Ross: Remember when oil companies warned us about climate change?
Oct 9, 2018, 8:03 AM
Remember when we thought we could just sign a climate change pledge and it would all be good?
Well now: “The UN Climate Change panel says past international pledges are completely off track and climate catastrophe beckons,” one news reports states. “One main message of the report is that consequences are already happening.”
Which is crazy! My generation had a deal with the universe — that climate change would not happen in our lifetime. So our only responsibility was to train our kids to be really good swimmers.
Now they say it’s already here. So who do we blame? I was gonna blame the energy companies. But then I found this film, released in 1991, and it’s full of ominous music. And it states that “Global warming is not yet certain, but many think that to wait for final proof would be irresponsible.”
The film was made by Royal Dutch Shell – the oil company. It talked about the millions of fossil-fueled cars, saying: “every year, each of them produces, on average, four times its own wait in carbon dioxide.”
It said the science was clear: “Is it too much to hope that it might act as the stimulus to a new era of technical and economic cooperation.”
That was from an oil company — 27 years ago! When we had 27 years to do something about it! If only they’d made the music a little more ominous.
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