The FBI may open an investigation into whether Exxon Mobil covered up its knowledge of climate change.
In a letter to Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., and Rep. Mark DeSaulnier, D-Mass., Peter Kadzik, assistant attorney general at the Justice Department, confirmed that the FBI has been asked to decide whether to investigate Exxon Mobil. Lieu and DeSaulnier asked the Justice Department to investigate Exxon Mobil in October.
The lawmakers believe Exxon Mobil hid science about climate change from shareholders and the public. The accusation is built off a Los Angeles Times and Inside Climate News report that the company knew in July 1977 that carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels would warm the planet.
Many scientists blame the burning of fossil fuels for releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, causing manmade climate change and the subsequent warming of the globe.
“As a courtesy, we have forwarded your correspondence to the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” the letter wrote. “The FBI is the investigative arm of the department, upon which we rely to conduct the initial fact finding in federal cases. The FBI will determine whether an investigation is warranted.”
According to the report, Exxon Mobil learned in 1977 from a senior scientist that burning fossil fuels would warm the planet. A year later, the company began researching how carbon dioxide released from the burning of fossil fuels would affect the planet.
After 10 years of exploring the problem, Exxon Mobil — then just Exxon — decided to “engage in a campaign of denial and disinformation,” the lawmakers wrote in their October letter.
In 1982, the company prepared an internal document on carbon dioxide and climate change that stated “major reduction” in fossil fuel use would be needed to avoid catastrophic events. While that was circulating, Exxon Mobil didn’t tell regulators about their findings, according to the Inside Climate News report.
Six years after the internal document was produced, Exxon Mobil went on the offensive, according to the report. The company began paying for efforts that would cast doubt on climate change, including founding the Global Climate Coalition.
At the same time, the company was building climate change projections into the company’s future plans. Among those plans was future drilling in the Arctic because the polar ice caps would melt.
Alan Jeffers, an Exxon Mobil spokesman, said the company has included information about climate change for many years in its information to shareholders.
“Media and environmental activists have used publicly available materials from the company’s archives to deliberately distort Exxon Mobil’s nearly 40-year history of climate research, which was conducted publicly in conjunction with the Department of Energy, academics and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Chang,” Jeffers said in a statement. “To suggest that we had reached definitive conclusions, decades before the world’s experts and while climate science was in an early stage of development, is not credible.”
