If you are familiar with the term “gaslighting,” which seems apt coming from an energy company, that’s precisely what ExxonMobil continues to do when confronting the public space.
The ExxonMobil strategy reminds us of other industry liars who in the past have tried to pull the wool over the eyes of the public. I’m thinking of one in particular, Big Tobacco.
Cigarette companies knew from their own internal laboratory reports that their products caused lung cancer. But that didn’t stop them in their pursuit of profits to the detriment of public health. Instead, they manipulated consumers through messaging. How so?
But much worse was the deliberate effort to increase nicotine content in each cigarette smoked. Nicotine which occurs in the tobacco plant naturally was enhanced, a psychoactive drug that the industry knew worked on the brain to foster addiction which made consumers buy more.
Big Tobacco knew their products caused cancer, pulmonary and lung disease, heart attacks, strokes, and premature deaths. They knew more people were dying from cigarette smoking than from all the murders, HIV infections, suicides, car crashes, alcoholism, opioids, and illegal drug use. They knew that exposure to secondhand smoke from cigarettes was unsafe at any level.
So what did Big Tobacco do?
And they were largely successful for a very long time.
The same has been true for ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel energy giants. In fact, ExxonMobil hired Hill & Knowlton to do the same number on the public that they had been doing for Big Tobacco.
But the latest perversion of the truth from ExxonMobil is to saddle the blame on consumers. The company accuses the public of making poor consumer choices. Instead of buying energy-efficient automobiles, high-energy use trucks and SUVs are the rage. Instead of electric and hybrid vehicles, consumers continue to purchase en masse fossil-fuel-powered cars and trucks.
One could say that the automobile industry is complicit in the big lie as well. The industry has never made electric and hybrid vehicles front and centre in their product offerings. They have never priced them to drive consumer demand. Only now are they promoting them in their advertising, another gaslighting exercise, when the vast majority of what they continue to produce burns fossil fuels.
In a recent RollingStone article by Amy Westervelt she writes about the deceptive and misleading messaging of the fossil fuel industry as a whole stating “It’s not just ExxonMobil telling us that it’s consumers, not companies, who are responsible for climate change…Chevron regularly highlights how it’s keeping the lights on for all of us. Shell leans on consumers to “do their part” by choosing carbon neutral energy. And BP famously invented the ultimate tool for pinning greenhouse gas emissions on individual consumers: the carbon footprint calculator.”
In light of the revelations this last week of the restored U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s take on climate change, and of the latest global review by the International Energy Agency (IEA), both topics that I will be pursuing in future postings here, it is clear that we can no longer afford to be taken in by an industry that would rather lie than take responsibility for its contributions to the growing threat of rising atmospheric temperatures caused by the burning of the products the fossil fuel industry keeps selling.
When Nobel laureates gathered a few weeks ago to talk about the existential climate threat, a prime tenet within the discussion was to “do no harm.” ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, BP and other energy companies believe in doing no harm to their bottom lines, not to the planet and the life upon it.
]]>New York City is not alone. In 2012 Seattle divested itself of fossil fuel investments. Washington, DC acted similarly as did many counties and cities in California, Colorado, and Massachusetts. After similar divestment announcements San Francisco and Oakland last September launched separate lawsuits against the five largest investor-owned fossil fuel companies in the world, holding them to account for costs incurred both present and future to harden the cities’ infrastructures in the face of climate change.
International divestment from fossil fuel stocks is happening from Capetown to Berlin. Last fall the city of Victoria, British Columbia, and two other Vancouver Island communities, Saanich and Highland, issued climate accountability letters to 20 of the world’s largest fossil fuel companies requesting that they pay for the costs these communities were incurring to fight climate change.
Such legal action against the oil majors is the beginning of a rising tide of litigation aimed at the fossil fuel industry that includes citizen lawsuits from The Netherlands, from children in U.S. states, and from individuals like Saul Luciano Lliuya, a Peruvian mountain guide who sees the melting of an Andes glacier near his hometown of Huaraz as linked to the use of fossil fuels.
The oil companies treat these cases as nuisance suits and argue that linking a storm like Hurricane Sandy to an Exxon-Mobil or a Chevron is unprovable. But those launching the suits have more than the money in mind. They are of a collective mind in showing the rest of the world how fossil fuel companies are no more ethical than Big Tobacco. That oil and gas companies have been in the know since the 1970s that their carbon emissions were warming the Earth’s atmosphere. That their scientists had conclusively linked the burning of fossil fuels to anthropogenic climate change.
The analogy to Big Tobacco is both stark and apt. The major cigarette producers all knew that the products they were making caused a range of diseases in their customers and denied the link between smoking and lung cancer, heart and lung disease, and other life-ending conditions. It is only in the last few years that Big Tobacco has been made to come clean in Western countries. The companies continue to sell their cigarette brands to the Developing World with abandon. I guess the litigators in these countries have yet to mount the kind of lawsuits and publicity to expose Big Tobacco’s lies. But in Europe and North America, Big Tobacco is coming up with ways to survive the end of cigarettes creating product alternatives deemed less harmful. Among these are e-cigarettes.
In launching the San Francisco lawsuit, City Attorney, Dennis Herrera stated:
“These fossil fuel companies profited handsomely for decades while knowing they were putting the fate of our cities at risk. Instead of owning up to it, they copied a page from the Big Tobacco playbook. They launched a multi-million dollar disinformation campaign to deny and discredit what was clear even to their own scientists: global warming is real, and their product is a huge part of the problem. Now, the bill has come due. It’s time for these companies to take responsibility for the harms they have caused and are continuing to cause.”
