Amy Westerfelt: The Reason COVID-19 and Climate Seem So Similar: Disinformation

The disinformation industry has deployed these strategies across multiple issues.

Illustration by Efflam Mercier.

by Amy Westerfelt, Drilled News, April 20, 2020

For a long time, the story went that the tobacco industry cooked up disinformation and then spread it to the fossil fuel guys, the chemical industry, pharma, you name it. But one thing that became incredibly clear when we began digging into PR firms and specific publicists was that this version of history is not quite right; if disinformation strategies were cooked up by any particular industry it was the public relations industry, which put these strategies to work on behalf of fossil fuels, tobacco, chemical manufacturers and more, often all at the same time. The very first publicist, Ivy Ledbetter Lee, worked on behalf of both Standard Oil and, shortly after, American Tobacco, for example. Daniel Edelman developed astroturf campaigns for both RJ Reynolds tobacco company and the American Petroleum Institute, as did John Hill, who went so far as to have tobacco folks join the API. He also worked with Monsanto, juggling all three clients at the same time. E. Bruce Harrison worked for the chemical guys first, then managed front groups for tobacco and fossil fuels at the same time. You get the drift.

These industries all surely learned from each other at various points in time, but that was mostly because they were working with the same publicists. The history is less that tobacco or oil embraced disinformation first and then passed it on and more that a handful of PR firms and consultants created the disinformation industry, and then put it to work on behalf of whatever industry needed it at any given time.

Today, those same strategies are at work on behalf of those who worry that the response to COVID-19 will undermine capitalism, which is why climate folks keep noting how familiar the whole anti-science component of the rightwing response to the pandemic feels. It’s familiar because the exact same strategies are being deployed, in some cases by the same people. Here are a few key examples:

1. Disinformation Strategy #1: He who controls the language controls the narrative. Ivy Lee’s big thing, way back 100+ years ago when he was working with the Rockefellers... oh, and advising Hitler and Goebbels too… was to take control of language. If the government wanted to impose safety regulations on your industry, you described them as “extra” or “additional” or “surplus.” In climate, we’ve seen language shift from “the greenhouse effect” to global warming to climate change. When media finally seized the power to make its own language choices, opting for “climate crisis” or “climate emergency," it was deemed radical, even by other journalists. In the COVID-19 context, we’ve seen this too. It’s gone from a “flu” to “a really bad flu” to “a pandemic” in a relatively condensed amount of time. But you’ll see those trading in disinformation continue to refer to it as “just a bad flu” or point out how many people the flu kills every year.
2. Disinformation Strategy #2: Leverage science illiteracy to create doubt: This has been a hugely effective tactic for multiple industries because the vast majority of public don’t spend a lot of time reading scientific studies, nor do they understand that scientific research has its own language. That makes it very easy to point to something like the uncertainty inherent in any scientific research and say “see, they don’t really know.” The best recent example of this is the re-emergence of Michael Fumento, as Drilled News contributor Paul Thacker pointed out recently. Fumento questioned health models for the tobacco guys, climate models for the oil guys, and has now returned to question public health models used to predict the spread and likely death toll of COVID-19. Fumento was also famously fired when Businessweek outed him for accepting $60,000 from Monsanto one year to write GMO-friendly pieces in his column, which was syndicated to dozens of papers across the country. Of course models, like science in general, have a bit of uncertainty baked in; they represent both the most extreme outcomes and the most likely scenarios, they encapsulate multiple variables. And if you know enough about them, it’s quite easy to cherry pick data and flaws and argue, as Fumento does, that modeling in general is bunk that ought to be thrown out.
3. Disinformation strategy #3: Astroturfing This weekend, social media was awash in the news that those anti-lockdown rallies in Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin and Colorado were all fomented by rightwing donors. Someone on Reddit figured out all the “re-open the economy” websites were made by one guy in Florida. This is astroturfing 101, and it’s a strategy that’s been a key tool in the disinformation toolbox for at least 100 years. When coalminers and steelworkers were striking regularly back in the late 1800s and early 1900s, publicists like Ivy Lee, Edward Bernays and John Hill helped create fake protest groups that supposedly represented all the coal miners who just wanted these strikes to be over so they could get back to work. In more recent years, fossil fuel companies have backed fake advocacy groups like the California Drivers Alliance or the Washington Consumers for Sound Fuel Policy to fight against everything from emissions regulations to a carbon tax. Astroturfing is fake activism meant to give the illusion of grassroots opposition to policy. My favorite example is the Save the Plastic Bag Coalition, a petrochemical and plastic manufacturers-backed group that protests bag bans and bag taxes. It’s somewhat rare, however, to get a sitting U.S. President supporting and promoting your astroturf campaign, as Trump has done with the fake “re-open the economy” movement.

