41way to put it: In a free-market system
where profit rules, how do you phase
down a product that’s making a profit?DECADES AGO, before climate change
entered the vernacular, oil companies
studied the science of how burning fos-
sil fuels would warm the planet and real-
ized as early as the 1970s that addressing
climate change would threaten their core
business. To protect their profits, they
hid the evidence and launched public re-
lations campaigns to sow doubt with the
public and obstruct appropriate regula-
tion. In Black Gold, TIME’s new docu-
series on the history of ExxonMobil’s
denial of the science of climate change,
viewers witness the oil and gas indus-
try’s decades-long effort unfold as theplanet warms. Scientists are silenced,
and shadowy dark-money groups are
brought on to help shape the public con-
versation. The bottom line was profit.
“It’s hard to imagine putting the fate
of humanity at such risk in return for
more money,” former Vice President Al
Gore, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for
his climate activism, says in the series.
The efforts paid dividends. Presiden-
tial administrations committed to enact-
ing climate policy, namely those of Bill
Clinton and Barack Obama, struggled
to get efforts off the ground as indus-
try lobbying dissuaded would-be sup-
porters. Under Republican administra-
tions, the industry enjoyed unparalleled
access, with former executives serving
in key positions of authority and making
government policy. Even President Joe
Biden, who campaigned on a promise to
be the most climate- forward President
yet, took office with climate plans largely
centered on incentivizing clean en-
ergy rather than penalizing fossil fuels.
Denying climate-change science and
delaying action are often portrayed by
activists as a moral crime. “From a
human perspective, it is the gravest sin
I can imagine,” says Christine Arena,
a former executive vice president at
Edelman who quit in protest of the
company’s work with oil and gas trade
groups, in Black Gold. Unsurprisingly,
industry leaders don’t view it that way.
In a 2019 interview, I asked Shell CEO
Ben van Beurden about a campaign ac-
cusing his company of knowing about
climate change for decades and failing
to act. Van Beurden acknowledged that
“yeah, we knew” and added, “Every-
body knew.” He went on to argue that
Shell had since publicly acknowledged
the science of climate change, but soci-
ety had failed to act. In other words, the
blame shouldn’t fall on Shell; in a free-
market economy, the role of a corpora-
tion is to make a profit, and in that con-
text, the company was delivering just as
it was supposed to do.
Indeed, when the price of oil declined
and profits waned in the mid-2010s—
thanks to widespread deployment of
fracking and horizontal drilling—the
industry all of a sudden became vul-
nerable to pushes for change. Protest-
ers staged die-ins at oil-company head-
quarters. Climate activists used reports△
In the U.S., refineries like this
Chevron facility in El Segundo,
Calif., process about 10.5 million
barrels of oil per dayTUNE
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