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Photographed by Theo Wyss-Flamm (12-1)
I’d like to extend a very warm welcome back to everyone! I hope midterms went well for everyone. Now that you’ve survived through that awful dread, come join me in an examination of the most extreme existential emergency that our Earth has ever encountered: global warming!
Now, you may be thinking, “But Michael! This is supposed to be a political column, not a science column!” You’re right, and as my teachers will tell you, science is not exactly my specialty. That’s why it pains me so much that this story is cropping up as a political problem when it really shouldn’t be classified as such; it’s a story about lies, deceit, and fat stacks of cash.
If you already don’t believe in climate change or the huge role that we play in this most seminal of tragedies, I’m not going to waste paper and ink trying to convince you. I implore you, track me down and we can discuss this. But not here. This is a time to take a hard look at what late stage capitalism has done to both the public and political psyche.
Much of the foundation for climate change denial has been built right under our noses, by presenting the issue as one yet undecided by science. There are scores of “scientific” institutes and researchers who claim climate change to be a hoax, without disclosing the enormous amount of funding they receive from oil and gas companies. And while not every scientist agrees on how serious the issue is, an overwhelming majority agree that it is an issue: 97%, to be exact.
Yet only seven out of ten Americans believe that climate change is happening. How!? Well, there’s certainly a lot of contributing factors ranging from political ideology to issues of religion and a mistrust of authority. Those are all serious reasons for this kind of blatant ignorance, yet I find myself especially concentrated on the influence of certain companies who may stand to gain from our increasing dependence on gas and oil. So, let’s jump into it.
The idea of human-caused climate change predates even the first mass manufactured cars, beginning with Svante Arrhenius’ 1896 publication supposing the idea of a greenhouse effect, where the burning of fossil fuels leads to an increase in Earth’s surface temperature.
Fast forward to 1970, when an internal report conducted by ExxonMobil confirmed that carbon emissions were causing the planet to warm in a significant way, stating that “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.” So, of course, Exxon did the responsible thing and shoved it all under the rug. In order to protect their own profits, they spent millions of dollars on a misinformation campaign that borrowed heavily from the tactics that big tobacco had used in the decades prior to convince the public that cigarettes didn’t cause lung cancer.
Even then, not all seemed lost. In 1980, a number of oil companies came together at a meeting of the American Petroleum Institute warning of the potentially catastrophic impacts of climate change. It seemed, for a brief moment, that we might be saved. We, however, were not.
From 2016 to 2019, the five largest publicly traded oil and natural gas producers have funneled more than a billion dollars into misleading, inaccurate, or outright false advertising and lobbying campaigns in connection to climate change. In the past thirty years, they have made more than $534 million in campaign contributions to politicians and parties. More than a quarter of that has come from the Koch Brothers alone, who for their long standing greed and dirty political influence have become infamous. And for just over a year, former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson served as President Trump’s Secretary of State, just after his company contributed nearly three million dollars to the Republican Party. Aren’t coincidences fun?
This has created a political climate of distrust and disgust which never should have existed in the first place. Millions march all around the world, pleading for their so called representatives to accept simple facts, while energy companies continue to print money. If we don’t do something now, we’ll all get burnt.
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