Climate Investigations Ctr CIC

see brown U

see Kert Davies target

https://climateinvestigations.org/climate-lawsuit-index-complaints-with-links-to-footnotes-and-referenced-documents/

---

energy in depth BS 12/19

SPENCER WALRATH

Kert Davies’ Climate Investigations Center (CIC) is at it again, trying to create a scandal by releasing cherry-picked documents from Imperial Oil’s publicly available archive, even as CIC was slammed by a non-profit group Thursday for “using dishonest and potentially unlawful business practices and wasting tax dollars to engage in its investigations.”

Anti-energy activists have spent years trying (unsuccessfully) to prove #ExxonKnew. This week was more of the same—literally—as DeSmog Blog and the CIC launched another collection of documents from an ExxonMobil Canadian subsidiary, Imperial Oil. Lost in the hype was the fact that the documents are as stale as the story the activists are stilltrying to sell and have been publicly available for years.

The posted documents include more than 300 pages of company reports, a letter to the Canadian government, and development plans, mostly from the 1980s and 1990s and found in the Imperial Oil archive at The Glenbow Archives, the largest non-governmental archival repository in Canada. All of this material has been publicly accessible for years–the only really “new” aspect about CIC’s trove of documents is that they are digitized.

Nevertheless, CIC and DeSmog are trying to pitch the release of the docs as a trove that sheds new light on Imperial’s (and by extension ExxonMobil’s) climate research and correspondence. That doesn’t hide that these claims are as warmed over as Thanksgiving leftovers.

Again, all of these documents have long been publicly accessible. They have been available to researchers for years, first at the Glenbow Library and then at the Taylor Family Digital Library at the University of Calgary. Climate activists know this because they have visited the archive before. As the CIC admits, DeSmog first visited the Imperial archive in late 2015. Other materials from the Imperial archive were used in reporting by InsideClimate News in 2016. They even were part of the Rockefeller-funded LA Times/Columbia Journalism School stories that helped lay a foundation for the climate liability lawsuits.

That hasn’t stopped climate activists from attempting to make hay out of the different approaches ExxonMobil and Imperial Oil took on climate policy. Their attacks conveniently disregard that the two companies operate in different countries, facing different regulatory and business environments.

The CIC’s interest in the inner working of Imperial Oil and ExxonMobil is more than a little hypocritical, since the center itself is funded through passthrough donations and a sea of dark money.

Recent reporting by the Washington Free Beacon uncovered that, despite describing itself as “a not-for-profit association of writes and advocates,” the CIC has never registered as a non-profit with the IRS. It also does not produce annual reports, or otherwise list its funders or disclose its parent organization.

Rather than registering as a nonprofit, CIC exists under the umbrella of Our Next Economy, a group founded in 2009 by John Passacantando, who worked with CIC founder and president Kert Davies at Greenpeace and Ozone Action before that. The deceptive arrangement allows CIC to obscure its funders. While the CIC does not appear to receive direct support from groups like the Rockefeller Family Fund, Tide Foundation of the Sustainable Markets Foundation, these groups dramatically increased their support for Our Next Economy in 2014, coinciding with the founding of CIC.

Between September 2010 and August 2017, the Sustainable Markets Foundation (SMF) donated nearly $5 million to Our Next Economy through payments to independent contractors earmarked for “program coordination.” For the first three years, these payments ranged between $180,000 and $320,000, but jumped to more than $1.5 million per year after CIC’s founding.

The SMF itself has received major donations from key funders of the climate litigation campaign, including the Rockefeller Family Fund (RFF) and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. The RFF has also promoted previous CIC document dumps and invited Passacantando and Davies to its 2016 strategy session plotting how to “delegitimize” ExxonMobil by “creating scandal.”

CIC is even facing a complaint from D.C.-based free market organization FreedomWorks, which argues that the center misrepresents itself to federal agencies to obtain documents through FOIA requests without paying for them. The CIC “is brazenly asking federal taxpayers to repeatedly foot their bill so they can engage in fishing expeditions into the annals of government records for the purpose of attacking the private entities they are averse to,” according to a lawyer representing FreedomWorks.

“Climate Investigations Center appears to be nothing more than a well-funded attack website that advances the agenda of its unknown financial backers,” the lawyer added. The Daily Caller News Foundation also reports that Daviesappears“to be engaging in undisclosed lobbying activities.”

Ironically for a man seemingly obsessed with transparency, this isn’t the first time Davies has been accused of trying to obscure his funding and operations. In addition to his work with CIC, Davies is also on the board of the organization behind Climate Liability News, an anti-oil and gas website funded by dark money that promotes climate lawsuits against energy producers. That group, which is incorporated in Washington D.C., was subject to a separate complaint earlier this year that accused the organization of failing to register as a foreign business in Maryland, where it is located and conducts its business.

The CIC’s latest document dump adds nothing new to the case activists have been trying for years to build against ExxonMobil. Rather than mounting a new case, they are left reposting old documents to new websites in the name of transparency while engaging in multiple tactics to hide their own financial backers and work around federal disclosure requirements.

---

REF unidentified "non-profit" above, tho ID'd elsewhere

https://dailycaller.com/2019/12/05/climate-investigations-center-misrepresented-nonprofit-taxpayers-bill/

no lnx

ENERGY

Environmental Group Misrepresented Itself As A Nonprofit In Order To Stick Taxpayers With The Bill For Its Open Records Requests

Climate Activist Greta Thunberg Holds "Fridays For Future" Event In Denver

DREW JOHNSON

NATIONAL DIRECTOR, PROTECT INTERNET FREEDOM

December 05, 2019

An attorney for FreedomWorks filed a complaint against Climate Investigations Center, an environmental activism organization, alleging that it misrepresented its nonprofit status to take advantage of FOIA requests.

Allegedly, the Center files FOIA requests for information on organizations it opposes and also requests a fee waiver as a nonprofit, even though it is not listed as one in the IRS database.

Climate Investigations Center has submitted in numerous FOIA requests involving energy corporations and think tanks involved with the energy industry as well as testified at House hearings on climate change.

An environmental activism outfitfocused on attacking energy companies and exposing funding for so-called “anti-environmental” organizations is using dishonest and potentially unlawful business practices and wasting tax dollars to engage in its investigations, critics claim.

According to its website, Climate Investigations Center “was established in 2014 to monitor the individuals, corporations, trade associations, political organizations, and front groups who work to delay the implementation of sound energy and environmental policies that are necessary in the face of ongoing climate crisis.”

Chris K. Gober, an attorney representing D.C.-based free market organization FreedomWorks, argues Climate Investigations Center’s efforts to “monitor” its opponents in public policy discussions include misrepresenting itself to federal agencies in order to collect documents through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) at no expense to the Center.

Gober filed a complaint with the Department of Justice on behalf of FreedomWorks accusing Climate Investigations Center of defrauding taxpayers.

