Near the end of the first century AD, in the highlands of northern Spain, the Roman governor, philosopher, and naturalist Pliny the Elder watched as mining cleaved a landscape. “What happens is far beyond the work of giants,” he said. Throughout the province, he saw gold, silver, copper, iron, and lead mines where hillsides were “attacked” with iron wedges and hammers, and mountains “bored with corridors and galleries.” Those doing the excavating would not see the sunlight for months, and many of them died within the tunnels. Finally, once the rock was hollowed out, the miners would deliberately force a collapse, removing roof supports or even pumping tunnels full of water.
Pliny wrote of how the rock’s “own weight brings the shattered mountain down in widespread destruction, with a roar that can scarce be imagined by the mind of man and causing a rush of air powerful beyond belief. Nature lies in ruins before the eyes of the conquerors.” This style of mining, he said, was called Ruina Montium: the fall of mountains. It was imponderably tough, backbreaking work. The “stubborn” durability of the rock was surpassed only, he said, by “the most stubborn thing of all, the hunger for gold.”
For years Pliny had followed the progress of his empire’s extractivism with increasing disquiet. “We trace out all the veins of the earth,” he wrote, “we penetrate into her entrails, and seek for treasures in the abodes even of the Manes,” the subterranean world of the spirits of the dead. Certainly, the ghosts of Roman extraction have persisted. In just a few centuries the empire dug up and smelted so much copper that its toxic emissions reached the Arctic troposphere and came to fall in snow on Greenland’s ice sheet, where scientists in the 1990s found atmospheric pollutant levels in ice cores that weren’t exceeded until the later twentieth century. One of the largest copper mines of Imperial Rome, the Wadi Fanyan in Jordan, turned an entire landscape into an industrial wasteland that has continued to poison the surrounding environment up to the present day, with high concentrations of metal contamination from its original operations still found in the living tissues of plants and livestock.
Yet there were, he acknowledged, some uncertainties remaining—in particular over the speed at which the world’s oceans could absorb CO₂.
Pliny saw in the scale of these works the portents of some future tragedy. This “hunger for gold,” for wealth, and for status (the “most stubborn thing of all”), had, he lamented, already grown too strong for civilization to resist. “It is what is concealed from our view,” he wrote, objects “sunk far beneath” the surface of our world, “that urge us to our ruin, that send us to the very depths of hell. As the mind ranges in vague speculation, let us only consider, proceeding through all ages, as these operations are, when will be the end of thus exhausting the earth, and to what point will avarice finally penetrate!”
What’s the timescale on exhaustion? How far will the hunger for wealth go? Extraction is nothing new. We can follow it back millions of years, to our ancient ancestors first chipping flints out of rock faces and sharpening them into blades and utensils. But mass extraction fueled by unchecked avarice? Extraction propelled by a global financial system that demands perpetual growth, even unto infinity? That is something different. Something that the “veins of the earth”— which, if they replenish at all, replenish on timescales far, far beyond human civilization—may not bear.
Pliny’s Roman Empire gave us Ruina Montium. Today, however, we are forced to confront the possibility that the convergence of the modern empires of economics, politics, and extraction has metastasized into Ruina Planetae: a whole planet on the cusp of “lying in ruins before the eyes of its conquerors.” Before us. How did we get here? And how do we—or even can we—avoid this fate?
In August 1979, exactly a year after I was born into oil-boom Shetland, one of the world’s biggest oil supertankers, berthed in a refinery dockyard on another island—the rather more tropical setting of Aruba in the Caribbean—was being fitted out with a state-of-the-art climate-monitoring laboratory.
The supertanker was called the Esso Atlantic, and it belonged to the oil giant Exxon. Two years earlier, in 1977, James Black, a senior company scientist, had given a presentation to the Exxon Management Committee—including the company chairman, president, and senior vice presidents—telling them that there was “general scientific agreement” that mankind was warming the global climate “through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels”—to such an extent that it could ultimately threaten the future of humanity.
