[rad-green] The Greatest Scam in History: How the Energy Companies Took Us All

*https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/11/11/greatest-scam-history-how-energy-companies-took-us-all
<https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/11/11/greatest-scam-history-how-energy-companies-took-us-all>TomDispatch
        November 11, 2019The Greatest Scam in History: How the Energy
Companies Took Us AllScience failed to have the necessary impact in
significant part because of disinformation promoted by the major
fossil-fuel companies, which have succeeded in diverting attention from
climate change and successfully blocking meaningful action.by Naomi Oreskes*

[image: In 2006, for instance, the Royal Society of the United Kingdom
documented ExxonMobil’s funding of 39 organizations that promoted
“inaccurate and misleading” views of climate science. (Photo: Johnny
Silvercloud/cc/flickr)]

*In 2006, for instance, the Royal Society of the United Kingdom documented
ExxonMobil’s funding of 39 organizations that promoted “inaccurate and
misleading” views of climate science. (Photo: Johnny Silvercloud/cc/flickr)*

It's a tale for all time. What might be the greatest scam in history or, at
least, the one that threatens to take history down with it. Think of it as
the climate-change scam that beat science, big time.

Scientists have been seriously investigating the subject of human-made
climate change since the late 1950s and political leaders have been
discussing it for nearly as long. In 1961, Alvin Weinberg, the director of
the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, called carbon dioxide one of the "big
problems" of the world "on whose solution the entire future of the human
race depends." Fast-forward nearly 30 years and, in 1992, President George
H.W. Bush signed the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC),
promising
<https://www.nytimes.com/1992/06/13/world/the-earth-summit-excerpts-from-speech-by-bush-on-action-plan.html>
"concrete
action to protect the planet."

Today, with Puerto Rico still recovering from Hurricane Maria and fires
burning across California, we know that did not happen. Despite hundreds of
scientific reports and assessments, tens of thousands of peer-reviewed
scientific papers, and countless conferences on the issue, man-made climate
change is now a living crisis on this planet. Universities, foundations,
churches, and individuals have indeed divested from fossil fuel companies
and, led by
<https://www.businessinsider.com/greta-thunberg-bio-climate-change-activist-2019-9#thunberg-partially-credits-her-aspergers-syndrome-for-her-fierce-activist-nature-she-was-diagnosed-four-years-ago-3>
a
16-year-old Swedish girl, citizens across the globe have taken to the
streets
<https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/sep/27/climate-crisis-6-million-people-join-latest-wave-of-worldwide-protests>
to
express their outrage. Children have refused
<https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/20/climate/global-climate-strike.html> to
go to school on Fridays to protest the potential loss of their future. And
if you need a measure of how long some of us have been at this, in
December, the Conference of Parties to the UNFCCC will meet for the *25th
time*.

Scientists working on the issue have often told me that, once upon a time,
they assumed, if they did their jobs, politicians would act upon the
information. That, of course, hasn't happened. Anything but, across much of
the planet. Worse yet, science failed to have the necessary impact in
significant part because of disinformation promoted by the major
fossil-fuel companies, which have succeeded in diverting attention from
climate change and successfully blocking meaningful action.

Making Climate Change Go Away

Much focus <https://exxonknew.org/> has been put on ExxonMobil's history of
disseminating disinformation, partly because of the documented
discrepancies between what that company said in public about climate change
and what its officials said (and funded) in private. Recently, a trial
<http://climatecasechart.com/case/people-v-exxon-mobil-corporation/> began
in New York City accusing the company of misleading its investors, while
Massachusetts
<https://www.mass.gov/lists/attorney-generals-office-exxon-investigation>
 is prosecuting
<https://www.masslive.com/news/2019/10/read-massachusetts-attorney-general-maura-healeys-lawsuit-against-exxon-mobil.html>
ExxonMobil
for misleading consumers as well.

If only it had just been that one company, but for more than 30 years, the
fossil-fuel industry and its allies have denied the truth about
anthropogenic global warming. They have systematically misled the American
people and so purposely contributed to endless delays in dealing with the
issue by, among other things, discounting and disparaging climate science,
mispresenting scientific findings, and attempting to discredit climate
scientists. These activities are documented
<https://www.climatechangecommunication.org/america-misled/> in great
detail in *How Americans Were Deliberately Misled about Climate Change*, a
report I recently co-authored*, *as well as in my 2010 book
<https://www.amazon.com/dp/1608193942/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20> and
2014 film <https://sonyclassics.com/merchantsofdoubt/>, *Merchants of Doubt*
.

