How We Set Fire to Our Planet

Dangerous Memories From the Climate Conspiracy of the 1980s

Are you terrified by the seemingly unstoppable moment of climate catastrophe? I know that I am.

I want to share with you my podcast episode How the 1980s Could Have Saved the Planet. It is a deeper dive into the research I did for my recent book Dangerous Memory: Coming of Age in the Decade of Greed.

The fact is it didn’t have to be this way but the window is quickly closing on our ability to turn things around. So let’s go back to 1980 and see how we found ourselves on this route.

THE MYSTERY SHIP

At the beginning of the 1980s a large super tanker slowly made its way across the oceans. The ship was the Esso Atlantic. It was owned by the massive oil giant Exxon but the supertanker wasn’t carrying oil. It was carrying scientists, atmospheric testing tools, and computer modelling equipment.

Exxon was trying to map out just how much damage they were doing to the earth’s atmosphere. And they were doing it on the down low. The evidence that the ship gathered was presented in the boardrooms of the oil giants – and the evidence was frightening. Fossil fuels were in the process of dangerously upending the earth’s climate. The researchers stated that it wouldn’t be until around the year 2000 that the public began to notice the impacts of a heating earth. And they warned, by then it might be too late.

But big oil didn’t do anything to warn the public. Instead, they spent billions on false science and disinformation campaigns. While they ratcheted up production.

Pick the date that the coal and oil barons first knew they were damaging the planet’s future. You could go back a hundred years of serious scientific reports and evidence.

But by the 1950s, the oil giants knew for sure. The message that they were risking the future of the planet had been delivered to the oil lobby by Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb. He walked them through the science. If they continued increasing oil production the rising temperatures would cause the polar ice caps to melt, flooding the coastal regions and plunging the world into environmental catastrophe.

By 1968, the American Petroleum Institute was able to plot out the timelines of this seemingly slow-moving disaster. They predicted that “significant temperature changes are almost certain to occur by the year 2000,” which would put in motion the eventual collapse of the Antarctic ice shelf.

In 1978 an Exxon memo warned that the industry had a narrow window of five to ten years before hard decisions had to be made. This led to the decision in 1979 to undertake a serious study of how burning fossil fuels was impacting the climate. They used the supertanker Esso Atlantic to take atmospheric readings and to plot out the scenarios for increasing carbon emissions.

By 1982 they knew damned well what the future held. The data told them they were plunging the world into a “catastrophic” future. The dudes in the Exxon boardroom were given the clear message – by the time public began to notice a changing climate the damage to the planet “may not be reversible, and little could be done to correct the situation.”

In 1988, Shell Oil received a similar set of analysis. And like other studies it put the countdown clock as beginning in or around the year 2000. The report stated, “Many scientists believe that a real increase in the global temperature will be detectable towards the end of this century.”

And one again, there was the kicker, “However, by the time global warming becomes detectable it could be too late.”

Shell, like Exxon suppressed the report but they did use the information to their benefit. They rebuilt their offshore oil rigs to withstand a six-foot rise in ocean levels.

This leads us to the question of why Big Oil’s scientific research wasn’t shared with the public. In what must stand as the greatest corporate conspiracy, cover up and cynical criminality of all time. Big Oil not only suppressed the evidence but launched a widespread publicity campaign to undermine the research of climate scientists. The industry spent billions spreading disinformation through bogus studies, paid influencers, and false front groups to question the science they knew to be true.

And Canada played its part in this deception because the oil giants and the political class were obsessed with exploiting the Athabasca tar sands, the dirtiest and with the highest greenhouse gas emissions per barrel on the planet.

In The Petroleum Papers, Geoff Dembicki writes that the “big lie … partially came from Canada,” as oil interests ramped up production in the heavily polluting oil sands north of Fort McMurray.

And God these disinformation campaigns were effective. At the beginning of the 1990s, 88% of the American public believed that climate change was a serious problem. By the end of the decade, that number had dropped to 28%. And that was before the rise of troll farms, BOT accounts and right wing “own the Lib” ideologies that embraced burning the future opportunities of our grandchildren as the kinda thing that freedom loving men and women should be entitled to as a birthright.

GOVERNMENT TRIES TO GET UP TO SPEED

As the Esso Atlantic was making its voyage, government research was scrambling to catch up to what was already well known by Big Oil. In the late 1970s, the Carter administration established a scientific panel to investigate the possible connection between carbon burning and climate instability. The 1979 report Carbon Dioxide and Climate: A Scientific Assessment confirmed the connection between man-made carbon dioxide and the changing climate. The report stated that the world was on track to see a disastrous rise in global temperatures, from 2 to 3.5 degrees Celsius.

Their data was also bang on. You see climate science isn’t all that complex or uncertain. Back in 1896 Svante Arrhenius noticed that since carbon dioxide emissions captured the sun’s rays in our atmosphere, a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide from intense coal burning would increase in surface temperatures of 5–6 degrees Celsius. That would spell the end of life on earth.

President Carter took the issue of the greenhouse effect seriously. He promoted the development of renewable energy technologies.

The incoming Reagan administration, however, was not about to do anything to challenge the dominance of Big Oil and King Coal.

