They did more than know; while knowing, they pretended not to, and cast doubt on research confirming what they internally knew.
If I make knowingly false representations to sell something, that's generally considered fraud.
We still live in a democracy, and have known about climate change for over 40 years- the central problem is just that people are (still) NOT willing to pay the price to avoid/mitigate emissions.
Because the options are plentiful, like just taxing CO2 emissions and imports, throwing massive funds at low-CO2 energy sources + storage, but taxpayers are simply unwilling- blaming corporations and politicians NOW is the absolute height of hypocrisy.
My goal in bringing it up is to note to whoever is reading it that you have better options than just eating Impossible burgers or paying some huckster for a paper that says someone in the Amazon didn't cut down a tree every time you fly on a plane. You can demand that the system change, that you have better options. That probably means that Exxon should stop existing. If you're worried about it costing you more now, it might, but it probably won't in the long run.
There are still people denying it, they are literally funded by companies like Exxon, and this is one of the biggest impediments to stopping climate change.
So, yeah, if Exxon had just announced their results 50 years ago rather than spending tons of money denying them it would have made a huge difference.
Only a few crackpots
> and this is one of the biggest impediments to stopping climate change.
No I dont believe this at all.
That's overly dismissive. They might be crackpots, but they're sometimes powerful crackpots. Like US Senators: https://www.cnn.com/2015/02/26/politics/james-inhofe-snowbal...
40-50 years from 1982 starts about now. So tell me, would it make a difference if we have started 40 years ago? Or should we wait another 40 since "everyone in western world is creating CO2 anyway"?
[0] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2805576-1982-Exxon-M... page 24