A key aspect of the fossil-fuel industry's disinformation campaign was the
mobilization of "third-party allies": organizations and groups with which
it would collaborate and that, in some cases, it would be responsible for
creating.

A key aspect of the fossil-fuel industry's disinformation campaign was the
mobilization of "third-party allies": organizations and groups with which
it would collaborate and that, in some cases, it would be responsible for
creating.

In the 1990s, these allied outfits included the Global Climate Coalition,
the Cooler Heads Coalition, Informed Citizens for the Environment, and the
Greening Earth Society. Like ExxonMobil, such groups endlessly promoted a
public message of denial and doubt: that we weren't really sure if climate
change was happening; that the science wasn't settled; that humanity could,
in any case, readily adapt at a later date to any changes that did occur;
and that addressing climate change directly would wreck the American
economy. Two of these groups—Informed Citizens for the Environment and the
Greening Earth Society—were, in fact, AstroTurf
<https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Astroturf> organizations, created
and funded by a coal industry trade association but dressed up to look like
grass-roots citizens' action organizations
<http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/UCSexxon_report.pdf>.

Similar messaging was pursued by a network of think tanks promoting free
market solutions to social problems, many with ties to the fossil-fuel
industry. These included the George C. Marshall Institute, the Cato
Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the American Enterprise
Institute, and the Heartland Institute. Often their politically motivated
contrarian claims were presented in formats that make them look like the
scientific reports whose findings they were contradicting.

In 2009, for instance, the Cato Institute issued a report that precisely
mimicked the format, layout, and structure of the government's U.S.
National Climate Assessment. Of course, it made claims thoroughly at odds
with the actual
<https://www.globalchange.gov/browse/reports/global-climate-change-impacts-united-states>
report's
science. The industry also promoted disinformation through its trade
associations, including the American Legislative Exchange Council, the
American Petroleum Institute, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National
Black Chamber of Commerce, and the National Association of Manufacturers.

Both think tanks and trade organizations have been involved in personal
attacks on the reputations of scientists. One of the earliest documented
was on climate scientist Benjamin Santer at the Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory who showed that the observed increase in global temperatures
could not be attributed to increased solar radiation. He served as the lead
author of the Second Assessment Report of the U.N.'s prestigious
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, responsible for the
1995 conclusion that "the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human
impact on the climate system."  Santer
<https://www.csldf.org/2017/12/26/perspectives-scientists-become-targets-ben-santer/%20%20https:/beta.prx.org/stories/95363>
became
the target of a vicious, arguably defamatory attack by physicists
<https://web.archive.org/web/20150815211135/http:/marshall.org/board-members/>
from
the George C. Marshall Institute and the Global Climate Coalition, who
accused him of fraud. Other climate scientists, including Michael Mann,
Jonathan Overpeck, Malcolm Hughes, Ray Bradley, Katharine Hayhoe, and, I
should note, myself, have been subject
<https://www.csldf.org/issues/scientists-stories/> to harassment,
investigation, hacked emails, and politically motivated
freedom-of-information attacks.

How to Play Climate Change for a Fool

When it came to industry disinformation, the role of third-party allies was
on full display at the House Committee on Oversight hearings on climate
change in late October. As their sole witness, the Republicans on that
committee invited Mandy Gunasekera, the founder and president of Energy45,
a group whose purpose, in its own words <https://www.energy45.org/>, is to
"support the Trump energy agenda."

Energy45 is part of a group known, bluntly enough, as the CO2 Coalition and
is a perfect example of what I've long thought of as zombie denialism in
which older players spouting industry arguments suddenly reappear in new
forms. In this case, in the 1990s and early 2000s, the George C. Marshall
Institute was a leader
<https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/George_C._Marshall_Institute> in
climate-change disinformation
<https://www.desmogblog.com/george-c-marshall-institute>. From 1974-1999,
its director, William O'Keefe, had also been the executive vice president
and later CEO of the American Petroleum Institute. The Marshall Institute
itself closed in 2015, only to re-emerge a few years later as the CO2
 Coalition.

