ORESKES 3
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target as lawsuits get serious
PIELKE
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exxon-texas-courts-critics-climate-crimes
guard uk
exxonMobil is attempting to use an unusual Texas law to target and intimidate its critics, claiming that lawsuits against the company over its long history of downplaying and denying the climate crisis violate the US constitution’s guarantees of free speech.
The US’s largest oil firm is asking the Texas supreme court to allow it to use the law, known as rule 202, to pursue legal action against more than a dozen California municipal officials. Exxon claims that in filing lawsuits against the company over its role in the climate crisis, the officials are orchestrating a conspiracy against the firm’s first amendment rights.
A US small-town mayor sued the oil industry. Then Exxon went after him
Read more](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/oct/16/imperial-beach-california-exxon-mobil-climate-crisis)
The oil giant also makes the curious claim that legal action in the California courts is an infringement of the sovereignty of Texas, where the company is headquartered.
Eight California cities and counties have accused Exxon and other oil firms of breaking state laws by misrepresenting and burying evidence, including from its own scientists, of the threat posed by rising temperatures. The municipalities are seeking billions of dollars in compensation for damage caused by wildfires, flooding and other extreme weather events, and to meet the cost of building new infrastructure to prepare for the consequences of rising global temperatures.
Rule 202 in effect allows corporations to go on a fishing expedition for incriminating evidence. They are able to question individuals under oath and demand access to documents even before any legal action is filed against them.
Exxon wants to use the provision to force the California officials to travel to Texas to be questioned by the firm’s lawyers about what the company describes as “lawfare” – the misuse of the legal system for political ends.
Exxon claims in a petition to the Texas supreme court that it is entitled to question the officials in order to collect evidence of “potential violations of ExxonMobil’s rights in Texas to exercise its first amendment privileges” to say what it likes about climate science.
“The potential defendants’ lawfare is aimed at chilling the speech of not just ExxonMobil, but of other prominent members of the Texas energy sector on issues of public debate, in this case, climate change,” the company claims in its petition.
The oil giant’s critics say Exxon’s attempt to use claims of free speech to curtail the first amendment rights of others follows a pattern of harassment toward those who challenge the company’s claims about the climate crisis.
Patrick Parenteau, a law professor and former director of the Environmental Law Center at Vermont law school, has described the company’s move as “intimidation” intended to make “it cost a lot and be painful to take on Exxon” whether or not the company wins its case.
Greg Abbott made the unusual move of writing to the state supreme court to advocate on the behalf of Exxon. Photograph: Bob Daemmrich/Zuma Wire/Rex/Shutterstock
:{:{In a highly unusual move, Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, has written to the all-Republican court – half of whose members he appointed – in support of Exxon. He accused the California litigants of attempting “to suppress the speech of eighteen Q
ATTACK 97% CONSENSUS? CLI LAWSHUTS SHERLING?
Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Naomi_Oreskes
Naomi Oreskes - Wikipedia
Naomi Oreskes (/ əˈrɛskəs /; [1] born November 25, 1958) [2] is an American historian of science. She became Professor of the History of Science and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University in 2013, after 15 years as Professor of History and Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego.
Cambridge University Press & Assessment
https://www.cambridge.org › core › books › honest-broker › A41AD4D7D14077165807DBE057B5FAF9
The Honest Broker - Cambridge University Press & Assessment
The Honest Broker Making Sense of Science in Policy and Politics Search within full text Cited by 1294 Roger A. Pielke, Jr, University of Colorado, Boulder Select format Digital US$52.00 Hardback Available Paperback Available Publisher: Cambridge University Press
rogerpielkejr.substack.com
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com › p › alternative-facts
Alternative Facts - by Roger Pielke Jr. - The Honest Broker
Mar 8, 2024During the meeting, Naomi Oreskes, the Harvard historian of science who popularized the connection between climate and tobacco, argued that scientists should use a different standard of proof for the relationship between climate change and extreme weather events.
Amazon
https://www.amazon.com › Climate-Fix-Roger-Pielke-Jr › dp › 0465025196
The Climate Fix: What Scientists and Politicians Won't Tell You About ...
Why has the world been unable to address global warming? Science policy expert Roger Pielke, Jr., says it's not the fault of those who reject the Kyoto Protocol, but those who support it, and the magical thinking that the agreement represents. In The Climate Fix, Pielke offers a way to repair climate policy, shifting the debate away from meaningless targets and toward a revolution in how the ...
RealClearScience
Weaponizing Peer Review With 'Tactical Science' - RealClearScience
Oct 4, 2024In their book, Merchants of Doubt, Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway argue that scientists "know bad science when they see it".
rogerpielkejr.substack.com
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com › p › the-weaponization-of-scientific-consensus
The Weaponization of "Scientific Consensus" - Substack
Feb 5, 2024In re-reading Oreskes 2004 on climate consensus for the first time in a while I was struck by this comment: This analysis shows that scientists publishing in the peer-reviewed literature agree with IPCC, the National Academy of Sciences, and the public statements of their professional societies.
Koonin, Pielke, Oreskes to testify on "dark money" - Reddit
Drs. Koonin, Pielke, Oreskes and others will be testifying to the US Senate budget committee on "dark money" and climate change.
National Center for Science Education
https://ncse.ngo › congratulations-naomi-oreskes-2015-friend-planet-winner
Congratulations to Naomi Oreskes, 2015 Friend of the Planet Winner
Roger Pielke Jr. wrote to Science, contending that her work was "a caricature" of the underlying science. She replied: A full debate on the moral, social, political, ethical, and economic ramifications of possible responses to climate change—as well as the ramifications of inaction—would be a very good thing.
Science | AAAS
https://www.science.org › doi › 10.1126 › science.308.5724.952
Consensus About Climate Change? | Science
In her essay "The scientific consensus on climate change" (3 Dec. 2004, p. 1686), N. Oreskes asserts that the consensus reflected in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) appears to reflect, well, a consensus. Although Oreskes found unanimity in the 928 articles with key words "global climate change," we should not be surprised if a broader review were to find ...
Department of the History of Science, Harvard University
https://histsci.fas.harvard.edu › file_url › 2113
ORESKES CV May 2023
May 9, 2025Oreskes, Naomi, Colleen Lanier-Christensen, Hannah Conway, and Ashton MacFarlane. "The origins of 'Weather and Climate' in the Clean Air Act: Historical evidence of what Congress knew about carbon dioxide and climate when the Act was passed," accepted at Ecology Law Quarterly. Supran, Geoffrey, Stefan Rahmsdorf and Naomi Oreskes, 2023.
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https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-april-6-2023/}:
04.06.23 - 10:00AM
The Century Long PR Campaign to Connect Capitalism to Democracy
Guest: Naomi Oreskes is professor of the history of science at Harvard University. Her books include, The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, and her latest with historian of science and technology Erik Conway, The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market.
child labor pew sunoco NAM dupont paid for von mises and hayek to come to US u chic; the free mkt pjt blueprint (rewrite road to serfdom, milton does it; lect series wm volker fdn)
little hse on prarie
xian econ, norm v peale; billy g; $ sign of god favor (recycled the --- of wealth); commies are godless, thus god likes capitalism
hollywood no more grapes of wrath motion pix assoc w ayn rand; wrote censorship codes not crit bank rich ppl; [sinclair EPIC? ]; CoC
RR: ike ltr to bro sec secure ~ sm# and stupid; GE NY (convicted rig elec mkt) , horatio alger, very pop pgm; RR sends the speech to nixon; libtard bk list ; RR unites social and fiscal conservatives? xian?
1929 ~ libtard
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shermer on regs
https://youtu.be/L028Pv2sofk
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https://www.desmog.com/2023/02/21/oreskes-conway-the-big-myth-free-market-capitalism-climate-change-mont-pelerin-society/
science historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, authors of the classic 2010 book Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, have released a new book placing that doubt machine into a longer arc of U.S. business and political history.
The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market explores an even more ambitious history dating from the dawn of the 20th century to the present day.
The book documents how today’s prevailing anti-regulatory and anti-government postures that deride Big Government and cheer for Big Business did not arise simply from grassroots demands. Instead, they arose from well-funded industry campaigns creating what Oreskes and Conway have called a manufactured consensus “quasi-religious belief” in deregulated markets and an accompanying diehard opposition to governmental solutions to public policy problems.
Fighting Public Utilities, Child Labor Laws
One of the first campaigns in that spirit occurred within the electricity utility industry via an organization which eventually became known as the Edison Electric Institute.
What is now colloquially calledEEI, was launched in 1885 as the National Electric Light Association, or NELA. At the time, it “represented more than five hundred of the largest privately owned electrical utilities, accounting for more than 90 percent of U.S. kilowatt output,” according to the book.
In the 1920s, according to Oreskes and Conway, “electricity industry leaders organized one of the largest propaganda campaigns in the history of the United States.” The campaign aimed to persuade the public thatmunicipal-owned electricity was a bad thing, advocating instead for investor-owned utilities. In the end, though, it resulted in higher rates for homeowners and small businesses and bigger profits for company owners and their bankrollers.
The initially unpopular campaign framed its activities under the guise of freedom and market efficiency. NELA’s influence operation — involving rewriting K-12 and university textbooks, courting and funding industry-friendly professors, utilizing astroturf campaigns, deploying sophisticated lobbying techniques to facilitate regulatory and legislative capture, and other deceptive practices — resembles much of the fossil fuel industry’s political pressure that DeSmog has covered and uncovered week-in and week-out for over a decade and a half.
