Ben Franta

gates

yikes GCC EBH ~

https://theintercept.com/2022/04/12/ipcc-report-global-climate-coalition/

OF THE PRIMARY reports that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change publishes every four to six years, the mitigation report, focused on what can be done and what’s holding climate action back, only gets more important with every cycle. While the latest mitigationreport states clearly that politics and corporate power are the only real impediments to action — not a lack of scientific evidence, technological or policy options, or even money — IPCC authors declined to engage with this problem both in the press conference for the report and in the report’s summary for policymakers. Now, a week after the report’s release, here comes a paper revealing that the IPCC itself has been the target of U.S. vested interests since its inception.

In 1988, climate scientist James Hansen gave a stark warning to the U.S. Senate, testifying, “It is time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.” Later that year, the IPCC was formed to bring the world’s climate scientists together to help inform governments, the media, and the public about climate change. Just one year before all this action on the “greenhouse effect,” global leaders had effectively joined forces to address the hole in the ozone layer, adopting the Montreal Protocol and agreeing to a mandatory phaseout of the chemicals associated with ozone depletion. Greenhouse gas-emitting industries were very concerned that they would be targeted next. Almost immediately, what environmental sociologists call the “climate countermovement” began to form in response.

one key entity in that movement was the Global Climate Coalition,which emerged in 1989 as a project of the National Association of Manufacturers, with founding members from the coal, electric utility, oil and gas, automotive, and rail sectors. Many scholars have noted the influential role the GCC played in obstructing climate policy in the 1990s, but the first peer-reviewed paper on the group, published this week, reveals that the original and lasting intention of the GCC was to push for voluntary efforts only and torpedo international momentum toward setting mandatory limits on greenhouse gas emissions.

Casting doubt on the science was part of that strategy from the beginning — the paper points to a 1994 communications strategy, for example, that suggested industry spokespeople downplay IPCC findings with following talking point: “The IPCC reports no evidence that directly links manmade GHG emissions to changes in global average temperatures.” Also common, though, were the delay tactics we still see today, particularly the economic argument against acting on the climate crisis and the jingoistic argument that America shouldn’t allow the rest of the world to tell it what to do.

“People have been very stuck on this idea that the industry strategy went from climate denial to delay,” said the paper’s author, Brown University environmental sociologist Robert Brulle. “That’s historically inaccurate. It was always about delay, and the PR guys viewed casting doubt on climate science as one of their key talking points, but not the only one and not the central one.”

Leaning on economic and cultural arguments came naturally for the public relations teams working on climate. Those arguments were first developed to help companies like Standard Oil and American Tobacco stave off regulation at the turn of the 20th century and have been deployed consistently, and effectively, ever since.

Brulle points to the GCC’s involvement in the passage of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC — the framework underpinning the annual Conference of the Parties meetings of global leaders to discuss international climate commitments — as a prime example of how industries have suggested voluntary action as a way to preempt government regulation. “They supported that because it was toothless. It was all about the need to further study the problem and for corporations and governments to take voluntary action.”

Melissa Aronczyk, a media studies scholar at Rutgers University, also documented the influence that the GCC and its primary PR person, E. Bruce Harrison,had on the UNFCCC process in “A Strategic Nature: Public Relations and the Politics of American Environmentalism,” a new book written with Maria Espinoza. “Harrison was invited as communications counsel to the CEOs who were participating at that Earth Summit in Rio [de Janeiro] in 1992,” Aronczyk explained. That was the summit at which global leaders drafted and adopted the UNFCCC. Notably, the U.N.-appointed organizer of that conference was Maurice Strong, a former oilman who believed that no effective climate treaty could be passed without buy-in from corporate interests....Because business communities had been invited to the conference and because they knew that their buy-in was so important, they planned extensively in the lead-up to the conference to be able to present what they call their own sustainable development charter.It was a nonbinding, nonlegal document that proposed a voluntary, self-regulating approach,” Aronczyk said. “And as you can imagine, this charter did not contain anything that would have really transformed how companies did business. … But it paid a lot of lip service to the idea of going green, and because they got out in front of the actual conference, they were really able to put that document forward and stave off other kinds of more binding legislation.”

The GCC worked to steer the Conference of the Parties and the IPCC in this direction as well. Many of the source documents Brulle cites in his paper, including Harrison’s 1994-1995 communications plan for the GCC, show this strategy explicitly. “The economic consequences of future actions by the COP are likely to attract more attention than statements about scientific uncertainties,” Harrison’s plan reads. “Especially if the economic stakes can be made apparent to ‘people on Main Street.’”It goes on to lay out specific messages that GCC members should emphasize to the press, politicians, and the public, including: “Voluntary programs for reducing [greenhouse gas] emissions are allowing industry to balance economics and environmental performance without impairing competitiveness.”

What’s also painfully obvious in these documents is just how close the international process came to forcing action on climate in the 1990s — the decade in which it would have had the most impact. The 1994-95 GCC communications plan shows that the group and the industries it represented were losing the fight and that momentum was building for a binding international treaty that would mandate emissions reductions. “Dozens of U.N. agencies, international organizations and special interest groups are driving events — regardless of economic costs and remaining scientific uncertainties — toward a conclusion inimical to the interests of the GCC and the U.S. economy,” the plan reads.

A few pages later it notes, “The window for influencing U.S. decisions on future U.N. actions is relatively narrow. During the next 18-24 months there will be a number of critical decision points as the Parties to the FCCC advance toward the COP’s 1997 deadline for elaborating new policies and measures.”

The 1997 Conference of the Parties was, of course, when the Kyoto Protocol was introduced; the international agreement mandated emissions reductions for certain countries, something the Clinton administration had already indicated it supported. It was a make-or-break moment for industries concerned about the impact that mandatory emissions reductions would have on their bottom line, and the GCC redoubled its efforts.

