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  • This, is the story of how your safety and future finances were robbed without you ever really noticing. Back in the 70s,

  • Everyone was like (peace),

  • but there was also the creation of an energy company called Exxon. They were obsessed with what we are still obsessed with now;

  • innovation. So, the oil company Exxon, decided to invest in science. Scientists hired by Exxon, again Exxon's very own

  • scientists, were the first to present a series of groundbreaking papers explaining that burning fossil fuels will

  • influence the climate as the carbon dioxide released will cause a greenhouse effect

  • Isn't it ironic, don't you think, that oil companies discovered climate change. This happened right in the early

  • 1980s just as the price of oil was

  • decreasing, so the higher-ups at Exxon chose to ignore the information and instead focus on growing the business. They did ask the scientists to keep

  • looking into it.

  • In 1982, their own scientists again came back, this time with more thorough research saying "yep, it was worse than they thought."

  • Based on what Exxon was planning to do in regards to fossil fuel extraction

  • would warm the climate, cause sea levels to rise, and increase deadly droughts. Humans will suffer effects, which will be indeed

  • catastrophic so the scientists pitched a major reduction in fossil fuel combustion. An email from Lenny Bernstein, a

  • former employee of Exxon wrote: "In the

  • 1980's, Exxon needed to understand the potential for concerns about climate change to lead to

  • regulation of...potential projects. They were well ahead of the rest of the industry in this awareness." If Exxon wanted to be innovators so bad,

  • maybe they would have taken this moment to

  • diversify the energy sector-

  • invest in alternative energy sources, but instead they decided to lie. To you, to me, and to your mom. It is now the

  • 1980s, and for the first time an internal memo is released at Exxon that says, they "need to start to emphasize the uncertainty of the

  • scientific data around climate change." They begin to start going against their very own

  • science and plant the seed for what we now know as climate change denial. Here is part of an internal memo from Exxon at the

  • time. "There is currently no unambiguous

  • scientific evidence that the earth is warming. If the earth is on a warming trend we're not likely to detect it before

  • 1995." One of the most frustrating parts of this story is that Exxon

  • did believe their climate change science. Right at this time they started to build

  • drilling platforms in the ocean a little bit higher up to deal with the rising sea levels they predicted. They also started to plan to

  • drill in the Arctic,

  • because as they knew the sea ice in the Arctic was going to melt. In the late 80s, the effects of climate change began to

  • become apparent.

  • Time magazine had a picture of the planet in shackles due to climate change on their cover, as the scientific

  • impact of burning fossil fuels became public knowledge.

  • At the time, 80% of Americans claimed that climate change was an issue, and

  • accepted that it was caused by the burning of fossil fuels. It was also not a political issue. Here, is

  • Republican President George Bush senior on the campaign trail in

  • 1988 after a year of severe heat waves killed thousands of Americans: "Don't say these problems are too big, that

  • it's impossible for an individual, or even a nation as great as ours to solve the problem of global warming,

  • or the loss of forests, or the deterioration of our oceans.

  • My response is simple; it can be done, and

  • we must do it.

  • Let's not forget all that we've accomplished,

  • all that we've accomplished since America first

  • concentrated its attention on

  • preserving the environment,

  • under a Republican administration,

  • back in 1970." This is the time when the oil companies started to get scared of that (evil

  • regulation from the government) so they started to really jack up their campaigns to increase

  • climate change denial. They became inventive, they actually created the OP ad that we now sometimes see in newspapers, where it kind of looks like

  • an article but it's actually fully a paid advertisement. So this is one of the op ads that they paid for in the

  • liberal New York Times. "One of the brighter hopes with the climate change debate has to be the benefits achieved

  • through technology." Notice how they used the word "debate" and notice how they sort of make it seem like, oh

  • climate change might be a good thing because we're gonna invent new things to cope. They secretly paid

  • scientists to promote fake science. In an article called climate change: a degree of uncertainty,

  • the first line wrote: "The debate on climate change has been long,

  • complex, and intense." This is of course not true, because according to their own science that there wasn't really a debate at all.

  • Quite a short explanation that was really quite simple it's that, the burning of CO2 creates a greenhouse effect that warms the earth.

