Exxon: The Road

Not Taken

By Neela Banerjee
John H. Cushman, Jr.
David Hasemyer
and Lisa Song
Copyright © 2015 InsideClimate News
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 1518718671
ISBN-13: 978-1518718670
 TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
1. Exxon's Own Research Confirmed Fossil Fuels' Role in Global
Warming Decades Ago
2. Exxon Believed Deep Dive Into Climate Research Would Protect Its
Business
3. Exxon Confirmed Global Warming Consensus in 1982 with In-House
Climate Models
4. Exxon's Business Ambition Collided with Climate Change Under a
Distant Sea
5. Highlighting the Allure of Synfuels, Exxon Played Down the Climate
Risks
6. Exxon Sowed Doubt About Climate Science for Decades by Stressing
Uncertainty
7. Exxon Made Deep Cuts in Climate Research Budget in the 1980s
8. More Exxon Documents Show How Much It Knew About Climate 35
Years Ago
9. Exxon's Oil Industry Peers Knew About Climate Dangers in the 1970s,
Too
Appendix I: List of Documents
Appendix II: Characters
Appendix III: Related Stories
Appendix IV: Frontline Videos
About the Authors
InsideClimate News
 INTRODUCTION

Laura Shaw was 12 years old when she won her seventh-grade
science fair at the Solomon Schechter Day School in Cranford, N.J. with a
project on the greenhouse effect. It was 1981, and no one at her school was
even aware of it.
Laura knew about it well because her father was an Exxon scientist,
and he had schooled his daughter on the emerging problem that her
generation is now inheriting.
The company at that time was at the forefront of climate research,
long before the general public knew about climate change.
This surprising detail is one of many that you’ll find in the following
pages, a compilation of the six articles in our groundbreaking investigative
series called Exxon: The Road Not Taken, three follow-up stories and
supplementary materials.
It’s a brief history of Exxon's engagement with the science of climate
change. The story spans four decades, and is based on interviews with former
company employees, internal company files never before seen and other
evidence.
It describes how Exxon conducted cutting-edge climate research
decades ago and pivoted to the forefront of climate denial, manufacturing
doubt about the scientific consensus and the dangers that its own scientists
had confirmed.
It is a timely, important and troubling account that is already changing
the global conversation about climate change. It is raising questions about
Exxon’s moral and legal responsibility for the environmental crisis afflicting
the entire planet.
Our reporters are continuing to cover unfolding events, and you can
follow their work on InsideClimate News. These pages provide the essential
background reading.

David Sassoon, Publisher

InsideClimate News
1. EXXON'S OWN RESEARCH CONFIRMED FOSSIL FUELS'
ROLE IN GLOBAL WARMING DECADES AGO
Top executives were warned of possible catastrophe from
greenhouse effect, then led efforts to block solutions.
By Neela Banerjee, Lisa Song and David Hasemyer
Sept. 21, 2015
At a meeting in Exxon Corporation's headquarters, a senior company
scientist named James F. Black addressed an audience of powerful oilmen.
Speaking without a text as he flipped through detailed slides, Black delivered
a sobering message: carbon dioxide from the world's use of fossil fuels would
warm the planet and could eventually endanger humanity.
"In the first place, 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," Black told Exxon's
Management Committee, according to a written version he recorded later.
It was July 1977 when Exxon's leaders received this blunt assessment,
well before most of the world had heard of the looming climate crisis.
A year later, Black, a top technical expert in Exxon's Research &
Engineering division, took an updated version of his presentation to a broader
audience. He warned Exxon scientists and managers that independent
researchers estimated a doubling of the carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration in
the atmosphere would increase average global temperatures by 2 to 3 degrees
Celsius (4 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit), and as much as 10 degrees Celsius (18
degrees Fahrenheit) at the poles. Rainfall might get heavier in some regions,
and other places might turn to desert.
"Some countries would benefit but others would have their
agricultural output reduced or destroyed," Black said, in the written summary
of his 1978 talk.
His presentations reflected uncertainty running through scientific
circles about the details of climate change, such as the role the oceans played
in absorbing emissions. Still, Black estimated quick action was needed.
"Present thinking," he wrote in the 1978 summary, "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."
Exxon responded swiftly. Within months the company launched its
own extraordinary research into carbon dioxide from fossil fuels and its
impact on the earth. Exxon's ambitious program included both empirical
CO2 sampling and rigorous climate modeling. It assembled a brain trust that
would spend more than a decade deepening the company's understanding of
an environmental problem that posed an existential threat to the oil business.
Then, toward the end of the 1980s, Exxon curtailed its carbon dioxide
research. In the decades that followed, Exxon worked instead at the forefront
of climate denial. It put its muscle behind efforts to manufacture doubt about
the reality of global warming its own scientists had once confirmed. It
lobbied to block federal and international action to control greenhouse gas
emissions. It helped to erect a vast edifice of misinformation that stands to
this day.
This untold chapter in Exxon's history, when one of the world's
largest energy companies worked to understand the damage caused by fossil
fuels, stems from an eight-month investigation by InsideClimate News. ICN's
reporters interviewed former Exxon employees, scientists, and federal
officials, and consulted hundreds of pages of internal Exxon documents,
many of them written between 1977 and 1986, during the heyday of Exxon's
innovative climate research program. ICN combed through thousands of
documents from archives including those held at the University of Texas-
Austin, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the American
Association for the Advancement of Science.
The documents record budget requests, research priorities, and
debates over findings, and reveal the arc of Exxon's internal attitudes and
work on climate and how much attention the results received.
Of particular significance was a project launched in August 1979,
when the company outfitted a supertanker with custom-made instruments.
The project's mission was to sample carbon dioxide in the air and ocean along
a route from the Gulf of Mexico to the Persian Gulf.
In 1980, Exxon assembled a team of climate modelers who
investigated fundamental questions about the climate's sensitivity to the
buildup of carbon dioxide in the air. Working with university scientists and
the U.S. Department of Energy, Exxon strove to be on the cutting edge of
inquiry into what was then called the greenhouse effect.
Exxon's early determination to understand rising carbon dioxide
levels grew out of a corporate culture of farsightedness, former employees
said. They described a company that continuously examined risks to its
bottom line, including environmental factors. In the 1970s, Exxon modeled
its research division after Bell Labs, staffing it with highly accomplished
scientists and engineers.
In written responses to questions about the history of its research,
ExxonMobil spokesman Richard D. Keil said that "from the time that climate
change first emerged as a topic for scientific study and analysis in the late
1970s, ExxonMobil has committed itself to scientific, fact-based analysis of
this important issue."
"At all times," he said, "the opinions and conclusions of our scientists
and researchers on this topic have been solidly within the mainstream of the
consensus scientific opinion of the day and our work has been guided by an
overarching principle to follow where the science leads. The risk of climate
change is real and warrants action."
At the outset of its climate investigations almost four decades ago,
many Exxon executives, middle managers and scientists armed themselves
with a sense of urgency and mission.
One manager at Exxon Research, Harold N. Weinberg, shared his
"grandiose thoughts" about Exxon's potential role in climate research in a
March 1978 internal company memorandum that read: "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."
His sentiment was echoed by Henry Shaw, the scientist leading the
company's nascent carbon dioxide research effort.
"Exxon must develop a credible scientific team that can critically
evaluate the information generated on the subject and be able to carry bad
news, if any, to the corporation," Shaw wrote to his boss Edward E. David,
the president of Exxon Research and Engineering in 1978. "This team must
be recognized for its excellence in the scientific community, the government,
and internally by Exxon management."

IRREVERSIBLE AND CATASTROPHIC

Exxon budgeted more than $1 million over three years for the tanker
project to measure how quickly the oceans were taking in CO2. It was a small
fraction of Exxon Research's annual $300 million budget, but the question the
scientists tackled was one of the biggest uncertainties in climate science: how
quickly could the deep oceans absorb atmospheric CO2? If Exxon could
pinpoint the answer, it would know how long it had before CO2 accumulation
in the atmosphere could force a transition away from fossil fuels.

Between 1979 and 1982, Exxon researchers sampled carbon dioxide levels aboard the company's Esso
Atlantic tanker (shown here).

Exxon also hired scientists and mathematicians to develop better

climate models and publish research results in peer-reviewed journals. By
1982, the company's own scientists, collaborating with outside researchers,
created rigorous climate models – computer programs that simulate the
workings of the climate to assess the impact of emissions on global
temperatures. They confirmed an emerging scientific consensus that warming
could be even worse than Black had warned five years earlier.
Exxon's research laid the groundwork for a 1982 corporate primer on
carbon dioxide and climate change prepared by its environmental affairs
office. Marked "not to be distributed externally," it contained information that
"has been given wide circulation to Exxon management." In it, the company
recognized, despite the many lingering unknowns, that heading off global
warming "would require major reductions in fossil fuel combustion."
Unless that happened, "there are some potentially catastrophic events
that must be considered," the primer said, citing independent experts. "Once
the effects are measurable, they might not be reversible."

THE CERTAINTY OF UNCERTAINTY

Like others in the scientific community, Exxon researchers

acknowledged the uncertainties surrounding many aspects of climate science,
especially in the area of forecasting models. But they saw those uncertainties
as questions they wanted to address, not an excuse to dismiss what was
increasingly understood.
"Models are controversial," Roger Cohen, head of theoretical sciences
at Exxon Corporate Research Laboratories, and his colleague, Richard
Werthamer, senior technology advisor at Exxon Corporation, wrote in a May
1980 status report on Exxon's climate modeling program. "Therefore, there
are research opportunities for us."

Exxon's Richard Werthamer (right) and Edward Garvey (left) are aboard the company's Esso Atlantic
tanker working on a project to measure the carbon dioxide levels in the ocean and atmosphere. The
project ran from 1979 to 1982. (Credit: Richard Werthamer)
 When Exxon's researchers confirmed information the company might find troubling, they did
not sweep it under the rug.
"Over the past several years a clear scientific consensus has emerged," Cohen wrote in
September 1982, reporting on Exxon's own analysis of climate models. It was that a doubling of the
carbon dioxide blanket in the atmosphere would produce average global warming of 3 degrees Celsius,
plus or minus 1.5 degrees C (equal to 5 degrees Fahrenheit plus or minus 1.7 degrees F).

"There is unanimous agreement in the scientific community that a

temperature increase of this magnitude would bring about significant changes
in the earth's climate," he wrote, "including rainfall distribution and
alterations in the biosphere."
He warned that publication of the company's conclusions might attract
media attention because of the "connection between Exxon's major business
and the role of fossil fuel combustion in contributing to the increase of
atmospheric CO2."
Nevertheless, he recommended publication.
Our "ethical responsibility is to permit the publication of our research
in the scientific literature," Cohen wrote. "Indeed, to do otherwise would be a
breach of Exxon's public position and ethical credo on honesty and integrity."
Exxon followed his advice. Between 1983 and 1984, its researchers
published their results in at least three peer-reviewed papers in Journal of the
Atmospheric Sciences and an American Geophysical Union monograph.
David, the head of Exxon Research, told a global warming
conference financed by Exxon in October 1982 that "few people doubt that
the world has entered an energy transition away from dependence upon fossil
fuels and toward some mix of renewable resources that will not pose
problems of CO2 accumulation." The only question, he said, was how fast this
would happen.
But the challenge did not daunt him. "I'm generally upbeat about the
chances of coming through this most adventurous of all human experiments
with the ecosystem," David said.
Exxon considered itself unique among corporations for its carbon
dioxide and climate research. The company boasted in a January 1981
report, "Scoping Study on CO2," that no other company appeared to be
conducting similar in-house research into carbon dioxide, and it swiftly
gained a reputation among outsiders for genuine expertise.
"We are very pleased with Exxon's research intentions related to the
CO2 question. This represents very responsible action, which we hope will
serve as a model for research contributions from the corporate sector," said
David Slade, manager of the federal government's carbon dioxide research
program at the Energy Department, in a May 1979 letter to Shaw. "This is
truly a national and international service."

BUSINESS IMPERATIVES

In the early 1980s Exxon researchers often repeated that unbiased

science would give it legitimacy in helping shape climate-related laws that
would affect its profitability.
Still, corporate executives remained cautious about what they told
Exxon's shareholders about global warming and the role petroleum played in
causing it, a review of federal filings shows. The company did not elaborate
on the carbon problem in annual reports filed with securities regulators
during the height of its CO2 research.
Nor did it mention in those filings that concern over CO2 was
beginning to influence business decisions it was facing.
Throughout the 1980s, the company was worried about developing an
enormous gas field off the coast of Indonesia because of the vast amount of
CO2 the unusual reservoir would release.
Exxon was also concerned about reports that synthetic oil made from
coal, tar sands and oil shales could significantly boost CO2 emissions. The
company was banking on synfuels to meet growing demand for energy in the
future, in a world it believed was running out of conventional oil.
In the mid-1980s, after an unexpected oil glut caused prices to
collapse, Exxon cut its staff deeply to save money, including many working
on climate. But the climate change problem remained, and it was becoming a
more prominent part of the political landscape.
"Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells Senate," declared the
headline of a June 1988 New York Times article describing the
Congressional testimony of NASA's James Hansen, a leading climate expert.
Hansen's statements compelled Sen. Tim Wirth (D-Colo.) to declare during
the hearing that "Congress must begin to consider how we are going to slow
or halt that warming trend."
With alarm bells suddenly ringing, Exxon started financing efforts to
amplify doubt about the state of climate science.
Exxon helped to found and lead the Global Climate Coalition, an
alliance of some of the world's largest companies seeking to halt government
efforts to curb fossil fuel emissions. Exxon used the American Petroleum
Institute, right-wing think tanks, campaign contributions and its own
lobbying to push a narrative that climate science was too uncertain to
necessitate cuts in fossil fuel emissions.
As the international community moved in 1997 to take a first step in
curbing emissions with the Kyoto Protocol, Exxon's chairman and CEO Lee
Raymond argued to stop it.
"Let's agree there's a lot we really don't know about how climate will
change in the 21st century and beyond," Raymond said in his speech before
the World Petroleum Congress in Beijing in October 1997.
"We need to understand the issue better, and fortunately, we have
time," he said. "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."
Over the years, several Exxon scientists who had confirmed the
climate consensus during its early research, including Cohen and David, took
Raymond's side, publishing views that ran contrary to the scientific
mainstream.

PAYING THE PRICE

Exxon's about-face on climate change earned the scorn of the

scientific establishment it had once courted.
In 2006, the Royal Society, the United Kingdom's science academy,
sent a harsh letter to Exxon accusing it of being "inaccurate and misleading"
on the question of climate uncertainty. Bob Ward, the Academy's senior
manager for policy communication, demanded that Exxon stop giving money
to dozens of organizations he said were actively distorting the science.
In 2008, under mounting pressure from activist shareholders, the
company announced it would end support for some prominent groups such as
those Ward had identified.
Still, the millions of dollars Exxon had spent since the 1990s on
climate change deniers had long surpassed what it had once invested in its
path-breaking climate science aboard the Esso Atlantic.
"They spent so much money and they were the only company that did
this kind of research as far as I know," Edward Garvey, who was a key
researcher on Exxon's oil tanker project, said in a recent interview with
InsideClimate News and Frontline. "That was an opportunity not just to get a
place at the table, but to lead, in many respects, some of the discussion. And
the fact that they chose not to do that into the future is a sad point."
Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at
Pennsylvania State University, who has been a frequent target of climate
deniers, said that inaction, just like actions, have consequences. When he
recently spoke to InsideClimate News, he was unaware of this chapter in
Exxon's history.
"All it would've taken is for one prominent fossil fuel CEO to know
this was about more than just shareholder profits, and a question about our
legacy," he said. "But now because of the cost of inaction—what I call the
'procrastination penalty'—we face a far more uphill battle."