At the time, it was the first of its kind industrial-scale full-court press, and it provided a roadmap for other corporate hegemons in subsequent decades. And NELA’s goal went far beyond merely winning a PR campaign, Oreskes and Conway conclude; it had much deeper ideological underpinnings.
“[U]nlike conventional PR, the aim was not simply to create a positive impression of a particular business or even of the whole industry,” they write. “Rather, the goal—expressed outright in numerous documents—was to change the way Americans thought about private property, capitalism, and regulation” altogether.
Core to NELA’s campaign, Oreskes and Conway wrote, was the idea “that free-market capitalism was the embodiment of freedom, writ large, and that any restriction on the freedom of any business would put us on a slippery slope to tyranny.”
Private ownership of the electricity industry was, up until then, relatively rare in the United States and even more so throughout the industrializing world. But as of 2017, 72 percentof U.S. electricity customers got their power from investor-owned utilities. NELA’s campaign, in other words, changed history as we know it.
Today, its successor EEI and its member companies continue to wage deceptive PR campaigns to fight renewable energy and bolster the continued consumption of fossil fuels.
The NELA campaign’s legacy, however, goes far beyond its sector alone, according to Oreskes and Conway. “Perhaps most importantly, NELA pioneered a strategy of insisting that these claims were true, regardless of the facts,” they wrote.
Broadening their view beyond the fossil fuel industry, Oreskes and Conway also detail how the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) propelled similar efforts across other industries during the same era. Like EEI, fast-forwarding to the present-day, NAM has served as a key node of climate denialism.
But in its earliest days,NAM maintained a different sinister focus, according to The Big Myth: advocating against child labor laws amid what the authors described as a “pandemic” of workplace deaths both among young workers and the adult workforce.The sheer volume of such deaths served as one of the first major wakeup calls in the need for a more active regulatory state, the book maps out.
In making its case for child labor and against regulations protecting children, NAM espoused “that the federal government had no business interfering in business” and called such a notion “socialistic in its origin, philosophy and associations.”
Libertarian Fringe to (Neo)Liberal Mainstream
While both NELA and NAM laid the groundwork for a paradigm that’s alive and well today, their ideas were not adopted globally until the formation of theMont Pelerin Society,a group created in 1947 that like EEI and NAM has received close scrutiny from DeSmog for years. Oreskes and Conway devote a whole chapter of The Big Myth to Mont Pelerin.
Like NELA and NAM, Mont Pelerin’s roots lay in anti-regulatory and business-funded ideology. But unlike them, Mont Pelerin came out of academia and via professors committed to the now globally pervasive neoliberal ideology they created. Mont Pelerin inspired similar groups that are, like it, still active today, such as the Koch Industries-funded Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University and the University of Chicago’s free market-oriented Economics Department.
Oreskes and Conway point to a legion of like-minded groups arising by the 1970s, riding the momentum of an academic community devoted to neoliberal ideology, and reacting to the gains made in environmental protection and other areas. Formation of these groups accelerated after the metaphorical call-to-arms made in a memo written to theU.S. Chamber of Commerce by the then-tobacco industry attorney and soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell.
Known today as the Powell Memo, the 1972 letter called for Big Business to undergo “careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations.”
The Powell Memo, Oreskes and Conway concluded, spearheaded free market fundamentalist groups such as the Cato Institute, Koch Family Foundations, Scaife Family Foundations, Olin Foundation, Heritage Foundation, and the Federalist Society, among others. All of these entities, and the groups they fund or work alongside in coalitions, remain powerful forces within U.S. and global politics.
The Big Myth further highlights how those think tanks and companies also played akey role in defeating the 2009 and 2010 congressional push, led by then-President Barack Obama, to pass a federal, market-oriented climate bill known as the American Clean Energy and Security Act. Critics would charge that the policy approach taken in the bill, emblematically, embodies the very “market fundamentalist” ethos reigning over U.S. politics for the past 100-plus years.
During the congressional debate over a bill that would haveenshrined the policy lever of cap-and-trade, the Koch-funded Tea Party network also ascended[vid]
previous congressional pushes in the 2000s for what was ultimately a business-friendly climate policy, had enjoyed bipartisan support. But The Big Myth explains how as the Tea Party network took flight, Republican Party support for the climate bill — and broader climate action — eroded to a near-zero level. It has mostly remained there since.
At the same time, the reality of climate change had and has continued to become all the more clear. That reality though, Oreskes and Conway wrote, clashes with the religion of market fundamentalism.
“[H]ad the market fundamentalists spent so much time defending the magic of the market-place that they simply couldn’t accept market failure on a global scale?” the authors asked of the legion of climate-change deniers who helped to kill the bill. “To accept the enormity of what climate change portended for civilization was to accept that capitalism, as practiced, was undermining the very prosperity it was supposed to deliver. And not just in some distant future, but now.”
Although this “quasi-religious belief” in the power of the market holds the greatest sway with conservatives, Oreskes and Conway argue that belief in the “magic of the marketplace” has become an intoxicating ideology withinliberal circles too, including within climate policy debates.
“Even in supposedly liberal enclaves like Cambridge, Massachusetts,” where Oreskes teaches at Harvard, “many people think climate change will be best addressed by technological innovation in the marketplace,” the co-authors surmise, perhaps in alluding to the prototypical industry-friendly policies pushed by former Obama Administration U.S. Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz — a professor at the nearby Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“The rise of right-wing think tanks helped spread the pro-market, antigovernment gospel across the country and insert what had been decidedly niche views into the mainstream,” the authors explained of the ideology’s spread. Other scholars have referred to this as the “force field” effect, moving the gravitational pull of what’s possible within U.S. politics further and further toward right-wing, corporate-created policy solutions.
The ideological roots of anti-democracy, anti-environmental, and anti-regulatory campaigning explored in The Big Myth also serve as the heart and soul of the book Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming, written by DeSmog co-founders James Hoggan and Richard Littlemore.
If you have learned from DeSmog’s reporting shedding light on the climate change denial machine, you’ll love The Big Myth, an excerpt from which follows below. The book is a must-read for all students of the sordid history of public relations and governmental capture.
Go grab a copy and checkout some recent interviews on the book, as well, for further background. A video of Professor Oreskes discussing the book can also be seen below.
Excerpt from The Big Myth
In the 1990s, as capitalism was being declared triumphant in many quarters, scientists had proved that man-made climate change was under way.1 Climate change was textbook market failure. It arose from everyday economic activity— using fossil fuels—but was about to impose a huge external cost, inundating major coastal cities around the globe, making hurricanes and cyclones even more deadly than they already were, and dislocating tens or even hundreds of millions of people. It was also textbook environmental injustice, as poor people would almost certainly bear the brunt of a problem created by the rich.
But it also had a textbook answer: putting a price on carbon. Economists called this solution a “Pigouvian tax”—after the Cambridge economist Arthur Pigou, who in the early twentieth century had helped develop the concept of negative externalities. (Pigou also suggested it would be reasonable for governments to subsidize activities that had “positive externalities,” such as education.) The idea of pricing social and environmental costs of carbon was hardly radical; Pigou was firmly mainstream, a respected scholar at Cambridge University, a leading figure in what came to be known as the Cambridge school of economics.2 The obvious benefit of the Pigouvian approach was that it remedied the market failure directly by embedding information—in this case scientific information—into the price of fossil fuels. Then consumers could decide for themselves whether or not to buy more expensive fossil fuels, and producers of alternatives could compete on a level playing field.
The Clinton administration proposed to address climate change through a Pigouvian tax, the so-called “BTU” tax (referring to the heat content of fuels as measured in British Thermal Units).3 But it was opposed—indeed, ridiculed—by a broad coalition of conservatives, including, the Chamber of Commerce, the American Petroleum Institute, and virtually every right-wing think tank in America.4
The notorious Global Climate Coalition, a network of fossil fuel producers and users that in the 1990s successfully prevented the U.S. Congress from ratifying the Kyoto protocol to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, was originally established as a committee of the National Association of Manufacturers. Even though the idea of putting a price on carbon was a mainstream economic approach to market failure, Republicans framed it as just another example of Democrats’ penchant to “tax and spend.” The Wall Street Journal mocked it as Al Gore’s “favorite tax.”5
In his 1979 paper on nonmarket failure, economist Charles Wolf had slipped into his conclusion the idea that one cause of nonmarket failure was “premature but politically effective demands for government action.”6 In the 1990s, many Republicans picked up on this theme, arguing that it was premature to act on climate change. Even at the time, that was wrong: scientists already had a consensus that man-made climate change was under way and likely to be very costly.7 To act in the 1990s would have been appropriate. It would have been timely. But Clinton was unable to generate congressional support for action; Republican opposition made it clear that any proposal to put a price on carbon would be dead on arrival. In 1999, when Vice President Al Gore ran for president on a platform prioritizing climate change, journalist Gregg Easterbrook (brother of Judge Frank Easterbrook) embarrassed him on the campaign trail with a false story that his mentor—climate champion Roger Revelle—had experienced a deathbed conversion and died thinking climate change was not a serious problem.8 (He had not.)
