https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/10/vested-interests-public-against-climate-science-fossil-fuel-lobby
How vested interests tried to turn the world against climate science
Felicity Lawrence, David Pegg and Rob Evans
Thu 10 Oct 2019
How vested interests tried to turn the world against climate science
For decades fossil fuel majors tried to fight the consensus – just as
big tobacco once disputed that smoking kills
In 1998 a public relations consultant called Joe Walker wrote to the
American Petroleum Institute (API), a trade association representing
major fossil fuel companies, with a proposed solution to a big problem.
In December the previous year, the UN had adopted the Kyoto protocol, an
international treaty that committed signatory countries to reducing
their greenhouse gas emissions in order to avert catastrophic climate
breakdown.
Reducing emissions represented a direct threat to the profits of fossil
fuel companies and the API was working on an industry response.
“As promised, attached is the Global Climate Science Communications Plan
that we developed during our workshop last Friday,” Walker wrote. The
workshop had involved senior executives from fossil fuel companies,
including the oil multinationals Exxon – later part of ExxonMobil – and
Chevron, and the gas and coal utility Southern Company, and a handful of
rightwing thinktanks.
Walker outlined a vision of a comprehensive, international campaign to
change public opinion on the climate crisis by casting doubt on the
scientific research, presenting it as unreliable when the overwhelming
majority of scientists had reached consensus.
The communications plan involved finding sympathetic scientists,
identifying thinktanks to fund that would produce helpful reports, and
working through supposed grassroots groups to hold debates questioning
the consensus on global heating, along with a constant flow of media
briefings manufacturing uncertainty.
The plan sounded much like a 1960s PR campaign devised by the tobacco
industry to delay controls by questioning the science showing that
smoking killed. Some of the people involved were in fact tobacco
campaign veterans.
The fossil fuel industry had been making use of its lobbying group, the
Global Climate Coalition, since 1989 to stress the uncertainties of
climate science. But by the late 1990s companies such as BP and Shell
were beginning to withdraw from it as public doubt about the problem
became increasingly untenable in the face of the evidence.
“Project goal: a majority of the American public, including industry
leadership, recognises that significant uncertainties exist in climate
science,” the 1998 Walker API memo began. A series of strategic goals
was elaborated. It said “victory will be achieved when … recognition of
uncertainties becomes part of the conventional wisdom” and “those
promoting the Kyoto treaty on the basis of extant science appear to be
out of touch with reality”.
After the memo was leaked to the New York Times, the industry said the
plan was only a proposal and was never put into effect.
Climate campaigners such as Greenpeace say they believe a highly
organised effort by the fossil fuel industry to question climate
science, involving scientists and some thinktanks in receipt of fossil
fuel industry funding, nevertheless succeeded in the following years in
shifting public opinion away from urgent action.
In 2010 the American sociologists Riley Dunlap and Aaron McCright
identified conservative thinktanks, along with US conservative
politicians, media and fossil fuel corporations, as crucial components
in a “denial machine” that emerged in the 1990s.
The activity of this machine would peak when the industry’s financial
interests came under threat, most notably in the years after 2007 and
the election of Barack Obama, who had pledged to regulate and cap emissions.
Robert Brulle, a professor of sociology and environmental science at
Drexel University in Pennsylvania, published the first peer-reviewed
study in 2013 of who was funding what he called the climate change
counter-movement that delayed action on the crisis. He found that
between 2003 and 2010 more than $500m had been donated by private
conservative philanthropic foundations to organisations whose output
included material disputing the consensus.
Thinktanks, trade associations and front groups were a key part of the
effort, he concluded, with their major funders including foundations
affiliated to the fossil fuel magnates the Koch brothers, ExxonMobil,
and the ultra-conservative Scaife and Bradley foundations.
Brulle also found evidence of a trend to conceal the sources of funding
once campaign groups such as the Union of Concerned Scientists,
Greenpeace and the Climate Disinformation Database started tracking what
they called dark money to climate denial from the mid-2000s.
In the second half of that decade, Koch, Scaife, Bradley and ExxonMobil
foundation funding to organisations involved in propagating doubt
declined while donations to the same organisations via two anonymised
vehicles, the Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, increased rapidly.
