TRANSCRIPT 🔗
00:00:01
Speaker 1: Previously on drilled.
00:00:05
Speaker 2: The issue was not where we're going to have a problem.
00:00:07
Speaker 3: The issue was simply how soon and how fashion.
00:00:09
Speaker 2: And how bad is it going to be?
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Speaker 1: Audi Nobody at Exon when I was there, was discussing.
00:00:14
Speaker 2: It was just Okay, how fast is it going to come and get me do something about it?
00:00:17
Speaker 3: How bad is it going to be? And when is it going to get here?
00:00:21
Speaker 1: But not if. When we left off, Exon had sent most of its scientists packing and seemed determined to spend millions not conducting climate science but undermining it.
00:00:34
Speaker 4: When I first started doing this, and I would talk about climate change, it was like another subject like geology, hydrology, meteorology, and it was well received. And then at some point it got politicized, and then it got more difficult to convey the science.
00:00:49
Speaker 5: Exxon as a company was putting ads in the newspaper that were contrary to the research that they were paying us to be doing.
00:00:57
Speaker 2: So this is an experiment in shifting public opinion away from urgency, because they know by nineteen ninety one we're on the verge of a call to arms. There is legislation being proposed, there's hearings in Congress, there's going to be an international meeting about this, an international body has been formed to study it. The world is waking up.
00:01:19
Speaker 1: A key element to this new approach was medium manipulation, but not just the sort of garden variety pr we'd seen before. This was more like psychological warfare. The targeted journalists. They may not have created false equivalents, that thing the media does where it gives equal coverage to both sides of a story, even when those two sides are not at all equally valid, but oil companies and the consultants they hired certainly weaponized it. Science historian Naomi Oreski's has traced this for years when.
00:01:51
Speaker 6: Journalists asked me about this problem of balance. So when I prefer to call false equivalents, honestly, I get a pit in my stomach because this has been going on for so long, and it's so distressing and it's so hard to fix. Many journalists think that being objective means giving equal time to quote both sides of an issue. But in the case of scientific work, where scientists have worked on a problem, examined the evidence, and come to a conclusion, there really isn't an equal and opposite side. Sometimes I make an analogy or a metaphor with sports reporting. If the Yankees beat the Red Sox last night six to one, journalists would report that, and they would not feel compelled to find someone to claim that the score was actually six to four, or that, in fact, the Red Sox had won six to one. That would be seen as completely preposterous, as in fact it is. But for me, as a scientist and a science historian, the kind of false equivalence that goes on in science journalism is as preposterous as if we were looking at both sides of a baseball game. And I think the fact that journalists don't get that as part of the problem. We all understand on baseball, we know that baseball is a game. It's played by certain kinds of rules. At the end of the game, there's a score. Most journalists don't understand that. While science is not a game, it is played by certain kinds of rules. Scientists follow those rules, and when they come to a conclusion, then unless you have new evidence, there really isn't another side.
00:03:19
Speaker 1: Really, if a journalist wanted to both sides a climate story, they'd be looking for a climate scientist with conservative projections on warming and one who's more of an alarmist, not one who still claims that climate change either isn't happening at all, isn't that bad, or isn't exacerbated by humans. Part of the issue is the media's tendency to overcorrect in the face of accusations over bias. I myself have had editors remove mentions of climate science from a story about worsening wildfires because they don't want to quote make the story political. That framing was entirely manufactured by the industry. Here's researcher Kurt Davies.
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Speaker 4: Again.
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Speaker 2: What they did well was they politicized. It is the wrong word, but it gets close. They made it a contentious science issue to the point where everybody had that feeling, and it was very deliberate.
00:04:10
Speaker 1: But oil companies didn't just manipulate the media and exploit their tendency toward false equivalency. That was just one part of a multi pronged strategy. The industry also had to create a whole new batch of experts to drown out the legitimate science Exxon had previously funded. The so called contrarian scientists had a variety of other explanations for what was causing climate change, the sun, volcanoes, normal shifts in climate. WILLI Soon is a longtime industry favorite. He's best known for pushing the solar radiation theory, the idea that sunspots and natural solar cycles are what's actually responsible for climate change. It's a theory that's been debunked over and over again, including by the industry's own scientists. The most recent flop pointed out in students' work is that if solar cycles were what controlled climate, we'd be cooling now, not warming. He's also fond of saying polar bears actually need less ice, and he still gets cited regularly by politicians.
