A UK government climate advisor, Lord Deben has asked Oil and gas giant, ExxonMobil to “own up and pay up” for its role in accelerating global climate change.
Lord Deben, who served as environment secretary and cabinet minister under Margaret Thatcher, also accused the company of “denying the facts” and singled it out for refusing to take “any responsibility” for heating up the planet.
This is coming after research published in the Science journal said Exxon “skillfully” predicted global warming in the 1970s but then spent decades discrediting climate science to protect its core business.
The research shows how scientists at Exxon accurately forecast that global temperatures and carbon dioxide emissions would climb steadily from the 1970s onwards and how at the same time executives at the company made public statements contradicting its own research.
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The Science study said Exxon funded research that confirmed what climate scientists were saying at the time, and also used more than a dozen different computer models that forecast the coming warming with precision equal to or better than government and academic scientists.
Scientists, governments, and activists have always believed that “Exxon knew” about the science of climate change since about 1977 all while publicly casting doubt on it and the Science research outlines in more detail how accurate Exxon’s scientists’ predictions were.
From 63 per cent to 83 per cent of those projections fit strict standards for accuracy and generally predicted correctly that the globe would warm by about 2C per decade.
Now, Lord Deben wants Exxon to own up and pay up in its own interests as the company has neither acknowledge any responsibility nor admit to its wrongdoing in warming up the climate despite accurate forecasts from its own scientists.
“Its delaying action has given us all a huge bill and we should be looking for reparation. As long as it denies the facts and its unique responsibility for the delay, this is not the company with which to ally. We should give other businesses our customs. By not being complicit either as partners or customers, those committed to achieving Net Zero can help Exxon see it is in their financial interest to own up and pay up,” he said in a newspaper article published in the UK on Tuesday.
However, a spokesperson for Exxon has affirmed the company’s commitment to providing reliable and affordable energy to support human progress while advancing effective solutions that address the risks of climate change.
The spokesperson said that the company supports the Paris Agreement and efforts to achieve net-zero emissions and plans to achieve net-zero emissions for its operated assets by 2050 and will also invest more than $17 billion on initiatives to lower greenhouse gas emissions over the next six years.
Story was adapted from Independent.