The comments of Republican committee members offer a sense of just how
deeply the climate-change disinformation campaign is now lodged in the
heart of the Trump administration and congressional Republicans as 2019
draws to an end and the planet visibly heats. Consider just six of their
"facts":

1) *The misleading claim that climate change will be "mild and
manageable."* There
is no scientific evidence to support this. On the contrary, literally
hundreds of scientific reports over the past few decades, including those
U.S. National Climate Assessments, have affirmed that any warming above 2
degrees Centigrade will lead
<https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/06/SR15_Headline-statements.pdf>
to
grave and perhaps catastrophic effects on "health, livelihoods, food
security, water supply, human security, and economic growth." The U.N.'s
IPCC <https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/> has recently noted that avoiding the worst
<https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/06/SR15_Headline-statements.pdf>
impacts
of global warming will "require rapid and far-reaching transitions in
energy... infrastructure... and industrial systems."

Recent events surrounding Hurricanes Sandy, Michael, Harvey, Maria, and
Dorian, as well as the devastating wildfire
<https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/camp-fire-by-the-numbers/> at
the ironically named town of Paradise, California, in 2018 and the fires
across much of that state
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/10/30/california-fires-seen-international-space-station-earth-observing-satellites/>
this
fall, have shown that the impacts of climate change are already part of our
lives and becoming unmanageable
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/29/has-the-climate-crisis-made-california-too-dangerous-to-live-in>.
Or if you want another sign of where this country is at this moment,
consider a new report
<https://climateandsecurity.files.wordpress.com/2019/07/implications-of-climate-change-for-us-army_army-war-college_2019.pdf>
from
the Army War College indicating that "the Department of Defense (DoD) is
precariously unprepared for the national security implications of climate
change-induced global security challenges." And if the Pentagon isn't
prepared to manage climate change, it's hard to imagine any part of the
U.S. government that might be.

2) *The misleading claim that global prosperity is actually being driven by
fossil fuels*. No one denies that fossil fuels drove the Industrial
Revolution and, in doing so, contributed substantively to rising living
standards for hundreds of millions of people in Europe, North America, and
parts of Asia. But the claim that fossil fuels are the essence of global
prosperity today is, at best, a half-truth because what is at stake here
isn't the past but the future. Disruptive climate change fueled by
greenhouse gas emissions from the use of oil, coal, and natural gas now
threatens both the prosperity that parts of this planet have already
achieved and future economic growth of just about any sort. Nicholas Stern,
the former chief economist of the World Bank and one of the foremost
experts on the economics of climate change, has put
<https://www.amazon.com/Why-Are-We-Waiting-Tackling/dp/026252998X> our
situation succinctly this way: "High carbon growth self-destructs."

3) *A misleading claim that fossil fuels represent "cheap energy*." Fossil
fuels are not cheap. When their external costs are included—that is, not
just the price of extracting, distributing, and profiting from them, but
what it will cost in all our lives once you add in the fires, extreme
storms, flooding, health effects, and everything else that their carbon
emissions into the atmosphere will bring about—they couldn't be more
expensive. The International Monetary Fund estimates
<https://www.pri.org/stories/2015-06-07/imf-true-cost-fossil-fuels-53-trillion-year>
that
the cost to consumers above and beyond what we pay at the pump or in our
electricity bills already comes to more than $5 trillion dollars annually.
That's *trillion*, not billion. Put another way, we are all paying a
massive, largely unnoticed subsidy to the oil, gas, and coal industry to
destroy our civilization. Among other things, those subsidies
<https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2015/wp15105.pdf> already "damage
the environment, caus[e]... premature deaths through local air pollution,
[and] exacerbat[e] congestion and other adverse side effects of vehicle
use."

