Why the Fossil Fuel Industry Fights So Hard
Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com
If we could see the world with a particularly illuminating set of spectacles, one of its most prominent features at the moment would be a giant carbon bubble, whose bursting someday will make the housing bubble of 2007 look like a lark. As yet -- as we shall see -- it’s unfortunately largely invisible to us.
In compensation, though, we have some truly beautiful images made possible by new technology. Last month, for instance, NASA updated the most iconic photograph in our civilization’s gallery: “Blue Marble,” originally taken from Apollo 17 in 1972. The spectacular new high-def image shows a picture of the Americas on January 4th, a good day for snapping photos because there weren’t many clouds.
It was also a good day because of the striking way it could demonstrate to us just how much the planet has changed in 40 years. As Jeff Masters, the web’s most widely read meteorologist, explains, “The U.S. and Canada are virtually snow-free and cloud-free, which is extremely rare for a January day. The lack of snow in the mountains of the Western U.S. is particularly unusual. I doubt one could find a January day this cloud-free with so little snow on the ground throughout the entire satellite record, going back to the early 1960s.”
In fact, it’s likely that the week that photo was taken will prove “the driest first week in recorded U.S. history.” Indeed, it followed on 2011, which showed the greatest weather extremes in our history -- 56 percent of the country was either in drought or flood, which was no surprise since “climate change science predicts wet areas will tend to get wetter and dry areas will tend to get drier.” Indeed, the nation suffered 14 weather disasters each causing $1 billion or more in damage last year. (The old record was nine.) Masters again: “Watching the weather over the past two years has been like watching a famous baseball hitter on steroids.”
In the face of such data -- statistics that you can duplicate for almost every region of the planet -- you’d think we’d already be in an all-out effort to do something about climate change. Instead, we’re witnessing an all-out effort to... deny there’s a problem.
Our GOP presidential candidates are working hard to make sure no one thinks they’d appease chemistry and physics. At the last Republican debate in Florida, Rick Santorum insisted that he should be the nominee because he’d caught on earlier than Newt or Mitt to the global warming “hoax.”
Most of the media pays remarkably little attention to what’s happening. Coverage of global warming has dipped 40 percent over the last two years. When, say, there’s a rare outbreak of January tornadoes, TV anchors politely discuss “extreme weather,” but climate change is the disaster that dare not speak its name.
And when they do break their silence, some of our elite organs are happy to indulge in outright denial. Last month, for instance, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by “16 scientists and engineers” headlined “No Need to Panic About Global Warming.” The article was easily debunked. It was nothing but a mash-up of long-since-disproved arguments by people who turned out mostly not to be climate scientists at all, quoting other scientists who immediately said their actual work showed just the opposite.
It’s no secret where this denialism comes from: the fossil fuel industry pays for it. (Of the 16 authors of the Journal article, for instance, five had had ties to Exxon.) Writers from Ross Gelbspan to Naomi Oreskes have made this case with such overwhelming power that no one even really tries denying it any more. The open question is why the industry persists in denial in the face of an endless body of fact showing climate change is the greatest danger we’ve ever faced.
Why doesn’t it fold the way the tobacco industry eventually did? Why doesn’t it invest its riches in things like solar panels and so profit handsomely from the next generation of energy? As it happens, the answer is more interesting than you might think.
Part of it’s simple enough: the giant energy companies are making so much money right now that they can’t stop gorging themselves. ExxonMobil, year after year, pulls in more money than any company in history. Chevron’s not far behind. Everyone in the business is swimming in money.
Still, they could theoretically invest all that cash in new clean technology or research and development for the same. As it happens, though, they’ve got a deeper problem, one that’s become clear only in the last few years. Put briefly: their value is largely based on fossil-fuel reserves that won’t be burned if we ever take global warming seriously.
When I talked about a carbon bubble at the beginning of this essay, this is what I meant. Here are some of the relevant numbers, courtesy of the Capital Institute: we’re already seeing widespread climate disruption, but if we want to avoid utter, civilization-shaking disaster, many scientists have pointed to a two-degree rise in global temperatures as the most we could possibly deal with.
If we spew 565 gigatons more carbon into the atmosphere, we’ll quite possibly go right past that reddest of red lines. But the oil companies, private and state-owned, have current reserves on the books equivalent to 2,795 gigatons -- five times more than we can ever safely burn. It has to stay in the ground.
Put another way, in ecological terms it would be extremely prudent to write off $20 trillion worth of those reserves. In economic terms, of course, it would be a disaster, first and foremost for shareholders and executives of companies like ExxonMobil (and people in places like Venezuela).
If you run an oil company, this sort of write-off is the disastrous future staring you in the face as soon as climate change is taken as seriously as it should be, and that’s far scarier than drought and flood. It’s why you’ll do anything -- including fund an endless campaigns of lies -- to avoid coming to terms with its reality. So instead, we simply charge ahead. To take just one example, last month the boss of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Thomas Donohue, called for burning all the country’s newly discovered coal, gas, and oil -- believed to be 1,800 gigatons worth of carbon from our nation alone.
