Newly-disclosed internal documents from ExxonMobil’s highest echelons reveal how executives persisted in privately undermining climate science, even as the company avowed it was moving to address its emissions.
The files show that “behind closed doors, the company behaved differently” than its public image sought to display, reports the Guardian, noting that they add to a “slew of documents that record a decades-long misinformation campaign waged by Exxon.”
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Subpoenaed during a 2015 New York state lawsuit and recently obtained by the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), many of the documents are from the years between 2006 and 2016, when former CEO and Trump-era U.S. secretary of state Rex Tillerson oversaw a major shift in Exxon’s climate messaging. In 2006, the company publicly accepted that the climate crisis posed risks, then went on to support the 2015 Paris agreement—in public.
“The general perception is that Tillerson was softer and stopped funding the bad guys,” Lee Wasserman of the Rockefeller Family Fund told WSJ. “This is the first X-ray into Tillerson’s head and shows he wanted to throw climate mitigation off the rails. It’s obituary-changing.”
Exxon pledged to stop funding climate denial groups in 2008, but “the company’s preoccupation with climate uncertainty continued,” says the Guardian. “That very same year, company leadership said it would support the company in directing a scientist to help the nation’s top oil and gas lobbying group write a paper about the ‘uncertainty’ of measuring greenhouse gas emissions.”
In 2012, one researcher expressed interest in finding “‘skeptic’ arguments that we consider to be not yet disproven.” At one meeting, board member Peter Brabeck-Letmathe said there was “still uncertainty in predicting future climate changes and impacts” and that “money and effort spent on climate change is misplaced.”
Exxon representatives were also displeased with findings from top authorities like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In 2011, Tillerson told a leading Exxon researcher the IPCC’s warning about the urgent need to curb greenhouse gas emissions was “not credible”. He said he was “dissatisfied” with media coverage of warnings about worst-case climate scenarios.
The researcher told colleagues in a 2012 email that Tillerson also wanted to engage with the scientists “to influence [the group], in addition to gathering info.”
Tillerson also expressed doubt about the Paris agreement, the Guardian says. In April 2015, months before the landmark accord was signed, he called a 2°C limit on average global warming “something magical”, according to a meeting summary. “Who is to say 2.5°C is not good enough?” Tillerson asked, noting that meeting such targets would be “very expensive.”
And not much has changed since: Late last month, Exxon blithely accepted that the emissions will blow through even a 2.0°C target, much less a 1.5°C guardrail for climate stability, as it projected that oil and gas will still meet 54% of the world’s energy needs in 2050. (Fortunately, the International Energy Agency has other ideas.)
Yet in December, 2015, Exxon publicly endorsed the Paris agreement, and during his Senate confirmation hearing for secretary of state in 2017, Tillerson professed his support.
Tillerson has declined to comment on the documents. Exxon’s current CEO, Darren Woods, has acknowledged that “when taken out of context, it seems bad.”
“But having worked with some of these colleagues earlier in my career, I have the benefit of knowing they are people of good intent,” he said. “None of these old emails and notes matter, though. All that does is that we’re building an entire business dedicated to reducing emissions—both our own and others’—and spending billions of dollars on solutions that have a real, sustainable impact.”
Exxon has long sought to dispel narratives that could lead to regulatory limits on oil and gas emissions, even though its own scientists warned executives about the dangers of fossil fuel combustion since as early as 1977. In the late 1980s, amid growing worldwide concern about global warming, Exxon executive Frank Sprow sent a memo to colleagues warning that if there were a global consensus on addressing climate change, “substantial negative impacts on Exxon could occur.”
Sprow later wrote in a memo—one that was ultimately adopted as a “central pillar” of Exxon’s strategy for climate change—that any further greenhouse gas research efforts of the company should have two primary purposes: “1. Protect the value of our resources (oil, gas, coal). 2. Preserve Exxon’s business options.”
A few years later, Exxon became “the architect of a highly effective strategy of climate change denial that succeeded for decades in politicizing climate policy and delaying meaningful action to cut heat-trapping pollution,” reports U.S. National Public Radio.
Exxon is among several oil and gas companies now facing lawsuits for deceiving the public about climate change and the dangers of fossil fuels. Most recently, the state of California announced it is taking five big companies to court—ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips, and Chevron—claiming their alleged actions caused tens of billions of dollars in damage. The industry’s leading U.S. lobby group, the American Petroleum Institute, is also named in the lawsuit.
The newly released files made public by the Wall Street Journal are also likely to be used in court, said Richard Wiles, president of the U.S. Center for Climate Integrity, an organization that tracks climate litigation.
“As communities pay an ever-greater price for our worsening climate crisis, it’s more clear than ever that Exxon must be held accountable to pay for the harm it has caused,” Wiles said in a statement.