Season 3 of Drilled gets into these strategies and more in great detail, and you’re bound to see in this history the roots of today’s pandemic disinformation machine.

This week is Earth Week and a lot of media outlets are focused on solutions to climate change, a conversation that COVID-19 has certainly changed. Which got me thinking: often people act like climate accountability is not a solution, like all we do is point out problems or play the blame game. Sorry for harshing your mellow about carbon capture occasionally, but for the team at Drilled News, accountability is an absolutely necessary part of addressing climate change. How can you move forward functionally if you don’t know where things went wrong in the past? How can any technological solution possibly work if it’s plugged into the same old system (carbon capture is an excellent example of this, come to think of it)?

Our hope, of course, is that when people learn to recognize these strategies and know what’s behind them, they might become less effective. Disempowering the disinformation industry is a necessary part of any climate solution.

https://drillednews.substack.com/p/the-reason-covid-19-and-climate-seem

L. A. Times: As lawsuits over climate change heat up, oil industry steps up spurious attacks on its critics

The Deepwater Horizon oil rig, aflame in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. The rig's owner, BP, is one of more than 20 oil companies being sued over their alleged role in climate change. (Gerald Herbert / AP)

by Michael Hiltzik, The Los Angeles Times, February 12, 2019

The oil industry has been depicting itself lately as the target of a conspiracy by scientists, local government officials and climate change activists to make it look bad.

It would be odd to think that a conspiracy is necessary to punch holes in the fossil fuel companies’ public reputation, but here’s the argument presented by the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA), one of the industry’s leading lobby organizations.

“In a highly-coordinated move,” the IPAA declares on its website, “nearly 30 scientists, government officials and third-party organizations recently joined the fledgling climate litigation campaign.” The IPAA labeled this a “free-for-all” and quoted an industry newsletter calling the campaign “a carefully orchestrated effort by local governments in California and elsewhere to use state law to collect damages from companies producing and marketing fossil fuels.”

If you think this sounds like a Goliath pretending to be a David, you are right. The litigation campaign IPAA refers to is a cluster of lawsuits pioneered in 2017 by the California counties of San Mateo, Imperial Beach, Marin, and Santa Cruz, and the cities of Richmond, Oakland, and San Francisco, among other jurisdictions, against more than 20 oil and gas companies.

The plaintiffs assert that the companies freely promoted the use of their products even though they were aware of the products’ effect on global warming — information the industry allegedly suppressed for years. The municipalities are asking that the companies be forced to help pay for the damage wreaked by climate change, including drought, wildfires, sea level rise, and extremes of heat and precipitation. Since the filing of the California cases, similar lawsuits have been filed by Rhode Island, Washington’s King County (that is, Seattle), Baltimore, and New York City.

The oil companies succeeded in transferring the state lawsuits to federal court, where they expect to face less liability under the law. The plaintiffs’ argument that the cases belong back in state court is being heard by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.

What has the industry vibrating at the moment is a sheaf of eight friend-of-the-court, or amicus, briefs all filed on January 29, 2019, with the appellate court supporting the transfer back to state court. Among other parties, the briefs were filed by the California Assn. of Counties, the Natural Resources Defense Council, a group of six prominent oil company critics, and the National League of Cities.

To the industry, this looks like a cabal. In a blog post, the IPAA found something sinister in “the fact that all eight of the briefs were filed within hours of one another on a random January afternoon (i.e. there wasn’t a court-designated deadline).” Not only was that “reason enough to suspect some level of coordination took place,” the blog post observes, but “signing onto the amicus briefs were many of the activists and politicians who have played key roles in the broader campaign to take down the oil and natural gas industry for years.”

A couple of points are pertinent here. First of all, there was indeed a court-designated deadline for filing the briefs — January 29, the day they were filed. The court’s procedural calendar specifies that amicus briefs must be filed no later than seven days after the main brief of the party they’re supporting. The California plaintiffs filed their brief on January 22, seven days earlier. So much for the “coordination.”

