A “big lie”: the UN Secretary General called on Wednesday to prosecute the big oil companies, as the tobacco companies were, for having hidden for years the information they had on global warming.
“Some fossil fuel producers were well aware in the 1970s that their flagship product was going to burn the planet,” said Antonio Guterres during a speech at the Davos Forum.
“But like the tobacco industry, they ignored their own science,” he added, deducing that “some oil giants have been peddling the big lie.”
As early as the 1980s, oil giant ExxonMobil had remarkably accurate global warming predictions made by its own scientists that turned out to be precisely what happened decades later, a study has confirmed. published Thursday in the prestigious magazine Science.
However, the company has for years publicly cast doubt on the state of scientific knowledge in this area, this publication also pointed out.
After publication in the journal Science, a spokesman for the company told AFP that “this question has surfaced several times in recent years”, adding that “each time, our response is the same: those who evoke what “Exxon knew are wrong in their conclusions. »
$246 billion
According to Antonio Guterres, “those responsible must be prosecuted” as the tobacco companies have been. A reference to the 246 billion dollars that the tobacco giants in the United States had agreed to pay in 1998 to 46 States over a period of 25 years, in order to cover the costs incurred to treat former smokers.
For several years now, ExxonMobil has been accused of having held a double discourse on climate change caused by the immense quantities of greenhouse gases released by humanity into the atmosphere, in particular through the combustion of coal or oil to produce energy.
“We must put an end to the lies of the oil, gas and coal giants, and take collective action to phase them out,” the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative said in a statement welcoming of the speech of the boss of the UN.
According to this organization, which campaigns for much more supervision of fossil fuel producers, the slow progress of governments in combating the effects on the climate of the oil giants is due to “the influence of lobbyists from the fossil fuel industry”.
The question of the impact of the oil industry on the planet is all the more pressing today as “every week brings its share of horrifying stories”, worried the UN Secretary General, who speaks of “flirting with climate disaster”.
Last Thursday, the World Meteorological Organization confirmed that the past eight years have been the hottest on record.
“The oil must stay in the ground,” urged 20-year-old Ecuadorian Amazon activist Helena Gualinga in an interview with AFP on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum meeting. Along with Sweden’s Greta Thunberg and other young activists, she is one of the new faces of the mobilization against climate change.
But this is not the direction the oil industry is taking, Antonio Guterres laments: “Today, fossil fuel producers and those who support them continue to fight to increase production, knowing full well that their economic model is incompatible with the survival of humanity.
“This madness is science fiction,” he hammered.
More broadly, the UN secretary-general castigated the “questionable” or “obscure” climate commitments of many companies on a goal of zero carbon emissions: it “misleads consumers, investors and regulators with false stories”, and opens the door to “greenwashing”.
“Our climate commitments require the full commitment of the private sector”, he insisted, believing that “the battle to meet the 1.5 degree target (of global warming) will be won or lost during this decade. “.