Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome back to Drill. I'm Amy Westervelt. This
Speaker 1: is our fourteenth, fourteenth season, and we're doing what I
Speaker 1: like to think of as the opposite of the Ezra
Speaker 1: Klein approach. We're digging deep and trying to understand.
Speaker 2: The moment that we're in because we're at a really
Speaker 2: bad time on climate right now, and you know, democracy
Speaker 2: and justice and all sorts of other things, and we're
Speaker 2: only just starting to really understand some of the forces
Speaker 2: that have worked really hard.
Speaker 1: To bring us to this moment. So you know, it's
Speaker 1: time to do the reading. For me, understanding the lack.
Speaker 2: Of political will to act on climate has always begun
Speaker 2: with talking.
Speaker 1: To social scientists, So for this season, I wanted to
Speaker 1: talk to some of the best, the folks behind an
Speaker 1: incredible new book from the Climate Social Science Network at
Speaker 1: Brown University that pulls together everything we currently know about
Speaker 1: climate obstruction, how it's happened all over the world. In
Speaker 1: the first four episodes of the season, we looked at
Speaker 1: how obstruction works, so we looked at pr and media
Speaker 1: and the psychology of this stuff. In the next few episodes,
Speaker 1: we'll focus on who's doing it, which industries are working
Speaker 1: the hardest to obstruct climate action. First up, no surprise,
Speaker 1: the fossil fuel industry. They're not the only ones doing it,
Speaker 1: of course, but they are certainly one of the biggest
Speaker 1: obstacles to climate action. Joining me today is a voice
Speaker 1: that might be familiar to longtime listeners, Kurt Davies, the
Speaker 1: investigator who read to us from so many great documents
Speaker 1: that he'd found back in season one of the podcasts.
Speaker 1: Kurt is at the Center for Climate Integrity. These days
Speaker 1: we also have Jeff Dembigie, global Energy editor of diesbog
Speaker 1: and author of the book The Petroleum Papers, and Christopher
Speaker 1: Eckberk from the University of Lund in Sweden. Let's get
Speaker 1: in to it.
Speaker 3: I am Kurt Davies.
Speaker 4: I am the Director of Special Investigations at the Center
Speaker 4: for Climate Integrity in Washington, d C.
Speaker 3: Hi.
Speaker 5: I'm kristofek but I'm associate Senior lecturer in Human Ecology
Speaker 5: at Lund University in Sweden.
Speaker 3: Hi.
Speaker 6: I am Jeff dam Bickie. I am Global Managing Editor
Speaker 6: with the Climate Investigation Side ds MOG.
Speaker 7: I want to start out talking about this thing that
Speaker 7: you guys start with in your chapter, which is the
Speaker 7: oil and gas industry's sudden embrace post Paris of net
Speaker 7: zero and all that it entails. There's this this line
Speaker 7: from an email that came out during the government's investigations
Speaker 7: in the US on climate disinformation. That's from the BP
Speaker 7: global head of Sustainability and Climate Policy, and Kurt, I'm
Speaker 7: going to ask you to do what I always ask
Speaker 7: you to do, which is read documents. Could you read
Speaker 7: this line from this guy? He kind of references embracing
Speaker 7: net zero and backing the Paris Climate Agreement is the
Speaker 7: most obvious course of action to take, and then he says, yes.
Speaker 4: I was reading the whole thing again earlier. And so
Speaker 4: it's an internal discussion within BP about Trump what Trump
Speaker 4: is going to do with Paris in March of twenty seventeen.
Speaker 4: And that's important because we really didn't know what they
Speaker 4: would do yet. And there's an article they're referring to
Speaker 4: where it says Trump administration might stay in Paris but
Speaker 4: kill the Obama pledge, so effectively be in the agreement
Speaker 4: without agreeing to do anything. And so the discussion within
Speaker 4: VP is Paul Jeffers' rights to Bob Stout and about
Speaker 4: six other people. He says, interesting Obviously I don't know
Speaker 4: what will happen, but this looks like the most obvious
Speaker 4: course of action to take all of the benefits and
Speaker 4: few of the risks. This is really why the Paris
Speaker 4: Agreement was designed the way it was to enable flexible
Speaker 4: transition from one political regime to the next. No one
Speaker 4: is committed to anything other than to stay in the game.
Speaker 4: And that last line, wow, really applies to the oil companies, right.
Speaker 4: They don't have to really commit to anything, but they
Speaker 4: want to stay in the game.
Speaker 7: Right, Okay, So why were oil and gas companies so
Speaker 7: into the idea of net zero comitment.
Speaker 6: Well, I think it was a period when the global
Speaker 6: consensus really was in favor of climate action, aggressive climate
Speaker 6: action perhaps, or just the appearance of it. And the
Speaker 6: oil and gas industry always wants to look like it's
Speaker 6: on the side of what all global governments and everyone
Speaker 6: is going to do for climate and the economy. And
Speaker 6: so during this period, the companies are all coming out
Speaker 6: and saying, yeah, we like we like net zero two,
Speaker 6: this is great, We're going to transform our operations with
Speaker 6: all sorts of new technologies. And it was also a
Speaker 6: period when a bunch of internal documents from the industry
Speaker 6: had been unearthed by journalists at the Los Angeles Times
Speaker 6: and other outlets, and a bunch of lawsuits were beginning
Speaker 6: to be filed against the industry that really scrutinized its
Speaker 6: past history of climate change denial and other obstruction tactics.
Speaker 6: And so this this was a period when it just
Speaker 6: really made a lot of sense for a whole bunch
Speaker 6: of reasons for the industry to try to portray itself
Speaker 6: as a climate leader.