As the 1990s became the 2000s—and scientists declared the evidence “unequivocal”—market fundamentalist did not adjust their views. To the contrary, their opposition hardened.9
In 2006, Lord Nicholas Stern, former chief economist of the World Bank, concluded on behalf of the UK government that, yes, fixing climate change would be expensive—perhaps as much as 1 percent of global GDP per annum—but not fixing it would cost much more: at least 5 percent and perhaps as much as 20 percent.10 Here was a solid argument from a man who could scarcely be accused of being any kind of -ist other than an economist. In response, conservatives dug in deeper. Senator Ted Cruz promoted the canard that global warming had stopped; Senator James Inhofe called it a liberal conspiracy to bring down capitalism.11 No matter what solutions were proposed—market-friendly or not—the right wing found reasons to oppose them. The science wasn’t settled (they claimed). It would be too expensive to fix. We could just adapt. It was all a hoax. Often these claims were couched in libertarian terms, as when in 2011 former House Speaker Newt Gingrich deemed the push to address climate change “the newest excuse to take control of lives.”12
The singular exception to climate denial in Republican Party leadership was Senator John McCain. He and conservative Democrat Joe Lieberman introduced Climate Stewardship acts in 2003, 2005, and 2007 to address the carbon dioxide emissionsthat drive climate change by creating an emissions trading system—a proven mechanism, albeit more complicated than a Pigouvian tax. But when given the chance to use it to address climate change, Republicans refused.13 The 2003 bill failed on mostly party lines, with a few Democrats and nearly all Republicans in opposition. But it was a closer call than many expected, and soon Congress faced intense lobbying pressure against climate legislation, particularly from NAM and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The 2005 version came to a vote and failed 60–38, with only a handful of Republicans voting yea.14 Two years after that, McCain could not even persuade Republican leaders to bring a climate bill to the Senate floor.15
In 2009, Congress tried once more, with the American Clean Energy and Security Act (better known as Waxman-Markey,for its primary sponsors, Massachusetts representative Ed Markey and California representative Henry Waxman). For the fourth time in a decade, Congress had the opportunity to address climate change using a market mechanism, and for the fourth time rejected it. The bill barely passed the Democratic-led House; nearly all Republicans voted against, as did Democrats from fossil-fuel-producing states (and a few Democrats who found the bill too weak). The Senate never brought it to a vote. Democrats concluded they could not overcome the “wall of opposition” they faced from their Republican colleagues, opposition fortified by fierce lobbying.16 One analysis concluded that, in the eighteen months between January 2009 and June 2010, electric utilities, oil and gas companies, trade associations, and think tanks spent at least $500 million against climate change legislation.17 Another study tracing anti-climate lobbying back to 2003 places the figure at closer to $1 billion.18
The fossil fuel industry’s economic interests in preventing climate action have always been obvious; less understood is how it has camouflaged those interests. No one ever said, “I am denying climate change to protect corporate profits.” They said they were protecting jobs, protecting the economy, and protecting free markets from government “encroachment.” They said they were fighting for capitalism and freedom.
But historically, capitalism has never been just one thing: Adam Smith’s eighteenth-century vision of a democratic, distributed marketplace populated by small bankers and businessmen was a far cry from the industrial capitalism that developed in early nineteenth-century England and Germany—with its cruel “Satanic mills”—or the monopolies and managerial capitalism that came to dominate America in the late nineteenth century, much less the globally financed capitalism that emerged at the end of the twentieth century. China has liberalized its markets while continuing to oppress and even murder its ethnic and religious minorities. There are many capitalisms. American market fundamentalists fight for a form of capitalism that is both brutal and ignorant: that brushes aside market failure, anticompetitive practices, and external costs, in part by denying the facts of science, the facts of history, and the necessary role of government in making capitalism work.19
The question is not whether government should set limits that prevent individual autonomy from producing collective harm, the question is where we draw the lines. That is not an economic question, it is a political one. Market fundamentalists have managed to distract from the political aspects of these decisions and frame them as questions of “economic freedom.” Thus, a reasonable response to climate change is rejected as unreasonable “government encroachment.”
All this may make one wonder: was this ever reallyabout capitalism? Or freedom? Or was it all just one long, semi-continuous, shape-shifting defense of the prerogatives of big business? Of freedom for capital and capitalists? Or had the market fundamentalists spent so much time defending the magic of the market- place that they simply couldn’t accept market failure on a global scale? To accept the enormity of what climate change portended for civilization was to accept that capitalism, as practiced, was undermining the very prosperity it was supposed to deliver. And not just in some distant future, butnow.
ref bib...
“Public Utilities Propaganda in the Schools, June 28, 1928,” Editorial Research Reports 1928,
vol.II, https://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/document.php?id=cqresrre1928062800
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https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/03/excerpt-from-naomi-oreskes-the-big-myth/
excerpt:
this is the story of how American business manufactured a myth that has, for decades and to our detriment, held us in its grip. It is the true history of a false idea: the idea of “the magic of the marketplace.”
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Some people call it market absolutism or market essentialism. In the 1990s, George Soros popularized the name we find most apt: market fundamentalism. It’s a quasi-religious belief that the best way to address our needs — whether economic or otherwise — is to let markets do their thing, and not rely on government. Market fundamentalists treat “The Market” as a proper noun: something unique and unto itself, that has agency and even wisdom, that functions best when left unfettered and unregulated, undisturbed and unperturbed. Government, according to the myth, cannot improve the functioning of markets; it can only interfere. Governments therefore need to stay out of the way, lest they “distort” the market and prevent it from doing its “magic.” In the late 20th century, market fundamentalism was cloaked in the seemingly ancient raiments of received wisdom. In fact, it was more or less invented in the 20th century.
Classical liberal economists — including Adam Smith — recognized that government served essential functions, including building infrastructure for everyone’s benefit and regulating banks, which, left to their own devices, could destroy an economy. They also recognized that taxation was required to enable governments to perform those functions. But in the early 20th century, a group of self-styled “neo-liberals” shifted economic and political thinking radically. They argued that any government action in the marketplace, even well intentioned, compromised the freedom of individuals to do as they pleased — and therefore put us on the road to totalitarianism. Political and economic freedom were “indivisible,” they insisted: any compromise to the latter was a threat to the former — any compromise at all, even to address obvious ills like child labor or workplace injury. Why did we ever come to accept a worldview so impervious to facts? A worldview Smith himself, often thought of as the father of free-market capitalism, would have rejected? How did so many Americans come to have so much faith in markets and so little faith in government?
Market fundamentalism is not just the belief that free markets are the best means to run an economic system but also the belief that they are the only means that will not ultimately destroy our other freedoms. It is the belief in the primacy of economic freedom not just to generate wealth but as a bulwark of political freedom. And it is the belief that markets exist outside of politics and culture, so that it can be logical to speak of leaving them “alone.”
We are all familiar with the idea that, as Soros has summarized, “the doctrine of laissez-faire capitalism holds that the common good is best served by the uninhibited pursuit of self-interest.” That’s the core argument Adam Smith made in 1776 and contented capitalists have accepted ever since. Market fundamentalists, however, depart from Smith by insisting there is no “common good,” merely the sum of all the individual private goods. For this reason, they reject government’s claims to represent “the people”: there are only people — individuals — who represent themselves, and they do this most effectively not through their governments, even democratically elected ones, but through free choices in free markets.
Milton Friedman, America’s most famous market fundamentalist, went so far as to argue that voting was not democratic, because it could too easily be distorted by special interests and because in any case most voters were ignorant. But rather than consider how special interests might be mitigated or how voters could be better informed, he maintained that true freedom was not expressed in the voting booth. “The economic market provides a greater degree of freedom than the political market,” Friedman said in South Africa in 1976, as he encouraged the citizens of that country not to fuss over apartheid, but to preserve and expand their market-based economy.
Friedman’s argument works when we are talking about the freedom to buy, say, shoes of any type. But it fails when we consider the larger picture, including deceptive advertising, aggressive and misleading PR campaigns, and what economists call “external costs”: costs that are invisible to or misunderstood by the shoe buyers, or that accrue to people who didn’t buy those shoes at all. Pollution is an external cost. What happens when the shoe manufacturer dumps toxic chemicals behind the plant and hides that fact from its workers, investors, and customers? Friedman downplayed the problem by giving it the friendly label of “neighborhood effects,” and claimed that any remedy would almost always be worse than the disease, because of the loss of freedoms or compromises to property rights typically associated with government regulations. In some cases, he may have been right. Regulations do compromise someone’s freedom in order to protect the freedom (and welfare) of others. When it comes to pollution, the “freedom” of factories to dump toxic wastes has been rightly rejected. When it comes to climate change, the “freedom” of corporations to sell oil, gas, and coal jeopardizes the rest of us. This creates a fundamental dilemma for the fundamentalists. But rather than rethink their arguments, market fundamentalists protect their worldview by denying that climate change is real or asserting that somehow “The Market” will fix it, despite all evidence to the contrary.
Friedman held that capitalism and freedom are two indivisible sides of the same coin, but this “indivisibility thesis” predates him by decades. In the early 20th century, it was promoted in the United States by a group of industrialists working under the umbrella of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM). NAM and its allies used the thesis to argue against political reforms that today we take for granted, such as laws limiting child labor, establishing workers’ compensation, and creating the federal income tax. In the 1930s, they aligned themselves with the electricity industry and used the thesis to argue against the Rural Electrification Administration, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and other elements of the New Deal. Mostly they lost these fights, in part because the thesis suffered a fatal flaw: it wasn’t true. Electricity was a case in point. Markets had failed to bring electricity to millions of Americans who wanted it, but the government had succeeded, and rural Americans were better off economically and no less free. Indeed, they were arguably freer than before, because they now had electrical appliances that reduced manual labor and electric lights to lengthen the usable day.
