Exxon has shifted the blame for international warming from oil corporations to customers – what is the level?
Guest essay by Eric Worrall
You must go through 5 paragraphs of Harvard Research before you see Naomi Oreskes. Other outlets didn’t mention her name at all. I wonder why news outlets seem so shy about bearing their names.
Exxon Mobils messaging put the blame for consumer warming on
An analysis of the company’s fossil fuel documents also found attempts were made to downplay the dangers of climate change
By Maxine Joselow, E & E News on May 15, 2021
According to a new article from Harvard University researchers, Exxon Mobil Corp. the language used to systematically shift the blame for climate change from fossil fuel companies to consumers.
The paper, published yesterday in One Earth magazine, could intensify efforts to bring the oil giant to justice for its alleged global warming fraud.
“This is the first computational assessment of how Exxon Mobil has used language in a subtle but systematic way to shape the way the public speaks and thinks about climate change,” said Geoffrey Supran, research fellow at Harvard and Co-author of the paper. said in an interview with E&E News.
“One of our general findings is that Exxon Mobil has used rhetoric mimicking the tobacco industry to downplay the realities and gravity of climate change and to shift responsibility for climate change from themselves to consumers,” he added.
An Exxon Mobil spokesman denied the paper, calling it part of a coordinated legal campaign against the company.
Supran and co-author Naomi OreskesThe Harvard professor of history of science (and a columnist for Scientific American) performed computational analysis of 180 Exxon Mobil documents from 1972 to 2019, including peer-reviewed publications, advertorials in the New York Times, and internal memos.
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Read more: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-mobils-messaging-shifted-blame-for-warming-to-consumers/
Seriously, are Scientific American and other outlets concerned that people would not read past the heading if they saw the Oreske name?
I suspect the problem is that Oreskes hasn’t said anything new in a long time and kept beating the same drum. And it doesn’t really offer a solution.
The core problem is that there is no serious alternative to fossil fuels. Electric vehicles are too expensive, and most of the world’s fossil fuel grids would buckle if more people opted for electric drive.
There is no hope that renewables will significantly replace fossil fuel infrastructure. They are just too unreliable. Either people accept the misery of unreliable energy or they pay for two types of infrastructure – the sign of virtue for renewable systems and the “backup” system that must be kept on warm-roll standby in case a cloud covers the sun.
Nuclear power could replace fossil fuels – but as Willis’ excellent analysis shows, it would take decades of massive investments to replace fossil fuel infrastructure with nuclear power plants. The money that becomes fully nuclear would cost a lot of schools and hospitals that would not be built.
I’m not a fan of exhaust smoke inhalation, as a severe asthmatic I would love if there was an easy solution to fossil fuel pollution removal. However, there is currently no such solution.
Naomi Oreskes, if you want people to watch out again, make an effort. Say something new You don’t have to hide your name in the sixth paragraph, you just have to say something interesting. Come up with an idea to eliminate fossil fuels that don’t require massive government intervention or exorbitant costs, or to burden fossil fuel companies with new burdens, the costs of which would inevitably be passed on to consumers in some form.
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