First it targeted key U.S. politicians. Working with Sens. Chuck Hagel and Robert Byrd, Brulle writes, the group rounded up support for an amendment to set strict criteria for any international climate accord. “This effort contributed to the passage of the Byrd-Hagel Amendment in July 1997,” Brulle writes. “This amendment required that any climate accord would have to include [emissions] reductions by developing countries and could not result in serious harm to the U.S. economy. These provisions damaged the credibility of the U.S. because it showed a lack of consensus among the different branches of government about an international climate accord.”

That argument stands in stark contrast to the fossil fuel industry’s narrative today, which holds that out-of-touch climate elitists are trying to force emissions reductions on countries that deserve to use fossil fuels to develop. Passage of the Byrd-Hagel amendment was the GCC’s first big victory after its success in shaping the UNFCCC. In the wake of that victory, GCC members poured $13 million into a PR campaign centered on the argument that the international accord would raise gasoline prices and harm the economy. The tag line of the anti-Kyoto campaign was It’s not global and it won’t work. ”:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"/maxresdefault.jpg)”

“They get a map of the globe and they start cutting out the countries that don’t have to comply,” Brulle said. “And then they hold up this map with all of these holes in it, and they said, ‘This is unfair. It won’t work and it’s not fair.’ And that’s what they ran on. And guess what? It works! It was very effective. And you still hear that today when folks argue against climate policy by saying, ‘What about China? What about India?’”

The group also commissioned third-party economists and policy analysts to bolster its argument that mandatory emissions cuts would spell death for the American economy. “It was very much, play up the economic impact, play up the threat to the ‘American way of life,’” Brulle said. “When you can attack the science, do that, but always, always play up the economics.”

That’s particularly interesting in the context of recent research in which some of the same economists the GCC hired have admitted that their models were deeply flawed. The paper “Weaponizing Economics,” published last year by Stanford University researcherBen Franta, shows that the economistsworking for the GCC and other anti-climate policy groups in the 1990s were using models that inflated the cost of climate policy while ignoring entirely the economic benefit of avoiding climate impacts.

Franta found that the same small group of economists was being routinely commissioned not only by the GCC but also the American Petroleum Institute (a founding GCC member)and various conservative think tanks; every time a policy was proposed that would limit carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gas emissions, this same model would get trotted out, and industry spokespeople and politicians would warn that acting on climate change would put companies out of business and cost the average American family thousands of dollars.

“Eventually their analyses became conventional wisdom,” Franta said. “The scientific merchants of doubt ultimately failed; their power waned. But this, the economics part, their power did not really wane in the same way. And you know, the implications are larger. I mean, it’s a fraudulent economic product. And now we have economists who worked on those models saying, by their own admission, that this analysis that showed it would be too expensive to act on climate is not true. And this has been going on for decades. So now the question is, what do we do about this?”

Brulle’s recent findings make it that much more concerning that the IPCC allowed mentions of obstructionism and vested interests to be scrubbed from its summary for policymakers. “That document was like Star Wars without Darth Vader,” he said. “This research gives us a history of what actually happened. It puts Darth Vader back in the story.”

ref franta weaponiz see below

aBSTRACT

The role of particular scientists in opposing policies to slow and halt global warming has been extensively documented. The role of economists, however, has received less attention. Here, I trace the history of an influential group of economic consultants hired by the petroleum industry from the 1990s to the 2010s to estimate the costs of various proposed climate policies. The economists used models that inflated predicted costs while ignoring policy benefits, and their results were often portrayed to the public as independent rather than industry-sponsored. Their work played a key role in undermining numerous major climate policy initiatives in the US over a span of decades, including carbon pricing and participation in international climate agreements. This study illustrates how the fossil fuel industry has funded biased economic analyses to oppose climate policy and highlights the need for greater attention on the role of economists and economic paradigms, doctrines, and models in climate policy delay.

1 Introduction

I believe we conducted sound economic analyses of the costs of reducing emissions … but I regret not being in a position where I could tell what I feel is the whole story.

- Economic consultant Paul Bernstein:{1:(style="box-sizing:border-box;position:relative;vertical-align:baseline;top:-0.5em"):}:

Numerous industries under regulatory threat have used the language of science to defend their commercial interests. The tobacco industry, under Operation Whitecoat, cultivated and funded a worldwide network of scientists to act as spokespeople and convince the public that the harms of cigarettes remained unproved (U.S. v. Philip Morris USA, Inc., 2006). The lead industry supported Harvard professor Joseph Aub to perform research ignoring the effects of lead on children (Markowitz and Rosner 2002). Chemical companies routinely hire scientific consulting firms such as Exponent, ChemRisk, Ramboll, and Gradient to produce studies disputing the hazards of products for lawmaking and litigation (Michaels 2020).

For some industries, science represents both a danger and an opportunity. Scientists make potent spokespeople, and rhetorical positions ostensibly backed by science are powerful, while misalignments between industry pronouncements and the scientific community can spell trouble. An early handbook written for regulated industries even has among its top recommendations, ‘Coopt the Experts’ (Owen and Braeutigam 1978). The handbook explains (p. 7):

“Regulatory policy is increasingly made with the participation of experts, especially academics. A regulated firm or industry should be prepared whenever possible to coopt these experts. This is most effectively done by identifying the leading experts in each relevant field and hiring them as consultants or advisors, or giving them research grants and the like. This activity requires a modicum of finesse; it must not be too blatant, for the experts themselves must not recognize that they have lost their objectivity and freedom of action. At a minimum, a program of this kind reduces the threat that the leading experts will be available to testify or write against the interests of the regulated firms. AT&T has made a major investment, for instance, in very high grade economic talent over the past decade. It is not entirely accidental that this group of economists has produced a formidable new theory of multiproduct natural monopoly that may serve as a powerful argument in favor of barriers to entry and the exclusion of competitors in AT&T markets.”

Economists, as the above quote indicates, are particularly relevant to industry efforts to influence regulation. In the context of climate change politics, much as been written about the use of scientists, often supported by fossil fuel or other antiregulatory interests, as spokespeople for policy delay (Oreskes and Conway 2011). Yet less attention has been paid to the role of economists.