ICN staff members Zahra Hirji, Paul Horn, Naveena Sadasivam, Sabrina Shankman and
Alexander Wood also contributed to this report.
 “In the first place, 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.”
James F. Black
Exxon Senior Scientist
1978

“Currently, the scientific evidence is inconclusive as to

whether human activities are having a significant effect on the
global climate.”
Lee Raymond
Exxon Chairman and CEO
1997
 2. EXXON BELIEVED DEEP DIVE INTO CLIMATE
RESEARCH WOULD PROTECT ITS BUSINESS
Outfitting its biggest supertanker to measure the ocean's
absorption of carbon dioxide was a crown jewel in Exxon's
research program.
By Neela Banerjee, Lisa Song and David Hasemyer
Sept. 21, 2015

In 1981, 12-year-old Laura Shaw won her seventh-grade science fair

at the Solomon Schechter Day School in Cranford, N.J. with a project on the
greenhouse effect.
For her experiment, Laura used two souvenir miniatures of the
Washington Monument, each with a thermometer attached to one side. She
placed them in glass bowls and covered one with plastic wrap – her model of
how a blanket of carbon dioxide traps the reflected heat of the sun and warms
the Earth. When she turned a lamp on them, the thermometer in the plastic-
covered bowl showed a higher temperature than the one in the uncovered
bowl.
If Laura and her two younger siblings were unusually well-versed in
the emerging science of the greenhouse effect, as global warming was
known, it was because their father, Henry Shaw, had been busily tracking it
for Exxon Corporation.
"I knew what the greenhouse effect was before I knew what an actual
greenhouse was," David Shaw, Henry's son, said in a recent interview.
 Henry Shaw, a former Exxon scientist, and his son David Shaw. (Credit: Family of Henry Shaw)

Henry Shaw, who died in 2003, was one of the Exxon scientists
engaged in an ambitious quest to comprehend the potentially devastating
effects that carbon dioxide emissions could have on the climate. From the late
1970s to the mid-80s, Exxon scientists worked at the cutting edge of climate
change research, documents examined by InsideClimate News show. This
history of that research emerged from an eight-month investigation by
InsideClimate News.
Exxon documents show that top corporate managers were aware of
their scientists' early conclusions about carbon dioxide's impact on the
climate. They reveal that scientists warned management that policy changes
to address climate change might affect profitability. After a decade of frank
internal discussions on global warming and conducting unbiased studies on it,
Exxon changed direction in 1989 and spent more than 20 years discrediting
the research its own scientists had once confirmed.
After reading the first chapter of InsideClimate News' series on
Exxon's carbon dioxide research, the company declined to answer specific
questions. In an email, Exxon spokesman Richard D. Keil said he would no
longer respond to inquiries from InsideClimate News, and added,
"ExxonMobil scientists have been involved in climate research and related
policy analysis for more than 30 years, yielding more than 50 papers in peer-
reviewed publications."

BUILDING THE TEAM

Henry Shaw was part of an accomplished group at Exxon tasked with

studying the greenhouse effect. In the mid-70s, documents show that Shaw
was responsible for seeking out new projects that were "of national
significance," and that could win federal funding. Others included Edward E.
David, Jr., a former science advisor to President Richard Nixon, and James F.
Black, who worked on hydrogen bomb research at Oak Ridge National
Laboratory in the 1950s.
Black, who died in 1988, was among the first Exxon scientists to
become acquainted with the greenhouse effect. Esso, as Exxon was known
when he started, allowed him to pursue personal scientific interests. Black
was fascinated by the idea of intentionally modifying weather to improve
agriculture in arid countries, said his daughter, Claudia Black-Kalinsky.
"He believed that big science could save the world," she said. In the
early 1960s, Black helped draft a National Academy of Sciences report on
weather and climate modification. Published in 1966, it said the buildup of
carbon dioxide in the atmosphere "agrees quite well with the rate of its
production by man's consumption of fossil fuels."
In the same period, a report for President Lyndon Johnson from the
President's Science Advisory Council in 1965 said the burning of fossil fuels
"may be sufficient to produce measurable and perhaps marked changes in
climate" by the year 2000.
By 1977, Black had become a top technical expert at Exxon Research
& Engineering, a research hub based in Linden, N.J., and a science advisor to
Exxon's top management. That year he made a presentation to the company's
leading executives warning that carbon dioxide accumulating in the upper
atmosphere would warm the planet and if the CO2 concentration continued to
rise, it could harm the environment and humankind.
 "The management committee consisted of the top level senior
managers at Exxon. The chairman, the president, the senior vice presidents,
corporate wide," N. Richard Werthamer, who worked at Exxon Research,
said in a recent interview with InsideClimate News. "The management
committee only has a limited amount of time and they're only going to deal
with issues that are of relevance to the corporation as a whole. They're not
interested in science per se, they are interested in the implications, so it was
very significant."
In those years, the evidence of global warming justified neither panic
nor complacency. "A lively sense of urgency," is what the National Academy
of Sciences (NAS) called for in a 1977 report that contained a comprehensive
survey of what was understood about global warming at that time.
The NAS report said that it would be understandable if the
uncertainties of climate science elicited a cautious response from researchers
and policymakers. But "if the decision is postponed until the impact of man-
made climate changes has been felt, then, for all practical purposes, the die
will already have been cast," it concluded.
Shaw heard these conclusions in October 1977 at a meeting in Atlanta
organized by scientists and officials from the Carter administration who had
formed a "study group on global environmental effects of carbon dioxide," he
told Exxon colleagues in a memo two weeks later.
The NAS report had concluded that the climatic effects of rising
carbon dioxide "may be the primary limiting factor on energy production
from fossil fuels over the next few centuries," Shaw wrote, quoting the
report's central conclusion almost verbatim.
Along with an awareness of the science, Shaw gained a sense of
opportunity, Exxon documents show. The U.S. Energy Department, which
had only been created in 1977 in response to a global oil shortage, was
launching a research program into carbon dioxide's effects and planned to
disburse about $9 million to research laboratories, Shaw learned.
At the time, two major uncertainties plagued climate science: how
much of the CO2 in the air came from fossil fuels as opposed to deforestation?
And how quickly could the oceans absorb atmospheric CO2? The scientists at
the Atlanta meeting considered it crucial to investigate those questions
immediately, Shaw wrote.
Both issues were vital to the oil industry's future. If deforestation
played as great a role as fossil fuels in CO2 accumulation, then responsibility
for reducing carbon dioxide emissions would not fall entirely on the energy
industry. If the oceans could slow the greenhouse effect by absorbing more
CO2, there would be time before the fossil fuel industry had to adjust.
In a memo to a colleague in March 1978, one of Shaw's
bosses, Harold N. Weinberg, wrote: "I propose that Exxon be the initiator of
a worldwide 'CO2 in the Atmosphere' R&D program…What would be more
appropriate than for the world's leading energy company and leading oil
company [to] take the lead in trying to define whether a long-term
CO2 problem really exists, and if so, what counter measures would be
appropriate."
But Weinberg's vision proved too ambitious for Exxon.
Exxon Research "considered an independent research program but
concluded that the amount of effort required and the scope of disciplines
involved made it impractical for a single institution to attack this problem
alone," Walter R. Eckelmann, an executive at the Science & Technology
Department at Exxon headquarters in New York wrote to a senior vice
president.
Eckelmann's letter was one of many instances when Exxon's
CO2 research would reach beyond Exxon Research & Engineering in New
Jersey and to executives at the company's New York headquarters,
documents show.
Exxon's extensive research was driven by the threat accumulating
CO2 posed to the company's core business, according to participants and
documents.
"My guess is they were looking for what might happen if we keep
burning fossil fuels; what that would mean to them," said Taro Takahashi, an
adjunct professor at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth
Observatory. Takahashi, who spent his career studying climate change,
collaborated on a research project with Exxon in the late 1970s to early 80s
and used data from the research in several studies he later published in peer-
reviewed journals.
The project he worked on—outfitting an ocean tanker to measure the
ocean's absorption of carbon dioxide—was a crown jewel in Exxon's research
program.

GROUNDBREAKING EXPERIMENTS

Bold research projects were not uncommon at Exxon, which in the

1970s considered gradually shifting from oil to become a diversified energy
company. Through its research units, Exxon explored ways to encourage
more efficient consumption of petroleum and a wide range of alternative
fuels. After company scientist Elliot Berman found a way to slash the cost of
making photovoltaic solar cells by 80 percent, Exxon's chairman Clifton
Garvin publicized how he heated his family swimming pool with solar power
to show support for energy diversification.
To nudge greater innovation, Garvin hired Edward E. David, Jr. in
1977 to run Exxon Research. David had spent two decades at Bell Labs, a
leader in the blue-sky research that led to big leaps in technology, and
eventually became its director of research. While serving as Nixon's science
advisor from 1970-'73, White House staff taught him about climate science as
part of a report on energy and electricity issues, one former staff member
recalled.
At Exxon, David opened the door wide to studying carbon dioxide.
In a letter to David and 14 other Exxon Research executives in
December 1978, Shaw spelled out why Exxon should take on carbon dioxide
research—specifically, with the ambitious ocean-sampling initiative.
"The rationale for Exxon's involvement and commitment of funds and
personnel is based on our need to assess the possible impact of the
greenhouse effect on Exxon business," Shaw wrote. "Exxon must develop a
credible scientific team that can critically evaluate the information generated
on the subject and be able to carry bad news, if any, to the corporation.
"We see no better method to acquire the necessary reputation than by
attacking one of the major uncertainties in the global CO2 balance, i.e., the
flux to the oceans and providing the necessary data."
Scientists knew the oceans had some ability to absorb CO2 and
potentially neutralize climate change. Any CO2 that made its way from the
atmosphere into the deep oceans—more than 50 to 100 feet below the surface
—would be sequestered away for hundreds of years. But they also knew the
rate of absorption was limited, and determining the exact rate was crucial for
understanding the oceans' ability to delay the greenhouse effect.

EXXON'S FLOATING LAB

Exxon delved into the oceans' role by installing a state-of-the-art lab

aboard the Esso Atlantic, one of the biggest supertankers of the time.
Exxon planned to gather atmospheric and oceanic CO2 samples along
the Esso Atlantic's route from the Gulf of Mexico to the Persian Gulf. If the
sensors revealed a deep enough oceanic sink, or absorption, the fossil fuel
industry might have more time before it had to make tough decisions about
its role in warming the planet.
"We couldn't account for everything because the exchanges between
the atmosphere and the oceans weren't fully understood," Edward Garvey,
Shaw's main researcher on the tanker project, said in an interview. "Our goal
was to complete the carbon cycle to understand where global carbon
production would end up and then make forecasts of how the system would
react in the future."
The experiment began on August 8, 1979, when Garvey oversaw the
equipping of the Esso Atlantic, which was docked by the Lago Refinery in
Aruba, an island in Dutch West Indies.
 The route of Exxon’s Esso Atlantic tanker.

Werthamer, Shaw's boss in 1980-81, said the project wouldn't have

happened without Shaw's initiative.
"Henry Shaw was a very forceful guy, quiet, he didn't hit you over the
head, but he presented his case in ways that made it hard to not agree with it,"
Werthamer said in a recent interview. "He had the political savvy to put it
over and the technical savvy to make it happen."
While the company had the wherewithal to carry out the study on the
oceans, it lacked the expertise. So Exxon recruited two experts, Wallace
Broecker and Takahashi, his colleague at Columbia University's Lamont-
Doherty Geological Observatory.
Takahashi said he made it clear that he and Broecker would not
compromise their scientific integrity. "The one condition that was not
negotiable was we shall publish our results to the open public no matter the
results," he said in an interview.
 Exxon scientists and managers involved with the project agreed.
"The tanker project was intended to provide valid, legitimate,
scientific data, unassailable hopefully, on key questions in atmospheric
chemistry [of] CO2 emissions," Werthamer said. "Henry's additional goal was
to make Exxon a credible participant in that research and in the dialogue that
would inevitably follow…He wanted Exxon to be respected as a valid player
and have Exxon's opinions solicited, and participate in discussions on policy,
rather than have the issue suddenly dumped with Exxon's back turned."
Responding to ICN's questions about the tanker research last week,
Exxon spokesman Richard Keil said it "was actually aimed at increasing
understanding of the marine carbon cycle – it had nothing to do with CO2
emissions."
But from the beginning of the research, documents show, its
participants described it differently.
In a memo to Harold Weinberg on July 3, 1979, Shaw described in
detail the tanker's route and its instruments, explaining that "this will provide
information on the possible growth of CO2 in the atmosphere."
In a November 1979 memo to Weinberg, he wrote, "It behooves us to
start a very aggressive defensive program in the indicated areas of
atmospheric science and climate because there is a good probability that
legislation affecting our business will be passed."
Depending on its findings, the research might provide an escape valve
from the carbon problem, or point to some new direction in energy.
The research "could well influence Exxon's view about the long-term
attractiveness of coal and synthetics relative to nuclear and solar energy"
David wrote in a November 1979 letter to senior vice president George T.
Piercy.
Exxon's enthusiasm for the project flagged in the early '80s when
federal funds fell through. Exxon Research cancelled the tanker project in
1982, but not before Garvey, Shaw and other company engineers published
an initial paper in a highly specialized journal on the project's methodology.
"We were anxious to get the word out that we were doing this study,"
Garvey said of the paper, which did not reach sweeping conclusions. "The
paper was the first of what we hoped to be many papers from the work," he
said in a recent email. But the other publications never materialized.
Takahashi later co-authored a study in 1990 partially based on the
tanker data that said land-based ecosystems—boreal forests, for example—
absorbed more atmospheric CO2 than the oceans. He used Exxon's tanker
records again in 2009, in an updated study that compiled 30 years of oceanic
CO2 data from dozens of reports. This time, his team concluded the oceans
absorb only about 20 percent of the CO2 emitted annually from fossil fuels
and other human activities. The paper earned Takahashi a "Champions of the
Earth" prize from the United Nations.

Columbia scientist Taro Takahashi helped review and process the climate-related data collected aboard
Exxon’s Esso Atlantic tanker. (Credit: Tara Takahashi)

Other research ideas that bubbled up in those days were even more
imaginative.
Shaw and Garvey sketched out a second project to determine how
much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was attributable to fossil fuels as
compared to deforestation. Shaw's team proposed measuring the carbon
isotopes—a chemical fingerprint—in 100 bottles of vintage French wine over
time. To ensure data quality, they would only sample wine from long-
established vineyards that kept careful records of temperatures and growing
conditions. In the same file was a New York Times review by wine critic
Frank Prial of classic Bordeaux vintages, including a $300 Lafite-Rothschild
bottle from 1945.
"The C-isotope studies of biological material also appear useful and
novel," David Slade, the head of the Energy Department's carbon dioxide
research, wrote to Shaw in a May 1979 letter. "We congratulate (with some
envy) Exxon's resourcefulness in selecting aged wines as the biological
material."

IMPLICATIONS BECOME CLEARER

As Exxon worked to reduce the uncertainties of climate science, its

employees developed a sophisticated understanding of the potential effects of
rising CO2 concentrations, documents show. They understood that the Earth's
poles would warm more quickly than the rest of the planet, and how a
reduction in ice and snow cover would change the planet's ability to reflect
sunlight.
They also discussed among themselves and with corporate executives
other potential effects of climate change, including an increase in weeds,
pests, and human migration, the documents show.
Some of the company's highest-ranking executives were told of the
studies and of estimates about when the impact of global warming might be
felt. On November 9, 1979, Edward David wrote a three-page letter to senior
vice president Piercy explaining the importance of the ocean investigations.
In January 1980, Science & Technology's Eckelmann wrote to senior
vice president M.E.J. "Morey" O'Loughlin that his unit "feels that the build-
up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a potentially serious problem
requiring the results of a huge worldwide research effort before quantitative
predictions can be reached on the probabilities and timing of world climate
changes."
Piercy and O'Loughlin seemed particularly interested in following the
emerging climate science, internal documents indicate. In a memo to
Werthamer and Shaw in June 1980, Weinberg wrote that Piercy "questioned
him closely" at an Exxon meeting about the movement of carbon dioxide
between the atmosphere and the oceans.

OUTSIDE EXPERTS TAKE NOTICE

During this time, Exxon was building a reputation for expertise on

carbon dioxide, prompting government and industry to seek its input on the
issue. As early as 1979, the American Petroleum Institute formed a CO2 and
Climate Task Force, and Exxon sent Shaw to the group's meetings as its
representative, according to documents. The other industry members were
Sohio, Texaco, and Shell. They often met in a conference room at LaGuardia
Airport.
Shaw was a regular on advisory committees and government task
forces, rubbing shoulders with many leading climate scientists, including
NASA's James Hansen and Columbia's Stephen Schneider, whom Exxon
even considered as a possible recruit, according to one document.
U.S. government officials expressed their appreciation to Exxon for
the company's contributions, calling it a valued partner.
In a letter to Shaw in May 1979, David Slade, the head of the Energy
Department's Carbon Dioxide and Climate Research program, wrote: "This
represents very responsible action, which we hope will serve as a model for
research contributions from the corporate sector."
Two years later, Slade's successor in President Ronald Reagan's
administration, Frederick A. Koomanoff, wrote: "We feel that Exxon should
be commended for their initiatives to investigate the carbon dioxide issue."

