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[Music] for more than 150 years oil and gas has played a critical role in our society improving human lives raising standards of living
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and enabling unprecedented economic growth what do you do when you learn the product that you make threatens the entire planet we already knew
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it would be a catastrophe so this was a model from 1982 with right startlingly accurate projections into the press that's correct the question came up what are we going to do
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they realized that it was going to be an existential threat to their business but they made a deeply unethical decision the scientific evidence remains
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inconclusive they lied the scientific data is inconclusive and yes i was misled this campaign of denial
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bought industry 30 plus extra years of profit at the expense of the planet go heat waves terrifying storms and widespread water shortages every heat
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wave occurring today is made more likely and more intense by climate once again putting lives at risk well 1978 my wife and i was just engaged six months prior so we were going to get
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married a year after i graduated from college i was kind of awkward a little bit reserved i was definitely a nerd i mean i grew up in a blue collar area in queens i went to cooper union and cooper
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union was very well known not to to my own horn but it had to be pretty good to get in so we were a draw for exxon exxon had a recruiting program they would go to colleges all around the
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country and every year they would take the best graduates from my school and so when exxon offered me a position in their research division and doing environmental monitoring for me it was a really good fit and the salary i got offered was about
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18 600 which in those days was a lot of money for somebody fresh out of school [Music]
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exxon was not just the largest oil and gas company in existence it was the largest company period in existence it did business all over the world it
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was enormous and the resources were gigantic and it had a very good reputation at the time i joined it they had a company making word processors
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fax machines there was a new division of the company exxon nuclear and they had exxon solar exxon wanted to become an energy company
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they were flush with funds the oil business was doing really well in the 70s and so they wanted to move into other fields related to energy so the project that i ultimately ended up working for them on was really blue sky they weren't going to make any money on
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it it was just research for the sake of doing research for somebody who was 22 or 23 years i was like wow am i i'm really happy here this is a really great place to be working i was really happy working for
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exxon [Music] [Music] back in the mid 70s i was working for nasa
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it was a very exciting time because nasa was sending probes all over the solar system and information that was coming back was very interesting things that we never knew
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for example we found out that venus was very hot it's at least 700 degrees there and the most plausible explanation came from the composition of venus's atmosphere venus is almost 100 carbon
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dioxide there was a kind of unified idea in the terrestrial planets of our solar system that the greenhouse gas warming
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was caused by uh high concentrations of carbon dioxide at the same time some research scientists were making observations of carbon dioxide in our own atmosphere and we have seen
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this curve of increasing carbon dioxide it's become a classic icon of the carbon dioxide problem where co2 keeps going up and up a few parts per million every year
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and we can attribute that to greenhouse gases primarily fossil fuel burning all of the models showed that the average temperature of the earth was going to warm [Music]
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the question came up what are we going to do over 85 percent of our energy was generated by fossil fuels and about that time is when i
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had the opportunity to work as a consultant with the biggest company in the world at the time exxon so this is this is a presentation
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entitled the proposed exxon research program to help assess the greenhouse effect it's presented by edward garvey myself henry shaw wally broker and tara takahashi columbia university march 26
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1979. [Music] exxon wanted to do research related to climate change but they wanted it to be recognized that something that exxon can contribute that
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was unlikely anybody else could do and the role of the ocean in the global balance of carbon dioxide was not well understood and so exxon saw an opportunity using the oil tanker to reinvolve itself in that line of
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research and make a really significant contribution to the understanding of the global cycle of carbon dioxide program goal use exxon expertise and facilities to help determine the likelihood of a
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global greenhouse effect wasn't dying to go to sea you know i was a city kid i wasn't a sailor but i think i understood from the very beginning that the oil tanker was going to be my baby so to speak i was going to
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make it work rationale for exxon involvement develop expertise to assess the possible impact of the greenhouse effect on exxon business form responsible team that can credibly carry bad news if any to the
