The greatest scam in history (1)

It’s a tale for all time. What might be the greatest scam in history or, at least, the one that threatens to take history down with it. Think of it as the climate-change scam that beat science, big time.

These were the remarks of Naomi Oreskes, professor of the history of science and affiliated professor of earth and planetary sciences at Harvard University. She is co-author, with Erik Conway, of Merchants of Doubt. Her latest book is Why Trust Science?

Stay with us for part one of a two-part article which appeared on the Asia Times website, titled: “The greatest scam in history”.

Scientists have been seriously investigating the subject of human-made climate change since the late 1950s, and political leaders have been discussing it for nearly as long. In 1961, Alvin Weinberg, the director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, called carbon dioxide one of the “big problems” of the world “on whose solution the entire future of the human race depends.” Fast-forward nearly 30 years and, in 1992, US president George H W Bush signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), promising “concrete action to protect the planet.”

Today, with Puerto Rico still recovering from Hurricane Maria and fires burning across California, we know that did not happen. Despite hundreds of scientific reports and assessments, tens of thousands of peer-reviewed scientific papers, and countless conferences on the issue, man-made climate change is now a living crisis on this planet. Universities, foundations, churches and individuals have indeed divested from fossil-fuel companies and, led by a 16-year-old Swedish girl, citizens across the globe have taken to the streets to express their outrage. Children have refused to go to school on Fridays to protest the potential loss of their future. And if you need a measure of how long some of us have been at this, in December, the Conference of Parties to the UNFCCC will meet for the 25th time.

Scientists working on the issue have often told me that, once upon a time, they assumed, if they did their jobs, politicians would act upon the information. That, of course, hasn’t happened. Anything but, across much of the planet. Worse yet, science failed to have the necessary impact in significant part because of disinformation promoted by the major fossil-fuel companies, which have succeeded in diverting attention from climate change and successfully blocking meaningful action.

Much focus has been put on ExxonMobil’s history of disseminating disinformation, partly because of the documented discrepancies between what that company said in public about climate change and what its officials said (and funded) in private. Recently, a trial began in New York City accusing the company of misleading its investors, while Massachusetts is prosecuting ExxonMobil for misleading consumers as well.

If only it had just been that one company, but for more than 30 years, the fossil-fuel industry and its allies have denied the truth about anthropogenic global warming. They have systematically misled the American people and so purposely contributed to endless delays in dealing with the issue by, among other things, discounting and disparaging climate science, misrepresenting scientific findings, and attempting to discredit climate scientists. These activities are documented in great detail in “How Americans Were Deliberately Misled about Climate Change,” a report I recently co-authored, as well as in my 2010 book and 2014 film, Merchants of Doubt.

A key aspect of the fossil-fuel industry’s disinformation campaign was the mobilization of “third-party allies”: organizations and groups with which it would collaborate and that, in some cases, it would be responsible for creating.

In the 1990s, these allied outfits included the Global Climate Coalition, the Cooler Heads Coalition, Informed Citizens for the Environment, and the Greening Earth Society. Like ExxonMobil, such groups endlessly promoted a public message of denial and doubt: that we weren’t really sure if climate change was happening; that the science wasn’t settled; that humanity could, in any case, readily adapt at a later date to any changes that did occur; and that addressing climate change directly would wreck the US economy. Two of these groups – Informed Citizens for the Environment and the Greening Earth Society – were, in fact, AstroTurf organizations, created and funded by a coal-industry trade association but dressed up to look like grassroots citizens’ action organizations.

Similar messaging was pursued by a network of think-tanks promoting free-market solutions to social problems, many with ties to the fossil-fuel industry. These included the George C Marshall Institute, the Cato Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Heartland Institute. Often their politically motivated contrarian claims were presented in formats that made them look like the scientific reports whose findings they were contradicting.

In 2009, for instance, the Cato Institute issued a report that precisely mimicked the format, layout and structure of the US government’s National Climate Assessment. Of course, it made claims thoroughly at odds with the actual report’s science. The industry also promoted disinformation through its trade associations, including the American Legislative Exchange Council, the American Petroleum Institute, the US Chamber of Commerce, the National Black Chamber of Commerce, and the National Association of Manufacturers.

Both think-tanks and trade organizations have been involved in personal attacks on the reputations of scientists. One of the earliest documented was on climate scientist Benjamin Santer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, who showed that the observed increase in global temperatures could not be attributed to increased solar radiation. He served as the lead author of the Second Assessment Report of the UN’s prestigious Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), responsible for the 1995 conclusion that “the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human impact on the climate system.” Santer became the target of a vicious, arguably defamatory attack by physicists from the George C Marshall Institute and the Global Climate Coalition, who accused him of fraud.

Other climate scientists, including Michael Mann, Jonathan Overpeck, Malcolm Hughes, Ray Bradley, Katharine Hayhoe and, I should note, myself, have been subject to harassment, investigation, hacked e-mails, and politically motivated freedom-of-information attacks.

When it came to industry disinformation, the role of third-party allies was on full display at the US House of Representatives Committee on Oversight hearings on climate change in late October. As their sole witness, the Republicans on that committee invited Mandy Gunasekera, the founder and president of Energy45, a group whose purpose, in its own words, is to “support the Trump energy agenda.”

Energy45 is part of a group known, bluntly enough, as the CO2 Coalition and is a perfect example of what I’ve long thought of as zombie denialism in which older players spouting industry arguments suddenly reappear in new forms. In this case, in the 1990s and early 2000s, the George C Marshall Institute was a leader in climate-change disinformation. From 1974-1999, its director, William O’Keefe, had also been the executive vice-president and later chief executive of the American Petroleum Institute. The Marshall Institute itself closed in 2015, only to re-emerge a few years later as the CO2 Coalition.

The comments of Republican committee members offer a sense of just how deeply the climate-change disinformation campaign is now lodged in the heart of US President Donald Trump’s administration and congressional Republicans as 2019 draws to an end and the planet visibly heats. Consider just six of their “facts”:

Point No. 1: The misleading claim that climate change will be “mild and manageable.” There is no scientific evidence to support this. On the contrary, literally hundreds of scientific reports over the past few decades, including those US National Climate Assessments, have affirmed that any warming above 2 degrees Celsius will lead to grave and perhaps catastrophic effects on “health, livelihoods, food security, water supply, human security, and economic growth.” The UN’s IPCC has recently noted that avoiding the worst impacts of global warming will “require rapid and far-reaching transitions in energy … infrastructure … and industrial systems.”

Recent events surrounding Hurricanes Sandy, Michael, Harvey, Maria and Dorian, as well as the devastating wildfire at the ironically named town of Paradise, California, in 2018 and the fires across much of that state this autumn, have shown that the impacts of climate change are already part of Americans’ lives and becoming unmanageable. Or if you want another sign of where the US is at this moment, consider a new report from the Army War College indicating that “the Department of Defense (DoD) is precariously unprepared for the national-security implications of climate change-induced global security challenges.” And if the Pentagon isn’t prepared to manage climate change, it’s hard to imagine any part of the US government that might be.

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