By the early 1980s, at least some economists were already counteracting calls for policies that would help prevent and minimize global warming. In 1983, the US National Academy of Sciences published Changing Climate, a report presenting an overview of contemporary climate science and policy thinking (National Research Council 1983). The portions by scientists, for the most part, warned that continued fossil fuel use would have dire consequences. Oceanographer Roger Revelle discussed the potential disintegration of the West Antarctic Sheet, warning that such a development would ‘flood all existing port facilities and other low-lying coastal structures, extensive sections of the heavily farmed and densely populated river deltas of the world … and large areas of many of the world’s major cities’ (p. 442).

The economists, in contrast, counseled against policy action, suggesting that global warming might not be that bad. Thomas Schelling of Harvard University argued that migration and adaptation would be preferable to reducing fossil fuel emissions. ‘It would be wrong to commit ourselves to the principle,’ he wrote, ‘that if fossil fuels and carbon dioxide are where the problem arises, that must also be where the solution lies’ (p. 449). William Nordhaus of Yale University agreed, writing that although a fossil fuel tax would reduce emissions, ‘[t]he strategies suggested … by Schelling … climate modification or simply adaptation to a high CO2 and high temperature world – are likely to be more economical ways of adjusting’ (p. 151). Yet neither economist provided a detailed analysis to support his conclusions.

The report’s summary, written by physicist William Nierenberg, adopted the economists’ position, stating (p. 61–62):

[I]t could be that emissions will be low, or that concentrations will rise slowly, or that climatic effects will be small, or that environmental and societal impacts will be mild … It is probably wiser not to act aggressively to ‘solve the CO2 problem’ right now, when we really do not know the future consequences or context of CO2 increase. In trying to consider the world of 50 or 100 years from now, we cannot be sure that we can tell the difference between solutions and problems.

While the scientists’ warnings were supported by decades of research, the economists’ reassurances were closer to hopeful guesses. Although it was possible that global warming would be less severe than expected, by the same logic it could also be worse. Coastal flooding worldwide would presumably pose a serious problem in any century, and without an understanding of the damage global warming would cause, it was impossible for the economists to know whether adaptation or prevention would be more economical. Yet the economists’ arguments, though speculative, were given credibility by the National Academies report, which was used by the Reagan administration to promote further coal use (Oreskes and Conway 2011, p. 182).

Scientists had been warning of global warming increasingly since the 1950s (Franta 2018), and by the early 1980s, even Exxon privately acknowledged that prompt action would be required to avoid severe damage (Knisely 1979). Despite the scientific consensus, the Changing Climate report demonstrated how economic rhetoric could be used to delay policy action, reflecting a broader trend since the 1970s of industries deploying economic arguments against regulatory efforts (Waterhouse 2014). The year after the report was published, its chairman, William Nierenberg, co-founded the George C. Marshall Institute, which went on to oppose climate policy for decades through a combination of science denial and anti-regulatory economic talking points (Oreskes and Conway 2011).

Thus, as pressure grew in the late 1980s to prevent severe global warming, it may not be surprising that the fossil fuel industry turned to economists to help influence public policy. Important among these economists were those at Charles River Associates, a US-based consulting firm that played a key role in weakening, delaying, or defeating a wide range of climate policies over the following years, including US carbon pricing proposals and international climate agreements. These economic consultants helped convince the public and policymakers that climate policy would be costly, global warming would be relatively unimportant, and there would be little harm in delaying action. Their work was paid for by the fossil fuel industry, a fact often concealed from the public, and their methodologies were incomplete in favor of the industry. Yet their results were only occasionally challenged and eventually formed a significant part of conventional economic thinking.:{2:(style="box-sizing:border-box;position:relative;vertical-align:baseline;top:-0.5em"):}: The history of Charles River Associates illustrates how the fossil fuel industry has used biased economic analyses to weaken and defeat climate policy and highlights the need for greater attention on the role of economists and economic paradigms, doctrines, and models in climate policy delay.

2. Carbon pricing in the 1990s

1988 was a key year in the history of global warming politics. Climate scientist James Hansen testified to Congress that anthropogenic global warming was likely underway, the United Nations established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and the Canadian government sponsored a conference in Toronto calling for worldwide carbon dioxide emissions to be reduced by 20% by 2005 (Bodansky 2001). As Europe and Japan considered carbon taxes to meet the goals of the Toronto conference, the US petroleum industry and Bush administration insisted that climate science was uncertain and that controlling emissions would destroy the economy (Platt’s Oilgram News 1988). Reinforcing the economic argument, in 1991 Bush’s Department of Energy released a report stating that the envisioned 20% reduction in emissions would require a large carbon tax of 500 USD per ton (Bradley et al. 1991). Rather than emissions cuts, the report promoted the administration’s National Energy Strategy, which would allow emissions to grow until at least 2015 and called for the focus to be taken off of the fossil fuel sector....

To support his claims, the president cited a report paid for by the American Council for Capital Formation and authored by Montgomery, Bernstein, and others, who were now working at another consulting firm, NERA Economic Consulting (Bernstein et al. 2017).

5. Discussion

Charles River Associates played a key role in weakening, defeating, and delaying US climate policy for decades. The group’s industry-funded reports provided economic talking points used by fossil fuel companies and the broader climate change counter-movement, often in combination with science denial, to oppose restrictions on carbon emissions (Brulle 2014, Jones et al. 2018). Separate from impact, however, were Charles River Associates’ reports accurate?

Following the tenets of neoclassical economics, Montgomery, Bernstein, and their coauthors assumed that the economy without climate policy was performing optimally, so that any limit on greenhouse gas emissions would hurt economic growth. Reflecting on the group's work, Bernstein explains that this assumption was attractive to the API. ‘Given the model’s view of the world, it’s clear that if you put on a constraint, then you’re going to require people to do something they’re not doing now, so it’s going to come at a cost,’ he says.:{7:(style="box-sizing:border-box;position:relative;vertical-align:baseline;top:-0.5em"):}: ‘So, in this case, if you put on a greenhouse gas limit, there’s going to be a cost to it.’ Bernstein reflects, ‘I think the API knew that if they had Charles River Associates run these models, it would produce the results the API wanted, namely that it would show a cost to this policy.’