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corporation we wrote computer programs we plotted graphs we analyzed the results we compared it with data with what nature was doing and we would compare
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our results with others results we would see if there's a consensus those papers would then get presented at meetings and it would sort of be this sort of brick by brick advance in our
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understanding of how the system worked everything that we studied was basically consistent with the finding that the earth was going to warm significantly and we just were trying to say how it would warm
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i can only speak about the research group and exxon research and engineering everybody there accepted it roger cohen completely accepted it roger cohen who was the manager of the
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group that i was consulting for passed a lot of our results on to higher levels of management because that's what this is he's writing to his boss about what the guys working for him are doing his
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unanimous agreement in the scientific community the temperature increase of this magnitude would bring about significant changes in the earth's climate including rainfall distribution and alterations in the biosphere
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our results are in accord with those of most researchers in the field and are subject to the same uncertainties there were uncertainties but it certainly was when how fast that's what
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we were looking at we didn't reduce fossil fuel consumption in a significant fashion we were going to be facing significant climate change in the future and here he's saying that we should keep doing the research because it can inform
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our decisions our ethical responsibility is to permit the publication of our research in the scientific literature indeed to do otherwise would be a breach
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of exxon's public position and ethical credo or honesty and integrity exxon knew i can tell honestly that exxon knew i was convinced that exxon was doing
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this research to understand it to get a place at the table to be part of the solution not so that we can deny the problem oh [Music]
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sometime in the 2000s exxon gave their archives to the library at the university of texas many truckloads of documents perhaps it was a pr effort to show
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that this company has a proud history and it's all transparent it's all in the library and so it was a revelation when these two teams of journalists one from inside climate news and another publishing in
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the la times uncovered documents showing how deep the conversation was about climate change within exxon [Music] by the 90s they were the kingpins of
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denial but we had no idea that they actually knew the science i've become a curator of documents and the evidence from the documents is that many industrial sectors were studying this independently
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members of the auto industry including gm the electric utilities and coal industry but exxon had a deeper program gasoline and fuel oil prices fell two
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percent last month the third consecutive monthly decline in the price of gasoline that set the stock markets getting into its worst loss in three months the oil world is in a state of shock at the moment
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now we're in 1982 and in 1982 oil prices dropped abruptly the bottom fell out of the old market and so exxon was having a hard time staying profitable and it began layoffs
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one of the things that was dropped overboard was a tanker project basically just said the market's too poor no longer can afford this level of research we're going to keep the modeling team together and shut down the
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tanker project and by 1984 lee raymond was senior vice president with broad oversight for exxon research and engineering raymond believed exxon would always be
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an oil and gas company it would never be anything else i know that exxon did some really good climate-related modeling work and was still funding research at columbia university but effectively they turned the corner
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and the place that i worked in was gone when the exxon retrenched and sold off its research and lithium batteries hold up its solar energy it's like you're throwing out the baby with the bath water these are all important lines of research for the potential for the
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company and you're just getting rid of them you're not trying to shrink them down saying okay we have to make do with a smaller budget no this is gone we're done with this we're done with this we're done with that alternative fuels there was a time in
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the late 70s that your company spent a lot of money at that time to say is there an alternative fuel that will work so that we don't have to burn fossil fuels right and put all that co2 in the ice we were the fir we were the first oil
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company that really spent a lot of money looking at all that and the results were what none of these technologies and we looked at everything i mean we looked from soup to nuts that none of these technologies were
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going to be competitive against oil financially competitive right [Music] 1988 was the year
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that the issue of climate change moved from scientific journals into the realm of public policy i was a 26 year old on the lower end of the totem pole in a senate office
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and senator wurtz said you want to work on the environment because that's where all the action is going to be our climate is changing very dramatically and it's time for us to start acting on it you know we identified early on how
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important this was and uh you know we're probably one of the first to bang away at it senator wurtz said i want to write a piece of legislation that addresses
