Submission + - 'What we now know they lied': how big oil companies betrayed us all (theguardian.com)
XXongo writes: The Frontline series The Power of Big Oil looks at how the oil industry successfully set up a campaign to discredit climate science and targetting individual politicians to vote against measures to curb climate change. Former Republican senator Chuck Hagel reflects on his part in killing US ratification of the Kyoto climate treaty, after a vigorous campaign by big oil to mischaracterise the Kyoto protocol as a threat to jobs and the economy while falsely claiming that China and India could go on polluting to their heart’s content. The resolution effectively put a block on US ratification of any climate treaty ever since. A quarter of a century later, Hagel acknowledges that the vote was wrong, and blames the oil industry for malignly claiming the science of climate change was not proved when companies such as Exxon and Shell already knew otherwise from their own research. “What we now know about some of these large oil companies’ positions: they lied. And yes, I was misled. They had evidence in their own institutions that countered what they were saying publicly. I mean they, lied,” he told the documentary-makers.
