Shahid Baloch is hard at work. He and his brothers are digging up mass graves in Karachi, ahead of a potentially deadly heat wave. The one last summer killed more than 1,300 people, and the fast-decaying corpses couldn't be buried quickly enough. (SOUNDBITE) (Urdu) GRAVE DIGGER, SHAHID BALOCH, SAYING: "Thank God, we are better prepared this year. God forbid that it happens again but we have already dug graves to accommodate 300 bodies." Hospitals and morgues in the Pakistani port city were overwhelmed last year as temperatures soared to 44 degrees Celsius. The crisis exposed the local government's inability to deal with a heat wave that scientists say will become more common in future.
Take a moment to imagine what is meant when a reporter writes, “fast-decaying corpses couldn’t be buried quickly enough,” and “morgues...were overwhelmed.”
Give that image a name: the Exxon Age.
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Exxon and other oil companies have known about the potentially catastrophic effects of long-term carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel use since at least the 1960s.
- A paper written to the American Petroleum Institute in 1968 warned that, “If CO2 levels continue to rise at present rates, it is likely that noticeable increases in temperature could occur...Changes in temperature on the world-wide scale could cause major changes in the earth's atmosphere over the next several hundred years including change in the polar ice cap.”
- Top Exxon climate scientist Brian Flannery co-wrote a chapter in a 1985 Energy Department report that “projected up to 6 degrees Celsius of warming by the end of the 21st century unless emissions of greenhouse gases were curtailed.”
Flannery’s now-30-year-old projection remains squarely in line with the current science. Writing back in 2011, Fatih Birol, then the chief economist for the International Energy Agency, told delegates to the U.N. climate talks in South Africa that, “the world is perfectly on track for a six-degree Celsius increase in temperature.”
It wasn’t just that Exxon knew. No, Exxon knew it all. They knew the big picture: potentially unstoppable feedback mechanisms, and the risk of temperature increases so extreme by the end of the 21st century that civilization could not survive.
And then they decided to hide what they knew, to lie about what they knew. For money.
I won’t recount the full history of Exxon’s truly stunning, money-motivated obfuscation and assault on the future; InsideClimate News has written a full e-book on the topic that’s well worth reading. Suffice it to say that Exxon spent the decades after it had uncovered the truth about climate change making sure American politics were paralyzed on the issue.
In the meantime, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have increased from roughly 322 parts per million at the end of 1968 to more than 400 parts per million at the end of 2015. We have blown past the 350 parts per million emphasized by Dr. James Hansen as the safe upper limit for avoiding climate disaster, and now find the end of the carbon budget staring us straight in the face. We have only ugly choices left in front of us, thanks to Exxon and companies like them buying off politicians, funding climate denial think-tanks, non-profits, and political action committees, and working hand-in-glove with governments to stack the deck on scientific advisory panels and working groups with fossil-fuel-friendly “scientists.”
We are clearly on a precipice as a species. There’s a real possibility that we’ll have an essentially ice-free Arctic at some point this summer. Droughts and heatwaves are pummeling the third world already. We’ve just had the hottest spring on record, and we’ll without a doubt have the hottest full year on record this year. All over the planet, the sixth great extinction is taking hold.
Which brings me to Wednesday, May 25th, in Dallas, Texas.
Exxon will hold a shareholder meeting at the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center, during which a number of deeply concerned shareholders will push the corporation to drop the climate denial. Here's what they're asking for:
Note what they’re not asking for. No one’s asking for a reckoning. No one’s demanding, for example, that corporate executives who’ve literally gambled with the lives of everyone on the planet end up with their heads on pikes. No, what’s being demanded is a few simple moves to put the company on the path toward responsibility and away from acting like, well, navel-gazing man-children with infinite money and no impulse control. It’s literally the least they could do if they want to be counted as actual human beings. We’re just asking them to adapt.
Many of us will be outside the Meyerson Symphony Center, rallying to support those inside and to demand that Exxon make better decisions—decisions that will benefit everyone, including them and their children. We need you to join us.
All over the world, the signs of the Exxon Age are settling in. The first mass graves are yawning open, waiting to see how many of us will march on in.
I’d rather go to a rally in Dallas.