How vested
interests tried to turn the world against climate science
For decades
fossil fuel majors tried to fight the consensus – just as big tobacco once
disputed that smoking kills
Revealed:
top UK thinktank spent decades undermining climate science
Felicity
Lawrence, David Pegg and Rob Evans
Thu 10 Oct
2019 16.00 BSTLast modified on Thu 10 Oct 2019 19.41 BST
In 1998 a
public relations consultant called Joe Walker wrote to the American Petroleum
Institute (API), a trade association representing major fossil fuel companies,
with a proposed solution to a big problem.
In December
the previous year, the UN had adopted the Kyoto protocol, an international
treaty that committed signatory countries to reducing their greenhouse gas
emissions in order to avert catastrophic climate breakdown.
Reducing
emissions represented a direct threat to the profits of fossil fuel companies
and the API was working on an industry response.
“As
promised, attached is the Global Climate Science Communications Plan that we
developed during our workshop last Friday,” Walker wrote. The workshop had
involved senior executives from fossil fuel companies, including the oil
multinationals Exxon – later part of ExxonMobil – and Chevron, and the gas and
coal utility Southern Company, and a handful of rightwing thinktanks.
Walker
outlined a vision of a comprehensive, international campaign to change public
opinion on the climate crisis by casting doubt on the scientific research,
presenting it as unreliable when the overwhelming majority of scientists had
reached consensus.
The
communications plan involved finding sympathetic scientists, identifying
thinktanks to fund that would produce helpful reports, and working through
supposed grassroots groups to hold debates questioning the consensus on global
heating, along with a constant flow of media briefings manufacturing
uncertainty.
The plan
sounded much like a 1960s PR campaign devised by the tobacco industry to delay
controls by questioning the science showing that smoking killed. Some of the
people involved were in fact tobacco campaign veterans.
The fossil
fuel industry had been making use of its lobbying group, the Global Climate
Coalition, since 1989 to stress the uncertainties of climate science. But by
the late 1990s companies such as BP and Shell were beginning to withdraw from
it as public doubt about the problem became increasingly untenable in the face
of the evidence.
“Project
goal: a majority of the American public, including industry leadership,
recognises that significant uncertainties exist in climate science,” the 1998
Walker API memo began. A series of strategic goals was elaborated. It said
“victory will be achieved when … recognition of uncertainties becomes part of
the conventional wisdom” and “those promoting the Kyoto treaty on the basis of
extant science appear to be out of touch with reality”.
After the
memo was leaked to the New York Times, the industry said the plan was only a
proposal and was never put into effect.
Climate
campaigners such as Greenpeace say they believe a highly organised effort by
the fossil fuel industry to question climate science, involving scientists and
some thinktanks in receipt of fossil fuel industry funding, nevertheless
succeeded in the following years in shifting public opinion away from urgent
action.
In 2010 the
American sociologists Riley Dunlap and Aaron McCright identified conservative
thinktanks, along with US conservative politicians, media and fossil fuel
corporations, as crucial components in a “denial machine” that emerged in the
1990s.
The
activity of this machine would peak when the industry’s financial interests
came under threat, most notably in the years after 2007 and the election of
Barack Obama, who had pledged to regulate and cap emissions.
Robert
Brulle, a professor of sociology and environmental science at Drexel University
in Pennsylvania, published the first peer-reviewed study in 2013 of who was
funding what he called the climate change counter-movement that delayed action
on the crisis. He found that between 2003 and 2010 more than $500m had been
donated by private conservative philanthropic foundations to organisations
whose output included material disputing the consensus.
Thinktanks,
trade associations and front groups were a key part of the effort, he
concluded, with their major funders including foundations affiliated to the
fossil fuel magnates the Koch brothers, ExxonMobil, and the ultra-conservative
Scaife and Bradley foundations.
Brulle also
found evidence of a trend to conceal the sources of funding once campaign
groups such as the Union of Concerned Scientists, Greenpeace and the Climate
Disinformation Database started tracking what they called dark money to climate
denial from the mid-2000s.
In the
second half of that decade, Koch, Scaife, Bradley and ExxonMobil foundation
funding to organisations involved in propagating doubt declined while donations
to the same organisations via two anonymised vehicles, the Donors Trust and
Donors Capital Fund, increased rapidly.
