(Davos) A “big lie”: the UN Secretary General called on Wednesday to prosecute the oil majors, 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 in a speech at the Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
“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, US oil company 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, an ExxonMobil spokesperson said that “this question” had “surfaced several times in recent years”, adding that “every time, our response is the same: those who bring up 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, the ExxonMobil group has been accused of having had a double discourse on the warming of the climate caused by the immense quantities of greenhouse gases released by humanity into the atmosphere, in particular via the combustion of coal and oil to produce energy.
Asked about the subject by the French channel BFM Business in Davos, the boss of the French hydrocarbon giant TotalEnergies Patrick Pouyanné said that his group “knew nothing at all”. “I don’t have climate scientists at TotalEnergies,” he said.
“The first thing I would like to see now would be oil and gas companies join the other critical business groups, many of whom are working diligently here to try to address the climate crisis,” the UN special envoy said. United States on Climate Change, John Kerry.
Former US Vice-President and climate activist Al Gore, also present in Switzerland, was more direct: “The oil, gas and coal industries fight tooth and nail against any climate legislation at the national, regional, local, and municipal” and use “their political influence and wealth to prevent progress”, he charged.
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 had been the hottest on record.
“The oil must stay in the ground,” said 20-year-old Ecuadorian Amazon activist Helena Gualinga. Alongside Sweden’s Greta Thunberg and other young activists, she is one of the new faces of the mobilization against climate change.
But that 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. »
The UN secretary-general also slammed many companies’ ‘dubious’ or ‘obscure’ climate commitments to a zero-carbon goal: it ‘misleads consumers, investors and regulators with false narratives’ and opens the door to “greenwashing”.
“Our climate commitments require the full engagement of the private sector”, because “the battle to meet the 1.5 degree [de réchauffement climatique] will be won or lost in this decade,” he said.