Crucially, the group's models ignored policy benefits, such as avoided global warming or improvements in air quality. Bernstein explains, ‘The models we had did not look at the benefit side. The only benefit we looked at was the reduction in emissions, but we didn’t quantify that in terms of dollars.’ With this limitation, Bernstein today offers an important caveat: ‘We could talk about cost effectiveness, but we couldn’t actually weigh the costs and the benefits. I think it served the API’s purpose.’

Although details of the economists’ models remain proprietary, the reports that are publicly available illustrate their general methodology. When estimating the costs of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, for example, Montgomery, Bernstein, and Rutherford estimated that without climate policy, emissions would grow by about 60% in OECD countries by 2030 (Bernstein et al. 1997). They then considered two climate policy emission paths: one in which carbon emissions would decline to 1990 levels by the year 2010 and remain there until 2030; and another in which emissions would be reduced even further to 10% below 1990 levels by 2010 and remain there until 2030. The difference in annual emissions between the no-policy, high carbon path and either of the two lower-emissions paths represented the emissions to be reduced each year.

Rather than replacing fossil fuels with other energy sources, Charles River Associates assumed that emissions would be reduced primarily by reducing overall energy use. Then, the economists estimated the energy price increase that would be required to suppress energy use by the required amount each year. To accomplish this, the economists used a neoclassical general equilibrium model describing the global economy with three inputs – labor, capital, and energy – which could substitute for each other at costs given by elasticities of substitution, which quantitatively connected price changes to consumption changes. Arequired reduction in energy use, along with elasticities of substitution, yielded an overall cost, which could be divided by the carbon emissions avoided to estimate an implied carbon price. The model estimated an implied carbon price of 200 USD–$350 per ton in 2010, which would rise to 430 USD–$580 per ton in 2030 as the difference between the no-policy and lower-carbon paths grew. The economists translated these costs to GDP and job losses and negative impacts on international trade.

In reality, of course, fossil fuels are not the only source of energy, so emissions reductions do not necessarily imply reductions in energy use. The economists modeled this, albeit crudely, using a maximum implied carbon price. Once the price reached this limit, the economists assumed that a zero-emission energy source would be used for additional energy needs, leaving the carbon price stationary. To set this maximum carbon price, the economists assumed it would correspond to an energy source that would be six times more expensive than fossil fuel, forever. If clean energy became cheaper than expected, then the economists assumed it would still be four times more expensive than fossil fuel, forever.

The overall approach inevitably yielded high cost estimates. First was the assumption on faith that unregulated markets produce optimal growth, so that any policy intervention would come at a cost. Second was the illogical assumption that carbon emissions would be reduced not by replacing fossil fuels with cleaner sources of energy but instead by suppressing overall energy use. Third was the use of elasticities of substitution empirically based on contemporary technologies, products, behaviors, and policies, which were subject to change over time and potentially of little relevance over the modeling period (through the 21st century). Finally, the economists ignored technological change, assuming that cleaner sources of energy would forever be prohibitively expensive.

Even with correct cost estimates, the economists would have needed also to estimate the economic benefits of reduced fossil fuel use in order to assess whether climate policies were economically beneficial overall. Bernstein today acknowledges that their models should not have been used to make absolute cost assessments or oppose climate policy altogether. Instead, he notes, the models should have been used to compare the relative costs of policies designed to produce the same climate outcome. This has left Bernstein, who has become increasingly concerned about global warming and the use of his work to delay policy action, less than satisfied:

I would rather have a chance to tell the whole story. I think that there are costs to climate policies, but I also think there are efficient ways to implement them. Let’s not say that we shouldn’t do anything. That’s where I have a big problem: when our reports were used to say that we found some job losses, so we should do nothing. It’s a message often spread by the industries that stand to lose.

Bernstein, who deserves credit for shedding light on this issue, notes that Charles River Associates’ work was not entirely outside the mainstream. Wharton Econometric Forecasting Associates, another consulting firm hired by the petroleum industry, also predicted high costs for climate policies (WEFA 1997, 1998). Perhaps most significantly, Bernstein observes that Charles River Associates’ work was similar to work done by other modeling groups such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, which is also funded by fossil fuel companies, and that both Charles River Associates and the Joint Program participated in Stanford University's Energy Modeling Forum, which again is funded by fossil fuel companies.:{8:(style="box-sizing:border-box;position:relative;vertical-align:baseline;top:-0.5em"):}:

6. Conclusion

For decades, the fossil fuel industry has hired economic consultants to help weaken and delay US and international climate policy. Among them, the economic consultants of Charles River Associates played a key role, helping to undermine carbon pricing, international climate agreements, and other climate policies from the early 1990s onward. The work of these economists was often portrayed to the public as independent, when in fact it was funded by the fossil fuel industry, and their models were incomplete and biased in favor of continued fossil fuel use. Yet their conclusions often passed without challenge and eventually came to represent a significant part of conventional economic wisdom.

Research on the climate change counter-movement has traditionally focused on documenting the promotion of disinformation regarding climate science (Brulle 2014, Franta 2021). While such disinformation has played a crucial role in delaying effective climate policy, the fossil fuel industry and broader climate change counter-movement have also made frequent use of economic arguments to justify inaction. At the same time, the fossil fuel industry has made substantial investments in influential climate economics programs across the US. Further attention is needed on the role of economists and particular economic paradigms, doctrines, and models within climate politics and the perpetuation of fossil fuels.

THACKER -->

ref 2 BS

https://eidclimate.org/something-tells-us-this-attempt-by-activists-to-make-apiknew-a-thing-is-going-to-fail-again/

anti-energy activists on Twitter are circulating a letter-to-the-editor published in the journal :{Nature:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: which claims to show that the American Petroleum Institute (API), an industry trade group, was informed of the existence of climate change in 1965. 350.org’s Jamie Henn described the news as “criminal” and “immoral,” while :{Politico:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: suggested the revelation may spawn a new front in the #ExxonKnew campaign: #APIKnew.

