Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming (11 page)

After we released the report five days early, we also contacted friends in London, England, where Ken Green and company had scheduled a press conference for the following Monday. (This itself was curious. The IPCC report was released in Paris. The Fraser Institute is based in Vancouver, B.C., and the American Enterprise Institute is in Washington, D.C. We wondered if they thought the London media wouldn’t have heard about the origin of the report.) When the event finally occurred, our London contacts distributed background information on the participants, and the few reporters who turned up seemed unmoved by the Fraser Institute’s analysis. If Exxon got any news coverage for this particular investment, we couldn’t find it.

This seemed like an excellent example, however, of some of the activities of a large group of “think tanks” that have come under public scrutiny for accepting funding from major industrial sources such as ExxonMobil and then challenging the science of climate change. I put the term “think tank” in quotes because it is so difficult to even define these organizations accurately, much less understand what they do. The original think tanks were founded as policy-development hothouses. They were organizations such as the Brookings Institution (founded 1916) in the U.S. or the C.D. Howe Institute (founded 1958) in Canada, where participants undertook research on issues of public interest and then served up the results for political and sometimes public consideration. The actual term “think tank” is thought to have emerged in the 1950s in reference to military intelligence organizations like the R AND Corporation (R AND is an acronym for “Research and Development”), which were established to try to advise government on how to keep the Cold War from going nuclear.

By the 1970s and ’80s think tanks were popping up like spring crocuses and seemed increasingly dedicated not to conceiving new policies, but rather to advocating for the kinds of policies that would advance the interests of their funders. We wound up with organizations like the Heartland Institute (founded in the Orwellian year 1984), which used its funding from Philip Morris not to consider whether smoking was a good thing, but to convince the public and, especially, the nation’s legislators that regulating against smoking was a bad thing. Even today (at least as of April 2009), Heartland maintains a pro-tobacco “Smokers’ Lounge” on its Web site, though it now refuses to acknowledge where the funding for this feature comes from. In short, for at least some of these institutions the emphasis has shifted from “think” to “tank.” What were once centers of academic excellence have become heavy-duty weapons in the battle for public opinion and political support.

This was fairly clear in the pro-tobacco performance of the Heartland Institute, but it was more difficult to establish on the climate change file. Greenpeace research director Kert Davies said in an interview with Richard Littlemore in February 2009 that his organization was becoming increasingly frustrated by the non-response from mainstream media to what Green-peace felt was an obvious, think tank-driven manipulation of the public conversation. Greenpeace had found and publicized the American Petroleum Institute’s “Global Climate Science Communications Plan,” which showed that four of the most prominent climate change-denying think tanks (the Heartland Institute, George C. Marshall Institute, American Legislative Exchange Council, and the Frontiers of Freedom Institute) were involved in conceiving that plan. But whenever Davies or his colleagues tried to point out the connection, reporters shrugged it off. No corpse, no bloodstained assassin, no story.

So Greenpeace researchers did what any conspiracy theorist (or smart police detective) does in this situation: they followed the money. A group called the Clearinghouse on Environmental Advocacy and Research had started to build a database in the 1990s that included records of major industry contributions to the wise use movement, a property-rights coalition that had been opposing environmental regulations ranging from wetland protection to the U.S. Endangered Species Act. Green-peace picked up the group’s material and research techniques and started composing a specific database of contributions that ExxonMobil was making to think tanks—and especially to think tanks participating in the campaign to promote uncertainty about climate change.

Davies said Greenpeace picked Exxon for two reasons. First, as the biggest and wealthiest corporation in the world, it had the capacity to exercise an immense influence. And second, it was the only major oil company in the world that had not by the turn of the century acknowledged that climate change was a problem and that the burning of fossil fuels was the principal cause.