Over the following year Black refined his presentation for more widespread internal company distribution. He included figures indicating that the doubling of carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere could increase average global temperatures by 2 to 3 degrees Celsius, and perhaps as much as 10 degrees Celsius at the poles. “Some countries would benefit but others would have their agricultural output reduced or destroyed,” he said. “Man has a time window of five to ten years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical.” Yet there were, he acknowledged, some uncertainties remaining—in particular over the speed at which the world’s oceans could absorb CO₂.
This was where the floating laboratory on the Esso Atlantic came in. Exxon’s science division equipped the supertanker with custom-made instruments for detecting and measuring oceanic and atmospheric CO₂. As it transported oil back and forth between the Gulf of Mexico and the Persian Gulf, the ship simultaneously gathered samples from the air and the water—the key part of a three-year, $1 million research project that combined empirical data gathering with sophisticated climate modeling. As Harold Weinberg, an Exxon research manager, put it in an internal memo: What could be more appropriate than that “the world’s leading energy company and leading oil company take the lead in trying to define whether a long-term CO₂ problem really exists, and if so, what counter measures would be appropriate”? It was a project, he continued, “aimed at benefiting mankind.”
Yet in the years that followed, Exxon’s messaging—internal and, in particular, external—changed.
Exxon’s scientists believed that they were already at a crucial moment—for their own company and, more broadly of course, for the planet. “Our goal,” said the supertanker project’s scientific manager, Henry Shaw, “was to complete the carbon cycle to understand where global carbon production would end up and then make forecasts of how the system would react in the future.” If the data from the Esso Atlantic showed that the world’s deep oceans had a high rate of CO₂ absorption, then it might allow Exxon and the wider fossil fuel industry to defer decisions on oil and gas production, and any energy transition, perhaps for generations. If, on the other hand, the absorption rate was low, and the capacity of the oceans as a carbon sink was limited, then, Shaw said, the Exxon scientists would deliver the “bad news” to the corporation.
That bad news duly came, amassed in multiple reports, internal memos, and data sets, including a series of graphs plotting historical and contemporary concentrations of atmospheric CO₂ alongside global temperatures, and showing how both were set to soar upward in the near future (these models, informed by the readings taken from the Esso Atlantic, have proven so accurate that they have tracked real changes in carbon dioxide and temperature almost perfectly over the forty years between then and now).
In 1982 a corporate document produced by the company’s environmental affairs department—circulated widely to Exxon management but marked not to be “distributed externally”—made it clear that preventing global warming “would require major reductions in fossil fuel consumption,” or “potentially catastrophic events” would begin to occur. Internal correspondence saw disputes over the timing and potential severity of these events—a 1981 communication between two Exxon climate researchers argued about just how “catastrophic” the impacts would be by the year 2030, with one believing they would be minimal, and the other suggesting that they could already be devastating for “a substantial fraction of the earth’s population.” While the company scientists acknowledged that gaps still remained in their understanding of the dynamics of climate change, there was broad consensus on the earth’s rapidly warming future, and the overwhelming reasons for it: Exxon’s own business.
Yet in the years that followed, Exxon’s messaging—internal and, in particular, external—changed. Out of the wealth of climate data that the company itself had generated, one word became preeminent: uncertainty. By 1988, company memos showed a pivot toward a public affairs strategy designed to “emphasise the uncertainty in scientific conclusions regarding the potential enhanced greenhouse effect.” That was the same year as the foundation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations body created to independently assess the science related to the world’s climate. When the IPCC produced its first report in 1990, it affirmed that the continued burning of fossil fuels made the warming of the planet “certain,” and recommended cuts of 60 to 80 percent of emissions to stabilize atmospheric concentrations of CO₂.
During the final session to agree the report’s summary for policymakers, Exxon’s chief climate researcher, Brian Flannery—attending as a representative of the International Petroleum Industries’ Environmental Conservation Association—argued that these cuts were far too severe “in the light of all the uncertainties about the behavior of carbon in the climate system.” (Five years earlier, Flannery had coauthored a paper for the U.S. Department of Energy that projected global warming of up to 6 degrees Celsius by the end of the twenty-first century unless greenhouse gas emissions were reduced. It was quite a shift in perspective).