[A girl kisses a makeshift Earth during a march for the climate in Bordeaux, southwestern France on December 8, 2018. – Thousands of people were participating today in climate marches in several cities in France. (Photo by NICOLAS TUCAT / AFP) (Photo credit should read NICOLAS TUCAT/AFP via Getty Images)]

The complaint claims the Center requests massive numbers of government documents from federal agencies using the FOIA process. Climate Investigations Center then requests a fee waiver — allowing the organization to receive the FOIA documents at taxpayers’ expense — on the basis that the outfit is a nonprofit.

A review of the IRS charitable database, however, indicates that Climate Investigations Center has never received a nonprofit status from the federal government. The group is also not registered or incorporated as a charity or business in any state.

Kert Davies, the founder and director of Climate Investigations Center did not respond to emails asking for clarification about the structure of the organization. The organization also failed to provide evidence that the Center is a federally registered nonprofit.

The federal government makes documents available through the Freedom of Information Act in order to broaden the public’s understanding of the actions of the federal government. Gober believes information collected and disseminated by Climate Information Center “does not accomplish this task.”

“Climate Investigations Center,” Gober wrote, “is brazenly asking federal taxpayers to repeatedly foot their bill so they can engage in fishing expeditions into the annals of government records for the purpose of attacking the private entities they are averse to.”

One of the Center’s broadest and most burdensome FOIA requests asked the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to provide digital copies of all emails containing any mention of two large oil and natural gas pipeline projects that were sent or received by a former official in the agency’s Office of Policy over a 49-month period. Due to the expansive and inexact nature of the request, EPA employees were still working to compile documents for Climate Investigations Center nearly seven months later.

In addition to the FOIA fee waivers received by the EPA for this and other requests, the Center has improperly requested and received fee waivers from the Justice Department, the Department of Energy, and the Department of the Interior, according to the complaint. (RELATED: DOJ Requests Information That Could Identify Trump Official Behind ‘Anonymous’ Op-Ed)

[HONG KONG, HONG KONG – MARCH 15: Students hold placards and shout slogans as they participate in a protest on March 15, 2019 in Hong Kong, China. (Photo by Anthony Kwan/Getty Images)]

“Itappears that Climate Investigations Center uses the FOIA process to secure government records related toentities averse to its apparent commercial interests, and that it then posts and distributes this information to cause commercial harm to the private subjects of the government records,” Gober said.

In addition to apparently misleading federal agencies in order to receive public records at no cost, Climate Investigations Center appears to have taken extreme measures to mask its supporters and sources of funding.

The organization’s website domain is registered through a proxy server that intentionally conceals the identity of those involved in purchasing the domain name and setting up the website. Climate Investigations Center also does not list a physical office address, only a post office box in the Washington, D.C. suburb of Alexandria, Virginia.

No fewer than 78 articles appear on the Center’s website related to funding of corporations and nonprofits engaged in influencing climate and environmental policy. One article demands ExxonMobil publish recipients of the company’s corporate giving.Others attack conservative think tanks and other political nonprofit organizations for receiving money from donors with investments in the energy industry.

In an interview with the Energy and Policy Institute, Davies criticized a conservative foundation for refusing to disclose its donors. “There’s no transparency, no accountability for the money. There is no way to tell who is funding them,” Davies complained.

Climate Investigations Center, however, fails to publicly disclose its own donors.

The Center does not solicit donations on its website. In fact, there is no clear way to contribute to the organization, indicating Climate Investigations Center has a stable, reliable source of financing.

Davies did not respond to emails asking how the Center is funded and requesting a list of donors.

Jason Pye, the Vice President of Legislative Affairs for FreedomWorks,said Climate Investigations Center is operating under a hypocritical double standard. “Climate Investigations Center is guilty of hypocrisy,” Pye said. “It’s clear the left doesn’t play by the rules. If any conservative or free-market organization did what Climate Investigations Center has done, there would be cries for donor disclosure laws.”

In addition to failing to publish its sources of funding, the Center also does not reveal salaries for top officers, and hides the identity of its board members. Such information is commonly available for both for-profit businesses and non-for-profit organizations – particularly those engaged in advancing transparency and accountability.

“Climate Investigations Center appears to be nothing more than a well-funded attack website that advances the agenda of its unknown financial backers,” said Gober.

The Center’s staffers may also be violating federal lobbying rules.

Neither Davies nor Climate Investigations Center’s other employee, investigator and freelance reporter Dan Zegart, are registered as lobbyists, but they appear to be engaging in undisclosed lobbying activities.

In the last year, both Davies and Zegart have been in attendance at [PUBLIC? VIDEO?] House subcommittee hearings about climate change, according to sources at the hearings. According to a Congressional staffer who spoke on condition of anonymity, Davies was overheard saying he got Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to appear at the hearing. He also boasted of plating a question that Rep. Ocasio-Cortez asked about the Koch brothers. (RELATED: Greenpeace Co-Founder: ‘Climate Crisis Is Not Only Fake News. It’s fake Science)

In his complaint to the Department of Justice, Gober asks that no more fee waivers be granted for Climate Investigations Center’s FOIA requests and calls for an investigation into the Center for misrepresenting itself as a nonprofit.

Pye said taxpayers should be reimbursed for the cost of providing FOIA records to the Center under false pretenses.

“Climate Investigations Center should be responsible for paying the FOIA fees they would’ve paid without the improper fee waivers.”

Tags : department of energy freedom of information act justice department

DREW JOHNSON

---

https://www.criticalfrequency.org/drilled

see Brulle

https://www.dropbox.com/s/t98nfoexa2fglji/SchmertzAMBspeech.jpeg?dl=0

speech meh

mobil op ed orig 1970, mgmt thot oil wd be in short supply, so boost mass transit?! nyt widely read (and repected?] has op eds from editors an guests; run of paper" ad cheaper than specifc spot and corner of op ed page is among highest; p 24 1st try controv w/ other oil co b/c mass transit, but proved worked; by q972 every wk; ow in wapo, LAT wsj boston globe...obsrvations kinda watered down op ed in 400 sunday supplements; other msg taylor to aud eg biz

---

https://www.drillednews.com/post/the-mobil-oil-flack-who-brought-us-false-equivalence-advertorials-and-corporate-free-speech

ep 4 and 5

In episodes four and five of Drilled, we tell the story of Herb Schmertz, former VP of Public Affairs for Mobil Oil. Schmertz brought many new PR tactics to the oil industry; he invented the advertorial, bullied journalists into false equivalence (what he called "creative confrontation"), and pushed for the first big corporate personhood case—long before Citizens United—back in the 1970s. He also coined the term "affinity of purpose" marketing to describe Mobil's longtime funding of Masterpiece Theatre and various other PBS programming, which helped to establish Mobil as "the thinking man's oil company."

Collected below are examples of the advertorials Schmertz distributed (in numerous interviews he refers to them as "pamphlets" and to The New York Timesas an excellent distribution system for the company's pamphlets), as well as some of the documents we referred to in the episode (speeches Schmertz gave, transcripts of interviews with him, and a Mobil doc explaining its advertorial strategy and the success of it). You can also listen to the episodes wherever you get your podcasts, or via the embedded players below.

