A Climate-Conscious Lent: Exxon-funded climate doubt

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Early in her career, climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe worked for Exxon, now known as ExxonMobil. In an essay for The Conversation, published in August 2017, she writes:

Investigative reports in 2015 revealed that Exxon had its own scientists doing its own climate modeling as far back as the 1970s: science and modeling that was not only accurate, but that was being used to plan for the company's future. …[W]hat Exxon was saying internally about climate change was quantitatively very different from their public statements. … [A]t least 80 percent of the internal documents … studied from between 1977 and 2014 were consistent with the state of the science — acknowledging that climate change is real and caused by humans, and identifying "reasonable uncertainties" that any climate scientist would agree with at the time. Yet over 80 percent of Exxon's editorial-style paid advertisements over the same period specifically focused on uncertainty and doubt, the study found.

Challenging world oil executives at a meeting in 2018, Pope Francis called them to "take to heart that 'civilization requires energy, but energy must not destroy civilization,' " Tony Magliano wrote in a column for National Catholic Reporter.

"The pontiff appealed to the energy executives to see the necessary moral interconnectedness of the elimination of poverty and hunger — including providing 'energy for all' — with 'sustainable development of renewable forms of energy' to replace dirty fossil fuels that are greatly contributing to a dangerous rise in global temperatures and thus leading to harsher environments and, not surprisingly, increased poverty," he wrote.