Among the
thinktanks most identified with spreading doubt are the Competitive Enterprise
Institute, the Marshall Institute (which folded in 2015), the Cato Institute,
the Heartland Institute, the Heritage Foundation and the campaign group
Americans for Prosperity.
Elsewhere
the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Global Warming Policy Foundation have
been prominent publishers of material questioning the consensus on climate
science in the UK. These organisations fiercely dispute that any of their work
constitutes organised climate change denial.
Americans
for Prosperity, which has received a very substantial part of its funding from
the Kochs, helped make resistance to action on climate a feature of Tea Party
rallies in the US.
The
counter-movement against action wound up to fever pitch in 2009 when it looked
as though Obama and the US would sign up to UN climate protocols after the
Copenhagen summit due at the end of that year.
Before the
summit, individual independent climate experts found themselves subject to
devastating attacks. Scientists at the University of East Anglia’s prestigious
Climate Research Unit had their emails hacked. The contents of the emails were
circulated, with the information they contained having been extracted in a way
that suggested the scientists had manipulated their data. A police
investigation failed to establish who the hackers were.
The
rightwing media labelled it “climategate” and several thinktanks promoted the
story enthusiastically. Multiple inquiries would later exonerate the scientists
but by then the damage was done; the public’s faith in climate science had been
measurably dented.
Half a
decade later some fossil fuel industry funding of climate contrarian science
was exposed, when Greenpeace found out via freedom of information requests that
a prominent academic at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Willie
Soon, had attracted more than $1.2m in payments over 14 years from ExxonMobil,
Southern Company, the API and a Koch foundation, to the centre for his work.
Soon doubted the scientific consensus that emissions were the principal cause
of global heating.
He is now
an affiliate of the Heartland Institute. Soon strenuously denied that his
industry funders had any influence over his conclusions and the Heartland
Institute said he was not even aware of who some of the donors to the centre
were, making a conflict of interest impossible.
US college
students protest against the Kyoto treaty in support of George W Bush at a
climate summit in Bonn in 2001
There has
been a noticeable moderation of views from those previously involved in
questioning the science of climate change. Several now acknowledge global
heating is caused by human activity but have shifted focus to arguing that the
market and technological innovation rather than government action or
international treaties curbing emissions are the best ways to tackle it.
The
director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s (CEI) Center for Energy and
Environment, Myron Ebell, for example, told the Guardian: “CEI believes
strongly that the policies being proposed by climate alarmists to deal with
global warming pose much greater threats to human flourishing than do the
effects of global warming. Abundant, affordable energy is a necessary condition
of human wellbeing but the global energy-rationing policies being pursued, like
those in the Paris climate treaty, threaten to consign billions of people
around the world to energy poverty and perpetual economic stagnation.”
ExxonMobil,
Chevron, Southern Company and the API all said they recognised the seriousness
of the climate crisis and the need for business, governments and consumers to
reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The API said the industry as a whole had
invested billions of dollars in zero- and low-carbon technologies. Chevron and
Southern Company said they had ambitious targets to reduce their carbon
footprints. ExxonMobil said its position on climate science in the past had
been misrepresented, and that claims regarding what it knew and when had been
debunked. None of the companies responded to questions on the communications
plan and funding of organisations whose output included doubting the science.
The Koch, Scaife
and Bradley Foundations Donors Trust, Donors Capital Fund and Americans for
Prosperity did not respond to requests for comment.
The
thinktanks said the criticisms levelled at them by climate activists and
critics seriously mischaracterised their positions. They said the views they
published were those of individual affiliates rather than institutional ones.
They added that they respected their donors’ privacy but the source of their
money did not influence their research or output, which was completely
independent. The Heritage Foundation said allegations it had denied climate
science were “seriously inaccurate”. It accepted “the climate is changing, the
planet is warming and that humans are playing a role”. Instead it described
itself as “sceptics of climate catastrophism and costly policies that will
drive energy prices higher”.
The Cato
Institute said it had never been in the business of “promoting climate science
denial”; it did not dispute human activity’s impact on the climate, but
believed it was minimal.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário