Qasim and friends, I've been thinking about this since the mid eighties!
I asked my self why! Well CEO's get paid on and for increasing the value of the stock of the corporations they run. To admit and take steps to address the truth of Climate change would mean the value of oil in the ground (on which oil companies are allowed to base their stock value) would diminish, and those CEO would preside over falling value and not get compensated very well.
So what to do?
First They deliberately lied and hid from the public crucial information that would diminish the stock price not only if but when the Truth becomes known! This is illegal under SEC regulations. Its defrauding any who have purchased stock since the active deception started! Possible shareholder lawsuits? Probably only possible after stock prices fall in response to devaluation of reserves that will no longer be as valuable, because using them is suicidal!
Going forward a legal framework must be put in place that holds All Corporate Speech as self serving and unlike the freedom of speech granted human citizens, Corporations have to be held to a higher standard. Due to the inherent power and longevity of corporations. All Corporate Speech must be truthful to avoid the Giant stock fraud that is ongoing, and to eliminate the contamination of public discourse on which the effective policy decisions rest!
Other research points back to the late 1950’s… At an old gunpowder factory in Delaware – now a museum and archive – I found a transcript of a petroleum conference from 1959 called the “Energy and Man” symposium, held at Columbia University in New York. As I flipped through, I saw a speech from a famous scientist, Edward Teller (who helped invent the hydrogen bomb), warning the industry executives and others assembled of global warming.
“Whenever you burn conventional fuel,” Teller explained, “you create carbon dioxide. … Its presence in the atmosphere causes a greenhouse effect.” If the world kept using fossil fuels, the ice caps would begin to melt, raising sea levels. Eventually, “all the coastal cities would be covered,” he warned.
In Wyoming, I found another speech at the university archives in Laramie – this one from 1965, and from an oil executive himself. That year, at the annual meeting of the American Petroleum Institute, the main organization for the US oil industry, the group’s president, Frank Ikard, mentioning a report called “Restoring the Quality of Our Environment” that had been published just a few days before by President Lyndon Johnson’s team of scientific advisers.
“The substance of the report,” Ikard told the industry audience, “is that there is still time to save the world’s peoples from the catastrophic consequences of pollution, but time is running out.”
He continued that “One of the most important predictions of the report is that carbon dioxide is being added to the earth’s atmosphere by the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas at such a rate that by the year 2000 the heat balance will be so modified as possibly to cause marked changes in climate.”
Ikard noted that the report had found that a “nonpolluting means of powering automobiles, buses, and trucks is likely to become a national necessity.”
As I reviewed my findings back in California, I realized that …the heads of the oil industry had been privately informed by their own leaders that their products would eventually alter the climate of the entire planet, with dangerous consequences.
ExxonMobile was the worst mastermind behind the conspiracy to confuse the public, started by Lee Raymond (& his corrupt comms wife) & continued under Rex Tillerson. We tracked down the actual written plan. The same right wing institutes (Heartland, Cato, CEI, AEI) & leading names (Steven Milloy - part of Trump 1.0 transition team, Marc Morano) pop up over and over again in the manufactured echo chamber Exxon & others funded. See: https://www.ucs.org/resources/smoke-mirrors-hot-air (I ran a 2 year national campaign called Exxpose Exxon in mid 2000s funded by the Partnership Project, aka Green Group, which exposed this, got wide coverage & led to shareholder & other actions to stop Exxon’s funding of climate denier groups.)
My father was a chemist and chemistry teacher and I can personally attest to how much scientists knew, including outside the corporate sphere, in the early 1960s. That is why I have never owned a car--I couldn't bear to have that on my conscience
Now that we know, we must look in the mirror when we ask whom we need to get to change. Every time a key is put in the ignition, the driver is responsible for contributing to these disasters. Start by using public transportation, walking, and biking, and use less HVAC.
So how can we organize and come to agreements that we all do something, however "small " and not just continue talking about it or depending upon one or a few educating journalists to do all the heavy work? Boycott biggest regional polutors until it hurts their wallets and hold to the fire the feet of the politicians, judges, and agencies supporting them? Requiring campaigning politicians and judges to pledge specific actions with reasonable deadlines on their state oil polluters or face recall and reelection. Revive national train systems that have been purposely gutted, so we have modern, efficient, relatively clean, and highly- used trains as they have in many other countries including in Europe and China!
