PFor excellent reasons, essentially judicial, historians have been very interested in the fabrication of doubt. In 2015, a leak of internal documents from the oil and gas giant Exxon showed the extraordinary discrepancy between the precise knowledge that the company possessed as early as 1977 and its misleading communication about the uncertainty that would surround climate change. A recent article of Science showed that the models available to Exxon proved to be remarkably accurate.
While climate skepticism has undeniably played a role in general procrastination, it has now been twenty years since the oil companies, at least in Europe, have moved on. The scientific consensus then the concrete experience of global warming making the strategy of doubt less and less effective, they opted for a more astute discourse because it won general support: that of the energy transition.
Already in 2000, British Petroleum claimed to be metamorphosing into Beyond Petroleum. More recently, Total adopted the ecumenical name of TotalEnergies. The message, repeated everywhere, is that oil companies have become players in the energy transition. But this being a long process, they are obliged, in the meantime, to pump, to drill and even to explore. Almost reluctantly…
Chronological question
The problem: it was already this excuse that Exxon gave forty years ago. On October 26, 1982, at the invitation of climatologist James Hansen, the director of research and development for the American major, Edward David, delivered an important speech at a climatology congress at the Columbia University observatory, not far from New York. He did not question global warming in any way. Former scientific advisor to Nixon, Edward David was well aware of the problem. Exxon had been working on this subject since 1977. But, according to him, the interesting question was chronological.
Which phenomenon will occur first: the climate catastrophe or the energy transition? ” Everyone knowshe asserted, that we have entered into an energy transition. » David bases himself on a false history of energy: the United States has already experienced two energy transitions: one from wood to coal, the second from coal to oil. In 1860, Exxon had already worked on the second, saving the whales in passing. And, a hundred years later, the company was there for the third transition, the one that would install “renewable energies that will not pose a CO problem2 ».
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