4) *A misleading claim about poverty and fossil fuels.* That fossil fuels
are the solution to the energy needs of the world's poor is a tale
<https://corporate.exxonmobil.com/en/News/Newsroom/Speeches/2015/0603_The-Global-Energy-Outlook-and-Industry-Outreach>
being
heavily promoted by ExxonMobil, among others. The idea that ExxonMobil is
suddenly concerned about the plight of the global poor is, of course,
laughable or its executives wouldn't be planning (as they are
<https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/10/oil-firms-barrels-markets>)
for significant increases in fossil-fuel production between now and 2030,
while downplaying the threat of climate change. As Pope Francis
<https://laudatosi.com/watch>, global justice leader Mary Robinson
<https://www.mrfcj.org/>, and former U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon—as
well as countless scientists and advocates of poverty reduction and global
justice—have repeatedly emphasized, climate change will, above all, hurt
the poor. It is they who will first be uprooted from their homes (and
homelands); it is they who will be migrating into an increasingly hostile
and walled-in world; it is they who will truly feel the heat, literal and
figurative, of it all. A fossil-fuel company that cared about the poor
would obviously not be committed, above all else, to pursuing a business
model based on oil and gas exploration and development. The cynicism of
this argument is truly astonishing.

Moreover, while it's true that the poor need affordable energy
<https://www.iea.org/statistics/electricity/>, it is not true that they
need fossil fuels*. *More than a billion people worldwide lack access (or,
at least, reliable access) to electricity, but many of them also lack
access to an electricity grid, which means fossil fuels are of little use
to them. For such communities, solar and wind power are the only reasonable
ways to go, the only ones that could rapidly and affordably be put in place
and made available.

5) *Misleading assertions about the costs of renewable energy*. The cheap
fossil fuel narrative is regularly coupled with misleading assertions about
the allegedly high costs of renewable energy. According to Bloomberg News,
however, in two-thirds of the world, solar
<https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-09-19/solar-and-wind-power-so-cheap-they-re-outgrowing-subsidies>
is
already the cheapest form of newly installed electricity generation,
cheaper than nuclear, natural gas, or coal. Improvements in energy storage
are needed to maximize the penetration of renewables, particularly in
developed countries, but such improvements are happening quickly. Between
2010 and 2017, the price of battery storage decreased a startling 79% and
most experts believe that, in the near future, many of the storage problems
can and will be solved.

6) *The false claim that, under President Trump, the U.S. has actually cut
greenhouse gas emissions.*  Republicans have claimed
<https://thebulletin.org/2019/10/declining-us-greenhouse-gas-emissions-a-republican-fairy-tale/>
not
only that such emissions have fallen but that the United States under
President Trump has done more to reduce emissions than any other country on
the planet. One environmental reporter, who has described herself as
"accustomed to hearing a lot of misinformation" about climate change,
characterized
<https://thebulletin.org/2019/10/declining-us-greenhouse-gas-emissions-a-republican-fairy-tale/>
this
statement as "brazenly false." In fact, U.S. CO2 emissions
<https://www.iea.org/geco/emissions/> spiked in 2018
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/us-greenhouse-gas-emissions-spiked-in-2018--and-it-couldnt-happen-at-a-worse-time/2019/01/07/68cff792-12d6-11e9-803c-4ef28312c8b9_story.html>,
increasing by 3.1% over 2017. Methane
<https://eos.org/research-spotlights/u-s-methane-emissions-on-the-rise>
emissions
are also on the rise and President Trump's proposal to rollback
<https://insideclimatenews.org/news/29082019/methane-regulation-oil-gas-storage-pipelines-epa-rollback-trump-wheeler>
methane
standards will ensure that unhappy trend continues.

Science Isn't Enough

And by the way, when it comes to the oil companies, that's just to start
down a far longer list of misinformation and false claims they've been
peddling for years. In our 2010 book, *Merchants of Doubt*
<https://www.amazon.com/dp/1608193942/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20>, Erik
Conway and I showed that the strategies and tactics used by Big Energy to
deny the harm of fossil-fuel use were, in many cases, remarkably similar to
those long used by the tobacco industry to deny the harm of tobacco use—and
this was no coincidence. Many of the same PR firms, advertising agencies,
and institutions were involved in both cases.

The tobacco industry was finally prosecuted
<https://www.publichealthlawcenter.org/topics/commercial-tobacco-control/commercial-tobacco-control-litigation/united-states-v-philip>
by
the Department of Justice, in part because of the ways in which the
individual companies coordinated with each other and with third-party
allies to present false information to consumers. Through congressional
hearings and legal discovery, the industry was pegged with a wide range of
activities it funded to mislead the American people. Something similar has
occurred with Big Energy and the harm fossil fuels are doing to our lives,
our civilization, our planet.