Because the indivisibility thesis had so little foundation in fact, American business leaders needed to find other ways to shore it up. One way was propaganda. In the 1920s, the National Electric Light Association (NELA) launched a massive campaign that included, among other things, the hiring of academics to rewrite textbooks and develop curricula to promote pro- market, antigovernment perspectives in emerging business schools and economics programs across the country. They also recruited experts to “prove” that private electricity was cheaper than public electricity, even when the available facts showed otherwise. In the 1930s, NAM reprised the effort, with a multimillion-dollar propaganda campaign to convince Americans that business and industry were working just fine, and that the real causes of the Great Depression were unionized labor’s unreasonable demands, coupled with the government’s excessive interference in business affairs and federal taxation that starved industry of the monies it needed to expand productive capacity. Well into the 1940s, NAM produced books, pamphlets, radio programs, lecture series, and documentary and feature films (and later television programs) designed to influence what newspapers had to say about the economy and American life, what teachers taught in the classroom, and, above all, what the American people believed.
Another strategy was to recruit sympathetic intellectuals to help give the myth credibility. For this, American businessmen relied on imports: the economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek, leaders of the Austrian school of economics. In the 1940s, a group linked to NAM paid for Mises and Hayek to come to America, arranged for them to be hired at New York University and the University of Chicago, respectively, and worked assiduously to promote the economists’ ideas, both in business circles and among the American people generally. This included publishing a dumbed-down version of Hayek’s famous book “The Road to Serfdom” in Reader’s Digest and a cartoon version of it in Look magazine. In the 1950s, Ronald Reagan would encounter that Reader’s Digest version; decades later “The Road to Serfdom” would be promoted by right-wing radio hosts Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh and touted by influential Republicans including Senator Ted Cruz and House leader Paul Ryan.
Businessmen helped create America’s first libertarian think tank, the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), established in 1946 by Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce manager Leonard Read to peddle pro-market, antigovernment ideology. They also funded the Hayek-aligned Mont Pelerin Society, a cadre of mostly European economists, cultural commentators, and political theorists promoting a renewed commitment to free-market principles under the aegis of what became known as neoliberalism. And they would help Milton Friedman write his most influential book, “Capitalism and Freedom” — essentially a restatement of the indivisibility thesis — which would dramatically reshape the American cultural conversation in the 1970s and ’80s. In 1988, Reagan would award Friedman both the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the National Medal of Science.
Few of Friedman’s readers knew that the book’s success was not the product of open competition in the marketplace of ideas: “Capitalism and Freedom” had been financed and nurtured by American businessmen, and it was the most public part of a much larger project. Reader’s Digest notwithstanding, the people who had brought Hayek to America had quickly concluded that his approach was too intellectual and too European to break through to the public.
Most Americans know that before becoming a politician Reagan was an actor, but fewer are aware that Reagan’s flagging screen career was revived by a job with the General Electric Corporation (GE). Reagan hosted the popular television show “General Electric Theater,” where each week his voice and face reached into tens of millions of homes, promoting didactic stories of individualism and free enterprise. At the same time, he traveled across the country on behalf of GE — visiting factories, making speeches at schools, and doing the dinner circuit in communities where GE had a presence — promoting the corporation’s stridently individualist antiunion and antigovernment vision.
Reagan’s mentor in this work was GE executive Lemuel Ricketts Boulware, whose antiunion tactics were so extreme they earned a name: Boulwarism. (They would also earn GE several indictments for federal labor law violations.) And while Reagan helped GE promote the ideology of free markets and free choice, the company conspired to rig electricity markets (an offense for which it would be successfully prosecuted in the 1960s). Boulware’s influence transformed Reagan’s politics. He went into GE a New Deal Democrat and came out an antigovernment conservative Republican. GE transformed Reagan’s political fortunes as well; he emerged from his time there with powerful backers in corporate America who helped him launch his career in elected office.
Reagan was known as the Great Communicator, and the success of American market fundamentalism was ultimately a triumph of public relations: its advocates built a myth and persuaded Americans of its truth. By the 1970s, what had begun as a self-interested defense of business prerogatives — one that was factually dubious and characteristically supported by gross distortions and misrepresentations of history — had been transmogrified into a seemingly intellectually robust body of thought.
Meanwhile, a network of libertarian think tanks, heavily funded by industries selling dangerous products including tobacco and fossil fuels, had been established to promote these views in schools, in universities, and in American life writ large. Among other things, these think tanks distributed free of charge millions of copies of Hayek’s and Friedman’s (and Ayn Rand’s) books. Meanwhile, progressive foundations mostly focused on specific issues — like saving whales or expanding access to education — not realizing that a larger ideological battle was under way. The myth spread, influencing American presidents from Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and, most recently, Donald Trump.
Americans in the early 20th century were largely suspicious of “Big Business” and saw the government as their ally. By the later decades of the century, this had flipped: many Americans now admired business leaders as “entrepreneurs” and “job creators” and believed it made more sense to count on the “magic of the marketplace” to solve problems than to engage government. Many Americans saw government as dead weight, taxation as unfair or even a form of theft. That they accepted these claims is proof of this story’s importance: propaganda and persuasion had worked. The people involved in this project were intellectually diverse and geographically dispersed, but they were also in important (and sometimes startling) ways interconnected. Theirs was not a conspiracy, but it was a network of people who knew each other, supported each other morally and financially, and used this mutual support to promote a singular myth.
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realclear invest links to EID?!
no docs
https://eidclimate.org/failure-to-disclose-new-report-exposes-academics-with-financial-ties-to-law-firms/
no lnx see realclear invest
FAILURE TO DISCLOSE: NEW REPORT EXPOSES ACADEMICS WITH FINANCIAL TIES TO LAW FIRMS
MAY 24, 2021| WILLIAM ALLISON
Just a week after the bombshell admission that a Harvard academic is working under a retainer agreement with a top plaintiffs’ attorney firm without any previous disclosure,a new report puts the spotlight on this practice happening at universities across the country.
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The report, “Private Funders, Public Institutions: ‘Climate’ Litigation and a Crisis of Integrity,” published by [NOT THE REAL] Government Accountability & Oversight, P.C. (GAO), uncovers the coordination taking place between public officials, activist organizations, wealthy donors, and university faculty to bring climate change-related cases against energy companies, with a specific focus on the lawsuit filed by Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison in June 2020.
Why the Naomi Oreskes-Sher Edling Retainer Presents Multiple Conflicts of Interest
The GAO report’s release couldn’t have come at a more apt time. Earlier this month, news broke that Harvard professor and longtime climate litigation activist Naomi Oreskes is on retainer with Sher Edling, LLP, the environmental plaintiffs’ law firm representing the majority of municipalities and states, including Minnesota, that have filed climate change lawsuits against the energy industry in recent years.
When Oreskes and fellow Harvard researcher Geoffrey Supran released a new study focused on climate change communications (that was just as flawed as their previous work), they did not seem prepared for the news that Oreskes is on retainer with Sher Edling to break. Notably, this wasn’t disclosed via a game of telephone, either, but Oreskes herself said so while under oath in a recent deposition.
It now appears that Oreskes sought to redefine her business relationship with Sher Edling after it hit the press, as she and Supran provided several different explanations to reporters when asked about her retainer disclosure. While Oreskes may be uncertain about the nature of her involvement with Sher Edling and its implications, others are not.
Academics took to Twitter to point out that this relationship should absolutely been disclosed:
A significant (an undisclosed) conflict of interesthttps://t.co/IPX2PgtsJ8
— Judith Curry(@curryja) May 14, 2021
Shot ‘n Chaser
LEFT – Authors of new paper about Exxon-Mobil complicity in downplaying climate states they have no relevant financial ties
RIGHT – Same author disclosing in a recent deposition (Mann vs CEI) that she is on retainer for a law firm suing Exxon-Mobil
This is fine pic.twitter.com/UGTxjAPizf
— Roger Pielke Jr.(@RogerPielkeJr) May 14, 2021
The Academic-Activist Behind the Curtain in Minnesota
The report shows that Oreskes is far from the only academic who is working directly with top attorneys involved in the climate litigation campaign.
In Minnesota, the report outlines the critical role that University of Minnesota law professor Alexandra Klassplayed in orchestratingAttorney General Ellison’s lawsuit. In April 2019, she signed a memo titled “Potential Lawsuit against Fossil Fuel Companies for Minnesota Climate Change Damages” to be shared with the newly sworn-in Ellison.
Newly released documents in the report show that Klass was approached by anoutside activist groupthat provided funding for her students to write the memo, reviewed by other attorneys supporting climate litigation, and backed by theRockefeller network that has manufactured entire national litigation campaign.
None of this involvement by Klass was ever disclosed to the public, whether when moderating a forum on campus with Ellison, providing quotes in local newspapers, or in podcasts discussing the lawsuit.
Highlighting emails obtained through public records requests, the report shows that in late 2018, Klass was approached by Michael Noble, executive director of local activist group Fresh Energy about enlisting her help with potential litigation in Minnesota. In conversations with Klass, Noble spoke of a “big idea” and sent along climate pleadings from previously filed cases, and that he was looking for Klass’s “reaction (and hopefully enthusiasm).”
Roughly one month later, in December 2018, Noble asked if Klass wanted “to do a phone call with the lawyers advising the Rockefeller family fund” (sic) and the climate case was off to the metaphorical races.
Image via GAO
By early 2019, Klass had a contract through Fresh Energy to hire several law students to assist her in drafting the legal memo focused on a potential Minnesota climate change lawsuit that was eventually sent to Ellison.
