Big Oil v the World

The story of what the fossil fuel industry knew about climate change more than four decades ago.

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 industry went on to mount a campaign to sow doubt about the science of climate change, the consequences of which we are living through today.

2022 is set to be a year of unprecedented climate chaos across the planet. As the world's leading climate scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issue new warnings about climate change and the soaring cost of fuel highlights the world's ongoing dependence on fossil fuels, this series details exactly how we got here.

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 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 climate action, but the billionaire Koch brothers made an effort to block the new President's attempts to pass climate change legislation, and climate denialism became the mainstream position of the Republican Party. A lawyer who worked for Kochs through this period speaks on camera for the first time.

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 promoted as a cleaner energy source. But Ingraffea explains how he later came to regret his work, when he realised that gas could be even worse for climate change than coal and oil.

Dar Lon Chang, a former ExxonMobil engineer, speaks for the first time on camera alleging that as the company increased its natural gas operations, it was not sufficiently monitoring methane leaks that were contributing to climate change. Now, after a year of unprecedented wildfires, drought, and other climate-related disasters, multiple lawsuits are being brought in US courts in efforts to hold Big Oil legally accountable for the climate crisis.