Exxon was responsible for the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989. Here, part of the spill in the Chenega Bay, Evans lsland (Prince William Sound). Credit: ARLIS Reference.

By Diego Arguedas Ortiz
SAN JOSE, Jul 17 2015 (IPS)

For decades, executives and decision makers at major U.S. and European fossil fuel companies were aware that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions caused global warming, but still provided millions in funding to boost disinformation campaigns and sponsor scientists who denied climate change.

As early as 1981, more than a decade before the first meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), leaders at oil giant Exxon acknowledged the connection between fossil fuels and climate change.“Their aim was to sell doubt. They don't have to disprove climate change, [they] just have to make people believe there was not consensus." -- Nancy Cole

The revelations emerged as part of a report released by the Washington, D.C.-based Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), called the Climate Deception Dossiers, which explores the tactics promoted by companies such as ExxonMobil, Shell, Peabody Energy, Chevron and Conoco-Phillips to undermine climate science.

“They were already factoring the risks of climate change in their business as early as 1981, and 34 years later they continue to lie to the people and undermining climate science”, Nancy Cole, Director of Campaigns for the UCS Climate and Energy Program and contributor to the report, told IPS.

The Dossiers show how Exxon and other major companies funded a vast disinformation campaign that included climate deniers, contrarian think tanks and public relations firms, with evidence pointing in their direction as recently as 2015.

“Their aim was to sell doubt. They don’t have to disprove climate change, [they] just have to make people believe there was not consensus,” said Cole.

One of the climate rebukers is Wei-Hock “Willie” Soon, an engineer affiliated with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who received more than 1.2 million dollars in big-oil funding between 2001 and 2012 and whose salary relied exclusively on their grants, according to UCS.

For years, Soon’s academic papers have largely overstated the solar influence in global warming and have been methodically discredited by fellow researchers, scientific journals and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), but have been used by conservative politicians and big oil companies to cast doubt on the climate consensus.

A 2014 e-mail by climate scientist Lenny Bernstein, an Exxon employee during the 1980s, revealed that the company was aware as early as 1981 of CO2 emissions. The oil giant decided against exploring the Natuna gas field, off the coast of Indonesia, after being alerted about the massive amount of CO2 trapped in it and the potential for future carbon-cutting regulations.

If exploited, its release would have been the single largest source of global warming pollution at the time, accounting to roughly one per cent of the world’s emissions in 1981.

“In the 1980s, Exxon needed to understand the potential for concerns about climate change to lead to regulation that would affect Natuna and other potential projects,” wrote Bernstein, a veteran of almost 30 years in the industry.

The full UCS report includes over 330 pages of document from around 85 internal company and trade association documents spanning 27 years.

For instance, during the 2009 discussion of the American Clean Energy and Security Act, which proposed a federal carbon emission reduction plan, the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE) hired a PR firm which forged letters from diverse organisations to lobby congressmen and women against the bill.

Another major player in the report is the American Petroleum Institute (API), self-proclaimed “only national trade association that represents all aspects of America’s oil and natural gas industry”.

A 1998 internal API strategy document outlines the roadmap devised to confront the ever-growing climate change science and explicitly aimed to confuse and misinform the public, by sponsoring contrarian scientists and targeting teachers, schools and students across the United States.

The document states that victory would be achieved when “average citizens ‘understand’ (recognize) uncertainties in climate science.” IPS reached out to API by e-mail but got no answer.

Their modus operandi mimics that of tobacco companies, according to former U.S. Department of Justice lawyer Sharon Eubanks who led the Department’s successful lawsuit against the tobacco companies.

“It’s like what we discovered with tobacco – the more you push back the date of knowledge of the harm, the more you delay any remediation, the more people are affected,” Eubanks told DeSmog website.

This was echoed by Katherine Sawyer, the International Climate Organiser at the watchdog group Corporate Accountability International, who told IPS that “we wouldn’t let the tobacco industry create tobacco control policy, so why are we letting the fossil fuel industry create climate change policy?” – referring to their participation in U.N. processes.

Some fossil fuel companies appear, at least publicly, to be willing to contribute to a solution. Six major European companies (Shell, BP, Total, Statoil, BG Group, and Eni) sent an open letter to the UNFCCC and the French Government stating they can take faster climate action if governments provide a global interlinked system of carbon pricing.

“If governments act to price carbon, this discourages high carbon options and encourages the most efficient ways of reducing emissions widely,” states their letter.

But the decades-long opposition of fossil fuel companies has eroded their credibility among climate scientists, activists and much of the public.

“For 20 years, the world’s largest polluters have stymied progress in the UNFCCC by exerting undue influence over the treaty process—from direct lobbying to sponsoring the talks themselves,” said Sawyer, recalling that this year’s COP21 climate talks in Paris will be sponsored by corporations like EDF and ENGIE whose coal operations contribute to the equivalent of nearly 50 percent of France’s emissions

“In order for the UNFCCC process to create the meaningful policy our planet desperately needs, negotiators need to kick big polluters out,” she said.

Throughout the world, fossil fuel companies have been hit both in their image and their financial appeal after years of campaigning by divestment groups, organisations that promote getting rid of stocks, bonds, or investment funds linked to high-carbon industries such as coal, oil, and carbon.

“I definitely feel like the fossil fuel divestment movement is David against Goliath,” Perri Haser, lead organiser of the divestment campaign at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, told IPS. “But here’s the thing about David and Goliath: we know how that story ends.”