Second, why should it be so odd that the supporters of the cities and counties are drawn from the community of fossil fuel critics? Who else?

Let’s examine some of the industry’s other points. Among the chief targets of its pushback are Naomi Oreskes and Geoffrey Supran of the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University, who filed one of the amicus briefs, in conjunction with four other scholars with interest in climate change science.

Oreskes and Supran were the authors of a 2017 study detailing the industry’s determined, decades-long effort to suppress scientific evidence of global warming caused by the burning of fossil fuels, despite warnings by its own scientific researchers that the phenomenon was genuine, dangerous, and accelerating. 

We reported here on their study, which focused on Exxon Mobil. They compared hundreds of Exxon Mobil's internal reports and peer-reviewed research papers with its advertising — especially paid "advertorials" the company placed in the op-ed section of the New York Times from 1972 through 2001. The authors concluded that Exxon Mobil had systematically "misled non-scientific audiences about climate science."

The IPAA blog post claims that the Oreskes-Supran study has been debunked, but that’s not so. Their statistical method was questioned by another researcher, who was paid by Exxon Mobil. But the core of their findings wasn’t statistical but empirical. They compared internal company documents with the ad campaign and found them wildly divergent.

Oreskes, in an email, labeled the so-called debunking “the sort of expert-for-hire doubt-mongering” engaged in by the tobacco industry when it was fighting medical science over the dangers of smoking. That’s a topic she’s familiar with, having covered it in the 2010 book “Merchants of Doubt,” co-written with Erik M. Conway.

It’s hardly surprising that the oil industry would be uneasy about the “fledgling climate litigation campaign.” The plaintiffs aim to use state laws to fix blame on the fossil fuel companies in ways that can’t be accomplished under federal environmental laws such as the Clean Air Act.

Indeed, federal law vests the states with primary responsibility for addressing air pollution, according to Victor Sher, the San Francisco attorney representing the counties and cities. “Cases involving false and deceptive marketing, over-promotion of products, campaigns to deceive the public — those are traditional state police power matters that the Clean Air Act doesn’t address at all.”

Federal Judge Vince Chhabria of San Francisco largely agreed last March, when he ordered the lawsuits returned to state court. The oil companies appealed his order, which is why it’s now before the 9th Circuit bench.

The municipalities also are hoping to take advantage of California’s “public nuisance” doctrine, which holds that business can be held responsible for damage done by its products even if their usage was standard practice at the time.

The public nuisance argument was central to a lawsuit brought by California municipalities against lead paint manufacturers that concluded in 2017 with an order that the companies pay to clean up residual lead in dwellings that could pose a health hazard to children in those homes.

There’s no question that the cities and counties face a long and arduous road to saddling the oil industry with the responsibility for climate change and the expense of addressing its impacts. The lead paint lawsuit lasted 17 years before the verdict was made final.

But there’s also no question that the industry did its best to hide what it knew about the prospects of global warming and its products’ role in it. The latest misleading attack on its critics shows, if nothing else, that it still hasn’t learned to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-climate-change-lawsuits-20190212-story.html

Bill Nye Does Not Speak for Us and He Does Not Speak for Science

by 500 Women Scientists, Scientific American, January 30, 2018

Tonight, Bill Nye “The Science Guy” will accompany Republican Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-OK), Trump’s nominee for NASA Administrator, to the State of the Union address. Nye has said that he’s accompanying the Congressman to help promote space exploration, since, he asserts, “NASA is the best brand the United States has” and that his attendance “should not be … seen as an acceptance of the recent attacks on science and the scientific community.”

But by attending the SOTU as Rep. Bridenstine’s guest, Nye has tacitly endorsed those very policies, and put his own personal brand over the interests of the scientific community at large. Rep. Bridenstine is a controversial nominee who refuses to state that climate change is driven by human activity, and even introduced legislation to remove Earth sciences from NASA’s scientific mission. Further, he’s worked to undermine civil rights, including pushing for crackdowns on immigrants,a ban on gay marriage, and abolishing the Department of Education.

As scientists, we cannot stand by while Nye lends our community’s credibility to a man who would undermine the United States’ most prominent science agency. And we cannot stand by while Nye uses his public persona as a science entertainer to support an administration that is expressly xenophobic, homophobic, misogynistic, racist, ableist, and anti-science.

