field was developed and all those gases released into the atmosphere, increasing global warming, then it would speed up public knowledge of the issue and bring government and popular pressure to deal with the issue to bear sooner than the company would have liked.

Despite knowing about the problem, and believing it was real, as evidenced by the decision to not exploit the Natuna field, the company spent more than $30 million dollars over the following decades to fund "scientists" and "think tanks" that would deny the problem in an effort to confuse public debate about the issue.

Exxon claims that it no longer funds such groups and acknowledges the risks climate change poses to the plant and humanity.