Still, a crucial question about the fossil-fuel industry remains to be
fully explored: Which of its companies have funded the activities of the
trade organizations and other third-party allies who deny the facts about
climate change? In some cases, we already know the answers. In 2006, for
instance, the Royal Society
<https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/publications/2006/royal-society-exxonmobil/>
of
the United Kingdom documented
<https://royalsociety.org/-/media/Royal_Society_Content/policy/publications/2006/8257.pdf>
ExxonMobil's
funding of 39 organizations that promoted "inaccurate and misleading" views
of climate science. The Society was able to identify $2.9 million spent to
that end by that company in the year 2005 alone. That, of course, was just
one year and clearly anything but the whole story.

Nearly all of these third-party allies are incorporated as 501(c)(3)
institutions, which means
<https://www.501c3.org/frequently-asked-questions/does-nonprofit-501c3-and-tax-exempt-all-mean-the-same-thing/>
they
must be non-profit and nonpartisan. Often they claim to be involved in
education (though mis-education would be the more accurate term). But they
are clearly also involved in supporting an industry—Big Energy—that
couldn't be more *for*-profit and they have done many things to support
what could only be called a partisan political agenda as well. After all,
by its own admission, Energy45, to take just one example, exists to support
the "Trump Energy Agenda."

I'm an educator, not a lawyer, but as one I can say with confidence that
the activities of these organizations are the opposite of educational.
Typically, the Heartland Institute, for instance, has explicitly targeted
schoolteachers with disinformation. In 2017, the institute sent a booklet
to more than 200,000 of them, repeating the oft-cited contrarian claims
that climate science is still a highly unsettled subject and that, even if
climate change were occurring, it "would probably not be harmful." Of this
booklet, the director of the National Center
<https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/climate-change-skeptic-group-seeks-to-influence-200000-teachers/>
for
Science Education said, "It's not science, but it's dressed up to look like
science. It's clearly intended to confuse teachers." The National Science
Teaching Association <https://www.nsta.org/climate/hearland.aspx>  has
called it "propaganda" and advised teachers to place their copies in the
recycling bin.

Yet, as much as we know about the activities of Heartland and other
third-party allies of the fossil-fuel industry, because of loopholes in our
laws we still lack basic information about who has funded and sustained
them. Much of the funding at the moment still qualifies as "dark money."
Isn't it time for citizens to demand that Congress investigate this
network, as it and the Department of Justice once investigated the tobacco
industry and its networks?

ExxonMobil loves to accuse me of being "an activist." I am, in fact, a
teacher and a scholar. Most of the time, I'd rather be home working on my
next book, but that increasingly seems like less of an option when Big
Energy's climate-change scam is ongoing and our civilization is, quite
literally, at stake. When citizens are inactive, democracy fails—and this
time, if democracy fails, as burning California shows, so much else could
fail as well. Science isn't enough. The rest of us are needed. And we are
needed now.
<https://www.commondreams.org/author/naomi-oreskes>

Naomi Oreskes is professor of the history of science and affiliated
professor of earth and planetary sciences at Harvard University and
co-author, with Erik Conway, of *Merchants of Doubt
<http://www.merchantsofdoubt.org/>: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured
the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming
<http://www.merchantsofdoubt.org/>*. Her latest book is* Why Trust
Science? *
<https://www.amazon.com/Trust-Science-University-Center-Values/dp/069117900X/ref=sr_1_2?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIhtSf3rvi5QIVaYVaBR2RsQ-VEAAYASAAEgI9F_D_BwE&hvadid=371119436315&hvdev=c&hvlocphy=9002574&hvnetw=g&hvpos=1t1&hvqmt=e&hvrand=1594389322705376307&hvtargid=kwd-781997307987&hydadcr=22536_9636733&keywords=why+trust+science&qid=1573485907&sr=8-2>Follow
her on Twitter: @NaomiOreskes <https://twitter.com/NaomiOreskes>

-- 

--- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sid-l" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected].
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sid-l/CACKppcwY%2BCFV_H16Qjp4LbPrJ%3DA_OLa0vsswpG_M77EGsX0X9Q%40mail.gmail.com.

---
To unsubscribe: <mailto:[email protected]>
List help: <https://riseup.net/lists>