> I find it strange to blame the industry just to absolve everyone else.

Putting the blame on "everyone else" was (is?) actually a propaganda strategy:

> A dominant public narrative about climate change is that “we are all to blame.” Another is that society must inevitably rely on fossil fuels for the foreseeable future. How did these become conventional wisdom? We show that one source of these arguments is fossil fuel industry propaganda. ExxonMobil advertisements worked to shift responsibility for global warming away from the fossil fuel industry and onto consumers. They also said that climate change was a “risk,” rather than a reality, that renewable energy is unreliable, and that the fossil fuel industry offered meaningful leadership on climate change. We show that much of this rhetoric is similar to that used by the tobacco industry. Our research suggests warning signs that the fossil fuel industry is using the subtle micro-politics of language to downplay its role in the climate crisis and to continue to undermine climate litigation, regulation, and activism.

* https://www.cell.com/one-earth/fulltext/S2590-3322(21)00233-...

> "It's incredibly subtle, and frankly, a bit patronizing because it's gaslighting to insist that consumers are responsible, and then present the company as a trustworthy innovator who we should rely on to make things better," Supran said.

* https://www.cbc.ca/radio/whatonearth/exxonmobil-blames-clima...

Especially because at the same time 'the industry' was actively spreading FUD about climate change:

> The fossil fuel industry has perpetrated a multi-decade, multibillion dollar disinformation, propaganda and lobbying campaign to delay climate action by confusing the public and policymakers about the climate crisis and its solutions. This has involved a remarkable array of advertisements – with headlines ranging from “Lies they tell our children” to “Oil pumps life” – seeking to convince the public that the climate crisis is not real, not human-made, not serious and not solvable. The campaign continues to this day.

[…]

> Between 1996 and 1998, for instance, Mobil ran 12 advertorials timed with the 1997 UN Kyoto negotiations that questioned whether the climate crisis is real and human-made and 10 that downplayed its seriousness. “Reset the alarm,” one ad suggested. “Let’s not rush to a decision at Kyoto … We still don’t know what role man-made greenhouse gases might play in warming the planet.”

* https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/nov/18/the-forg...

(The article has scans of the various ad campaigns.)

> As if they had been in a somehow privileged position to know. To me it seems like there was some early research and then more and more research, so that by the 80s there was a clear picture that included the likely scope of the consequences.

They were in a privileged position, as their models from the 1970s are as accurate (or more so) than many of the models that are available academically today. They knew what would happen in the 1970s and spent the last forty years denying it.

> Despite that, the technology to move away from fossil fuels at scale was just not there yet.

Perhaps the technology was not developed because no one felt a need for it—partly because the reality of climate change was downplayed or denied. And if we (as a society) had known about its importance we could have allocated more resources in R&D.