Article by Eric Worrell
So much for the conspiracy about the big oil secret. In 1977, Marathon Petroleum published an article in a company journal suggesting that carbon dioxide could cause mass starvation.
U.S. oil company published article in 1977 predicting climate crisis could lead to starvation
Marathon Oil ex warned of potential 'social and economic disaster' in decades-old publications
Geoff Dembicki Thursday 18 July 2024 22:00 AEST
The predecessor of Marathon Oil Company, the largest U.S. refiner A company journal from nearly 50 years ago explained that rising global temperatures potentially linked to “industrial expansion” could one day lead to “widespread hunger and other social and economic disasters.”
This decades-old account of climate breakdown comes from a 1977 issue of Marathon World magazine, in which an unnamed author attributes it to several experts, including one who works for a top U.S. agency scientist.
“Although climatologists disagree on the root causes, many believe that future climate change will be greater, bringing extreme drought to areas,The magazine was previously published by Marathon Petroleum Corporation, which was later spun off into Marathon Petroleum Corporation and Marathon Petroleum Corporation, an exploration and production company.
Marathon Petroleum is one of several oil and gas companies, including Exxon Mobil, Shell and BP, being sued by the city of Honolulu for allegedly “concealing and denying knowledge” of its role in coordinating communications efforts. Disastrous climate impacts from burning oil.
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Learn more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/18/us-oil-marathon-petroleum-climate-change
Company journals aren't exactly secret internal memos.
To suggest that oil companies knew we were headed for some kind of doom as early as the 1970s and were trying to hide this fact, even without this latest revelation, is a preposterous position to take, given that climate scientists themselves proposed starkly in the 1970s Different perspectives.
Celebrity scientists such as Gifford Miller, Stephen Schneider, Chester Langway and James Hayes appeared in the popular 1978 documentary “In Search of…The Coming Ice Age.” Scientists featured in the documentary defend their claims that the world may be on the brink of a global cooling catastrophe. Schneider suggested using nuclear reactors to melt the polar ice caps.
I remember watching this documentary as a kid. The host is Leonard Nimoy, the original “Star Wars” Doctor Spock. All adults worry about this cold threat to their children's futures.
The lack of scientific certainty is further evidenced by “secret” internal memos that serve as smoking gun for the false Big Oil conspiracy narrative. For example, below is a copy of Glaser's 1982 memo that was distributed to ExxonMobil management.
The memo does not establish that climate change will have catastrophic impacts, remember this is a private internal memo. For example, at the bottom of page 4, continue to the top of page 5.
“Currently there are There is no clear evidence that the earth is warming. If the Earth was on a warming trend, we would be unlikely to detect it before 1995. On the other hand, if climate model uncertainties exaggerate temperature rises, the “greenhouse effect” caused by carbon dioxide may not be detected until 2020 at the earliest.
When global warming activists began to dominate the scientific debate, why didn't oil companies adjust their stance?scientists like Stephen Schneider jumping ship to join the global warming camp?
There is plenty of evidence that carbon dioxide does not cause climate change—in the ancient record, carbon dioxide follows climate change, not the other way around. Other factors triggering climate change have driven historical changes in carbon dioxide levels – including drops in temperatures when carbon dioxide levels were higher.
But there’s a more obvious explanation for why oil executives and others aren’t taking every pivot of the scientific doomsday movement seriously — alarmists consistently make wrong predictions.
Almost every day we discover another “established scientific” disaster prediction that turns out to be completely wrong.
What happened to the safe limit of global warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius?
The failure of predictions and alarmism of the scientific disaster movement were as evident in the 1970s as they are today. For example, Paul Ehrlich's 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb predicted mass starvation within a decade.
The battle to feed all humanity is over. In the 1970s, despite any emergency planning now in place, hundreds of millions of people were starving to death. To this day, nothing has been able to prevent the dramatic increase in the world's mortality rate.
Many oil company executives who ignored global warming alarmism in the 1970s and 1980s were well aware that predictions like Ehrlich's book failed, and will also be aware of scientists like Stephen Snyder who, in just a few years, went from calling for fossil fuels to be shut down to prevent the next ice age to calling for fossil fuels to be shut down to prevent the world from overheating. They would all have seen Schneider preach about global cooling in the documentary “Looking,” and their own researchers would have told them how Schneider vacillated between the global warming scare and the global cooling scare in the 1970s.
Wikipedia suggests that Snyder's global warming awakening date occurred in 1974, but if that's the case, why did Snyder appear in the 1978 “Searching” documentary and suggest melting the ice caps? It's a case of “What did Snyder say this week?” No wonder oil company executives aren't taking it seriously.
Against the backdrop of decades of scientific uncertainty and doomsday vagaries, there is one thing we do know.
The year the oil companies shut down was the year six billion people died of hunger.
Fossil fuels are essential for producing fertilizers and pesticides and transporting food, allowing the world's population to grow from millions to millions. Without trillions of dollars in additional investment, not even nuclear energy can replace all the ways fossil fuels make our modern society possible. If fossil fuels were eliminated today or even in the next decade, food production methods would be forced back to 18th-century agricultural practices, and most people alive today would surely die.
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