Scientists are people, and in today’s society, it is impossible to separate science at major agencies like NASA from other pressing issues like racism, bigotry, and misogyny. Addressing these issues should be a priority, not only to strengthen our own scientific community, but to better serve the public that often funds our work. Rather than wield his public persona to bring attention to the need for science-informed policy, Bill Nye has chosen to excuse Rep. Bridenstine’s anti-science record and his stance on civil rights, and to implicitly support a stance that would diminish the agency’s work studying our own planet and its changing climate. Exploring other worlds and studying other planets, while dismissing the overwhelming scientific evidence of climate change and its damage to our own planet isn’t just dangerous, it’s foolish and self-defeating. 

Further, from his position of privilege and public popularity, Bill Nye is acting on the scientific community’s behalf, but without our approval. No amount of funding for space exploration can undo the damage the Trump administration is causing to public health and welfare by censoring science. No number of shiny new satellites can undo the racist policies that make our Dreamer colleagues live in fear and prevent immigrants from pursuing scientific careers in the United States. And no new mission to the Moon can make our LGBTQ colleagues feel welcome at an agency run by someone who votes against their civil rights.

As women and scientists, we refuse to separate science from everyday life. We refuse to keep our heads down and our mouths shut. As someone with a show alleging to save the world, Bill Nye has a responsibility to acknowledge the importance of NASA’s vast mission, not just one aspect of it. He should use his celebrity to elevate the importance of science in NASA’s mission—not waste the opportunity to lobby for space exploration at a cost to everything else.

The true shame is that Bill Nye remains the popular face of science because he keeps himself in the public eye. To be sure, increasing the visibility of scientists in the popular media is important to strengthening public support for science, but Nye’s TV persona has perpetuated the harmful stereotype that scientists are nerdy, combative white men in lab coats—a stereotype that does not comport with our lived experience as women in STEM. And he continues to wield his power recklessly, even after his recent endeavors in debate and politics have backfired spectacularly.

In 2014, he attempted to debate creationist Ken Ham—against the judgment of evolution experts—which only served to allow Ham to raise the funds needed to build an evangelical theme park that spreads misinformation about human evolution. Similarly, Nye repeatedly agreed to televised debates with non-scientist climate deniers, contributing to the false perception that researchers still disagree about basic climate science. And when Bill Nye went on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show to "debate" climate change in 2017, his appearance was used to spread misinformation to Fox viewers and fund raise for anti-climate initiatives.

Bill Nye does not speak for us or for the members of the scientific community who have to protect not only the integrity of their research, but also their basic right to do science. We stand with others who have asked Bill Nye to not attend the State of the Union. Nye’s complicity does not align him with the researchers who have a bold and progressive vision for the future of science and its role in society.

At a time when our ability to do science and our ability to live freely are both under threat, our public champions and our institutions must do better.

[The views expressed are those of the author(s) and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.]

About the Authors:

500 Women Scientists

500 Women Scientists is a grassroots organization started by four women who met in graduate school at CU Boulder and who maintained friendships and collaborations after jobs and life took them away from Boulder. Immediately following the November 2016 election, we published an open letter re-affirming our commitment to speak up for science and for women, minorities, immigrants, people with disabilities, and LGBTQIA. The mission of 500 Women Scientists is to serve society by making science open, inclusive, and accessible.

• https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/bill-nye-does-not-speak-for-us-and-he-does-not-speak-for-science/

Please sign petition: Bill Nye thinks he can convince nominated-for-NASA-head, climate-denier Brindenstine of the science

Bill Nye thinks he can convince nominated-for-NASA-head, climate-denier Brindenstine of the science, but we all know that's impossible (or about as much chance as the sun exploding tomorrow).

SIGN HERE PLEASE:  https://act.climatetruth.org/sign/billnye-sotu

Tell Bill Nye: Don’t support the Trump administration’s disastrous climate denial agenda

SIGN THE PETITION

Your letter will be delivered to Bill Nye the Science Guy:

Thank you for all of your important work standing up for science, fighting back against climate denial, and being a critical ally in the climate fight! I was greatly disappointed to find out that you are planning on attending the State of the Union on January 30 as a guest of climate denier Jim Bridenstine. I urge you to cancel these plans.

