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There are new revelations from the continuing InsideClimate News investigation of what the oil industry knew about the potential climate impacts of carbon dioxide from fuel burning even as it sought delays in related national and international policies.

The headline and deck on today’s story neatly summarize the news:

Exxon’s oil industry peers knew about climate dangers in the 1970s, too. Members of an American Petroleum Institute task force on CO2 included scientists from nearly every major oil company, including Exxon, Texaco and Shell.

Below you can read my proposal for what the industry might do to make the best use of its deep knowledge of carbon dioxide and climate change, along with its scientific and technical capacity.

Here’s a snippet from Neela Banerjee’s article, but please read the rest at the link below:

The American Petroleum Institute together with the nation’s largest oil companies ran a task force to monitor and share climate research between 1979 and 1983, indicating that the oil industry, not just Exxon alone, was aware of its possible impact on the world’s climate far earlier than previously known. The group’s members included senior scientists and engineers from nearly every major U.S. and multinational oil and gas company, including Exxon, Mobil, Amoco, Phillips, Texaco, Shell, Sunoco, and Sohio, according to internal documents obtained by InsideClimate News and interviews with the task force’s former director. [Read the rest.]

My thoughts on the series’ earlier findings are here.

All of this bolsters a notion I first floated awhile ago on Twitter, related to a 1978 proposal by an Exxon scientist, Harold N. Weinberg:

Maybe @exxonmobil can answer Weinberg’s ’78 call by filling RD&D gap on scalable CO2 removal //t.co/eQo5MmdmfN //t.co/6eKhcBqTxI — Andy Revkin (@Revkin) 18 Oct 15

In a memo to superiors, revealed in InsideClimate’s earlier reporting, Weinberg wrote: “What would be more appropriate than for the world’s leading energy company and leading oil company [to] take the lead in trying to define whether a long-term CO2 problem really exists and, if so, what counter measures would be appropriate.”

The proposal was not embraced, needless to say.

While others pursue investigations that may or may not bear fruit (but will surely enrich several generations of lawyers), I have an idea for something that could start now.

I suggest that Exxon, and perhaps the fossil fuel industry more generally, might help propel a vigorous new burst of research in ways to take back the CO2 added to the atmosphere by fossil fuel combustion at a scale that would matter to the climate system. (Those of us who benefitted from decades of cheap fossil fuels can do our part by supporting boosted federal investments in clean-energy science and technology development — and, yes, deployment.)

After all, the putative trajectories for avoiding dangerous climate change that were the centerpiece of discussions and pledges in the Paris climate treaty talks all rely on as-yet-untested massive atmospheric CO2 removal sometime late in this century.

At the same time, none of the pledges in the Paris agreement are focused on developing the capacity to do anything of that sort in coming decades. That was the “reality gap” I wrote about. (The innovation initiatives announced there by the Obama administration and Bill Gates and others are a great start, but just a start.)

Here’s what an Exxon promotional logo might look like once the company embraces this notion:

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In late November, I had an initial email exchange about this notion with Kenneth P. Cohen, Exxon’s vice president for public and government affairs. He responded, “We actually have some very interesting/promising work underway in the CO2 capture area,” but couldn’t elaborate at the time. I’m looking forward to hearing more.

Here are articles describing the kinds of efforts I’m thinking about — all of which are very different than simply catching and compressing CO2 from smokestacks and pumping it into the ground (a process that remains a pipe dream at anything approaching the necessary scale):

I was heartened to see an excellent piece posted by The Conversation on Dec. 12 on the notion of a “CO2 takeback scheme.”

The essay is by Myles Allen, an Oxford University climatologist who was a leader of research developing a carbon budget as a way to gauge global warming solutions and has since 2013 pressed for intensified work on capturing CO2.

Here’s an excerpt and link:

To stabilize temperatures at any level, be it 1.5℃, 2℃ or even 3℃, net carbon dioxide emissions must be reduced to zero. Most governments, environmental groups and business leaders now understand this. And it is acknowledged, albeit implicitly, in Article 4 of the Paris agreement, which calls for greenhouse emissions to be “balanced” by carbon sinks some time after mid-century. But we’re unlikely to hit “net zero” emissions before temperatures reach 2℃, and even less likely before they reach 1.5℃. Warming is currently at about 1℃ and rising by 0.1℃ every five to ten years. We could slow the warming by reducing emissions, of course. But if we fail to reduce at the required rate – and the inadequate emissions targets indicate this is the intention – then we will be left with no option but to scrub the excess CO2 back out of the atmosphere in future. Owners of fossil fuel assets



That is why the deal is like a gigantic take-back scheme. The proof lies in what is not said in the Paris agreement. There is no explicit mention of a global carbon budget for instance, which adds up total emissions since the industrial revolution. That is despite the fact that all governments have acknowledged, through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the reality that stabilising temperatures requires a limit on cumulative CO2 emissions. Certain countries simply cannot accept the suggestion that they may be obliged to leave some of their prized fossil carbon reserves underground. And why should they? We do not need, and nor have we any right, to ban India from using its coal. We simply need to ensure that, by the time global temperatures reach 2℃ (or 1.5℃ if that is what is eventually deemed safe), any company that sells fossil fuels, or any carbon-intensive product like conventional cement, is obliged to take back an equivalent amount of CO2 and dispose of it safely to ensure it doesn’t end up in the atmosphere. [Read on.]

Addendum, 8:40 p.m. | This story by Bloomberg’s Eric Roston is relevant, as well: “ExxonMobil and Sierra Club Agreed on Climate Policy—and Kept It Secret. A forgotten accord reached in 2009 may yet have relevance for the future of U.S. climate policy.”