  • In 1997 Lee Raymond, the CEO of Exxon at the time actually

  • decided that in the

  • presentation he was going to say that, no in fact according to their science the earth was cooling. This was a full lie. Again he

  • did this in a presentation in 1997,

  • more than 20 years after his own scientists first broke the fact that the greenhouse effect is real, and the name of his

  • presentation, boldly a bold lie was, "Is the earth warming? Does burning fossil fuels cause global warming?"

  • Lee Raymond sucks, because he also is the person who began to make climate change a political issue. Lee Raymond

  • persuaded George Bush, the younger one, to go against his campaign promise and take carbon dioxide

  • off the list of pollutants. These are one of the first times that we actually see climate change become a political issue, a side of

  • left or right, and at the time the Republican Party was under a lot of pressure

  • from these big oil companies, and they released this

  • Memo: "The scientific debate is closing [against us] but not yet closed. There is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science."

  • Later in the memo it reads: "Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues around global warming are settled, their views about

  • global warming will change accordingly. Therefore we need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a

  • primary issue of debate". All of this hard work paid off. In

  • 2017, around 90% of Americans did not know there was a scientific consensus on global warming.

  • 52% of Americans think the threat of climate change has been exaggerated. This lack of knowledge helped Rex Tillerson,

  • who

  • became the CEO of Exxon after it merged with Mobil to become Exxon Mobil, to sign a

  • 500 billion dollar deal to explore for oil in the rapidly thawing Russian Arctic. For this plan, he was awarded the

  • Russian order of friendship. Global warming and climate change is caused by our immense burning of coal, gas, and oil for energy.

  • This causes the carbon release to combine with oxygen in the atmosphere to produce CO2,

  • carbon dioxide, which traps heat that would have been radiated back out into space.

  • Due to this, the extra

  • heat trapped near earth is equivalent to the heat from four hundred thousand bombs the size of what was dropped on Hiroshima,

  • being collected in our atmosphere every day. By

  • 2100, the rising sea levels will cost the world 14

  • trillion dollars. 9 of the 10 deadliest heat waves in recorded human history have occurred since the year

  • 2000. Since the 1970s, 60% of the world's wildlife has been killed. If we continue with our current greenhouse gas emissions, by

  • 2070 tropical regions that now get one day a year of oppressive humid heat will get between 100 to 250 days per year.

  • 100 million trees died in California in the past 10 years, and studies show that by

  • 2050, if temperatures rise the way they are predicted, a quarter of the earth will experience extreme droughts and desertification.

  • Stephen Hawking gave humanity a deadline of a century to leave earth, as it may be the only way to save ourselves.

  • And who is going to be able to afford this? Maybe Lee Raymond, as his retirement package from

  • ExxonMobil was a mere $400 000 000, for his impressive work of making money for the company at your expense.

  • Climate change is real. I was lied to,

  • you were lied to, your parents were lied to. These oil companies did all of this because they were

  • short-sighted. They wanted to make money for themselves, but we need to think about the future. We as young people are the ones who

  • are left to kind of figure out this mess. It's not

  • necessarily our fault, this is a huge injustice. All these lies and deceit that these companies did to the public consciousness are

  • unfair, but we have to figure out what we do now. In our next video we're gonna talk about hope.

  • So, one thing is that a lot of people are

  • challenging and figuring out how the law should get involved with these companies. They should technically be sued for what they did.

  • There's the green New Deal happening in America, What exactly is that what does that mean for such a large

  • economic power? And we're gonna highlight some of the amazing,

  • innovative ways that science is now trying to figure out how to clean up this mess.

  • Thank you so much for watching, you can subscribe to this channel we're gonna release the video in the next few weeks. We just

  • wanted to make this video because we make our animated videos on Thursdays where we try and get people interested in science and

  • understanding a critical thought and learning about how the world works around us, but there's

  • Also these other things going on within the science community that we need to talk about and that's what this video was, so we hope

  • that you like it. Follow me on Instagram and Twitter, smash out like button, hit that subscribe and we'll see you next week. Peace :)

This, is the story of how your safety and future finances were robbed without you ever really noticing. Back in the 70s,

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