Speaker 4: The only thing I would add to that, I think
Speaker 4: is that the net zero concept actually starts a few
Speaker 4: years earlier with the IPCC, with the scientists, and they
Speaker 4: are trying to figure out what dangerous climate change is,
Speaker 4: debating the two degree one point five degree limit, and
Speaker 4: it's originally a chart that shows if you're going to
Speaker 4: get to a safe climate, you have to have net
Speaker 4: zero emissions by some point in time to get there,
Speaker 4: And so governments adopt that language, and then the corporations say, well,
Speaker 4: if we're saying the same thing, that'll be cozy. So
Speaker 4: I feel like it was of convenience that they started
Speaker 4: using the same verbiage to seem like they were in
Speaker 4: sync with the scientists. Commandment and the government effort.
Speaker 5: I think it also relates to something that we probably
Speaker 5: will come back to, but this focus on emissions specifically
Speaker 5: that there was this was also a way to talk
Speaker 5: about climate action without having to talk about well extraction
Speaker 5: of fossil fuels basically or scope three emissions in more
Speaker 5: specific ways. So it was a sort of way out
Speaker 5: of more difficult discussions for fossil fuel companies.
Speaker 3: Exactly.
Speaker 7: Okay, so you guys talk in this chapter about climate
Speaker 7: obstruction in a few different ways, and specifically about three
Speaker 7: categories of obstruction tactics, denial, delay, and co optation. Can
Speaker 7: I have you define those terms for us and talk
Speaker 7: a little bit about the interplay between them. I thought
Speaker 7: this was really important, this point that you make that
Speaker 7: wasn't like first there was denial, and then there was delay,
Speaker 7: and then there was this sort of like all this
Speaker 7: stuff happening all the time. So would love to have
Speaker 7: you explain that.
Speaker 5: I think this is actually one of the most important
Speaker 5: things that we contribute with is just to focus on
Speaker 5: this that the responses from fossil fuel companies aren't really
Speaker 5: they're not linear in that sense, but very dependent on context,
Speaker 5: and we can show that, yeah, all companies in different
Speaker 5: regions use these different tactics throughout well basically from the
Speaker 5: nineteen seventies and onwards, but depending on context. So it's
Speaker 5: not sort of this obvious development from denying scientific facts
Speaker 5: to delaying sort of obstructing the environmental policy or climate
Speaker 5: change policy discussions, but rather that these strategies change depending
Speaker 5: on the challenges specific challenges that oil industry face. And
Speaker 5: I think with the three categories it was one way
Speaker 5: to divide it. But I mean there's a lot of
Speaker 5: different concepts floating around in these discussions. But I would
Speaker 5: say that perhaps with denial, we're talking specifically about well
Speaker 5: denying the scientific facts of climate change, global warming, and
Speaker 5: we delay. Our focus is primarily on the sort of
Speaker 5: economic scare tactics of fossil fuel company and sort of
Speaker 5: this idea that climate change action or action against climate
Speaker 5: change will hurt different people regions in different ways. And
Speaker 5: with co optation, we trace basically the way that fossil
Speaker 5: fuel companies have been involved in framing the issue in
Speaker 5: coming up suggestions on how to perhaps tackle the question
Speaker 5: or not tackle the question.
Speaker 6: And what I would add to that is there's sort
Speaker 6: of like two overriding things that are key to understanding
Speaker 6: these tactics. One is that no matter what tactic the
Speaker 6: oil and gas industry is using at any given time,
Speaker 6: the ultimate goal is to allow the industry to keep
Speaker 6: producing as much oil and gas as possible. And what
Speaker 6: allows the industry to shift back and forth between these
Speaker 6: tactics depending on whatever the political or economic context is,
Speaker 6: is that the industry is always right on the vanguard
Speaker 6: of doing all of the research and establishing the expertise
Speaker 6: it needs to lead any given debate. So oil and
Speaker 6: gas companies were able to deny the science because they
Speaker 6: had studied the science for so long. They were able
Speaker 6: to use convincing sounding economics scare tactics because they were
Speaker 6: some of the first organizations to really study the economics
Speaker 6: of climate change, and they were able to co op
Speaker 6: the process because the process of international climate negotiations, because
Speaker 6: from day one they were involved with it, learning all
Speaker 6: the nuances of it. And so I think that's really
Speaker 6: key to all of this as well.
Speaker 7: And I think pointing out that these things are shifting
Speaker 7: around all the time and constantly being used helps people
Speaker 7: understand the resurgence of denial.
Speaker 4: Now right, Yeah, that was I think we worked hard
Speaker 4: at that in the chapter to sort of break that,
Speaker 4: as you said, linear logic that people have used like that,
Speaker 4: it went from a period of denial into a period
Speaker 4: of play along, feel good co optation. And it really
Speaker 4: is whatever tactic is needed at any given time, they
Speaker 4: can play it, and that's what happens. And here we
Speaker 4: are now and you don't see any green washing because
Speaker 4: they don't need to have green washing right now.