If the models are “lousy,” it might mean the end of the company. If they are not, it means the end of the planet, or at least humanity’s place on it.
The IPCC report concluded that the threat to the planet was existential if the status quo continued. Exxon effectively concluded the opposite: that the threat to its own business—and to the fossil fuel industry in general—was existential if it didn’t continue. In 1989, Exxon cofounded the Global Climate Coalition (GCC), an alliance of many of the world’s largest energy companies—including the American Petroleum Institute, the National Coal Association, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—an organization that spent the next decade lobbying and campaigning against any government plans to curb emissions. In 1992 the GCC’s executive director wrote to the New York Times, emphasizing the “considerable debate” over whether or not burning fossil fuels really was “triggering a dangerous ‘global warming’ trend”; and then the Coalition produced a half-hour film called The Greening of Planet Earth, which claimed that increasing atmospheric CO₂ would actually boost crop yields and end world hunger.
Exxon’s new chief executive, Lee Raymond, used uncertainty as a mantra in his public speeches. In 1996 he told the Economic Club of Detroit that “currently, the scientific evidence is inconclusive as to whether human activities are having a significant effect on the global climate.” Speaking to the World Petroleum Congress in Beijing in 1997—just weeks before the Kyoto Protocol, the first international meeting of governments to actively agree to begin collective emissions reductions—he said that “we need to understand the issue better, and fortunately, we have time…It is highly unlikely that the temperature in the middle of the next century will be significantly affected whether policies are enacted now or 20 years from now.”
For over ten years the company ran a series of advertorials across major newspapers with headlines like UNSETTLED SCIENCE, WITH CLIMATE CHANGE WHAT WE DON’T KNOW CAN HURT US, and CLIMATE CHANGE: A DEGREE OF UNCERTAINTY. One advert placed in the Washington Post in 2000 criticized independent researchers for putting a “political cart before the scientific horse” and using “unreliable models” that were “not yet capable of predicting Earth’s global climate.” This so incensed the U.S. Federal Government’s chief scientist on global warming, Michael MacCraken, that he wrote directly to Exxon’s board of directors and their chief executive, Lee Raymond.
MacCraken’s great- grandfather had been chief legal counsel to the company’s founder, John D. Rockefeller (and had refused to take shares in the original company to ensure that his “opinions would not be tainted by the economic implications of his advice”). “What I rather imagine he would say,” MacCraken wrote of his great-grandfather, “is that you are on the wrong side of history, and you need to find a way to change your position.” As he put it, “to be in opposition to the key scientific findings is rather appalling for such an established and scientific organization.” What the company was doing, MacCraken said, “was equivalent to turning your back on the future and putting your head in the sand.”
Regardless, a full decade and a half later, Exxon’s new chief executive, Rex Tillerson, was still pushing the uncertainty line to a 2015 annual shareholders’ meeting. It was better to wait until the science was absolutely clear, Tillerson said. Because what if the company did act, and “it turns out our models are lousy, and we don’t get the effects we predict?” What if … Tillerson presented it as a zero-sum game. If the models are “lousy,” it might mean the end of the company. If they are not, it means the end of the planet, or at least humanity’s place on it. Presumably the shareholders would prefer the latter.
Exxon was far from alone in its historical awareness of CO₂ and rigorous research into its ongoing ecological impacts—and in its subsequent shift toward dismissing or denying the veracity of its own science. Researchers studying corporate archives have found similar evidence of detailed knowledge of the risks of carbon emissions in the 1970s, in the oil companies Total and Shell, and in Ford and General Motors; in the 1960s in the U.S. coal industry; and in the 1950s in the American Petroleum Institute.
So here is one answer to Pliny’s question. This is the point to which avarice will finally penetrate. To the opening up of a rift from nature so absolute that economics and vested interests float free from measurable reality. To the world’s largest energy companies taking the lead not in understanding the consequences of their businesses, but in arguing that there are no consequences. To the economics and politics of denial. To a world where the truth is whatever you want it to be. Or, rather, whatever your money wants it to be.
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From The Vanishing Earth. Used with the permission of the publisher, Bloomsbury. Copyright © 2026 by James Crawford
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