ICN staff members Zahra Hirji, Paul Horn, Naveena Sadasivam,

Sabrina Shankman and Alexander Wood also contributed to this report.
 “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 F. Black
Exxon Senior Scientist
1978

“It is highly unlikely that the temperature in the middle of the

next century will be significantly affected whether the policies are
enacted now or 20 years from now.”
Lee Raymond
Exxon Chairman and CEO
1997
 3. EXXON CONFIRMED GLOBAL WARMING CONSENSUS
IN 1982 WITH IN-HOUSE CLIMATE MODELS
The company chairman would later mock climate models as
unreliable while he campaigned to stop global action to reduce
fossil fuel emissions.
By Lisa Song, Neela Banerjee and David Hasemyer
Sept. 22, 2015

Steve Knisely was an intern at Exxon Research and Engineering in

the summer of 1979 when a vice president asked him to analyze how global
warming might affect fuel use.
"I think this guy was looking for validation that the greenhouse effect
should spur some investment in alternative energy that's not bad for the
environment," Knisely, now 58 and a partner in a management consulting
company, recalled in a recent interview.
Knisely projected that unless fossil fuel use was constrained, there
would be "noticeable temperature changes" and 400 parts per million of
carbon dioxide (CO2) in the air by 2010, up from about 280 ppm before the
Industrial Revolution. The summer intern's predictions turned out to be very
close to the mark.
Knisely even concluded that the fossil fuel industry might need to
leave 80 percent of its recoverable reserves in the ground to avoid doubling
CO2 concentrations, a notion now known as the carbon budget. In 2013, the
United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change formally
endorsed the idea.
"The potential problem is great and urgent," Knisely wrote. "Too little
is known at this time to recommend a major U.S. or worldwide change in
energy type usage but it is very clear that immediate research is necessary."
The report, which circulated within the company through the early
1980s, reflected Exxon's growing need to understand when the climate
implications of increased CO2 emissions would begin to spur policy changes.
 So Exxon (now ExxonMobil) shelved an ambitious but costly
program that sampled carbon dioxide in the oceans—the centerpiece of its
climate research in the 1970s—as it created its own computerized climate
models. The models aimed to simulate how the planet's climate system would
react to rising CO2 levels, relying on a combination of mathematics, physics,
and atmospheric science.
Through much of the 1980s, Exxon researchers worked alongside
university and government scientists to generate objective climate models
that yielded papers published in peer-reviewed journals. Their work
confirmed the emerging scientific consensus on global warming's risks.
Yet starting in 1989, Exxon leaders went down a different road. They
repeatedly argued that the uncertainty inherent in computer models makes
them useless for important policy decisions. Even as the models grew more
powerful and reliable, Exxon publicly derided the type of work its own
scientists had done. The company continued its involvement with climate
research, but its reputation for objectivity began to erode as it campaigned
internationally to cast doubt on the science.
This eight-month InsideClimate News investigation details Exxon's
early research into global warming, based on hundreds of pages of internal
documents and interviews with former employees and scientists. The
company declined to provide comment or answer questions for this article.

Brian Flannery (Credit: © Academia Engelberg Foundation)

 One scientist who crossed over from academia to Exxon Research
was Brian Flannery, an associate professor of astronomy from Harvard and
an expert in mathematical modeling. Flannery joined the company in 1980.
At about the same time, Exxon hired Andrew Callegari, a mathematics
professor at New York University. When the company shifted its focus to
modeling in 1981, Callegari became head of the company's CO2 research,
replacing Henry Shaw, who had steered the ocean sampling project.
Callegari approached Martin Hoffert, an old colleague at NYU, to
work with the Exxon team as a consultant on modeling. Hoffert jumped at the
chance. He was already deeply concerned about the consequences of
atmospheric carbon and saw the opportunity as an "all hands on deck"
approach to heading off an environmental disaster.
"We were all interested as geek scientists at the time," Hoffert, who is
now retired, recalled in a recent interview. "There were no divisions, no
agendas."
Flannery and Callegari were "very legitimate research guys," Hoffert
said. "We talked about the politics of this stuff a lot, but we always separated
the politics from the science."

CLIMATE 'CATASTROPHE' FORESEEN

By 1981, Exxon scientists were no longer questioning whether the

buildup of CO2 would cause the world to heat up. Through their own studies
and their participation in government-sponsored conferences, company
researchers had concluded that rising CO2 levels could create catastrophic
impacts within the first half of the 21st century if the burning of oil, gas and
coal wasn't contained.
"When I arrived there, I was quite surprised to discover that people in
the research lab were very aware of the increase in the growth rate of carbon
dioxide measurements in Hawaii [at the Mauna Loa observatory]," Morrel H.
Cohen, a senior scientist at Exxon Research from 1981 to 1996, said in a
recent interview. "They were very aware of the greenhouse effect."
As the researchers alerted Exxon's upper management about the
CO2 problem, the scientists worked to provide better estimates of when the
warming trend would create noticeable damage, and how large the impacts
might be.
One scientist, Werner Glass, wrote an analysis in 1981 for a senior
vice president that said the rise in global temperatures would begin to be
noticed in a few decades. But Glass hedged his bet, saying the magnitude of
the change would be "well short of catastrophic" in the early years.
Exxon manager Roger Cohen saw things differently.
"I think that this statement may be too reassuring," Cohen, director of
the Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences Laboratory at Exxon
Research, wrote in an August 18, 1981 memo to Glass.
He called it "distinctly possible" that the projected warming trend
after 2030 "will indeed be catastrophic (at least for a substantial fraction of
the earth's population)."
Cohen continued: "This is because the global ecosystem in 2030
might still be in a transient, headed for much significant effects after time
lags perhaps of the order of decades."
Cohen demonstrated a sophisticated understanding of the climate
system. He recognized that even if the impacts were modest in 2030, the
world would have locked in enough CO2 emissions to ensure more severe
consequences in subsequent decades. By 2030, he warned, the damage could
be irreversible.

UNANIMOUS AGREEMENT

"Over the past several years a clear scientific consensus has emerged
regarding the expected climatic effects of increased atmospheric CO2," Cohen
wrote to A.M. Natkin of Exxon Corporation's Science and Technology Office
in 1982. "The consensus is that a doubling of atmospheric CO2 from its pre-
industrial revolution value would result in an average global temperature rise
of (3.0 ± 1.5)°C." (Equal to 5.4 ± 2.7°F).
"There is unanimous agreement in the scientific community that a
temperature increase of this magnitude would bring about significant changes
in the earth's climate, including rainfall distribution and alterations in the
biosphere."
Exxon's own modeling research confirmed this and the company's
results were later published in at least three peer-reviewed science articles.
Two of them were co-authored by Hoffert, and a third was written entirely by
Flannery.
Exxon's modeling experts also explained away the less-dire
predictions of a 1979 study led by Reginald Newell, a prominent atmospheric
scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Newell's model
projected that the effects of climate change would not be as severe as most
scientists were predicting.
Specifically, Newell and a co-author from the Air Force named
Thomas Dopplick challenged the prevailing view that a doubling of the
earth's CO2 blanket would raise temperatures about 3°C (5°F)– a measure
known as climate sensitivity. Instead, they said the earth's true climate
sensitivity was roughly less than 1°C (2°F).
They based their results on a mechanism called "evaporative
buffering," in which excess warming at the equator causes increased
evaporation, cooling the planet in the same way that perspiration cools a
marathon runner.
Exxon's research team disagreed. Even if the mechanism cooled the
equator, the worldwide warming would still be higher, they found, according
to the researchers' peer-reviewed studies.
"In summary, the results of our research are in accord with the
scientific consensus on the effect of increased atmospheric CO2 on climate,"
Cohen wrote in the 1982 letter he sent to Natkin.
 Martin Hoffert (Credit: NASA)

Exxon's science turned out to be spot on, and the company's early
modeling projections still hold up more than 30 years later, Hoffert said in an
email to InsideClimate News. The Arctic's rapid warming and the extreme
vulnerability of Antarctica's ice sheets are "consistent with the results of our
theory which predicted them before they happened," Hoffert wrote.
Exxon "should be taking credit for their role in developing useful
model predictions of the pattern of global warming by their research guys, as
opposed to their denialist lobbyists saying global warming from fossil fuel
burning doesn't exist or is at best 'unproven,'" he wrote.

SPREADING THE WORD, INTERNALLY

The conclusions of Exxon's climate modeling were being circulated

broadly within the company in the 1980s.
Marvin B. Glaser, an Environmental Affairs Manager at
Exxon, distributed a 43-page primer on climate change on Nov. 12, 1982.
In a cover letter to 15 Exxon executives and managers, Glaser said the
document provided guidance "on the CO2 'Greenhouse' Effect which is
receiving increased attention in both the scientific and popular press as an
emerging environmental issue." He continued: "The material has been given
wide circulation to Exxon management and is intended to familiarize Exxon
personnel with the subject."
 "However, it should be restricted to Exxon personnel and not
distributed externally," he wrote.
Glaser's primer drew from the best research of the time, including
Exxon's, to explain how global temperatures would rise considerably by the
end of the 21st century. Because of the warming, "there are some potentially
catastrophic events that must be considered," including sea level rise from
melting polar ice sheets, according to the document. It noted that some
scientific groups were concerned "that once the effects are measurable, they
might not be reversible."
Reining in "the greenhouse effect," the primer said, "would require
major reductions in fossil fuel combustion."
Yet the report also argued against a rapid shift to non-fossil fuel
energy sources, noting that "making significant changes in energy
consumption…amid all the scientific uncertainties would be premature in
view of the severe impact such moves could have on the world's economies
and societies."
Exxon's reputation for conducting serious carbon dioxide research
was growing outside the company. Its scientists were frequent participants on
industry and government panels.
Flannery, for example, contributed to a multi-volume series of Energy
Department reports published in 1985 on the state of climate change science.
It concluded that atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations had already
increased by about 25 percent in the past century, and continued use of fossil
fuels would lead to substantial temperature increases in the future.
Flannery was the only industry representative among 15
scientists who wrote the volume titled "Projecting the Climatic Effects of
Increasing Carbon Dioxide."
Hoffert and Flannery co-authored a chapter that concluded that since
the Industrial Revolution the Earth would warm 1°C (or 2°F) by 2000 and
rise another 2 to 5°C (4 to 9°F) over the next hundred years.
As it turned out, the world's temperature has risen about 0.8°C (1.4°F)
and mainstream scientists continue to predict, with increasing urgency, that if
emissions are not curtailed, carbon pollution would lock in warming of as
much as 3 to 6°C (or 5 to 11°F) over the next several decades.
 QUANTIFYING THE UNCERTAINTY

Throughout its climate modeling phase, Exxon researchers, like

outside scientists, grappled with the uncertainties inherent in climate model
projections.
"Models are being used to explore physical effects (scenarios) and as
a predictive tool," Andrew Callegari said in a Feb. 2, 1984 presentation for
colleagues. The "validity of models [are] not established," Callegari wrote.
"Complexity of carbon cycle and climate system require many
approximations."
Scientists, regulators and Exxon all had to ask themselves: what
should be done, given that uncertainty? Should governments and corporations
wait for the ambiguities to be resolved before acting to cut fossil fuel
emissions? Or should the researchers recommend immediate action because
of a preponderance of evidence?
Since then, modeling has become an increasingly useful and reliable
tool. The IPCC, the United Nations institution that compiles the scientific
consensus on global warming, has issued a series of reports since 1990 based
on those models. Each report has grown more certain. By the fifth report in
2013, the IPCC said it was "extremely likely that human influence has been
the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century."
As the consensus grew within the scientific world, Exxon doubled
down on the uncertainty. Its campaign to muddy research results placed the
company outside the scientific mainstream. Some of the researchers who
once led the company’s modeling became vocal climate contrarians, among
them Brian Flannery and Roger Cohen.
Flannery survived the lay-offs of the mid-1980s that decimated the
Exxon Research staff and rose in the corporate ranks to become the
company's chief scientist. He attended IPCC meetings from the outset and by
the early 1990s, he emerged as a prominent skeptic of the science he had
once conducted.
For example, in a 1999 paper based on a speech to Exxon's European
affiliates, Flannery derided the second IPCC assessment that concluded in
1995 that the scientific evidence suggested "a discernible human influence on
climate."
"You'll note that this is a very carefully worded statement,
recognizing that the jury is still out, especially on any quantifiable connection
to human actions," Flannery wrote. "The conclusion does not refer to global
warming from increases in greenhouse gases. Indeed, many scientists say that
a great deal of uncertainty still needs to be resolved."
The change in Cohen's thinking was also stark, as he acknowledged in
2008. While still at Exxon he was "well convinced, as were most technically
trained people, that the IPCC's case for Anthropogenic Global Warming
(AGW) is very tight." But he wrote in a 2008 essay for the Science and
Public Policy Institute, a climate denial website, that upon closer inspection
of the research he found it to be "flimsy."
In 2007, the American Physical Society, the country's largest
organization of physicists, adopted a strong statement on climate change that
said "The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring."
Cohen, an APS fellow, helped lead a campaign to weaken the APS's
official position and earlier this year succeeded in stripping out the word
'incontrovertible' from a draft text. APS members will vote on the final
language in November.
Flannery and Cohen declined to comment, despite multiple requests.
Exxon's former chairman and CEO, Lee Raymond, took an even
tougher line against climate science. Speaking before the World Petroleum
Congress in Beijing in 1997, Raymond mocked climate models in an effort to
stop the imminent adoption of the Kyoto Protocol, an international accord to
reduce emissions.
"They are notoriously inaccurate," Raymond said. "1990's models
were predicting temperature increases of two to five degrees Celsius by the
year 2100," he said, without explaining the source of those numbers. "Last
year's models say one to three degrees. Where to next year?"

ICN staff members Zahra Hirji, Paul Horn, Naveena Sadasivam,

Sabrina Shankman and Alexander Wood also contributed to this report.
 “There is unanimous agreement in the scientific community
that a temperature increase of this magnitude would bring about
significant changes in the earth’s climate, including rainfall
distribution and alterations in the biosphere.”
Roger Cohen
Exxon Sciences Lab Director
1982

“A major frustration to many is the all-too-apparent bias of

IPCC to downplay the significance of scientific uncertainty and
gaps.”
Brian Flannery
Exxon Position Paper
2002
 4. EXXON'S BUSINESS AMBITION COLLIDED WITH
CLIMATE CHANGE UNDER A DISTANT SEA
Throughout the 1980s, the company struggled to solve the carbon
problem of one of the biggest gas fields in the world out of concern
for climate impacts.
By Neela Banerjee and Lisa Song
Oct. 8, 2015

In 1980, as Exxon Corp. set out to develop one of the world's largest
deposits of natural gas, it found itself facing an unfamiliar risk: the project
would emit immense amounts of carbon dioxide, adding to the looming threat
of climate change.
The problem cropped up shortly after Exxon signed a contract with
the Indonesian state oil company to exploit the Natuna gas field in the South
China Sea—big enough to supply the blossoming markets of Japan, Taiwan
and Korea with liquefied natural gas into the 21st century.
Assessing the environmental impacts, Exxon Research and
Engineering quickly identified Natuna's greenhouse gas problem. The
reservoir was contaminated with much more carbon dioxide than normal. It
would have to be disposed of somehow—and simply venting it into the air
could have serious consequences, Exxon's experts warned.
Exxon's dawning realization that carbon dioxide and the greenhouse
effect posed a danger to the world collided with the company's fossil fuel
ambitions.
"They were being farsighted," recalled John L. Woodward, who wrote
an internal report in 1981 on Natuna's climate implications.
"They weren't sure when CO2 controls would be required and how it
would affect the economics of the project."
Since 1978, long before the general public grew aware of the climate
crisis, Exxon had worked at the cutting edge of emerging climate science. At
first, Exxon’s internal studies had described climate change as an important
but somewhat distant problem. Now, sooner than expected, climate
considerations were affecting strategic business decisions. Natuna was one
example; another was Exxon’s proposed leap into synthetic fuels.
Releasing Natuna's carbon pollution would make it "the world's
largest point source emitter of CO2 and raises concern for the possible
incremental impact of Natuna on the CO2 greenhouse problem," declared an
October 1984 report from Exxon's top climate modeler, Brian Flannery, and
his boss Andrew Callegari.
Documents and other evidence uncovered by InsideClimate News
also show that Exxon calculated that Natuna's emissions would have twice
the climate impact of coal. The company spent years researching possible
remedies, but found them all too costly or ineffective, ICN's eight-month
investigation found.
Exxon managers saw the problem as both technically vexing and
environmentally fraught. Not only was there carbon dioxide to be dealt with,
it was mixed with toxic, flammable hydrogen sulfide, a contributor to acid
rain.
"I think we generally agree that we are seeking a method of disposing
of the off gases in a manner which will minimize the risk of environmental
damage," wrote Exxon's manager of environmental affairs Alvin M. Natkin
in an October 1983 letter to Natuna project executive Richard L. Preston.
"We must also have the data which will be convincing not only to ourselves
but also to the international environmental community that the method
selected is environmentally sound."
The company consulted with leading scientists, including NASA's
pioneering expert James E. Hansen, to understand the effect on atmospheric
CO2 concentrations if the gas from Natuna were released. It sent staff to
facilities at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada to simulate the diffusion
of the gas into ocean water. Over the years, Exxon scientists developed
mathematical models to assess the options.
Because the project was so complex and expensive, the Natuna staff
presented regular updates, including details of the CO2 issue, to Exxon's
board of directors, whose members were drawn almost entirely from the
company's upper management.
 Some Exxon directors accepted the emerging climate consensus.
Others were less sure of the science, but agreed that as popular attention to
global warming mounted, releasing Natuna’s greenhouse gases into the air
could turn into a public relations debacle, former employees said.
Either way, directors repeatedly told project staff Natuna could not
proceed unless the CO2 was handled in a cost-effective way that did not harm
the atmosphere.
"Their concerns kept getting stronger," said a former employee with
knowledge of the project, who asked for anonymity because the issue
remains sensitive even years later. "Their attitude went from, 'Maybe we have
to remove the CO2,' to, as the years went by, their saying, 'This project cannot
go ahead unless we remove the CO2.'"
In 1984, Lee Raymond joined Exxon's board of directors. A senior
vice president, Raymond's responsibilities included overseeing Exxon
Research and Engineering, which conducted the Natuna studies. In the
summer of 1985, ER&E prepared documents for Raymond about a study that
examined disposing Natuna's CO2 into the ocean, an Exxon memo shows.
Eventually, Raymond would rise to become chairman and chief
executive, and to lead a public campaign discrediting the scientific consensus
on climate change and fighting measures to control greenhouse gas
emissions.
In the meantime Exxon, now known as ExxonMobil, appears to have
kept its years of climate-related deliberations about Natuna mostly to itself.
Exxon only began to disclose climate risks to its shareholders years after it
first weighed Natuna's risks, federal filings show.
ExxonMobil declined to answer specific questions for this article. In
July, when ICN questioned him for an earlier article about Natuna,
spokesman Richard Keil said, "It is company policy not to comment on
potential commercial operations."

