science

Big Oil v the World episode 3: How the 2010s became another lost decade in the fight against climate change – as the move to natural gas delayed a transition to more renewable sources of energy. Engineer Tony Ingraffea explains how, in the 1980s, he helped develop a new technique for extracting gas and oil from shale rock, which ultimately became known as ‘fracking’. It was to unleash vast new reserves of fossil fuels and was promoted as a cleaner energy source. But Ingraffea explains how he later came to regret his work when he realised that gas could be

Big Oil v the World episode 2: Even as the science grew more certain, the oil industry continued to block action to tackle climate change in the new millennium. In a revelatory interview, Christine Todd Whitman, George W Bush’s former environment chief, tells the story of how the industry successfully lobbied President Bush to reverse course on his campaign promise to regulate carbon emissions.     Tensions grew between two of the world’s biggest oil companies, ExxonMobil and BP, after the latter publicly called for action to tackle climate change. The election of Barack Obama provided hope for supporters of

Big Oil v the World episode 1: The story of what the fossil fuel industry knew about climate change more than four decades ago, as scientists working for Exxon reveal how they sounded the alarm about the effects of fossil fuels.     Scientists who worked for the biggest oil company in the world, Exxon, reveal the warnings they sounded in the 1970s and early 1980s about how fossil fuels would cause climate change – with potentially catastrophic effects. Drawing on thousands of newly discovered documents, the film goes on to chart in revelatory and forensic detail how the oil