The Greenpeace team set up a Web site called ExxonSecrets .org. Based on tax information and on Exxon’s own annual corporate giving report, ExxonSecrets laid out which think tanks were receiving money and how much. Through creative use of “mind-mapping” display technology, the site also drew connections among the institutions and “experts” who were making themselves famous (and increasing their incomes) by claiming that the science of climate change was still in doubt. For example, the scientist Dr. S. Fred Singer, a hardworking climate change denier who has done no obvious scientific work in the field for years, was shown as president of his own think tank, the Science & Environmental Policy Project; editorial advisory board member for the Cato Institute; advisory board member for the American Council on Science and Health; adjunct scholar for the National Center for Policy Analysis; research fellow for the Independent Institute; distinguished research professor at the Institute for Humane Studies, George Mason University; former adjunct fellow at the Frontiers of Freedom Institute; former fellow at the Hoover Institution; former fellow at the Heritage Foundation; former fellow at TASSC; and editor of the newsletter
Global Climate Change.
ExxonSecrets also showed that all of these organizations receive money directly or indirectly from Exxon.

ExxonSecrets established that in the ten years after the creation of the Kyoto Protocol, Exxon invested more than US$20 million in think tanks that dedicated a large amount of effort to questioning whether climate change was sound science.

While Greenpeace was nailing down the dollars, three academics were conducting a peer-reviewed study of actual think tank output from the early 1970s forward. Peter Jacques and Mark Freeman of the Department of Political Science at the University of Central Florida in Orlando and Riley Dunlap of the Department of Sociology at Oklahoma State University-Still-water looked at the rise in publications that express all kinds of “environmental skepticism.” Their paper, titled “The Organization of Denial: Conservative Think Tanks and Environmental Scepticism” and published in June 2008 in the journal
Environmental
Politics,
searched all the available English-language books published between 1972 and 2005 that denied the seriousness of environmental problems. They found 141 such books denying or downplaying the seriousness of issues including climate change; stratospheric ozone depletion; biodiversity loss; resource shortages; chemical and other pollutants in the air, water, or soil; threats to human health of trace chemical exposure; and the potential risks of genetic manipulation. Of those 141 books, 130 (92.2 percent) were published by conservative think tanks, written by authors affiliated with those think tanks, or both.

Jacques, Dunlap, and Freeman concluded that “environmental skeptics are not, as they portray themselves, independent and objective analysts. Rather, they are predominantly agents of conservative think tanks, and their success in promoting skepticism about environmental problems stems from their affiliation with these politically powerful institutions.”

As for the think tanks themselves, Jacques and company also argued that the batch of environmentally skeptical organizations were in a class by themselves:

Unlike traditional think tanks that aimed to provide reasonably “objective” policy analyses, CT Ts [conservative think tanks] are “advocacy” organisations that unabashedly promote conservative goals. Launched in the 1970s in reaction to social activism and an expanding federal government, CTTs were an institutional answer from American business leaders who during this time “voiced fears of ‘creeping socialism.’” The strategy was to create an activist counter-intelligentsia to conduct an effective “war of ideas” against proponents of government programmes designed to ameliorate presumed social problems such as poverty.

Thus, again the think tanks were not primarily engaged in research, but were acting as strategists and lobbyists in the “war of ideas.” The think tanks on the Jacques list also did more than publish books or other materials intended to influence public opinion or policy. In the most dramatic instance, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) twice sued the U.S. government in an effort to block the release of the
National Assessment of Climate
Change,
a comprehensive report on likely climate change effects and complications that was commissioned under the Clinton Administration and slipped into a drawer during the Bush years.

Jacques and company also attempted a random assessment of the material that the think tanks were promoting on their Web sites, aside from what they were pushing into print. The academics chose fifty conservative think tanks, gleaned from a list posted by the Heritage Foundation, which was established in 1973 and has stood as the granddaddy of conservative think tanks ever since. Then they checked the Web site content for material that promoted skepticism on environmental issues. Of the fifty identified, forty-five (90 percent) espoused environmentally skeptical policies. And of the forty-three skeptical think tanks that Jacques lists specifically in his paper, twenty-eight show up on the ExxonSecrets list as having accepted money from ExxonMobil in the past ten years.