Image via GAO]
In October 2019, Klass helped to host a panel discussion at the University of Minnesota Law School on “the legal and scientific case for recovering climate change damages in Minnesota from fossil fuel companies” which featured both Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison and Sher Edling’s Vic Sher, whose law firm now represents Minnesota in its climate change deception case.
At the time, the event was framed as an academic discussion. But what the public didn’t know was that Klass had already written a memo to Ellison earlier that year laying out the proposed legal theories that could back a climate change-focused lawsuit targeting the energy industry. Furthermore, the event was coordinated by Sam Duggan – one of the students who helped write the memo.
Despite her direct involvement in the drafting of the lawsuit, Klass has continued to present herself as an impartial expert on Minnesota state law. When Ellison initially filed his climate case last summer, Klass was quoted in news stories, including coverage from the Minneapolis Star Tribune as a professor of environmental law and thus, a neutral third-party expert. To date, she has not publicly spoken about her lack of disclosure regarding her involvement in helping put the idea of climate litigation in front of Ellison.
Efforts to keep government actions hidden from the public has even extended to Ellison’s office.Earlier this year, Ellison wrote an op-ed in the Star Tribune touting his office’s transparency, but the hiring of two Bloomberg-funded Special Assistant Attorneys General from another university – the NYU Law School’s State Energy & Environmental Impact Center – raises serious questions. Ellison’s claim that these SAAGs “report to me and no one else,” and thus solely loyalty is to Minnesota taxpayers, is hard to believe when the job description for a similar position with the New York Attorney General explained:
“Fellows hosted by the OAG as special assistants will have responsibilities that include… preparing periodic reports of activities and progress for the State Impact Center.”
The Group in the Middle of It All? The Rockefellers
To the surprise of no one who has is even remotely familiar with the climate litigation campaign, the Rockefellers are one of the common threads between Oreskes and Klass.
The Rockefeller Family Fund supported all three of Oreskes’ major studies focused on the energy industry,and if there was any doubt that the wealthy foundation that supports climate litigation wouldn’t have any subjective effect on this research, then let Oreskes herself explain how the source of a researcher’s funding can lead to unconscious bias.
As Oreskes stated in published a letter she co-authored in 2015:
“But the issue is deeper than one of obeying rules; the important question is why those rules are necessary. The answer is that even if we think of ourselves as honest, objective, and independent, scientific evidence demonstrates that our research can be influenced by the sources of our funding… Many of us are reluctant to accept this funding because it seems to imply that our colleagues—including individuals we may know and respect—have been corrupted. Corruption exists, but the funding effect may more often be the result of unconscious bias.” (emphasis added)
In Minnesota, the Rockefeller Family Fund has been just as active. The group, and its director Lee Wasserman in particular, put the idea of a climate lawsuit in front of Michael Noble right after Ellison was elected in November 2018, as the report shows:
Image via GAO]
In turn, Noble then went to Klass where he explained the Rockefeller Family Fund’s role in supporting a climate lawsuit in Minnesota:
Images via GAO]
The “lawyers advising Rockefeller family fund” that Noble mentions is the Center for Climate Integrity, an activist group that’s supporting climate lawsuits across the country and which has received more than $3 million from the Rockefeller Family Fund. The group was also a sponsor of the 2019 panel that Ellison and Klass attended, and two senior officials from the group, Judith Enck andAlyssa Johl, provided feedback on Klass’s memo:
Images via GAO
With the memo prepared, Noble then went about bringing all the threads togethers by arranging a meeting of the key players, including Klass and officials with the Rockefeller Family Fund and the Center for Climate Integrity:
Finally, shortly after Ellison introduced the lawsuit, Noble couldn’t help but tout his own work when he admitted on a public webinar that he and the Rockefeller-funded Center for Center for Climate Integrity convinced the attorney general to file the case.
West Coast Edition
The coordination among academics and law firms is indeed happening from coast to coast, includingAnn Carlson, the UCLA Law professortaking a leave of absence to serve in the Biden Administration.
Previously, Carlson has worked as a consultant with Sher Edling, the same firm that has Naomi Oreskes on retainer. Carlson also appeared on a panel discussion on climate litigation alongside Vic Sher at the University of Hawai’i Richardson School of Law in May 2019, just ten months before the City & County of Honolulu filed its own climate lawsuit.
The report outlines Carlson’s work at theUCLA Law School and the financial support she received:
“Consider another relevant example, revealed in a recent public-record production obtained from UCLA Law School by Government Accountability & Oversight, P.C. That production of documents revealed certain details of how donors named Dan Emmett and Ralph and Shirley Shapiro gave a combined $1.5 million to a ‘Carlson discretionary fund’ which, according to the Shapiros’ instruction, is ‘to be used at the discretion of Professor Ann Carlson… in her sole discretion as she deems appropriate.’” (emphasis added)
Conclusion
As Energy In Depth as shown for years, the Rockefellers have manufactured the entire climate litigation campaign and their work hasn’t slowed down.
This new paper from Government Accountability & Oversight, P.C. uncovers the role that academics have played in supporting these lawsuits with Minnesota the latest example of the lack of disclosure between government officials, activist groups, and college professors.
Added on top of the bombshell news that Harvard professorNaomi Oreskes is on retainer with a top plaintiffs firm, this nationally coordinated campaign becomes more interconnected by the day.
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From the IPCC to the SOTU, people are picking up on climate disinformation
Published on March 3rd, 2022
TAGGED: CLIMATE, DISINFORMATION, IPCC, SOTU
Climate misinformation is having a moment! With an ample selection of news stories deserving attention, you might have to look pretty closely to notice. But hey, that’s what we’re here for, right? Because tucked into the latest IPCC report are a few key mentions of climate misinformation. Flipping through to page 2,515, Section 14.3 covers the “perception of climate change hazards, risks and adaptation in North America,” describing how the “consensus that mean global temperature has increased and human activity is a major cause” is “the context for public policy action.”
[tom toles climate change denial fire]
(Cartoon by Tom Toles from the Washington Post – get his book on climate change co-written with Dr Michael Mann, The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy)]
By Climate Denier Roundup
But “despite expert scientific consensus,” there is still “ongoing debate… in the public and policy domains,” because “rhetoric and misinformation on climate change and the deliberate undermining of science have contributed to misperceptions of the scientific consensus.”
And though the report doesn’t use the word “disinformation,” and doesn’t go quite as far as it could to “name names” as Simon Lewis told DeSmog. But it does address it, describing how “vested economic and political interests have organized and financed misinformation and ‘contrarian’ climate change communication.” (If the misinformation is deliberately “organized and financed” by “vested economic and political interests,” then it’s not false content innocently and unknowingly shared as misinfo, it’s intentionally deceptive disinformation!)
As Geoffrey Supran told press, “these two paragraphs in the latest IPCC report are significant because they are the first-of-their-kind, finally throwing the weight of the global scientific community behind the mountain of social science scholarship on climate obstructionism.”
In past reports, “the history of climate disinformation, lobbying, and propaganda by fossil fuel interests has been consistently ignored,” Supran explained.
That’s why the WGII report, meant to summarize the latest climate science, dips back all the way to the mid-00’s when referencing studies about, the report states, how “the journalistic norm of ‘balance’ (giving equal weight to climate scientists and contrarians in climate change reporting) biases coverage by unevenly amplifying certain messages that are not supported by science, contributing to politicization of science, spreading misinformation, and reducing public consensus on action.”
These days the problem is more social media than legitimate outlets, and more up-to-date studies reflect that, the report finds: “Much online social media discussion of climate change … takes place in ‘echo chambers’’ – a social network amongst like-minded people in communities dominated by a single view that contributes to polarization (Williams et al., 2015; Pearce et al., 2019), and the spread of misinformation (Treen et al., 2020).”
The IPCC report’s inclusion of misinformation is important, Supran said, “because the IPCC reports are the most visible climate reports in the world. They frame the climate problem, its significance, and its solutions for the public and policymakers worldwide.”
And indeed, as international negotiators and scientists were in the home stretch of finalizing the Summary for Policymakers for the report (which didn’t happen to fit misinformation into its 36 page summary of the 3,675 page full report) some policymakers in the White House were getting a misinformation briefing of their own.
According to an official press release, the “2-hour virtual roundtable” brought together “White House leaders and 17 scientists and communications experts” in order “to discuss the scientific understanding of why arguments for delaying action on climate change are appealing and how they can be countered effectively.”
Among the participants was Naomi Oreskes, whose studies the IPCC referenced. According to the readout, she noted that extreme weather “made worse by climate change” is making it harder and harder to deny the reality of the climate crisis. “People may say ‘let’s wait and see.’ The truth is, we have waited, and we have seen.”
To put it in decidedly less White House-appropriate terms, thanks to Big Oil’s disinformation, we’ve spent decades fucking around. And now, the latest IPCC report makes clear, we’re finding out.
(Originally appeared at DailyKos)
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cic
july 2020
BBC Radio Series Tracks History of Climate Denial
Posted: July 27, 2020
The BBC has launched a two hour series on the history of corporate climate denial. The series starts in 1988 and traces the rise in climate policy attacks through the George W. Bush Administration in the 2000s. They been researching this series for several months. Great to hear it finally! Featured interviews include Naomi Oreskes, …
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2017 maloney oversight written test:
https://www.democrats.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Naomi_Oreskes_Testimony.pdf
Naomi Oreskes
Professor of the History of Science
Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA 02138
Testimony for the U.S. Select Committee on Climate Change
October 23, 2019
I. Introduction
Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak with you today. My testimony is based on 15
years of research, on the history of climate science, and on the history of attempts to undermine,
distract attention from, and confuse the American people about that science.