Documents:

1978 briefing for the American Management Association, "Corporations and the First Amendment"

1982 internal Mobil progress report on its advertorial program, uncovered by the Climate Investigations Center

1984 article by Schmertz in the journal Communications and Law, entitled "The Press and The Public"

1987 Herb Schmertz speech "Patronage, Creativity, and American Culture: Patronage that Pays"given at Fairfield University in Fairfield, CT

1991 transcript of interview with Laurence Jarvik for the book Masterpiece Theatre and the Politics of Quality

Advertorials

---

sum

Fossil fuel companies have been lying to the public for decades; it's well-documented that almost as soon as climate change became a scientific reality, they actively downplayed the crisis. But to keep Americans unaware of the growing urgency of our environmental problem, those same companies needed a way to paint themselves as heroes. Advertising allowed fossil fuel companies to sell themselves, not their products, as the good guys. The depictions of billion-dollar companies were often folksy, innovative, innocent, and brazenly, stereotypically American. The strategy was genius. It’s also now the subject of congressional scrutiny. This week, the House Oversight Committee officially launched an investigation into the fossil fuel industry's disinformation efforts and their impact on the climate crisis. Journalist and podcast host Amy Westervelt wanted to go back to the beginning — to find out how advertising, the media, and the fossil fuel industry became so intertwined. Her podcast Drilled profiled several of the men who invented the public relations business we know today — starting with a man named Herb Schmertz.

This is a segment from our September 17th, 2021 program, Fire and Brimstone.

no lnx

The Birth of Climate Disinformation

Photograph of Herb Schmertz in his office, circa mid 1980s.

TRANSCRIPT

SACHA PFEIFFER We heard Hertsgaard say that fossil fuel companies have been lying to the public for decades. In fact, it's well documented that almost as soon as climate change became a scientific reality, they actively downplayed the crisis. But to keep Americans unaware of the growing urgency of our environmental problem, those same companies needed a way to paint themselves as heroes. Advertising allowed fossil fuel companies to sell themselves, not their products, as the good guys. The depictions of billion dollar companies were often folksy, innovative, innocent and brazenly, stereotypically American. The strategy was genius. It's also now the subject of congressional scrutiny. This week, the House Oversight Committee officially launched an investigation into the fossil fuel industry's disinformation efforts and their impact on the climate crisis. Journalist and podcast host Amy Westervelt wanted to go back to the beginning to find out how advertising the media and the fossil fuel industry became so intertwined. Her podcast Drilled, profiled several of the men who invented the public relations business we know today. The following is an excerpt from one of those episodes.

[CLIP]

HERB SCHMERTZIf you're going to do the job properly, you have to find unconventional ways to communicate to the public. And it's not a question of convincing the press of anything. It's a question of convincing the public [END CLIP]

AMY WESTERVELT That’s Mobil Oil's legendary PR guy, Herb Schmertz. Schmertz was VP of public affairs for Mobil for decades. Slick and handsome, always with an expensive suit, he was the smartest guy in the room and mostly thought that both journalists and other PR guys were idiots. He ran PR for Mobil Oil from 1969 to 1988 and became a master of media manipulation. Schmertz didn't just focus on placing particular stories he set about fundamentally changing the relationship between corporations and the media. To Schmertz, the press was more of an obstacle between him and the public or Mobil and policy makers.

[CLIP]

HERB SCHMERTZ And to do the job properly, you have to really go around the press or beyond the press or against the press to get a story out so that the public focuses on it, not the press. If you're just going to limit yourself to getting the press to focus on it, you're not doing the entire job. [END CLIP]

AMY WESTERVELT Schmertz is the guy who really turned media into another propaganda tool for the fossil fuel industry. He invented the advertorial for a start. He also invented issue advertising, which is now the only type of advertising the oil industry does. You'd think all they do is farm algae and research carbon capture and worry about climate change if you only paid attention to their ads.

[CLIP]

EXXON MOBIL ADVERT Energy is a complex challenge. People want power and power plants have more than a third of energy related carbon emissions. The challenge is to capture the emissions before they're released into the atmosphere. Exxon Mobil.... [END CLIP]

AMY WESTERVELT Schmertz, also bullied journalists into covering big oil’s side of the story, and he encouraged his peers to do the same. Which, sadly, worked really well, and he lobbied for corporate First Amendment rights and against any media regulations that would make it harder for him to use the press as a tool. Known during his heyday for dapper suits, cigars and generally being something of a dandy. For the first half of his life, Herb Schmertz seemed more destined to be secretary of labor than a famous PR guy. After graduating from Columbia Law School in 1955, Schmertz was drafted into the Army. The Vietnam War was just beginning, given his law background, Schmertz was sent straight to work in counterintelligence in Washington, D.C. After 2 years there, it was back to law for Schmerts. Labor law, following in the footsteps of his older brother. In 1960, Schmertz signed on to work for JFK's campaign.

[CLIP OF JFK AD PLAYS, CHORUS SINGS "KENNEDY" REPEATEDLY]

AMY WESTERVELT He was a Democrat, an idealist, and he helped the campaign with voter registration and reaching out to special groups. Including labor and various ethnic communities in New York. When he went to work for Mobil, commerce is actually still working in labor. He handled the company's labor relations for 5 years, but his background in law and political campaigning, combined with his relationships with various labor unions, made Schmertz an even greater, if unexpected, fit for the company's public affairs office. By this point, 1969, Mobil's CEO was a man named Rawleigh Warner. Warner wanted Mobil, which always seemed to be playing catch up to Exxon, to be more of a visible player in the industry. Schmertz had a lot of ideas on that front, starting with humanizing Mobil. Giving the company a personality, complete with ideas that needed to be shared. Here's Schmertz much later in life, describing that strategy.

[CLIP]

HERB SCHMERTZ As a personality where we believe very strongly about the importance of public policy. We believe fervently that as custodians of vast resources and one that we were not doing our job if we did not participate in the marketplace of ideas [END CLIP]

AMY WESTERVELT To get all the facets of the corporation's personality across to the public, Schmertz used the tools he's come to be known for. The issue ad and the advertorial. The latter was born in 1970, when the New York Times opened up its op-ed pages to advertising for the first time. Schmertz wanted Mobil's ad to be just as smart and provocative as any editorial that might appear in the section otherwise. He hired legit writers to write them and eventually ran them every week for decades. They ran the gamut from squawking about taxes, to complaining about the media,to unexpected takes in favor of public transit. Schmertz talked about one of his advertorials on the PBS show The Open Mind in 1980.

[CLIP]

DAVE Herb, thanks for joining me today.

HERB SCHMERTZ A great pleasure to be here Dave.

DAVE I want to turn as quickly as possible to a new fairy tale, the Mobil ad or op ed piece or editorial, call it what you will ...

HERB SCHMERTZ We call them, pamphlets,.

DAVE Pamphlets, but they appear in newspapers.

HERB SCHMERTZ Yes. [END CLIP]

AMY WESTERVELT A new kind of fairy tale was the title of Schmertz's latest advertorial, and it criticized PBS for running a film that stereotyped Saudi Arabians. It was, of course, in Mobil's interest to be seen as a friend and staunch defender of Saudi Arabia.At this point in time in particular, the company was increasing its profits mainly by expanding its development and production in Saudi Arabia.

