Get Aggressive On Global Warming
Paul Rogat Loeb
April 18, 2007
Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A
Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear. See www.paulloeb.org.
With over 1,400 local events, the April 14 National Day of Climate Action
offered a national wakeup call, with citizens in every state raising their
voice. But even as we build on this powerful day to move forward, we need to talk
about why it’s been so hard for Americans to recognize the climate issue’s
urgency.
As recently as July 2006, the acknowledgement of the crisis by ordinary
Americans lagged behind not only our counterparts in Great Britain, Germany and
Japan, but also behind those polled in China, India, Argentina, Nigeria and
Indonesia. U.S. citizen awareness has increased significantly in the wake of
this past winter’s massive storms (even before the latest East Coast disaster)
and coverage of the international scientific reports. But though between 77
percent and 83 percent of Americans now acknowledge that global warming poses
a serious problem, only 55 percent in a January Pew poll say the issue
requires immediate government action, and only 47 percent in the same Pew poll say
that they believe it’s human caused. This means there’s still serious
denial. And to dismantle its architecture means taking on the key role of
ExxonMobil.
Those who dismiss global warming’s threat have embraced a series of
arguments, retreating from one to the next as they’re trumped by reality. The planet
isn’t really warming, they say. If it is, it’s due to random fluctuations or
sunspots, not human-created greenhouse gases. And even if global warming is
real, it will bring more benefits than problems. Wherever I go, people offer
up the same rationales. Some even rattle off the names of dissenting
scientists, websites, or journal articles. They dismiss the 99 percent unanimity of
international climate scientists and scientific associations by saying those
sounding the warning are all on the take and probably also personal
hypocrites.
“They’re just giving the government funding agencies what they want,” a
student in Colorado Springs told me two weeks ago. “If they don’t, they won’t
get their grants.” It’s an odd concept of pandering, given the massive
challenges faced by any elected leader who takes the scientific message seriously.
But the deniers insist that a handful of contrarians whose views are refuted
by every major scientific study are somehow more credible than the collective
judgment of practically every climate scientist in the world.
These arguments emerge from the standard echo chamber of Hannity, Rush and
Fox News. But the spokespeople who articulate them in these venues and others
more mainstream have been overwhelmingly sponsored by Exxon. As the Union of
concerned Scientists explores in their meticulously detailed report, Smoke,
Mirrors and Hot Air, and as George Monbiot examines in his powerful global
warming book Heat, Exxon’s strategy of using a handful of industry-funded
dissenters to cast doubt on an overwhelming scientific consensus was borrowed from
the fight over tobacco regulation. In 1992, a major EPA report warned of the
medical harm from second hand smoke. In response, Philip Morris hired the PR
firm APCO to create a supposedly independent group, The Advancement of Sound
Science Coalition (TASSC), to promote scientists who’d dispute this harm.
Enlisting enough other corporate supporters so the effort didn’t seem just a
tobacco industry creation, TASSC’s mission echoed the phrase from a memo of
fellow tobacco company Brown and Williamson, "Doubt is our product.”
As part of creating that doubt, APCO’s Steven Milloy founded
JunkScience.com, which would later become a key website for global warming denial. Milloy
also became associated with other key climate change denial organizations, like
the Competitive Enterprise Institute (which has called the Kyoto accords “a
power grab based on deception and fear”), and later become a columnist for
Fox. Major climate denial activist Frederick Seitz also had strong tobacco
industry ties, drawing $585,000 from RJ Reynolds between 1979 and 1987 before
going on to the George Marshall Institute. Exxon jumped in to support these
efforts early on, as part of a more general assault on government regulation and
action.
As the scientific consensus around global warming began to solidify, they
began funding a series of studies and spokespeople to insist that mainstream
scientific opinion was sharply divided. Between 1998 and 2005 the company has
invested over $16 million in challenging the overwhelming consensus among
climatologists, spreading the resources among at least 43 different institutions
to give the appearance of a broad chorus of dissent. Whether the Heartland
Institute, Alliance for Climate Strategies, Center for the Study of Carbon
Dioxide and Global Change, or the Competitive Enterprise Institute and George
Marshall Institute, they all got major Exxon support for their role in arguing
that no global warming crisis existed. Until recently, the efforts to sow
doubt have worked, with the help of a compliant media and the Bush presidency.