I wish I could say Americans are concerned about fossil fuel use, but I can't since I see absolutely no evidence of it on the road where vehicles are getting bigger and speeding is routine, or in the air where people are flying all over the world just for fun with annual increases in flying expected.
Our entire way of life runs of fossil fuels from our transportation right down to the plastic coating on the throw-away (can't be recycled) coffee cups we get ad Dunkin', Starbucks, Panera. Plastic is now routinely used to shrink wrap everything.
Convenience rules. Recycling is a joke because of contamination with things that rules state should not be put in recycling streams. Get out away from cities and there is effectively no recycling offered.
Climate change is not a daily issue in "the news" and is not a subject for discussion in Congress as Trump turns back what rules the EPA has enacted in the past. He is pushing for more US fossil fuel extraction and is holding down the price of gasoline when it should be steadily increasing. Have you heard members of your family or friends complaining about this? No.
We have had two or three generations of American children passing through school where the environment is a common topic. Do we see those now adults putting what they learned into the way they live their lives? No.
Some do. And some try to but can't. They don't have the infrastructure to do it in most places. I live in a college town in Oregon, where buses are free to ride. This is really nice, & we can get just about anywhere we need to by bus or bike (my preferred mode of traveling). I have no car & really don't need one in town. But as great as our town is, in most respects, there is no rapid transit within the Willamette Valley as there should be. If I need to go to Portland, which can be reached by car in 1 1/2 to 2 hours, there is no other way I can go that I can be assured of getting to some well-known places in Portland within 6 hours by train, by bus or by shuttle (to the airport). There are buses, trams, & rapid transit within Portland, but nothing goes directly to the places I need to go, & there are multiple transfers & walks from bus stop to bus stop to catch a bus. It is rare that I have to go out of town, but college students, businesspeople, etc. have to or want to travel frequently from place to place within the Willamette Valley or beyond, & there's no convenient public transportation that will get them very far very fast. Live in Europe, China, Japan or Singapore & you can get from place to place instantly, with their great, reliable, comprehensive transit systems.
We are still in a primitive stage 60 years after Japan introduced the bullet train. Also it is still difficult to obtain solar heating, energy efficient appliances & housing, etc., even as it becomes much cheaper than fossil fuels. Get government & business to finally offer us & make it easy, convenient & affordable to live an energy efficient lifestyle & obtain green products & you will get much greater public buy-in. The current regime is going in the opposite direction from where we need to go.
Wonder where they think they'll survive with their trillions? With no water to drink , no food to eat and no air to breathe. I picture them laying lifeless with everyone else, except they holding onto handfuls of cash.
Doing my best to elevate human rights, my friend! Grateful for your support in helping me do so. Know that subscribers like yourself make this advocacy possible ❤️✊🏽
I knew with the Exxon Valdez, that these men were corrupt, and didn't give a damn about people, only profits. Since, I've never bought Exxon gas again -- a small tidbit, but it nourished my soul. Nowadays, it remains the same -- firing the experts, more $$$, greed, less caring. Thank you for staying on top of this, and I'll do what I can.
Thank you for this important information. We are already feeling the effects of these climate changes, but unless something changes soon, our grandchildren and their descendants will pay an even higher price for the profits of Big Oil.
Wild how Big Oil basically speedran the villain arc. They had the science. They had the charts. They had the “hey guys, maybe don’t boil the planet” memos. And their response was to fire the scientists and hire the marketing department. It’s like discovering your house is on fire and deciding the solution is… to gaslight the smoke alarm.
They didn’t just lie. They built an entire religion around the lie and tithed the rest of us into climate purgatory.
Brilliant piece. If accountability ever arrives, I hope it shows up with the enthusiasm of a Category 5 storm they swore was “just weather.”
Qasim and friends, I've been thinking about this since the mid eighties!
I asked my self why! Well CEO's get paid on and for increasing the value of the stock of the corporations they run. To admit and take steps to address the truth of Climate change would mean the value of oil in the ground (on which oil companies are allowed to base their stock value) would diminish, and those CEO would preside over falling value and not get compensated very well.
So what to do?
