InsideClimate News - Neela Banerjee
One of the longest and most consequential campaigns against science in
modern history is becoming more extreme—and turning against its
originators.
The Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank, launched a
billboard campaign in 2012 to compare believers in global warming to
"murderers and madmen" such as the Unabomber, Charles Manson and Osama
bin Laden. The backlash was so severe that Heartland pulled the plug
within 24 hours, but it still lost major donors and political allies and
faced criticism that its fight against climate science was beyond
extreme.
Five years later, on June 1, 2017, the group's chief executive, Joseph Bast, was a guest of
Donald Trump in the White House Rose Garden as the president announced the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris climate agreement.
"We are winning in the global warming war," Bast declared later in an
email to supporters.
Heartland's rebound is striking. Its ascent into the Trump
administration's orbit, where it now advises the Environmental
Protection Agency on
climate change
issues, marks the most dramatic success yet in a decades-long crusade,
first funded by fossil fuel money, against the mainstream scientific
conclusion that human activity is warming the planet and inviting
disastrous consequences.
Hundreds of millions of dollars from corporations such as ExxonMobil
and wealthy individuals such as the billionaires Charles and David Koch
have supported the development of a sprawling network, which includes
Heartland and other think tanks, advocacy groups and political
operatives. They have cast doubt on consensus science, confused public
opinion and forestalled passage of laws and regulations that would
address the global environmental crisis. It is one of the largest,
longest and most consequential misinformation efforts mounted against
mainstream science by an industry.
Climate denial,
thanks to the network's influence, has become a core message of the
Republican Party, now in control of the White House and Congress.
"This didn't come out of nowhere. Trump was taught to say these
things on climate by Heartland, the Competitive Enterprise Institute and
other think tanks. They maintained this denial space in public policy
dialogue," said Kert Davies, director of the Climate Investigations
Center, a watchdog group. "And you can definitely credit Exxon and Koch
brothers' money for giving the think tanks the megaphone to keep climate
science denial in the world."
But now, just like the Republican upstarts that threaten the party
establishment, Heartland is taking climate denial farther than many
fossil fuel companies can support. While ExxonMobil today publicly
accepts the reality of human-caused climate change and the need to
address the problem, Heartland argues for the benefits of a warming
world. The group is pushing the
EPA
to overturn its official conclusion—known as the endangerment
finding—that excessive carbon dioxide is a danger to human health and
welfare. The finding, affirmed by the Supreme Court, is what empowers
the agency to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
This rift was on display at a recent meeting of the American
Legislative Exchange Council, a group that influences state governments
to adopt conservative priorities. Heartland wanted ALEC to approve a
resolution calling on the EPA to withdraw the endangerment finding. But
ExxonMobil, once at the forefront of climate denial, was among several
corporations and utilities that convinced ALEC to shelve a vote on the
resolution.
ExxonMobil had become just another member of "the discredited and
anti-energy global warming movement," complained Heartland's president,
Tim Huelskamp, a former Republican congressman from Kansas. "They've put
their profits and 'green' virtue signaling above sound science."
ExxonMobil is among an early group of donors that slowed or ended its
funding of climate denial. But the misinformation apparatus the
corporations helped create is now so independent and robust, it no
longer needs—or trusts—them.
"Robespierre beheading Danton is pretty apt here," said Jerry Taylor,
president of the bipartisan, pro-climate action think tank Niskanen
Center, referring to French revolutionaries executing the moderates
among them during the Reign of Terror. "There used to be some degree of
interest in projecting an image of seriousness, of expertise and
evenhandedness on climate, and there isn't anymore."
The new goal is making sure that denial is "part of the ideological
catechism of the conservative base," Taylor said. "They are trying to
keep the hard Right animated."
Taylor knows this universe from the inside. Once a prominent climate
skeptic, he worked at ALEC as staff director for energy and environment
issues early in his career. From 1991 to 2014, he was a vice president
at the Cato Institute, focusing on energy and climate issues. And, his
brother, James Taylor, is a senior environmental fellow at Heartland.
Whatever their differences today, corporations such as ExxonMobil were crucial to getting the denial network up and running.
According to climate watchdogs Greenpeace/ExxonSecrets, ExxonMobil
led corporate donations to think tanks, giving nearly $31 million
between 1998 and 2014 to 69 groups that spread climate misinformation.
The Koch brothers, whose conservative ideology dovetails with their
petrochemical business interests, led giving among individual magnates,
donating more than $100 million since 1997 to 84 groups.