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global warming the first person i reached out to was dr hansen distinguished senior scientist at nasa a lot had changed between the middle
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1970s when we first got interested in the problem and the 1980s the late 1980s because the real world was beginning to show
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signs that humans were affecting climate that implies that we're really going to get a significant change a few decades downstream my response was pretty immediate this is
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a big deal you know we need to get working on a hearing seattle and other parts of the northwest had their driest february in history irrigation reservoirs are 40 to 85 below
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normal levels by the spring of 1988 there was a full-scale drought the earliest fire season in memory has been declared it was my perception that
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the media wanted to explain this drought and seemed to be at a tipping point on the issue of climate change the evening before i was lying on my bed in a hotel in washington writing my
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testimony and listening to the yankees baseball game and i wrote my testimony out by hand i do think that scientists have a moral
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obligation to point out the implications of their findings and try to do it as clearly as possible i had a sense that it was going to be a good hearing and
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that his statement would be important you could feel it in the room that this was a significant moment i would like to draw three main conclusions number one
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the earth is warmer in 1988 than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements number two the global warming is now large enough that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence
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a cause and effect relationship to the greenhouse effect and number three our computer climate simulations indicate that the greenhouse effect is already large enough to begin
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to affect the probability of extreme events such as summer heat waves altogether this evidence represents a very strong case in my opinion that the greenhouse effect has been detected
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and it is changing our climate now that was a kind of a magic sentence this was not environmental groups this was not some green cabal this was probably the lead climate scientist in the federal government
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making this statement there was a buzz i wrote on the hearing transcript historic and some experts are saying now that the whole world is heating up because of a
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global greenhouse effect the implications for every human being every animal every plant on earth are enormous the next morning the story was on the front page of the new york times
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there are no easy solutions we're talking here about the use of gas and coal and oil it was as if the rocket had lifted off pragmatists would argue that we cannot change our energy habits overnight
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scientists say we had better get going i felt like tremendous progress was being made there was greater awareness there was public policy emerging there was
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international negotiations developing the problem of global climate change is one that affects us all we can't just do nothing
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momentum is on our side and it kind of opened up the world and you had the feeling oh wow you know this is really going to change but the minute targets and timetables began to appear
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you know those were magic signals to the industry oh this is serious little did we know how devastating the counter attack was going to be
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[Music] i've collected documents from every place where i've worked my basement looks like a trash bin and a fire hazard but nevertheless i'm terry yossi i'm vice president for health and
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environment at the american petroleum institute i want to thank api at that time was tremendously influential it was chief lobbying organization for the petroleum industry and had representation from some of the major
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oil companies exxon mobil chevron shell bp companies like that by early 1989 the newspapers the
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television networks were bombarding api with questions such as well what do you think of hansen's testimony what is your view of climate change in general what do you think needs to be done about climate change terry what do
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you make of all of this the decision was made that a briefing needed to be prepared for industry ceos global warming the knowns and unknowns
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by terry f yossi american petroleum institute january 1989 there is scientific consensus that the atmosphere is changing due to human activities
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there are three schools of thought that characterize the scientific and public debate over global warming one that reflects api's present thinking was expressed by a scientist named patrick michaels in a recent article in the
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washington post our policies noted michaels should be no more drastic than the scientific conclusions they are based upon i'm not uh i hate this word i'm not a
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denier i'm a lukewarmer totally different and people get that wrong the lukewarm view on climate change which means climate change is real people have something to do with it but it's
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probably not the end of the world i'm probably a lukewarm libertarian too there is a real problem with this so-called global warming apocalypse projection the earth may in fact be going in the
