The Biggest Lie About Climate Change

9 minute presentation created by two Canadians, Mitchell Moffit and Gregory Brown.
This is the story of how people’s safety and future finances were robbed without them ever really noticing.
The oil company Exxon decided to invest in science. Scientists hired by Exxon, again Exxon's very own scientists, were the first to present a series of ground-breaking papers explaining that burning fossil fuels will influence the climate as the carbon dioxide release will cause a greenhouse effect. That was ironic. Those oil companies were the ones to discover climate change. This happened right in the early 1980s just as the price of oil was decreasing, so the higher-ups at Exxon chose to ignore the information and instead focus on growing the business. They did ask the scientists to keep looking into it.
In 1982, their own scientists again came back, this time with more thorough research saying "yep, it was worse than they thought."
Based on what Exxon was planning to do regarding fossil fuel extraction which would warm the climate, cause sea levels to rise, and increase deadly droughts. Humans will suffer effects, which will be indeed catastrophic, so the scientists pitched a major reduction in fossil fuel combustion. An email from Lenny Bernstein, a former employee of Exxon wrote: "In the 1980's, Exxon needed to understand the potential for concerns about climate change to lead to regulation of...potential projects. They were well ahead of the rest of the industry in this awareness." If Exxon wanted to be innovators so bad, maybe they would have taken this moment to diversify the energy sector-invest in alternative energy sources, but instead they decided to lie. To you, to me, and to your mom. It is now the 1980s, and for the first time an internal memo is released at Exxon that says, they "need to start to emphasize the uncertainty of the scientific data around climate change." They begin to start going against their very own science and plant the seed for what we now know as climate change denial. Here is part of an internal memo from Exxon at the time. "There is currently no unambiguous scientific evidence that the earth is warming. If the earth is on a warming trend, we're not likely to detect it before 1995." One of the most frustrating parts of this story is that Exxon did believe their climate change science. Right at this time they started to build drilling platforms in the ocean a little bit higher up to deal with the rising sea levels they predicted. They also started to plan to drill in the Arctic, because as they knew the sea ice in the Arctic was going to melt. In the late 1980s, the effects of climate change began to become apparent.
Time magazine had a picture of the planet in shackles due to climate change on their cover, as the scientific impact of burning fossil fuels became public knowledge.
At the time, 80% of Americans claimed that climate change was an issue and accepted that it was caused by the burning of fossil fuels. It was also not a political issue.
Republican President George Bush senior was on the campaign trail in 1988 after a year of severe heat waves killed thousands of Americans: "Don't say these problems are too big, that it's impossible for an individual, or even a nation as great as ours to solve the problem of global warming, or the loss of forests, or the deterioration of our oceans.”
The response is simple; it can be done, and we must do it.
Let's not forget all that we've accomplished, all that we've accomplished since America first concentrated its attention on preserving the environment, under a Republican administration, back in 1970." This is the time when the oil companies started to get scared of that (evil regulation from the government) so they started to really jack up their campaigns to increase climate change denial. They became inventive, they created the OP ad that we now sometimes see in newspapers, where it kind of looks like an article but it's a fully paid advertisement. So, this is one of the op ads that they paid for in the liberal New York Times. "One of the brighter hopes with the climate change debate has to be the benefits achieved through technology." Notice how they used the word "debate" and notice how they sort of make it seem like, oh climate change might be a good thing because we're going to invent new things to cope. They secretly paid scientists to promote fake science. In an article called climate change: a degree of uncertainty, the first line was: "The debate on climate change has been long, complex, and intense." This is of course not true, because according to their own science there wasn't really a debate at all.
Quite a short explanation that was quite simple is that the burning of CO2 creates a greenhouse effect that warms the earth.
In 1997 Lee Raymond, the CEO of Exxon at the time, decided that in his presentation he was going to say that, no in fact according to their science the earth was cooling. This was a full lie. Again, he did this in a presentation in 1997, more than 20 years after his own scientists first broke the fact that the greenhouse effect is real, and the name of his presentation, a bold lie was, "Is the earth warming? Does burning fossil fuels cause global warming?"
Lee Raymond sucks, because he also is the person who began to make climate change a political issue. Lee Raymond persuaded George Bush, the younger one, to go against his campaign promise and take carbon dioxide off the list of pollutants. These is one of the earliest times that we see climate change become a political issue, a side of left or right, and at the time the Republican Party was under a lot of pressure from these big oil companies, and they released this Memo: "The scientific debate is closing [against us] but not yet closed. There is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science."
Later in the memo it reads: "Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues around global warming is settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, we need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue of debate". All this hard work paid off. In 2017, around 90% of Americans did not know there was a scientific consensus on global warming.
52% of Americans think the threat of climate change has been exaggerated. This lack of knowledge helped Rex Tillerson, who became the CEO of Exxon after it merged with Mobil to become Exxon Mobil, to sign a 500-billion-dollar deal to explore for oil in the rapidly thawing Russian Arctic. For this plan, he was awarded the Russian order of friendship. Global warming and climate change are caused by our immense burning of coal, gas, and oil for energy.
This causes the carbon release to combine with oxygen in the atmosphere to produce CO2, carbon dioxide, which traps heat that would have been radiated back out into space.
Due to this, the extra heat trapped near earth is equivalent to the heat from four hundred thousand bombs the size of what was dropped on Hiroshima, being collected in our atmosphere every day. By 2100, the rising sea levels will cost the world 14 trillion dollars. 9 of the 10 deadliest heat waves in recorded human history have occurred since the year 2000. Since the 1970s, 60% of the world's wildlife has been killed. If we continue with our current greenhouse gas emissions, by 2070 tropical regions that now get one day a year of oppressive humid heat will get between 100 to 250 days per year.
100 million trees died in California in the past 10 years, and studies show that by 2050, if temperatures rise the way they are predicted, a quarter of the earth will experience extreme droughts and desertification.
Stephen Hawking gave humanity a deadline of a century to leave earth, as it may be the only way to save ourselves.
And who is going to be able to afford this? Maybe Lee Raymond as his retirement package from ExxonMobil was a mere $400 000 000, for his impressive work of making money for the company at your expense.
Climate change is real. Everyone was lied to. These oil companies did all of this because they were short-sighted. They wanted to make money for themselves, but we need to think about the future. We as young people are the ones who are left to figure out this mess. It's not necessarily our fault, this is a huge injustice. All these lies and deceit that these companies presented to the public consciousness are unfair, but we must figure out what we do now. In our next video we're going to talk about hope.
So, one thing is that a lot of people are challenging and figuring out how the law should get involved with these companies. They should technically be sued for what they did.
There's the green New Deal happening in America, what exactly does that mean for such a large economic power? And we're going to highlight some of the amazing, innovative ways that science is now trying to figure out how to clean up this mess.

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The views expressed in the article are the author’s and are not necessarily shared by the members of the Foundation.

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