Among the thinktanks most identified with spreading doubt are the
Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Marshall Institute (which folded
in 2015), the Cato Institute, the Heartland Institute, the Heritage
Foundation and the campaign group Americans for Prosperity.
Elsewhere the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Global Warming
Policy Foundation have been prominent publishers of material questioning
the consensus on climate science in the UK. These organisations fiercely
dispute that any of their work constitutes organised climate change denial.
Richmond v Chevron: the California city taking on its most powerful polluter
Read more
Americans for Prosperity, which has received a very substantial part of
its funding from the Kochs, helped make resistance to action on climate
a feature of Tea Party rallies in the US.
The counter-movement against action wound up to fever pitch in 2009 when
it looked as though Obama and the US would sign up to UN climate
protocols after the Copenhagen summit due at the end of that year.
Before the summit, individual independent climate experts found
themselves subject to devastating attacks. Scientists at the University
of East Anglia’s prestigious Climate Research Unit had their emails
hacked. The contents of the emails were circulated, with the information
they contained having been extracted in a way that suggested the
scientists had manipulated their data. A police investigation failed to
establish who the hackers were.
The rightwing media labelled it “climategate” and several thinktanks
promoted the story enthusiastically. Multiple inquiries would later
exonerate the scientists but by then the damage was done; the public’s
faith in climate science had been measurably dented.
Half a decade later some fossil fuel industry funding of climate
contrarian science was exposed, when Greenpeace found out via freedom of
information requests that a prominent academic at the
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Willie Soon, had attracted
more than $1.2m in payments over 14 years from ExxonMobil, Southern
Company, the API and a Koch foundation, to the centre for his work. Soon
doubted the scientific consensus that emissions were the principal cause
of global heating.
He is now an affiliate of the Heartland Institute. Soon strenuously
denied that his industry funders had any influence over his conclusions
and the Heartland Institute said he was not even aware of who some of
the donors to the centre were, making a conflict of interest impossible.
There has been a noticeable moderation of views from those previously
involved in questioning the science of climate change. Several now
acknowledge global heating is caused by human activity but have shifted
focus to arguing that the market and technological innovation rather
than government action or international treaties curbing emissions are
the best ways to tackle it.
The director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s (CEI) Center for
Energy and Environment, Myron Ebell, for example, told the Guardian:
“CEI believes strongly that the policies being proposed by climate
alarmists to deal with global warming pose much greater threats to human
flourishing than do the effects of global warming. Abundant, affordable
energy is a necessary condition of human wellbeing but the global
energy-rationing policies being pursued, like those in the Paris climate
treaty, threaten to consign billions of people around the world to
energy poverty and perpetual economic stagnation.”
ExxonMobil, Chevron, Southern Company and the API all said they
recognised the seriousness of the climate crisis and the need for
business, governments and consumers to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The API said the industry as a whole had invested billions of dollars in
zero- and low-carbon technologies. Chevron and Southern Company said
they had ambitious targets to reduce their carbon footprints. ExxonMobil
said its position on climate science in the past had been
misrepresented, and that claims regarding what it knew and when had been
debunked. None of the companies responded to questions on the
communications plan and funding of organisations whose output included
doubting the science.
The Koch, Scaife and Bradley Foundations Donors Trust, Donors Capital
Fund and Americans for Prosperity did not respond to requests for comment.
The thinktanks said the criticisms levelled at them by climate activists
and critics seriously mischaracterised their positions. They said the
views they published were those of individual affiliates rather than
institutional ones. They added that they respected their donors’ privacy
but the source of their money did not influence their research or
output, which was completely independent. The Heritage Foundation said
allegations it had denied climate science were “seriously inaccurate”.
It accepted “the climate is changing, the planet is warming and that
humans are playing a role”. Instead it described itself as “sceptics of
climate catastrophism and costly policies that will drive energy prices
higher”.
The Cato Institute said it had never been in the business of “promoting
climate science denial”; it did not dispute human activity’s impact on
the climate, but believed it was minimal.
=====================================
To subscribe, unsubscribe, turn vacation mode on or off,
or carry out other user-actions for this list, visit
https://www.freelists.org/list/keiths-list
Note: new climate change website is now in pre-launch
Visit https://www.10n10.ca/e/index.shtml