How Fossil Fuel Executives Fooled Themselves on Climate Change

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/543266/how-fossil-fuel-executives-fooled-themselves-on-climate-change/

[font face=Serif]Richard Martin
November 9, 2015

[font size=5]How Fossil Fuel Executives Fooled Themselves on Climate Change[/font]

[font size=4]Oil companies’ climate change policies may not have been criminal, but they were self-deceiving.[/font]

[font size=3]Last week the New York state attorney general announced an investigation into the climate change statements and policies of Exxon Mobil. Attorney General Eric Schneiderman issued a broad subpoena to the world’s largest private-sector oil company, seeking to discover whether Exxon Mobil misled the public and investors with statements that contradicted its own internal research on climate change. The investigation represents the clearest signal yet that fossil fuel companies may yet have to come clean on their long and well-funded history of obfuscation and outright mendacity on the science of climate change.

In a separate but releated case, Schneiderman’s office also announced a settlement with Peabody Energy, the largest publicly traded coal company in the world, after a two-year investigation that found that Peabody’s climate change denial program had “violated New York laws prohibiting false and misleading conduct in the company’s statements to the public and investors.” As part of the settlement, Peabody will revise its past disclosures to affirm that “concerns about the environmental impacts of coal combustion … could significantly affect demand for our products or our securities.”

These cases raise the question, what do the people who crafted these strategies actually believe? Questioning science, generally, is not a path to profitability in the oil and gas or the coal business. Were they cynical, or merely misguided?

…

Whatever their personal beliefs on climate change—a psychological puzzle that would take a university department to plumb—it’s clear that the executives at Exxon Mobil, Peabody, and other fossil fuel companies have engaged in a long, thorough, and pervasive campaign of ignorance and self-delusion. Soon they will find out what that campaign will cost them.[/font][/font]

[Fred Sanders]

1. It has been a campaign of Big Lies and Big Secrecy...all to preserve fossil fuel profits and

short-term gain instead of long-range vision.

What else could one respect of an almost unregulated, highly profitable yet highly subsidized industry that has used those massive and consistent profits to buy out so many politicians and media?

[ruffburr]

2. FOOLED?

My ass, Not Criminal?, My aching ass