A senior researcher named Henry Shaw had argued that the company needed a deeper understanding of the issue in order to influence future legislation that might restrict carbon-dioxide emissions. It behooves us to start a very aggressive defensive program, Shaw wrote in a memo to a manager, becaus
But the Charney report had changed industrys cost-benefit calculus. Now there was a formal consensus about the nature of the crisis. As Henry Shaw emphasized in his conversations with Exxons executives, the cost of inattention would rise in step with the Keeling curve.
hensive study, to be called Changing Climate, that would analyze social and economic effects of climate change. More urgent, the National Commission on Air Quality, at the request of Congress, invited two dozen experts, including Henry Shaw himself, to a meeting in Florida to propose climate policy.
The talk of ending oil production stirred for the first time the gentleman from Exxon. I think there is a transition period, Henry Shaw said. We are not going to stop burning fossil fuels and start looking toward solar or nuclear fusion and so on. We are going to have a very orderly transition fr
received overtures from a funding partner far wealthier and less ideologically blinkered than the Reagan administration: Exxon. Following Henry Shaws recommendation to establish credibility ahead of any future legislative battles, Exxon had begun to spend conspicuously on global-warming research. I
Exxon soon revised its position on climate-change research. In a presentation at an industry conference, Henry Shaw cited Changing Climate as evidence that the general consensus is that society has sufficient time to technologically adapt to a CO greenhouse effect. If the academy had concluded