And this brings us to the hot summer of 1988. The news media stated that 1988 was the hottest summer on record, and that six of the previous hottest records were set in the 1980s. This was no meteorological anomaly. In late June, the US Senate launched special hearings into the greenhouse effect. Dr. James E. Hansen of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration gave riveting testimony on how the scientific community was certain that man-made carbon dioxide was affecting the planet’s atmosphere. Hansen presented scientific modelling that backed up his troubling claims.

Democratic senator Timothy E. Wirth declared, “The scientific evidence is compelling: the global climate is changing as the earth’s atmosphere gets warmer. Now, the Congress must begin to consider how we are going to slow or halt that warming trend and how we are going to cope with the changes that may already be inevitable.”

And here’s the thing: Hansen’s analysis of the rising curve of temperatures from increasing fossil fuel production was similar to Big Oil and the Carter government report. All have proven extremely accurate.

Hansen’s testimony came at a moment when environmental activism was on the move. Across the United States, grassroots campaigns backed up by legal action were forcing the clean-up of environmental disaster zones like Love Canal. Battles to save old growth forests and take on the increasingly destructive clear cutting of pacific forests led to massive civil disobedience campaigns. More than eight hundred people were arrested and put on trial as a result of the Clayoquot Sound protests in British Columbia, to stop the clear-cutting of old-growth forests. In Temagami, Ontario, Indigenous activists stepped to the forefront to defend and lay claim to their traditional lands.

On the political front, action was being taken to stop the destruction being caused by acid rain. Canada’s Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney managed to twist Ronald Reagan’s arm into signing an agreement to limit the sulphuric acid emissions coming from mining and steel mill smelter stacks. The acid rain treaty had a huge impact on lakes in the northern forests. In fact, many of those severely damaged water systems were able to recover.

And so it just seemed obvious that action would be taken to mitigate the threat of burning planet.

But here’s the kicker: nobody factored in just how powerful the oil lobby was and how ruthless they would be in subverting the science, paying off the politicians and spending billions to lie to the public about the danger humanity was facing.

The Exxon, Shell and other research reports stated that the climate warning signs would become apparent by the early 2000s. And they were bang on again. Mega disasters like Hurricane Katrina not only showed the brutal and growing power of nature but our inadequate measures to respond. Now we are living in the age of the flash mega flood, the flash mega storm and flash mega fire. California on fire. Greece on fire. Australia on fire. Fort MacMurray burned. Paradise California burned. Litton exploded and burned. Jasper burned.

In Canada, our northern boreal forests are becoming a climate feedback disaster of burning and rising carbon. In 2023, as 200,000 Canadians were fleeing unprecedented climate fires and floods, an executive with oil giant Suncor told his investors that the industry needed to respond with a “sense of urgency” – not an urgency of a planet on fire, but the urgency to make even more money. And in 2024, oil production in Canada hit record production.

No wonder UN Secretary-General António Guterres has called out the oil giants for knowingly putting the future of humanity at risk. “Just like the tobacco industry, they rode roughshod over science,” he said. “Big Oil peddled the big lie … today fossil fuel producers and their enablers are still racing to increase production, knowing full well that their business model is inconsistent with human survival.”

But those lies are coming back to bite the oil giants in a big way. Across the United State a series of lawsuits are being launched by states to recover the damages that were knowingly caused by big Oil's deception. For years, Big Oil used the Big Tobacco playbook of deception. Now the playbook used to take down big tobacco is being used against big oil.

More than five billion people have been born since the record-breaking summer of 1988. Since then, the planet has transitioned into a new and frightening, unstable geological epoch. In Fire Weather, John Vaillant writes: “By almost any measure, anyone born after 1990 is finding themselves in a new geological era, navigating a world fundamentally different from the one Baby Boomers and Gen Xers inherited. The chances of anyone alive today experiencing a year as relatively cool as 1996 are effectively nil.”

In the 2000s the extreme weather has become the norm. The eight years leading up to 2021 were the eight hottest ever recorded. Then 2023 blew all those previous records away. And by 2024, climate scientists were warning that global temperatures were “off the charts.”

WE SAVED THE PLANET ONCE

But there are dangerous memories from the 1980s that we can use to save the planet today. In 1987, representatives of fifty-five countries gathered in Montreal to address the damage chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were causing to the earth’s fragile ozone layer, which protects us from deadly radiation from the sun. The chemical companies that produced CFCs were purposely undermining the science. And, like the climate crisis, deterioration of the ozone layer was happening much faster than expected. The United States announced they wouldn’t be bound by the agreement, and environmental activists denounced the agreement as weak and a sellout.

Yet the Montreal Protocol succeeded, proving that the global community could come together to address human-caused threats to the planet.

Initially only 24 countries signed on to the agreement. But the commitment to annual meetings led to the eventual ratification by 197 nations.

What they committed to was a a total phase out and ban of CFCs.

This is what the United Nations Panel of Climate have been struggling to put in place for dealing with the climate disaster. But those annual COPP gatherings have become a focal point for lobbying and interference by big oil and the politicians who do their bidding.

Meanwhile the planet burns.

And this is where another lesson from the 1980s could make the difference. The mass protest marches against the nuclear threat put enormous pressure on politicians to find a solution. This activism can force governments and industries to halt the expansion of fossil fuel production and start making more dramatic investments in a renewable non-carbon future.

Yes, the window is narrow and the odds against success appear high. But they are as high as they were in Montreal almost four decades ago. This is a dangerous memory that must be shared, because despite it being such a close call, the fragile ozone layer continues to heal. We can do the same to cool a burning planet.