And though a number of other energy companies also participated, ExxonMobil was
the critical initiator, and remained firmly denying the crisis even as other
oil companies, like BP Amoco and Shell, acknowledged the gravity of the
threat.
Many of us know Exxon’s role in climate change denial, and have avoided
buying their gas for that reason. Others have avoided the company because of the
Exxon Valdez oil spill. But we need more than individual actions. In July
2005, major environmental groups launched an international boycott. The
coordinating organization, www.exposeexxon.org, has played an important role in
getting the word out about the company’s role. Their petition campaign for Exxon to
cease funding global warming deniers and join other oil companies in making
significant investments in renewable energy has generated over a half million
signatures. But their effort has mostly been a media campaign, as opposed to
one focusing on grassroots organizing.
Even with this initial pressure, though, the company seemingly begun to
backtrack. This January, new CEO Rex Tillerson claimed followed strong criticism
of Exxon’s actions by the British Royal Society, US Senators Snowe and
Rockefeller, and in the Union of Concerned Scientists report, by announcing that
they’d stopped funding “five or six” of the groups that promoted climate change
skepticism. But except for the Competitive Enterprise Institute Tillerson
refused to name all the individuals and groups Exxon has given money to or
specify those they’ve cut off. And he gave no reason for the shift, although an
Exxon spokesman did say the adverse publicity was a distraction.
Meanwhile, the company is still paying a handsome salary to former American
Petroleum Institute lobbyist and Bush Council on Environmental Quality chief
of staff Philip Cooney, who Exxon hired after he resigned following media
reports of how he edited the reports of climate scientists to render them
innocuous. They even sponsor a website aimed at British primary school children,
featuring a cute climate skeptic robot that claims the cause of global warming
remains uncertain. And ExxonMobil continues to be rated lower environmentally
than every other major multinational oil company. While the company’s stated
shift may be hopeful, it’s by no means certain that it’s anything but
greenwashing.
Solving global warming will be hard enough, even without orchestrated
opposition. And of course we need to focus on where we need to go, like StepItUp’s
call for an 80 percent reduction in CO2 emissions by 2050. But if we only do
that and ignore the counterattacks, our efforts will continue to get Swift
Boated, and it will be far harder to build the necessary political will for
them to succeed. Targeting Exxon pressures them and other corporations to stop
trying to undermine the scientific consensus and to stop blocking attempts to
rein in greenhouse gas emissions—as in a recent Competitive Enterprise
Institute ad that proclaimed about CO2, “They call it pollution, we call it life.”
It also highlights the roots of why so many Americans have resisted the
reality of the crisis—how what many of us think this is just our personal
skepticism is product of a deliberate disinformation campaign.
Some questionable companies are hard to boycott—where do you start with
Haliburton? But ExxonMobil has a presence in every city in this country. Their
gas stations are accessible for rallies and picketing. Every dollar that their
stations lose and every bit of adverse press coverage will create further
pressure.
Imagine if enough organized effort was focused so that Exxon had to sell or
close some of their stations. Or if enough Americans understood their
manipulative role so that both the company and the groups they’d supported lost all
media and political credibility. Think about how INFACT (now the Corporate
Accountability Campaign) ran their largely successful campaigns against Nestle
and GE. Or how the United Farm Workers conducted their grape boycotts. Or the
successful recent campaign of Florida’s Coalition of Immokalee Workers to
get Taco Bell and McDonalds to require their subcontractors to pay higher
wages to tomato pickers. These efforts didn’t just call on individuals not to buy
specific products from the problematic companies. They actively organized,
in communities, in congregations, and on campuses. They convinced their fellow
citizens to withhold their dollars in a way that created the maximum public
attention.
Global warming solutions exist, and we need to forge the political will to
enact them, building on existing programs like California’s “million solar roof
” legislation and the climate change initiatives of the European nations.
But even as public attitudes begin to shift, and major corporations like GE,
Dupont and BP Amoco are at least talking about taking the issue seriously,
Exxon continues to impede political progress. To prevent a future of endless
climate-driven disasters, we’re going to have to keep talking about their role.
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