But in rushing to share this letter, activists and reporters forgot that they’ve tried this before – and failed spectacularly.

Déjà vu, all over again

In April 2016 the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) published a directory of industry documents as part of its support for the #ExxonKnew Campaign. According to CIEL, “In 1968, a report commissioned by the oil industry detailed rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere and warned of potentially catastrophic climate risks.” CIEL would issue new press releases in May and July of that same year, though they were ultimatelyunable to attract much attention.[ICN LAT]

Now activists hope to make a bigger splash with a document from 1965, three years prior to their previously touted report. But the document they cite, API president Frank Ikard’s speech at the group’s 1965 annual meeting, is not a characterization of the energy industry’s internal understanding of climate change. No: Ikard was instead relaying the findings of President Lyndon Johnson’s Science Advisory Committee’s report, which had been published three days prior. Ikard, it would seem, was telling his members about something many of them had already likely seen reported on in the news. Imagine that!

#EveryoneKnew

As InsideClimate News wrote in 2016: “By the 1960s, the CO2 problem was gaining wider scientific recognition, especially as President Lyndon B. Johnson’s science advisers and leading experts brought it to the attention of the White House in 1965.” VICE News, in its reporting on CIEL’s 2016 announcement, wrote:

“Well before the [1968 report commissioned by API], popular media discussed the likely effects of carbon emissions in terms that will be familiar to today’s audience. In 1956, Time magazine noted that ‘in 50 years or so,’ a CO2 buildup ‘may have a violent effect on the earth’s climate.’ A 1958 science film produced by Bell Labs and Hollywood legend Frank Capra talked about possible melting of the polar ice caps if global temperatures rise ‘even a few degrees.’”

Author Has Ties to #ExxonKnew Campaign

The author of the letter in Nature, Benjamin Franta, has strong ties to the anti-fossil fuel activist campaign. The research supporting his letter was funded by the Center for Climate Integrity (CCI), which is a project of the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development (IGSD). CCI was launched in 2017 by activist Richard Wiles to support “meritorious climate cases aimed at holding fossil fuel companies and other climate polluters liable for the damages they have caused.” Richard Wiles is also the publisher of Climate Liability News, a dark-money “news” site launched in 2017 to promote those climate lawsuits.

In addition to funding Franta’s research, IGSD also recently published a podcast called :{Drilled:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, which invites listeners to join them as they “uncover” how the energy industry allegedly “created climate denial and made it viral.” CCI is also funding an activist campaign, Pay Up Climate Polluters,which is pressuring cities like Miami Beach and Houston to file climate liability lawsuits against the energy industry.

Benjamin Franta is no objective researcher, either. Earlier this year he flew to the United Kingdom to give a presentation as part of a panel on “Mobilization for and against fossil fuel development.” You’ll never guess which side of the debate he’s on:

“My name is Ben Franta and I’m from Stanford and I’m a PhD student in the history department there and I’m also a JD student at the law school there. I’m going to talk to you today about both of those things. So, I called it ‘Taking on Big Oil,’ but I really want to call it ‘Kicking Big Oil’s Ass’ – that’s what this talk is about and using history and law and lawsuits. Let’s get started.” (emphasis added)

https://www.climateone.org/audio/enablers-firms-behind-fossil-fuel-falsehoods

february 11th, 2022

Public perception is important to any company, and fossil fuel companies are no different. Every year, they spend large amounts of money to make sure that the public is abundantly aware of all of the work fossil fuel companies are doing to help with the transition to clean energy. The problem is, the money spent on the messaging outpaces the money spent on the decarbonization.

PR firms, ad agencies, and law firms work behind the scenes to protect the fossil fuel industry and slow down the clean energy transition. Despite the industry having knowledge of the climate crisis as early as 1959, they continue to resist any change.

For example, many large oil and gas companies say they support a price on carbon pollution. Yet large oil companies invest a small fraction of their profits promoting carbon pricing policies and low carbon energy. The House oversight committee reports that less than half of 1% of their lobbying effort over the past decade focused on carbon pricing.The committee also reports that from 2010 to 2018, BP spent about 2% of its capital expenditures on low carbon investments. Exxon spent less than a quarter of 1% on cleaner energy. Jamie Henn, founder and director of Clean Creatives, gives some insight into these expenditures:

“I think it tells a story that big oil’s supposed commitment to climate action is little more than greenwashing. ExxonMobil just made record profits because of high gas prices. And what are they doing with it? They are telling their shareholders that they are going to increase oil and gas production, and they're doing a $10 billion stock buyback to reward their shareholders. In comparison ExxonMobil spent maybe upwards of about $300 million on algae research, which over the last 10 years, so that's about 30 million a year maybe. Yet that's the focus of all their advertising.”

Despite how much money these companies have to spend, they are still losing the battle of public perception. 60% of Americans say that fossil fuel companies are to blame for the climate crisis and about 50% of them want them to pay damages. Christina Arena, former VP at the global PR firm Edelman, argues that proponents of clean energy can use this reality to help deal with the climate crisis.

“This industry is kind of losing control of the narrative, even though it is trying so hard to direct it. And so, I think that opens the door for clean tech marketers and clean energy marketers to come in with a more compelling narrative. Tell your story better be more creative. Capture America's hearts and minds.”

Law firms also help fossil fuel companies' limit their legal liabilities. Michaela Anang, a research coordinator for Law Students for Climate Accountability and a law student at UC Davis, says the group grew out of a desire by law students to bring more scrutiny to their future employers.

“The top 100 law firms which we called the Vault 100 firms or Big Law are significantly contributing to furthering issues within our climate as opposed to mitigating those issues which we as students and as future legal professionals hope that they would be moving towards. ”

:{Scientists’ Letter to Ad Agencies:(style="font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;text-decoration-line:underline;text-decoration-skip-ink:none;white-space:pre-wrap"):}:

https://www.desmog.com/2022/02/07/fti-consulting-fossil-fuels-pr-energy-in-depth/

no lnx many docs grafx

An FTI Consulting Presentation Pulls Back the Veil on Fossil Fuel PR

The 2015 slides describe “discrediting” science, “debunking” documentaries, and positioning its fracking industry project Energy In Depth “at the center of the shale boom’s biggest moments.”