Speaker 7: It's not necessary any necessary.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 7: You do talk about the evolution of denial a little
Speaker 7: bit too, and not just denial of climate change and
Speaker 7: the science behind what drives it and all that, but
Speaker 7: also of even more basic concepts like I don't know,
Speaker 7: this thing of we're yeah, we're totally committed to this
Speaker 7: stuff while continuing to increase production volumes and things like that, which,
Speaker 7: as you point out, has just becomes so normal that
Speaker 7: it's people don't even pay attention to it anymore. So, Yeah,
Speaker 7: I would love to have you expand on that a
Speaker 7: little bit. What are some of the other ways that
Speaker 7: they use denial of basic science to their benefit.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think that the point here was that it's
Speaker 4: not just flat denial, it's not happening greening Earth, you know,
Speaker 4: which we still see, we see again even in the
Speaker 4: Trump report that just came out, but that we can
Speaker 4: denial can be just denying the urgency, denying what scientists
Speaker 4: are saying needs to be cut to save us. And
Speaker 4: the slowing down is a form of denial. And you know, ultimately,
Speaker 4: you know, as we were saying, that the you know,
Speaker 4: denying helps them avoid the real discussion of the need
Speaker 4: for fossil fuel phase out, the need to cut production
Speaker 4: of their products, and that's what they really don't want,
Speaker 4: so they look for every other pathway that allows their
Speaker 4: business to continue, and that includes you know, carbon capture
Speaker 4: mythologies and treating with natural carbon credits and all these
Speaker 4: other schemes that are in fact denying what the scientists
Speaker 4: say is urgently needed.
Speaker 5: Now, I was just thinking about bringing it back to
Speaker 5: this Stanley Cohen, who's sort of been very influential in
Speaker 5: the discussion of denial and his idea of implicatory denial
Speaker 5: that is very much what we see basically people not
Speaker 5: acting others have talked about, yeah, refusal or other words,
Speaker 5: just to describe what we also show in the chapter
Speaker 5: that even though we have these promises of a climate action,
Speaker 5: we see that, Yeah, production just goes up, and there's
Speaker 5: like in their own annual reports, there's no sign of
Speaker 5: cutting production.
Speaker 6: So yeah, and what I would say is, like with
Speaker 6: the implicit denial, it's basically like the same obstruction mechanism,
Speaker 6: Like in the hardcore denial days in like the nineties,
Speaker 6: industry would be like, climate change isn't happening, and then
Speaker 6: they would keep producing more and more oil and gas
Speaker 6: at the same time. So obviously they got a lot
Speaker 6: of flack that they looked kind of crazy to the public. Eventually,
Speaker 6: so the company is just like deleted that like really
Speaker 6: in your face denial, but just kept doing basically the
Speaker 6: exact same things. So now they say, oh, yeah, we
Speaker 6: acknowledge climate change is real and urgent, and then their
Speaker 6: production keeps going up and up and up. So despite
Speaker 6: a lot of rhetorical change over the years, the sort
Speaker 6: of material circumstances of what they're doing remain almost exactly
Speaker 6: the same.
Speaker 5: And it might be also important to say that this
Speaker 5: sort of more obvious science denial hasn't disappeared. I mean,
Speaker 5: it might have disappeared from the fossil fuel company strategies
Speaker 5: or rhetoric, but it has appeared in other places, like
Speaker 5: in for right environments, and I mean with Trump and
Speaker 5: others like we see see those kind of claims still there,
Speaker 5: but perhaps not as much from fossil fueled companies as before.
Speaker 6: Well, if you consider that the current Energy Secretary, Chris Wright,
Speaker 6: used to be a fracking executive until very recently, and
Speaker 6: now he's sponsoring a report saying that the human contribution
Speaker 6: to climate change is I think we're.
Speaker 4: Like that sure, And adding to that, I would credit
Speaker 4: Exon's money and coke Industry's money with keeping denial alive.
Speaker 3: You know, Exon.
Speaker 4: Paid a fortune to keep these voices active in the
Speaker 4: late nineties and into the early two thousands. Coke industries
Speaker 4: paid a lot of money to these same organizations. So
Speaker 4: the whole reason that Chris Wright has learned those things
Speaker 4: is because of megaphones that the oil companies bought.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, well, Chris Writ's been brown down with the
Speaker 7: cokes for a long time. Okay. So I realized that
Speaker 7: this question could take like the whole hour to answer,
Speaker 7: so feel free to just give me the headlines. But
Speaker 7: I do want to talk a little bit about the
Speaker 7: role that industry led an industry funded research has played
Speaker 7: into all of this as well, like the extent to
Speaker 7: which they have tried to use credible seeming science or
Speaker 7: credibly adjacent science to earn themselves a seat at the
Speaker 7: table and then use that seat to mess things up.
Speaker 3: Along the way. You know, it's actually different for each company.
Speaker 4: We don't know a lot about what the individual companies
Speaker 4: were studying, except for Shell and Exxon especially. We have
Speaker 4: evidence that the American Patrolling Institute as a body was
Speaker 4: monitoring the science very very broadly, and through the GCC.
