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Fossil fuel companies have been misleading the public and
policymakers about the risks of their products for decades. These
corporations should obviously be held accountable.
It’s odd that we aren’t able to discuss this straightforwardly. After
all, accountability is common for other industries. When companies
mislead the public about the health effects of the drugs they market,
for instance, we hold them accountable.
Similarly, when
asbestos manufacturers misled the public about the cancers their
product caused, they were held accountable. When Enron misled its
customers and shareholders, it was held accountable. And when we learned
that Volkswagen cheated consumers by secretly embedding an emissions
control “kill switch” in it’s diesel vehicles, citizens and government
officials swung into action to hold the company accountable.
Most
significantly, when we discovered that the tobacco industry hid
information about the addictive nature and deadly toll of cigarettes and
systematically engaged in a decades-long campaign to misinform the
public, we held the industry accountable.
Given this history, let’s be clear about what we now know regarding the fossil fuel industry’s history of deception on climate change.
As early as the
late 1970s, executives at fossil fuel companies were well aware that
burning oil, gas and coal could cause irreversible and dangerous climate
change. Indeed, as early as 1981, Exxon-Mobil was weighing whether or
not to develop carbon-intense gas reserves off the coast of Indonesia
because of the climate risks associated with the project.
Exxon-Mobil and other fossil fuel companies chose, however, to suppress what its own scientists knew.
From 1979 to 1983, the American Petroleum Institute operated a
scientific task force to study climate change. According to a researcher
who worked on the project, it was taken out of scientists’ hands and
quickly buried — and forgotten — until reporters rediscovered it just
last year.
Public agencies
and university scientists were also tracking climate change around this
same, of course, and the first high-profile climate hearings in the
U.S. Congress occurred around 1988. That’s when fossil fuel industry
lobbyists and executives started pouring more money into front groups
and advocacy campaigns aimed at spreading doubt about climate science
and blocking action to reduce emissions.
Leonard
Bernstein, an Exxon-Mobil scientist who advised one of the industry’s
public policy groups in the mid-1990s attempted to set the companies
straight on climate science. He was rebuffed.
Despite executives’ claims to the contrary, many oil and coal companies continue to support groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council,
which spreads misinformation about climate science to state
legislators, but denies that it denies climate science. And in the past
few months, we’ve learned that now-bankrupt coal giant Alpha Natural
Resources was funding a lawyer who has carved out a niche for harassing climate scientists.
If any other
industry took such drastic steps to hide obvious risks from its
products, would they find such ready defenders in the editorial pages of
Rupert Murdoch‘s Wall Street Journal (WSJ)?.
Consider in this regard the deeply deceptive recent WSJ op-ed by David B. Rivkin Jr., who writes for the National Review and is a principal attorney in the fossil fuel industry attacks on the EPA clean power plan, and Andrew M. Grossman, who represents the Competitive Enterprise Institute
(CEI), an organization with long-established ties to both the fossil
fuel industry and the tobacco industry before it, including its ongoing
affiliation with Chris Horner, the very lawyer Alpha was funding to attack climate scientists.
The main
defense Rivkin and Grossman muster in the face of calls to hold
companies accountable for funding deceptive campaigns about their
products is that under the First Amendment, the government cannot
prevent them or the groups they work with from speaking out.
No doubt.
But when state and U.S. prosecutors successfully sued the tobacco
companies for systematically misleading the public about the risks their
products caused, no one’s free speech rights were infringed. Instead,
tobacco companies agreed to pay states for health care costs associated
with their products, just as Volkswagen will have to pay its customers
and other people who suffered from its deceptions.
The fossil fuel industry can and should be held accountable in the same way. And indeed, thousands of Americans are calling on state attorneys general and the Department of Justice to act.
Rivkin and Grossman also peddle falsehoods about me specifically. For example, they launder a popular myth
in climate change denier circles that the famous “Hockey Stick” curve
which my co-authors and I published sixteen years ago is “an artifact of
[our] statistical methods”. The claim is flatly untrue.
Our key
finding, that the recent warming trend is unprecedented over at least
the past 1000 years, has not only been overwhelmingly affirmed by more
than a dozen subsequent studies, but has been vastly strengthened. There
is now widespread consensus in the scientific community that recent
warmth is unprecedented over an even longer time frame (for the full story behind fossil fuel industry-funded attacks on me and the hockey stick, read my book “The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars“).
Perhaps more to the point, Rivkin and Grossman completely mislead readers about why CEI and the National Review are being sued by me.
The lawsuit is not about their political stances or even their feelings
or beliefs about climate policy or climate science. It focuses instead
on their clients’ false, defamatory and libelous accusations that my
work is fraudulent.
Indeed, given
their affiliations with groups that have regularly attacked climate
scientists, it’s quite galling to see Rivkin and Grossman compare
themselves to Galileo Galilei, the famous Italian scientist who bravely
insisted that the Earth orbited the Sun and not the other way around.
Such ironic attempts by climate change deniers, anti-vaxxers, and other
science critics to usurp the mantle of legitimate scientific skepticism
is so commonplace it has a name — the Galileo Gambit.
So let’s be
clear about the facts: Galileo had the courage to speak truth to the
powerful interests of his day in the Roman Catholic Church, just as two
generations of scientists have tried to speak truth about climate change
to executives and lobbyists in the fossil fuel industry.
The Catholic
Church declared Galileo a heretic and placed him under house arrest. Oil
industry lobbyists don’t have that kind of power, thankfully, so they
merely suppressed internal climate research and started funding groups
like CEI to publicly attack independent climate researchers, instead.
If he were
alive today, Galileo would be appalled to witness industry shills
attempt to wrap themselves in his legacy. He would not be on the side of
powerful fossil fuel interests who fund attacks on scientific research;
perhaps this time, ironically, he would be on the side of his Pope
and the scientists whose council he regularly seeks, who respect facts
and evidence and recognize the reality we live in for what it is.
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