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ONE WILD WORLD — NEWSLETTER
Issue #029 · Things Companies · June 2026
Exxon Knew about fossil fuels. They Knew in 1977
Inside the 1977 briefing that told Exxon's executives exactly what burning fossil fuels would do to the planet — and the $23 million campaign the company ran to convince the public it wasn't true.
Scientists now estimate that if the world had started cutting carbon emissions in the early 1980s — when the science was clear and political momentum was possible — warming could have been limited to somewhere under 1°C. We're currently at 1.3°C and rising. The difference is measured in floods, droughts, species, and coastlines.
The question of why the 1980s window closed has a lot of answers. One of them is this: the company that produced more oil than almost anyone else on the planet had already done the science. Its own researchers had already built the models, run the projections, and concluded that the world was in trouble. And then the company spent the next four decades telling the public the opposite.
The company is ExxonMobil — the largest private oil company in the world, descended from the Standard Oil trust that the US government broke up in 1911. Today it operates in over 60 countries and produces roughly 4 million barrels of oil equivalent per day. In 1977, one of its senior scientists walked into a boardroom and told the company's top executives exactly what was coming.
This is what he said. And this is what they did with it.
BY THE NUMBERS |
1977 The year Exxon's senior scientist James Black first briefed the company's Management Committee on the link between fossil fuel combustion and global warming — more than a decade before it became a public issue. |
2–3°C Exxon's own projected temperature rise from a doubling of atmospheric CO2, per Black's 1978 updated presentation. At the poles: up to 10°C. The 1982 internal primer put the best estimate at 1.3–3.1°C. |
63–83% Accuracy range of Exxon's internal climate projections between 1977 and 2003, per a 2023 analysis in the journal Science. The models were 'at least as skillful' as those of independent academic and government scientists. |
0.2°C Warming per decade that Exxon's models projected. What actually happened: roughly 0.18–0.2°C per decade. Harvard researchers called this precision 'frankly, shocking.' |
81% Share of Exxon's op-ed advertorials in the New York Times that expressed doubt about climate science. Share of its own internal documents acknowledging climate change was real: 80%. Same company. Same decade. Opposite messages. |
$23M+ Total ExxonMobil funding to organisations working to undermine climate science. Between 2000 and 2003 alone: at least $8.7 million to 40 separate groups. |
The Research
To understand what makes this story so striking, you have to understand what Exxon actually built. This wasn't a company that caught a vague whiff of a scientific debate and ignored it. Exxon funded the science. They ran the experiments. They built the models.
After Black's 1977 briefing, Exxon's leadership didn't dismiss the findings — they invested in them. The company launched one of the most ambitious private climate research programmes of the era. They outfitted a supertanker, the Esso Atlantic, with custom instruments to measure CO2 concentrations over the ocean. They spent more than $1 million on the project. They built in-house climate models. They collaborated with universities. They published in peer-reviewed journals.
By 1982, they had produced an internal technical review — marked 'proprietary' and restricted to Exxon personnel — that laid out the situation plainly. The CO2 concentration in the atmosphere had risen 8% in the previous 25 years. Exxon's models projected the concentration would double by around 2090. The temperature increase: 1.3 to 3.1°C. The document noted that dealing with climate change 'would require major reductions in fossil fuel combustion.'
Roger Cohen, director of Exxon's Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences Laboratory, wrote in a 1981 internal memo that it was 'distinctly possible' the projected warming after 2030 'will indeed be catastrophic (at least for a substantial fraction of the earth's population).' He was correcting a colleague who had suggested the impacts might be manageable. |
The 1982 primer carried a note: 'This document contains information which could be misleading in the hands of someone not familiar with the subject.' It was not distributed externally. Exxon's public communications in the same period said something quite different.
The Pivot
At some point in the mid-to-late 1980s, Exxon made a decision. It isn't documented in a single memo or a single meeting. It emerged from the accumulated weight of financial interest and strategic calculation.
In June 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen testified before a Congressional hearing that the planet was already warming and that human activity was the cause. The issue landed on the national agenda. What had been a matter of internal scientific discussion at Exxon was now a political problem.
Exxon's response was not to share what its own scientists had found. It was to question the science publicly, fund researchers who would provide alternative explanations, and build the institutional infrastructure of doubt.
The main vehicle for this was the Global Climate Coalition — a cross-industry lobby group that Exxon helped found and lead, representing fossil fuel producers, automakers, and large industrial companies. Throughout the 1990s, it ran media campaigns aimed at convincing the public and policymakers that human-caused climate change was unproven. The GCC's own internal documents described the 'contrarian theories' it was promoting as 'not convincing.' The campaign went ahead anyway.