The Heartland Institute rejects suggestions that it was ever part of
any group fostered by corporations. "Heartland has long supported and
promoted scientists skeptical of man-caused global warming on
principle," Jim Lakely, the organization's spokesman, told InsideClimate
News.
Data from Greenpeace/ExxonSecrets
shows the organization received $650,000 from ExxonMobil between
1998 and 2006. Heartland points out that it ramped up its work on
climate after its Exxon funding ended, and that the only Koch-connected
contribution it received in the past 15 years, of $25,000, supported its
work on health care issues.
ExxonMobil and Koch Industries did not respond to requests for comment.
As Money Flowed, Strategies Passed Like a Baton
Social scientists are still trying to gauge the full breadth of
spending on climate denial because of the large number of players
involved, the growth of money from secretive sources, and the wide range
of public relations tactics fossil fuel companies use to delay action,
according to Robert Brulle, professor of sociology at Drexel University.
Brulle mined IRS and other public filings to show that between 2003
and 2010, 91 groups promulgating climate denial received more than a
half-billion dollars from 140 foundations. Corporations such as
ExxonMobil pared back their funding in that decade; most of the money
came from financial vehicles such as Donors' Trust, which shields
funders' identities.
As the money flowed through and nurtured the network over the
decades, its misinformation strategies passed like a baton to a shifting
array of coalitions and initiatives that protected fossil fuel
interests in the climate debate. Some groups produced reports that cast
doubt on the accumulating evidence of manmade climate change, and others
amplified the alternative findings. Think tanks in the network held
conferences, sponsored panels, wrote op-eds and letters, and created an
echo chamber loud enough to command equal time in the mainstream media.
 |
| U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was Exxon's CEO from 2006 to 2016, after working his way up in the oil company. According to climate watchdogs Greenpeace/ExxonSecrets, ExxonMobil gave nearly $31 million between 1998 and 2014 to 69 groups that spread climate misinformation. Credit: Eric Piermont/AFP/Getty Images |
Still, in 2007, under pressure from its shareholders, ExxonMobil
announced in its Corporate Citizenship report that it would stop funding
a number of climate denial groups. The following year, the presidential
nominees of both major political parties felt safe promising voters
they would address the threat of climate change if elected.
Then in 2010 the equilibrium changed. The Supreme Court's decision in
Citizens United vs. FEC removed
caps on corporate and nonprofit political donations and opened the
floodgates on campaign spending. Billionaires such as the Kochs moved
millions of dollars to support the rise of the Tea Party movement and
ultra-conservative candidates who saw climate denial as the bedrock of
party orthodoxy. Soon, few Republicans running for federal office would
admit to accepting the reality of manmade climate change. After
conservative populism put Donald Trump in office, the hard-right's
social media ecosystem, empowered by a president eager to tweet, has
accelerated the spread of false climate narratives, making them more
difficult to counter, much less uproot.
"They decided that if they have to choose between an argument that is
solid and serious and one that is dodgy but easily understandable by
the base, they'll go with the latter," Taylor said. "Anything that moves
the needle for the Fox News or Breitbart reader."
The machinery of climate misinformation has gone global and now runs
itself. A false story that appeared last February in the Daily Mail, a
British tabloid, got pushed by right-wing outlets and social media deep
into the halls of Congress. "Exposed: How world leaders were duped into
investing billions over manipulated global warming data," its headline
said. The story claimed that American government scientists had
manipulated climate research to advance the Paris accord.
Ten days later, Texas
Republican Lamar Smith,
a fossil fuel champion and chair of the powerful House Committee on
Science and Technology, pressed the government to release the data the
scientists had allegedly misused. The story of scientific deception was
fake news. A British media oversight body forced the Daily Mail to
retract the story, but that was six months after it was published.
'Delay and Defeat': A Strategy Evolves
Oil companies began developing strategies to sow doubt about science
that could lead to regulation long before global warming became an
issue.
 |
| Biochemist Arie Haagen-Smit discovered in the early 1950s that oil was the cause of dangerous smog shrouding Los Angeles. The industry tried to discredit his findings. Credit: California Institute of Technology |
Beginning in the 1940s, smog routinely choked Los Angeles, fueling a
public health crisis. The city hired Arie Haagen-Smit, a biochemist from
the California Institute of Technology, to investigate the cause. He
quickly identified oil as the culprit, showing that nitrogen oxide
emissions and uncombusted hydrocarbons from car tailpipes and refineries
formed smog when exposed to sunlight.