THE CARBON FOOTPRINT

First discovered by the Italian oil company Agip in the early 1970s,
the Natuna gas field lies about 700 miles north of Jakarta and holds about 46
trillion cubic feet of recoverable methane, or natural gas. But the undersea
formation also contains 154 trillion cubic feet of other gases, mostly CO2.
To liquefy Natuna's methane for shipping, it must be supercooled. At
those low temperatures, the carbon dioxide would freeze into dry ice and clog
equipment, so it had to be removed. The question was where to put it.
The Indonesian government and the state-run oil company had no
issue with releasing the CO2 into the air, former Exxon staff said. But
awareness of carbon dioxide's impact on global temperatures had been
seeping through Exxon, from its rank-and-file engineers to its board of
directors.
"Within Exxon in those days, there were probably two to three
believers in global warming for every denier or those who emphasized the
uncertainty," said another former Exxon Research executive, who asked not
to be identified for fear of reprisal.
Among the key people searching for a solution was Gilbert Gervasi,
the Natuna project manager, who worked in Houston under executive
Richard Preston for Esso Eastern, the unit that oversaw projects in East Asia.
Gervasi spearheaded the effort from the early to mid-1980s to figure out how
big Natuna's carbon footprint would be and what to do about it.
In a Feb. 3, 1981 letter to Gene Northington at Research and
Engineering, Gervasi challenged a "rough calculation" that Northington had
made of the CO2 emissions from producing Natuna's gas and burning it as
fuel. Northington's math showed Natuna's total CO2 emissions would be “no
higher than what would be emitted by burning" an equivalent amount of coal,
Gervasi wrote.
After conducting what he described as “more rigorous” calculations,
Gervasi concluded “that the total release of CO2 from producing Natuna gas
and burning of the LNG manufactured from the gas would be almost twice
that emitted by burning an equivalent amount of coal.”
Six months later, Research and Engineering sent Gervasi a report,
entitled "Possible Climate Modification Effects of Releasing Carbon Dioxide
to the Atmosphere from the Natuna LNG Project." It commissioned
assessments of Natuna by seven eminent atmospheric scientists, including the
climatologists Helmut Landsberg of University of Maryland and NASA's
Hansen.
The report, written by John Woodward, a high level engineer at
Exxon Research, presented a mixed message. Natuna would constitute a
"small fraction of worldwide CO2 budget," it found. But it also found that
"emissions are nonetheless substantial by several comparisons."

DISPOSAL OPTIONS

Woodward examined the option of flaring the CO2 after it had been
stripped from the natural gas.
Although not combustible, the CO2 had to be flared rather than simply
vented because it was mixed with hydrogen sulfide, which is often burned to
convert it to safer compounds. But flaring would not eliminate Natuna’s
greenhouse gas emissions.
Next, Woodward looked at releasing the CO2 into seawater around
Natuna, a process known as sparging. The gas from the Natuna well would be
piped to a nearby platform where the valuable methane would be separated
from the waste CO2 and the toxic hydrogen sulfide. Those unwanted gases, in
turn, would then be sent from the platform to a pipe about 300 feet below on
the ocean floor. The pipe would be arranged in a circle 6 miles in diameter
and the gas would be bubbled out of perforations every six to 10 feet, like
aerating an aquarium.
Woodward said that in 1982 he visited the oceanography department
at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia to use their equipment to collect data
for sparging models. Dalhousie had a tank about 40 feet high and 10 feet
wide, filled with ocean water. Researchers released CO2 at the bottom of the
tank, and Woodward measured the size and quantity of the bubbles at various
depths as they rose to the surface to understand how the gas dissipated.
In the end, the hydrogen sulfide released with the CO2 stymied the
sparging idea, Woodward said. Exxon worried that a toxic plume might kill
fish and result in bad press.
 BACK TO SQUARE ONE

The Natuna project staff and Research and Engineering specialists

probed for answers through the 1980s, sometimes revisiting the approaches
that Woodward had examined.
In October 1983, Gervasi sent a letter and background paper on
Natuna to about a dozen staff and executives from different branches of the
corporation to develop "a study program which over the next 1-2 years will
put Exxon in a position to reach a final decision on the environmental aspects
of the project."
The background paper laid out options to dispose of the CO2, none of
them optimal. Releasing the waste gases into the air remained the simplest,
cheapest method. "However, this raises environmental questions concerning
the 'greenhouse' effect of the CO2," the paper said.
Gervasi’s paper said the only effective way to dispose of carbon
dioxide and hydrogen sulfide without harming the atmosphere or ocean
would involve injecting the gases underground into the Natuna formation
itself or a nearby reservoir. But that option appeared prohibitively expensive.
Thwarted by cost or environmental impact, Exxon returned to
mathematical models over the next two years to home in on a suitable
approach.
By February 1984, Exxon Research began modeling once more the
feasibility of sparging.
The scientists found that the ocean would release the CO2 into the
atmosphere, probably in 10 years or sooner. Further, increased CO2 would
raise the acidity of the ocean water, damaging the local environment. "Our
conclusion is that atmospheric discharge is preferable to seawater sparging,"
Flannery and others concluded.
Study after study returned Exxon back to square one with Natuna: it
held the rights to an enormously promising field but was unable to develop it
because it was unwilling to pump so much CO2 into the air.
 The scientists' conclusions were reflected in papers prepared for a
1985meeting with Lee Raymond on Exxon Research's activities.
Their synopsis said: "We modeled the sub-sea disposal of CO2 in the
shallow basin near the Natuna site and found that retention in the sea is only
about a decade, as opposed to 1000 years if the CO2 is disposed in the deep
ocean. We recommend that the sub-sea sparging of CO2 not be implemented
since it offers little advantage over direct atmospheric release."
By the late 1980s, Exxon started to explore pumping the CO2 back
into the Natuna formation, the safest option but probably the priciest.
The company found a cost-effective method to dispose of half of
Natuna's CO2 underground, but calculated that the rest of the CO2 would still
be the equivalent of half of Canada's annual greenhouse gas emissions, said
Roger Witherspoon, a former Program Officer in Corporate Contributions in
the Public Affairs department.
Company officials asked Witherspoon to find a way to plant 100,000
trees annually to offset Natuna's remaining CO2 emissions. The total acreage
would eventually equal the size of Connecticut, Witherspoon said.
As Witherspoon researched the options starting around 1993, Exxon
had embarked on a public campaign casting doubt on climate science as a
basis for strong policy actions. Internally, the attitude was different.
"It was that greenhouse gas buildup could pose a threat to our
business," said Witherspoon, a longtime journalist who worked at Exxon's
Texas headquarters from 1990 to 1995. "You didn't want climate change
caused by oil and gas. So the responsible thing to do was offset any
greenhouse gases you were putting into the atmosphere."
Witherspoon said Exxon started his tree planting plan, but he does not
know how long it lasted.
Exxon continued to investigate possibilities for responsibly disposing
of Natuna's CO2. The project remains dormant, but Exxon never gave up.
After an on-and-off relationship with Indonesia, the company still holds the
license, which is up for renewal next summer.
 “It is now clear that for a number of years, both Bush
administration political appointees and a network of organizations
funded by the world’s largest private energy company,
ExxonMobil, have sought to distort, manipulate, and suppress
climate science, so as to confuse the American public about the
reality and urgency of the global warming problem, and thus
forestall a strong policy response.”
Dr. James J. McCarthy
American Association for the
Advancement of Science
2007

“ExxonMobil has always advocated for good public policy

that is based on sound science. We will continue to do that despite
criticism from those who make unsupported and inaccurate claims
about our company.”
Ken Cohen
Exxon VP of Public &
Government Affairs
2015
 5. HIGHLIGHTING THE ALLURE OF SYNFUELS, EXXON
PLAYED DOWN THE CLIMATE RISKS
In the 1980s, Exxon lobbied to replace scarce oil with synthetic
fossil fuels, but it glossed over the high carbon footprint associated
with synfuels.
By John H. Cushman Jr.
Oct. 8, 2015

Early in the 1980s, the lingering fear of oil scarcity and the emerging
threat of climate change were beginning to intersect. And at that junction
stood Exxon Corp., working out its strategy for survival in the uncertain
21st century.
At the time, Exxon believed oil supplies could not keep up with
demand, so it put its weight behind a crusade to develop synthetic fossil fuels
as a costly and carbon intensive, but potentially profitable alternative. It could
liquefy the vast deposits of coal, oil shale and tar sands that were readily
available in North America. This would be the new black gold, supplying as
much as a third of the energy the United States would use in the early
21st century, company executives estimated.
"These resources are adequate to support a 15 million barrel a day
industry for 175 years," said Randall Meyer, a senior vice president, in a
1981 speech before the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
By then, however, researchers at Exxon were well aware of the
looming problem of climate change. Years earlier, one climate researcher at
the company, Henry Shaw, had called management's attention to a key
conclusion of a landmark National Academy of Sciences report: global
warming caused by carbon dioxide emissions, not a scarcity of supply, would
likely set the ultimate limit on the use of fossil fuels.
Yet in his speech, Meyer said nothing about the carbon footprint of
synfuels – even though the company was aware that making and burning
them would release much more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than
ordinary oil.
 In a 21-page speech, Meyer explained that a national synfuels
program would require investing almost $800 billion (in 1980 dollars) over
three decades. He said it would create 870,000 jobs. It would, he promised,
carry the nation through a long-term transition to "non-depleting and
renewable" energy sources.
"Over the past couple of years my associates and I have talked about
synthetic fuels as a major national need to a lot of audiences," he noted. "In
the federal government, that included the White House and most cabinet
members. At the state level, we visited with governors, and a good many
senators and congressmen. We have had audiences like GM’s and Ford's
senior managements, the Business Roundtable, national labor leaders, major
media companies, influential academics and many others."
The government did respond, with a costly synfuels program that
ultimately folded as oil markets turned from shortage to glut and the
technology proved to be unaffordable. Congress withdrew funding from the
United States Synfuels Corporation, and most forms of synfuels production
never grew to global significance.
One important remnant that survived was the industry's foray into tar
sands oil, especially in Canada, where Exxon would become a major player –
and where the carbon dioxide problem still plagues the industry after more
than three decades. Recent research finds that substantial growth in tar sands
production is incompatible with keeping CO2 emissions below the
internationally accepted target of 2 degrees C.
But in the early days of synfuels, as Exxon defended them as a costly
but plausible solution to oil scarcity, it sidestepped the carbon problem. In the
text of a speech by Exxon chief executive Clifton Garvin before a particularly
skeptical audience, the Environmental Defense Fund, in April 1981, global
warming was never mentioned among the environmental risks that he said the
industry would be "held primarily responsible for solving."
Nor, it appears, did Exxon elaborate on the link between synfuels and
global warming in annual reports to shareholders filed with regulatory
agencies in those early days, when synfuels remained at the heart of the
company’s long term ambitions.
Yet all along, there had been a bubbling concern among researchers,
including some inside Exxon, about the carbon implications of synfuels.
Company documents discovered during an eight-month investigation
by InsideClimate News show that Exxon Research & Engineering estimated
that producing and burning oil shales would release 1.4 to 3 times more
carbon dioxide than conventional oil, and would accelerate the doubling of
greenhouse gases in the atmosphere by about five years. The company knew
that a doubling would risk about 3 degrees Celsius of warming, or 5.4
degrees Fahrenheit.
The company was tracking the research closely. When two U.S.
Geological Survey scientists estimated in Science magazine in 1979 that the
carbon footprint from synfuels might be three to five times more than
conventional fuels, ER&E climate researcher Henry Shaw wrote in a memo
that the upper range "may alarm the public unjustifiably."
As early as November, 1979, Shaw had told Harold Weinberg in a
memo on atmospheric research that environmental groups "have already
attempted to curb the budding synfuels industry because it could accelerate
the buildup of CO2 in the atmosphere." He warned Exxon not to be caught off
guard, the way the aviation industry had been surprised by the threat to
supersonic airplane development when the ozone hole was discovered.
In 1980, after attending a federal advisory committee meeting, Shaw
explained why he didn't think the carbon dioxide problem would block work
on synfuels any time soon.
"I attended the last meeting of this committee on January 17 and 18,
1980, and found such a vast diversity of interests and backgrounds that I
believe no imminent action is possible," he wrote in a memo.
"For example, some environmentalists suggested that all development
of synthetic fuels be terminated until sufficient information becomes
available to permit adequate strategic decisions to be made. The industrial
representation, on the other hand, indicated that the build up of CO2 in the
atmosphere was not necessarily anthropogenic, and is of little consequence
for the next century."
But Shaw also circulated a clipping from The New York Times in
August 1981, under the headline "Synthetic Fuels Called a Peril to the
Atmosphere."
 In the article, the Associated Press quoted an economist named Lester
Lave as testifying before Congress that "if we take CO2 seriously, we would
change drastically the energy policy we are pursuing."
As in so many other realms of its research, Exxon studied a potential
future of synthetic fuels while recognizing that carbon dioxide could be a
powerful factor in its business decisions for decades to come.
 “We are very pleased with Exxon's research intentions related
to the CO2 question. This represents very responsible action, which
we hope will serve as a model for research contributions from the
corporate sector. This is truly a national and international
service.”
David Slade
US Department of Energy
2002

“To call ExxonMobil’s position out of the mainstream is thus

a gross understatement. To be in opposition to the key scientific
findings is rather appalling for such an established and scientific
organization.”
Michael MacCracken
US Global Change Research Program
2002
6. EXXON SOWED DOUBT ABOUT CLIMATE SCIENCE FOR
DECADES BY STRESSING UNCERTAINTY
Collaborating with the Bush-Cheney White House, Exxon turned
ordinary scientific uncertainties into weapons of mass confusion.
By David Hasemyer and John H. Cushman Jr.
Oct. 22, 2015

As he wrapped up nine years as the federal government's chief

scientist for global warming research, Michael MacCracken lashed out at
ExxonMobil for opposing the advance of climate science.
His own great-grandfather, he told the Exxon board, had been John D.
Rockefeller's legal counsel a century earlier. "What I rather imagine he would
say is that you are on the wrong side of history, and you need to find a way to
change your position," he wrote.
Addressed to chairman Lee Raymond on the letterhead of the United
States Global Change Research Program, his September 2002 letter was not
just forceful, but unusually personal.
No wonder: in the opening days of the oil-friendly Bush-Cheney
administration, Exxon's chief lobbyist had written the new head of the White
House environmental council demanding that MacCracken be fired for
"political and scientific bias."
Exxon was also attacking other officials in the U.S. government and
at the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC),
MacCracken wrote, interfering with their work behind the scenes and
distorting it in public.
Exxon wanted scientists who disputed the mainstream science on
climate change to oversee Washington's work with the IPCC, the
authoritative body that defines the scientific consensus on global warming,
documents written by an Exxon lobbyist and one of its scientists show. The
company persuaded the White House to block the reappointment of the IPCC
chairman, a World Bank scientist. Exxon's top climate researcher, Brian
Flannery, was pushing the White House for a wholesale revision of federal
climate science. The company wanted a new strategy to focus on the
uncertainties.
"To call ExxonMobil's position out of the mainstream is thus a gross
understatement," MacCracken wrote. "To be in opposition to the key
scientific findings is rather appalling for such an established and scientific
organization."

