There is a worrisome absence from the public, media, and political spheres in America, of anger towards Exxon Mobil.

Despite being reported on by The Guardian, Inside Climate News, and The LA Times, it appears as if the general public is ignorant of what it is Exxon has done. Despite being a country that prides itself on a right to protest, to be represented by elected officials, and touts “justice for all,” there is an eerie silence regarding the fact that Exxon committed crimes against humanity and Earth itself.

"Exaggeration, surely," someone might say; Exxon didn’t murder anyone, and its only one company. True enough, the company did not physically injure anyone — besides the Valdez spill that dumped 11 million gallons of crude oil into US coastal waters. An accident, the spill doesn’t represent a nefarious or malicious crime, even if it did ruin an ecosystem. No, what was purposefully deceitful and emblematic of the corporate greed America so publicly purports to deride, was Exxon’s funding of Climate Change denial after finding, in the '70s by its own research, that carbon emission was warming the world.

Exxon, far from trying to test a theory, has actively financed efforts to refute their own research. In the '70s, the company —presumably still run by what could be designated "humans"— funded research into the potential threats of increased carbon emissions. The report by Inside Climate News doesn’t allege that Exxon found conflicting data on the subject, but rather exposes actual memos from the company’s own scientists that explicitly state the severity of the threat at hand.

A "skeptic" might assert that memos between the head of the research branch and the company’s board and President does not constitute proof — forcing their way to willful ignorance. To that statement, it might serve to mention that Exxon, endowed with this information, arranged the first world climate summit in order to tackle the issue head on. Strange that company would do so if its results on the matter were inconclusive — which, again, they were, as evidenced by the mountain of information compiled by Inside Climate News.

After that summit, however, something changed, and the strategy shifted from tackling climate change head on, to attacking its validity in order to continue profiting. Paying researchers, lobbyists, and politicians, Exxon went to work burying and complicating an issue they themselves uncovered. Beyond the ethical repugnance of political bribery, Exxon’s crime has been the profiteering on pollution that harms an entire world’s ecosystem.

Despite some attempts at calling for criminal charges, Exxon has walked away from revelations of scientific undermining, cultural manipulation, and outrightly lying to people who it affects regardless of their participation. There has been no greater corporate crime against the human race than the purposeful obfuscation of an issue that so ubiquitously affects it.

Tobacco companies lying under oath in regard to the carcinogenic effects of cigarettes pales in comparison to a company that has so fervently worked to undermine the very research it funded. Exxon knew over 30 years ago that increased CO2 emission would warm the planet, raise sea levels, and threaten countless lives — they didn’t cover this up; they paid people to make the issue controversial so that nothing could be done about it.

There is no metric by which we can fully evaluate the harm of climate change; estimates of sea level and temperature rise vary in the specifics of a consensus that the cost will be dear. Exxon didn’t cause climate change, and they certainly are not the only contributor either; that is not the subject at hand. What Exxon did was delay the acceptance of climate change within the public and political sphere, to the point where the politicians they paid off now believe the now-revealed fallacies they were told to parrot relentlessly.

Purposefully skewing public perception, hindering scientific acceptance and trustworthiness in the public eye, and adding to political gridlock, Exxon’s effort to cling to a profiting industry has wrought a cost on the world we can only guess at. If politicians want to play at condemning corporate greed, they should start by levying charges against this oil giant that has been such a cancer on the United States and the world at large.

Those who knowingly supported the obviously duplicitous agenda of Exxon in the political system should see their own penalties, but this company, the epitome of corporate greed, should be made to face the people it misled and took advantage of in court. We cannot allow people who sacrificed the safety of the world on the altar of capitalism to walk away unpunished as we try to mitigate the coming flood they assured us wasn’t coming.