The
Smoke and Fumes committee at the American Petroleum Institute (API), the industry's main lobbyist, counter-attacked.
It funded scientists who rebutted Haagen-Smit and disparaged him
personally. The industry asserted that the science of smog was too
uncertain to justify new laws or expensive pollution-control equipment.
By the mid-1950s, industry's own researchers confirmed Haagen-Smit's
findings. And the first Clean Air Act, in 1963, soon put industry in the
crosshairs of federal regulators. Oil companies began campaigns
claiming smog controls would cripple the economy.
 |
| A smoggy day in Los Angeles in 1955. Credit: Los Angeles Public Library Photo Collection |
API has continued the decades-long fight against stricter smog
limits, with new rules delayed along the way by Republican and
Democratic administrations alike. The 1970 Clean Air Act, meanwhile, has
provided trillions of dollars in health and economic benefits, far
exceeding the cost of regulations. One Environmental Protection Agency
study calculated that the benefits of the 1990 amendments to the law
would amount to $2 trillion a year by 2020.
Louis McCabe, Los Angeles's first smog regulator, summarized in 1949
what would become an enduring industry strategy: "Why have we generally
failed in our efforts to control air pollution?" he asked. "We have
failed because industry believed that air pollution control cost too
much. Smoke and dusts were the wages of a prosperous industrial
community...There were 'cooperative' programs with the dual objectives
of delay and defeat."
The Corporate Pivot to Uncertainty
As the oil industry bolstered its own research into air pollution in
the 1950s, some of its scientists began conducting basic research into
carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels, following work published by
leading academics. In 1968, the
industry's main pollution-control consultants warned API that it should pay close attention to carbon dioxide emissions.
By the mid-1970s,
Exxon began to take carbon pollution seriously.
In July 1977, James Black, a senior scientist at Exxon, told top
executives that carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels would
warm the atmosphere and endanger human life. Company leaders knew that
if fossil fuel emissions made the planet hotter, politicians would
likely take steps to cut pollution. So Exxon launched its own sampling
of carbon dioxide in the air and oceans and conducted rigorous climate
modeling to better understand how the planet was warming, when
temperatures might rise, and the effect on human life. Exxon believed
that its own peer-reviewed research would give it a credible voice in
policymaking if the government decided to regulate emissions. Other
fossil fuel companies followed Exxon's lead.
 |
| Exxon scientists led research into carbon dioxide changes in the oceans and atmosphere in the early 1980s, but then the corporate tone shifted. Credit: Richard Werthamer |
But the industry's forthright approach started to shift toward denial
after landmark events in 1988. NASA's James Hansen, a leading climate
expert, raised alarm bells in Congress with his testimony that the
warming trend was driven by carbon dioxide emissions. The United Nations
that year established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) to provide assessments of evolving climate science. More than 300
scientists and policymakers met at a climate conference in Toronto,
declaring, "it is imperative to act now." They called for cutting
greenhouse gas emissions 20 percent over two decades. Regulation of
carbon pollution went from a distant possibility to an imminent threat
to fossil fuel businesses.
In December 1988,
API helped sponsor a conference
on preparing for climate change. And the oil industry and utility
companies began to pivot to a new narrative: There was uncertainty and,
thus, no urgency to heed the emerging science. In late 1995, Leonard S.
Bernstein, a scientist for Mobil Oil Corp.,
drafted a primer about climate science
for the industry's Global Climate Coalition (GCC). In it, Bernstein
wrote: "the potential for human impact on climate is based on
well-established scientific fact, and should not be denied." But he
later added, "It is still not possible to accurately predict the
magnitude (if any), timing or impact of climate change."
As the international community moved in 1997 to curb emissions with the Kyoto Protocol, Exxon's Chairman and CEO
Lee Raymond focused on amplifying scientific doubt.
"Let's agree there's a lot we really don't know about how climate
will change in the 21st century and beyond," Raymond said in a 1997
speech. "We need to understand the issue better, and fortunately, we
have time."
Doubts about climate change were echoed by think tanks that the
corporations nurtured with donations starting in the 1990s. Boosted by a
grant from Exxon,
the Competitive Enterprise Institute
organized the Cooler Heads Coalition in 1998, which over time has
brought together more than 30 conservative groups into an influential
echo chamber of climate denial. The group still exists.
Halting climate action has been a leading priority of this coalition
and its allies, not reluctant to promote questionable information if it
supports their cause.
