Case Study: Why Industry Self-Regulation Almost Never Works

There’s a basic business reality: unless everyone in a business sector is meaningfully bound to an enforceable standard, regulation cannot work. There may be private systems where those unwilling to adhere to group rules might be excluded to their detriment – common in banking and share trading – but there are much bigger swaths of financial and environmental regulations where powerful companies, even when they know better, will simply do everything in the power to avoid regulations and will promulgate helpful myths and practices they know are toxic… simply to support profitability and minimize costs regardless of the damage they know they are causing.

As we watch wildfires, droughts, massive flooding and coastal erosion, exploding tornadoes and increasing intense storms, intensified polar vortex in winter and searing heat in summer… all but science deniers know that climate change is real. As the Russian invasion of Ukraine illustrates, we can now add inflation and political instability to the list of climate change disasters, based on continuing dependence of fossil fuel.

We’re spending billions of dollars every year in this country to pay for the ravages of “natural destruction” linked to climate change, a global reality based on carbon emissions trapped in the upper atmosphere trapping greenhouse gasses like a lid on hot kettle. The burning of fossil fuels is the greatest contributor to those emissions. Big Oil today is publicizing all those wonderful efforts they are making to reduce emissions… but their actual efforts are and always have been to ensure that their fuels always have full and ready markets.

A slow release of information, studies by academic researchers and a more in depth review of corporate documents (leaked or discovered) explains the long-term understanding by Big Oil of this rising cost of climate change… and even clearly knowing that reality… their efforts to discredit scientific studies and massive supporting data at every turn. As Tony Briscoe, writing for the January 13th Los Angeles Times, one typical example of such corporate perfidy seems to be Exxon Mobile:

“In perhaps the most unexpected twist in the field of climate science, new research suggests Exxon Mobil Corp. had keener insight into the impending dangers of global warming than even NASA experts but still waged a decades-long campaign to discredit the science on climate change and its connection to the burning of fossil fuels.

Despite its public denials, the major oil corporation worked behind closed doors to carry out an astonishingly accurate series of global warming projections between 1977 and 2003, according to a study published Thursday [1/12] in Science.

“‘Exxon didn’t just know some climate science, they actually helped advance it,’ said Geoffrey Supran, lead author of the study and former researcher in the department of the history of science at Harvard University. ‘They didn’t just vaguely know something about global warming decades ago, they knew as much as independent academics and government scientists did. And arguably, they knew all they needed to know.’

“In a review of archived documents and memos, researchers found that scientists for what was then Exxon had completed a set of 16 models that predicted global temperatures would rise, on average, about 0.36 degrees Fahrenheit per decade. Since 1981, Earth’s global average temperature has risen about 0.32 degrees per decade, according to NASA.

“Researchers at Harvard and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research found most of the Exxon Mobil projections are consistent with subsequent global temperature observations, according to the study. Many of the Exxon projections proved to be more precise than those by James Hansen, then-director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who famously testified before the U.S. Senate in 1988 about the greenhouse effect.

“The analysis adds to a growing body of evidence that the nation’s largest oil producer recognized burning fossil fuels was warming Earth, even as it continued to heap doubt onto that idea publicly. The paper also shows, for the first time, just how precise and sophisticated the fossil fuel industry’s climate research was.

“In response to the study, Exxon Mobil spokesperson Todd Spitler said the company’s understanding of climate science has evolved along with that of the broader scientific community. The energy company, he said, is now actively engaged on several efforts to mitigate global warming.”

Sorry, Todd, the one “true thing” of which we can be certain: Exxon Mobile and its precursor companies, like most of Big Oil, knew better a long time ago and did everything in their power to stop/discredit the inquiry and deny what they knew to be factual. As you watch their lacky politicians, mostly Republicans, continue to fight measures to reverse the continuing damage of climate change, you know Big Oil really has not reversed course. After all, a lot of people make a lot of money extracting and selling fossil fuels, including many state treasuries that continue to depend on extraction royalties. Follow the campaign contributions and lobbying efforts!

I’m Peter Dekom, and as much as the GOP continues to wish to dismantle effective financial and environmental regulations, they only reinforce their status as paid operatives of the richest in the land.