If you wanted to pick the year the world started taking climate change seriously, 1988 is a decent choice. That June, NASA climatologist James Hansen told Congress the planet was warming and would keep warming as long as humans burned fossil fuels. Months later the United Nations set up the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And somewhere in between, Frank Sprow of Exxon’s corporate research department was writing his colleagues a memo. “If a worldwide consensus emerges that action is needed to mitigate against Greenhouse gas effects,” he warned, “substantial negative impacts on Exxon could occur.”
That memo is one of a batch of previously undisclosed Exxon documents released this year, without fanfare, as court filings in the lawsuit Massachusetts filed against the company back in 2019. Nicholas Kusnetz reported the details at Ars Technica, and several of the documents are published there for the first time. They line up with hundreds of confidential files already unearthed by Inside Climate News and others, but they add texture to a story that now runs, in documented form, from the 1980s to the 2010s.
The early documents read like the strategy memo they were. In November 1988, five months after Hansen’s testimony, Sprow wrote that Exxon’s research on the greenhouse effect should have two goals: “Protect the value of our resources (oil, gas, coal),” and “Preserve Exxon’s business options.” Because climate science runs on modeling, he suggested “it could be considered important to be at the forefront of this modeling effort” — by funding a researcher somewhere like Princeton, or embedding one of Exxon’s own. He also proposed keeping an eye on nuclear, solar and biofuels, both as competitive threats and, eventually, as places Exxon might find “a research breakthrough” that fit its business. Geoffrey Supran, a University of Miami professor who studies Exxon’s public-relations record and consults on climate litigation, told Kusnetz these records serve as concise roadmaps for what became the company’s climate strategy over the following decades.
The algae were never going to work
Fast forward to the modern era of climate marketing. For years Exxon ran a sustained advertising campaign about turning algae into fuel, a sustainable alternative to petroleum. In March, The Wall Street Journal reported that Exxon’s own scientists had told executives the targets weren’t feasible. The Massachusetts filings add a deposition from an Exxon scientist who worked on the program. Was a 2018 press release claiming Exxon anticipated that “10,000 barrels of algae biofuel per day could be produced by 2025” misleading? “Yes,” he said. “All the clauses in there are patently false.” The 10,000-barrel target was, he testified, “completely impossible to achieve,” and he had told people inside the company so before the release went out. Another algae development Exxon publicly described as a breakthrough was, internally, “a dead end.”
Exxon eventually dropped the algae work and pivoted its climate messaging to carbon capture and storage. Here the documents tell a similar story, according to the Massachusetts attorney general’s office. A 2014 internal presentation on the company’s carbon capture portfolio said that getting to commercial scale would take a “massive investment,” that costs were high, that there were no market-based incentives, and that widespread deployment would eventually mean storing carbon at a rate “comparable to current oil and gas production” — that is, you’d need to build a second oil industry, running in reverse, that nobody pays for.
Three years later, a different Exxon scientist was asked to record an ad for the technology. He was, he noted, “not a big fan” of the company’s claim to be a carbon capture leader. Exxon’s actual operations were mostly at gas processing plants, stripping CO2 out of methane and injecting it into oil and gas fields — which, he said, “has nothing to do” with the kind of carbon capture Exxon was promoting for power plants and industry. He eventually appeared in an ad about his research, minus the leadership claim.
The ads worked, anyway
Why keep saying things your own scientists keep telling you aren’t true? A 2017 presentation offers a clue: it rated Exxon’s algae and carbon capture ads among its highest-performing campaigns and labeled them “All-Around Winners.” A 2021 presentation about an ad campaign aimed at political and financial leaders stated the objective plainly — to get audiences to “believe ExxonMobil is committed to helping solve climate change” and to prove the company and carbon capture “play an indispensable role in facilitating the transition to a lower carbon energy system.” Under “what we’re doing,” it listed a proposed Houston carbon capture hub Exxon no longer promotes.
The Massachusetts case is unusual among the wave of climate suits because it is a deception case rather than a damages case: the state argues Exxon misled consumers and investors into believing it was acting on warming when the effort was mostly public relations, and it wants fines and an injunction. It is also live at a delicate moment. This week the Supreme Court heard Exxon and Suncor argue that a suit brought by Boulder, Colorado should be halted — a decision that could determine the fate of more than two dozen other claims. Those suits argue the industry should help pay for climate-driven extreme weather, whose US costs topped $100 billion in four of the last five years; Exxon reported nearly $19 billion in earnings in the first six months of this year alone.
Aaron Regunberg of Public Citizen said the filings show why the industry wants to stop these cases before discovery: “that we have seen just a sliver of the evidence that they actually have that they’ve spent decades knowingly deceiving the public about this crisis. How many more reports are they sitting on?” Exxon didn’t respond to requests for comment but has denied misleading anyone; in its annual securities filing it calls the suits “meritless” and “an inappropriate attempt to use the court system to usurp the proper role of policymakers.”
The grim little joke of the archive is that Exxon did follow the 1988 memo. It got good at climate modeling. It monitored the alternatives. It preserved its business options. The science was handled; it was the commercials that had a quality-control problem.