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other direction and until we solve that it seems to me that we ought not take any very expensive remuneration pat michaels was not a major voice in the scientific community on climate change but i think he was primarily
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useful to the industry as an external voice of doubt creating more skepticism about policymakers taking action in that vein api must become an active
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participant in the scientific and policy debate we are well on our way to doing that we must make policymakers fully aware of the uncertainty surrounding the global warming issue
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it's amazing i mean it's it is um it's almost it's a call to action they're realizing it's going down we need to be in the room talking about uncertainty and
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downplaying the urgency effectively that that is the call their focus is trying to emphasize uncertainty and we can show that they pretty much
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did that in following years [Music] [Applause] the man standing beside me today has what it takes to lead this nation from the day we take office senator al
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gore of tennessee bill clinton the democratic party's certain choices presidential candidate has announced his running mate al gore has spent the last decade working on the global environmental challenges we
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desperately need to address together we will finally give the united states a real environmental presidency now you're in the white house having spent years working on climate change
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did you feel a sense of responsibility oh absolutely that's why i was on the ticket that's why i agreed to run but that was the principal uh task that i set for myself entering the white house and i went to work right
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away today i announce our nation's commitment to reducing our emissions of greenhouse gases to their 1990 levels by the year 2000. so when clint and gore were elected um
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there was you know widespread hope but the honeymoon just didn't last long [Music] i remember seeing in the press this skeptic fred singer
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saying global warming was not a problem for the planet a respectable body of opinion in the international scientific community believes that any climate warming is as
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likely to be beneficial as harmful you saw that he had worked on tobacco and a number of other issues he was sort of a specialist in denial i thought that's odd
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i was aware that this emerging industry of naysayers was growing this effort to cast doubt you had reams of material coming out of the government
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they were at noaa at nasa this expanding network of people working on this day in and day out saying that this was a legitimate issue and that we needed to do something about
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it and on the other hand you had two or three guys who went around to conferences and said i'm not sure oh maybe there's clouds i would like to show you the warming
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that the satellite sensed over the same region from 1979 to now which is the next slide if you could thanks nothing first fred singer then pat michaels
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so you start to think well who are these people and where are they coming from oh interesting they're funded by exxon's foundation from the coal-fired power utilities western fuels association global climate
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coalition and they're funding climate deniers we are not an ad hoc group anymore but as a matter of fact the global climate coalition formalized not too long ago
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the global climate coalition consisted of every major manufacturing trade association that produced or consumed fossil fuels and every major company that was in the
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fossil fuels industry and so it's a considerable coalition of business interests the global climate coalition put out a bid for a contractor to provide communication
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services i'd left api in the late spring and i had come over to the harrison firm a public relations firm devoted exclusively to environmental issues
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i was asked to be a part of the pitch team because i was well known in the petroleum industry i was brought in specifically to handle press relations for the global climate coalition
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a lot of reporters were assigned to write stories and they were struggling with the complexity of the issue so i would write backgrounders so that reporters can read them and get up to speed communication proposal prepared for the
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global climate coalition by the hebrews harrison company scientists economists academics and other noted experts carry greater credibility with the media and general public than industry representatives
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communication efforts should be directed toward expanding the platform for third-party spokespersons you recruit that person you pay that person to give a speech or write an
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op-ed the global climate coalition would do the background work of placing that op-ed or maybe editing it i met some really brilliant climatologists and meteorologists i met
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pat michaels he struck me as someone who was very smart he loved talking about this issue what was your relationship with the gcc
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the global climate coalition oh god not much you were on their scientific advisory board yeah what does that mean i don't think we ever had a meeting
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i i understand you did we did it wasn't much of a relationship at all i mean when you when you bring up gcc it's like oh wait a minute who were those guys
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how did the funding that you received from the fossil fuel industry and impact what you were able to do work wise and impact the uh views that you took it didn't change what i do it didn't change the way i think how much do you think
