本讲摘要

The past fifteen years has seen an explosion of academic and journalistic accounts showing that executives all across the Western oil industry were fully aware by 1980 that their product was the main contributor to global warming (with catastrophic consequences likely to result) and that those executives' firms began funding aggressive climate denialsm campaigns around 1990. These studies aim to force some much-needed accountability from a seemingly lawless industry. Yet the ExxonKnew (ShellKnew, TotalKnew, etc.) narrative simplifies events in ways that could hinder the drive for accountability. This paper examines two anomalies in the ExxonKnew story: first, what happened between 1980 and 1990? And second, how should we explain the oil industry's leading role in promoting the commercialization of alternative energy in the 1970s? I show that the oil industry has been involved with lower-carbon alternatives, especially solar, nuclear, and geothermal energy, going back to the 1920s. In the 1970s, executives at most large and midsize Western oil firms believed that long-term, well-funded diversification into alternative energy was necessary to preserve their profits or even their companies' existence. In the 1980s, however, they largely abandoned their investments in alternatives thanks to the falling price of oil and pressure from investors, management scholars/consultants, and neoliberal economists and politicians. We should therefore seek accountability for oil firms' turn to denialism not just from those firms themselves but also from other actors who encouraged and facilitated that turn.

主讲人介绍

Cyrus Mody is the Professor of the History of Science, Technology, and Innovation at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. He is the author of three monographs (all with MIT Press) on the recent history of US applied science, most recently The Squares: US Physical and Engineering Scientists in the Long 1970s. He has co-edited journal special issues on oil history, the history of nanotechnology, the history of chemistry, and the history of research integrity, as well as the edited collection (with Joseph Martin) Between Making and Knowing: Tools in Materials Research (World Scientific, 2020). He is currently PI of the Dutch Research Council Vici project Managing Scarcity - which looks at the oil industry long-term involvement with alternative energy and environmental governance - and co-PI of the European Research Council Synergy project NanoBubbles - which asks how, when, and why scientists fail to correct the scientific record.