I Hate You, Exxon

I want to thank you, however, for your vehement and vociferous campaign to deny the existence of climate change. If it weren't for you, I would be a climate change illiterate today. Because your wonderfully funded campaign convinced so many others to deny reality, I had to learn the science to show scores of climate change deniers why, how, and where they were wrong — and that took a lot of reading and research into the climate change science on my part. (Note to deniers: Subscribing to paid professional denier blogs and reading armchair denier social media posts for three years does not equal "I've been researching climate change for three years.")

 For nearly two decades — including a year of ramping it up before the Copenhagen climate conference (see my old blog: https://blog.greenhearted.org) — all my climate science learning has come about because of the research I felt compelled to do every time I came across a denier's seemingly outlandish claim (you know the old tropes: things like "man is arrogant to think he can change the climate" and "CO2 is too small a component of the atmosphere to have any impact"). I've had to work hard to get at the truth of the climate emergency.

 You see, I'm a former teacher of languages who doesn't have a scientific bone in her body. But because I'm a teacher, children are my raison d'être. As my social media profile says, "Everything I do is for the children, of all species." I had to become scientifically literate, understanding concepts like correlation and causality, weight of evidence, peer review, feedback loops (both positive and negative), shifting baselines, tipping points, different timescales, exponential growth, the precautionary principle, ecological limits to growth, the state of the planet, etc.

 Tragically for our children and grandchildren (and life in the biosphere of this wonderfully diverse and beautiful planet), Exxon, you have had access to the most expensive PR firms, the most expensive communication experts, the most expensive advertising companies, and the most expensive scientists-for-hire. (I wonder if you paid your own staff scientists — who raised the alarm on the impacts of continued burning of fossil fuels in the early 1980s — anywhere near what you paid your professional deniers.)

 So Exxon, I can’t help being miffed with you. Your scientists told you FORTY YEARS AGO what your "products" were doing to the climate, to the atmosphere, to the oceans and to the Earth — and you chose to cover it all up, putting money, profit, greed, and power ahead of life and human survival.

 When I think of how many hundreds of hours I've spent reading up on the climate science and the climate crisis — WHEN I DIDN'T HAVE TO — I feel like throwing up. You have wasted half of my life because of your avarice and your cold-hearted, mean-spirited decision to keep destabilizing the climate when you could just as easily have made the "pivot" to renewable energy (remember Beyond Petroleum?). How many people have you and your oil and gas killed since your 1982 memo explaining the dangers of burning fossil fuels? 

 I'm not a hateful person, Exxon, but I hate you.