By Sharon Kelly onFeb 7, 2022

Facebook post by Energy In Depth sharing a video with four Earths and arrows pointing up or down to show countries' carbon emissions

A screenshot of a 2016 Earth Day message from Energy In Depth, a fracking industry project of FTI Consulting and the Independent Petroleum Association of America.

“We understand how the oil and gas sector works — we’ve worked in it, studied it, defended it and impacted the policy that regulates it,” a 2015 presentation delivered to the Tennessee Oil and Gas Association begins. “We have been instrumental players in the industry’s highest profile business issues, regulatory hearings, legal disputes and arbitration.”

Those bona fides came not from an oil and gas company or investor, but from FTI Consulting, a sprawling consulting firm that markets its strategic communications services to a wide range of industries — including coal, oil, and gas producers.

FTI’s 2015 presentation, obtained by DeSmog, offers a rare glimpse at what PR firms offer to fossil fuel companies and how they work their messaging and strategies into news articles and headlines. It comes at a time when the PR industry has been wrestling with its role in the climate crisis. In January, the Clean Creatives campaign, which represents PR professionals concerned about their industry’s role in promoting fossil fuels, released a letter signed by 450 scientists. It calls on PR firms to drop fossil fuel clients and stop spreading what the letter described as “advertising and PR efforts by fossil fuel companies that seek to obfuscate or downplay our data and the risks posed by the climate crisis.”

FTI’s claim in the 2015 presentation to have been instrumental for the oil industry isn’t bluster. In November 2020, a New York Times investigation found that “FTI has been involved in the operations of at least 15 current and past influence campaigns promoting fossil-fuel interests in addition to its direct work for oil and gas clients.”

“This is pretty damning.”

Melissa Aronczyk, Rutgers University professor

This is reflected in the 2015 presentation, in which FTI touted its connections to dozens of fossil fuel and chemical companies, including Shell, Halliburton, and Range Resources, and lists groups like the Marcellus Shale Coalition, the Shale Resource Centre Canada, and the Center for Liquified Natural Gas under the heading “redefining communications support.” The presentation focuses on what is perhaps FTI’s best-known project for the fossil fuel industry: Energy In Depth, a project that’s served as a “rapid response platform” for the shale industry.

Outside experts called the presentation revealing.

“PR firms — I guess FTI Consulting is also strategic management — they don’t want to ever be seen officially to be very overtly trying to control the conversation,” Melissa Aronczyk, a professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University, told DeSmog. “They want to be able to say, ‘no, no, we’re just producing our facts, we’re just producing our evidence and using the statistics that are out there.’”

“And so this is pretty damning,” she added.

Entering FTI’s World

A major focus of FTI’s 2015 presentation, mentioned on more than 20 of its 45 slides, is Energy In Depth, which calls itself a “research, education and public outreach campaign” that was“launched jointly by FTI and Independent Petroleum Assn. of America (IPAA) in 2009” and is “specifically focused on” shale and fracking. In 2011, DeSmog obtained a leaked memo crediting fossil fuel companies including BP, Anadarko, Shell, Halliburton, and others, as well as trade associations, including IPAA and the American Petroleum Institute, with “early financial commitments” without which “the ‘Energy In Depth’ project would not be possible.”

FTI’s 2015 presentation tallies more than 1,100 Energy In Depth “rebuttals” and 600,000-plus Google hits for Energy In Depth, and claims the initiative was “at the center of the shale boom’s biggest moments.”

To enter the world of Energy In Depth’s messaging, as seen in FTI’s 2015 presentation, is to enter a world where “the facts about methane emissions” show that the greenhouse gas pollution from “some of the most prolific” U.S. oil and gas fields had dropped “considerably.” Graphs show carbon dioxide and methane emissions plunging as shale gas production takes off. “Happy Earth Day! From Energy In Depth,” an accompanying video still reads.

A screenshot from FTI Consulting’s May 2015 presentation.

“It sounds like a happy story because it looks like CO2 emissions are going down,” said Ben Franta, an attorney and director of accountability research for the Climate Social Science Network, when asked about FTI’s slides on methane. “But, of course, what matters is the entire global warming effect from all greenhouse gases.”

Today, we know that methane levels in the atmosphere were on the rise in 2015 — and they’ve continued to climb since then, in no small part due to the oil and gas industry’s leaks and routine “venting” of unburned methane. “After a plateau which began in 1999, concentrations of the gas in the atmosphere started rising again in 2007, a trend that continues to this day,” the Economist reported last year. “Both ground-based and aerial studies show that leaky natural-gas pipes are one culprit.”

Methane matters enormously because it’s a powerful and fast-acting greenhouse gas that’s partly responsible for the climate crisis shifting into high gear. In recent years, natural gas–fired power plants have increasingly displaced coal-fired plants.

Franta pointed to the broader PR industry’s involvement in fossil fuel climate messaging for decades. “The idea of promoting natural gas as a climate solution goes back to at least the late ’80s as well,” he said. “In some of the fossil fuel industry’s internal documents, they identify various strategies they can use to look like they’re addressing climate change while actually keeping fossil fuels dominant in the market — and one of those strategies is, promote more natural gas.”

But that, as an August 2021 editorial in the scientific journal Nature explains, has come at “a cost to the climate,” since methane has contributed as much as 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit of today’s global warming, compounding the problems caused by the most closely tracked greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide.

“PR professionals have been helping the industry craft its messages and those messages have been designed to create delay,” Franta said. “Looking at the presentation, it seems pretty clear that Energy In Depth — and FTI who’s behind that — is playing a role in not telling the whole story about fossil gas.”

Debunk and Discredit

FTI’s understanding of its own work in 2015 appears to have included, in the presentation’s words, “debunking” prominent documentaries and “discrediting” scientific research.