What he and the rest of the energy-industrial elite are denying, in other words, is that the business models at the center of our economy are in the deepest possible conflict with physics and chemistry. The carbon bubble that looms over our world needs to be deflated soon. As with our fiscal crisis, failure to do so will cause enormous pain -- pain, in fact, almost beyond imagining. After all, if you think banks are too big to fail, consider the climate as a whole and imagine the nature of the bailout that would face us when that bubble finally bursts.
Unfortunately, it won’t burst by itself -- not in time, anyway. The fossil-fuel companies, with their heavily funded denialism and their record campaign contributions, have been able to keep at bay even the tamest efforts at reining in carbon emissions. With each passing day, they’re leveraging us deeper into an unpayable carbon debt -- and with each passing day, they’re raking in unimaginable returns. ExxonMobil last week reported its 2011 profits at $41 billion, the second highest of all time. Do you wonder who owns the record? That would be ExxonMobil in 2008 at $45 billion.
Telling the truth about climate change would require pulling away the biggest punchbowl in history, right when the party is in full swing. That’s why the fight is so pitched. That’s why those of us battling for the future need to raise our game. And it’s why that view from the satellites, however beautiful from a distance, is likely to become ever harder to recognize as our home planet.
Bill McKibben is Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College, founder of the global climate campaign 350.org, a TomDispatch regular, and the author, most recently, of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.
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Now perhaps you can explain the following:
The 1994 TASSC memo, exposing PR firm APCO Worldwide's plan to sell its Big Tobacco science denial strategy to other industries, like Big Oil:
http://tobaccodocuments.org/pm/2078848225-8226.html
The 1998 API memo, showing the same strategy in the hands of Big Oil's trade association just four years later. Not surprisingly, one of the authors was Steve Milloy, the PR man formerly in charge of TASSC:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Global_Climate_Science_Communications_Plan_(1998)
The 2002 Luntz memo exposing the GOP spinmeister coaching Republican Party on talking points...in support of the same science denial strategy:
http://www.ewg.org/project/luntz-memo-environment
Then there's the 2006 IREA memo, in which merchant of doubt and PR firm owner Pat Michaels is exposed taking $100k+ from coal-fired electric utilities to shill up pseudoscience: http://lightbucket.wordpress.com/2009/08/17/pseudoscience-and-astroturfing-three-leaked-memos/
Then explain why anyone should think "the scientists are exaggerating" versus the fossil fuel lobby is spreading disinformation.
The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t...
If I were those companies - I'd be doing whatever I could to combat these guys.
So the inevitable question becomes "how do we solve this?" How do we break the political and marketing/PR power of arguably the most powerful industry on earth, in order to insure that our children have a future worth having?
I say the answer begins with exposing the public to the truth. Show them the memos exposing this cynical disinformation campaign for what it is. Expose the money trail to their Merchants of Doubt and their PR mouthpieces. Expose the politicians who are in their pocket and doing their bidding. Get people mad at the massive fraud the fossil fuel lobby has perpetrated. Mad enough to act. Mad enough to go to the polls, and take to the streets.
Keep up the fight. I thank you on behalf of my two young sons.
Why can't it simply be 'enough' for a company to make a profit? Why does a company have to continually grow in order to be considered successful? I believe it has a lot to do with shareholders and the trade of stocks, but I'm certainly no expert. I'm just a layman who sees the error of business practices in today's world.
The discovery has stunned scientists, who had believed that around 50bn tonnes of meltwater were being shed each year and not being replaced by new snowfall.
The study is the first to survey all the world's icecaps and glaciers and was made possible by the use of satellite data.- The Guardian
Cherry Pick #1: Select one particular temperature record
Cherry Pick #2: ignore what's happening to the rest of the climate
Cherry Pick #3: Comparing single years rather than statistical trends
http://www.skepticalscience.com/3-levels-of-cherry-picking-in-a-single-argument.html
--If you are actually practicing public relations, take a close look at your clients and at your own performance. There has to be a point where principle trumps short-term economic gain, a point where you admit to yourself that it’s not worth the money to put the planet at risk.--
http://www.desmogblog.com/slamming-the-climate-skeptic-scam
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2012-036
And yet the Earth has done just fine through larger variations in global temperature many times..
Usual alarmism.
There's a big difference.
Exactly what time period are you referring to?
We are already in the midst of the greatest extinction event the planet has seen in 3 billion years--courtesy of man. That will accelerate. The oceans are already dying, expect that to finally go. Pollinators are already dying off. Once they are gone, the plants they pollinate will go along with the animals that live off of them. Wildlife of any kind except scavengers and roaches will be a rarity. Life period will consist mostly of what is increasingly expensively farmed or ranched for our food. The loss of this diversity will result in starvation and death for billions--they won't go quietly though. Did you enjoy 9-11? Expect many more reenactments, with nukes and war between nations over dwindling resources will escalate, liberty will be a lost concept and between pollution, smoke of war and collapse of the ecosystem, this planet will quickly turn into a burnt out, used up, ball of dust, inhabitable only by bacteria .
When a prediction based on a scientific hypothesis fails, the hypothesis also fails. That is science.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/media_v_reality.html
Care to list those predictions that keep failing? From my reading, those predictions have actually been confirmed.
http://bartonpaullevenson.com/ModelsReliable.html
http://agwobserver.wordpress.com/2009/09/11/papers-on-climate-predictions-of-1970s/