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Speaker 5: First of all, I like to know how many of you really believe that this guest called CO two some people call it satanic gas can be really dangerous for the climate and for the whole planetary Earth itself. How many of you.
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Speaker 1: Zero?
00:05:32
Speaker 5: Y'all can go home now anyway. The first disclaimer is that I truly speak it on my own behalf, but I am a scientist. I've been working in this subject. I would say, they in and you can ask my wife for some twenty seven plus years, and I really
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are very serious. What I'm concerned about is actually the truth? As you know, any of you know what what is ZEO two?
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Speaker 4: Guests?
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Speaker 2: Right?
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Speaker 4: COO two?
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Speaker 5: Okay, this is case of life. So if they want to tell you that COEO two is dangerous, you tell them to stop reading.
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Speaker 4: Right.
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Speaker 1: Although he always claims to work only for himself, a popular line amongst industry funded scientists is that they only ever accept money for travel. At various points, Soon has had to disclose who his funders are Axon Mobile, Southern Company, Peabody Coal, the American Petroleum Institute, or the API and coke industries. It's worth pointing out that oil companies knew full well that theories like zoons didn't hold water. In nineteen ninety five, a primer on climate change was developed by the Global Climate Coalition, a trade group that included manufacturing, oil and gas companies and utilities. The primer was intended for public release and underscored the uncertainty of climate science and provided talking points for those who wish to combat with denialis of the time referred to as quote climate alarmism. In an early draft of the primer circulated amongst the group in nineteen ninety six, scientists from member companies debunked the contrion theories of the day, which are still being pushed today. Here's our document, Guy Kurt Davies again with.
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Speaker 2: That set the stage here that in nineteen ninety six, the Global Climate Coalition, which was the allied forces of everything from the oil industry to the autos, to mining to metals, heavy manufacturing, all of them in one group, allied against the unf Triple C. Basically their aim was to slow down international policy. So they're monitoring everything, they're sending people to the meetings, and they're doing a variety of variety of publications that they're handing out at these meetings. So IBCC is supposed to do these reports every five years. The second one comes out in ninety five, and they're doing this book that will respond to that and give industry's opinion. So as a whole draft, and they go through all these different different ways that you can still say that it's uncertain in the face of this phone book thick IPCC report. Part of this draft is a discussion in the again only in the draft form of the question as it stated here, quote, are there alternative explanations for the climate change which has occurred over the last one hundred and twenty years. And they go on to say several arguments have been put forward attempting to challenge the conventional view of greenhouse gas induced climate change. These are generally referred to as quote contrarian theories. This section summarizes these theories and the counter arguments presented against them, and one by one in this draft, solar variability, the role of water vapor differences in the temperature record between the satellite record and the surface record. That's the John Christie argument, and the various arguments Pat Michael's argument on whether or not models line up, naming the scientist Dick Linz and Pat Michaels Jastro as the authors of these various theories, and then they give the counter argument, the solar variability argument, which of course carries through to Willie Soon's work. This some fifteen years later, funded by Exxon, funded by American Petrollum Institute funded by the Koch Brothers, started with this guy, Robert Jastro at Mount Wilson Observatory, and they publish various papers showing that they felt there was a correlation between sunspot cycles and differences in solar intensity that matches up with the temperature record better than anything to do with carbon dioxide. This approval draft says that argument is sufficient to account for no more than point one degree see of temperature change, so they say it may be factor. Solar radiation may be a factor, but quote if solar variability has accounted fer point one degree temperature increase over the past the last one and twenty years, it is an interesting finding, but it does not allay concerns about future warming which could result from greenhouse gas emissions. So this draft, written by a mobile oil scientist, knocks down the variety of arguments that we still hear today.
00:10:27
Speaker 1: That chapter was never published. The primer was printed and distributed without it, and member companies went on to fund scientists who promoted these theories, despite the fact that they had already disproven them. Climate scientists have continued to debunk them ever since, but it's hard for them to compete with the viral videos and full court press of the industry backed contrarians. In addition to weaponizing the media's myth of its own objectivity and propping up science they knew to be flawed, oil company pr teams created a whole new tool for influencing the public, particularly influencers and media. They invented the op AD, an advertorial published in the op ed section that feels and looks like a regular op ED mobile, and then Excellent and then Exon Mobil placed these in papers throughout the country. These weren't always or even often obvious pleas against regulation or outright denials of climate science. Instead, they focused on making oil companies look like good corporate citizens. This was a key part of the work Ebruce Harrison had begun when he was working with American Cyanamide in DuPont to combat any harm done to the chemicals industry by Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring. A mix of greenwashing and corporate social responsibility, this pr strategy held that to avoid onerous regulations or damage to reputation, companies needed to at least appear like good global citizens. From nineteen seventy two to the two thousands, Exxon ran advertorials regularly in the New York Times editorial pages. Naomireski's and her research partner Jeffrey Supran studied these as part of a recent study of all of
Exxon's public facing communications efforts. Around climate science. Here's Supran on the scale of this advertorial effort and how it dwarfed the minimal amount of climate science the company continued to do in the nineteen nineties.