The presentation includes slides about FTI’s work “Debunking Gasland,” referring to an award-winning 2010 documentary that explores the environmental consequences of fracking and its 2013 sequel. Energy In Depth claims credit for launching a 35-minute video dubbed “Truthland,” “to combat Gasland,” adding that they “executed a 60-stop screening tour in 20 states.”

One subsequent slide is devoted to “discrediting the Duke Methane Studies,” a collection of scientific research from Duke University into the shale industry’s environmental impacts. On the slide’s left, a news headline reads “Pennsylvania fracking called peril to water,” while on the right, a bolded passage from a different article suggests water problems were “unrelated to nearby fracking wells.” An arrow bearing Energy in Depth’s logo draws the eye from the left side of the slide to the right.

A screenshot from FTI Consulting’s 2015 presentation highlight its efforts to cast doubt on scientific studies.

In the years since, Duke’s early research has in fact held up well within the scientific community, with the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences listing hundreds of citations of the paper pictured, including 72 within the past two years.

“Our research, it’s meant to be criticized and it’s meant to be talked about,” said Nathaniel Warner, a Penn State University professor and lead author of the 2012 study pictured on FTI’s slideshow. “And if somebody comes up with a way in which to disprove it by doing a scientific study then that’s great and that’s okay. But most of these are more — I don’t know — they’re more just trying to suggest things that could be wrong and not necessarily go about demonstrating that they are wrong.”

“I thought I was going to be kind of a champ for industry here,” Warner added, explaining that some, though not all, of the paper’s findings on water contamination had actually proved favorable for industry.

The FTI presentation is by Katie Brown, then an Energy In Depth spokesperson according to the slides, which add that she previously worked for “an education campaign” for the Keystone XL pipeline.Brown also authored numerous Energy In Depth posts, such as this July 2015 piece on methane leaks whose description of a set of scientific studies published by a number of universities and the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) was so flawed that EDF, which coordinated the series, put out a response calling Energy In Depth’s work “flat wrong” and a “willful misrepresentation of the findings.”

Seeding a Response

FTI’s 2015 presentation is also noteworthy because it doesn’t just look backwards at Energy In Depth’s work to date. It also looks forward, identifying a handful of what FTI called “priority issues” — that is, potential crises that might hit the industry.

That look forward illustrates an area where Aronczyk, co-author of the new book A Strategic Nature: Public Relations and the Politics of American Environmentalism, said polluting industries have historically tended to outperform environmentalists.

PR firms, she explained, developed the practice of “issue management,” strategically tackling long-term liabilities and simmering problems that could one day boil over. That strategy involves laying the groundwork so their clients — in this case, oil and gas companies — will have an early entry into debates that could impact regulation. More generally, the strategy is meant to burnish an industry’s or company’s credibility in areas where their operations are likely to cause bigger headaches down the road.

“Wherever you see Energy In Depth as part of the conversation, that’s where the problem is.”

Melissa Aronczyk

FTI’s first “priority issue” slide focuses on earthquakes — a problem that is indeed still plaguing the oil and gas industry.

In 2015, there was still debate over whether fracking directly caused earthquakes, and regulators were just starting to scrutinize the role played by the oil and gas industry’s wastewater disposal practices. In April 2015, a month before FTI’s presentation, the state of Oklahoma had acknowledged for the first time that the oil and gas industry was likely responsible for a massive surge in earthquakes that had begun rattling the state.

“They see that it’s a problem waiting to explode because the more earthquakes that happen, the more people are going to panic and cause some sort of reckoning,” Aronczyk told DeSmog. She pointed to a CBS News interview highlighted in FTI’s presentation, explaining that “they’re showing how their Energy In Depth spokesperson is already talking about it and saying, ‘we’re sharing science, we’re cooperating, we’re part of this conversation, we’re in the mix’.… They’re seeding, essentially, their future response so that when the crisis hits, they’ve already got everything in place to respond.”

FTI tagging earthquakes as a “priority issue” proved prescient. The temblors have indeed continued in Oklahoma — and the United States Geological Survey has even noted that they are “known to be induced by hydraulic fracturing” — though their numbers dropped after state regulators placed curbs on the oil and gas industry’s wastewater disposal practices. More importantly, that strategic approach suggests that Energy In Depth’s “priority issues” — which in 2015 also included local efforts to ban fracking and the Environmental Protection Agency’s closely watched research into fracking and water contamination — may offer clues to where bigger problems for oil and gas may be about to emerge.

“Wherever you see Energy In Depth as part of the conversation,” said Aronczyk, “that’s where the problem is.”

The Climate Threat

It’s worth bearing in mind that FTI is not simply a PR firm and that many of its clients are not fossil fuel companies. A May 2015 FTI investor presentation shows that a mere 10 percent of FTI’s first quarter 2015 revenues came from its “strategic communications” work. According to this presentation, a majority of the firm’s revenue came from other activities like consulting on economics and litigation or working on bankruptcies and corporate finance.

But this sliver of work might pose a potential risk to FTI’s overall operations. The company’s public climate-related policies show the firm’s management is aware of the risks it faces from climate change, including potential damage to its reputation. “FTI Consulting recognizes that climate change is a global threat,” an Environmental Responsibility and Climate Change Disclosure Policy released by FTI in March 2021 says, “and one of the most significant environmental challenges of our time.”

Towards the end of 2021, the firm also acknowledged climate change directly in its first-ever corporate sustainability report. The report referred to the “ongoing climate crisis” and observed that FTI itself “may be indirectly affected from a reputational standpoint based on work we do for our clients in high emissions industries.”

“Reputational risk is critically important to our firm and brand because our ability to attract and retain leading experts, as well as our retention by global clientele including on their own reputational risks, is driven by our own reputation,” FTI’s report adds. In other words, the firm is aware that its reputation is key to hiring experts and retaining clients who are conscious of their own reputations.

Climate campaigners were quick to point out the disconnect between FTI’s climate messaging and FTI’s public relations work for fossil fuel firms.

