Planetary Smoking is Dangerous

What Did Big Oil Know About Global Warming?

SOURCE: AP/Mary Sage Recently revealed documents just add to the evidence that sowing doubt about global warming seems to have been in part a political strategy. Above: Waves pounding against the sandbagged seawall in Kivalina, Alaska. The city of Kivalina sued Exxon Mobil Corp. and eight other oil companies last year, claiming that the greenhouse gases they emit contribute to global warming that threatens the community's existence.

I must confess I was a tad under-whelmed by the headline last week in The New York Times: “Industry Ignored Its Scientists on Climate.” Not that it wasn’t an important story. It was. But we’ve known for some time that fossil-fuel company interests and their political allies worked hard, especially during the 1990s but well into this decade as well to sow doubt about mainstream climate science so as to stave off regulatory action.

Last week’s story, by the newspaper’s global warming guru, Andrew Revkin, is based on a document that emerged during climate-related litigation between automakers and the state of California. Dated December 21, 1995, it’s a “primer” on climate science by a technical advisory committee to the Global Climate Coalition, the leading industry group on global warming during the 1990s and a chief opponent of the Kyoto Protocol.

This primer rejects the then-recent conclusion by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its Second Assessment Report that a “discernible human influence on global climate” had already been detected. But the primer also provides clear reasons for thinking that human-caused global warming is a serious risk.

“The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied,” the primer proclaims. The Global Climate Coalition’s scientific advisers, it appears, simply couldn’t go against the irrefutable physics of the greenhouse effect, which has been understood for at least 150 years.

Later, the report also debunks a number of then-current “contrarian” theories opposing this conclusion—for instance the idea that solar variability explains our temperature trends—opining that they “do not offer convincing arguments against the conventional model of greenhouse gas emission-induced climate change.”

The primer clearly shows that even if they felt human-caused global warming had not yet been definitively shown to have arrived (as of 1995), industry’s experts nevertheless considered the greenhouse effect, and the theory of greenhouse gases, to be extremely well understood. And that meant industrial carbon dioxide emissions were dangerous, period.

In short, these scientists were advising the companies comprising the Global Climate Coalition that they were involved in an activity that had very serious consequences.

It’s important, however, not to read this latest document in isolation. Arguably still more outrageous things have been revealed in the past. In my 2005 book The Republican War on Science, for instance, I highlighted a 1998 New York Times expose centered on this document, describing an American Petroleum Institute climate change communications plan to “maximize the impact of scientific views consistent with ours with Congress, the media, and other key audiences.”

“Victory will be achieved,” the plan stated, when “recognition of uncertainties becomes part of the ‘conventional wisdom.’” And of course, we all know about ExxonMobil’s history—more recently, I understand, it has ceased—of funding think tanks that have consistently sowed doubt about human-induced climate change.

At this point, anyone who seriously engages with the historical, journalistic, and also increasingly legal record on climate change over the last 20 or so years will find a gap between the state of scientific understanding on the one hand, and what some prominent corporate players were saying on the other. Inevitably, then, industry was either advised competently about the science and ignored it—as the latest memo would appear suggest—or was ill-advised, which is hard to believe given the size and scientific resources of most of these companies.

In addition, there’s at least some evidence, cited above, that industry at times set out to fight against the science much like the tobacco industry did—a strategy epitomized by the famous tobacco “doubt is our product” memo.

An interesting question now becomes whether someday, all this will matter for anything other than to generate outrage over the fossil-fuel industries’ shenanigans. For instance, the ongoing Kivalina case, a global warming lawsuit which takes on a number of oil and power companies and tries to seek damages for the plight of a threatened Alaskan village, contains a conspiracy charge. As the lawsuit puts it:

“There has been a long campaign by power, coal, and oil companies to mislead the public about the science of global warming.” ExxonMobil, in particular, is singled out in the case as “the most active company in such efforts.”

In this sense, the latest industry document “helps us factually build the case of what they knew and when they knew it,” explains Matt Pawa, who has specialized in bringing global warming cases against industry and is centrally involved in the Kivalina case. “They clearly had a sense they were causing massive harm to the planet.”

But it’s just one piece of evidence to that effect. The real question, over the next ten years, is whether a judge will determine that the fossil fuel industry’s tobacco-like strategy merits a tobacco-like legal verdict.

Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

Tags: Climate Change

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