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Speaker 1: When I first started doing this and I would talk

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Speaker 1: about climate change, it was like another subject like geology, hydrology, meteorology,

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Speaker 1: and it was well received. And then at some point

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Speaker 1: it got politicized.

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Speaker 2: Exton as a company was putting ads in the newspaper

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Speaker 2: that were contrary to the research that they were paying

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Speaker 2: us to be doing.

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Speaker 1: Well.

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Speaker 3: Some of the predictions, like sea level rise go all

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Speaker 3: the way back to the nineteen fifties. Other predictions developed later,

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Speaker 3: maybe in the seventies and eighties, and what we're seeing

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Speaker 3: now is that all these predictions are coming true.

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Speaker 4: So this is an experiment in shifting public opinion away

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Speaker 4: from urgency, because they know by nineteen ninety one we're

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Speaker 4: on the verge of a call to arms. There is

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Speaker 4: legislation being proposed, there's hearings in Congress, there's going to

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Speaker 4: be an international meeting about this, and international body has

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Speaker 4: been formed to study it. The world is waking up.

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Speaker 4: A lot of people today think of Russian bought armies

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Speaker 4: and information wars and the.

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Speaker 3: Well oiled political propaganda machine operating in the US as

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Speaker 3: a modern invention brought about by data mining and social media.

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Speaker 3: In fact, those are just new tools in an established trade,

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Speaker 3: and that trade was perfected in the nineteen eighties and

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Speaker 3: nineteen nineties on one long running, well orchestrated campaign that

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Speaker 3: spanned industries. It manipulated not only the media, but also

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Speaker 3: various institutions and the general public. It turned America's individualism

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Speaker 3: on itself and twisted it. It planted the right people

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Speaker 3: at the right parties to make sure progress could be stopped.

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Speaker 3: I'm talking about patient zero in the US propaganda war,

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Speaker 3: the creation of climate denial. This is a story that's

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Speaker 3: been told a few different times, in a few different ways,

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Speaker 3: but always with some key pieces missing.

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Speaker 4: And let's just say we've found the pieces.

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Speaker 3: I'm Amy Westervelt, and this is drilled