First They deliberately lied and hid from the public crucial information that would diminish the stock price not only if but when the Truth becomes known! This is illegal under SEC regulations. Its defrauding any who have purchased stock since the active deception started! Possible shareholder lawsuits? Probably only possible after stock prices fall in response to devaluation of reserves that will no longer be as valuable, because using them is suicidal!
Going forward a legal framework must be put in place that holds All Corporate Speech as self serving and unlike the freedom of speech granted human citizens, Corporations have to be held to a higher standard. Due to the inherent power and longevity of corporations. All Corporate Speech must be truthful to avoid the Giant stock fraud that is ongoing, and to eliminate the contamination of public discourse on which the effective policy decisions rest!
Chris Guelich
Other research points back to the late 1950’s… At an old gunpowder factory in Delaware – now a museum and archive – I found a transcript of a petroleum conference from 1959 called the “Energy and Man” symposium, held at Columbia University in New York. As I flipped through, I saw a speech from a famous scientist, Edward Teller (who helped invent the hydrogen bomb), warning the industry executives and others assembled of global warming.
“Whenever you burn conventional fuel,” Teller explained, “you create carbon dioxide. … Its presence in the atmosphere causes a greenhouse effect.” If the world kept using fossil fuels, the ice caps would begin to melt, raising sea levels. Eventually, “all the coastal cities would be covered,” he warned.
In Wyoming, I found another speech at the university archives in Laramie – this one from 1965, and from an oil executive himself. That year, at the annual meeting of the American Petroleum Institute, the main organization for the US oil industry, the group’s president, Frank Ikard, mentioning a report called “Restoring the Quality of Our Environment” that had been published just a few days before by President Lyndon Johnson’s team of scientific advisers.
“The substance of the report,” Ikard told the industry audience, “is that there is still time to save the world’s peoples from the catastrophic consequences of pollution, but time is running out.”
He continued that “One of the most important predictions of the report is that carbon dioxide is being added to the earth’s atmosphere by the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas at such a rate that by the year 2000 the heat balance will be so modified as possibly to cause marked changes in climate.”
Ikard noted that the report had found that a “nonpolluting means of powering automobiles, buses, and trucks is likely to become a national necessity.”
As I reviewed my findings back in California, I realized that …the heads of the oil industry had been privately informed by their own leaders that their products would eventually alter the climate of the entire planet, with dangerous consequences.
https://asiatimes.com/2021/10/what-and-when-big-oil-knew-about-climate-change/
Ffs. Think how black your soul must be, to sell out everyone's future, for a profit today. This is crazy. Yes, I will support this!
Yep. Creating the deflection story -
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/23/big-oil-coined-carbon-footprints-to-blame-us-for-their-greed-keep-them-on-the-hook
For people like me who like to dig into old documents you can find them linked in this article also
https://commonhome.georgetown.edu/topics/climateenergy/defense-denial-and-disinformation-uncovering-the-oil-industrys-early-knowledge-of-climate-change/
ExxonMobile was the worst mastermind behind the conspiracy to confuse the public, started by Lee Raymond (& his corrupt comms wife) & continued under Rex Tillerson. We tracked down the actual written plan. The same right wing institutes (Heartland, Cato, CEI, AEI) & leading names (Steven Milloy - part of Trump 1.0 transition team, Marc Morano) pop up over and over again in the manufactured echo chamber Exxon & others funded. See: https://www.ucs.org/resources/smoke-mirrors-hot-air (I ran a 2 year national campaign called Exxpose Exxon in mid 2000s funded by the Partnership Project, aka Green Group, which exposed this, got wide coverage & led to shareholder & other actions to stop Exxon’s funding of climate denier groups.)
My father was a chemist and chemistry teacher and I can personally attest to how much scientists knew, including outside the corporate sphere, in the early 1960s. That is why I have never owned a car--I couldn't bear to have that on my conscience
Now that we know, we must look in the mirror when we ask whom we need to get to change. Every time a key is put in the ignition, the driver is responsible for contributing to these disasters. Start by using public transportation, walking, and biking, and use less HVAC.
So how can we organize and come to agreements that we all do something, however "small " and not just continue talking about it or depending upon one or a few educating journalists to do all the heavy work? Boycott biggest regional polutors until it hurts their wallets and hold to the fire the feet of the politicians, judges, and agencies supporting them? Requiring campaigning politicians and judges to pledge specific actions with reasonable deadlines on their state oil polluters or face recall and reelection. Revive national train systems that have been purposely gutted, so we have modern, efficient, relatively clean, and highly- used trains as they have in many other countries including in Europe and China!