Speaker 4: They were sending people to the Governmental Panel and climate
Speaker 4: change meetings, were reporting back to all of them what
Speaker 4: was going on in the science. But as far as
Speaker 4: their own research, we know exem was doing its own modeling,
Speaker 4: it knew what was going on. We know Shell looked
Speaker 4: at all the science in the early eighties and determined
Speaker 4: that by the time the science was unequivocal, it would
Speaker 4: be too late, in their words, which is kind of
Speaker 4: grim and they actually proposed a more precautionary approach internally,
Speaker 4: but never said that out loud to the world. Shell
Speaker 4: but this is kind of crucial that they were playing
Speaker 4: along and part of what they started to lead research
Speaker 4: on was things like carbon capture, which is the ultimate
Speaker 4: holy grail now for the oil industry is that we
Speaker 4: can keep burning fossil fuels as long as we capture
Speaker 4: some of the carbon and tuck it back in the ground,
Speaker 4: and which they have never done effectively, but that's on
Speaker 4: the horizon. Dream has allowed them to keep producing in
Speaker 4: selling oil because they're working on it, because they're researching it.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and I would give the example of Exon and
Speaker 6: carbon pricing. So in part of the period that we're
Speaker 6: looking at in the chapter following the twenty fifteen Paris talks,
Speaker 6: Exon was part of organizations that we're calling for a
Speaker 6: price on carbon and said, you know, this is the
Speaker 6: type of policy we could potentially support. And then of
Speaker 6: course the Exon lobbyist Keith McCoy was secretly recorded by
Speaker 6: Greenpeace researchers saying that the company only supports a carbon
Speaker 6: price because it gives it a nice talking point and
Speaker 6: it actually knows that this is probably never going to
Speaker 6: happen in the US. And that was just such a
Speaker 6: fascinating admission because it sort of confirmed what a lot
Speaker 6: of people thought. But it also came as Exon was
Speaker 6: going to war with basically every major substantial climate policy
Speaker 6: that was proposed in the US, and then as a
Speaker 6: defense it could say, well, we support this carbon pricing thing.
Speaker 6: And so of course after that interview came out, Exon
Speaker 6: kind of dropped any pretense of that. But I think
Speaker 6: I think that shows what this co opting dynamic is
Speaker 6: all about.
Speaker 5: Also another example with that Learonovskiaez looked at the SHELL
Speaker 5: sponsored research by James Lovelock, for example, which is I
Speaker 5: think that adds another bit to it that is not
Speaker 5: always and this is historical research, so it's not always
Speaker 5: that the industry let research have been like instrumental or
Speaker 5: specifically targeting climate change or climate science. But sometimes it's
Speaker 5: sort of a broader perspective where they can sort of
Speaker 5: pick and choose later on specific things that they bring
Speaker 5: to the fore. So in this case, the adapt ability
Speaker 5: of natural systems or the fact that some organisms emits
Speaker 5: CEO two that later on could be used as a
Speaker 5: part of science. Ton So I think it's also important
Speaker 5: to like, not everything is very instrumental. They have a
Speaker 5: lot of resources so can actually fund quite broadly in
Speaker 5: a sense.
Speaker 7: Yeah, just sort of like shape basic understandings and things too. Actually, relatedly,
Speaker 7: can I have you guys speak to how important it
Speaker 7: was for these companies to get academics, especially academics connected
Speaker 7: with elite universities, to carry water for some of their ideas,
Speaker 7: or even just to do research along with their scientists.
Speaker 4: I think starting with the GCC, we see that they
Speaker 4: were participating in scientific processes industry, especially Exon scientists were
Speaker 4: co authors and part of the IPCC process. It was
Speaker 4: important for them, they felt too, to be in that
Speaker 4: room to know where the science was. They heavily focused
Speaker 4: on the modeling. They still do because they know that
Speaker 4: the forecasting is really what drives the urgency, and they
Speaker 4: start to form partnerships with academic institutions BP at Princeton,
Speaker 4: EXON at Stanford, Exon at MIT to bring those logos
Speaker 4: next to theirs. Then they also have third party surrogates
Speaker 4: like Richard Lindzen at MIT or Pat Michaels who was
Speaker 4: at UVA, who will say the things that they don't
Speaker 4: want to say, but they have an incredible academic label,
Speaker 4: and they were more useful than just the pundits at
Speaker 4: the think tanks because it made it look like serious
Speaker 4: people disagreed with the urgency of climate change or the
Speaker 4: Jim Hanson. It was a counter to the jimhnns and
Speaker 4: mode of speaking about the issue, or Steve Schneider. So
Speaker 4: it was a I think a very deliberate effort to
Speaker 4: again just cast doubt.
Speaker 3: All.
Speaker 4: Their whole objective is to have some shred of doubt
Speaker 4: around the issue, which gives somebody in the policy arena,
Speaker 4: some politician, the ability to say, let's wait and study this,
Speaker 4: let's look at this a little bit more.
Speaker 3: It's not that urgent. Look this guy at MIT just said,
Speaker 3: it's not that bad.
Speaker 4: That's ongoing and has been going heavily for thirty years now.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I would argue it's maybe even increasing now that
Speaker 7: public funding is getting good too. Anyone else want to
Speaker 7: add to that.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I'd say having these prestigious academic institutions attached to
Speaker 6: denial really helps influence policymakers. But from the very earliest
Speaker 6: days of public denial, a lot of these spokespeople were
Speaker 6: encouraging Americans and whoever else to spread these ideas in
Speaker 6: their own social or family networks. So some of the
Speaker 6: earliest denial ads on the radio, people would say change
Speaker 6: begins at the dinner table. You should you should share
Speaker 6: these ideas with people close to you because it's such
Speaker 6: an important discussion to have. And so I think the
Speaker 6: only way that you can really convince a ton of
Speaker 6: people to accept something as crazy is what the companies
Speaker 6: were pushing with denial is if it comes from someone
Speaker 6: you trust, and so I think that's what this whole
Speaker 6: process is all about. And then, of course, when this
Speaker 6: whole discussion shifted online onto big digital media platforms, I
Speaker 6: think that really allowed all of this to supercharge because
Speaker 6: it wasn't necessarily some big evil oil company telling you
Speaker 6: to distrust scientists. It was like your uncle who you
Speaker 6: meet with once a week, posting something on Facebook.
Speaker 7: Right, right, Okay, we mentioned economics before and how the
Speaker 7: industry was amongst the earliest, if not the earliest, to
Speaker 7: study the economic implications of climate policy. So would love
Speaker 7: to talk about that a little bit more. What they
Speaker 7: did and how important that was to obstruction and efforts.
