Deepwater Horizon on fire,
persons in the water.
In 2010, Deepwater Horizon,
a BP operated oil rig,
exploded, releasing 200 million gallons of oil into the ocean.
I don’t know if you can feel the heat right now.
Still got about 11 to 15 people missing.
This is what a burning rig looks like.
Eleven workers lost their lives alongside millions of marine animals.
It was the worst oil spill in US history.
BP downplayed the incident.
I think the environmental impacts of this disaster
is likely to have been very, very modest.
And when they were found guilty of deliberate misconduct,
they went on a PR offensive, tripling their advertising budgets.
We’re committed to the goal for everyone who loves it
and everyone who calls it home.
Covering their tracks is something that fossil fuel companies
have been doing for decades,
and not just with oil spills.
They knew well in advance about the greatest threat to our planet.
So in 1982, Exxon accurately predicted
a temperature increase of 1° Celsius.
Dr. Hoffert, is that correct?
We were excellent scientists.
Yes, you were. Yes, you were.
We also predicted how much CO2 had increased due to the emissions,
assuming a scenario of business as usual.
ExxonMobil years ago acknowledged climate change privately
is a serious problem,
but it did not acknowledge it publicly.
But instead of dealing with the problem,
they undermined their own science.
The fossil fuel industry waged a massive multi-decade,
multi-million dollar disinformation campaign to sabotage science
and to undermine policy to protect their profits.
I think I’m going to have to say that made me very angry.
They lobbied to weaken climate change legislation.
The United States will withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord.
And they shifted the blame onto us, the consumers.
The climate crisis is now well underway.
This whole place is on fire.
This is a real nightmare.
I can't believe this is real.
But recent undercover footage of an Exxon lobbyist
shows us that the playbook hasn’t changed.
We were looking out for our investments.
We were looking out for our shareholders.
As some attempt to hold the fossil fuel industry to account,
how did these companies bury the science?
This is how the fossil fuel industry misled us about the climate crisis.
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Holy shit.
In its recent landmark report,
the IPCC warned that climate change was today inevitable
and irreversible.
That may not sound like much to the punter in the street,
but from a scientific point of view,
it’s quite a profoundly important statement
to say something is a known scientific fact,
that it’s unequivocal.
Fossil fuel companies had predicted just as much 40 years ago.
I was actually there between the late 1970s and the middle 80s
as a consultant.
The industry was, at the time,
investing millions of dollars into cutting-edge climate science.
They had a world-class research group
that was saying that by 40 years from then,
in other words, now,
the temperature of the Earth would have risen by about 1° Celsius.
It’s risen by 1.1°,
so we absolutely nailed it 40 years ago.
In 1982, an internal Exxon document concluded the science was unanimous
and that global warming would bring about a significant shift
in the Earth’s climate.
While they were supporting our really good work in their research labs,
at the same time was giving grants and contracts to other people
mostly interested in public relations.
Suddenly, all their climate research was downgraded or called off.
They got rid of all their alternative energy work,
including the lithium batteries.
They should have said, “Look,
we’ve got an inside track on these lithium batteries,
which could be the basis of an electric car
that doesn’t admit any CO2.”
The industry chose not to sound the alarm
and hurried to bury the science.
Many scientists agree there’s ample time
to better understand climate systems
and consider policy options.
So there is simply no reason to take drastic action now.
Instead, Exxon's policy has been this outward facing denial
and continued reliance on fossil fuels.
Hopefully to God, we can salvage some of it.
Today, 97 percent of climate scientists
believe that the climate is changing
and that humans are the main cause.
Climate change is here.
You just have to watch the news every day,
and you can see the southwestern United States burning up.
You can see Australia burning up.
You can see the floods.
But only 58 percent of Americans agree with the scientists.
The fossil fuel industry spun the narrative
by funding massive PR operations.
This is a truly coordinated labyrinth of fossil fuel companies
and trade associations and libertarian billionaires,
along with PR firms and ad agencies,
all feeding into an echo chamber of media and blogs and politicians.
It’s what we call the climate denial and delay machine.
Paying off scientists was also part of the plan.
I was offered $5,000
to write an article that was negative towards climate change.
I called up a friend of mine who was a climate scientist.
He said, “Oh, yeah, I’ve got a bunch of them,
and there’s no way I would even think about doing that.”
The idea was to promote doubt,
to promote uncertainty about the basic science,
and then basically encourage policymakers to wait
until there’s more science and more evidence.
This tactic had been perfected decades before
by the tobacco industry.
Yes, folks, the pleasing mildness of a Camel
is just as enjoyable to a doctor as it is to you or me.
And so what the fossil fuel industry has done
is use exactly the same playbook,
use exactly the same techniques of attacking science,
of attacking scientists.
