{"id":15597,"date":"2015-07-11T13:56:55","date_gmt":"2015-07-11T20:56:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=15597"},"modified":"2015-07-11T13:56:55","modified_gmt":"2015-07-11T20:56:55","slug":"knowing-is-not-caring","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2015\/07\/11\/knowing-is-not-caring\/","title":{"rendered":"Knowing is NOT Caring"},"content":{"rendered":"

Looking back to thirty four years ago, I was vaguely aware of the greenhouse effect and knew some scientists were sounding warnings, but the issue seemed distant.  At the time, I was more concerned that a second-rate actor, who had been upstaged by a chimp, had his finger on the nuclear trigger and was talking about evil empires.  But someone did know how serious the problem is.  Their identity makes their subsequent actions all the more criminal.<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\"0711Exxon\"\u201cPope Francis blasts global warming deniers,\u201d the Washington Post<\/a><\/font> wrote last month. The Pope\u2019s climate encyclical<\/a><\/font> focused on the immorality of climate inaction \u2014 which makes the immorality of knowingly spreading disinformation for the purpose of delaying action all the more base.<\/font><\/p>\n

Now the Union of Concerned Scientists has disclosed<\/a><\/font> an email revealing that Exxon understood the scientific reality of climate change as far back as 1981. \u201cOther companies, such as Mobil, only became aware of the issue in 1988, when it first became a political issue,\u201d Exxon\u2019s former in-house climate expert, chemical engineer Leonard S. Bernstein wrote last year<\/a><\/font>. The 30-year veteran of Mobil and Exxon explained:<\/font><\/p>\n

Exxon first got interested in climate change in 1981 because it was seeking to develop the Natuna gas field off Indonesia. This is an immense reserve of natural gas, but it is 70% CO2. That CO2 would have to be separated to make the natural gas usable.<\/font><\/p>\n

And yet despite a growing understanding of the scientific reality of climate change in the 1980s and 1990s, Exxon became one of the biggest funders of scientists and think tanks and others who do little but deny and cast doubt on the scientific understanding of human-caused global warming<\/strong>.<\/font><\/p>\n

As recently as February 2015, a New York Times expos\u00e9<\/a><\/font> revealed that a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who routinely casts doubt on widely accepted climate science had \u201caccepted more than $1.2 million in money from the fossil-fuel industry over the last decade while failing to disclose that conflict of interest in most of his scientific papers.\u201d This included funding from ExxonMobil and \u201cat least $230,000 from the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation.\u201d\u2026 [emphasis added<\/em>]<\/font><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Inserted from <Think Progress<\/a>><\/p>\n

I just can\u2019t get my head around how criminal greed can be so pervasive that they did this for all these years, when they had a better understanding than most Americans do now.  Only one word is sufficient to describe it: Republican!<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Looking back to thirty four years ago, I was vaguely aware of the greenhouse effect and knew some scientists were sounding warnings, but the issue seemed distant.  At the time, I was more concerned that a second-rate actor, who had been upstaged by a chimp, had his finger on the nuclear trigger and was talking […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15597","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15597","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15597"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15597\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15597"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15597"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}