“Exxon Knew” as Historical Fallacy (Part I)
By Robert Bradley Jr. -- September 23, 2025The following memorandum within the vast bowels of Exxon Corporation from 1979 has led to several fallacies that the memo represented company policy and was definitive at the time.
False and false. This memo from certain employees never made it to a company position for cause. Global cooling was the bigger concern back then, and the above memo did not investigate the SO2 offset, much less the benefits from CO2 fertilization and incremental warming. Peak Oil and Peak Gas was the intellectual/practical concern of this era.
Background Posts
MasterResource has opined on this subject is a series of posts, summarized here.
- A rebuttal to an op-ed by Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes, “The Forgotten Oil Ads that Told Us Climate Change was Nothing.”
- A critical review of Inside Climate News’s “Exxon: The Road Not Taken” (here and here)
- A three-part rejoinder of Big Oil vs The World by the BBC (Episode I; Episode II; Episode III)
- A rejoinder to Shell Knew (here)
- ‘ExxonKnew’: More Correction (Sept. 18, 2023)
- “Exxon Knew”: More Rebuttal (again) (Sept. 19, 2024)
Another post has challenged the “Shell Knew” narrative.
Also see rebuttals from Robert Rapier (here) and ExxonMobil (here). One is hard-pressed to disagree with the company’s statement:
ExxonKnew is a coordinated campaign perpetuated by activist groups with the aim of stigmatizing ExxonMobil. Funders of the “#ExxonKnew” campaign have placed “pay to play” news stories, released flawed academic reports and coordinated with public officials to launch investigations and litigation, creating the false appearance that ExxonMobil has misrepresented its company research and investor disclosures on climate change to the public.
The goddamn tort lawyers, practitioners of champerty and barratry, their enablers, the ambulance-chasers and a completely corrupt, innumerate and economically illiterate segment of the population are destroying this country.