Big Oil, Like Big Tobacco, Faces Tough Times Ahead

In the 1960s, when the tobacco industry learned that its product caused cancer and that millions of its customers would suffer agonizing deaths as a result of smoking cigarettes, its leaders conspired to suppress this finding, so as to protect their profit stream. Now we’re confronting another shocking truth: it was only a decade later that Big Oil (Exxon in particular) followed the identical path.  In the late 1970s the company’s own scientists proved that the consumption of fossil fuels was rapidly warming the Earth’s atmosphere and irreparably altering its climate, but the firm, (now ExxonMobil) made a decision to hide this conclusion and work to discredit anyone whose research pointed in the direction of anthropogenic climate change.

We humans are frail creatures on so many levels, and one of our most critical vulnerabilities, it seems, is our credulity, our childlike innocence.  We simply find it hard to accept that people, seemingly just like ourselves, would conspire to harm our civilization so profoundly just to make a few lousy dollars.  But the evidence is upon us, and now it’s up to us to act accordingly.

Act?  How?  Big oil essentially owns the U.S. Congress.  The policy-making apparatus of the world’s super-power is short-circuited by the influence of the very industry it most needs to manage.  My friends tell me that fixing this isn’t going to be easy.  LOL; I get that. But fortunately, there is an enormous amount of horsepower behind the environmental movement, and it’s growing stronger with each passing day.