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you did receive from industry i don't know you feel like in a way you were sort of used by them um that you were no i was using them you got you got that wrong what
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i mean i'm somewhat verbal and i like to write and i have an overestimation of my ability my sense of humor but can you imagine somebody giving you
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a little bit of money to say write whatever you want every two weeks uh and we had a blast doing that [Music]
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we weren't doing what we were told we were doing what we wanted the global climate coalition is seeding doubt everywhere sort of fogging the air with these
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counter arguments that are contradictory and nonsensical and environmentalists really don't know what's hitting them does it cross your mind or give you any kind of late night worries that you were being
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paid by a group that had a vested interest in delaying action blocking action creating doubt in the minds of the public and policy makers
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the backgrounders i was writing the narrative that i represented as the communications lead for the global climate coalition was not a popular narrative there's no question about that there was a lot we didn't know at the
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time and part of my role was to highlight what we didn't know you want to make an assumption that it's a meritocracy a good argument will prevail and it will
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it will displace a bad argument but what the geniuses of the pr firms who work for these big fossil fuel companies know is that truth has nothing to do with who wins the argument
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if you say something enough times people will begin to believe it [Music] come on [Music]
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finally tonight some new word on the temperature of the world charlene hunter galt has that story it's warmer than ever and last year set a record that's what british meteorologists reported today the met
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office says the last 12 months have been the warmest since records began in the 17th century you have ice slowly melting you have sea levels rising you have places like we knew we knew in 95 that
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humans were affecting the global climate back in 1990 the first report of the intergovernmental panel on climate change the ipcc concludes that it's too soon to tell definitively whether there
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is or is not a human-caused global warming signal five years later a very very different finding people at different institutes using different statistical methods different
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models formally identified a human-caused global warming signal this was a paradigm shift in scientific understanding of the reality of human effects on climate
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i was 40 years old i had spent one and a half years working as convening lead author for chapter eight of the ipcc's second assessment report this detection of climate change
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and attribution of causes we were in plenary in the beautiful palacio de congresos de madrid some of the industry scientists were
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involved in the process harun keshki from exxon was there from the beginning of our work on chapter eight right through to the end the global climate coalition and the saudis and kuwaitis dominated the
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plenary sessions saying if you say something's uncertain then it can be overturned which led to all of these sometimes heated exchanges because
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uncertainty is an irreducible part of climate science the notion that uncertainties mean you can't say anything useful about anything is preposterous
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there were these extraordinary back and forth discussions and my job was to implement those changes that we had discussed and agreed upon [Music]
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the bottom line finding agreed upon by all countries present in madrid was 12 words quote the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global
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climate unquote madrid was a triumph of the science the science won it was a big deal [Music] hi i'm joey chen an international panel
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of scientists agrees we can blame ourselves for global warming madrid where 2500 scientists from around the world have finally agreed with one another and are convinced that burning oil and coal is causing the world's temperature
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to rise which may bring with it environmental disaster how do you think this is going to affect policy action on this because certainly ammunition for those that would like more government regulation of industry to move away from
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fossil fuels to other forms of energy in retrospect those 12 words were the handwriting on the wall [Music] what happened next was that the global climate coalition really
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came onto my radar screen [Music] in the spring of 1996 they published this report the ipcc
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institutionalized scientific cleansing they were arguing that i had purged all discussion of uncertainty from the document which was patently untrue twenty percent of chapter eight was specifically
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devoted to the discussion of uncertainties the changes quite clearly have the obvious political purpose of cleansing the important information
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that would lead policymakers and the public to be very cautious if not skeptical about blaming human activities for climate change over the past century
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i had grandparents who were cleansed because of their religion in the second world war people were being cleansed because of their religion in bosnia
