Climate change, oh climate change! Not a week passes without some new information popping up about the condition, all of it informing us of things we already knew. But we’re here to keep you informed, so that’s what we’re going to do, even if it’s only confirming something you already knew.
According to a new report brought forth by the Center for International Environmental Law, big oil companies knew about climate change since the 1960s, or even before that. The report further states that the companies pulled as many strings as possible to keep it silent, and even joked about how much harm they could do.
The report states that fossil fuel executives knew the harm their work will do to the planet since even before that, as they have been working since the 1940s on their efforts to spin the propaganda in order to make environmentalists look foolish and the consequences of their work look insignificant.
It also states that petroleum magnates were also overheard joking about competing with each other to see who could melt the ice caps faster. While the role of fossil fuels in raising the concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide has been discussed since the end of the 19th century, the 20th century came with incorrect data.
Most researchers during the 220th century believed that greenhouse gasses will be absorbed by all the oceans around the world, but according to what the Center for International Environmental Law stated on their website,
In 1957, a landmark paper by Roger Revelle and Hans Suess of the Scripps Institute upturned that conventional wisdom, demonstrating that far more CO2 would remain in the atmosphere than previously assumed, potentially accelerating the impact of global climate change.
But here is where the Smoke and Fumes Committee comes in. As big oil companies noticed all the smog present over Los Angeles in the 1940s, they decided to establish the committee. Its sole responsibility, governed by representatives of the country’s biggest oil companies, was to put environmental concerns in a bad light, and to present these regulations as unwarranted and unnecessarily costly.
The group continued for years under different names, and by 1958, they were focused on putting out reports that diminished the impact of fossil fuels on the rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. And it would seem like the effect of this public manipulation still holds up today.
As much as this report may sound like a conspiracy theory, it is entirely backed up by data and facts that can be readily made available if you know where to look for them. Meanwhile, oil companies are playing the victim, claiming that climate experts are just picking on them and that they aren’t largely responsible for the troubling state in which our planet finds itself.
Image source: Wikimedia