I have been accused of being “an activist,” and were that the case I would defend my right as a
citizen to be one. When citizens are inactive, democracy fails. But I speak here not as an activist—I
represent no group, no political party, no NGO. I would prefer that I were at home, working on my
next book (and so would my editor and my agent). But like the diverse Americans who have already
appeared before this committee—scholars and scientists, athletes and business leaders—I have
come to understand that we must all become active to stop further dangerous climate change before
the opportunity to do so is lost.1
And if we are to have any chance of that, we must come to grips
with the forces that have contributed to our inaction.
II. The Science
Last week I had the opportunity to testify to the House Committee on Oversight and Reform,
Subcommittee, Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. The topic of the hearing was the
oil industry’s efforts to suppress the truth about climate change, and the disproportionate impact
that the impacts of climate change are already having, and will continue to have, on low income
communities and people of color. Climate change affects all Americans, but it affects low-income
Americans and people of color disproportionately, insofar as these American citizens typically lack
the political power and financial resources needed to protect themselves from the worst effects of
climate change. They are also more likely to live in vulnerable locations such as flood plains, or in
poorly built homes that cannot withstand the effects of extreme weather events.
In that testimony--submitted as an appendix to my testimony today (Appendix 0)--I recounted how
scientists have been seriously investigating the subject of man-made climate change since the late
1950s, and political leaders have been discussing it for nearly as long. I recounted the discussion in
Congressional hearings leading up to the 1970s Clean Air Act, which helps to explain why the Act
explicitly states that “All language referring to effects on welfare includes, but is not limited to,
effects on soils, water, crops, vegetation, manmade materials, animals, wildlife, weather…and
climate….”2 The discussion of CO2 and climate in Congressional hearings also explains why, as the
Clean Air Act was finalized in December 1970, Jennings Randolph, Republican Senator of West
Virginia—and chair of the Senate Public Works Committee, which drafted the Act—advocated for
worldwide pollution monitoring, which would aid efforts to understand the global increase in CO2
as its unfolding effects on “weather and climate.”3
Between 1970 and 1992, human-caused climate change went from being a prediction to a fact. And
so it was in no way premature when, in 1992, President George H. W. Bush, signed the United
2
Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which committed its nearly 200
signatories to global action to prevent “dangerous anthropogenic interference” with the climate
system. In signing this convention, President Bush promised to translate the promises made in Rio
“into concrete action to protect the planet.”4
But that did not happen. We did not take concrete action to protect the planet—to protect
ourselves. Why not? A major reason is the systematic, organized campaign by the fossil fuel
industry and its allies to sow doubt about the science and prevent meaningful action.
III. The Disinformation
Last week’s hearings focused particularly on the role of ExxonMobil. This focuses stems from the
documented discrepancies between what ExxonMobil has said in public about climate change and
what they said in private. Investigations by journalists, statements by former ExxonMobil
employees, and my own peer-reviewed analysis of ExxonMobil climate documents demonstrate that
the company was aware of progress in climate science as early the 1970s, and until the early 1980s
contributed substantively to that science. However, in the late 1980s to early 1990s, ExxonMobil
changed course. Rather than act upon the emerging scientific consensus about the threat of
anthropogenic global warming, and alter its business model accordingly, it made the fateful decision
to turn to denial and disinformation.
In our 2017 analysis of ExxonMobil’s 40-year history of climate change communications,
my postdoctoral research fellow, Dr. Geoffrey Supran, and I analyzed ExxonMobil’s outreach to the general
public through paid advertising in leading newspapers. From 1989 to 2004, ExxonMobil published
a series of “advertorials” in The New York Times and other leading newspapers. These were paid
advertisements, but were formatted to look like editorials, and which were not labelled as the
advertisements that they in fact were.
We documented two things:
First, that many of their advertorials were misleading.They misrepresented the state of the science
and exaggerated the degree of uncertainty. In one case, the misrepresentation was so egregious that
the scientist whose work was being cited called the use of his data ‘very misleading,” and stated that
what ExxonMobil had done was “something no responsible scientist would do.”5
Second, that there was a systematic discrepancy between what the advertorials—designed to
influence public opinion—said about climate change and what the company and its scientists said
either in private, or in communications that were intended for restricted scientific or industrial
audiences. Approximately 80% of peer-reviewed papers and internal documents acknowledged that
climate change was real and human-caused, but 81% of the advertorials expressed doubt.
However, fossil fuel disinformation goes well beyond ExxonMobil’s advertorials. For more than
thirty years, the fossil fuel industry and its allies have denied the truth about anthropogenic global
warming. They have systematically misled the American people, and contributed to delay in acting
on the issue by discounting and disparaging climate science, mispresenting scientific findings, and
attempting to discredit climate scientists. These activities are documented in my recent co-authored
report, How Americans Were Deliberately Misled about Climate Change, submitted as an appendix to my
testimony, along with supporting materials (Appendices 1-18).
3
A key aspect of this disinformation campaign was the mobilization of “third-party allies”:
organizations and groups with whom the industry collaborated on messaging, who they funded
extensively and in some cases were responsible for creating.
In the 1990s these included the Global Climate Coalition, the Cooler Heads Coalition, Informed
Citizens for the Environment, and the Greening Earth Society. Like ExxonMobil, these groups
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 we could readily adapt to any changes that did occur,
and that addressing climate change would wreck the American economy. Two of these groups—the
so-called Informed Citizens for the Environment and the Greening Earth Society—were created and funded
by a coal industry trade association, the Western Fuels Association, representing Powder River basin
coal producers. 6
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, but were not limited to,
the George C. Marshall Institute, the Cato Institute, the Competitive Institute, the American
Enterprise Institute and the Heartland Institute. Often their politically motivated contrarian claims
were presented in formats designed to make them look like the scientific reports that they were in
fact rejecting. In 2009, the Cato Institute issued a report that precisely mimicked the format, layout,
and structure of the U.S. National Climate Impact Assessment, but which presented claims deeply at
odds with that report’s science (Appendix 15).7 In 2017, the Heartland Institute sent a booklet to
over 200,000 school teachers, repeating the oft-cited contrarian claims that climate science is still
highly unsettled, and that even if climate change is occurring it “would probably not be harmful.”
The director of the National Center for Science Education has said of this booklet, “It’s not science,
but it’s dressed up to look like science. It’s clearly intended to confuse teachers.”8
The National Science Teachers Association has called it “propaganda,” advising that teachers place their copies in
the recycling bin.9
A third way the industry has promoted disinformation is through their trade associations. In the
early 1990s, the Western Fuels Association ran a media campaign across the country designed to
undermine public support for climate action by promoting the message that it would be wasteful to
spend money solving a problem that perhaps did not actually exist (Appendix 16). These trade
associations include the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the American Petroleum
Institute (API), the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Black Chamber of Commerce
(NBCC), and the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM).
A fourth way the fossil fuel industry has undermined public understanding is through personal
attacks on scientists. One of the earliest documented was the attack on climate scientist Benjamin
Santer, the scientist 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 in the Second Assessment Report of the IPCC, responsible for the 1995 conclusion that
“the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human impact on the climate system.”10 Santer
became the target of a vicious, and arguably defamatory, attack by physicists from the George C.
Marshall Institute and the Global Climate Coalition, who accused him of fraud.11 Other climate
scientists, including Michael Mann, Jonathan Overpeck, Malcolm Hughes, Ray Bradley, Katharine
Hayhoe, and, I should note, myself, have been subject to harassment, investigation, hacked email,
and politically motivated freedom-of-information attacks.12
Sadly, some of these attacks have emanated from the U.S. Congress, led by Texas Representative Joe
Barton and Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe. Texas and Oklahoma are of course, oil and gas states,
4
and both these men have received extensive campaign contributions from the fossil fuel industry.13
Groups that continue to attack and harass scientists include the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the
American Traditions Institute, and the Energy and Environment Legal Institute.14 At present, the
Energy and Environment Legal Institute home page features a link to the Amazon page for a new
book by Steve Milloy, who is well-known for his work in the 1990s on behalf of the tobacco
industry. Among other things, Milloy ran an organization known as TASSC—the Advancement of
Sound Science Coalition—a front organization created by Philip Morris tobacco to attack the EPA
on the issue of second-hand smoke.15
IV. Third Party Allies Continue to Make Inaccurate Claims, Offer Partial Truths, and
Promote Misleading Narratives
The role of third-party allies was on full display in last week’s house hearings, where Republican
members invited as their sole witness the founder and President of Energy45, a group whose
purpose, in their own words, is to “support the Trump energy agenda.”
Energy45 is part of a group known as the CO2 Coalition. This illustrates a strategy that I call
“zombie denialism,” in which old players and arguments reappear in new forms.
Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, a leader in climate change disinformation was the George C.
Marshall Institute. Its director, William O’Keefe, was the long-time Executive Vice President and
CEO of the American Petroleum Institute (1974-1999). The Marshall Institute closed in 2015, only
to remerge a few years later as the CO2 Coalition.
The representative of Energy45 was Mandy Gunasekera, a political operative who formerly worked
in Trump administration and as counsel to Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe. (She was, evidently,
the staffer who passed the Senator his infamous snowball on the Senate floor.) Under questioning,
she acknowledged that her organization is funded by the Mercer Family, who are well known for
supporting groups that deny the scientific consensus on climate change, and by Koch Industries.