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and the global climate coalition through this odious scientific cleansing was arguing that i was guilty of a crime these revisions raise very serious questions
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about whether the ipcc has compromised or even lost its scientific integrity um i certainly had a probably a role in the creation of this there's a there's a
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level of detail here i just i i don't remember but what i do i do remember the gist of this um where things were said at one point in the process and then they disappeared at the next
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and that struck me as troubling and so i noted that to the folks in the coalition this stuff caught on like wildfire
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patrick michaels devoted substantial time to amplifying the global climate coalition's allegations others picked up that report and repeated bits of it verbatim
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things became worse when professor frederick seitz wrote an op-ed in the wall street journal i was accused of the worst abuse of the peer-reviewed system that professor seitz had seen in his 60
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years as a scientist folks who were calling for my dismissal with dishonor from my position a gentleman intimated that i was about to be indicted by the hague international court of justice for quote falsification
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of international scientific documents unquote i was in a fight for my professional life it was a very lonely place that document set in motion
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a number of public attacks on the lead author of that chapter oh he was particularly shaken by the accusation that he was guilty of scientific cleansing he found that yeah
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that that wouldn't have been terminology by the way that i would have used how this was used and what others did with it was outside of my control and and purview and it troubles me to to hear that this
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had such an impact on an individual that's not something i would want to do to to anybody this attack on individuals on their integrity
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decency honesty involved high personal cost and the global climate coalition knew what they were doing so those seeds of doubt and watch them grow and mature
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and they did [Music] in the mid 90s after he becomes the chairman of the board of exxon lee raymond is an ardent denier but scientific evidence remains
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inconclusive as to whether human activities affect the global climate and here he is absolutely refuting what his own scientists knew global warming who's right facts about
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the debate he's coming out strong saying it it's so uncertain we should research it but we shouldn't take any action what what's the date of this my god is this 82
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[Music] no this says 1996. i am just flapping by this the unproven theory this policy if implemented has ominous
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economic implications yet scientific evidence remains inconclusive as to whether human activities affect global climate it's just total baloney
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this person should never be the ceo of an energy company i think it's outrageous that he would say such a thing because
00:39:46
he has a world-class climate and carbon cycle research group in his own laboratory in exxon research and engineering he could pick up the phone and ask one of the people in that group if that
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statement is true and they would tell him that it isn't he's using something which is a lie to justify a policy which is bad for the world and
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i would have to say that on an ethical basis it's it's actually evil i think he should be ashamed of himself and i think he should apologize to the
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world for saying that [Music] two weeks from now this issue of global climate change
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[Music] will be discussed by more than 120 different countries in berlin i wanted the united states of america
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to lead the world community to agree on a set of global initiatives and policies the united states is committed to reaching 1990 levels of greenhouse gas
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emissions by the year 2000. thank you very much thank you we said that the united states was prepared to engage in targets and timetables
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i mean that was obviously a massive threshold for us to cross i declare open the first session of the conference of the parties
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the convention is coming of age the question was who goes first it was in no way possible to get a global treaty with a proposal that the
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poorest countries in the world would have to take the same obligations that the wealthy countries were undertaking and the idea was those who developed the most and had contributed historically
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the most to the problem should step up to the plate first in the effort to reduce emissions i should bang the hammer now that was the formula that the world agreed was the only way to make progress
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toward a truly global agreement he will be calling on all the developed countries to agree a figure of between five and ten percent below 1990 levels at a follow-up in kyoto japan
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negotiators hope to agree on binding limits the negotiators did agree they would exempt developing countries from the caps negotiated in kyoto but the fossil fuel companies took that
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feature of the agreement and made that a better noir they made that a politically uh salient issue that they use to uh to great effect this
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is the strategy of the grand fog this is a plan from the pr firm uh ebruce harrison after berlin prepared for the global climate coalition july 11 1995.