[CLIP]

DAVE At the end, your conclusion in the ad, we hope that the management of the Public Broadcasting Service will review its decision to run this film. Meaning you hoped they wouldn't run it.

HERB SCHMERTZ Well not necessarily [OVERTALK]

DAVE ...and exercise responsible judgment in the light of what is in the best interest of the United States.

HERB SCHMERTZ Right

DAVE Do you think they did exercise responsible judgment?

HERB SCHMERTZ I think they did a better job after this ad period than they otherwise would have, but they could have done substantially more [END CLIP]

SACHA PFEIFFER Driven, at least in part by this advertorial, PBS aired a panel discussion following that film where Mobil's position was represented alongside other voices.

AMY WESTERVELT In various documents and speeches, Schmertz referred to how they helped shape the discourse on key issues to the company and established mobile as the thinking man's oil company. In a long buried briefing that we found called the Corporations and the First Amendment that Schmertz wrote for the American Management Association in 1978, he explains why he chose The New York Times for these ads. He writes, quote, The Times was chosen because it is published in the nation's leading population communications and business center. Because it has a highly intelligent, vocal, sophisticated readership and because it reaches legislators and other government officials. In short, it was the paper most likely to reach the largest number of opinion leaders and decision makers. Schmertz also talks about the program as a great success, in this briefing. "Mobil found that the medium worked," he writes. "The messages stimulated discussion among influentials on both sides of the issue. Exactly what the company had set out to do." But it turns out that the result of placing all those ads was quite different from simply stimulating discussion, not just in terms of reaching a large audience of readers, but also in shaping the Times his own coverage of these issues.

KERT DAVIES They talk about having influence The New York Times editorial viewpoints.

SACHA PFEIFFER Kert Davies is the founder and director of the Climate Investigation Center, a nonprofit watchdog group that focuses on influence around energy and environmental policy. They uncovered an internal marketing report from 1982 in which Mobil's marketing and PR team was reporting to the company's leadership about how these advertorials had done.

KERT DAVIES The document says, quote, our analysis shows that the Times has altered or significantly softened its viewpoints on conservation, moving from a total reliance on conservation to advocating increased production incentives to solve the supply shortage on monopoly and divestiture. Moving from approving the breakup of the oil companies to opposing divestiture.Moving from advocating strict environmental safeguards to suggesting more relaxed controls on offshore drilling. Moving from valuing environmental concerns at the expense of exploration and development, to urging accelerated offshore drilling. So they are tallying how they have affected the viewpoints of The New York Times on conservation, monopoly and divestiture. Decontrol, natural gas, coal, offshore drilling, all things that they had written op eds on.

GEOFFREY SUPRAN And they've been open and forthright about this, even in some of the editorials themselves.

SACHA PFEIFFER Harvard science historian Geoffrey Supran has studied these advertorials at length.

GEOFFREY SUPRAN No doubt the fossil fuel industry has been very effective at embedding themselves into our culture and our society and our media in an increasingly insidious way that makes it hard to discern when you are being advertised to, versus simply being reprogrammed to see the world and society in a slightly different way.

AMY WESTERVELT Mobil was convinced enough that its advertorial strategy worked, to keep running them weekly in the Times for decades. It was even a program that Exxon kept going after it acquired Mobil.

GEOFFREY SUPRANThey've taken out about one in four of all the advertorials that have ever appeared on the op ed page of The New York Times.

AMY WESTERVELT He said one in four. So 25 percent of all advertorials that have ever run in the New York Times op ed pages were commissioned by Mobil or ExxonMobil.

GEOFFREY SUPRAN Political scientists studying these efforts have described this campaign as towering over all other competitors in its volume and expense.

AMY WESTERVELT ExxonMobil doesn't run its advertorials anymore, but it's moved on to the latest iteration. Campaigns made by The New York Times itself. It's not the newsroom, it's the brand studio that The New York Times created, but still, it's the same company that puts out The New York Times newspaper – making oil companies ads for them. See if you can spot a bit of the Schmertz magic here. In 1978, he said the goal of Mobil's advertorial campaigns was to, quote, stimulate discussion among influentials. In 2020, The New York Times brand studio website's tagline is, quote, stories that influenced the influential. Here's a campaign they did for ExxonMobil last year. Highlighting the company's algae biofuel program.

[CLIP]

ALGAE BIOFUEL ADVERT These vibrant green dots, microscopic living organisms are algae. Look closely, algae grows almost everywhere from murky ponds. [END CLIP]

AMY WESTERVELT Again, the brand studio is separate from the newsroom. There's a definite firewall between advertising and editorial. And every time I talk about these campaigns, New York Times reporters bristle at the idea that they are being accused of being manipulated or influenced by industry. Whether they are or aren't influenced is not really the point. It's not even the goal of these campaigns. The goal is to reach and influence certain types of readers and to wrap the industry's messages in the cloak of credibility provided by The New York Times or The Washington Post, which also does this.

Last year, The Post ran a series of stories that its brand studio created for the American Petroleum Institute, all about how, quote, natural gas and oil are helping to deliver a sustainable fuel mix. These campaigns are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue for newspapers at a time when the business model for journalism has never been more strained. And when you ask for proposals on them, as I did, ad sales, people start offering all kinds of things. You could place content they write for you in the climate section. You can peg it two key words like climate change and make sure it's a suggested next read on any related news story. Influence doesn't look like an oil tycoon in a top hat showing up at your desk to twirl his mustache and tell you to spike a story. It looks like readers being fed a bunch of oil propaganda before, after and right next to your legit climate reporting. We have Herb Schmertz to thank for that.

SACHA PFEIFFER That was an excerpt from the Mad Men season of Drilled, an Investigated podcast about climate change hosted by Amy Westervelt.

---

https://climateinvestigations.org/the-climate-change-countermovement-brown-university-report-and-panel/

The Climate Change Countermovement: Brown University Report and Panel

Climate Investigations Center on February 28, 2019

Kert Davies

Earlier this month, CIC’s Kert Davies was an invited speaker at a collaborative conference held at Brown University on the economic impacts of climate change and the opposition to policy advances. The day long event, America’s Climate Change Future: Housing Markets, Stranded Assets, and Entrenched Interests, gathered experts on a range of climate change topics ranging from increased flood risk and stranded assets in fossil fuels, to the climate change countermovement and misinformation campaigns.

Alongside keynote speaker Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and Brown professor Timmons Roberts, Davies participated in a discussion on a recently published paper by Justin Farrell of Yale’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. The paper’s focus on the “institutional and corporate structure of the climate change countermovement” helped shaped a discussion which outlined the existing body of research the paper built on.

The panelists examined the corporate genesis of the climate denial movement and the many methods of influence that have been utilized to stall effective climate change policy. Using documents and analysis found on Climate Files, Davies recounted how the largest oil majors, including Shell and Exxon, had extensive internal knowledge about climate change science and impacts decades before it became a topic of global concern. Rather than addressing the threat that their product posed to the world, the documents show that the fossil fuel industry engaged and funded a climate change countermovement to deny the urgency their own scientists knew to be true.