Speaker 6: Well, I always point to this study that Exxon's Canadian subsidiary,
Speaker 6: Imperial Oil, created in the early nineteen nineties, and so
Speaker 6: Imperial and Exon were like so far ahead of the
Speaker 6: curve in understanding climate change, that they were hiring consultants
Speaker 6: and actively studying solutions to climate change in the early nineties,
Speaker 6: and this was only a few years after James Hansen
Speaker 6: had given his testimony to Congress and turned climate change
Speaker 6: into sort of like a big mainstream issue. And so
Speaker 6: in one of these were ports that Exxon and Imperial commissioned,
Speaker 6: they determined that a price on carbon emissions in Canada
Speaker 6: could potentially stabilize greenhouse gas emissions in the country without
Speaker 6: a hugely negative impact on the economy because governments would
Speaker 6: have so much additional revenue from taxing carbon. The company
Speaker 6: and its consultants determined, however, that carbon pricing would be
Speaker 6: specifically bad for Imperial's bottom line, and therefore they came
Speaker 6: up with a strategy to portray carbon pricing and any
Speaker 6: other climate solution in the worst possible light to media
Speaker 6: and policy makers, and so that this approach was tried
Speaker 6: out in kind of an experimental sense in places like
Speaker 6: Canada and other regions, and then it really started to
Speaker 6: go mainstream throughout the nineties, to the point where any
Speaker 6: discussion about climate change always contained this reflex of response
Speaker 6: from industry saying that any solution will destroy the economy.
Speaker 3: And here we are in twenty twenty five.
Speaker 7: I know, it's like the consistent talking point even from
Speaker 7: a lot of people who say that they think we
Speaker 7: should act on climate.
Speaker 4: I think that's important that they wanted to feather this
Speaker 4: in because it allowed even people who cared to hedge
Speaker 4: by saying, but we shouldn't hurt the economy. And that's
Speaker 4: also the basis of really the bird Hagel stuff and
Speaker 4: the stuff that the American Patrol means to push after
Speaker 4: Kyoto was Yes, but we shouldn't hurt the American economy.
Speaker 4: And that's really a powerful message, and of course resonates
Speaker 4: more with average people than environmental benefit if you're going
Speaker 4: to hurt the economy. And it even came down to
Speaker 4: very deliberate scare tactics when they started doing these so
Speaker 4: called economics reports where ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council,
Speaker 4: did a report that showed all the bad things that
Speaker 4: would happen state by state. I think it was ALEC,
Speaker 4: you know that, you know you if you do Kyoto,
Speaker 4: it's going to raise the price of energy by one
Speaker 4: two hundred and twelve dollars in Iowa and total made
Speaker 4: up numbers, but very effective local headlines they could create
Speaker 4: with these economic so called studies. And one of the
Speaker 4: people who did those studies admitted in a documentary recently
Speaker 4: that they failed to include the economic downside of climate change,
Speaker 4: the damages in their equations, So not very good math
Speaker 4: in the end.
Speaker 5: And I think as coming from from history always, I
Speaker 5: have a pH d in history, So that's why it
Speaker 5: might be a way that I said. I'm in human ecology,
Speaker 5: but I'm a historian by training, and I think this
Speaker 5: is sort of a anti environmental talking point already from
Speaker 5: the nineteen seventies. I guess with already with the oil crisis,
Speaker 5: that if something hurts basically energy industry largely, then that
Speaker 5: will affect your possibility for transportation, for heating, for electricity.
Speaker 5: So it's a very close by topic or I don't
Speaker 5: know how to say it correctly in English, but yes,
Speaker 5: you can sort of feel it right away. So I
Speaker 5: think that's the way it has been very effective, and
Speaker 5: it's been used. I mean, now we talked about the US,
Speaker 5: but as we show in the papers, we talked about
Speaker 5: the basically oil industries attacks on the suggestion to have
Speaker 5: a joint carbon tax, in the European in early nineteen nineties,
Speaker 5: where Yeah, basically the same talking points were used. So
Speaker 5: it's an effective around the world tactic.
Speaker 4: I guess making it look like sacrifice instead of progress
Speaker 4: is really what right they tried to do the whole time.
Speaker 6: Yeah, well, and I think another important part of that
Speaker 6: was dismantling this conservative consensus that protecting the environment is
Speaker 6: also good for the economy, which took a lot of
Speaker 6: deliberate work on the part of oil and gas because
Speaker 6: even up into the nineties, you know, some of the
Speaker 6: most consequential environmental initiatives came from conservative politicians, Republican administrations,
Speaker 6: and so the oil and gas industry. By using these
Speaker 6: scare tactics, it wasn't just rhetorical. They could reorient an
Speaker 6: entire side of the political spectrum to get the kind
Speaker 6: of anti regulatory policies that they wanted. Yeah.
Speaker 7: I mean, I feel like we could almost point to
Speaker 7: the current abundance discourse is the ultimate success here.
Speaker 5: Yeah. I just came back from a conference and we
Speaker 5: talked about this, like, should we under stand climate change
Speaker 5: denial as primarily an environmental issue or something developed in
Speaker 5: relation to environmental issue, or if we should see it
Speaker 5: as an energy issue. I think that really makes a
Speaker 5: difference in how we see that. We can see that well,
Speaker 5: basically some part of the Conservatives could actually agree on
Speaker 5: environmental stuff, but when it came to questions on energy
Speaker 5: and basically economic growth and those kind of issues, then yeah,
Speaker 5: there's a much stronger pushback.
