LETTER TO THE EDITOR: Honesty in 1977 would have helped stop pollution of south

So I thought I’d stay local with the campaign of the group Global Justice, who were in front of the Minster of All Saints in Rotherham on Thursday, September 22, with a banner highlighting the injustice of global pollution by nations of the global north, and the plight of the people of the global south who are suffering the result (the ongoing flooding of almost half of Pakistan and resulting destruction and loss of life being an example).

The demonstration follows a letter sent by an Oliver Blensdorf to the Sheffield Telegraph, pointing out that the rich nations and polluting corporations of the global north are responsible for the climate change, but billions of people in the global south are being impacted by it despite being least responsible for causing it.

Some countries from the global south are calling for countries with a history of high carbon emissions, such as ours, to pay into a compensation fund, known as “Loss and Damage”, to help pay for these impacts, but talks on the starting of this fund have so far been blocked.  

On the subject of carbon emissions, I’d like to answer Clive Phillips’ oft repeated accusation that the Green Party have been lying for 30 years on the subject, with a potted history from the archives of the oil industry.

The term carbon emissions was actually first used in 1977, 13 years before the formation in 1990 of the Green Party. A group of Exxon scientists, on the instruction of their executives, had conducted extensive research on CO2 pollution, and reported back to their executives that the effects then were such that action should be taken “in no more than ten years”.

In June 1998, 11 years later, NASA scientist James Hansen reported that as a result of the emissions the climate had already started to change.

Exxon publicly countered that the science was controversial, denied the information taken from their earlier research, and in conjunction with several other companies set up the Global Climate Coalition to deliberately question any scientific basis for concern on climate change.

Their wealth and powerful lobbying helped prevent the USA  from signing the International Treaty to Control Greenhouse Gasses at the Kyoto Protocol of 1998, and with China and India following the US lead, the treaty was never enforced.

A group calling itself The Union of Concerned Scientists has since taken up the investigation, and has included in its publications a copy of a memo in which a coalition of fossil fuel companies pledge to launch efforts to sow doubt on any campaign to combat global CO2 pollution, and which includes the phrase “Victory will be achieved when the average person is uncertain about climate science”.

So, our supposed 30 year alleged lie is actually a true report written 45 years ago by Exxon scientists to their executives, and their findings denied ever since by profit hungry fossil fuel company executives willing to spend millions on lobbying, “smoke screen” organisations and agents to promote their lying denials with no thought of the destruction and suffering it would cause, 45 years wasted in which the world could have found and implemented the means to avert the situation we are in at the start of today.

All we needed was honesty in 1977.

Charles David Foulstone, Rotherham Green Party