See video below of the full session with Davies, Senator Whitehouse and professor Roberts called, “Pushing Against Climate Denial and Defending Science.”

Brown University: New Report on Climate Change Countermovement

Brown University’s Climate Development Lab recently released a supplemental report titled Countermovement Coalitions: Climate Denialist Organizational Profiles tracking the affiliations and output of twelve organizations that “engaged in public misinformation campaigns about climate change” from 1989 to present day. Collaborating with CIC and drawing from Climate Files, ExxonSecrets, and other resources, the report highlights the coalitions’ “insular nature,” showing many to “share leadership teams, major donors, key members, and mission statements.” The twelve organizations highlighted by the Brown team are:

the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE)is another influential voice in climate obstructionism, ranked as Number 3 in Mother Jones’ “Dirty Dozen” series, which profiled the most prominent and influential denialist organizations. The Nation dubbed ACCCE “the driving force behind coal’s rebranding effort” in an article on the messaging of “clean coal.” The notoriety surrounding ACCCE is due in part to its deep ties to the lobbying firm Bonner & Associates, responsible for the forged 2009 letters to Congress, in which fake letters were sent to lawmakers that claimed to be from non-profit groups who opposed climate change legislation. ACCCE is also the brainchild of Stephen Miller, who in 2008 consolidated two other organizations (Center for Energy and Economic Development (CEED) and Americans for Balanced Energy Choices (ABEC)) into ACCCE. The front group currently operates with an annual budget of more than $45 million, and claims to be “the only national trade organization whose sole mission is to advocate at the federal and state levels on behalf of coal-fueled electricity and the coal fleet.” Their main directive is the promotion of “clean coal” through aggressive public advertising campaigns and massive political lobbying and donations. Membership From their own Membership page: “Our membership is comprised of major industries — electricity generators, coal producers, railroads, barge operators, and equipment manufacturers — involved in generating electricity from coal.” Notable members include American Electric Power, Peabody Energy, the Carbon Utilization Research Council, the Western Fuels Association, and the Kentucky Coal Association.

---

ref 40 pp 2108 report dl 10 21 countermovement pdf nice tables timeline

http://www.climatedevlab.brown.edu/uploads/2/8/4/0/28401609/covercountermovementcoalitions.2.2019.pdf

Global Climate Coalition ............................................................... 3 Information Council on the Environment......................................... 6 Alliance for Climate Strategies .....................................................10 Coalition for Vehicle Choice..........................................................12 Cooler Heads Coalition ................................................................15 Center for Energy and Economic Development ...............................18 Americans for Balanced Energy Choices ........................................21 American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity ..................................23 Alliance for Energy and Economic Growth ......................................27 Coalition for Affordable and Reliable Energy...................................30 Coalition for American Jobs..........................................................33 Partnership for a Better Energy Future ..........................................36

---

no lnx many

Mike Rowe’s New Discovery+ Show Is Big Oil-Funded Propaganda

By Dharna Noor

4/02/21 10:00AM

Comments (321)

Alerts

Mike Rowe takes part in a roundtable discussion on manufacturing with Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in 2012.

Mike Rowe takes part in a roundtable discussion on manufacturing with Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in 2012. Photo: Mandel Ngan (Getty Images)

Reality show host Mike Rowe’s new series Six Degrees, which is currently streaming on Discovery+ and will soon air on television, begins how I expected it would: with him on screen in a t-shirt, jeans, and baseball cap, and smiling wryly. It’s classic Rowe, posturing as an avatar for the “average” American.

The conceit of the show is to tie seemingly unrelated events together. In the first episode, Rowe traces the history of the dating app Tinder back to the invention of the horseshoe. He explains that in the 1700s, a young blacksmith melted horseshoes to create the first iron plow, and that decades later, Australian outlaw Ned Kelly used an iron plow to create a suit of armor for the first time. Kelly then became the subject of the world’s first feature-length film, which contributed to the rise of the movie industry. Hollywood made actress and inventor Hedy Lemarr famous. One of her inventions was a precursor to wifi, which we use to surf dating apps. Rowe describes this all circuitously, stopping along the way for jokes and whiskey shots. It’s dumb but seemingly innocuous—until you get to the end.

“Six Degrees is sponsored by the oil and natural gas industry. Why? Because oil and natural gas connects everything,” Rowe says at the episode’s conclusion. He goes on to explain that Lemarr’s inventing process was funded by the fortune her boyfriend made in the oil fields.

Related Stories

Big Oil's New Carbon Tax Stance Is Just Its Latest Trick to Keep Polluting

The ABCs of Big Oil: How Big Oil Killed Our Political Imagination

Could Fossil Fuel Companies Ever Be Tried for Crimes Against Humanity?

Image for article titled Mike Rowe’s New Discovery+ Show Is Big Oil-Funded Propaganda

The Oil and Gas Industry Is Fighting North Face for Some Reason

The North Face has become the oil industry’s new favorite brand to hate. It all started back in…

I knew that Big Oil funded Six Degrees—the blog Reality Blurred caught wind of the sponsorship in January. In fact, I started watching it because I’d read it was funded by the American Petroleum Institute (the oil and gas industry’s biggest trade group) and Distribution Contractors Association (a lobbying group for fossil fuel pipeline contractors). Still, watching this unfold on screen, I nearly fell out of my chair.

Ransomware Hackers Reportedly Targeted 3 Different U.S. Water Facilities This Year Alone

It turns out Rowe shouts out the oil and gas industry in some capacity in every episode. I couldn’t believe he was so up front about it. But as jarring as it was to hear him praise the industry that is largely responsible for frying the planet, this sponsorship makes sense. It fits right in with the industry’s current favorite media strategy: Reminding us that their products are used in everything.

“They want to impress upon us that they’re responsible for making a lot of the cool shit we use, starting with when you wake up in the morning and you take a hot shower, and then when you fry an egg, and then when you turn on your iPhone,” said Kert Davies, director of Climate Investigations Center.

It’s true that across the U.S., water heaters, stoves, and electricity that keeps your phone charged largely run on fossil fuels. Yet none of it has to. We have the technology to power each of those things with clean energy. Delaying that transition would lock in catastrophic climate damage. That’s what makes Rowe’s show and other fossil fuel PR campaigns like it so insidious.

“If all you know about this industry, if all you see, is that that they sponsor a cool show you like, you’ll probably subconsciously think, ‘how bad could they be?’” said Geoffrey Supran, a Harvard researcher who has studied the fossil fuel industry’s misinformation campaigns.

Davies was a little more, uh, direct: “The point of the ads is, back off, don’t fuck with us, you need us. It’s all to do with social license.”

Though the blatant shilling for Big Oil on the show is shocking, it’s not surprising. Rowe has a history of pro-fossil fuel messaging, and according to tax forms obtained by Earther, his nonprofit has raked in six-figure donations from the likes of Koch Industries. (He declined to comment for this story through Discovery+, and Earther did not receive a response from his nonprofit.)

