Knowing, Lying, Profiting, Fleeing

In 2024, global average atmospheric CO₂ reached 422.8 parts per million — a new record high. The increase over 2023 was 3.75 ppm: the largest single-year gain ever measured on the Keeling Curve, the continuous atmospheric record maintained by NOAA and Scripps Institution of Oceanography since 1958.

Pre-industrial CO₂ levels held at approximately 280 ppm for the 10,000 years before the mid-18th century. The current level is a 54% increase over that baseline — the highest concentration in 14 million years. In May 2024, the Mauna Loa Observatory recorded a monthly peak of nearly 427 ppm.

The IPCC's assessment is unambiguous: the warming caused by this accumulation is already killing people. Mortality from floods, drought, and storms is 15 times higher in the world's most climate-vulnerable regions than in wealthy countries with the resources to adapt. The World Bank estimates climate-related losses — incorporating non-economic costs such as lost well-being, displacement, and health — at $520 billion per year, more than double the conventional economic estimate.

In 2023 alone, climate-related hazards caused 26.4 million displacements. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre reports an average of 21.9 million annual internal displacements from weather-related events over the past decade. By the end of April 2024, UNHCR estimated total global forced displacement had exceeded 120 million people. The carbon that caused these displacements was primarily produced by the richest countries, the richest industries, and the richest individuals on Earth.

In July 1977, Exxon's senior scientist James Black delivered a private briefing to company management: fossil fuel combustion was warming the planet, and unrestrained emissions would produce dangerous consequences within decades. Exxon did not go public with this finding. It launched an internal research program to study it more.

By 1982, Exxon's environmental affairs office had produced an internal report marked "not to be distributed externally." The document stated there was "little doubt" that CO₂ concentrations were rising due to fossil fuel combustion, and that unrestrained emissions had the potential to cause "great irreversible harm to our planet." Exxon's climate models from this period, later assessed by peer-reviewed researchers, turned out to be accurate — they projected warming consistent with what has since been observed.

Beginning in the 1990s, Exxon reversed course. Rather than act on its own science, the company joined a coordinated industry effort to manufacture public doubt about climate change. Between 1998 and 2014, Exxon spent at least $30 million funding climate denial organizations including the Heartland Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute, and Heritage Foundation. The ExxonSecrets database has tracked over $33 million going to more than 60 organizations since 1998 alone.

In April 1998, representatives from Exxon, Chevron, and Southern Company participated in drafting the American Petroleum Institute's Global Climate Science Communications Action Plan — a strategy memo modeled explicitly on tobacco industry tactics. Its stated objective: "Victory will be achieved when average citizens understand 'uncertainties' in climate science." Not when the science is resolved. When the public is confused.

The legal reckoning came slowly. In 2019, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey filed a consumer and investor fraud lawsuit against Exxon, charging the company with systematically misleading Massachusetts consumers and investors about its role in climate change. California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed suit against Exxon, Shell, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, BP, and the API in 2023, alleging a "decades-long campaign of deception" about the link between fossil fuels and climate change. Both cases are ongoing.

From 1997 to 2017, Koch Industries and the Koch family funneled $127,006,756 to 92 organizations that advance attacks on climate science while presenting themselves as independent experts. The organizations include the Heartland Institute, Americans for Prosperity, the Cato Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and dozens of smaller think tanks and academic centers designed to give industry-funded denial the appearance of scholarly legitimacy.

The strategy was not improvised. It was adapted directly from the tobacco industry's decades-long campaign to manufacture doubt about the health risks of smoking. The 1998 API memo lays out the playbook explicitly: identify scientists willing to dispute the consensus, place skeptical op-eds in newspapers, train journalists to treat climate science as "controversial," and measure success by confusion rather than truth.

The Heartland Institute received at least $60,000 from Koch foundations and additional funds from ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel interests. Its annual International Conference on Climate Change — branded as a scientific gathering — assembled contrarian researchers and policy advocates to amplify the message that climate change is uncertain, overstated, or beneficial. The conferences continued for years after the scientific consensus had been effectively settled.

The outcome of this investment was not scientific disagreement. It was political paralysis. The United States failed to pass binding climate legislation during every Congress from 2009 forward. The cap-and-trade bill that passed the House in 2009 died in the Senate, in part due to the coordinated advocacy of Americans for Prosperity, which ran a $2 million "Hot Air Tour" targeting undecided senators. Koch Industries was the principal funder. Charles Koch's six-act dossier is documented in full here.