Through the early years of the new millennium, there is little doubt that the CEI was the leading vehicle in the anti- climate-science think tank battalion. CEI was the biggest recipient of Exxon funding, taking more than US$2 million of the US$20 -plus million that Exxon spent on denial beginning in 1998. A leaked coal-industry memo also reported that GM and Ford were frequent funders of CEI’s climate change activities, although Ford specifically denied that it had funded CEI’s infamous series of TV commercials lauding the burning of fossil fuels and celebrating the production of carbon dioxide.
²

These commercials, which as of February 2009 were still available for viewing on the CEI Web site, were beautifully and expensively produced. They were also so over-the-top that they probably did CEI more damage than good. Featuring bubble-blowing beauties and lushly attractive photos of the sun rising over a distant oil refinery, the ads challenged evidence that carbon dioxide is creating any kind of problem in the world. Far from being a pollutant, the ads said, carbon dioxide is “essential to life.” With orchestral chords building in the soundtrack, the announcer intoned, “We breathe it out; plants breathe it in.” In the final scene a little girl blows the seeds off a single, perfect dandelion while the announcer says, “Carbon dioxide. They call it pollution. We call it life.”

What’s missing here is a sense of scope. Iron is an essential vitamin, but that would not make a diet of nails any more palatable.

There is no specific evidence of what pushed the Royal Society of London to object to CEI’s nonsense, but in September of 2006 news broke that this, one of the most august scientific bodies in the world, had called Exxon onto the carpet and demanded that it stop funding the denial machine and stop quibbling about the science. In a letter to Exxon that was leaked to the press and published in the U.K.
Guardian,
Bob Ward of the Royal Society said:

It is now more crucial than ever that we have a debate which is properly informed by the science. For people to be still producing information that misleads people about climate change is unhelpful. The next IPCC report should give people the final push that they need to take action and we can’t have people trying to undermine it . . . At our meeting in July . . . you indicated that ExxonMobil would not be providing any further funding to these organizations. I would be grateful if you could let me know when ExxonMobil plans to carry out this pledge.

In a response reported in the
Guardian
on September 20, 2006, under the headline “Royal Society Tells Exxon: Stop Funding Climate Change Denial,” an unnamed Exxon executive replied, “We can confirm that recently we received a letter from the Royal Society on the topic of climate change. Amongst other topics our Tomorrow’s Energy and Corporate Citizenship reports explain our views openly and honestly on climate change. We would refute any suggestion that our reports are inaccurate or misleading.” But by January 2007 Exxon was changing its tune on climate change and on funding the think tanks that had earned the Royal Society’s contempt. “We know enough now— or society knows enough now—that the risk is serious and action should be taken,” Exxon Vice President for Public Affairs Kenneth Cohen told the
Wall Street Journal.
In particular, Cohen announced that Exxon had cut off funding to the CEI.

That was all to the good, except that when Greenpeace checked the record later the same year, it found that Exxon during 2006 had still divided more than US$2 million among forty-one other think tanks active in the denial movement. And in May 2008, when Exxon released its
2007 Corporate Citizenship
Report,
it announced that it had cut off funding to only nine other groups, leaving a total investment of US$2 million to be divided among thirty-seven groups active in denying, delaying, minimizing, or equivocating about the effects of global warming.

Greenpeace’s Davies was encouraged, though, that Exxon actually acknowledged in its 2008 report that it had been financing activities that were, at the very least, unhelpful. Exxon said, “In 2008 we will discontinue contributions to several public policy interest groups whose position on climate change could divert attention from the important discussion on how the world will secure the energy required for economic growth in an environmentally responsible manner.” This, however, still contains the euphemistic reference to “groups whose position on climate change could divert attention.” It makes the idea of fooling the public about climate science seem almost accidental— and completely innocent.