Jim Bridenstine is a fossil fuel industry-funded politician with no science background who denies the reality of climate change. He has no business running NASA.  As you know, NASA performs critical climate science research and if the Senate confirms Bridenstine's nomination he could work with President Trump to end NASA's earth science missions and ground essential research satellites.

Please do not support the Trump administration's disastrous climate denial agenda by attending the State of the Union as Jim Bridenstine's guest. I hope that you will cancel this unfortunate plan and instead speak out against this dangerous nomination.

News just broke that Bill Nye, the “Science Guy,” is planning to attend the State of the Union address on January 30th as a special guest of Trump’s anti-science, climate-denying NASA nominee Jim Bridenstine. Bill Nye has been a critical ally in the climate fight. We hope he’ll continue to be, and if he hears from enough of us we’re sure he’ll wisen up and cancel this unfortunate plan.

Bill Nye has been a stalwart voice against the Trump administration’s climate denial in the past year. Meanwhile, Jim Bridenstine is exactly the opposite: a climate denying, fossil-fueled politician who has no business running NASA. As a member of Congress from Oklahoma, Bridenstine has already racked up $170,000 in campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry. Even though he refutes the science of climate change and has no scientific background, he just moved one step closer to becoming the head of NASA.

NASA performs critical climate science research, and if the Senate confirms Bridenstine's nomination he could work with Trump to end NASA's earth science missions, and ground essential research satellites. In fact, in 2013 Bridenstine demanded that President Obama apologize for spending money on climate change research.

With his controversial nomination heading soon to the Senate floor, Bill Nye’s tacit endorsement could be just what Bridenstine needs to get enough votes to be confirmed. We have to stop this in its tracks.

Tell Bill Nye today: Don’t support the Trump administration’s disastrous climate denial agenda by attending the State of the Union as Jim Bridenstine’s guest.

SIGN HERE PLEASE:

https://act.climatetruth.org/sign/billnye-sotu

Graham Readfearn: White House debate on Paris was never about climate change

The wrangling between Trump’s advisors was always about how best to burn more fossil fuels

Supposedly at war over climate change, key advisors Jared Kushner and Steve Bannon watch on as Trump signs orders to green-light the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines (Photo: Office of the President of the United States)

by Graham Readfearn, Climate Change News, June 2, 2017

As United States President Donald Trump was deliberating his country’s future in the Paris climate deal, there were two internal camps marshalling their arguments.

But the wrangling in the White House was not a debate about climate change. It was over how best to burn more fossil fuels.

In one corner were the fossil fuel apologists, the climate science denialists and the network of conservative think tanks that have used conflicted cash to keep their arguments flowing.

For them, leaving the United Nations pact would help the US regain a competitive advantage and put their economic prosperity first. The costs of climate change impacts were never factored, because for them, they do not exist.

In the other corner, there were groups who, on the face of it, seemed unlikely bedfellows.

Trump’s daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner – both presidential advisors – recruited of the likes of Hollywood star-turned-climate campaigner Leonardo diCaprio and former Vice-President Al Gore to sit down with the president.

In the uncertain months leading up to this decision, much was made of her influence on her father. But, on this issue at least, that appears to have been overblown.



Rex Tillerson told his senate confirmation hearing that the US should stay in the agreement to protect its own interests (Photo: greatagain.com)

Ivanka was joined by Trump’s secretary of state Rex Tillerson, who oversaw a long-running programme designed to confound climate action as the CEO of Exxon. He was also pushing for the Trump administration to keep a seat at the UN table.

At least two coal companies, Peabody Energy and Cloud Peak, had tried to convince Trump to remain in the Paris deal. Oil and gas giants Exxon and Conoco also voiced support for the Paris deal.

This internal fight represented two different approaches from a fossil fuel industry trying to sustain itself. One approach is to bulldoze and cherry-pick your way through the science of climate change and attack the UN process — all to undermine your opponents’ core arguments.

Another approach is to accept the science but work the system to convince governments that “clean coal” and efficiency gains are the way forward.

The latter was exactly the rationale reportedly deployed by coal firms like Peabody Energy and Cloud Peak.

According to White House officials quoted by Reuters, these firms wanted Trump to stay in the Paris deal because this gave them a better chance of getting support for “low-emission” coal plants.  They might also get some financial help to support the development of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology.