Before Six Degrees, Rowe made a name for himself as the host of Dirty Jobs‚ a show with an obvious—if shallow—appeal as an ode to the American working class, particularly if you think of the working class as exclusively white dudes in hard hats. On each episode, he worked in different thankless and sometimes gross professions, including a roadkill collector, sewer inspector, and “avian vomitologist,” which is exactly what it sounds like.

This was an unlikely career path for Rowe, who before the show began was an opera singer—far from the stereotypical conception of a good ol’ rugged American dude he portrays on TV. But Dirty Jobs gave him a certain credibility as an advocate for forgotten workers.

In 2008, Rowe launched mikeroweWORKS, a nonprofit promoting vocational training for blue-collar jobs. The organization provides scholarships for job training programs in fields including automotive technology, HVAC, manufacturing, and diesel technology, which in itself isn’t a bad thing. But the foundation is premised on the idea that the reason people are struggling to find good-paying work in these sectors is because of a skills gap for those in blue-collar fields—a thoroughly debunked myth pushed by industry leaders to make workers feel underqualified for positions, which research suggests helped companies to put more conditions on their job listings and offer lower rates of pay. mikeroweWORKS also fails to grapple with the reality that amid the worsening climate crisis, many of these fields will have to undergo major changes (and in the case of diesel, at least, be fully phased out).

“He’s to the oil and gas industry what Ronald Reagan was for General Electric, a charming pitch man.”

In the years since starting his nonprofit, Rowe started a parallel media career as a pundit, frequently appearing on Fox News to openly speak out against regulating oil and gas extraction.

Despite his posturing as a friend of the working class, Rowe doesn’t have much to say how the industry mercilessly lays off employees while paying shareholders or that working in the fossil fuel industry comes with notoriously dangerous conditions for workers and long-term health risks. (Instead, he suggests safety concerns are overblown). He’s also failed to show much support for labor organizing in the energy sector, even though they could desperately use his support. Federal data shows rates of unionization in the coal, oil, and gas sector is dwindling.

“He’s to the oil and gas industry what Ronald Reagan was for General Electric, a charming pitch man,” Adam Johnson, the co-host of the podcast Citations Needed, wrote in an email.

That’s likely no accident. As Johnson’s podcast uncovered on a 2019 episode, Rowe’s foundation is funded by anti-regulation groups including the Distribution Contractors Association (yes, the same group funding his new show), auto parts manufacturer Federal Mogul Motor Parts, a subsidiary of the British multinational energy firm Centrica, and perhaps most damning of all, the massive fossil fuel and petrochemical conglomerate Koch Industries. A document the Climate Investigations Center found on Guidestar, which is marked “not open to public inspection,” shows that Koch Industries and the Koch Foundation, both tied to the massive fortune amassed by the Koch brothers, have together donated more than $1 million dollars to Rowe’s foundation since it was founded.

“Not Open to Public Inspection”—oops!

“Not Open to Public Inspection”—oops!Photo: Guidestar via Climate Investigations Center

Johnson described Rowe as the “greatest anti-worker avatar money can buy,” because he’s “someone who a lot of working people genuinely love ... but who is 100% against their interests.”

Rowe’s an especially useful ally to the fossil fuel sector because he continually perpetuates the age-old conservative myth that environmental regulation must come at the expense of jobs, despite mountains of evidence that the opposite is true and that a just transition for fossil fuel employees is possible (and needed).

“The dirty truth about fossil fuels and the petrochemical industry is that it is really dangerous dirty work all the way from the frack fields and wellheads to the refineries and chemical plants,” said Davies. Workers get sick and die. Fenceline communities get sick and die. There are cancer clusters, increased asthma and other health problems associated with petrochemicals, plastics and pesticides.”

In Six Degrees, Rowe doesn’t take an explicitly anti-renewable stance. In an episode connecting sheep to how we do our taxes, he speaks with a solar installer and asks him when the energy source will “become not just an alternative but one of the go-to choices.” But even then, he doesn’t say anything about why solar might be preferable because oil and gas have created an existential threat.

“API is hitching its wagon to a show that appears to promote discourses of fossil fuel essentialism and fossil fuel solutionism,” Supran said.

In another episode of the show, for instance, Rowe says electricity is “made possible by spinning turbines—turbines powered by wind and solar, but mostly by oil and gas.”

“In other words, the audience is not-so-subtly indoctrinated with the idea that fossil fuels will inevitably be essential for the foreseeable future, which is a political judgement, not a scientific necessity, and a recipe for climate disaster,” said Supran.

Image for article titled Mike Rowe’s New Discovery+ Show Is Big Oil-Funded Propaganda

Big Oil's New Carbon Tax Stance Is Just Its Latest Trick to Keep Polluting

The American Petroleum Institute, the largest lobbying arm for the oil and gas industry, said this…

In an email, a spokesperson for Discovery+ said that Six Degrees is the only program on the network that is funded by advocacy or trade groups. Though he said he could not disclose exactly how much money the American Petroleum Institute or Distribution Contractors Association contributed to the production of Six Degrees, he said that the groups didn’t influence the show’s content.

“This sponsorship was simply to get production started,” he said. “There was no creative input or influence on the series.”

But it’s clear why the industry itself would want to sponsor this kind of endeavor now. Public concern about the climate crisis is growing. The Biden administration has imposed new regulations limiting extraction, and organizers who correctly state these moves are insufficient are pressuring officials to do far more. There’s also the reality that climate change poses an existential threat if left unchecked. And the fastest way to reduce carbon emissions is to wind down the fossil fuel industry while simultaneously protecting the workers Rowe says he stands in support of. From Six Degrees, though, you’d never know that phasing out fossil fuels is a necessary step to securing working people a livable future.

“As the stakes around climate change continue to get higher—and more people point toward fossil fuels as the main culprit to the warming of our planet—Big Oil’s sponsorship of Mike Rowe’s new show on Discovery+ is concerning,” said Allison Fisher, climate and energy program director at Media Matters for America. “Unlike the conservative audience that tunes in when Rowe talks about the oil and gas industry on Fox News and Fox Business News, Discovery+ is reaching a new and unwitting audience who may not have an opinion on Big Oil one way or another, but could be persuaded by Rowe.”

Six Degrees is right—currently, fossil fuels do provide the foundation of society and are connected to nearly everything. But that’s not an immutable truth, it’s a problem to be solved by creating a just, green economy. It’s precisely because of the interconnectivity of everything, the premise on which the show is built, that we need to forge that new world. Rowe’s new show is a roadblock to do just that, and that’s exactly the way the Six Degrees’ sponsors want it.

---

recall exxon busted (UK?) and promised to stop funding denial so shift to buffer/front/trade:

https://climateinvestigations.org/exxon-and-friends-still-funding-climate-denial-and-obstruction-through-ipaa-fti-energy-in-depth

many docs grafs

Internal documents and conversations from the fracking lobby, revealed this week in HuffPost, shine new light on a ten year old public relations campaign front group called Energy In Depth. Documents show this front group is designed explicitly to exist without the fingerprints of its fossil fuel funders, giving the oil industry the “ability to say, do and write things that individual company employees cannot and should not.”

