Compiled by @VatanHuzeir, the latest cache of internal documents describing Big Oil's concealed knowledge of global warming is a gold mine.

One bombshell is a confidential @Shell scenario report from 1989 which imagined two futures: SUSTAINABLE WORLD and GLOBAL MERCANTILISM 🧵 In SUSTAINABLE WORLD, greenhouse gas emissions would peak around the year 2000 and decline rapidly thereafter, and total CO2 concentrations would be limited to 400 ppm.

GLOBAL MERCANTILISM, on the other hand, would see emissions continue to rise (this is the path we're on)

It's usually not worth responding to these kinds of attacks on Twitter, but this seems to be a teachable moment for discussing the nature of historical research into efforts to obstruct fossil fuel controls. 🧵

https://twitter.com/atrembath/status/1491062358155751427

By now there's a large body of scholarly work establishing that the fossil fuel industry, especially large oil companies like Exxon, internally understood decades ago the damage their products would cause. You can see many of the documents yourself here:
industrydocuments.ucsf.edu/fossilfuel/

Just saw #DontLookUp and personally thought it was genius!

As an historian, I couldn't help but notice a sobering message within the story's timeline.

If we were in the movie, how close would the comet be today? Here are some thoughts. 🧵 Early on, the film's scientists discover the comet and warn the government about it.

With climate, that happened all the way back in 1965.
nature.com/articles/s4155…

Our new paper about Total and global warming (with a cameo by Exxon) is now the top-trending geography article in the world.

Here's an explainer thread, including the backstory on these important new findings.

🧵👇👇
sciencedirect.com/science/articl… In 2018, a colleague sent me a photograph of a 1971 article from the magazine Total Information, from French oil company Total. The article was in French, but it looked like it was about climate change. I was intrigued.

Could Big Oil be tried for crimes against humanity?

"Yes, they could. The law constantly evolves in light of changing historical conditions, and what might seem implausible today may become inevitable in time. So let’s look at the evidence."
gizmodo.com/could-fossil-f… By the late 1970s, the US oil industry’s main trade association, the American Petroleum Institute, had a secret task force, including scientists from nearly every major oil company, to monitor climate change research.

Effects of increased CO2 on the American west, Exxon internal memo, 1979:

[quote]
• The southwest states would be hotter, probably by more than 3 °F, and drier.
• The flow of the Colorado River would diminish and the southwest water shortage would become much more acute. • Most of the glaciers in the North Cascades and Glacier National Park would be melted. There would be less of a winter snow pack in the Cascades, Sierras, and Rockies, necessitating a major increase in storage reservoirs.

Climate litigation is often compared to tobacco litigation (similar patterns of deception & harmful products) & people often ask why it's realistic to expect the fossil industry to contract substantially or completely, given the cigarette industry is still around & profitable 1/n It's a good question! The first time I heard it, I didn't have a good answer.

But now I think there are a bunch of reasons why Big Carbon is in a WORSE position than Big Tobacco.

Something wildly under-appreciated is that climate is a tightly controlled field. A handful of “climate gurus,” often funded by the oil industry itself, dictate the climate education for many future leaders in elite universities. 1/n This promotes intellectual and ideological homogeneity, often in the fossil fuel industry’s favor.

For instance, at Harvard, where I helped to teach the College’s primary climate change course twice, I (and countless other students) were taught that:

I've published a new paper in @Env_Pol reporting what I believe is the earliest known example of climate deception from the fossil fuel industry, from all the way back in 1980.

In this thread, I'll explain this discovery & its significance 🧵
tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10… The key document is "Two Energy Futures: A National Choice for the 80s," a public policy book published by the American Petroleum Institute.

In it, the API argued to expand fossil production in the US, open federal lands for extraction, use coal-to-liquids technology & so on.

I have to give a TWITTER APOLOGY to @JesseJenkins. I recently critiqued some work he was involved in on decarbonization on here, w/out reading the entire report. The more I think about that, the more it bothers me. It wasn't professional, & fwiw Jesse, I'm sorry for being hasty! It's like critiquing a book you haven't completely read, which is one of my pet peeves in professional history. It's lazy and not very helpful...if going public with criticism, the least one can do is read the whole thing. (Obviously, that makes for a better critique too.)

Stanford recently announced its new major research program for climate and energy: the "Strategic Energy Alliance"

Who's the alliance with? It turns out 3/4 of the funders are fossil fuel companies.

(mini thread)
stanford.app.box.com/s/0az1erru3nsq… It's just another example of the fossil fuel industry's invisible colonization of academia.
theguardian.com/environment/cl…

Nice piece by @KateAronoff observing that calls to "believe" or "trust" science miss the target.

Instead of imperious instructions to believe science, a better approach is to expose the disinformation campaigns at their (usually corporate) source.

thread
newrepublic.com/article/157442… There are at least 3 big problems with the reflexive call to "believe" science:

1) It isn't historically defensible. Sexism, racism, & eugenics were all scientific, as were a range of assuredly safe products & medical practices now known to be harmful. "Science" can be wrong.

This article is a great example of framing climate change as primarily a technological problem, with studious ignorance of history/politics - a misdirecting frame helping Big Fossil.

This particular piece also has a number of misleading tropes. Worth analyzing in depth! (Thread)

https://twitter.com/Oliver_Geden/status/1250143959445356544

Like all effective misleading frames, there IS some truth to it. Replacing fossil fuels is, of course, a technological process. But it's not JUST a technological process, nor is that necessarily the bottleneck to progress.

To make solutions, we should look at the WHOLE problem.

Sometimes a piece appears that is so juicily deceptive, so full of false and misleading information, that it cries out for a response, if only to study its ignorance-spreading mastery. Today's article in the @nytimes is just such a piece. nytimes.com/2020/01/09/opi… Others like @DoctorVive have already pointed out the logical fallacies and outright falsehoods in this masterclass in shilling for Big Oil, written by the head of its policy trojan horse, the ironically named @TheCLCouncil. So I'll just note a few things.

https://twitter.com/DoctorVive/status/1215259279055343616?s=20