Still_Ad4634

Still_Ad4634 t1_ixym5aj wrote

Fortunately, this isn't true - because oil companies drop frankly huge sums into funding research into climate change to the point where there's been attempts to put together a research group (Fossil Free Rearch) in order to operate without the influence of funding from sources that are heavily biased against results that show fossil fuel impact on climate change.

We have a history of fossil fuel companies doing the research themselves - including as far back as 1971 (Total, scientific article for internal corporate magazine) - proving their direct detrimental impact, and then hiding the results from the wider world. Exxon had a secret climate research program that even the wider oil industry didn't know about until 1984, which predicted that fossil fuel controls were going to be needed and determined that an international response from IPIECA would be needed to keep fossil fuels top of the heap.

tldr; The companies most invested in finding that fossil fuels and related issues (runoff, byproducts) are not affecting climate change are funding huge amounts of research and are /still/ finding the same results, to the point where the risk is that we are underestimating the issue - not overestimating.

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