This reporting reveals how climate denial remains a key oil industry strategy in spite of their efforts to clean up their image. These shrouded attacks on climate science and solutions, attacks on lawmakers, scientists, lawyers and advocates stand in stark contrast to the seemingly desperate efforts of Exxon and their brethren to retain ‘social license’, gain credibility on climate change and distance themselves from their legacy of climate science denial.

Let’s define “climate denial” up front, as we did years ago in a Guardian interview for a story about Edelman PR: “Our definition of denial is anyone who is obstructing, delaying or trying to derail policy steps that are in line with the scientific consensus that says we need to take rapid steps to decarbonize the economy.” Simple enough. It goes beyond just denying that global warming exists.

HuffPost’s reporting shows that Exxon is a member of the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA), an oil and gas industry trade association whose online assets include “news” sites like Energy In Depth (EID) that spew climate denial and attacks on scientists, journalists, advocates, and lawyers. IPAA acts as a pass through, bundling corporate members’ cash that’s funneled to the firm FTI Consulting, which created and manages sites like EID. An ExxonMobil spokesperson, responding to questions from the HuffPost reporter, tried valiantly to keep the veil in place, saying, “Your questions are better addressed to EID or IPAA.”

IPAA’s long history of denial

The IPAA has a long history of funding and proliferating misinformation on climate change, a legacy that continues to the this day. IPAA was named as a potential funder of the infamous multi-million dollar “uncertainty” campaign detailed in the 1998 Global Climate Science Communications Plan, an effort organized by API, Exxon, Chevron, Southern Company and assorted libertarian extremists. You can find that file and others in our ClimateFiles collection.

POTENTIAL FUNDING FOR GLOBAL CLIMATE SCIENCE COMMUNICATIONS (p. 8)

Potential funding sources were identified as American Petroleum Institute (API) and its members; Business Round Table (BRT) and its members, Edison Electric Institute (EEI) and its members; Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA) and its members; and the National Mining Association (NMA) and its members. - Potential fund allocators were identified as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), Competitive Enterprise Institute, Frontiers of Freedom and the Marshall Institute.

[View entire document on DocumentCloud]

The IPAA fact sheet on Climate Change released that same year has some pretty alarming climate denial claims — some even more extreme than the Global Climate Coalition was pushing at the time, and includes references to Fred Singer’s Leipzig Declaration and theImperial Oil DRI/McGraw Hill study on carbon taxes. IPAA also blame termites and volcanoes — basically everything but fossil fuels — for altering the atmosphere more than fossil fuels:

“Consider this: the largest source of greenhouse gas may be termites, whose digestive activities are responsible for 10 times more production of CO2 than burning fossil fuels.”

“So, since human-related CO2 is only a small portion of total atmospheric CO2, measures taken to limit it will have little or no measurable effect on overall emissions into the atmosphere. More importantly, there is still no evidence that CO2 emissions are warming the earth’s atmosphere. And we have no proof that man’s impact makes a difference at all.”

By 2008, the IPAA had a more nuanced fact sheet on climate change, but still emphasized uncertainty and denial,

“…no climate change policy action should discard the question of science. Too often, recent arguments for action discard the uncertainties of today’s understanding of global climate science. Global climate science is an emerging field, one that changes as the tools to model it improve.”

They know better…

The Washington Post revealed that in a June, 2019 presentation at an IPAA meeting, influential energy lawyer Mark Barron said the “ship has sailed” on using climate science denial as the first line of defense. Instead, Barron advocated lobbying Congress for climate legislation that benefits the oil and gas industry. He drew a sharp contrast between the industry’s former attacks on climate science and a more recent nuanced approach. He told the oil and gas executives and lobbyists gathered at the meeting sponsored by fracking giants Halliburton, Schlumberger and Oxy that they should be ready to talk about global warming, as long as they position fossil fuels as the solution. Despite this, HuffPost reporting shows that Barron’s audience, the IPAA and its members, are still deploying on climate denial and attacks on scientists through projects like EID and other web organs.

Funding Front Groups – FTI and Energy In Depth

IPAA describes Energy in Depth as the industry’s lead “rapid response platform” for the fracking industry. IPAA created Energy in Depth (EID) shortly after the environmental impacts from the fracking boom began to make national headlines. IPAA member Exxon/XTO was one of EID’s first funders.

Internal IPAA Board documents, published by HuffPost, describe the purpose of the project:

“The main focus of EID has evolved into addressing the “Keep It In The Ground” movement.” (Keep it In The Ground refers to activists and scientists working to keep new fossil fuels from being extracted and burned, commensurate with the conclusion by international scientists that we simply cannot burn even a percentage of known and potential fossil fuel reserves if we want to keep global temperatures from rising to dangerous levels.)

...

Funding for EID comes directly from unnamed oil and gas corporations like Exxon, Halliburton, Schlumberger, Oxy, Marathon Oil, and is funneled through IPAA, which funds the Energy in Depth project on an annual basis.

According IPAA budget documents, the EID campaign costs more than $2 million dollars per year, representing about one fifth of IPAA’s total budget, second only to “Salaries and Benefits” in scale.

BIG QUESTION: What puzzles us is how IPAA is classifying this expense to the IRS.This $2M plus annual payment to FTI does not appear, as required by law, on the IRS 990 form filed by IPAA under “Independent Contractors” “that received more than $100,000 in compensation from the organization.” (see Part VII Section B on page 8 of 2017 990). Perhaps IPAA can provide an explanation.

IPAA 2017 990 Independent Contractors Page 8

The real story of Energy In Depth

Colleagues at DeSmog have been watching Energy in Depth from the beginning, when it was launched to blunt attention to the rapid spread of fracking ten years ago and concerns from community members, lawmakers, journalists and activists.

IPAA’s Jeff Eshelman, described the genesis and purpose of the group in a 2017 IPAA retreat:

The IPAA funding of over $2M a year to FTI/Energy in Depth is spent on five sub-campaigns, meant to undermine the public’s understanding and support of climate and environmental protections:

EID Climate exists “to counteract the “Keep it in the Ground” movement’s newsiest strategy to use climate change as a weapon to silence dissent and shut down American energy production”. The website pushes back on litigation against oil and gas companies.

EID Health is a “rapid response program” to counter studies linking oil and gas drilling and production to health impacts.

Endangered Species Watch is meant to blunt the Federal Endangered Species Actand is described as “disseminating news, regulations and issue alerts to member companies, affiliated industries and policy makers.”

Energy Tax Facts defends tax subsidies for the fossil fuel industry

Fossil Fuel Divestment Campaign advocates against movements asking Universities and pension funds to divest from fossil fuels.

