- Question
- Is climate change real?
- Position1 of 3›
- Yes, climate change is real
In the 1960s and 70s oil company scientists understood that climate change was real, and the companies worked to hide and obscure this information from the public.
The argument
The argument draws on an unusual kind of evidence: not the scientific literature itself, but the private conclusions of the industry with the strongest interest in rejecting it. Oil companies were aware of the harm fossil fuels could cause to the environment, and they were aware of it early. In 1977, after sending scientists to conduct tests, Exxon acknowledged that fossil fuels did in fact negatively affect global temperature. The finding was the company's own, produced by researchers it employed and paid for, addressing a question it had itself chosen to investigate. What makes that acknowledgement probative is the direction in which the company's interests ran. An organisation whose entire business depends on the continued extraction and sale of fossil fuels has every reason to conclude that its product is harmless, and none to conclude otherwise. When such an organisation's own investigation returns the opposite answer, the finding cannot be attributed to the motivations usually alleged against climate science — activism, funding incentives, ideological commitment. Exxon's scientists reached their conclusion against the grain of who was paying them. The subsequent conduct is what gives the argument its force. Having established internally that fossil fuels affected global temperature, the companies continued to produce them. That sequence tells against any suggestion that the science was genuinely unsettled at the time: a firm that believed the question open would have had no reason to treat its own result as information to be managed rather than acted upon. So the conclusion about the physical world and the conclusion about conduct arrive together. Climate change is real, and one demonstration of this is that the industry most motivated to deny it had already confirmed it decades ago through its own testing. On this reasoning oil companies should decrease their production — they have known what the product does for longer than the public debate has existed.
Premises
Counter-arguments
Decreasing the sale of oil would affect the economy. Without oil, cars would not be a means of ready transportation, leaving many people stranded from job opportunities outside of their neighborhood or city.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P2] If oil companies cut down on production, it will affect people’s livelihood and hurt their chances of getting good jobs.