Big Oil knew it was destroying coral reefs

Fossil fuel companies knew since at least the 1980s that their products would decimate coral reefs, new research shows.

Marine species thriving in the Great Barrier Reef, the largest living structure on Earth. Photo by Francesco Ungaro on Unsplash

When biologist Terry Hughes showed devastating aerial surveys of mass bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef to his students back in 2016, they wept. They discovered 93% of the largest living structure on Earth, stretching for more than 1,400 miles off Australia’s northeastern coast, suffered some degree of bleaching.

“It broke my heart to see so many corals dying on northern reefs on the Great Barrier Reef,” Hughes, director of the Arc Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University in Queensland, Australia, said then.

“With rising temperatures due to global warming, it’s only a matter of time before we see more of these events,” he added. Since that third global coral bleaching event from 2014 to 2017, the world has already gone through its fourth global coral bleaching event, which has officially gone down as the largest, most destructive, and most widespread mass bleaching event on record.

This catastrophe is a direct symptom of oceans warming at an alarming rate, driven by a century of fossil fuel production. For decades, major oil, gas, and coal companies have extracted resources, encroached on Indigenous lands, and pumped planet-warming pollution into the atmosphere. While many journalists have long documented that Big Oil was well aware it was driving a global climate crisis, a striking new dimension of the industry’s knowledge has just come to light.

New research published this week by the Oxford Sustainable Law Programme reveals that major fossil fuel companies knew since at least the 1980s that their products would specifically decimate global coral reefs.

The industry understood that its greenhouse gas emissions would trigger the exact formula for reef destruction that Hughes and the rest of the world are seeing today: extreme marine heatwaves, rapid ocean acidification, and intensified storms.

“As coral reefs around the world are killed by marine heatwaves and other effects of climate change — destroying ecologies, cultures, livelihoods, and enormous economic value — the fossil fuel industry’s historical awareness of this global tipping point is increasingly important,” said lead author Benjamin Franta, senior research fellow in climate litigation at the Oxford Sustainable Law Programme and founding head of the Climate Litigation Lab.

Big Oil knew since the 1980’s

By mapping out corporate records from the late 1970s and 1980s using artificial intelligence, researchers identified key documents proving that top officials and scientists at major fossil fuel companies including ExxonMobil and Shell explicitly foresaw the destruction of marine ecosystems.

One instance mentioned in the study was when James Black, Exxon’s research and engineering scientist in 1978, briefed the U.S. Department of Energy about the need to determine whether shallow-water carbonates, like corals, were dissolving due to rising carbon dioxide levels.

By the early 1980s, Exxon ran into a major dilemma with a newly discovered gas field near the Natuna Islands in the South China Sea, which contained over 70% carbon dioxide. If pumped into the atmosphere, Exxon knew it would make the field the largest point source of carbon pollution in the world, industry documents show. As an alternative, Exxon modeled an idea that would inject carbon emissions 140 meters deep into the ocean. They eventually discovered this would spike ocean acidification across the area, dissolving the calcium carbonate structures that corals and shellfish rely on to survive.

Oil and gas production contributes to air pollution and the climate crisis. Photo by Patrick Hendry on Unsplash

Meanwhile, a confidential 1986 internal memo by Shell’s “Greenhouse Effect Working Group” mapped out the exact mechanics of ocean acidification, warning that adding carbon emissions would cause ocean acidification, leading to massive marine die-offs and loss of natural barriers like corals.

Shell wrote at the time that the “dissolution of shells and corals and subsequently local but massive deaths of organisms... is therefore not unrealistic.” The report also accurately predicted that rapid ocean acidification in shallow coastal zones would destroy coral reefs and sediments. They warned this would wipe out natural shoreline protections and could lead to the complete “disappearance of complete coral islands,” the study showed.

Big Oil denied and downplayed threats

“We also found that, even decades later, the fossil fuel industry supported public-facing disinformation denying and downplaying the destructive effects of their products on coral reefs,” Franta, the study’s lead author, said.

As the scientific consensus on the climate crisis solidified, fossil fuel companies launched sophisticated public relations campaigns to muddy the waters, creating authoritative-looking reports designed to mimic official government science while downplaying the catastrophic threat to marine ecosystems like coral reefs.

In 2012, the Cato Institute, a U.S.-based thinktank heavily funded by ExxonMobil, the American Petroleum Institute, the Koch family, and other major players in the industry, published a 200-page report titled “Addendum: Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States.”

The report deliberately used the exact same title and nearly identical cover graphics as a seminal 2009 report by the U.S. Global Change Research Program. This is the original government report that had been the legal foundation for the Environmental Protection Agency’s ruling that greenhouse gases threaten public health, also known as the “endangerment finding,” which the Trump administration has since repealed.

Cato’s “addendum” was designed to neutralize that ruling by reassuring the public that climate impacts had “little national significance.” It also directly targeted the growing alarm over coral bleaching and ocean acidification by denying the crisis, normalizing ecosystem shifts, and claiming corals would actually benefit — all public disinformation.

“These findings are important, but not surprising,” said Jessica Vandenberg, an environmental social scientist at the University of Rhode Island and research fellow at Ocean Nexus, who is not involved with the study. “They fit a long pattern in which industries with harmful products or practices have known far more about the risks than the public while using that knowledge gap to shape the regulatory landscape, deflect accountability, and protect profits.”

The truth

Vandenberg, who has studied coral reef restoration, said that this issue goes beyond what fossil fuel companies knew, but also that “the costs of that obstruction are born unevenly by communities that depend on reef ecosystems,” reflecting a major power imbalance in which multinational corporations have the resources to fund research and influence public messaging, “while frontline communities are left to absorb the environmental and social consequences of delayed action.”

The stark reality is that mass coral bleaching and mortality are linked to warmer sea surface temperatures, caused by a climate crisis fueled by Big Oil. Unless the world begins making deep cuts to planet-warming pollution by phasing out the burning of fossil fuels, the scientists predict that all coral reefs would bleach around the world.

But it’s not all doom and gloom: New research presented at the recent Our Ocean Conference in Mombasa, Kenya, found there are close to 166,000 square kilometers of reefs around the world that were potentially thriving under extreme temperatures in the Bahamas, Cuba, Australia, Indonesia, and the Philippines.

“It provides some hope,” Craig Dahlgren, executive director of the Perry Institute for Marine Science, who was not involved in the analysis, told the CBC last month. “Things are bad, but we do have places [where] there’s something about them and the corals there that we can learn from, build off of, and help ensure there’s a future for coral reefs.”