FTI has carved out a specialty in aggressive attacks on foes of the oil and gas industry, doing the dirty work that oil corporations would not want their brands tied to in public. An FTI “Techical Paper” report presented at a 2014 Brazilian oil industry conference describes Energy in Depth’s purpose pretty bluntly, stating that the web asset provides the “ability to say, do and write things that individual company employees cannot and should not.” (emphasis added)

The actual work of running EID is contracted out by IPAA to FTI Consulting, a massive global PR and consulting firm. Here are a few individuals we know are connected to the Energy In Depth project and have written themselves into the wrong side of history:

Matt Dempsey, a Managing Director at FTI, manages Energy in Depth and lists himself as an editorial editor WesternWire, another front group run for Western Energy Alliance, another oil trade association like IPAA. Dempsey and a colleague were recently recorded by a lawyer for EarthRights International who called them out for being agents of Exxon, and pretending to be journalists. Exxon is a defendant in the Boulder Colorado lawsuit that EID and WesternWire have tried hard to malign. Dempsey used to work for Senator James Inhofe.

Steve Everley, is an FTI Managing Director of Strategic Communications and a senior advisor on the Energy In Depth project. Inside Climate News ran a lengthy rebuttal to the work Everley did to trash their actual journalism on fracking in 2014.

Spencer Walrath, who is actually an FTI employee (Director, Energy & Natural Resources at FTI Consulting Inc) but pretends to be an journalist on Energy In Depth. He graduated University of Northern Iowa in 2012. Spencer’s FTI job was announced in his college newsletter.

Katie Brown, PhD, who now works for FTI out of Belgium was a major part of Energy in Depth while working for FTI in Washington DC until a couple years ago. This archived 45 slide Powerpoint presentation from 2014 by Brown lays out the IPAA-FTI-EID connection and details all their work to undermine regulations on ozone, groundwater protection, methane emissions and more. (Brown’s PhD is in English, btw and she is or was working on a book on James Joyce…congratulations, but how does that PhD apply to an energy front group website besides using good grammar?)

More EID denial

FTI’s Energy in Depth Climate front group spends most of its pixels trying to trash climate lawsuits, promoting natural gas as a climate solution, and attacking science implicating methane’s role in climate change. Methane, a super greenhouse gas and the main component of “natural gas”, leaks from fracking fields in vast quantities making the current natural gas supply much dirtier fuel than it used to be before fracking became a thing. This point was recently illustrated nicely with FLIR images by the New York Times, and news of this Exxon gas well leak which released more methane in a few weeks than many countries emit in a year.

Each of the EID sub-campaigns employ tactics common to climate deniers, like attacking climate models, denying the impact of methane from fracking, repeating debunked myths about a global pause in warming, and claiming that “one in six climate and earth scientists” think human’s impact on climate change is “little or none.”

Most recently, Spencer Walrath wrote a piece in EID going after a peer reviewed scientific study on ocean acidification and the companies connected to the carbon dioxide that has acidified the ocean, the science of which is even harder to deny than climate change.

And this post by Katie Brown, PhD at EID uses sham science and Wikipedia links to attack calls for accountability for companies like Exxon.

EID “Experts”

:{:{}:

On the EID Climate website, the list of experts includes people like Craig Richardson, president of the coal-funded, climate-denying Energy and Environment Legal Institute. Richardson has called climate change a communist plot.

Other experts include Horace Cooper, who is listed as a senior fellow the National Center for Public Policy Research an organization that has received $445,000 in grants from Exxon over the past two decades including several grants earmarked for climate work.

NCPPR CLIMATE GRANT (p. 44)

View entire document on DocumentCloud]

Cooper is also a Fellow with the preeminent climate science denial group the Heartland Institute. Heartland has held a number of gatherings dedicated to outright climate science denial. Heartland was also heavily funded by Exxon until they dropped them after 2006. The Mercer Family stepped in in 2008 and has given Heartland upwards of $6.7M from 2008-2017. In 2018, this grant appears to have been moved through Donors Trust.

FTI work for other industries with legal and political problems

In 2019, court documents revealed FTI was running opportunities for Monsanto on RoundUp and GMO fights, alternately posing as journalists and attacking journalists, complete with an FTI campaign spreadsheet of steps taken to undermine and intimidate journalist Carey Gillam.

Most recently, FTI produced a report on health care for a front group attacking “Medicare for All” proposals by politicians.

IPAA Lobbying With Climate Denial Under Trump

IPAA is a significant lobbying arm of the oil industry, spending 1.4 million on lobbying in 2018. Freedom of Information Act requests have revealed emails from IPAA lobbyists to key political appointees in the Department of Interior, showing an ignorance of basic climate change information and a willingness to disregard climate science when it gets in the way of oil and gas production.

In one set of emails,IPAA lobbyist Samantha McDonald asked DOI appointees to reduce protections on an endangered species of beetle. A key reason IPAA protested the beetle’s protected status? – because its projected decline was based in part on climate change science. McDonald directly questioned the viability of climate change models, but not before admitting she is “not too familiar” with the 30 year old UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). As proof that the preeminent scientific body studying climate change in the world could not be trusted, she cited a Google search and a random Forbes article. MacDonald wrote to DOI appointee Vincent DeVito in 2017:

“All modeling is done using the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. While I am not too familiar with this organization or their work, I did some searching and found this Forbes article discrediting the IPCC, citing irresponsible science practices (intentionally manipulating data, suppressing legitimate opposing arguments, etc.). This may be something to look into and push back on, since most of the climate changes threat analysis in the SSA is based on this work.”

IPAA ON IPCC (p. 214)

View entire document on DocumentCloud]

In spite of her lack of science background, IPAA’s McDonald would go on to testify on endangered species law, and the beetle would eventually be “downlisted” by the Trump administration as reported by the Washington Post.

In sum, the Energy In Depth project is entirely consistent with the 30 year campaign (or back to the 1940s…see CIEL’s Smoke and Fumes) by the oil industry to avoid being regulated for environmental harm caused by their products – climate change, air and water pollution. This covert effort contradicts oil industry leaders’ anxious attempts to portray a greener, climate friendly business model in recent years.

We can see right through it, but the aim is clear. Between Barron, the lawyer’s comments and IPAA’s front group Energy In Depth, the fossil fuel industry clearly is trying to play it both ways – opposing climate action while pushing natural gas as a solution and trying to benefit from whatever climate policies do come to pass and keep drilling away unchecked. All the while refusing to treat the global climate crisis like the real and present danger that it is. While IPAA lobbyists may try to play good cop in meetings on the Hill, they are actually leaning on old fashioned attacks on science to delay and distort any serious attempt to address climate change.

---

Exxon & Climate Change Denial

ExxonMobil has spent tens of millions of dollars funding organizations questioning the existence of man-made climate change. From 1997 to 2005, Exxon gave at least $19.5 million in grants to climate change denial organizations. A total of at least$35 million in grants went to climate change denial groups between 1997 and 2016 with over $5 million of those donations earmarked for climate change. Many grant recipients were members of the Cooler Heads Coalition.

Climate Investigations Center*:{noted that Lee Raymond was responsible for promoting Ken Cohen, formerly Legal Counsel for Exxon, to the position of Vice President for Public and Government Affairs. Steve Coll wrote in *Private Empire:[11]}:

“Ken Cohen and his public affairs shop, in tandem with the K Street office in Washington, oversaw contributions to free-market advocates who published, spoke out, and file lawsuits to challenge policies designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or assess the long-term impact of global warming.”

Stance on Climate Change

---