Inside Story Reporters Mine a Rich Vein of Who Knew What, When, on Climate


InsideClimate News, a Pulitzer Prize-winning nonprofit dedi- cated to covering climate change, energy and the environment, is known for going deep into stories. For its 2015 investigation, “Exxon: The Road Not Taken,” reporters Neela Banerjee, John H. Cushman, Jr., David Hasemyer and Lisa Song spent eight months painstakingly documenting Exxon’s work in the early days of emerging climate science and tracking down its scientists, some after almost four decades. The 2015 series has already won several prizes, including first place in environmental reporting from the Scripps Howard Foundation and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service Journal- ism and the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting. SEJournal’s Beth Daley recently caught up with Baner- jee to talk about the project.


SEJournal: How did the idea originate to explore what Exxon knew about global warming?


Neela Banerjee: At our January 2015 staff retreat, founder and publisher David Sassoon proposed that


umented. All the earlier reporting done by loads of reporters and watchdogs, such as ExxonSecrets.org, showed that starting in the late 1980s, Exxon joined the Global Climate Coalition to halt reg- ulatory efforts to cut emissions from fossil fuels. But who decided that the company needed to take that approach, why and when and what kind of internal debate there might have been: our reporting so far has not exposed that. SEJournal: What were the biggest challenges to reporting the


story?


Exxon researchers contributed key climate modeling to a 1985 Energy Department study that projected significant global warming, and said some climate change was already locked in.


we look into what the fossil fuel industry knew about climate change, when they knew it and what they did with that knowledge. He was inspired by accounts he’d been reading about BP’s scien- tists in the 1990s coming to accept climate science and convincing their CEO to do as well.


He’d been to a journalism conference in fall 2014 where he


was urged to look for climate science whistleblowers within the fossil fuel industry. David was jazzed about the idea. The rest of us were far more skeptical that it would be anything more than a wild goose chase. That said, we were intrigued and thought we should at least poke around a bit. Initially, reporters looked at Shell, BP, Exxon, the coal industry


and the American Petroleum Institute. We thought that fossil fuel industry scientists would probably be active in the 1990s, as BP’s were. We focused more on Exxon when former federal scientist Mike MacCracken told InsideClimate reporter Dave Hasemyer that Exxon was doing solid peer-reviewed research with top academics as early as 1983. Then I found evidence of Exxon’s ambitious re- search efforts in the late 1970s, and that’s when the focus really tightened on the company. SEJournal: In your reporting, where do you see the most crit- ical moment when Exxon turned a climate research issue into a po- litical one?


Banerjee: It wasn’t our research that showed that shift. In some ways, the turn to shaping the narrative was already well doc-


Banerjee: The biggest challenge was the fact that the events that interested us most occurred almost 40 years ago, so many peo- ple we wanted to speak to were dead or they are quite elderly and ill with dementia and Alzheimer’s and there- fore in no condition to talk. We also found a fair number of folks who didn’t want to talk. SEJournal: What surprised you the most during the reporting? Banerjee: The fact that people did talk and that we gathered the documents we did. I


Graphic courtesy of DoE


was amazed at how much people remembered of projects they’d done 35 years earlier. You could tell that they’d recalled things so clearly — which were then supported by documents and interviews with others — because the work had been so exciting and mean- ingful for them.


More than anything, I was stunned to discover that Exxon took climate science seriously, and they wanted to be a leader in the field. They felt that by doing rigorous science, they would get a seat at the table when politicians and regulators crafted the inevitable pol- icy response to climate. It was so poignant to see that they had once considered a constructive approach when we know now that the tack Exxon eventually took was far different. I felt like I was look- ing back on history and got a glimpse of how things could have been, and that’s a rare and moving opportunity. SEJournal: For many journalists, climate change can be chal- lenging to report on because so many stories feel familiar. What advice do you have to look at the issue through a fresh prism? Banerjee: I think investigative work on climate is always a rich vein to mine: Why do politicians behave a certain way? Why are companies saying what they are? Can you follow the money? Who stands to gain by halting sensible action on climate change? Who stands to gain by certain projects going forward that damage the climate?


SEJournal: Can you explain how the team worked together Continued on page 20


9 SEJournal Summer 2016


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