When the World Coal Association talks about its role at United Nations climate talks, it too is hopeful that being inside the United Nations tent will give them a chance to justify the future of its industry through less-dirty coal generators and CCS.

During his senate confirmation, Tillerson was asked if the US should maintain leadership on climate issues. He demurred, saying that the US should “maintain its seat at the table”. Earlier he had said he held this view so that the US could understand “what the impacts may be on the American people and American competitiveness.”

It was hardly an endorsement of the aims of the process. Its certainly didn’t convince Trump, of course, as we now know who won.

Celebrating today will be Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon, the former boss of the hyper-partisan news outlet Breitbart, and Scott Pruitt, the head of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (Bannon once called global warming a manufactured crisis, while Pruitt is unconvinced that extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is causing climate change).

Trump had declared a year ago that, if elected, he would leave the Paris agreement and stop all payments to “UN global warming programs.” On that, he has simply fulfilled a campaign promise.

The “remain” camp was clearly facing an uphill battle.

There’s an awful lot of dust that needs to settle before the implications of Trump’s decision become clear.  Will his decision galvanize others, such as Europe and China, to take a great leadership role?

Will it encourage some eastern European countries already unhappy at the greenhouse gas cuts pledged in Paris, to slow the process further?

For the meantime, we can begin to assess why the climate denial machine that won the day over those trying to subvert the climate process from within.

Social science academics that have studied the “climate change counter movement” say the organisations that proliferate this world view have captured key institutions that grant them outsize power.

Professor Riley Dunlap, a pioneer in the field of environmental sociology, concedes that Trump’s decision is  “a major victory for the denial machine.”

In particular Dunlap, of Oklahoma State University, points to “core elements like the Heritage Foundation” – a think tank that Trump has tapped for several positions in his administration.

“Withdrawal is the logical outcome of their success in getting Trump to appoint hardcore deniers like Scott Pruitt to key cabinet and administrative positions,” says Dunlap.

“This administration is institutionalising climate change denial2 more fully and brazenly than did the George W. Bush administration, which was effective in stalling both national and international policy-making.”

“While efforts to reduce carbon emissions can still be taken at state and local levels, the federal government’s role is critical, especially in international efforts to deal with climate change.”

The only way to change that is through the ballot box, he says.

“We are not going to reduce the influence of the denial interests in the federal government until we see major changes in its composition – a new administration and Republicans losing their grip on Congress.”

Professor Robert Brulle, of Drexel University, has studied the network of think tanks that have been pushing back against climate action – often with debunked arguments about the influence of fossil fuel brining on the climate.

“It is very clear to me that the organisations long-associated with providing climate misinformation played a major role in the announcement by president Trump,” Brulle told Climate Home.

“What is needed is the public exposure of the tactics and strategies of these organisations engaged in misinformation efforts, and how they work with their sponsors to create and promulgate their misinformation campaigns.”

Professor Aaron McCright, of Michigan State University, also researches the political and social dimensions of climate policy.

He says there is a slowly strengthening bloc within the Republican Party that rejects the kind of climate science denial that has become a key element of their party’s identity.

“These science-accepting Republicans must continue to grow in number; they must find public platforms to consistently communicate their messages; and they must do the hard work of convincing their GOP brothers and sisters to accept the science and go about looking for conservative solutions to climate change,” he says.

“This will not be easy.  But, I think this is the only real way to crowd out motivated climate change denial from their party.  The change must come from within.”

http://www.climatechangenews.com/2017/06/02/white-house-debate-paris-never-climate-change/

Graham Readfearn, The Guardian: Trump’s Paris exit: climate science denial industry has just had its greatest victory

Trump’s confirmed withdrawal from the United Nation’s Paris climate deal shows it’s time to get to grips with the climate science denial industry

by Graham Readfearn, "Planet Oz," The Guardian, June 1, 2017

Moments before the US president, Donald Trump, strode into the Rose Garden, TV cameras pictured his chief strategist, Steve Bannon, shaking hands and looking generally pleased with himself.

Bannon once called global warming a “manufactured crisis.”

Bannon, with Trump’s head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, were among the loudest and most forceful voices in Trump’s ear, imploring the president to pull out of the Paris climate change agreement.