On the eve of the 1997 Kyoto climate negotiations, the Global Climate Coalition sponsored a $13 million advertising campaign in the United States arguing against the agreement. The campaign helped ensure the US Senate voted 95–0 against ratifying any treaty that excluded binding targets for developing countries — a condition designed to be unacceptable. The United States never ratified Kyoto. |
The Campaign
While the GCC handled the industrial-scale lobbying, Exxon ran a parallel operation in print. It placed advertorials — paid editorial-format advertisements — in the op-ed section of the New York Times, regularly, for years. The Harvard researchers who later analysed them found a pattern so stark it was almost mathematical.
Eighty per cent of Exxon's internal scientific documents acknowledged that climate change was real and caused by humans. Only twelve per cent of the advertorials did. Eighty-one per cent of the advertorials expressed doubt.
Between 2000 and 2003, ExxonMobil channelled at least $8.7 million to forty organisations running disinformation campaigns. Total funding over the full period: more than $23 million. In 2002, a leaked memo showed ExxonMobil had lobbied the Bush White House to have Robert Watson removed as chair of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Watson was removed.
In 2021, an Exxon lobbyist named Keith McCoy was secretly recorded bragging that the company had fought climate science through 'shadow groups' and targeted influential senators to weaken climate legislation. Asked about Exxon's publicly stated support for a carbon tax, McCoy called it a 'talking point' — something used because it was 'great for PR.' Exxon's chairman condemned the remarks. |
What Harvard Found
In January 2023, researchers Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes published an analysis in the journal Science — the first systematic, quantitative assessment of a fossil fuel company's internal climate projections.
They found every available temperature projection produced by Exxon scientists between 1977 and 2003. Twelve documents, sixteen distinct projections. They digitised the graphs and compared them against what actually happened to global temperatures.
Between 63% and 83% of the projections were accurate by strict statistical standards. Exxon's models projected warming of approximately 0.2°C per decade. Real-world figure: roughly 0.18 to 0.2°C. The models accurately predicted that human-caused warming would become statistically detectable around the year 2000.
"What we found is that between 1977 and 2003, excellent scientists within Exxon modelled and predicted global warming with, frankly, shocking skill and accuracy — only for the company to then spend the next couple of decades denying that very climate science."
— Geoffrey Supran, lead author, Harvard University / University of Miami (2023)
Oreskes, whose earlier work documented the tobacco industry's playbook, noted the particular irony of Exxon's advertorials. For years the company had publicly questioned the reliability of climate models. Its own models — the ones kept internal — were more accurate than the ones it was dismissing in print.
Exxon's scientists predicted the future. They got the numbers right.
Then Exxon told the world the models couldn't be trusted.
The projections they hid were more accurate than the ones they were publicly attacking.
The lobbyists are still working.
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SOURCES
Black, J. — Internal presentation to Exxon Management Committee, July 1977. Reproduced in InsideClimate News investigation (2015).
Glaser, M.B. — Internal memo to Exxon management: 'CO2 Greenhouse Effect: Technical Review,' November 12, 1982. Available at ClimateFiles.com.
Cohen, R. — Internal memo to W. Glass, Exxon Research & Engineering, August 18, 1981. Cited in InsideClimate News (2015).
Supran, G., Rahmstorf, S., Oreskes, N. — 'Assessing ExxonMobil's global warming projections,' Science, Vol. 379, Issue 6628 (2023). DOI: 10.1126/science.abk0063
Oreskes, N. and Conway, E.M. — Merchants of Doubt (2010). Bloomsbury Press.
InsideClimate News — 'Exxon: The Road Not Taken' (2015), eight-part investigation. Pulitzer Prize finalist.
Supran, G. and Oreskes, N. — 'Rhetoric and frame analysis of ExxonMobil's climate change communications,' One Earth (2021). DOI: 10.1016/j.oneear.2021.04.014
Franta, B. — 'Shell and Exxon's secret 1980s climate change warnings,' The Guardian (2018).
Greenpeace UK / Unearthed — Undercover recording of ExxonMobil lobbyist Keith McCoy (2021). unearthed.greenpeace.org
Mother Jones — 'Exxon's Climate Denial Machine,' investigative report (2005/updated).
DeSmog — 'ExxonMobil's Funding of Climate Science Denial' (ongoing). desmog.com
Wikipedia — 'ExxonMobil climate change controversy'.
NPR — 'How Decades of Disinformation About Fossil Fuels Halted U.S. Climate Policy' (October 2021).
Global Climate Coalition internal documents — cited in Nation of Change investigation (2019).
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