00:43:26
third-party recruitment and op-ed placement efforts will continue although with a new emphasis on economists there are firms that they can pay who will say you know solving global warming
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will cost lots of jobs there'll be higher energy costs this is the next layer of fog [Music]
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in 1996 i finished up grad school and accepted a job at charles river associates we were doing work for the american petroleum institute so they had a
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particular point of view if the us goes ahead and reduces its emissions and countries like china and india don't do anything the us puts itself at a competitive disadvantage
00:44:21
to try and put numbers on what those damages would do how much they were hurt i think is important right we wrote a couple papers on our findings i had general surprise of how much
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attention it got it was finding its way into the airwaves our president must decide if he'll sign a u.n climate treaty that could increase the cost of gasoline by 50 cents a
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gallon and raise electricity and natural gas prices by 25 to 50 percent there's great pressure that came from the clients to talk about jobs we tried to tell clients we really can't
00:44:59
measure jobs accurately but you know you have to get paid at the at the end of the day so you know we ended up doing the best we could talking about jobs
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but you don't really you don't really know would cost probably five six seven hundred thousand jobs a year that would hurt the us automobile industry and it would hurt the us
00:45:23
economy every independent and i say every independent economic study has come to the same conclusion that the impact is negative and it's going to cost jobs
00:45:35
[Music] i had misgivings about just telling half the story right you know what do we get if we reduce emissions we get less damage from climate change right and we're not
00:45:49
putting that in there yeah i wish i weren't a part of that looking back i wish i weren't a part of delaying action you know clearly on the wrong side of
00:46:02
history [Applause] 18 weather and climate-related disasters with a damaged total of more than one billion dollars each now scientists warn these natural
00:46:33
disasters could push the nation's infrastructure to the brink the international monetary fund's job is to spot the economic dangers that lie ahead it believes that climate change is one of them
00:46:52
[Music] please welcome our chairman lee raymond a united nations effort is moving toward decision in 1997 to cut the use of fossil fuels
00:47:08
based on the unproved theory that they affect the earth's climate so it's critical that we in the industry provide a voice of common sense on this important issue
00:47:20
so we must continue to work for more unity and more cooperation one example is our close cooperation with the automobile industry recently they have become engaged in the
00:47:32
global climate issue and are active aggressive allies in the run-up to the kyoto protocol there's a massive push to stop it to kill it uh by industry they know that this is the big fight
00:47:45
you're seeing these ad campaigns denial ad campaigns tv ads print ads there's op-eds millions and millions of dollars worth of advertising it's not global why is the us being obliged to do
00:47:58
more than everyone else it's not global and it won't work and everybody sung from the same song sheet consensus that exists on global warming is fiction who really cares the
00:48:09
biggest loser in all of this will be science and i'm here to defend science and then out of nowhere the senate issues this bird hegel
00:48:20
resolution which passes 95 to zero once there's an international treaty it has to come back and be ratified and in a nutshell the bird hagel resolution says the senate wouldn't sign on it just put
00:48:34
this storm cloud above the negotiations even before the meeting began esres 98 puts the administration on notice that an overwhelming and
00:48:46
bipartisan majority of the united states senate rejects its current negotiating position on a proposed new global climate treaty i was not going to support a treaty that bound this country which
00:49:00
would affect our economy everything else when we didn't have the absolute scientific evidence first of all to prove it and second and maybe even more important let all these
00:49:12
other countries off that was my position then be my position now if anything has become clear during congressional hearings on this issue it is that the science
00:49:24
is unclear is that the scientific community has not even come close to definitively concluding that we have a problem i'm not a scientist
00:49:35
i'm not a climatologist i listen to a lot of people i ask uh for a lot of opinions i i had scientists come in i had other people come in we on earth documents that show
00:49:50
a series of meetings and briefings that chuck hagel received quite amazing here's a memo from the american petroleum institute they're putting on a luncheon they're hosting senator hagel and they're going to brief
00:50:06
him scientists do not have a precise understanding of this issue doubt doubt meeting with senator hagel and the ford motor company this is the american automobile manufacturers association the aluminum
00:50:18
association chemical manufacturers association you know i'm emphasizing senator hagel but this is happening uh all throughout the senate what was they saying to you in those
00:50:30
meetings and did you learn anything that did help to shape your views well they made their case they made their point i wasn't surprised by anything i heard you met lee raymond the chairman and ceo
00:50:45