Speaker 4: Which has always made it harder than solving the ozone
Speaker 4: layer or toxic waste or other things that other environmental challenges.
Speaker 7: Right, so not at all. Unrelatedly, can I have you
Speaker 7: walk through a quick history of the Waxman Marquee Act
Speaker 7: and how I don't know, sort of a combination of
Speaker 7: these obstruction tactics work to kill it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I can take this. I mean the evolution of
Speaker 4: wax and Marquee. Of course, it's in two thousand and nine,
Speaker 4: so Obama has just been elected. There's been a bit
Speaker 4: of a sea change in the US in the second
Speaker 4: Bush term where more climate action is inevitable. So Obama
Speaker 4: gets elected and both the House and the Senate are
Speaker 4: in Democratic hands. So we're going to I heard someone
Speaker 4: say we're going to run the table on climate and
Speaker 4: the first play was, of course, they went after healthcare
Speaker 4: first and that was a mistake, so it got the
Speaker 4: enemy riled up, including the Koch brothers. But Waxman Marquee
Speaker 4: was constructed in the same form as all other climate
Speaker 4: policy at the time, a sort of cap and trade
Speaker 4: mentality of putting a cap on carbon and then figuring
Speaker 4: out a way to get.
Speaker 3: To those goals.
Speaker 4: The mistake was that many the people who ran the
Speaker 4: game thought that the coal fired utilities and coal interests
Speaker 4: were going to be the biggest obstruction and therefore needed
Speaker 4: the biggest handout to get them to not try to
Speaker 4: kill the bill. So there were a lot of handouts
Speaker 4: for coal fired power plants if they could get to
Speaker 4: carbon capture, and I'm calling them handouts, but the smart
Speaker 4: people who wrote it probably thought they were really clever
Speaker 4: devices to get some action out of those industries, and
Speaker 4: there was nothing in it for big oil. So after
Speaker 4: the bill passed the House in the early summer, then
Speaker 4: the oil industry got really mobilized and went after it,
Speaker 4: and we see the birth of the Energy Citizens campaign
Speaker 4: by American Petroleum Institute with Edelman PR's help, where they
Speaker 4: went after it hard and they basically knew they could
Speaker 4: kill it in the Senate and that's where it died.
Speaker 4: It never evolved. The importance of two thousand and nine
Speaker 4: can't be underestimated because we were headed towards the Copenhagen
Speaker 4: meeting of the UNF Triple C, and that was going
Speaker 4: to be what Paris eventually was was a rebirth after
Speaker 4: Kyoto fizzled, and it was supposed to be then. And
Speaker 4: then because the Obama administration had nothing to bring because
Speaker 4: Waxman Marquee didn't evolve into law, then that meeting fizzled,
Speaker 4: also Climategate, but it was it was really a failure
Speaker 4: of the US to lead. And then we're you know,
Speaker 4: of course into a whole mess the next year with
Speaker 4: the Deep Water Horizon. But the Wasston Marquee, you know,
Speaker 4: the concept was good, and it was the first major
Speaker 4: attempt at an economy wide you.
Speaker 3: Know, law in the US, and it didn't didn't get there.
Speaker 6: And another important piece of that, and that's a great summary, Kurt,
Speaker 6: is that this really came during a moment when a
Speaker 6: lot of conservatives were sort of cautiously embracing climate action publicly,
Speaker 6: including even Rupert Murdoch, who said he wanted to use
Speaker 6: his media empire to push out pro climate messages at
Speaker 6: one point, which just seems insane now, but you had
Speaker 6: the heads of oil companies coming out saying climate change
Speaker 6: is real. Lindsey Graham was backing the cap and trade effort,
Speaker 6: and so the smart oil and gas people realized they
Speaker 6: needed to break that emerging consensus on the right. And
Speaker 6: so when all of these Tea Party protests started erupting
Speaker 6: around healthcare, that's when coke industries and other oil and
Speaker 6: gas money kind of got involved in trying to steer
Speaker 6: that grassroots right wing movement again that's climate action. And
Speaker 6: they were very successful in doing that. And as the
Speaker 6: Tea Party progressed, one of its major policy goals was
Speaker 6: to repeal Wax and Marquee. And in the process of
Speaker 6: all of these like angry revolts and far right people
Speaker 6: screaming at their representatives, Lindsey Graham got spooked. He pulled
Speaker 6: his support for the bill. Fox News went fully in
Speaker 6: bed with the Tea Party and was pulled even further
Speaker 6: to the right. A lot of these sort of conservative
Speaker 6: thought leader people backed off and started embracing climate denial again,
Speaker 6: and within a few years, this consensus that we needed
Speaker 6: to do something about climate change, even among conservatives was
Speaker 6: sort of like lying in tatters on the ground.
Speaker 7: It's interesting and depressing story.
Speaker 4: McCain also needs to be mentioned there. McCain, who lost
Speaker 4: to Bush in the Republican primary for two thousand comes
Speaker 4: back and becomes a climate champion and pushes a bill
Speaker 4: for years that was losing again and again and again.
Speaker 4: But that was part of what Jeff was mentioning that
Speaker 4: there was there were actually a lot of conservatives who
Speaker 4: realized something had to be done on this, and that
Speaker 4: was pushing Bush, and that was pushing the politics on it.
Speaker 4: You know, even Mitt Romney, who ran for president against Obama,
Speaker 4: was better on a climate change than any Republican had been.
Speaker 4: So there's an inevitability in two thousand and nine that
Speaker 4: I think we squandered collectively.
