It’s widely asserted that Exxon knew about what they are doing back in 1970s.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-...
Case in point, from the article:
>present thinking holds that man has a time window of five to 10 years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical
Yet decades later that window continues to shift. This was an unverified theory in the 70s, and rightly so - we had spatially sparse measurements at the very tail end of a time series which naturally cycles on the order of hundreds to millions of years. For example a consensus has only recently formed that the oceans have been absorbing energy and delaying atmpspheric temperature rise.
Finally, the sources for that Scientific American are InsideClimate and Greenpeace, which are at least as biased as any oil company, just in reverse. I know that oil companies are the Philip Morris du jure, but this article is just retroactive demonization.
Exxon having a "oh fuck" moment where they told their workers to stop working, their customers that there is no product to sell etc. seems something so extremely hard to pull off even if all of upper and middle-management wanted to do the right thing, I can't see how they could have.
I always imagine what would happen if the "5G/Radio is bad for you" crowd was proven right by people at Nokia. What would a realistic while morally sound strategy have looked like?
If this is just an inherent condition of humans working together in groups, shouldn't we rather put the blame on the regulators for ignoring the science and accepting the bribes for this long?
https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/ROTWKG19120814....