Michael MacCracken (Credit: Michael MacCracken)

MacCracken had a long history of collaboration with Exxon

researchers. He knew that during the 1970s and 1980s, well before the
general public understood the risks of global warming, the company's
researchers had worked at the cutting edge of climate change science. He had
edited and even co-authored some of their reports. So he found it galling that
Exxon was now leading a concerted effort to sow confusion about fossil
fuels, carbon dioxide and the greenhouse effect.
Exxon had turned a colleague into its enemy.
It was a vivid example of Exxon's undermining of mainstream science
and embrace of denial and misinformation, which became most pronounced
after President George W. Bush took office. The campaign climaxed when
Bush pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol in 2001. Taking the U.S. out of the
international climate change treaty was Exxon's key goal, and the reason for
its persistent emphasis on the uncertainty of climate science.
This in-depth series by InsideClimate News has explored Exxon's
early engagement with climate research more than 35 years ago – and its
subsequent use of scientific uncertainty as a shield against forceful action on
global warming. The series is based on Exxon documents, interviews, and
other evidence from an eight-month investigation.
"What happened was an incredible disconnect in people trained in
physical science and engineering," recalled Martin Hoffert, a New York
University professor who collaborated with Exxon's team as its early
computer modeling confirmed the emerging scientific consensus on global
warming. "It's an untold story of how we got to the point where climate
change has become a threat to the world."

THE UNCERTAINTY AGENDA

As the Bush-Cheney administration arrived in the White House in

2001, ExxonMobil (NYSE: XOM) now had partners for a climate uncertainty
strategy.
Just weeks after Bush was sworn in, Exxon's top lobbyist Randy
Randol sent the White House a memo complaining that "Clinton/Gore carry-
overs with aggressive agendas" were still playing a role at the IPCC as it
prepared its next assessment of the climate science consensus.
MacCracken and three colleagues should be replaced, or at least kept
out of "any decisional activities," he wrote. Meanwhile, U.S. input to the
IPCC should be delayed.
Further, two scientists highly critical of the prevailing consensus
should be enlisted: John Christy of the University of Alabama should take the
science lead and Richard Lindzen of MIT should review U.S. submissions to
the IPCC.
Exxon had been circulating a proposal to fundamentally overhaul
MacCracken's global change research program, by emphasizing the
uncertainties of climate science.
The timing was not coincidental because the administration, as
required by law, was about to lay out a new federal climate research strategy.
Exxon and its allies wanted the work done during the Clinton-Gore years to
be marginalized.
In March 2002, Flannery, Exxon's science strategy and programs
manager, contacted John H. Marburger, the president's incoming assistant for
science and technology, to pitch the company's favored approach of
emphasizing the uncertainty. Earlier discussions, he asserted, "have not
sought to place the uncertainty in the context of why it is important to public
policy."
Exxon's position paper, attached to his letter, took a dig at the work of
the IPCC.
"A major frustration to many is the all-too-apparent bias of IPCC to
downplay the significance of scientific uncertainty and gaps," the memo said.

A SEAT AT THE TABLE

Exxon had not always been so at odds with the prevailing science.
Since the late 1970s, Exxon scientists had been telling top
executives that the most likely cause of climate change was carbon pollution
from the combustion of fossil fuels, and that it was important to get a grip on
the problem quickly. Exxon Research & Engineering had launched
innovative ocean research from aboard the company's biggest supertanker,
the Esso Atlantic. ER&E's modeling experts, by the early 1980s,
had confirmed the consensus among outside scientists about the climate's
sensitivity to carbon dioxide.
"The facts are that we identified the potential risks of climate change
and have taken the issue very seriously," said Ken Cohen, Exxon's vice
president of public and government affairs, in a press release on October 21
addressing the ICN reports. "We embarked on decades of research in
collaboration with many parties."
 Exxon has declined to answer specific questions from InsideClimate
News.
A 1980 memo proposed an ambitious public-relations plan aimed at
"achieving national recognition of our CO2 Greenhouse research program."
"It is significant to Exxon since future public decisions aimed at
controlling the build-up of atmospheric CO2 could impose limits on fossil
fuel combustion," said the memo. "It is significant to all humanity since,
although the CO2 Greenhouse Effect is not today widely perceived as a threat,
the popular media are giving increased attention to doom-saying theories
about dramatic climate changes and melting polar icecaps."
Most of all, Exxon wanted a seat at the policy-making table, and the
credibility of its research had earned that. In 1979, David Slade, manager of
carbon dioxide research at the Energy Department, called it "a model for
research contributions from the corporate sector."
Sen. Gary Hart, a Colorado Democrat, invited Henry Shaw, an early
Exxon scientist, to join the policy deliberations. He was the only industry
representative invited to an October 1980 conference of the National
Commission on Air Quality, newly set up by Congress, to discuss "whether
potential consequences of increased carbon dioxide levels warrant
development of policies to mitigate adverse effects."
Shaw's bosses agreed that he should attend, "both to be informed as to
what actions or proposals that result and to bring objective thinking and
information to the meeting," Harold Weinberg, Shaw's boss in Exxon
Research and Engineering, wrote in a memo. But first, he said, Shaw needed
to be briefed by public affairs executives "on possible hidden agenda and
individual biases of which we may not already be aware."
When Shaw gave feedback to the commission in December, he noted
the uncertainties about carbon dioxide and climate change. At the same time,
he wrote that it was "important" to place CO2 on the nation's public policy
agenda, as the commission was recommending, and supported the panel's
suggestion that it was "timely to consider ways of reducing CO2 emissions
now."
He also backed a recommendation that the U.S. "seek to develop
discussions on national and international policies."
In late spring of 1981, Flannery was one of the few industry
representatives at a large gathering of accomplished scientists at Harper's
Ferry, W. Va., for a Department of Energy "Workshop on First Detection of
Carbon Dioxide Effects." He sat on a panel with NASA's James Hansen, who
was about to publish a landmark study in Science magazine warning of
significant warming even if controls were placed on carbon emissions.
The workshop's proceedings would declare that "scientists are agreed"
that carbon dioxide was building up in the atmosphere, that the effects "are
well known" and "will bring about an increase in the mean global
temperature," and that it is "commonly accepted" that warming "will affect
the biosphere through a change in climate."
Working with Hoffert, Flannery wrote a highly technical 50-page
chapter to a1985 Energy Department report. Their modeling projected up to 6
degrees Celsius of warming by the end of the 21st century unless emissions of
greenhouse gases were curtailed.

Exxon researchers contributed key climate modeling to a 1985 Energy Department study that projected
significant global warming and said some climate change was already locked in. (Credit: DoE)

The influential government report said the models provided a "firm

basis" for this kind of projection, and that "we are already committed to some
of this warming as a result of emissions over the last several decades."
The Harper's Ferry conference was chaired by MacCracken; he also
edited the warming report. He recalled recently that "the underlying push was
for a level of understanding that was convincing enough to let policymakers
become aware of what the issue was that society faced."
As Hoffert put it in a recent interview, in those days at Exxon "there
were no divisions, no agendas. We were coming together as scientists to
address issues of vital importance to the world."

FORK IN THE ROAD

In 1988, James Hansen told Congress that there was now enough
warming to declare that the greenhouse effect had arrived. Also that year, the
United Nations set up the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
It was a moment that Exxon's climate experts had been forecasting for
a decade: that as warming became unmistakable, governments would move to
control it.
Looking backward, one Exxon document from the early 1990s
reflects a trail of research into global warming stretching back "long before
the issue achieved its current prominence."
An internal compendium of the company's environmental record, on
file in the official ExxonMobil historical archives at the University of Texas-
Austin, acknowledged the uncertainties that have always faced climate
researchers, but it didn't downplay the risks.
"Fossil fuel use dominates as the source of man-made emissions of
carbon dioxide," said one section of the encyclopedic review. "Current
scientific understanding demonstrates the potential for climate change to
produce serious impacts."
"For Exxon and the petroleum industry, potential enhancement of the
greenhouse effect and the possibility of adverse climate are of particular and
fundamental concern," it said.

DRILLING FOR UNCERTAINTY

 The IPCC published its first report in 1990. Despite the scientific
gaps, the panel warned that unrestrained emissions from burning fossil fuels
would surely warm the planet in the century ahead. The conclusion, the IPCC
said after intense deliberations, was "certain." It prescribed deep reductions in
greenhouse gas emissions to stave off a crisis in the coming decades.
At this crucial juncture, Exxon pivoted toward uncertainty and away
from the global scientific consensus.
At the IPCC's final session to draft its summary for policymakers,
Exxon's Flannery was in the room as an observer. He took the microphone to
challenge both the certainty and the remedy. None of the other scientists
agreed with Flannery, and the IPCC brushed off Exxon's advice to water
down the report, according to Jeremy Leggett's eyewitness account in his
book, The Carbon War.
At a conference in June 1991, MacCracken joined a panel chaired by
Flannery to work together on a climate change project involving geo-
engineering.
The contact, according to MacCracken, led to an unexpected
solicitation from the oil lobby in Washington. Will Ollison, a science adviser
at the American Petroleum Institute, in a fax marked urgent, asked
MacCracken, then at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, to write a
paper highlighting the scientific uncertainties surrounding global warming.
The API, where Exxon held enormous sway, wanted him to write up
the complex nuances in plain English – with an emphasis on the unknown,
not the known.
Ollison said the IPCC's 1990 report "may not have adequately
addressed alternative views."
"A review of these alternative projections would be useful in
illustrating the uncertainties inherent in the 'consensus' views expressed in the
IPCC report," Ollison wrote.
MacCracken rejected the task as "fruitless."
"I would caution you about too readily accepting whatever the
naysayers put forth as a means of achieving balance," MacCracken wrote
back.
 Flannery, for his part, continued to emphasize uncertainty. And so did
Exxon's new chairman and chief executive, Lee Raymond, who spoke of it
repeatedly in public.
"Currently, the scientific evidence is inconclusive as to whether
human activities are having a significant effect on the global climate,"
Raymond claimed in a speech delivered in 1996 to the Economic Club of
Detroit.
"Many people, politicians and the public alike, believe that global
warming is a rock-solid certainty," he said the next year in a speech in
Beijing. "But it's not."
Addressing the World Petroleum Congress, which was meeting just
before the conclusion of the Kyoto Protocol negotiations, Raymond even
disputed that the planet was warming at all. "The earth is cooler today than it
was 20 years ago," he said.
That was false. Authoritative climate agencies declared 1997 the
warmest year ever measured. Decade by decade, the warming has continued,
in line with the climate models.
But Raymond, turning his back on Exxon researchers and their state-
of-the-art work, mocked those climate models.
"1990's models were predicting temperature increases of two to five
degrees Celsius by the year 2100. Last year's models say one to three degrees.
Where to next year?"
"It is highly unlikely," he said, "that the temperature in the middle of
the next century will be significantly affected whether policies are enacted
now or 20 years from now."

THE DOUBT INDUSTRY

Exxon and its allies had been working hard to spread this dilatory
message.
First, they set up the Global Climate Coalition (GCC), a lobbying
partnership of leading oil and automobile companies dedicated to defeating
controls on carbon pollution.
"As major corporations with a high level of internal scientific and
technical expertise, they were aware of and in a position to understand the
available scientific data," recounts an essay on corporate responsibility for
climate change published last month in the peer-reviewed journal Climatic
Change.
"From 1989 to 2002, the GCC led an aggressive lobbying and
advertising campaign aimed at achieving these goals by sowing doubt about
the integrity of the IPCC and the scientific evidence that heat-trapping
emissions from burning fossil fuels drive global warming," says the article,
by Harvard climate science historian Naomi Oreskes and two co-authors.
Then, in 1998 Exxon also helped create the Global Climate Science
Team, an effort involving Randy Randol, the company's top lobbyist, and Joe
Walker, a public relations representative for API.
Their memo, leaked to The New York Times, asserted that it is "not
known for sure whether (a) climate change actually is occurring, or (b) if it is,
whether humans really have any influence on it." Opponents of the Kyoto
treaty, it complained, "have done little to build a case against precipitous
action on climate change based on the scientific uncertainty."
The memo declared: "Victory will be achieved when average citizens
'understand' (recognize) uncertainties in climate science," and when
"recognition of uncertainty becomes part of the 'conventional wisdom.'"
Exxon wholeheartedly embraced that theme. For example, an
advertisement called "Unsettled Science" that ran in major papers in the
spring of 2000, prompted one scientist to complain that it had distorted his
work by suggesting it supported the notion that global warming was just a
natural cycle. "It's a shame," Lloyd Keigwin later told the Wall Street
Journal. "The implication is that these data show that we don't need to worry
about global warming."
Another ad, one of a series placed in The New York Times, cast
aspersions on scientists who "believe they can predict changes in climate
decades from now."
Then, in the heat of the 2000 presidential race between climate
champion Al Gore and erstwhile oilman George W. Bush, Exxon placed an
ad in the Washington Post accusing MacCracken's office of putting the
"political cart before a scientific horse."

BLOWING THE WHISTLE

The collaboration between Exxon, its surrogates, and the Bush

administrationto emphasize uncertainty and stave off action came to light in
2005. Awhistleblower named Rick Piltz disclosed that Philip Cooney, an oil
lobbyist who had become chief of staff at the White House environmental
council, had been heavily editing the work of government researchers.
Cooney resigned, and was hired by Exxon.
But the clashes continued between the scientific establishment and
Exxon's purveyors of uncertainty.
The Royal Society of the United Kingdom, for centuries a renowned
arbiter of science, harshly criticized Exxon in 2006 for publishing "very
misleading" statements about the IPCC's Third Assessment Report. The IPCC
found that most of the observed warming of the planet in the late 20th century
was probably caused by humans.
The Society's communications manager Bob Ward reminded Exxon
pointedly that one of its own scientists had contributed to the IPCC chapter in
question.
The Royal Society said it had no problem with Exxon funding
scientific research, but "we do have concerns about ExxonMobil's funding of
lobby groups that seek to misrepresent the scientific evidence relating to
climate change."
Ward said Exxon was funding at least 39 organizations "featuring
information on their websites that misrepresented the science on climate
change, by outright denial of the evidence that greenhouse gases are driving
climate change, or by overstating the amount and significance of uncertainty
in knowledge."
Exxon's uncertainty campaign was detailed in three exhaustive reports
published in 2007 by the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Government
Accountability Project.
 At a Congressional hearing in 2007, Harvard scientist James
McCarthy, who was a member of the UCS board and the newly elected
president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science,
declared: "The Bush administration and a network of Exxon-funded,
ExxonMobil funded organizations have sought to distort, manipulate and
suppress climate science so as to confuse the American public about the
urgency of the global warming problem, and thus, forestall a strong policy
response."

James McCarthy (Credit: Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer)

To this day, top Exxon officials sometimes argue that models are no
basis for policy.
While Rex Tillerson, the current chairman, doesn't echo Lee
Raymond's science denial in his formal speeches, he sometimes backslides
when speaking off the cuff.
At Exxon's annual meeting in 2015, Tillerson said it would be best to
wait for more solid science before acting on climate change. "What if
everything we do, it turns out our models are lousy, and we don't get the
effects we predict?" he asked.
And in its formal annual energy forecasts, as well as in its latest report
on the implications of its carbon footprint, Exxon adopts business-as-usual
assumptions. It deflects the question of how much carbon will build up in the
world's atmosphere over the next few decades, or how much the planet will
warm as a result.
"As part of our energy outlook process, we do not project overall
atmospheric GHG [greenhouse gas] concentration, nor do we model global
average temperature impacts," both reports say.
In footnotes, Exxon offers this excuse: "These would require data
inputs that are well beyond our company's ability to reasonably measure or
verify."