Speaker 7: Despite this consistent effort to push against any kind of action,
Speaker 7: and you know, the billions and billions of dollars and
Speaker 7: lobbying and marketing and fogus research and all of this stuff,
Speaker 7: the industry does still position itself as part of the
Speaker 7: solution on climate And I wonder if you could speak
Speaker 7: to I guess see how and why that is still happening.
Speaker 6: Well, I think more than anything else. The oil and
Speaker 6: gas industry is in the business of managing risk. And
Speaker 6: so despite this like full fledged turn towards insane, hardcore
Speaker 6: climate change denial under the Trump administration, a lot of
Speaker 6: major oil and gas companies they're still kind of hedging
Speaker 6: their bets politically, I think a little bit. They can
Speaker 6: kind of like implicitly support a lot of the things
Speaker 6: the Trump administration is doing, but they won't come out
Speaker 6: and say, yeah, all of this climate stuff was like
Speaker 6: totally bullshit and we actually think it's fake because they
Speaker 6: know the political wins could turn again and then that's
Speaker 6: suddenly going to become a liability for them, and so
Speaker 6: I think it's in their best interest to sort of
Speaker 6: maintain this very kind of like hollow facade that they
Speaker 6: are climate leaders while kind of quietly racing everything that
Speaker 6: Trump is pushing.
Speaker 7: Well, and there are global companies too, right, so they
Speaker 7: still have deal with other governments.
Speaker 5: I think the example that we have on equin or
Speaker 5: the state owned company Norway is quite telling. Actually the
Speaker 5: Utanists contributed with the an old company that is sort
Speaker 5: of bound by a lot of climate legislation in Norway
Speaker 5: and the carbon tax, but still sort of yeah, produce
Speaker 5: a lot of oil, but then have had to change
Speaker 5: their model and talking about producing green oil, basically electrifying
Speaker 5: all of their production, but still pumping up oil and gas.
Speaker 5: And that's very much like how they have been able
Speaker 5: to well portray themselves as part of some kind of
Speaker 5: solution being greener than other oil companies. Again, coming back
Speaker 5: to this focus on emission that really offers an opt
Speaker 5: out in or an opt in to continue to produce
Speaker 5: fossil fuels.
Speaker 4: Perhaps, Yeah, I mean going to the chapter and the
Speaker 4: time frame we're talking about here. Just before Paris, the
Speaker 4: oil industry, many big oil companies form the Oil and
Speaker 4: Gas Climate Initiative, the OGCI, and they you know, it's
Speaker 4: a total pr effort, but they form a new trade
Speaker 4: association internationally to help to solve climate change. On its face,
Speaker 4: and you know, it includes a lot of happy talk
Speaker 4: about natural gas as a cleaner form of energy and
Speaker 4: how it's a bridge fuel, and then it talks they
Speaker 4: talk about carbon capture a lot, and they are trying
Speaker 4: to get a seat at the table.
Speaker 3: They effectively do.
Speaker 4: Initially excellent and Chevron did not join that, and eventually
Speaker 4: they've realized that's the way to go. But it's again
Speaker 4: having credibility, needing to look like they are part of
Speaker 4: the solution is the whole game, to not look like
Speaker 4: an obstruction, to look like they care too. That's really
Speaker 4: what they That's what they say in they're advertising, by
Speaker 4: the way, we care. But it's really important, and they
Speaker 4: also have us. All hostage is the other truth, right,
Speaker 4: All governments of the world are hostage to the oil
Speaker 4: industry at some level, and whether as a producer or
Speaker 4: a consumer, they can use this economic blackmail anywhere anytime.
Speaker 7: Okay, Christopher, I have a history question for you. I
Speaker 7: want to talk about a little bit of the history
Speaker 7: of just, you know, any kind of efforts to a
Speaker 7: dress environmental problems at an international level in general, and
Speaker 7: how the industry gets involved right from the beginning. So
Speaker 7: you talk about this in the chapter of pulling to
Speaker 7: the other of efforts through the International Chamber, and then
Speaker 7: how the industry deals with the Brutland Commission and the
Speaker 7: formation of IPKA and all of this stuff, which I
Speaker 7: find really interesting, and I'm sorry to distill it all
Speaker 7: down to just one question, but I can I talk
Speaker 7: a little bit about that period of the early seventies
Speaker 7: to the early nineties and how they ingratiate themselves into
Speaker 7: these international efforts.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think that's and you have also written about this,
Speaker 5: I know, but I think it's such an important part
Speaker 5: for understanding this idea of co option, that they were
Speaker 5: there from the start, As you say, old men like
Speaker 5: Marris Strong was part of we're sharing the Stockholm conference
Speaker 5: in nineteen seventy two. And actually what some scholars have
Speaker 5: shown that the industry position was actually sort of a
Speaker 5: sort of after competence, that these people we're seen as
Speaker 5: people that could well do stuff, make things happen. So
Speaker 5: oil industry was already in Stockholm and in later conferences.
Speaker 5: Part of the discussion about how well basically how we
Speaker 5: understand sustainability or sustainable development, and particularly in this part
Speaker 5: that Ankle Symbticus has contributed to a lot and also
Speaker 5: written about in other parts, is how basically these international
Speaker 5: business organizations coordinate, through international Chamber of Commerce and other
Speaker 5: venues like and conferences and such basically to come up
Speaker 5: with their own position, to come up whe their position
Speaker 5: or already made answer that they could actually use in
Speaker 5: discussions about central concepts like sustainable development or precautionary principles
Speaker 5: or those kind of important topics throughout sort of nine
Speaker 5: eighties and ninety nineties. But if they're part of that
Speaker 5: discussion up until maybe the ninety nineties, something clearly changes
Speaker 5: after the establishment of IPCC, and yeah, that climate change
Speaker 5: really becomes more of a salient issue, but yeah, a
Speaker 5: more important issue in the nineteen nineties, and that's when
Speaker 5: we see this more aggressive push against any type of
Speaker 5: climate action. So I think it's important to have in
Speaker 5: mind that they were there from the start, and they
Speaker 5: have in all of these organizations from the start.