During his speech, Trump claimed the Paris deal was bad for America. The themes were economic, but the speech was laced with jingoistic protectionism.“Our withdrawal represents a reassertion of America’s sovereignty,” he said.

But make no mistake here.

The foundation for Trump’s dismissal of the Paris deal – and for the people who pushed him the hardest to do it – is the rejection of the science linking fossil-fuel burning to dangerous climate change.

Or rather, Trump’s rejection of the Paris deal was built on the flimsy, cherry-picked and long-debunked talking points of an industry built to manufacture doubt about climate science. Once you fall for those arguments, making an economic case suddenly feels plausible.

After Trump signed off with his catchphrase pledge glib enough to fit on a baseball cap, he invited Pruitt to say a few words.

Pruitt, who as the attorney general of Oklahoma had a long history of backing fossil-fuel interests over environmental concerns, has denied that CO2 causes global warming.

Bannon is the former boss of Breitbart – the hyper-partisan right-wing outlet that pushes climate science denial and an overt hatred for climate scientists.

As Guardian US has has reported, Trump’s team has been filling the administration with climate science “sceptics”.

Myron Ebell, the man picked by the Trump campaign team to engineer the EPA’s transition from an agency that acknowledges the risk of fossil-fuel burning to one being forced to publicly deny it, is a long-serving member of that climate science denial industry.

As long ago as 1998, Ebell joined the fossil-fuel industry for a campaign that aimed to reset the public’s understanding of climate science from acceptance to doubt.

Moments after Trump’s announcement, Steve Milloy, one of Ebell’s colleagues in that 1998 campaign who was also drafted by Ebell to help him “transition” the EPA, tweeted: “Congratulations to all climate skeptics! We have reaped a tremendous victory.”

 Follow

Steve Milloy @JunkScience

Congratulations to all climate skeptics! We have reaped a tremendous victory. #ParisAgreement

3:04 PM - 1 Jun 2017

 
•  6767 Retweets
 
•  196196 likes

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Earlier this week, the veteran coal lobbyist Fred Palmer was salivating in a column for Breitbart over Trump’s intentions.

“Stay on the course that recognizes the Paris agreement incorrectly demonizes carbon and CO2 emissions,” wrote Palmer, who is now a senior fellow at the climate science-denying Heartland Institute.

Palmer has explained to me how some 25 years ago he kickstarted what is thought to be the first fossil-fuel funded campaign aimed squarely at undermining the science linking fossil-fuel burning to dangerous climate change.

Since then, elements of the fossil-fuel industry have run a relentless campaign of self-interested misinformation that puts the protection of their industry above the protection of communities, habitats and species across the planet.

They got together with so-called “free market” advocates whose view on the world tells them governments have to be small and that regulations are bad.

Just weeks ago, a collective of conservative “free market” organisations wrote an open letter to Trump urging him to cut ties with the Paris deal.

The first name on the letter was Ebell’s. Many signatories reject entirely the role of fossil-fuel burning in changing the climate. Many of the groups those people represent have taken millions of dollars in donations from the petrochemical billionaires Charles and David Koch.

Those groups are the same ones who have developed talking points, compiled reports, appeared in the media, written newspaper columns, gone on speaking torus, given testimony to congress – all geared to protecting the fossil-fuel industry while relegating, ignoring or misrepresenting the science.

Several members of that denial industry – including Ebell – were reportedly invited to the Rose Garden to hear the news.

As Rhode Island senator and Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse said in the moments after Trump’s announcement, Trump “is betraying the country, in service of Breitbart fake news, the fossil fuel industry, & the Koch brothers’ climate denial operation.”

 Follow

Sheldon Whitehouse 

✔@SenWhitehouse

.@POTUS is betraying the country, in service of Breitbart fake news, the fossil fuel industry, & the Koch brothers’ climate denial operation pic.twitter.com/J3YwrORboA

2:42 PM - 1 Jun 2017

 
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So what comes next? Hopefully, one realization will be this.

Now is the time to learn about the methods, the tactics, the personnel, the structure and the reach of the global climate science denial industry.

They just convinced the leader of the United States to pull the plug on a historic deal signed by almost 200 countries, and instead join Nicaragua and Syria as the only countries not signed up.

It is time to take that climate science denial industry seriously.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/planet-oz/2017/jun/02/trumps-paris-exit-climate-science-denial-industry-has-just-had-its-greatest-victory