In the Oakland lawsuit, City Attorney Barbara J. Parker was equally blunt in her comments:
“Global warming is an existential threat to humankind, to our ecosystems and to the wondrous, myriad species that inhabit our planet. These companies knew fossil fuel-driven climate change was real, they knew it was caused by their products and they lied to cover up that knowledge to protect their astronomical profits. The harm to our cities has commenced and will only get worse. The law is clear that the defendants are responsible for the consequences of their reckless and disastrous actions.”
The fossil fuel companies are making some small moves into alternative energy hedging their bets against coal, oil, and natural gas assets losing value in a low-carbon future. Some are dipping into solar and wind energy. Others are dabbling with fuel cell technology and hydrogen. And some are investing in battery storage. This isn’t the first time the companies have looked at renewables. A decade ago when oil and gas prices were peaking, some of these companies had alternative energy assets which they dumped to put all their money into their fossil fuel operations. But now in the post-Paris COP 21 Climate Agreement world, the companies are once again starting to acquire wind farms, photovoltaic and solar thermal power plants, and battery storage technology companies.
But there remain hardliners like Koch Industries which continues to push a big oil and gas agenda, bankrolling minions like Donald Trump and funding climate change denial organizations like the Heartland Institute, all in the hope of putting off the day of reckoning. The Koch brothers put money before country and the planet.
We in the general population must push back. We need to make everyone aware of these Big Oil lawsuits. We need more cities, other government sub-jurisdictions, and citizens’ groups to join in and launch similar legal actions. In the end, it will exert a growing toll on Big Oil, and like Big Tobacco will eventually lead to a day of reckoning.
“We all know that smoking is harmful to the human body, but there is actually a second damaging side to smoking and cigarettes. Both cigarette smoke itself and the waste from cigarettes can have a major impact on the environment.”
So how much damage is tobacco and smoking doing to more than just human lungs? I think you will find the statistics on discarded cigarette butts pretty appalling.
The arrival of Jenny’s infographic coincides with my visit to my rheumatologist to get a cortisone injection in my knee. To get there I walked the 1.2 kilometers to the subway with cane in hand. But as I walked it was impossible not to notice the refuse of cigarettes everywhere. I shared my observations with Jenny in an email.
This is what I saw and obsessively counted thinking I might write about this very subject:
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One can expect that funding for climate studies will be slashed by a Trump or Ted Cruz-led regime. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will see its Clean Power Plan quashed. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) will see its budgets decreased. Planning and budgeting for the replacement of aging Earth-observation satellites studying sea level rise and other aspects of climate science will be put on hold or cancelled. Arctic, Atlantic and Pacific-coast drilling for oil and gas will be back on. And coal-fired power plants will no longer be on the chopping block.
Will scientists sit idly by and watch this happen? That’s an interesting question. On a smaller scale Australia went through a similar experience after a change in government. With Tony Abbott in charge a progressive carbon tax was repealed. Government departments researching climate change were closed. Australia set minimal targets for carbon reduction paying lip service to international attempts to combat climate change. But Australia’s scientists rebelled, taking it upon themselves to continue the research and reporting on the continent’s changing climate. Crowd funding replaced government money. Eventually Abbott was turfed and replaced by Malcolm Turnbull who hasn’t reinstated the carbon tax but at least affirms a belief that climate change is real and human caused.
Should America’s scientists be contingency planning similar actions as those of their Australian colleagues in the event of a Republican presidency? Should they be raising money to defend themselves when Republican witch hunts start to identify the “climate science criminals” among us like the Red Scare of the 1950s? One would hope so because current GOP leadership has clearly stated its plans to eliminate all significant American national climate policies. For the Republicans, climate change isn’t a national issue. It’s a Democratic Party issue.
How far the Republicans have moved from their environmental interventionist past under President Nixon and George H. W. Bush. Nixon who created the EPA, and Bush who invented cap and trade mechanisms for dealing with atmospheric pollutants, both listened to scientists.
So what explains the behavioral shift? Money!
The money from fossil fuel companies is lining the pockets of Republican politicians to block progress on the climate file. Delay to maximize profits is the fossil fuel industry strategy. This is the same strategy employed by Big Tobacco in its fight against scientific evidence that its products caused cancer. And interestingly enough, the climate science deniers who publish anti-climate science bromides and hold pseudo-climate science conventions, are people with roots in trying to block action against tobacco companies. They are working from the same playbook.
In the last few days the current Chairman of the House Science Committee, a Republican congressman from Texas, Lamar Smith, accused NOAA of “misrepresenting research” requesting the emails of scientists involved in a 2014 study. His objective was to uncover the conspiracy behind research on temperature observations. Smith’s agenda is the GOPs. He is quoted as stating, “Instead of hyping a climate change agenda, NOAA should focus its efforts on producing sound science and improving methods of data collection…..Unfortunately, climate alarmism often takes priority at NOAA.” His Democratic opponents on the House Science Committee have referred to Smith’s agenda as a “grand conspiracy to falsify data.”
Scientists need to make the same point and loudly. The politicizing of climate change by the Republican Party is putting the citizens of the United States at risk as well as the rest of the planet. A Republican in the White House will diminish and delay sound science-based policy. In four years time the cost to address the impact of climate change will increase 40% for each decade of delay. Who will bear the cost? Mexico?
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