A 2013 report highlighted how 90 companies, 50 of them publicly traded, were responsible for almost two-thirds of the world’s industrial carbon emissions over the past two and a half centuries.

That several major oil companies acknowledged risks from CO2 emissions as early as the 1980s doubles its significance since more than half of all industrial carbon emissions from 1750 onwards have been released since 1988.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Flooding on the A361, the main road from Taunton to Glastonbury, England. Scientists warn that climate change is well underway, producing costly and tragic extreme weather events. Credit: Mark Robinson/cc by 2.0

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Nov 3 2014 (IPS)

“Greenhouse gas emissions from human activity are higher than ever, and we’re seeing more and more extreme weather and climate events….We can’t prevent a large scale disaster if we don’t heed this kind of hard science.”

Question: Is that statement about the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report from Greenpeace or the U.S. State Department?The fact that Kerry must appeal to the fossil fuel industry’s sense of morality rather than tough regulations on CO2 emissions makes plain the industry’s naked power in the U.S. political system.

Answer: It’s by John Kerry, U.S. secretary of state, the second most powerful official in the Barack Obama administration.

Important officials in many other countries have made similar statements about the IPCC Synthesis Report released Nov. 2 in Copenhagen. Canada’s Stephen Harper government remains in denial and has been silent.

“The longer we are stuck in a debate over ideology and politics, the more the costs of inaction grow and grow,”said Kerry in a statement.

The IPCC Synthesis Report distills seven years of climate research by thousands of the world’s best scientists and concludes that climate change is well underway, producing costly and tragic extreme weather events. These will grow worse than anyone can imagine unless humanity weans itself off fossil fuels.

Climate change is actually easy to understand and can be summed up in less than 60 seconds:

For decades humanity has pumped hundreds of millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels —coal, oil and natural gas.

Measurements show there is now 42 percent more CO2 in the atmosphere than 100 years ago. It is long-established science that CO2 acts as blanket, keeping the planet warm by trapping some of the sun’s heat. Each year our emissions of CO2 is making that blanket thicker, trapping more heat.

That fossil-fuel CO2 blanket has raised global temperatures 0.85C. It would far hotter if not for the oceans absorbing 95 percent of the extra heat trapped by the blanket. But the oceans won’t help us for much longer. 2014 will be the warmest year on record.

“Urgent action is needed to cut global greenhouse gas emissions,”said Michel Jarraud, Secretary General of the World Meteorological Organization.

“The longer we wait, the more expensive and difficult it will be to adapt –to the point where some impacts will be irreversible and impossible to cope with,” Jarraud said in a comment about the Synthesis Report.

There is nothing fundamentally new in this latest IPCC document. All that’s really changed is the urgency and desperation in the language climate scientists now use.

Everyone knows by now that fossil fuels have to be phased out and replaced by energy sources that don’t add more CO2 to the stifling blanket we’ve woven.

And we already know how to make the low-carbon transition because it is “hardly rocket science,” said Bob Watson, former chair of the IPCC.

To reiterate the steps: big increases in energy efficiency, massive roll outs of renewable energy, shutting down most coal plants, a carbon price, etc. There are dozens of studies on how to do this with no new technology. All of this can be achieved with very little extra cost to the global economy, according to The Global Commission on the Economy and Climate.

These studies end up concluding that what’s missing in a shift to low-carbon living is political will or political courage. Left unsaid is the incredibly powerful and influential fossil fuel industry, their bankers, investors, lawyers, public relations consultants, unions and others all fighting desperately to keep humanity addicted to their products.

That means opposing low-carbon alternatives and branding grandparents who worry about their grandchildren’s future as “green radicals”.

“Think of this as an endless war,”public relations consultant Richard Berman told oil and gas industry executives last June in Colorado.

It’s a dirty war against environmental organisations and their supporters. Industry executives must be willing to exploit emotions like fear, greed and anger of the public against green groups and individuals, Berman said, according a recent New York Times article.

A tobacco industry PR specialist, Berman was speaking at an event sponsored by the Western Energy Alliance, a group whose members include Devon Energy, Halliburton and Anadarko Petroleum. The speech was secretly recorded by an energy industry executive offended by the tactics.

Berman advised major energy corporations secretly financing anti-environmental campaigns not to worry about offending the general public because “you can either win ugly or lose pretty,” he said.

‘Big Green Radicals’ is Berman and Co.’s latest multi-million-dollar campaign and it targets groups like the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council. It has also aggressively attacked groups opposing fracking and lobbies to prevent stricter controls over the process that pollutes both air and water.

Berman also promises strict confidentiality for anyone who funds his efforts, saying: “We run all of this stuff through nonprofit organisations that are insulated from having to disclose donors.”

Berman is hardly alone in his efforts. The fossil fuel industry spends hundreds of millions of dollars each year on PR, advertising and lobbying in the U.S., Canada, Australia and elsewhere.

“Those who choose to ignore or dispute the science so clearly laid out in this report do so at great risk for all of us and for our kids and grandkids,” Secretary Kerry said to conclude his statement on IPCC Synthesis Report.

The fact that Kerry must appeal to the fossil fuel industry’s sense of morality rather than tough regulations on CO2 emissions makes plain the industry’s naked power in the U.S. political system.

In Copenhagen on Sunday, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was able to say what Kerry couldn’t and urged big investors such as pension funds and insurance companies to reduce their investments in fossil fuels and invest in renewable energy instead.

That’s a start but far more action is needed by everyone who believes that our children and grandchildren have a right to a liveable planet.

Edited by Kitty Stapp