Fossil fuel behemoth Exxon-Mobil is ignoring net zero and planning to sell ever more climate-changing aviation fuel, reports Independent.
Changing the world’s climate
Thrusting aside the government’s international commitments, the “jet zero” promises of the aviation industry and the need to develop replacement non-polluting fuels, the company is building a new pipeline from its refinery at Southampton to Heathrow. It is expected to have 140 per cent of the carrying capacity of the one built in 1972. That’s half as much again to reinforce Exxon’s contribution to global heating.
After all, this is the company that claimed that the science of climate change was uncertain, even though its own scientists had proved the opposite. Last month, Harvard University’s analysis of Exxon’s own company papers proved what many of us had long thought.
Nearly 30 years ago, their own scientists had informed the company’s directors that the burning of fossil fuels was changing the world’s climate. They even worked out – extremely accurately – the scale of the damage.
As for the climate change we are seeing today, Exxon knew about for certain, then – yet it denied it and spent $30m financing campaigns to pretend that the scientists didn’t know and therefore governments shouldn’t act. To protect their profits, they insisted there was no proof – when all along they knew the damage they (and the rest of the oil industry) were doing.
So, planned action was stopped in its tracks and the US government programme to counter the climate crisis came to a halt. The convenient excuse that science was still “uncertain” meant that, all round the world, action stalled. The global warming deniers were given sustenance by the massive public relations campaign of the fossil fuel industry driven by Exxon.
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Source: Independent