You've been taking on the important righteous causes, & this one is dearest to me. I've been talking about this since last century.
Thanks for everything you do.
Sounds a whole lot like the tobacco industry.
I wish I could say Americans are concerned about fossil fuel use, but I can't since I see absolutely no evidence of it on the road where vehicles are getting bigger and speeding is routine, or in the air where people are flying all over the world just for fun with annual increases in flying expected.
Our entire way of life runs of fossil fuels from our transportation right down to the plastic coating on the throw-away (can't be recycled) coffee cups we get ad Dunkin', Starbucks, Panera. Plastic is now routinely used to shrink wrap everything.
Convenience rules. Recycling is a joke because of contamination with things that rules state should not be put in recycling streams. Get out away from cities and there is effectively no recycling offered.
Climate change is not a daily issue in "the news" and is not a subject for discussion in Congress as Trump turns back what rules the EPA has enacted in the past. He is pushing for more US fossil fuel extraction and is holding down the price of gasoline when it should be steadily increasing. Have you heard members of your family or friends complaining about this? No.
We have had two or three generations of American children passing through school where the environment is a common topic. Do we see those now adults putting what they learned into the way they live their lives? No.
Some do. And some try to but can't. They don't have the infrastructure to do it in most places. I live in a college town in Oregon, where buses are free to ride. This is really nice, & we can get just about anywhere we need to by bus or bike (my preferred mode of traveling). I have no car & really don't need one in town. But as great as our town is, in most respects, there is no rapid transit within the Willamette Valley as there should be. If I need to go to Portland, which can be reached by car in 1 1/2 to 2 hours, there is no other way I can go that I can be assured of getting to some well-known places in Portland within 6 hours by train, by bus or by shuttle (to the airport). There are buses, trams, & rapid transit within Portland, but nothing goes directly to the places I need to go, & there are multiple transfers & walks from bus stop to bus stop to catch a bus. It is rare that I have to go out of town, but college students, businesspeople, etc. have to or want to travel frequently from place to place within the Willamette Valley or beyond, & there's no convenient public transportation that will get them very far very fast. Live in Europe, China, Japan or Singapore & you can get from place to place instantly, with their great, reliable, comprehensive transit systems.
We are still in a primitive stage 60 years after Japan introduced the bullet train. Also it is still difficult to obtain solar heating, energy efficient appliances & housing, etc., even as it becomes much cheaper than fossil fuels. Get government & business to finally offer us & make it easy, convenient & affordable to live an energy efficient lifestyle & obtain green products & you will get much greater public buy-in. The current regime is going in the opposite direction from where we need to go.
Wonder where they think they'll survive with their trillions? With no water to drink , no food to eat and no air to breathe. I picture them laying lifeless with everyone else, except they holding onto handfuls of cash.
I am amazed by the number of good causes that you have actively supported, Qasim. You are generating an enormous amount of good karma.
Doing my best to elevate human rights, my friend! Grateful for your support in helping me do so. Know that subscribers like yourself make this advocacy possible ❤️✊🏽
I knew with the Exxon Valdez, that these men were corrupt, and didn't give a damn about people, only profits. Since, I've never bought Exxon gas again -- a small tidbit, but it nourished my soul. Nowadays, it remains the same -- firing the experts, more $$$, greed, less caring. Thank you for staying on top of this, and I'll do what I can.
Thank you for this important information. We are already feeling the effects of these climate changes, but unless something changes soon, our grandchildren and their descendants will pay an even higher price for the profits of Big Oil.
Exactly right.
Wild how Big Oil basically speedran the villain arc. They had the science. They had the charts. They had the “hey guys, maybe don’t boil the planet” memos. And their response was to fire the scientists and hire the marketing department. It’s like discovering your house is on fire and deciding the solution is… to gaslight the smoke alarm.
They didn’t just lie. They built an entire religion around the lie and tithed the rest of us into climate purgatory.
Brilliant piece. If accountability ever arrives, I hope it shows up with the enthusiasm of a Category 5 storm they swore was “just weather.”
Well said. The religion of greed and the cult of structural eugenics.