Let us behold the “debate” over climate policy now unfolding at the European Union Parliament. Its most prominent feature is a serious effort to deny ExxonMobil (EM) the ability to lobby on climate policy and other related matters with members of the parliament.
This effort to redefine debate as non-debate will be voted upon by the parliament at the end of this month, a European manifestation of the EM-as-bogeyman story line.
That stance was promoted in recent testimony by one Geoffrey Supran, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Department of Science, with Naomi Oreskes, a professor of the history of science at Harvard, in a 2017 co-authored paper, that EM in the 1970s was making one set of scientific arguments about the effects of greenhouse gas emissions internally, while making a very different set of arguments publicly.
Oreskes and Supran failed to notice that Exxon and Mobil did not merge until 1999, before which time Exxon was making one set of arguments (actually, Exxon was examining a range of scientific hypotheses), while Mobil was making a different set of policy arguments.
Oreskes and Supran failed to notice that Exxon and Mobil did not merge until 1999, before which time Exxon was making one set of arguments (actually, Exxon was examining a range of scientific hypotheses), while Mobil was making a different set of policy arguments.