16
Although we were all under oath—promising to tell the whole truth—Ms. Gunasekera testified to
several half-truths and made misleading claims. Some of her claims were demonstrably untrue.
These included:
1) The misleading claim that climate change will be “mild and manageable.” There is no scientific
evidence to support this claim. On the contrary, literally hundreds of scientific reports over
the past few decades, including the U.S. National Climate Impact Assessments, have
affirmed that the impacts of warming above 2o C will lead to serious, perhaps catastrophic,
effects on “health, livelihoods, food security, water supply, human security, and economic
growth.”17 The IPCC has recently noted that avoiding the worst impacts of climate change
will “require rapid and far-reaching transitions in energy, … infrastructure...and industrial
systems…These systems transitions … imply deep emissions reductions in all sectors, a wide
portfolio of mitigation options and a significant upscaling of investments in those options.”18
One could argue that, as projections, these statements cannot be proven, but recent events
surrounding Hurricanes Sandy, Michael, Harvey and Maria, as well as the devastating
wildfires at Paradise California, have shown that the impacts of climate change are already
becoming unmanageable. Moreover, a just-issued report from the Army War College states
5
that “the Department of Defense (DoD) is precariously unprepared for the national security
implications of climate change-induced global security challenges.”19 If the Pentagon is not
prepared to manage climate change, it is hard to imagine who is.
2) A misleading narrative about global prosperity being driven by fossil fuels. No one denies that fossil
fuels drove the Industrial Revolution, and in doing so contributed substantively to the rise in
living standards of hundreds of millions of people in Europe, North America, and parts of
Asia. But this is at best a half-truth, because what is at stake here is not the past but the
present and the future, because disruptive climate change threatens both the prosperity that
we have already achieved and future economic growth. As Nicholas Stern, the former Chief
Economist of the World Bank and one of the world’s foremost experts on the economics of
change, has said: “high carbon growth self-destructs.”20
3) A misleading and arguably false narrative about “cheap energy.” Fossil fuels are not cheap. When
their external costs are considered, they are in fact very expensive. The International
Monetary Fund estimates the costs to consumers—above and beyond what we pay at the
pump or in our electricity bills—at over $5 trillion dollars per year. Trillion. This is in effect
a massive subsidy to the oil and gas industry. Among other things, these subsidies “damage
the environment, caus[e]…premature deaths through local air pollution, [and] exacerbat[e]
congestion and other adverse side effects of vehicle use…” 21
4) A misleading narrative about “energy poverty.” This narrative, which has been heavily promoted
by ExxonMobil, insists that fossil fuels are the solution to the energy needs of the world’s
poor.
22 The idea that ExxonMobil is suddenly concerned about the plight of the global poor
is prima facie—and I might add literally—incredible, for if they were concerned, they would
not be downplaying the threat of climate change. As Pope Francis, Mary Robinson, Ban KiMoon and others advocates for poverty reduction and global justice have repeatedly
emphasized—and as we heard in last week’s House hearings—climate change will hurt the
poor above all. A fossil fuel company that cared about the poor would not be pursuing a
business model that commits to further oil and gas exploration and development, and
through it, to further disruptive climate change.23 The cynicism behind this argument is
simply astonishing.
Moreover, while it is true that people need affordable energy, it is not true that they need
fossil fuels.24 More than a billion people world-wide lack access or reliable access to electricity,
but many of these also lack access to an electricity grid. Fossil fuels are of little use for them.
For communities without access to an electricity grid, distributed solar and wind are the only
solutions that can be rapidly and affordably implemented. They also do not rely on
government officials who may be corrupt, corruption that is often linked to oil and gas
development. 25
5) Misleading assertions about the cost of renewable energy. The cheap fossil fuel narrative is coupled to
misleading assertions about the allegedly high cost of renewable energy. According to
Bloomberg News, in two-thirds of the world, solar is the cheapest form of newly installed
electricity generation. It is cheaper than nuclear, cheaper than gas, and cheaper than coal.26
Improvements in energy storage are needed to maximize renewable penetration, particularly
in developed countries, but improvements are happening quickly. Between 2010 and 2017,
6
The price of battery storage decreased 79%, and most experts believe that with the right
incentives, appropriate regulatory reform, and continued support of R & D in industry
government, and academia, the storage problem can and will be solved.
6) The false claim that the U.S. under President Trump has cut greenhouse gas emissions. Both Ms.
Gunasekara and Republican members repeatedly claimed not only that emissions had fallen,
but that the United States under President Trump had done more to reduce emissions than
any other country. This is untrue. One environmental reporter, who has described herself
as “accustomed to hearing a lot of misinformation” about climate change, characterized this
statement as “brazenly false.”27 In fact, U.S. greenhouse gas emissions spiked in 2018, seeing
a 3.1% increase over 2017.28
7) The claim that carbon pricing increases the cost of energy. This is also false. Carbon pricing increases
the cost of carbon-based energy, and deliberately so. The purpose is to make the price we pay
reflect the true cost, and therefore correct a market failure. Moreover, to the extent that a
carbon pricing system stimulates investment and innovation in the renewable sector, in
efficiency, and in storage, it is like to reduce the cost of energy in the long run, as indeed
emissions trading did in the case of acid rain.29
In our 2010 book, Merchants of Doubt, Erik M. Conway and I showed that the strategies and tactics
used by the fossil fuel industry to deny the harms of fossil fuel use were in many cases the same as
those used by the tobacco industry to deny the harms of tobacco use. We further showed that this
was no coincidence, because many of the same individuals, PR firms, advertising agencies, and
institutions were involved in both (Appendix 18).
The tobacco industry was prosecuted by the U.S. Department of Justice under the RICO statutes in
part because of the ways in which individual companies coordinated with each other, and with third
party allies, to present false information to consumers. Through Congressional hearings and legal
discovery, it was made clear that the industry had funded a wide range of activities intended to
mislead the American people. I believe that something similar has occurred with respect to the
harms of fossil fuels.
This raises a crucial question about the fossil fuel industries activities: who has funded the activities
of the trade organizations and other third-party allies who deny the facts about climate change? In
some cases, we know the answer: in 2006, The Royal Society of the United Kingdom documented
ExxonMobil funding of 39 organizations that promoted “inaccurate and misleading” views of
climate science.30 The Society was able to identify $2.9 million spent in this manner in the year 2005.
But that was just one year, and it is unlikely that this is the whole story.
Nearly all these third-party allies are incorporated as 501(c)(3)s, which means they should be nonprofit and nonpartisan.31 Often they claim to be involved in education. But they are clearly involved
in supporting a for-profit activity—the oil and gas industry—and they have done many things to
support a partisan political agenda. Energy45 by its own admission exists to support the “Trump
Energy Agenda” (Appendix 19). And these organizations do not inform—they misinform. I am not
a lawyer, but as an educator I can say with confidence that the activities of these organizations are
not educational.
7
I close by returning to the Heartland Institute, who of all these groups have most explicitly targeted
school teachers and school children. Their materials do not inform and educate; they misinform and
dis-educate. As the Executive Director of the National Center for Education has put it, their work is
not intended to help teachers, but to confuse them.32
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 this is funded by “dark money.” I believe that it is time for Congress
to investigate this network, as Congress and the Department of Justice investigated the tobacco
industry and its networks. Why, for example, is the National Black Chamber of Commerce
opposing solar power in Florida?33
I would like to see Congress subpoena the CEOs of leading fossil fuel corporations and their allies,
and question them under oath, as Congress did for tobacco.
I believe the American people have the right to know who has been sustaining this massive effort to
mislead us about climate change, one of the most important issues of our time, one that affects our
basic constitutional rights to life, liberty and property.
I suggest that the U.S. Congress use its legal authority to try to find out.
Thank you for your time.
Acknowledgements and Financial Disclosure
I acknowledge the assistance of my graduate students, Colleen Lanier-Christensen, Hannah Conway,
and Ashton MacFarlane, and my post-doctoral associate, Dr. Geoffrey Supran. The research upon
which this testimony relies was funded in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the
American Philosophical Society, the Wallace Global Threats Fund, the Grantham Foundation, and
Harvard University. Geoffrey Supran’s work on ExxonMobil communications was funded by
Harvard University and by the Rockefeller Family Fund philanthropy. The preparation of this
statement was done by me, on personal time, with the assistance of Ms. Lanier-Christensen. None
of the people involved in helping me to prepare this testimony received financial or other
compensation, other than gratitude.
It is possible that sales of my new book, Why Trust Science?, may increase as a result of publicity
related to this testimony. That project was funded by the Tanner Foundation, by way of my Tanner
Lectures on Human Values at Princeton University. The Tanner Foundation played no role in my
choice of topic, no role in the design of the study or methodology used, and no role in reviewing the
study prior to publication.
I declare no conflicts of interest.
8
notes:
1 The 2018 IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5o C concluded we have 12 years left (now 11) to achieve
radical reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. The exact language includes these two passages:
In model pathways with no or limited overshoot of 1.5°C, global net anthropogenic CO2 emissions decline by about
45% from 2010 levels by 2030 (40–60% interquartile range), reaching net zero around 2050 (2045–2055
interquartile range). [C1]
Pathways limiting global warming to 1.5°C with no or limited overshoot would require rapid and far-reaching
transitions in energy, land, urban and infrastructure (including transport and buildings), and industrial systems (high
confidence). These systems transitions are unprecedented in terms of scale, but not necessarily in terms of speed, and
imply deep emissions reductions in all sectors, a wide portfolio of mitigation options and a significant upscaling of
investments in those options. [C2]
2 42 U.S.C. 7602(h).