Speaker 7: The Paris Agreement comes up, of course a lot throughout
Speaker 7: this whole book and in this chapter, and I do
Speaker 7: feel like this thing has happened where it's pointed to,
Speaker 7: is this big success, But in some ways it seems
Speaker 7: like a real win for industry as well. So I'm
Speaker 7: going to throw that thorny question at you. Who is
Speaker 7: Paris a win for?
Speaker 3: If anyone, it's pretty grim.
Speaker 4: I mean, I think that goes back to that quote
Speaker 4: at the top that no government really still wants to
Speaker 4: commit to anything that you know everybody else isn't doing.
Speaker 4: There's so much selfishness embodied in the Framework Convention or
Speaker 4: it'll never leave. It's not it's also part of it,
Speaker 4: but it will never leave. And the industry knows. The
Speaker 4: industry knows they can prey on that. So to have
Speaker 4: an agreement that relies on government pledges that have to
Speaker 4: be met by the governments takes the burden off of
Speaker 4: the industry really, because it's then the government's fault if
Speaker 4: they don't meet the pledge, and they know that. And
Speaker 4: also pretty much every pledge included magical solutions like carbon
Speaker 4: capture as part of the pledge, so they kind of
Speaker 4: built their survival into the UK Pledge, the US Pledge,
Speaker 4: other big government policies to sort of show or try
Speaker 4: to make an oil future inevitable.
Speaker 3: And the main thing they want there is.
Speaker 4: You know, yeah, yeah, yeah, we care, but you're not
Speaker 4: going to turn off oil and gas tomorrow, right, And
Speaker 4: then they haven't yeah, and the government has to say, well, yes,
Speaker 4: of course, we're reasonable, we're not going to turn it
Speaker 4: off tomorrow, and then you buy time and then you
Speaker 4: have a way out, and by the time we get
Speaker 4: back to another agreement, all those other politicians are dead
Speaker 4: and buried and they start again with denial and that's
Speaker 4: pretty grim.
Speaker 3: But that is the best they could do. I think
Speaker 3: in twenty fifteen they probably if you talk to.
Speaker 4: Someone like the Obama administration or Al Gore even they
Speaker 4: would say, we got the best we could out of
Speaker 4: that moment. And there's some very smart, practical people who
Speaker 4: try to push the international agreements as hard as they
Speaker 4: can and get what they can. But it's a tough
Speaker 4: sport because you're up against a mountain of resistance.
Speaker 7: So you say at the end of the chapter, if
Speaker 7: far right and authoritarian politics continue to gain hold, this
Speaker 7: trend may herald a new form of denial and obstruction
Speaker 7: that is not passive or opaque, but blatantly refuses to
Speaker 7: comply with the scientific warnings about climate change. I think
Speaker 7: we're there in the US. So where are you seeing
Speaker 7: this turn up? And what are you sort of anticipating
Speaker 7: to see in the next couple of years.
Speaker 6: Well, it's funny because when we had that prediction at
Speaker 6: the end of our chapter, it did feel like a
Speaker 6: little bit like edgy or like looking out a little
Speaker 6: bit to include something like that. And now, of course,
Speaker 6: like hardcore climate denial is the mainstream in the US,
Speaker 6: and of former fracking executive is the head of the
Speaker 6: Department of Energy, and he commissioned climate deniers active during
Speaker 6: the heyday of denial in the nineties to come back
Speaker 6: and write a report saying that humans may not be
Speaker 6: the primary cause of global temperatureize. And now the Trump
Speaker 6: administration is using that to demolish US climate policy and
Speaker 6: deregulate oil and gas. So we in the US at
Speaker 6: least we're fully there. But I think versions of this
Speaker 6: are kind of like echoing out across the world. In
Speaker 6: the UK, Nigel Farage and Reform have like fully gone
Speaker 6: in on climate denial. There's like slightly more subtle forms
Speaker 6: of it in Canada and the big like Tarzans producing areas,
Speaker 6: and so I think it shows that like whatever the
Speaker 6: mainstream political context is will determine how the oil and
Speaker 6: gas industry is going to react, and the big companies
Speaker 6: haven't so far are fully jumped back into the climate
Speaker 6: denial mode. But it's this has shifted the whole center
Speaker 6: of gravity in terms of how these companies are going
Speaker 6: to react to what's going on in politics.
Speaker 5: I think also one important context for this is basically
Speaker 5: Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the geopolitic, like the political
Speaker 5: concerns that followed after that in terms of energy policy,
Speaker 5: that made both this well refusal or denial, but also
Speaker 5: a very mainstreaming of the economic scare tactics that basically
Speaker 5: open up for this kind of denial that we are
Speaker 5: we have other priorities, we have other things that we
Speaker 5: need to think about right now, so we cannot deal
Speaker 5: with this messy topic of climate change, your climate action.
Speaker 5: So I think that really shifted the balance. And in Sweden, well,
Speaker 5: I mean the Sweden, the far right Sweden Democrats have
Speaker 5: been sort of the closest allies to the more denialist
Speaker 5: groups from well basically twenty tens. But yeah, now it's
Speaker 5: their policies that dictates much of what is happening today.