ICN staff members Neela Banerjee, Lisa Song, Zahra Hirji, and Paul
Horn also contributed to this report.
 7. EXXON MADE DEEP CUTS IN CLIMATE RESEARCH
BUDGET IN THE 1980S
The cuts ushered in a five-year hiatus in peer-reviewed publication
by its scientists and the era when the company first embraced
disinformation.
By John H. Cushman Jr.
Nov. 25, 2015

Internal Exxon Corporation budget documents from the 1980s show

that the oil giant sharply curtailed its ambitious program of innovative
climate research in those years, chopping well over half from its annual
budget for internal investigations into how carbon dioxide emissions from
fossil fuels would affect the planet.
Facing a budget crunch and sensing that any government efforts to
clamp down on carbon pollution were a long way off, Exxon terminated two
especially innovative experiments. One involved oceanic observations during
voyages of the Esso Atlantic, a supertanker. The other proposed to test
vintage French wines for tell-tale traces of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels or
other sources.
And then, in the late 1980s, Exxon ramped up a decades-long public
relations campaign to sow uncertainty about the increasing scientific
evidence for urgent action on climate change.
Exxon's pivoting from the cutting edge of early climate change
science to the forefront of climate denial was described in a six-part series
published by InsideClimate News beginning in September, based largely on
primary sources including Exxon's own internal documents. Similar findings
were reached independently by a team based at the Columbia Journalism
School in partnership with the Los Angeles Times.
Exxon spokesman Ken Cohen has questioned ICN's reporting that the
company "curtailed" its research program after a few years of unusually
advanced experiments and modeling work in the 1980s.
But several documents uncovered by ICN show that the budget cuts
during the 1980s were steep and sudden. The cuts reversed the course that the
company followed in the late 1970s, when top company scientists warned
Exxon's management for the first time of the risks of climate change, and
launched internal research programs unparalleled among its oil industry
peers.
ICN provided an Exxon spokesman copies of the documents being
published today and requested any additional information about climate
research spending during the 1980s, the period closely examined in ICN's
series, "Exxon: The Road Not Taken." The spokesman, Alan Jeffers, declined
to provide any additional budget numbers.
One of the documents, a June 18, 1982 memo to Harold Weinberg, a
top research official, informed him that the year's budget for research into the
looming CO2 problem was to be cut from $900,000 to $385,000
immediately, and to just $150,000 the following year, an 83 percent cut.

"We feel this rate of expenditure should be sufficient to fulfill the

Corporation's needs in the CO2 greenhouse field," said the memo, written by
A.M. Natkin, environmental affairs coordinator in the corporate science and
technology department.
"These funds are intended to support a resident source of scientific
expertise on all phases and aspects of the CO2 Greenhouse effect," he wrote.
"It is important for the corporation to stay abreast of developments in order to
assess the impact of new scientific discoveries and to respond to various
inquiries."
He said that $150,000 a year "should be sufficient to do this."
Exxon's annual research and development budget at the time was
more than $600 million, according to a speech by Exxon Research &
Engineering chief Ed David at a 1981 Exxon R&D symposium in San
Francisco. The company's exploration and capital budgets amounted to $11
billion.
The Natkin memo augured the dismantling of the crown jewel of
Exxon's early research on climate change: a seagoing field experiment into
the ocean's absorption of carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil
fuels. Once envisioned as an expanding, multiyear effort, it was terminated in
1982, another memo confirmed.

Another innovative proposal to test the carbon dioxide in old vintages

of fine French wines also fell by the wayside.
An additional internal document, this one an October 4, 1985 update
presented by Brian Flannery, Exxon's top climate researcher, showed that
Exxon's budget for CO2 research in 1985 and 1986 would be no more than
$250,000 each year.
 That was to cover professional work by Exxon employees, payments
to consultants or contractors for research, travel and miscellaneous expenses,
and payments to the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia
University, which was a partner in the tanker project and other early Exxon
work.

Exxon's documents show not only that the research was curtailed, but
why.
The idea to cut back the research program first surfaced in a January
1981 "scoping study." That was a type of internal Exxon planning document
meant to be the "initial phase in the development of comprehensive plans for
high-impact programs," a cover sheet explained.
"Our recommendation is that comprehensive program plan
development not be undertaken for the atmospheric CO2 area," said the cover
sheet.
After all, said the 16-page scoping study, "There is no near term threat
of legislation to control CO2. One reason for this is that it has not yet been
proven that the increases in atmospheric CO2 constitute a serious problem
that requires immediate action."
The scoping study, a 16-page document, was published by ICN as
part of thefirst installment of its six-part investigative series.
"The increasing level of atmospheric CO2 is causing considerable
concern due to potential climate effects," the document said. Exxon Research
& Engineering, it noted, "has been actively conducting research on certain
aspects of the issue for approximately two years. This report addresses the
question of whether a comprehensive research plan with greater breadth for
ER&E than the current plan should be developed."
The answer to that question was, in short, no. The work "if successful,
will likely provide recognition for Exxon for making important technical
contributions to this global environmental issue," according to the document.
However, "an expanded R&D program does not appear to offer
significantly increased benefits," the document went on. "It would require
skills which are in limited supply, and would require additional funds on the
part of Exxon since Government funding appears unlikely."
In the mid-1980s the company wrapped up publication of a burst of
modeling efforts undertaken during the heyday of its early research–including
three important peer-reviewed studies, all described in the ICN series. Those
studies by Exxon scientists and consultants, one of them published by the
federal government and two by academic journals, confirmed the emerging
consensus regarding the planet's sensitivity to increased concentrations of
carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Then Exxon's published research hit a five-year hiatus, as shown
in Exxon's own list of more than 50 peer-reviewed climate studies its
employees have worked on.
From 1986 to 1990, Exxon went without publishing any peer-
reviewed scientific research into the problem, just as it was becoming a hot
topic of political debate.
In 1988, 1989 and 1990, Exxon sharply escalated its well-documented
efforts to emphasize the scientific uncertainty surrounding climate change, a
campaign of misinformation that would last for decades.
 Exxon asserts that it has been doing important scientific research
continuously since the 1970s. It frequently mentions its financial support for
work done by programs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
(Exxon’s support for work at Stanford University, more costly and more
geared to developing technologies as opposed to understanding climate
change itself, began much later.)
Announced in 1993, Exxon's first grant of $1 million to the MIT
program was expressly designed to produce assessments "based on realistic
representations of the uncertainties of climate science." That phrase occurred
both in the press release announcing the grant and, a year later, in the
program's first report, entitled "Uncertainty in Climate Change Policy
Analysis."
In the light of 20 years of hindsight, that 1994 MIT report's
conclusions seem vague and equivocal, providing "no guidance for
greenhouse policy."
It said "neither of the extreme positions, to take urgent action now or
do nothing awaiting firm evidence, is a constructive response to the climate
threat."
"Uncertainty is the essence of the issue," it declared.
 8. MORE EXXON DOCUMENTS SHOW HOW MUCH IT
KNEW ABOUT CLIMATE 35 YEARS AGO
Documents reveal Exxon's early CO2 position, its global warming
forecast from the 1980s, and its involvement with the issue at the
highest echelons.
By Neela Banerjee
Dec. 1, 2015

In our series, "Exxon: The Road Not Taken," InsideClimate News

published several dozen documents that established the arc of Exxon's
pioneering yet little-known climate research, which began 40 years ago.
Our reporting team chose them from the thousands of mainly internal
company documents that we reviewed in our 10-month investigation.
In addition to the ones we have already published since September—
which ExxonMobil has now downloaded from the ICN website and imported
to its blog—there are more worth sharing.
Each illuminates a nuance of Exxon's early internal discussions about
climate change, from interactions at the highest echelons to presentations for
the rank-and-file. The documents reveal the contrast between Exxon's initial
public statements about climate change and the company's later efforts to
deny the link between fossil fuel use and higher global temperatures.
A selection of previously unpublished memos and reports are
included and explained here, as part of ICN's continuing exploration of
Exxon’s climate documents.
Exxon Senior Vice President Weighs in on the 'Greenhouse Program'
(1980)
This memo from June 9, 1980, indicates that carbon dioxide research
was not a project that Exxon's board simply greenlighted. It was an issue so
important that at least one senior vice president was paying close attention to
the science, and he was interested and versed enough to argue its arcana.
On June 9, 1980, Harold N. Weinberg, a top manager in Exxon Research and Engineering, the hub of
the company's carbon dioxide research, sent a note to Richard Werthamer and Henry Shaw with the
subject, "Greenhouse Program," the company's CO2 research initiative. Shaw was the unit's lead
climate researcher at the time, Werthamer his boss.

In the note, Weinberg wrote that he gave a presentation at a June 4

meeting about the program and said, "George Piercy questioned me closely
on the statement that there is a net CO2 flux out of the ocean at the upwelling
zones."
At the time, Exxon had deployed a state-of-the-art supertanker
outfitted with equipment for measuring marine CO2 concentrations to
understand the role the oceans play in the world's carbon cycle. Scientists
knew that the oceans had absorbed some of the carbon dioxide released from
the increased global consumption of fossil fuels. But Exxon's researchers
wanted to understand how exactly CO2 behaved in the oceans—and whether
after trapping the gas, the seas would eventually release it into the
atmosphere.
Piercy was a senior vice president at Exxon in 1980, and a member of
the board of directors. According to the note, he challenged Weinberg's
assertion that global circulation patterns move CO2 out of the deep oceans to
the surface where it escapes into the atmosphere, a process known as
"upwelling."
Piercy disagreed, arguing the oceans can hold higher concentrations
of CO2without releasing it into the air. (As it turns out, Weinberg was right,
though overall, the world's oceans act as a global sink, pulling CO2 from the
air into the water and helping dampen the effects of climate change.)
Other memos from the early 1980s (here and here) show that ER&E
staff regularly apprised at least one other senior vice president, M.E.J.
O'Loughlin, of the latest climate research, too.
Exxon's Lead Climate Researcher Presents: The Company's Position on
the CO2 Greenhouse Effect (1981)
In this May 15, 1981 memo, Exxon estimates a 3-degree Celsius rise
in global average temperatures in 100 years, and appears ready to discuss
publicly that a time could arrive when the world would have to shift to
renewable energy. Exxon thought such a transition could happen in a
gradual, "orderly" way.

By 1981, Exxon had already established itself as a leader on the

greenhouse effect with many in industry and the government. In early May of
that year, Henry Shaw prepared a "brief summary of our current position on
the CO2Greenhouse effect" for Edward E. David, Jr., president of Exxon
Research and Engineering, in case the topic came up at an Exxon symposium
in San Francisco where David would be speaking.
Based on documentary evidence, it appears the summary went
through several drafts and the final version went to David's office on May 15.
The bullet points that Shaw presented to David start with the idea that
"there is sufficient time to study the problem before corrective action is
required." Shaw based his caution on estimates that higher global
temperatures caused by rising CO2 would only be felt around the year 2000,
and that CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere would double in about 100
years. Those gaps, Shaw wrote, permit "time for an orderly transition to non-
fossil fuel technologies should restrictions on fossil fuel use be deemed
necessary."
The document did not raise doubts about the links between fossil fuel
use, higher CO2 concentrations and a warmer planet. Shaw wrote:
• "Atmospheric CO2 will double in 100 years if fossil fuels grow at
1.4%/ a2.
• 3oC global average temperature rise and 10oC at poles if CO2 doubles.
—Major shifts in rainfall/agriculture
—Polar ice may melt"
Eleven other staff and managers at Exxon Research, besides David,
were sent the paper with the corporate position on global warming that Shaw
had articulated.
By the end of the 1980s, Exxon would publicly pivot away from open
consideration of any restrictions on fossil fuel use because of its effect on the
atmosphere.
In 1996, when climate research was more certain about the link
between fossil fuel combustion and climate change than during the time of
Shaw's memo, Exxon's new chairman and chief executive Lee Raymond said
in a speech in Detroit: "Currently, the scientific evidence is inconclusive as to
whether human activities are having a significant effect on the global
climate."
At Exxon's annual meeting in 2015, chairman Rex Tillerson said it
would be best to wait for more solid science before acting on climate change.
"What if [after] everything we do, it turns out our models are lousy, and we
don't get the effects we predict?"
A Presentation on 'CO2 Greenhouse and Climate Issues' (1984)
 Exxon began incorporating CO2 estimates into its corporate planning
as early as 1981, this March 28, 1984 presentation shows. The company
acknowledged the link between fossil fuel use and climate change throughout
most of the 1980s.

