I was going to wait on this, but it’s too important. The point has often been made that the climate denial industry is based on the disinformation techniques pioneered and developed by the Tobacco industry – Naomi Oreskes does it elsewhere on this page. There’s a lot of footage here of tobacco flacks presenting to media and congress.
The parallels between “there is still debate about the link between smoking and cancer” and “there is still debate about the link between CO2 and global climate” are obvious.
See if you can pick out the specific techniques – and see if you can listen to this whole film without getting nauseous as I did.
The part explaining the 1953 document that shows the industry had discovered a link between heavy smoking and cancer, yet made the report confidential got me worked up.
see the New York Times on documents from the mid 90s, ‘Global Climate Coalition” (denial group)
For more than a decade the Global Climate Coalition, a group representing industries with profits tied to fossil fuels, led an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign against the idea that emissions of heat-trapping gases could lead to global warming.
But a document filed in a federal lawsuit demonstrates that even as the coalition worked to sway opinion, its own scientific and technical experts were advising that the science backing the role of greenhouse gases in global warming could not be refuted.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/24/science/earth/24deny.html
My jaw is dropped. I’ll have to get back to read it all in detail later, but definitely bookmarked. Great link reference. Definitely saving the pdf referenced in the article. I also have that API memo describing a game plan to make Kyoto obsolete. Oh, and the Exxon tax filing documents that show donations to Heartland Institute for “climate change”.
So the premise is that the Global Climate Coalition’s own scientists were saying internally that CO2 can produce significant warming, yet they continued to campaign against that finding anyway. I had not seen this before. The parallel with the 1953 tobacco industry document is amazing.
Excuse me, I need to smash something.
Good shot.
Also => The Climate Change Denial Industry
“… We can see that the same people who were once denying the health risks of tobacco smoke are now spreading doubt about the scientific consensus on manmade climate change. …”
The difference in the tobacco story and what’s happening now is that we had a Congress then with most important members firmly in the camp of science. Now we don’t, which makes the obvious parallels of the tobacco and fossil fuels disinformation/doubt techniques all the more painful. Media and the blogosphere are also louder now, and many outlets are seductively pushing the industry disinformation. An unfortunate similarity is that we also have several scientists who continue to spread doubt about the importance of getting off fossil fuels.
Another big difference is that while tobacco can affect the next generation of children if their mothers smoked prenatally and those around them smoke as they grow, greenhouse gases will affect the young of all species for centuries to come. Moreover, our whole economy is based on fossil fuels but quitting smoking is an immediate option based on individual choice. The siren song of jobs vs. environment is way off key, but it, too, is seductive and more far more powerful with climate than in the tobacco struggle.
The stakes in this game are higher and the solutions far more challenging. Extinction is forever, and detrimental changes in climate are a threat multiplier for the species (human) that do survive.
Thank you for telling it like it is, even though this chilling documentary contributes to the deficit in my hope budget.
Keep enough in your hope budget to keep at it until the end. Hopefully, we all can.
Might be a good time to remind readers of the link between industry and government at this stage, as for example Exxon Mobil’s 2002 lobbying of the Bush administration to oust the IPCC president (see the leaked memo here: http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/files/pdfs/migrated/MultimediaFiles/Live/FullReport/4736.pdf)
You think this is despicable?
Consider that for the most part, smoking is voluntary and so, even adding in the family members and co-workers exposed to second-hand smoke, the effects are limited.
On the other hand, EVERYONE breathes toxic tropospheric ozone.
Believe it or not, the (not so) covert campaign to cast doubt on the science of diseases caused by ozone, and especially the DAMAGE DONE TO TREES AND PLANTS, has been proportionately that much vaster than the conspiracy to hide the harm done by tobacco,…to the point where there is virtually no public discussion and hasn’t been since it first became evident how enormous the problem is – back when the Ag. Dept. instituted the NCLAN (National Crop Loss Assessment Network) program, scaring the wits out of themselves, and the Forestry Dept. and Park Service figured out what is happening to trees.
It makes perfect sense, since as huge as the profits are in the tobacco industry, they are dwarfed by the profits generated by burning fuel.
You should really do a video on the many lawsuits and “public” hearings, and who has funded them, to impede and delay regulation by the EPA…not to mention the way progress has been co-opted by industry in the exact same revolving door system that has polluted the banking industry, including lobbying of politicians, and federal agencies appointed with oversight, and even universities.
Now, that’s REALLY nauseating and scary.
The story is the same, the motivation is the same, the techniques are the same, even the actors are the same. Whether it is tobacco causing cancer, or ozone causing tree deaths, or CO2 causing climate change, the script is the same. But, at least, in these cases, the respective industries can plausibly argue that they didn’t know of the adverse consequences when the business was first started and then had to dissemble and lie in order to keep their profits flowing. Did you know that in the case of Leaded Gasoline, the Lead was deliberately added for profit when there were perfectly acceptable, benign alternatives? Please take a look at the Nation’s article on “The Secret History of Lead” at:
http://www.thenation.com/article/secret-history-lead
Which leads me to contend that it is the culture that is messed up. It is a culture that puts profit above Life while paying lip service to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. To corrupt a culture, all you have to do is to corrupt its language so that the words don’t mean the same thing any more. All you have to do is to conflate the Pursuit of Happiness with the Pursuit of Affluence in order to fulfill an infinite procession of desires while “transforming people into constantly moving happiness machines, machines that are the key to economic progress,” as Herbert Hoover so eloquently put it.
And, voila’, you have the culture of modern industrial civilization. But, constantly moving happiness machines are the kind that do drugs in order to forget their disconnection from reality. That isn’t happiness as any ancient text worth its salt will tell you.
I was already aware that there were very distinct similarities between the tobacco lobby and the climate change denial lobby, bit just how similar hit me with this video. The arguments are almost exactly the same…
I just hope they won’t delay any effective measures for decades, as it are decades we don’t have…