“If climate change is a global threat,” Duncan Meisel, director of the Clean Creatives campaign, said in an email to DeSmog, “fossil fuel companies are a global threat.”

“They are primarily responsible for the growth of global carbon pollution, and it’s irresponsible for FTI to retain them as clients, particularly in this capacity,” Meisel continued. “Simply put, we cannot stop the climate emergency in a world where these companies continue to grow, and that is what they hire FTI to help them do.”

FTI declined to say whether it would heed Clean Creatives’ call.“As a matter of policy, we do not comment on client engagements,” Matthew Bashalany, head of FTI’s global media relations, said in an email.

FTI did however provide a response to our inquiry regarding the Duke methane studies. “Just for background information and factual context regarding the slide you referenced below, I thought it would be helpful to include a sample of what third-party, independent researchers and government agencies said about the conclusions of the paper you cited following its release back in 2011,” FTI’s spokesperson wrote.

He offered links to two news articles and three scientific publications that cast doubt on the broader series of Duke methane studies. “The slide covered the series,” he clarified in an email.

The scientific publications, however, included a study that carries a correction because its lead author had failed to disclose that he was “funded privately by Chesapeake [Energy] for this work” and omitted information about the other two authors’ ties to fossil fuel companies.

FTI’s work through Energy In Depth has drawn congressional attention in recent years. “Here in Congress, we can’t keep dancing to the tune of this crowd,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) said in a December 2020 speech discussing FTI’s work for fossil fuel clients. “It is on us whether this web of denial will hold us back or whether we will break free at last of its corrupting influence and do, for once — for once — our duty instead of its bidding.”

ENERGY SCIENCE DENIAL

https://www.desmog.com/2021/10/29/dirty-dozen-documents-big-oil-secret-climate-knowledge-part-1/

cartoon timelines TELLER!

https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/03/03/illustrated-history-american-petroleum-institute-oil-knew-climate-change

By now, it’s no secret that oil companies have been long aware of the risks of climate change from burning fossil fuels. Exxon had “no doubt” that carbon dioxide was a global threat by the late 1970s, and Shell wrote in 1988 that the resulting climate change might lead to “the greatest [changes] in recorded history.”

But decades before, the oil industry was already privy to — and giving its own internal warnings about — the climate threats of carbon pollution from burning its products. In fact, as one science-and-art collaboration illustrated this week, that was happening before humans even landed on the Moon in 1969.

“Today much is being discovered about the history of fossil fuel producers, their knowledge of climate science, and their promulgation of disinformation to the public and policymakers,”Stanford researcher Benjamin Franta told DeSmog. “That information is crucial for understanding how the climate catastrophe was knowingly created and how to fight back — but much of it is in reports and academic articles not read by many.”

However, thanks to Stanford student Nathan Chael, who heard Franta speak about his doctoral research in this area, that information is taking a more artistic and accessible form. Chael suggested that Franta translate his academic work into an illustration and connected him with sustainability consultant and illustrator Alexandre Magnin.

The result of Franta and Magnin’s collaboration is a three-part series of illustrations giving a narrative timeline of Big Oil’s knowledge of the human impact on the climate and its decisions about what to do with that information.

Posted here with permission is episode one in the series, which starts with the oil industry’s early knowledge of fossil fuels’ impacts on the environment in the 1950s and ‘60s. One notable event the pair highlighted in this comic was the 1965 speech by American Petroleum Institute CEO Frank Ikard on the “catastrophic consequence” of carbon pollution.

Magnin will post episodes two and three on his website Sustainability Illustrated in the coming months.

...

pt 2 https://sustainabilityillustrated.com/en/2019/03/12/petroleum-history-comic-2/

http://redgreenandblue.org/2021/01/14/american-petroleum-institute-denying-climate-science-since-1980/

while many in the Trump administration are concerned about their next job — “member of a violently seditious racist’s government” doesn’t look great on a resume, after all — apparently the American Petroleum Institute has no qualms with hiring terrorist-adjacent staff, and has _{hired}_ Energy Dept press secretary Jessica Szymanski. Despite a tweet from an API executive condemning the violence (_{less than even other pro-polluter groups}_ who issued full statements) given that API bankrolls Republicans (including _{insurrectionists}_) it’s not exactly a surprise to see they’ve rescued Szymanski from unemployment.

By Climate Denier Roundup

Because as a new study shows, API has been embracing denial for decades now. Dr. Ben Franta’s latest, _{in }__{Environmental Politics}_ examines an archival report published by API in 1980 that shows how “commercial fossil fuel interests played a more obstructive role in climate change discourse and policy throughout the 1980s than previously understood.”

In _{a twitter thread}_ last week, Dr. Franta explained how the “Two Energy Futures” policy report lays bare three key aspects of the oil industry’s long-term denial campaign. It ignored conclusions of its own internal reports showing an impending climate crisis, and instead deliberately downplayed the climate science’s certainty of negative impacts by invoking a false balance claiming that “scientists were more or less split” on the CO2-climate change link and misrepresenting Carl Sagan’s views on the issue.

Further, the API report portrayed a World Coal Study (funded, of course, by the fossil fuel industry) as credible and consistent with other expert assessments, and an independent validation that more coal would be a good thing, in part because of the coal-to-gas process API envisioned would be prevalent.

This combination of pretending not to know what its own scientists have found, misrepresenting what others say, and setting up your own front groups to launder self-serving opinions as expertise, Dr. Franta _{tweeted}_, “shows that by 1980 the fossil industry was not only paying attention to climate science but also actively intervening to prevent climate from becoming a public policy issue.”

Far from the _{perceived notion}_ of an industry’s once-constructive research being buried and then turned into disinformation, Dr. Franta’s analysis _{shows}_ that “from the inception of public awareness of global warming, the petroleum industry sought to pollute public understanding, manipulate science, and delay policy action.”

So please keep in mind the fact that the industry has lied about their responsibility for climate change for decades before treating them like good-faith actors in the policy arena.

Ben Franta

aBSTRACT

2. Carbon pricing in the 1990s

5. Discussion

6. Conclusion

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