In one instance, the Spanish economist Gabriel Calzada Alvarez
published a study in 2009 that said Spain's push to develop renewable
energy had hurt employment, costing 2.2 jobs for every clean energy job
created. The Spanish government and
the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory showed that Calzada's methodology was flawed. But this did not stop deniers from embracing his narrative.
Calzada was a fellow at the Center for the New Europe, a free-market
think tank funded in part by ExxonMobil and the Koch brothers.
Koch-supported advocacy organizations spread Calzada's findings through
blog posts and friendly media. Calzada
delivered testimony
to the U.S. House of Representatives. Three years later, Kenneth Green
of the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (AEI),
another conservative think tank,
cited the Spanish study in House testimony against federal support of green jobs. AEI received
nearly $5 million from the Kochs and ExxonMobil from 1998 to 2012.
Fossil Fuel Fingerprints on Contrarian Research
Think tanks needed support from science, which proved tricky to get, because
97 percent of peer-reviewed articles
published about climate change show that it is driven by human
activity. So, industry directly funded the work of contrarians within
the climate science community.
Among the best known is Willie Soon, a proponent of the theory that
solar cycles drive climate change. His notion has been discredited by
mainstream science, which determined that the influence of solar
fluctuations has been too small to account for the magnitude of modern
warming. Yet deniers and politicians cite his papers as evidence that
scientists are divided about what causes climate change.
In 2015, it
emerged that Soon's research
had received hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants from 2003 to
2015 from API, ExxonMobil, the Charles Koch Foundation and the Southern
Company, one of the country's largest coal-burning electric utilities.
He called his papers "deliverables" in return for the funding.
"I have a
big super-duper paper
soon to be accepted on how the sun affects the climate system," Soon
wrote in a 2009 email to a research specialist with Southern.
Denialist think tanks and politicians convinced many Americans that
scientists such as Soon are as numerous as those whose work shows fossil
fuel consumption to be the main driver of climate change. A 2016 survey
by the Pew Research Center quantified the success of their effort.
Fewer than 30 percent of Americans know
that the vast majority of climate scientists and the peer-reviewed
literature support the conclusion that global warming is manmade.
'The Earth Is Greening'
The Heartland Institute's rise to policy prominence marks a break
from previous brokers of climate denial, because it promotes a narrative
that was once rejected as too extreme and divorced from accepted
climate science.
The narrative—that excessive carbon dioxide is beneficial for the
Earth—is now backed by some in the EPA and the White House and is
deployed as a weapon against the endangerment finding. One of
Heartland's policy experts, Kathleen Hartnett White, who has called
carbon dioxide "the gas of life," was nominated by the administration to
lead the White House Council on Environmental Quality.
The EPA and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.
In his email to supporters, dated Oct. 12, 2017, and leaked to
E&E News, Heartland's CEO Bast detailed plans for how to "market"
the positive narrative about excessive carbon dioxide. For instance, he
suggests convincing the EPA and the courts that doubling atmospheric CO2
would increase crop yields, and suing companies for not increasing
emissions.
Surveys show "we are winning the public opinion battle, since most
Americans don't believe global warming is a problem that merits the
attention being given to it by the media and politicians," Bast wrote.
"The best messages are positive: CO2 increases crop yields, the earth is
greening."
Heartland rejects claims that it "denies science." Rather, it asserts
that the idea of a scientific consensus that climate change is
human-caused is without merit. "The scientists we work with have looked
at the data and have concluded climate change is not driven by human
activity," Lakely told InsideClimate News. "And the consequences of our
uncontrollable warming world are not universally bad, but have a lot of
positives, according to the scientists and other experts Heartland
communicates and work with."
When the Global Climate Coalition disbanded in early 2002, its
members said their work was done because they had succeeded in keeping
the United States out of the Kyoto Protocol, the first global climate
treaty that paved the way for the
Paris Agreement.
Now, a dozen years later, climate misinformation is emanating directly
from the White House. The administration has orchestrated a rollback of
regulatory measures on climate change adopted during the Obama years,
and the exit from the Paris accord that President Trump announced with
much fanfare from the Rose Garden.
"The basic parameters of the long-term threat posed by climate change
were well described and known by 1979," Brulle of Drexel said,
referring to a major report on climate change issued by the National
Academy of Sciences. "But here we are, coming up on nearly 40 years, and
there still is confusion and a lack of willingness to act. So I guess
in that sense, the effort to stop climate action has won, as if this is a
winning position in any sense of the term."
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