Ignorance is no excuse; pretended ignorance deserves harsher punishment.
“Mankind
has this enormous capacity to deal with adversity, and those solutions will
present themselves as those challenges become clear” - ExxonMobil CEO Rex
Tillerson said at the company’s 2015 annual shareholder meeting.
ExxonMobil, the american multinational oil and gas corporation
giant, is under probe for withhelding information from shareholders and the
public about the risks associated with their business. The company’s own
climate researchers had warned the senior management of the potential negative
effects of green house gas emissions way back in 1977 which
was kept a secret by the company.
19 US Senators in July 2016, called out fossil fuel industry on their
Climate change denials. The big oil and gas Corporations were exposed for
carrying out corporate funded campaign to spread skepticism regarding climate
change. Fossil fuel industry made millions of financial transactions to fuel the climate change denial machine.
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| Image source:http://www.ecowatch.com/senators-expose-web-of-denial-blocking-climate-change-action-1917189475.html |
A climate consensus was reached at the beginning of 1990s that: manmade
activities are causing climate change. To prevent this from achieving a concrete
status, the fossil fuel industry started funding numerous independent think
tanks, researchers to write and publish against climate change. They wanted to
create the sense of ’doubt’ and divide climate science into a debate. Their
tactic was to place ‘doubts’ to delay
climate action. This tactic was employed by all the think tanks and researchers
funded by the fossil fuel industry. Between
1994 and 1997, 1 billion US dollar was spent to downplay the climate change
effect. This misinformation campaign was funded by all the big oil companies
including Exxon Mobil, Koch brothers etc. They funded everyone from business groups
to think tanks to researchers to youth to senior citizens to rubbish the
climate change science. They tried extensively to brand climate change as just ‘a
theory’ and not truth. Investigative
reports by The Guardian, Inside climate news series found that Exxon Mobil has spent at least $33
million since 1998 on a network of more than 60 think tanks, advocacy groups
and trade associations, many of which continue to distort climate science and
denigrate renewable energy to this day.
America is the largest contributor
of Green house gases (GHGs). Work of geographer Richard Heede shows that a
relatively small number of investor- and government-owned companies are
responsible for two-thirds of human-caused carbon emissions since the beginning
of the Industrial Revolution. Heede’s 2014 study found
that just 90 companies accounted for 65 percent of worldwide carbon emissions
between 1854 and 2013. Half of those companies’ total emissions have occurred
since 1988 — long after the scientific community and the public became aware of
the threat posed by global warming. Rather
than changing their business models, they pumped in millions for climate
denials and lied for decades meantime profiting billions of dollars from
polluting the earth.
Its them- the fossil fuel industry including the likes of Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP, Royal Dutch Shell, ConocoPhillips, Peabody Energy, Consol Energy, Arch Coal etc - who should pay for the remedial measures. They should be charged for their actions. Fossil fuel industry in USA gets 7.5 billion dollar subsidy annually. This should be taken away and given to clean energy industry.
They should be made to :
·
Acknowledge
the negative impacts caused by them and accept wrong doings
·
Change into a clean model of energy and
·
Pay
60% or more for the climate adaptation and mitigation funds.
Only by stringent measures can we prevent another
tobacco or coal episode in future.
Anu Kuncheria
anukuncheria@gmail.com
References:
Heede, R. Climatic
Change (2014) 122: 229. doi:10.1007/s10584-013-0986-y
http://www.desmogblog.com/exxonmobil-funding-climate-science-denial
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