of exxon what kind of relationship did you have with him uh well lee raymond was a south dakota boy i remember that um i didn't have a close relationship with him i um but i listened to him he's
00:50:58
head of the largest oil company uh in the country i listened to everybody's opinions so this is a page from a a briefing document and it's uh the title is the
00:51:11
dilemma for congress draft resolution is attached for your consideration so the american automobile manufacturers association is putting forth on behalf i
00:51:24
think of the global climate coalition the draft resolution for the senate to preemptively kill the kyoto protocol i mean the bird hegel resolution they didn't draft that
00:51:39
that resolution was decided uh by us by the senators vice president al gore is on his way to kyoto japan to attend the global warming summit now the goal of the conference is
00:51:53
an international treaty to protect the environment but so far it's been hard to find anything the diplomats can agree on i think bird hagel really destroyed any hope of getting something done in kyoto
00:52:05
there was no argument by the administration against the byrd hegel resolution the clinton administration certainly didn't want to go into open war
00:52:17
to those who seek to obfuscate and obstruct we say we will not allow you to put narrow special interests above the interests of all humankind
00:52:30
[Music] corporate american leadership will not save the world it was just an unbelievable mess he did broker a deal and got as much out
00:52:46
of kyoto as he could have but we were not going to get steep cuts in co2 emissions out of a global agreement with all the industry fighting against them delegates from the u.s and 149 other
00:53:00
countries have approved the treaty known as the kyoto protocol the powerful american industrial lobby says any deal will now be blocked in the usa i feel that at the end of the day the
00:53:12
clinton gore administration was not able to deliver on the lofty promise of american leadership the door closed for the next 10 years
00:53:25
so it was a significant missed opportunity [Music] they won the battle i was intent that they would not win the war
00:53:39
it became clear to me at that point that it was going to be a longer war it is unequivocal that human activities are responsible for climate change that's the finding of a new study by the
00:54:00
un's intergovernmental panel on climate change a dire warning and a stark reality the head of the un referred to this as code red for humanity global
00:54:12
temperatures are the hottest in a hundred thousand years and many effects of climate change are already irreversible if we want to avoid catastrophe we have to drastically cut emissions
00:54:25
now we now know that exxon was making a concerted effort through the 1990s to cast doubt even though their own scientists were telling them that climate change science was sound do you
00:54:40
feel that you were misled well what we now know about um some of these large oil companies positions they lied and yes
00:54:53
i was misled others were misled when they had evidence in their own institutions that countered what they were saying publicly i mean they lied
00:55:06
if they had said that if they'd held their hands up then and said yes this is real could it have been different oh absolutely it would have changed everything i would have i think it would have changed the average citizen's
00:55:19
appreciation of climate change and and mine of course it would have put of the united states in the world on a whole different track and today we would have been so much
00:55:32
further ahead than we are it costs this country and it costs the world [Music] i think it's the moral equivalent of a
00:55:46
war crime i think that it is in many ways the most serious crime of the post-world war ii era the consequences of what they've
00:55:58
done are just almost unimaginable my name is darren woods i'm the chairman and chief executive officer of exxon mobil corporation exxonmobil has long recognized that
00:56:16
climate change is real and poses serious risks but there are no easy answers i am not aware of any unique understanding that we had in the science
00:56:28
we engaged with the broader community and worked with them to advance our own understanding and as time passed and scientific understanding evolved so did our position [Music]
00:56:47
[Music] i'm 83 years old three or four decades ago we predicted it as a scientist to have those predictions come true
00:57:07
that's sort of the golden icon that you look for however as a human being and as an inhabitant of planet earth
00:57:19
i'm horrified to watch the lack of response to this i am trying as much as possible to distance myself emotionally
00:57:38
so you're angry yes i'm furious it's heartbreaking to me i saw all of that potential there at least at that point in time to really
00:57:55
solve the problem in many different ways had exxon chosen to pick up the ball then and begin to lead the discussions would have been about how to do it
00:58:09
we had solar scientists doing research we had lithium battery chemists doing research think of how important these sciences are to the world currently parts of the world are going to suffer enormously unnecessarily so
00:58:22
and for for something that we could have done something about not doing anything for decades that that's just it's just squandered time and we're going to pay for it
00:58:43
i don't think science is settled i mean how could it be koch industries was able to reshape the republican party into one that identified with the idea that climate change is not real it really was
00:58:55
a tragedy there was no appetite for addressing climate change at all you were generating so much money you could forget everything else the climate skeptics and denialists were in a position of strength in every decisive
00:59:08
fight we had won [Music] [Music] you
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