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‘They Have Lied for Decades’: European Parliament To Scrutinise Exxon’s Climate Science Denial
‘They Have Lied for Decades’: European Parliament To Scrutinise Exxon’s Climate Science Denial
With millions of students taking to the streets and oil majors increasingly facing litigation, the fossil fuel industry is finally being held to account for its contribution to the climate crisis.
This week, the EU is taking this accountability up a notch, with ExxonMobil’s decades-long denial of climate science facing the scrutiny of MEPs and the public at a hearing at the European Parliament in Brussels on Thursday.
During the two-hour session, scientists, campaigners and a historian will examine the history of climate denial and in particular the misinformation spread by Exxon, with MEPs able to ask questions about the role and behaviour of the oil major.
The hearing is being held jointly by the petitions committee and the environment, public health and food safety committee. It was arranged following a petition by Food & Water Europe, a Brussels-based non-governmental organisation, which gained 732 signatures.
“To my knowledge, this is the first major body of lawmakers, certainly at the national or international level, to hear on record expert testimony about the history of climate denial today,” says Geoffrey Supran, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard who has examined Exxon’s history of obfuscation on climate change, and who will testify at Thursday’s hearing. “There’s a general momentum here, that investigative bodies are starting to formalise this enquiry.”
Representatives from the oil company itself won’t attend the hearing, due to “ongoing climate change related litigation in the US”, according to leaked notes from the coordinators of the hearing. Exxon did not respond to requests for comment at the time of publication.
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Analysis: The legacy of the Fukushima nuclear disaster
The movement was so severe that the country moved a few metres east, the local coastline dropped, and it triggered a tsunami which killed thousands of people.
But what many people outside Japan remember is the nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant (hereafter just ‘Fukushima’), which released a plume of radiation into the surrounding area and ocean.
The disaster took place just as some nations were considering the idea of a “nuclear renaissance”. The impact of Fukushima on the nuclear industry was severe, in Japan and beyond.
Nuclear heat
When the earthquake hit, there were 11 reactors operating at four nuclear power plants in the affected Miyagi region.
These were the four reactors at Fukushima Daini, three reactors at Onagawa, one reactor at Tokai, and three reactors at Fukushima Daiichi. Daiichi’s three other units were not in operation at the time, with the fourth reactor down for refuelling.
All the units shut down automatically when the quake hit — but this is not enough to stop a plant from generating heat. Even after a plant has shut down it continues to produce “decay heat”, which amounts to 6-7% of the heat power produced by a fully operating plant.
This heat quickly diminishes. But to avoid nuclear meltdown, it is imperative that the reactor is kept cool in the first day or so after the reaction has stopped taking place.
This was what happened at the eight reactors sited at the Daini, Onagawa and Tokai plants, which were able to access the back-up power needed to run the cooling process.
At Fukushima Daiichi, however, the process failed. The result was the largest nuclear disaster since the Chernobyl accident in 1986 in what is now Ukraine.
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