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Speaker 3: These advertorials, which it became clear, were part of a very comprehensive exomobile climate change communication plan, whereby they took out advertorials every Thursday between nineteen seventy two and you know, the two thousands, and they paid like about thirty one thousand dollars per advatorial. They got a discounted rate from the New York Times, and so it was such a sort of orchestrated, comprehensive effort to reach literally millions of people in the general public versus one guy conducting you know, genuinely decent, peer reviewed science on average read by a few tens of people in the academic world, so that the discrepancy in scale is sort of on both ends of that equation.
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Speaker 1: A recently discovered and not yet published early eighties internal Mobile memo reveals just how valuable this advertorial program was. In it, the mobile communications team focuses not on how many readers they're reaching, but on the way these pieces have helped to influence how these issues get covered in general. Here's Kurt again with.
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Speaker 2: That this is an evaluation inside Mobile Oil of their op ED program, and they talk about the impact on opinion leaders since Mobile began its various expanded public affairs programs in nineteen seventy the views of the majority of the American people on certain basic issues. In helping change these perceptions, Mobile can claim to have played a significant role. Our op ED program and our support for the Masterpiece Theater in particular, have enabled the company to become part of the quote collective unconscious of the nation as the change views of opinion leaders have gradually molded general public opinion.
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Speaker 1: They go on to congratulate themselves on the fact that The New York Times in particular has quote even changed to positions similar to Mobiles on at least seven key energy issues.
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Speaker 2: In another section of the document, they talk about having influenced the New York Times editorial viewpoints, and the document says, quote, our analysis shows that the Times has altered or significantly softened its viewpoints on conservation, moving from a total reliance on conservation to advocating increased production incentives to solve the supply shortage. On monopoly and divestitures, moving from approving the breakup of the oil companies to opposing divestiture on something called decontrol, moving from opposing decontrol to urging phase deregulation on natural gas, moving from urging price controls to endorsing a speed up of deregulation and decontrol of new gas prices, And moving from advocating strict environmental safeguards to suggesting more relaxed controls on offshore drilling, moving from valuing environmental concerns at the expensive exploration and development to urging accelerated offshore drilling. And on gas a hall which is another name for ethanol, moving from increased subsidies for gas hall production from grain to arguing against such subsidies. So they tallying how they have affected the viewpoints of The New York Times on conservation, monopoly, indovestiture, decontrol, natural gas, coal, offshore drilling, and gas hall, all things that they had written op eds on.
00:15:40
Speaker 1: A decade or so later. Mobile was still taking out arboritorials every week, and in the lead up to Kyoto in the nineteen nineties it placed a fairly aggressive ad in both the New York Times and The Washington Post. The ad read quote, Let's face it, the science of climate change is too uncertain to mandate a plan of action that could plunge economies into turmoil. Scientists cannot predict with certainty if temperatures will increase by how much, and wear changes will occur. In fact, scientists predictions of climate change were remarkably accurate, including exons whose experts in the nineteen seventies accurately predicted CO two concentrations by twenty ten and the result in warming. But oil companies weren't about to let facts get in the way of a good story. Next time I'm on Drilled.
00:16:34
Speaker 4: I was on a radio show two hours. They called and said, can you come in and talk about climate change? Sure? And it was Katok Radio six thirty am. And I still remember this so well. And it was two hours of live TV and they broke the call record and everybody that called in was antagonistic toward me, nasty. It was all, let me talk to that tree hug and do gooder kind of guy. And that's how the whole interview went. And I got done. I was like, why are they so angry?
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Speaker 1: Drilled is produced and distributed by Critical Frequency. Reporting for this series was done by me Amy Westervelt. Our producer and composer is David Whited. Our executive producer is Richard Wiles. Our story and concept consultant was Raka Murphy. Our cover art was designed by Lucas Lisakowski. You can find Drilled wherever you listen to podcasts. Please remember to rate and review the podcast. It helps us find new listeners. Thanks for listening, See you next time.