The greatest scam in history (2)

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 the second and concluding part of her article which appeared on the Asia Times website, titled: “The greatest scam in history”.

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. 2: The misleading claim that global prosperity is actually being driven by fossil fuels. No one denies that fossil fuels drove the Industrial Revolution and, in doing so, contributed substantively to rising living standards for hundreds of millions of people in Europe, North America and parts of Asia. But the claim that fossil fuels are the essence of global prosperity today is, at best, a half-truth, because what is at stake here isn’t the past but the future. Disruptive climate change fueled by greenhouse-gas emissions from the use of oil, coal and natural gas now threatens both the prosperity that parts of this planet have already achieved and future economic growth of just about any sort. Nicholas Stern, the former chief economist of the World Bank and one of the foremost experts on the economics of climate change, has put the situation succinctly this way: “High carbon growth self-destructs.”

Point No. 3: The misleading claim that fossil fuels represent “cheap energy.” Fossil fuels are not cheap. When their external costs are included – that is, not just the price of extracting, distributing, and profiting from them, but what it will cost in all our lives once you add in the fires, extreme storms, flooding, health effects, and everything else that their carbon emissions into the atmosphere will bring about – they couldn’t be more expensive. The International Monetary Fund estimates that the cost to consumers above and beyond what we pay at the pump or in our electricity bills already comes to more than US$5 trillion annually. That’s trillion, not billion. Put another way, we are all paying a massive, largely unnoticed subsidy to the oil, gas and coal industry to destroy our civilization. Among other things, those subsidies already “damage the environment, [cause] … premature deaths through local air pollution, [and exacerbate] congestion and other adverse side effects of vehicle use.”

Point No. 4:  The misleading claim about poverty and fossil fuels. That fossil fuels are the solution to the energy needs of the world’s poor is a tale being heavily promoted by ExxonMobil, among others. The idea that ExxonMobil is suddenly concerned about the plight of the global poor is, of course, laughable, or its executives wouldn’t be planning (as they are) for significant increases in fossil-fuel production between now and 2030, while playing down the threat of climate change.

As Pope Francis, global justice leader Mary Robinson, and former UN secretary general Ban Ki-Moon – as well as countless scientists and advocates of poverty reduction and global justice – have repeatedly emphasized, climate change will, above all, hurt the poor. It is they who will first be uprooted from their homes (and homelands); it is they who will be migrating into an increasingly hostile and walled-in world; it is they who will truly feel the heat, literal and figurative, of it all. A fossil-fuel company that cared about the poor would obviously not be committed, above all else, to pursuing a business model based on oil and gas exploration and development. The cynicism of this argument is truly astonishing.

Moreover, while it’s true that the poor need affordable energy, it is not true that they need fossil fuels. More than a billion people worldwide lack access (or, at least, reliable access) to electricity, but many of them also lack access to an electricity grid, which means fossil fuels are of little use to them. For such communities, solar and wind power are the only reasonable ways to go, the only ones that could rapidly and affordably be put in place and made available.

Point No. 5: Misleading assertions about the costs of renewable energy. The cheap-fossil-fuel narrative is regularly coupled with misleading assertions about the allegedly high costs of renewable energy. According to Bloomberg News, however, in two-thirds of the world, solar is already the cheapest form of newly installed electricity generation, cheaper than nuclear, natural gas or coal. Improvements in energy storage are needed to maximize the penetration of renewables, particularly in developed countries, but such improvements are happening quickly. Between 2010 and 2017, the price of battery storage decreased a startling 79% and most experts believe that, in the near future, many of the storage problems can and will be solved.

Point No. 6: The false claim that under President Trump the US has actually cut greenhouse-gas emissions. Republicans have claimed not only that such emissions have fallen but that the United States under Trump has done more to reduce emissions than any other country on the planet. One environmental reporter, who has described herself as “accustomed to hearing a lot of misinformation” about climate change, characterized this statement as “brazenly false.” In fact, US CO2 emissions spiked in 2018, increasing by 3.1% over 2017. Methane emissions are also on the rise and Trump’s proposal to roll back methane standards will ensure that unhappy trend continues.

And by the way, when it comes to the oil companies, that’s just to start down a far longer list of misinformation and false claims they’ve been peddling for years. In our 2010 book Merchants of Doubt, Erik Conway and I showed that the strategies and tactics used by Big Energy to deny the harm of fossil-fuel use were, in many cases, remarkably similar to those long used by the tobacco industry to deny the harm of tobacco use – and this was no coincidence. Many of the same public relations firms, advertising agencies and institutions were involved in both cases.

The tobacco industry was finally prosecuted by the US Department of Justice, in part because of the ways in which the individual companies coordinated with one another and with third-party allies to present false information to consumers. Through congressional hearings and legal discovery, the industry was pegged with a wide range of activities it funded to mislead the American people. Something similar has occurred with Big Energy and the harm fossil fuels are doing to American lives, to the whole human civilization, and to the entire Planet.

Still, a crucial question about the fossil-fuel industry remains to be fully explored: Which of its companies have funded the activities of the trade organizations and other third-party allies who deny the facts about climate change? In some cases, we already know the answers. In 2006, for instance, a society in Britain documented ExxonMobil’s funding of 39 organizations that promoted “inaccurate and misleading” views of climate science. It was able to identify $2.9 million spent to that end by that company in the year 2005 alone. That, of course, was just one year and clearly anything but the whole story.

ExxonMobil loves to accuse me of being “an activist.” I am, in fact, a teacher and a scholar. Most of the time, I’d rather be home working on my next book, but that increasingly seems like less of an option when Big Energy’s climate-change scam is ongoing and our civilization is, quite literally, at stake. When citizens are inactive, democracy fails – and this time, if democracy fails, as burning California shows, so much else could fail as well. Science isn’t enough. The rest of us are needed. And we are needed now.

SS