In 1984, Shaw no longer ran Exxon's CO2 research. He had been

moved from that post a few years earlier as the company shifted its focus
from the expensive empirical research on the tanker to cheaper, yet still
highly significant, climate modeling. By the mid-1980s, Shaw worked on
keeping track of emerging independent climate research and apprising top
managers.
On March 28, Shaw gave a presentation at an internal Exxon
environmental conference in Florham Park, N.J. He showed projections of
fossil fuel use through the 21st century and the growth in global carbon
dioxide expected from it.
Shaw told his audience that he was regularly asked to prepare
estimates for Exxon about CO2 from fossil fuel use. Those estimates used and
were integrated into the company's energy projections for the 21st century
and circulated within Exxon.
 He wrote in the presentation: "As part of CPPD’s technology
forecasting activities in 1981, I wrote a CO2 greenhouse forecast based on
publically available information. Soon thereafter, S&T [Science &
Technology] requested an update of the forecast using Exxon fossil fuel
projections. This request was followed late in 1981 with a request by CPD
[Corporate Planning Department] for assistance in evaluating the potential
impact of the CO2 effect in the '2030 Study.' After meeting CPD's specific
need, a formal technology forecast update was issued to S&T in the
beginning of April 1982. It was subsequently sent for review to the Exxon
affiliates."
Exxon's affiliates are the company's various divisions, including
exploration and production, refining, international units and shipping.
Then Shaw shared with his audience estimates by Exxon and three
other entities—the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Academy
of Sciences, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—about when
CO2would double in the atmosphere, what kind of increases could occur in
average global temperatures and the effects of such changes on human life.
Exxon estimated that CO2 would double by 2090, which was later
than what the other groups had projected. It estimated that average global
temperatures would rise by 1.3 to 3.1 degrees Celsius (2.3 to 5.6 degrees
Fahrenheit), which was in the mid-range of the four projections that Shaw
shared.
Shaw showed the policy recommendations of the three organizations
and Exxon to address climate change. According to him, MIT argued for an
"extreme reduction in fossil fuel use," while the others, including Exxon,
urged a more cautious approach. But Exxon did not deny the link between
fossil fuel use and climate change as it would begin to do just five years later.
ICN reporter Lisa Song contributed to this report.
 9. EXXON'S OIL INDUSTRY PEERS KNEW ABOUT
CLIMATE DANGERS IN THE 1970S, TOO
Members of an American Petroleum Institute task force on CO2
included scientists from nearly every major oil company, including
Exxon, Texaco and Shell.
By Neela Banerjee
Dec. 22, 2015
The American Petroleum Institute together with the nation's largest oil
companies ran a task force to monitor and share climate research between
1979 and 1983, indicating that the oil industry, not just Exxon alone, was
aware of its possible impact on the world's climate far earlier than previously
known.
The group's members included senior scientists and engineers from
nearly every major U.S. and multinational oil and gas company, including
Exxon, Mobil, Amoco, Phillips, Texaco, Shell, Sunoco, Sohio as well as
Standard Oil of California and Gulf Oil, the predecessors to
Chevron, according to internal documents obtained by InsideClimate News
and interviews with the task force's former director.
An InsideClimate News investigative series has shown that Exxon
launched its own cutting-edge CO2 sampling program in 1978 in order to
understand a phenomenon it suspected could harm its business. About a
decade later, Exxon spearheaded campaigns to cast doubt on climate science
and stall regulation of greenhouse gases. The previously unpublished papers
about the climate task force indicate that API, the industry's most powerful
lobbying group, followed a similar arc to Exxon's in confronting the threat of
climate change.
Just as Exxon began tracking climate science in the late 1970s, when
only small groups of scientists in academia and the government were engaged
in the research, other oil companies did the same, the documents show. Like
Exxon, the companies also expressed a willingness to understand the links
between their product, greater CO2 concentrations and the climate, the papers
reveal. Some corporations ran their own research units as well, although they
were smaller and less ambitious than Exxon's and focused on climate
modeling, said James J. Nelson, the former director of the task force.
"It was a fact-finding task force," Nelson said in an interview. "We
wanted to look at emerging science, the implications of it and where
improvements could be made, if possible, to reduce emissions."
The group was initially called the CO2 and Climate Task Force, but
changed its name to the Climate and Energy Task Force in 1980, Nelson said.
A background paper on CO2 informed API members in 1979 that
carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was rising steadily, and it predicted when
the first clear effects of climate change might be felt, according to a memo by
an Exxon task force representative.
In addition, API task force members appeared open to the idea that
the oil industry might have to shoulder some responsibility for reducing
CO2emissions by changing refining processes and developing fuels that
emitted less carbon dioxide.
Bruce S. Bailey of Texaco offered "for consideration" the idea that
"an overall goal of the Task Force should be to help develop ground rules for
energy release of fuels and the cleanup of fuels as they relate to CO2creation,"
according to the minutes of a meeting on Feb. 29, 1980.
The minutes also show that the task force discussed a "potential area"
for research and development that called for it to "'Investigate the Market
Penetration Requirements of Introducing a New Energy Source into World
Wide Use.' This would include the technical implications of energy source
changeover, research timing and requirements."
Yet by the 1990s, it was clear that API had opted for a markedly
different approach to the threat of climate change. It joined Exxon, other
fossil fuel companies and major manufacturers in the Global Climate
Coalition (GCC), a lobbying group whose objective was to derail
international efforts to curb heat-trapping emissions. In 1998, a year after the
Kyoto Protocol was adopted by countries to cut fossil fuel emissions, API
crafted a campaign to convince the American public and lawmakers that
climate science was too tenuous for the United States to ratify the treaty.
"Unless 'climate change' becomes a non-issue, meaning that the Kyoto
proposal is defeated and there are no further initiatives to thwart the threat of
climate change, there may be no moment when we can declare victory for our
efforts," according to the draft Global Climate Science Communications
Action Plan circulated by API.
API and GCC were victorious when George W. Bush pulled the U.S.
out of the Kyoto agreement. A June 2001 briefing memorandum records a top
State Department official thanking the GCC because Bush "rejected the
Kyoto Protocol in part, based on input from you."
API did not respond to several requests for comment on this story.
The Climate and Energy Task Force continued until at least 1983,
when Nelson left API after a four-year stint. At the time, the Environmental
Protection Agency's authority was growing, and oil companies believed the
agency was silencing them, Nelson said. It became harder for corporations to
get scientific papers published or to draw favorable media attention, the
industry felt. In the end, company leaders feared this would lead to
overregulation.
As a result, API decided that it wasn't enough to have scientists
meeting in a task force about climate change or other pollution issues. It
needed lobbyists to influence politicians on environmental issues, Nelson
said.
James J. Nelson, the former director of the API task force on CO2. Credit: Neela
Banerjee/InsideClimate News
 "They took the environmental unit and put it into the political
department, which was primarily lobbyists," Nelson said of API. "They
weren't focused on doing research or on improving the oil industry's impact
on pollution. They were less interested in pushing the envelope of science
and more interested in how to make it more advantageous politically or
economically for the oil industry. That's not meant as a criticism. It's just a
fact of life."
Nelson said he departed API because he was not a lobbyist, but said
he did not object to API's lobbying. Nelson does not accept that human
activity is the main driver of climate change; he believes that natural cycles
and phenomena such as volcanoes and deforestation have contributed
significantly to a warming planet. The API was not about "trying to distort
the truth but about getting the information out in a factual manner. It wasn't
about propaganda," he said.
Nelson joined API in 1979 after a career as an Air Force pilot and
then as the director of the first air quality monitoring system in Fairfax
County, Va. At the time, API had an environment division that helped
member companies organize and staff committees on potential pollution
issues, including waste management and water quality. Nelson was hired to
run the air quality committee, which focused largely on pollution such as
sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and other pollutants that had more immediate,
local consequences.
CO2 was not among the most pressing issues that API members faced,
Nelson said. Still, by the time he arrived, companies were already putting
together the task force to monitor the emerging science on higher
atmospheric CO2 concentrations and their possible impact on the climate.
They had seen how pollution had hammered other industries, such as acid
rain's effect on power generation or asbestos on construction, Nelson said.
The oil industry did not want to be blindsided by the CO2 problem, which the
science of the late 1970s had already linked to fossil fuel combustion.
As the group came together, Raymond J. Campion, a scientist at
Exxon Research and Engineering and a member of the task force,
recommended in memos to colleagues that "CO2 not receive a high priority"
from API. One reason, Campion wrote, was because "the industry's
credibility on such issues is not high at the present time, and should an API
study indicate no serious CO2 problems, the results would be greeted with
skepticism."
Some of the recipients of those memos were top people on the
lobbying and planning side of Exxon USA, the company's domestic affiliate.
On July 9, 1979, Campion wrote a memo to W.W. Madden, the manager of
strategic planning at Exxon USA. Campion noted "Bill Slick's need for
information on atmospheric CO2 buildup as a potential emerging issue for
API to consider." Slick was an Exxon USA vice president and a well-known
lobbyist in Washington.
Another reason to pursue a limited agenda, Campion wrote, was
because the Energy Department and the American Association for the
Advancement of Science (AAAS) were expected to issue a report
"momentarily" based on an April 1979 climate symposium that "concluded
no catastrophic hazards would be associated with the CO2 buildup over the
next 100 years and that society can cope readily with whatever problems
ensue."
(Eventually published in October 1980, the AAAS report offered
more sobering forecasts than Campion had expected, describing risks to
nearly every facet of life on Earth and concluding catastrophes could be
avoided only if timely steps were taken to address climate change.)
A memo from Campion to colleague J.T. Burgess dated Sept. 6, 1979
showed that the task force moved quickly to draft a background paper about
CO2. Campion wrote that he was asked to critique it for Slick to use in API
discussions.
Campion suggested corrections to the background paper's
quantification of the rate of CO2 build-up, as well as an estimate in the paper
that the "warming of the atmosphere…may be noticeable within the next
twenty years."
He estimated that the effects would be felt after 2000, after a cyclical
cooling period had passed. Because a cyclical warming trend was then
expected post 2000, it would intensify climate change, "worsening the
effect," he wrote. It is not known if the corrections were made to the paper.
Campion declined to be interviewed regarding his participation on the
task force. Other Exxon representatives included Robert J. Fritz, who could
not be located, and Henry Shaw, the company's lead climate researcher in the
late 1970s, who is deceased. Exxon did not answer a request for comment.
The company representatives were scientists and engineers, and well-
versed on air quality issues, Nelson recalled. Their views on carbon dioxide's
possible impact on the climate varied, with many skeptical that man-made
emissions could substantially affect the atmosphere. But they approached
their participation on the task force dispassionately, he said.
"The individuals I had on the task force were very, very technically
and ethically moral," Nelson said. "They felt that their job for their company
was to look at an issue and if there was a problem, or if the petroleum
industry was part of it or could contribute to fixing the problem, they wanted
to do that."
Nelson organized the monthly meetings, took minutes and
disseminated information companies wanted to share. Documents show
representatives of about a half-dozen companies at various meetings. The
meeting sites rotated among the members' cities, including oil hubs such as
Houston and Tulsa; Washington, where API is located; and New York, where
Exxon was headquartered at the time.
As Campion had recommended, API did not conduct its own
research. But some of its members did, and they were generous about sharing
their work and insights, Nelson said. "There were lots of discussions about
climate models: whose were right and whose were wrong," he said.
Chevron acquired Texaco in 2000. Nelson said that Texaco's Bailey
ran a small climate modeling team at the research facility in Beacon, N.Y.
Bailey could not be located for comment. Chevron declined to comment on
early CO2 research activities.
At Shaw's urging, the task force invited Professor John A. Laurmann
of Stanford University to brief members about climate science at the
February 1980 meeting in New York. Shaw and Laurmann had participated
in the same panel at the AAAS climate conference in April 1979.
Like many scientists at the time, Laurmann openly discussed the
uncertainties in the evolving climate research, such as the limited long-term
sampling data and the difficulty of determining regional effects of climate
change, according to a copy of his presentation attached to the meeting
minutes.
Still, Laurmann told his audience several times that the evidence
showed that the increase in atmospheric CO2 is likely "caused by
anthropogenic release of CO2, mainly from fossil fuel burning."
In his conclusions section, Laurmann estimated that the amount of
CO2 in the atmosphere would double in 2038, which he said would likely
lead to a 2.5 degrees Celsius rise in global average temperatures with "major
economic consequences." He then told the task force that models showed a 5
degrees Celsius rise by 2067, with "globally catastrophic effects."
The documents also show that the Energy Department contacted the
task force in November 1979 to get its opinion on a study to be published in
the journal Science about CO2 emissions from the development of oil shale.
The government and oil industry had embarked on a mission to develop
synthetic petroleum from sources such as oil shale and coal because of falling
conventional oil production in the U.S. and political instability in the Middle
East.
The Science study, by two geologists from the U.S. Geological
Survey, estimated that synthetic crude from oil shale would generate three to
five times more CO2 than conventional oil, double previous estimates, the
Energy Department said.
The task force spent several months analyzing and refining its
statement on the USGS paper, documents show. "Our estimates are less than
theirs," Nelson said, "and if their numbers become gospel and no one
challenges them, it could cause concern."
Because it was heavily involved in synfuels, Exxon weighed in first in
December 1979. Shaw said that the paper was well-written. But he agreed
with the Energy Department that the CO2 estimates were too high, and that
"the paper may alarm the public unjustifiably," he wrote in a letter to API.
Shaw's own calculations about CO2 from synfuels served as the basis
of the eventual position paper the task force sent to the Energy Department in
the spring of 1980 after multiple drafts. In one draft, the task force stated in
March 1980 that the estimates in the Science article were accurate in light of
the assumptions it used. "However, several of these assumptions stem from
worst-case scenarios that are highly improbable and unrealistic," the task
force concluded.
It is unclear what the Energy Department did with the task force's
assessment of the paper. Roger C. Dahlman, the Energy Department staff
member who sent the article to the task force, did not respond to multiple
requests for comment.
After he left API in 1983, Nelson said he followed sporadically the
organization's response to climate change. He said he felt the API's lobbying
stemmed from a desire to have its concerns heard.
"That was the driving force, a worry about excessive regulation, my
impression from having watched it along the way," he said.
Charles DiBona served as president of API from 1979 to 1997, when
the organization shifted its approach on climate change from following the
science to intense lobbying to discredit it. DiBona said in a phone interview
that he did not remember the climate task force. Like Nelson, he does not
accept the prevailing scientific consensus that climate change is being driven
by fossil fuel combustion. "I think there is some question about the broader
scientific community. There's not much evidence that there is real
consensus," DiBona said.
In the 1990s, API argued that the science was too weak to warrant
action, even as research grew more certain about the link between fossil fuel
use, greater CO2 concentrations and rising global temperatures. Exxon chief
executive Lee Raymond was API chairman from 1996 to 1997, when he
focused on the uncertainty. The GCC emphasized the issue, too, in its public
statements.
"Many people, politicians and the public alike, believe that global
warming is a rock-solid certainty," Raymond said in a 1997 speech in
Beijing. "But it's not."
API organized industry resistance to the possibility of the EPA's
regulation of greenhouse gases in 1999. When the Bush administration took
office, former API lobbyist Philip A. Cooney became chief of staff at the
Council on Environmental Quality, the White House office that drove climate
policy. Government scientists accused Cooney of rewriting federal research
reports to sow doubt about man-made climate change. Cooney resigned in
2005 and went to work for ExxonMobil.
API's current position is that "fossil fuel development and
environmental progress are not mutually exclusive," according to Jack
Gerard, the group's president. But API still rejects any federal mandates to
reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Gerard decried President Obama's Clean
Power Plan to cut emissions from the country's power plants, the cornerstone
of the administration's climate agenda, as destructive "government
interference" in free markets.
 APPENDIX I: LIST OF DOCUMENTS
Available for download at insideclimatenews.org

• Government Meeting Memo (1977)

Exxon scientist Henry Shaw summarizes a government meeting he attended,
on the "global environmental effects of carbon dioxide."

• James Black Talk (1977)

Summary of a presentation on the CO2 greenhouse effect that Black gave to
top Exxon executives and other company scientists.

• "Bad News" Letter (1978)

Exxon scientist Henry Shaw tells his boss the company needs a "credible"
team to research CO2.

• "Worldwide" R&D Memo (1978)

Exxon's Harold Weinberg proposes some "grandiose thoughts" on how
Exxon might research the "CO2 problem."

• CO2 and Fuel Use Projections (1979)

Exxon intern Steve Knisely's report on how global warming might affect
future fuel use.

• Comments on API CO2 Research (July 1979)

Exxon's Raymond Campion's memo about the American Petroleum Institute's
CO2 research strategy, July 1979.

• Comments on API CO2 Paper (Sept. 1979)

Exxon's Raymond Campion comments on the American Petroleum Institute's
background paper on CO2 effects.

• Presentation to NOAA (1979)

Exxon and Columbia University scientists present their CO2 research plan to
NOAA scientist Lester Machta.

• Probable Legislation Memo (1979)

Exxon scientist Henry Shaw tells his boss there is "a good probability" that
CO2 legislation will eventually be passed.

• AQ-9 Task Force Meeting (1980)

The American Petroleum Institute's "CO2 and Climate Task Force" (AQ-9)
meeting minutes from March 18, 1980.

• CO2 Forecast (1980)

Overview of the current scientific understanding of the CO2 greenhouse
effect and ongoing federal research programs into the issue.

• Exxon's Policy Input to Congressional Commission (1980)

An Exxon researcher played a role as a Congressionally mandated
commission examined policy options.

• Letters to Senior VPs (1980)

Exxon scientists update Senior Vice Presidents M.E.J. O'Loughlin and
George T. Piercy on the status of their CO2 research.

• PR Plan for Exxon's CO2 Research (1980)

Exxon officials proposed a publicity campaign to burnish the company's
image as a climate science leader.

• Weinberg CO2 Memo (1980)

Exxon's Harold Weinberg questions the concentration of CO2 in the ocean
versus the atmosphere in a letter to his colleagues.

• "Catastrophic" Effects Letter (1981)

Exxon's Roger Cohen says the impacts of rising CO2 will likely be
catastrophic.

• Exxon Position on CO2 (1981)

A brief summary of Exxon's position on the global warming in 1981.

• Exxon Review of Climate Research Program (1981)

In this scoping study, an Exxon manager recommends curtailing the
company's ambitious climate research agenda.

• Gilbert Gervasi's Natuna CO2 Calculations (1981)

After examining a colleague's estimates of the CO2 that might be released
from the Natuna gas field, Gervasi, the Natuna project manager, produced
"more rigorous" calculations of the project's CO2 footprint.

• Budget Cutting Memo (1982)

A memo announcing Exxon's decision to slash its CO2 budget.

• "Consensus" on CO2 Impacts (1982)

Exxon's Roger Cohen says there's a "consensus" that a doubling of
atmospheric CO2 concentrations will result in an average global temperature
increase of roughly 3C.

• Esso Project Terminated (1982)

A letter announcing the termination of Exxon's CO2 project aboard the Esso
Atlantic tanker.

• Exxon CO2 Primer (1982)

This document describes the state of the science on the greenhouse effect was
widely circulated among Exxon management.

• Exxon Modeling (1982)

Presentation by Andrew Callegari on Exxon modeling results that reject
Reginald Newell's conclusions.

• Natuna Background Paper (1983)

A background paper on the Natuna gas field's environmental issues.

• Natuna Environmental Concerns Letter (1983)

Alvin M. Natkin, Exxon's manager of environmental affairs, says the
CO2 must be disposed of in a way that wins the approval of environmental
groups.

• CO2 Sparging Report (1984)

Exxon Corporate Research investigates bubbling CO2 from the Natuna gas
field into the ocean to prevent its release into the atmosphere.

• Exxon Climate Modeling (1984)

Presentation by Exxon scientist Andrew Callegari on Exxon's climate
modeling research.

• Shaw Climate Presentation (1984)

A 1984 conference presentation called "CO2 Greenhouse and Climate Issues"
by Exxon scientist Henry Shaw.

• CO2 Research Update (1985)

Exxon scientist Brian Flannery reviews the company's climate change
research efforts in a presentation.

• Handout For Meeting With Lee Raymond (1985)

Excerpts from a document that includes information on how Corporate
Research interacts with the rest of Exxon. Includes data on CO2 and Natuna.

• Global Climate Science Communications Plan (1998)

The American Petroleum Institute's draft Global Climate Science
Communications Plan from 1998.

• Exxon Lobbyist's Memo to the White House (2001)

Exxon's top lobbyist urged the White House to replace holdovers from the
Clinton-Gore administration, accusing them of political bias.

• Global Climate Coalition Meeting (2001)

A 2001 State Department briefing memo about a meeting with
representatives of the Global Climate Coalition.

• Exxon Scientist Lobbies the White House (2002)

Exxon's leading climate scientist worked to overhaul the Bush-Cheney
administration's climate research strategy, focusing on uncertainty.

• MacCracken Letter to Exxon (2002)

In 2002, Michael MacCracken, the government's top climate scientist, wrote
ExxonMobil's board chairman a scathing letter about the company's stance on
climate science.

