Did The Guardian Just Blow Up the Exxon Knew Narrative? – Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

So much for the big secret big oil conspiracy. Marathon Oil published an article in 1977 in a company periodical suggesting CO2 might cause mass starvation.

US oil company ran 1977 article predicting climate crisis could cause starvation

Marathon Petroleum predecessor warned of potential for ‘social and economic calamities’ in decades-old publication

Geoff Dembicki Thu 18 Jul 2024 22.00 AESTShare

The corporate predecessor to America’s largest refiner of oil, Marathon Petroleum, explained in a company periodical nearly 50 years ago that global temperature rise potentially linked to “industrial expansion” could one day cause “widespread starvation and other social and economic calamities”.

This decades-old description of climate breakdown is from a 1977 issue of the magazine Marathon World and is attributed in the article by an unnamed author to several experts including a scientist working for a top US agency.

“Although climatologists disagree on the underlying reasons, many see a future climate of greater variability, bringing with it areas of extreme drought,” said the magazine, previously published by Marathon Oil Company, which later split into Marathon Petroleum as well as the exploration and production company Marathon Oil.

Marathon Petroleum is among several oil and gas companies – including Exxon, Shell and BP – currently being sued by the city of Honolulu for allegedly engaging in a coordinated communications effort “to conceal and deny their own knowledge” of catastrophic climate impacts caused by burning their products.

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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/18/us-oil-marathon-petroleum-climate-change

A company periodical is not exactly a secret internal memo.

Suggesting oil companies knew we were heading for certain doom back in the 1970s and tried to hide that knowledge is an absurd position even without this latest revelation, because climate scientists themselves were offering wildly differing opinions in the 1970s.

Well credentialed scientists like Gifford Miller, Stephen Schneider, Chester Langway and James Hayes appeared in the wildly popular 1978 documentary “In search of … The Coming Ice Age”. The scientists in the documentary defended their claim the world could be on the brink of a global cooling catastrophe. Schneider suggested using nuclear reactors to melt the polar ice caps.

I remember watching this documentary as a kid. The presenter was Leonard Nimoy, the original Star Trek Doctor Spock. All the adults were worried about this icy threat to their children’s future.

The lack of certainty about the science is further supported by the “secret” internal memos which are the alleged smoking guns of the fake Big Oil conspiracy narrative. For example, the following is a copy of the Glaser 1982 memo, which was circulated to Exxon management.

The memo, and bear in mind this was a private internal memo, is anything but certain that climate change will have catastrophic impact. For example, at the bottom of Page 4, continuing to the top of Page 5.

“There is currently no unambiguous evidence that the earth is warming. If the earth is on a warming trend, we’re not likely to detect it before 1995. This is about the earliest projection of when the temperature might rise the 0.5° needed to get beyond the range of normal temperature fluctuations. On the other hand, if climate modelling uncertainties have exaggerated the temperature rise, it is possible that a carbon dioxide induced “greenhouse effect” may not be detected until 2020 at the earliest”.

Why didn’t oil companies adjust their positions when global warming activists started to dominate the scientific debate, and scientists like Stephen Schneider jumped ship and joined the global warming camp?

There is a lot of evidence CO2 does not drive climate change – in the paleo record, CO2 follows climate change, not the other way around. Something else triggered the climate change which drove historical changes in CO2 level – including downward shifts in temperature when CO2 levels were high.

But there is a more obvious explanation for oil companies executives and other corporates don’t take every pivot of the scientific doomsday movement seriously – alarmists keep getting their predictions wrong.

Hardly a day passes we don’t discover yet another “settled science” disaster prediction turns out to be dead wrong.

Whatever happened to the 1.5C global warming safety limit?

The predictive failure and alarmism of the scientific catastrophe movement was as obvious in the 1970s as it is today. For example, Paul Ehrlich’s blockbuster 1968 book “The Population Bomb” predicted mass starvation within a decade.

The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.

Many of the oil company executives who ignored global warming alarmism in the 70s and 80s would have been well aware of predictive failures like Ehrlich’s book, and would also have been aware of scientists like Stephen Schneider, who in just a few short years jumped ship from demanding fossil fuel be shut down to prevent the next ice age, to demanding fossil fuel be shut down to prevent the world from overheating. They would have all seen Schneider preaching global cooling in the “In search of” documentary, and their own researchers would have told them how Schneider flip-flopped between global warming scares and global cooling scares in the 1970s.

Wikipedia suggests the date of Schneider’s global warming awakening occurred in 1974, but if this is the case, why did Schneider appear in the 1978 “In search of” documentary and suggest melting the ice caps? Was it a case of “what is Schneider saying this week?”. No wonder oil company executives didn’t take it seriously.

Against this decades old backdrop of unsettled science and flip-flopping doomsday claims, there is one thing we do know for sure.

The year oil companies are shut down is the year six billion people die from starvation.

Fossil fuel is utterly essential for producing the fertiliser and pesticides, and transporting the food which allowed the world’s population of millions to grow into a global population of billions. Even nuclear power couldn’t replace all the ways fossil fuel makes our modern society possible, without trillions of dollars of additional investment. If fossil fuel was withdrawn today, or even over the next decade, food production methods would be forced to return to the agricultural practices of the 18th century, and most people alive today would surely die.