On World Earth Day this year,
Exxon advertised their efforts to tackle the climate crisis.
We may face setbacks along the way,
but we are really committed to cracking this science.
But an undercover operation by Greenpeace
showed the true colors of Exxon lobbyists.
Did we aggressively fight against some of the science?
Yes.
But there’s nothing illegal about that.
These lobbyists revealed how the company undermined basic science
in order to protect the business interests of their company.
The industry has used lobbyists like this for decades.
In the 1990s,
they pushed for governments
to undermine the Kyoto climate negotiations.
The oil companies exert most influence behind the scenes.
They’ve got 60 people here going round.
Exxon told the Chinese that they certainly shouldn’t go in
for any voluntary restrictions on emissions.
Encouraged by lobbyists,
George W. Bush eventually pulled the US out of the Kyoto agreements.
I will not commit our nation
to an unsound international treaty
that will throw millions of our citizens out of work.
Years later,
the industry found Donald Trump to be even more receptive.
Exxon had extraordinary success over the last four years.
What were the big wins you got out of Trump?
You know, the wins are such
that it would be difficult to categorize them all.
The industry’s lobbyists are still having an impact,
targeting key senators to push back on measures to tackle climate change.
Senator Coons, who has a very close relationship with Senator Biden,
matter of fact, our CEO is talking to him next Tuesday.
Just a short while ago, the United States Senate
passed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
Billions of dollars of proposed support for climate initiatives
had been eliminated from the bill.
To know that ExxonMobil is bragging to potential clients
in their ability to do this,
it’s explosive.
-No climate! -No deal!
There is an understanding that there is a dark underbelly of Washington
that works this way.
Rarely do we see it exposed in real time of current legislation
right before us in Congress.
Please pray for us.
Please pray for us, everyone. Please pray for us.
Me and my baby, we’re stuck right here.
Please pray for us.
In August 2019, Hurricane Dorian decimated the Bahamas.
That’s the front porch.
The water is about six feet.
Hundreds of people died.
We think it might be thousands
because there were undocumented Haitians
that were also a part of the dead.
And hundreds of people still don’t have anywhere to live.
The storm caused $3.4 billion worth of damage.
There are miles and miles of dead trees, dead mangroves,
neighborhoods that are still very much battered and demolished.
It’s kind of traumatic to witness that.
From farmers affected by prolonged droughts
to small islands disappearing due to sea level rises,
many communities have been suffering from
a crisis they have played no part in creating.
With climate change harder to ignore,
fossil fuel companies have instead switched strategy.
They’ve pushed the blame away from their actions and onto us.
BP created the first carbon footprint calculator
and they took out print adverts, billboards, TV, and radio,
asking people, “What is your carbon footprint?
How responsible are you, and how can you take action?”
We want to help you to reduce your car’s CO2 emissions.
Firstly, we can give you an insight into your car’s total emissions
and can help you to reduce them by improving your driving behavior.
In the age of consumerism,
the consumer became the perfect scapegoat.
They can claim that they don’t bear responsibility
and that it all lies on the consumer.
The way BP tried to not take full responsibility
for something as blatant as an oil spill
has parallels to promoting for the first time
the very idea of a carbon footprint.
The city of Imperial Beach in California
is one of many at risk of being wiped out by rising sea levels.
But the city is fighting back,
suing oil companies for fueling climate change.
These companies,
they’re still making a lot of money selling fossil fuels,
business as usual.
The next step,
which allows the plaintiffs to have access to company records.
As that information comes out,
the oil companies start looking less like innocent businesses,
and they start to look more like
companies that are trying to pull the wool over the public’s eye.
Others have started suing fossil fuel companies
for their role in promoting misleading greenwashing campaigns.
What they’re really looking for is companies to admit responsibility
and to help share some of that burden.
Shell, Shell, Shell!
I’m here outside the Science Museum
with amazing young groups of people.
They’re here because Shell is sponsoring
a climate crisis exhibition.
The damage caused by the fossil fuel industry has never been more visible.
The wildfire is a very in-your-face expression
of what global warming is looking like for us.
The responsibility that these companies
have been dodging for 40 years
is becoming harder to hide.
People ought to know, people ought to know!
But despite the science and the news,
the power of the industry's propaganda machine still lingers.
We’re failing to address the climate crisis
not for want of technologies or policy
but because of the greed and self-interest
of a small group of fossil fuel and conservative billionaires
working to defend the status quo.
Is your philosophy drill, baby, drill?
No, my philosophy is to make money.
This is a failure that frankly is unparalleled
in the history of humanity.
People are challenging fossil fuel companies.
They're trying to hold them accountable.
And I think that’s really important.
I think they should be punished.
You know like how somebody gets community service,
they have to help to repair the bad things that they’ve done.