• Exxon Reply to the Royal Society (2006)

Ken Cohen, head of public and government affairs at Exxon, defended the
company's record on climate change.

• Royal Society Letter to Exxon (2006)

Bob Ward, the Royal Society's communications director, complained that
Exxon was distorting the science of climate change.

• McCarthy Exxon Statement (2007)

James McCarthy, a Harvard scientist, board member of the Union of
Concerned Scientists and president-elect of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science, testified in 2007 about Exxon's campaign of
uncertainty at a congressional hearing.
 APPENDIX II: CHARACTERS

(Credit: Family of James Black)

• James F. Black: Black (1919-1988) was the Scientific Advisor in the

Products Research Division of Exxon Research & Engineering, and one of
the top technical people at Exxon Research & Engineering until his
retirement in 1983. In 1977, Black told Exxon’s management committee of
top executives that emerging science showed that carbon dioxide levels were
rising, likely driven by fossil fuel use, and such increases would boost global
temperatures, leading to widespread damage.
 (Credit: Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory)

• Wallace Broecker: As a Columbia University scientist, Broecker

collaborated with Exxon on its climate research starting in the late 1970s
through the mid-1980s. Working with Exxon's Henry Shaw, Broecker and his
colleague Taro Takahashi helped analyze the carbon dioxide data collected
from the company's tanker project. Nicknamed the "Grandfather of Climate
Science," Broecker has received numerous awards for his research focused on
the ocean's role in climate change, including the National Medal of Science in
1996. Broecker is a scientist with Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth
Observatory, where he's been since 1959. He is also the Newberry Professor
of Geology at Columbia.
• Andrew Callegari: After joining Exxon in 1980, Callegari took over the
company's CO2 research efforts in 1981 and oversaw its climate modeling
program. He served as Brian Flannery's boss and recruited New York
University's Martin Hoffert as a consultant to help with the company's
climate research. Callegari spent more than two decades at the oil company,
where he worked across divisions from Exxon Research and Engineering to
Exxon Mobil Corporation. Since 2007, he has worked as an energy
consultant. In an interview with InsideClimate News, Hoffert described
Callegari and Flannery as "very legitimate research guys."

• Roger Cohen: As a scientist at Exxon, Cohen spent the 1980s contributing

to the company's climate research. During that time, he once described the
predicted future impacts of climate change as "catastrophic" for most people
on Earth. Cohen worked at Exxon for approximately 25 years, retiring in
2003 as a manager of strategic planning. After leaving the company, he
became an outspoken climate denier. He helped lead the push for the
American Physical Society to weaken its stance on the issue. In an article
published in 2008, Cohen wrote: "...at the time of my retirement I was well
convinced, as were most technically trained people, that the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's case for Anthropogenic Global
Warming (AGW) is very tight. However, upon taking the time to get into the
details of the science, I was appalled at how flimsy the case really is." Cohen
currently serves on the board of directors for CO2 Coalition, a group
established in 2015 to counter "the demonizing of CO2 and fossil fuels."
 (Credit: CSTPR/University of Colorado-Boulder)

• Edward E. David: David served as president of Exxon Research and

Engineering (ER&E) in Florham Park, NJ from 1977 to 1986, when Exxon
launched its own research into carbon dioxide from fossil fuel combustion
and its effects on the global climate. From 1950 to 1970, he worked at Bell
Laboratories, eventually becoming executive director of research. He served
as the White House science advisor to President Richard M. Nixon from 1970
to 1973. David signed off on a groundbreaking Exxon project that used one
of its oil tankers to gather atmospheric and oceanic carbon dioxide samples,
beginning in 1979. He also oversaw the transition Exxon made to greater
climate modeling. David kept Exxon upper management apprised of ER&E's
carbon dioxide research. After retiring, David became a climate change
denier. David was one of the 16 co-authors of an opinion piece deriding
global warming that ran in the Wall Street Journal in 2012.
 (Credit: © Academia Engelberg Foundation)

• Brian Flannery: Flannery was one of Exxon's top climate modelers after
he joined the company in 1980. His research initially confirmed the findings
of independent scientists, who said a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere
would raise average global temperatures by roughly 3 degrees Celsius. By
1990, however, Flannery served as Exxon's top scientific spokesman as it
worked to derail international efforts to cut greenhouse gases from fossil fuel
use. In 1998, he transitioned into a managerial role at ExxonMobil
Corporation. Flannery spent three decades at the company; during that time,
he served as a lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change's Working Group 3 (from 1998-2004) and was a member of multiple
climate-related business committees. He continues to participate in the
climate discussion as a fellow at Resources for the Future, an economic
research and analysis nonprofit in Washington, D.C.
 (Credit: Virginia Tech)

• Clifton Garvin: Garvin was Exxon's chairman and chief executive in the
late 1970s and early 1980s, when the company was launching its ambitious
climate-related tanker and modeling efforts. In a 1984 speech he made at
Vanderbilt University, Garvin said the then-called "greenhouse effect" would
"presumably lead to an increase in global temperatures with attendent
consequences." Garvin worked at the oil company for nearly four decades.
After retiring in 1986, he has held many roles from serving on the board of
several major companies to participating on President Ronald Reagan's
National Productivity Advisory Committee.
 (Credit: Frontline)

• Edward Garvey: Garvey worked at Exxon Research & Engineering from

1978 to 1983 and was Henry Shaw's top researcher on the tanker initiative.
Exxon paid in part for his graduate studies at Columbia University; during
that time, Garvey worked with Columbia University's climate researchers
Wallace Broecker and Taro Takahashi. After leaving Exxon, Garvey has
worked for various consulting firms and his main client has been the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency.
 (Credit: NASA)

• Martin Hoffert: Martin Hoffert worked as a physics professor at New

York University from 1975 to 2007. In that role, he teamed up with Exxon
scientists Brian Flannery, Andrew Callegari and Haroon Kheshgi in the
1980s to review and create climate models. Hoffert said the collaboration
during the 1980s was a good one. "We talked about the politics of this stuff a
lot, but we always separated the politics from the science," Hoffert told
InsideClimate News.
 (Credit: Mike MacCracken)

• Mike MacCracken: MacCracken was the scientific director for the climate
unit of the U. S. Department of Energy's Carbon Dioxide Research and
Assessment Program from 1979 to 1990. In that capacity, MacCracken
helped coordinate various studies in the early 1980s by scientists from
academia, government and the industry, primarily Exxon, into the potential
climatic effects of increasing carbon dioxide. He is now Chief Scientist for
Climate Change Programs with the Climate Institute, a non-governmental
organization based in Washington D.C. that promotes national and
international efforts to understand, adapt to and mitigate climatic change.

• Maurice Edwin James "Morey" O'Loughlin: O'Loughlin (1922-

2009) served as a senior vice president and director of Exxon Corporation in
the 1980s until his retirement in 1987. He took an interest in research by
Exxon and outside scientists into the "greenhouse effect," as climate change
was then known.
• George T. Piercy: Piercy (1915-2000) was an Exxon senior vice president
in the late 1970s until his retirement in 1981. He was among the top
executives regularly updated about the company's climate-related research. In
the early 1970s, he served as the company's chief representative in
negotiations with Middle Eastern countries during the Arab oil embargo and
he oversaw the diversification of Exxon Enterprises. After Exxon, he worked
as the chairman of the Education Broadcasting Corporation in New York and
served on the boards of several nonprofit organizations.

(Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

• Lee Raymond: Raymond became the company's chief executive in 1993

and then added the position of chairman in 1999. He joined Exxon in 1963.
Raymond was an outspoken skeptic of mainstream climate science. Under
Raymond, Exxon led a coalition of fossil fuel companies called the Global
Climate Coalition, which sought to delay action on climate change and cloud
public understanding of the issue. Raymond retired in 2005 and was
succeeded by Rex Tillerson.

(Credit: Family of Henry Shaw)

• Henry Shaw: As manager of the Environmental Area in Exxon Research &

Engineering's Technology Feasibility Center, Shaw (1934-2003) was one of
the earliest employees to advocate for company research into atmospheric
carbon dioxide levels. Shaw’s family fled France in 1940 when the Nazis
invaded. They eventually arrived in Brooklyn when Shaw was an adolescent.
He joined Exxon in 1967. Shaw established a collaboration with Columbia
University's Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory, with which he
developed the idea of outfitting a company oil tanker with special equipment
to sample carbon dioxide concentrations in the air and water. Shaw left
Exxon in 1986, to become a professor of chemical engineering at New Jersey
Institute of Technology.

(Credit: Taro Takahashi)

• Taro Takahashi: Takahashi, a climate scientist at Columbia University's

Lamont-Doherty Earth Geological Observatory since 1957, collaborated with
Exxon researchers on the company's ocean-related climate research in the late
1970s and early 1980s. Specifically, Takahashi and his colleague Wallace
Broecker helped analyze the carbon dioxide data from air and ocean samples
collected as part of the company's tanker project. Takahashi used the Exxon
tanker data—along with dozens of datasets from universities and other
research institutions—in two studies published in 1990 and 2009. He won the
U.N. Environmental Programme's 2010 "Champion of the Earth" award for
his climate-ocean studies. Takashi currently serves as Columbia's Ewing
Lamont Research Professor.
 (Credit: Family of Harold Weinberg)

• Harold N. Weinberg: Weinberg (1929-2008) ran Exxon Research &

Engineering's Technology Feasibility Center in the early 1980s, the unit
responsible for finding commercial applications for the studies scientists
performed. In 1978, he proposed that Exxon launch a worldwide 'CO2 in the
Atmosphere' research program. That did not materialize, but he remained
active in the company's global warming studies. After retiring from Exxon in
1987, he became Vice President of Engelhard Corporation and later the
Chairman of New Jersey's Institute for Energy Research, among other
positions.

(Credit: Frontline)

• N. Richard Werthamer: Werthamer worked at Exxon from 1978 to 1983,

where he helped oversee the tanker research program. From 1980 to 1981, he
was a manager at Exxon Research & Engineering and the boss of scientist
Henry Shaw. Werthamer told InsideClimate News, "The whole idea was to
do a really clean, really defensible research project, and that would be the key
to open the door to whole [climate change] debate. It was for the company
not to be the bad guy. Obviously later, the Exxon chairman and senior
executives were climate deniers. That was not the case then." After leaving
the company in 1983, he wrote a book on blackjack and served as executive
director of the Becton, Dickinson and Company.
 APPENDIX III: RELATED STORIES

Exxon, Chevron Reject Shareholder Measures on Climate Change Again, by

Elizabeth Douglass, May 28, 2015
Exxon's Gamble: 25 Years of Rejecting Shareholder Concerns on Climate
Change, by Elizabeth Douglass, June 8, 2015
Exxon's 25 Years of 'No': A Timeline of Resolutions on Climate Change, by
Elizabeth Douglass, June 8, 2015
Email Shows Exxon Was Studying Its Climate Impact in the '80s, by Neela
Banerjee, July 8, 2015
Video: Exxon Researched Climate Change in 1977, in collaboration with
FRONTLINE, Sept. 16, 2015
ExxonMobil Faces Heightened Risk of Climate Litigation, Its Critics Say, by
Bob Simison, Sept. 30, 2015
Two U.S. Representatives Seek Justice Department Inquiry into Exxon, by
David Hasemyer, Oct. 16, 2015
Bill McKibben Wants Everyone to Know Why He's So Mad at Exxon, by
Katherine Bagley, Oct. 19, 2015
Sanders Calls for Investigation of 'Potential Corporate Fraud' by Exxon, by
Lisa Song, Oct. 20, 2015
U.S. Senators Press Exxon for Answers on Climate Denial Funding, by John
H. Cushman Jr., Oct. 29, 2015
How Exxon Overstates the Uncertainty in Climate Science, by John H.
Cushman Jr., Oct. 29, 2015
Hillary Clinton Joins Call for Justice Dept. to Investigate Exxon, by
Katherine Bagley, Oct. 29, 2015
Partnership with Exxon Puts MIT's Climate Action Vow to the Test , by
Zahra Hirji, Oct. 29, 2015
Environmental and Civil Rights Groups Urge Federal Probe of Exxon, by
Katherine Bagley, Oct. 30, 2015
Congressmen Call on SEC to Investigate Exxon's Climate Disclosures, by
Neela Banerjee, Nov. 2, 2015
Congressmen Call on SEC to Investigate Exxon's Climate Disclosures, by
Neela Banerjee, Nov. 2, 2015
Exxon CEO Denies Misleading Public About Climate Change, by John H.
Cushman Jr., Nov. 5, 2015
New York Attorney General Subpoenas Exxon on Climate Research, by Bob
Simison, Nov. 5, 2015
Subpoena Power: Exxon's Climate Scandal Now Under a Spotlight, by Zahra
Hirji, Nov. 6, 2015
Peabody Settlement Shows Muscle of Law Now Aimed at Exxon, by David
Hasemyer, Nov. 10, 2015
How We Got the Exxon Story, by Neela Banerjee, Nov. 10, 2015
Investors Urge Exxon to Take Moral Responsibility for Global Warming, by
David Hasemyer, Nov. 11, 2015
Daniel Ellsberg: #ExxonKnew Is the Best 'Thank You' Since the Pentagon
Papers, by David Sassoon, Nov. 15, 2015
350,000 Sign Petition Asking for Federal Probe of Exxon , by Katherine
Bagley, Nov. 19, 2015
California Attorney General Urged to Investigate Exxon Over Climate, by
David Hasemyer, Nov. 20, 2015
Exxon's Support of a Tax on Carbon: Rhetoric or Reality?, by David
Hasemyer and Bob Simison, Dec. 21, 2015
 APPENDIX IV: FRONTLINE VIDEOS
The PBS show “Frontline” produced a short film in collaboration with
InsideClimate News about Exxon’s early research into climate change to
accompany our investigative series.
The film, as well as longer clips from interviews with Exxon
researchers and InsideClimate News reporter Neela Banerjee, can be viewed
at http://insideclimatenews.org/news/15092015/frontline-video
 ABOUT THE AUTHORS

NEELA BANERJEE: Neela Banerjee is a Washington-based reporter for

Inside Climate News. Before joining ICN, she spent four years as the energy
and environmental reporter for the Los Angeles Times' Washington bureau.
Banerjee covered global energy, the Iraq War and other issues with The New
York Times. She also served as a Moscow correspondent with The Wall
Street Journal. Ms. Banerjee graduated from Yale and grew up mostly in
south Louisiana.

JOHN H. CUSHMAN JR.: Jack Cushman is the author of Keystone and

Beyond: Tar Sands and the National Interest in the Era of Climate Change,
which tells the definitive account of the Keystone XL pipeline saga. Before
joining the InsideClimate News staff, he was a writer and editor in
Washington, D.C. since 1978, principally with the Washington bureau of The
New York Times. Cushman has written extensively about energy, the
environment, industry and military affairs, also covering financial and
transportation beats, and editing articles across the full spectrum of national
and international policy.
Among his beat assignments at The Times, he covered climate and the
environment during the Clinton administration. He served on the board of
governors of the National Press Club and was its president in the year 2000.
He has taught brief courses in media and environmental law at the Vermont
Law School.

DAVID HASEMYER: InsideClimate News reporter David Hasemyer is co-

author of the Dilbit Disaster: Inside the Biggest Oil Spill You've Never Heard
Of, which won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, was a finalist
in the 2012 Scripps Howard Awards for Environmental Reporting and won
an honorable mention in the 2012 John B. Oakes Award for Distinguished
Environmental Journalism. Prior to joining InsideClimate News, he was a
freelance journalist whose career included an award-winning tenure at
the San Diego Union-Tribune as an investigative reporter. Hasemyer's work
has been recognized by the Associated Press, the Society for Professional
Journalists, the Society of American Business Editors and Writers and the
California Newspaper Publishers Association. He has also been a finalist for
the Gerald Loeb Award.
Among the articles Hasemyer researched and wrote for the Union-
Tribune was a series about a 10-million ton pile of nuclear waste, a remnant
of the uranium-mining boom in the 1950s and '60s that threatened the
Colorado River. Those stories have been widely credited as critical to the
U.S. Department of Energy's decision in 2000 to move the pile away from the
river. Hasemyer graduated from San Diego State University with a
Bachelor’s degree in Journalism.

LISA SONG: Lisa Song joined InsideClimate News in January 2011, where
she reports on oil sands, pipeline safety and natural gas drilling. She helped
write "The Dilbit Disaster" series, which won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for
National Reporting, was a finalist in the 2012 Scripps Howard Awards for
Environmental Reporting and won an honorable mention in the 2012 John B.
Oakes Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism. She previously
worked as a freelancer, contributing to High Country News, Scientific
American and New Scientist. Song has degrees in environmental science and
science writing from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
 INSIDECLIMATE NEWS

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