3 Randolph, Jennings. “A Worldwide Commitment.” Journal of the Air Pollution Control Association 21, no. 2 (February
1971): 58.
4 https://www.nytimes.com/1992/06/13/world/the-earth-summit-excerpts-from-speech-by-bush-on-action-plan.html
5 Supran and Oreskes, 2017 Assessing ExxonMobil’s climate change communications (1977–2014), Environmental
Research Letters, 12, https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa815f, on p 9.
6 http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/UCSexxon_report.pdf
7 https://www.globalchange.gov/browse/reports/global-climate-change-impacts-united-states
8 https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/climate-change-skeptic-group-seeks-to-influence-200000-teachers/
9 https://www.nsta.org/climate/hearland.aspx
10 https://www.csldf.org/2017/12/26/perspectives-scientists-become-targets-ben-santer/
https://beta.prx.org/stories/95363
11 The Chair of the Global Climate Coalition was William O’Keefe, Executive Vice President and CEO of the American
Petroleum Institute, 1974-1999. From 2001-2005, he was a paid lobbyist for ExxonMobil. When asked once, what
advice would he give Greenpeace, he replied, “They couldn’t afford me.”
https://www.desmogblog.com/william-o-keefe
https://web.archive.org/web/20150815211135/http://marshall.org/board-members/
https://exxonsecrets.org/html/personfactsheet.php?id=289
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqiCLuOtXts
12 https://www.csldf.org/issues/scientists-stories/
13 https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of-congress/summary?cid=N00005656
https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of-congress/summary?cid=N00005582&cycle=2020&type=C
14 https://eelegal.org/
15 Oreskes, Naomi and Erik M. Conway, 2020. Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues
from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. (New York: Bloomsbury Press), 2nd edition, expected publication 2020.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1446868/
16 On the Mercers, see
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/the-mercers-trump-mega-donors-back-group-that-casts-doubt-on-climatescience/2017/03/26/dc1fde86-109b-11e7-9b0d-d27c98455440_story.html
9
On the Koch networks, see Jane Mayer, 2017 Dark Money, Anchor Press, and Nancy MacLean, 2018, Democracy in
Chains, Penguin Books.
17 https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/06/SR15_Headline-statements.pdf
18 https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/06/SR15_Headline-statements.pdf
19 https://climateandsecurity.files.wordpress.com/2019/07/implications-of-climate-change-for-us-army_army-warcollege_2019.pdf
20 Nicholas Stern, Lecture at Harvard University, October 15, 2019, see also
Nicholas Stern, 2015. Why Are We Waiting? MIT Press.
21 https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2015/wp15105.pdf see also https://www.pri.org/stories/2015-06-
07/imf-true-cost-fossil-fuels-53-trillion-year
22 https://corporate.exxonmobil.com/en/News/Newsroom/Speeches/2015/0603_The-Global-Energy-Outlook-andIndustry-Outreach
23 http://w2.vatican.va/content/dam/francesco/pdf/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclicalaudato-si_en.pdf
24 https://www.iea.org/statistics/electricity/
25 https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/01/shell-to-be-prosecuted-with-criminal-charges-over-nigerian-oil-deal.html
26 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-09-19/solar-and-wind-power-so-cheap-they-re-outgrowingsubsidies
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2019-can-renewable-energy-power-the-world/
see also
https://about.bnef.com/blog/global-wind-solar-costs-fall-even-faster-coal-fades-even-china-india/
27 https://thebulletin.org/2019/10/declining-us-greenhouse-gas-emissions-a-republican-fairy-tale/
28 https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/us-greenhouse-gas-emissions-spiked-in-2018--and-itcouldnt-happen-at-a-worse-time/2019/01/07/68cff792-12d6-11e9-803c-4ef28312c8b9_story.html. Global emissions
reached a record high in 2018, led by China and the United States.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=36953 Emissions fell slightly in. 2017, but rose sharply in 2018.
Moreover, these statistics refer only to CO2; there has also been a large rise in methane emissions, which are worse in
terms of their warming potential. https://eos.org/research-spotlights/u-s-methane-emissions-on-the-rise
29 Oreskes and Conway, 2010, Merchants of Doubt.
30 https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/publications/2006/royal-society-exxonmobil/
https://royalsociety.org/-/media/Royal_Society_Content/policy/publications/2006/8257.pdf
31 https://www.501c3.org/frequently-asked-questions/does-nonprofit-501c3-and-tax-exempt-all-mean-the-same-thing/
32 https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/climate-change-skeptic-group-seeks-to-influence-200000-teachers/
33 https://www.energyandpolicy.org/category/front-groups/national-black-chamber-of-commerce/
---
ref 15 pp
https://mahb.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/America_Misled.pdf
First published in October 2019. For more information, visit https://www.climatechangecommunication.org/america-misled/ Graphic design: Wendy Cook Cite as: Cook, J., Supran, G., Lewandowsky, S., Oreskes, N., & Maibach, E., (2019). America Misled: How the fossil fuel industry deliberately misled Americans about climate change. Fairfax, VA: George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication. Available at https://www.climatechangecommunication.org/america-misled/
How the fossil fuel industry polluted the information landscape
Key points 1. Internal corporate documents show that the fossil fuel industry has known about the reality of human-caused climate change for decades. Its response was to actively orchestrate and fund denial and disinformation so as to stifle action and protect its status quo business operations. 2. As the scientific consensus on climate change emerged and strengthened, the industry and its political allies attacked the consensus and exaggerated the uncertainties. 3. The fossil fuel industry offered no consistent alternative explanation for why the climate was changing—the goal was merely to undermine support for action. 4. The strategy, tactics, infrastructure, and rhetorical arguments and techniques used by fossil fuel interests to challenge the scientific evidence of climate change—including cherry picking, fake experts, and conspiracy theories—come straight out of the tobacco industry’s playbook for delaying tobacco control. These key points reflect the position of experts studying climate denial and the history of fossil fuel interests, based on thousands of pages of documented evidence.
...
Contradictory contrarianism The most common denialist arguments have been shown to contain fatal assumptions or fallacies26. Climate deniers do not offer any rational explanation for why our climate is changing. Rather, denialist arguments are incoherent and often contradictory27. For example, deniers will seize on snowfall to claim that global warming is a hoax, while at the same time claiming that an extreme event such as a drought or wildfire cannot be attributed to climate change. This is incoherent because either extreme events can be a signal of climate change or they cannot be. Climate denial lacks consistency because it is not about scientific evidence—it is about how to continue business as usual in the face of climate disruption. Climate deniers reject climate science because they are averse to proposed or perceived solutions to climate change28.
...
Common Fallacies
Climate denial arguments can be summarized by the five techniques of science denial (summarized with the acronym FLICC): fake experts, logical fallacies, impossible expectation, cherry picking, and conspiracy theories29,30. Fake Experts Logical Fallacies Impossible Expectations Cherry Picking Conspiracy Theories Promoting dissenting non-experts as highly qualified while not having published any actual climate research and/or received any relevant education. Logically flawed arguments that lead to false conclusions. Common logical fallacies are red herrings, non sequiturs, and false dichotomies. Demanding unrealistic standards of certainty before acting on the science. A technique practised by the tobacco industry. Selectively choosing data that supports a desired conclusion that differs from the conclusion arising from all the available data32. Proposing a secret plan among a number of people, generally to implement a nefarious scheme such as conspiring to hide a truth or perpetuate misinformation. Climate deniers are more likely to be conspiracy theorists33
nice graphics throughout eg]
Deconstructing Denial
Figure 7 shows deconstructions of some of the most common myths about climate change. Determining the misleading techniques of a climate myth requires outlining the argument structure: listing any premises (starting assumptions) and the conclusion. This allows one to ascertain whether any premises are false, and/or whether the argument is logically invalid. Figure 7: Deconstruction of common climate myths. MYTH “Cold weather disproves global warming.” Premise 1 CHERRY PICKING IMPOSSIBLE EXPECTATIONS Some place is cold. Premise 2 No place can experience cold during global warming. Conclusion Global warming isn’t happening. Cherry Picking: Ignores that most of the globe is warm. Impossible Expectations: Global warming doesn’t mean cold events don’t happen, just that they’re less likely to happen. MYTH “Global warming stopped in 1998.” SLOTHFUL INDUCTION CHERRY PICKING Premise 1 The temperature trend since 1998 is statistically insignificant. Conclusion Global warming isn’t happening. Slothful Induction: Ignores other temperature records and measures of heat imbalance showing a significant warming trend. Cherry Picking: Trends over short periods do not lead to conclusions about
...
Conclusion Disinformation about climate change has a straightforward purpose—to block action on climate change. In America, it has largely succeeded, with policies to mitigate climate change stymied or delayed for decades. Meanwhile, climate change has intensified, causing impacts such as intensified extreme weather events, rising sea level, harmful effects on human health, and much more. Climate denial has seriously hurt the American people. The damage, deaths, and harm to people will continue to worsen if we don’t expose and discredit denial. This is not the first time that corporations prioritizing profits over people have caused great harm. The tobacco industry spent hundreds of millions of dollars disinforming the public about the health impacts of smoking in order to undermine tobacco control34,35. The World Health Organization estimates that six million people die every year from preventable tobaccocaused disease. Drawing on the tobacco industry’s playbook, fossil fuel companies have done the same on climate change, spending hundreds of millions of dollars confusing the public and delaying life-saving action. Their legacy is the death, destruction, and injustices of irreversible global warming. Big Oil is the new Big Tobacco.