Oxfam's 2024 analysis, conducted with the Stockholm Environment Institute, found that the world's richest 1% are responsible for around 16% of global carbon emissions — the same share as the 5 billion people comprising the poorest 66% of humanity. The wealthiest 10% were responsible for 50% of total emissions. At the apex, a person from the richest 0.1% produces more carbon pollution in a single day than someone in the bottom 50% produces in an entire year.

For billionaires, the personal emissions from investments, jets, and yachts are staggering by any comparison. The average billionaire holds an investment portfolio that produces 1.9 million tonnes of CO₂ annually — nearly 40% of billionaire investments analyzed by Oxfam are in highly polluting industries: oil, mining, shipping, and cement. The investment emissions alone are roughly equivalent to 400,000 average American households.

The personal consumption numbers compound this:

• Jeff Bezos: Two private jets collectively emitted 2,908 tonnes of CO₂ in a year. His Koru sailing superyacht — at $500 million, the world's largest — emits an additional 7,154 tonnes annually. Combined: roughly 207 years of emissions for an average person.
• Elon Musk: His two private jets produced 5,497 tonnes of CO₂ per year — equivalent to 834 years of average global per-capita emissions.
• Bill Gates: His Gulfstream G650 logged 435,342 miles across 273 flights in 2024, consuming 478,920 gallons of jet fuel and emitting 4,787 tonnes of CO₂. Gates has written books on climate change.

Oxfam's most direct formulation: fifty of the world's richest billionaires produce more carbon through their investments, private jets, and yachts in just over 90 minutes than the average person produces in their entire lifetime. The richest 1%'s emissions in 2030 are projected to be 22 times greater than what is compatible with the Paris Agreement's 1.5°C target.

Climate change is not an abstract future risk. In 2023, climate-related hazards — floods, storms, wildfires, droughts — caused 26.4 million displacements. Over the past decade, the average annual figure has been 21.9 million. These numbers do not include long-term relocation driven by sea level rise or desertification, which are ongoing and accelerating.

The IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report documents that mortality from floods, drought, and storms is 15 times higher in highly vulnerable regions than in wealthy industrialized countries. The populations absorbing this mortality — in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, Small Island Developing States — are responsible for a negligible fraction of historical cumulative emissions. The atmosphere does not distinguish between perpetrators and victims.

The Loss and Damage Fund, operationalized at COP28 in 2023 and formally launched in 2024, was hailed as a breakthrough: for the first time, wealthy nations formally acknowledged their obligation to compensate climate-vulnerable countries for irreversible losses. The fund was capitalized at approximately $700 million — against estimated annual losses in the trillions of dollars. At COP29, the agreed commitment rose to $300 billion per year by 2035, a figure climate advocates described as critically insufficient.

The math of who caused the warming and who absorbs the cost is not ambiguous. The United States and European Union are responsible for the largest shares of cumulative historical CO₂ emissions. Within those countries, the wealthiest individuals and corporations — the ones who funded the denial campaigns, opposed the legislation, and flew 5,000-tonne jets — bear the largest share of annual emissions. The farmers in Bangladesh losing crops to saltwater intrusion, the families displaced by flooding in Pakistan, the island nations watching their coastlines dissolve: they did not make these choices. They were made by people with private jets and lobbying budgets.

The pattern is not complicated. The fossil fuel industry funds denial organizations. Those organizations fund political campaigns. Those campaigns elect legislators who oppose climate legislation. The same legislators receive direct campaign contributions from the same fossil fuel companies. The regulatory agencies that should enforce environmental law are staffed by industry alumni who return to industry after their government service. The result is a closed circuit: harm without accountability, profit without consequence.

Every major federal climate bill has been defeated or gutted in this loop. The cap-and-trade bill passed the House in 2009 and died in the Senate. The Clean Power Plan was enjoined by courts and later revoked. The Inflation Reduction Act, passed in 2022, is the most significant climate legislation in US history — and it was enacted only after the industry's preferred Senate proxy, Joe Manchin (recipient of more fossil fuel industry donations than any other senator), extracted significant concessions and blocked stronger measures for two years.

The litigation record is similar. Exxon's Massachusetts fraud case has survived motions to dismiss and will proceed to trial. California's multi-company fraud suit is in its early stages. But litigation is not a substitute for policy: by the time any verdict produces meaningful industry reform, the accumulation of CO₂ already in the atmosphere will continue to drive warming for decades.

The through-line from the 1977 Exxon briefing to the 422.8 ppm reading in 2024 is not a story of ignorance. It is a story of deliberate choice: to know, to lie, and to profit. The people who made those choices are still here. Their companies reported record profits in 2022 and 2023. Their jets are still flying. Their yachts are still at anchor. The Loss and Damage Fund has $700 million. The tab they created runs to the trillions.