OTM: Exxon's History of Climate Change Research

This week’s On The Media story I chose to cover is Exxon’s history of climate change research. I found this topic to be quite interesting because it seems that the changing of climate due to pollution is getting ever bigger in the media world. So here is so back story to the report. Throughout the 1970’s Exxon was not just doing research into climate change and how the ocean absorbs Co2 from the atmosphere but they were leading it. Thats right, through found documents one of the biggest oil companies out there was in front calling for change and more research knowing that if earth’s global temperature increased it would have massive negative effects on living things on the planet. Then after the price of oil sank in 1986, Exxon had to layoff hundreds of workers including those scientist researching climate change. Not until the year 1989 was the topic of climate change brought up again did the media see Exxon have a stance in the issue claiming they knew nothing of the topic and founded groups to defend and question the claims of climate change.

Physical: Exxon went 180 degrees from leading and calling for action in climate change research to denying it not knowing anything about it. Pollution from the burning of fossil fuels makes the air we all breath toxic along with changing the climate faster than what most organisms can adapt to.

Temporal: The topic of climate change began in the 1970’s with little coverage of the research and today is one of the biggest issues and problems facing our society today. Also nearly 100 percent of scientist around the world are concerned about the effects of climate change.

Social: What we are seeing from Exxon, a large oil company, is almost a direct parallel to what happened with the tobacco industry. The companies themselves knew of the danger of their products well in advance to the general public and then hind or denied evidence of harmful effects.

Psychological: Exxon has lied about their research and its finding even when they knew the consequence the whole time. This is a textbook scandal when in part infuriates the public and governing bodies finding out evidence that they were lied to which reflect a negative public image of the company occurs. After an event such like this one it is hard for those companies like this one to recover for example look at the BP oil spill and the negative backlash it had both environmentally and in public discourse.

Cultural: I feel like once this information of negligence becomes better known to the public we’ll see people coming together both in protest and in social media to support better understanding of climate change and what we can do to help stop it. This could also be seen as people writing to their government representatives asking for more regulation or more research in helping the matter at hand.   

Thanks for reading.