9 ms·

How the oil industry made us doubt climate change

72 points by willvarfar 6y ago

guerby 6y ago
"They ran advertising campaigns designed to undermine public support, cherry picking the data to say, 'Well if the world is warming up, why is Kentucky getting colder?' They asked rhetorical questions designed to create confusion, to create doubt," argued Naomi Oreskes. (...) The ICE campaign identified two groups which would be most susceptible to its messaging. The first was "older, lesser educated males from larger households who are not typically information seekers". The second group was "younger, low-income women," who could be targeted with bespoke adverts which would liken those who talked about climate change to a hysterical doom-saying cartoon chicken. " Brutal.
Hokusai 6y ago
> "What he wrote is the same memo we have seen in multiple industries subsequently," says David Michaels, author of The Triumph of Doubt, which details how the pesticides, plastics and sugar industries have also used these tactics. Meanwhile big corporations go unpunished for killing people in the thousands and making live worse for millions things would not change. The result of their actions is death at a scale that most criminals cannot even imagine. But, as they commit their murders with several degrees of separation from the consequences it seems that many people don't hold them accountable (and dirty money also helps). Related news: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24535241 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24535241 (Global banks defy U.S. crackdowns by serving oligarchs, criminals and terrorists )
- acqq 6y ago
  The new book mentioned: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-triumph-of-doubt-9780190922665 https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-triumph-of-doubt... "The Triumph of Doubt -- Dark Money and the Science of Deception" David Michaels, April 2020 "- An insider's look at the machinations of manufactured doubt in science — bogus studies, congressional testimonies, think-tank policy documents — and how they have risen to prominence in American life and government - Details how corporations manipulate science not just to defend dangerous products and activities, but also to market them as safe - New details around high-profile cases of manufactured, misleading uncertainty, including in car manufacturing, professional sports, our food and drink, and the air we breathe"
- ncmncm 6y ago
  Laws already on the books permit prosecution of those executives. The Justice Department only needs to apply them, as written.
kristopolous 6y ago
I really wish there were public trust crimes with penalties of dissolving a corporate charter. Currently unscrupulous people face no consequences except for extremely limited brief public shaming. When we got rid of kings, I don't think this was an intended replacement.
sunseb 6y ago
Yeah and 16 years old Greta Thunberg is telling the truth of course and we should blindly trust her.
- xtian 6y ago
  The only people with strong opinions on Greta Thunberg as a celebrity figure are those completely ignorant of the scientific consensus on the climate crisis. Go read the IPCC report and then decide how much you need to care about Greta Thunberg.
- ManuelKiessling 6y ago
  Why listen to a 16 years old girl, or even blindly trust her? You'd be an idiot if you did that. You might, however, consider listening to / reading the IPCC reports, and then start to form an opinion.
  - steve_adams_86 6y ago
    I agree with you, but there is no shortage of people who believe the IPCC is no more credible than Thunburg. Asking people to read those reports doesn’t seem to motivate anyone to do so. I often wonder what a valid alternative would be. It’s a hard problem.
    - acqq 6y ago
      IPCC is a huge report and it is a result of a work of international cooperation of more than a hundred of countries. As such it's not an easy read. Here are some book suggestions, some of them could be easier to read: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/climate/climate-change-books.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/climate/climate-cha... But the typical people denying the thing even existing will seldom be willing to hear from anybody but those they trust -- it's a kind of tribal thing. You can try to give the facts to somebody, but for that you should first learn yourself enough answers to the issues they will typically raise. Basically you should really expect all the arguments like in the links and learn enough to understand the topic and be able to give a reliable answer: https://grist.org/series/skeptics/ https://grist.org/series/skeptics/ or https://opr.ca.gov/facts/common-denier-arguments.html https://opr.ca.gov/facts/common-denier-arguments.html But people don't tend to believe just the "facts" if these are just told to them, even the opposite happens, they have to be involved in the process of learning -- the whole process of coming to new perspectives they can relate -- and that takes a lot of time and patience.
kossTKR 6y ago
Let me recommend the book "Toxic Sludge Is Good For You" - despite the rather silly title that book is an extremely thorough historical examination of PR, AstroTurfing and in general a rather shocking unveiling of an aspect corporate power that most people know very little about - from Edward Bernais right up until about when the internet really took over. Lobbying, policy writing, press release creating, corrupting and local power infiltrating hidden complexes was already completely all encompassing and dangerous to everything "scientific" and everything "true" 20 years ago. I can't even begin to imagine how advanced that system has become today with social media, fake grassroots, corporate sponsored think tanks and targeted advertisement. Rather scary.
- amelius 6y ago
  Interesting, but we need a book that explains what we can do about it.
  - klyrs 6y ago
    Simple. Overthrow both dominant political parties in the US and replace them with altruistic "save-the-world" type politicians who are impervious to lobbying/bribery. Er, nevermind, not simple.
  - loopz 6y ago
    Stop your support of it. Simple.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- floor2 6y ago
  This comment shows the same strange (to me) bias that I see so often now, of using "corporate" as a scary or negative thing. Would a think tank sponsored by a religious organization be inherently better than one with corporate sponsors? Is lobbying by the prison guards union more beneficial to society than lobbying by a trade group? Is the grassroots anti-vax movement more trustworthy than the corporate vaccine producers?
thisjustinm 6y ago
For anyone looking to dive even deeper I highly recommend the Drilled podcast (https://www.criticalfrequency.org/drilled https://www.criticalfrequency.org/drilled) in particular season 3 which gets into the formation of PR and advertising around oil companies.
rbecker 6y ago
All right, then lets doubt it. Lets try to massively cut emissions until we're sure they won't have catastrophic climate effects. If you're not sure whether you'll have a car accident or not, you still take precautions and put on your seat-belt. Only if you're sure you won't have one, can you go without.
smitty1e 6y ago
In all seriousness, wouldn't doubting climate change mean supporting the idea of a constant climate? Perhaps I'm being obtuse, but "climate change" seems so amorphous as to be irrefutable. Clean air, clean water, and a safe environment are positive arguments that sane adults can support. Tell me about the latest nuclear reactor designs.
- breakyerself 6y ago
  Global warming is the root of the issue. Global warming is causing climate change. Because we've caused a 40% increase in atmospheric co2 by releasing tens of billions of tons of it into the atmosphere every year. Yes nuclear probably has a role to play, but it isn't a silver bullet. we should be putting a price on co2 emissions and letting the market decide how best to decarbonize. Different markets will almost certainly choose different things depending on their climate, topography, economy, available capital, and level of development.
  - smitty1e 6y ago
    The idea of carbon markets as such is well worth discussing. Of particular interest is who 'we' are and who is controlling 'we'. The act of carrying out decisions is substantially less concerning than who is managing the decisions.
    - breakyerself 6y ago
      Cap and trade was effective in ending the emissions of ozone depleting gasses in the 1980s and it's kind of cool to see legacy automakers buying carbon credits from Tesla effectively subsidizing their own replacement, but I really think putting a price on carbon helps to reduce the difficulty of having to worry about who is administrating the carbon market. It's much simpler and harder to game the system if governments just put a tax on fossil fuels at their source. Then the regular markets will decarbonize without the need for administration of a complex regulatory scheme.
onecommentman 6y ago
“They asked rhetorical questions designed to create confusion, to create doubt.” The same complaint made against every scientist and every intellectual who significantly challenged the Church or the State in a public forum. When this becomes your complaint, you’ve moved from reasoned discourse into the area of theology known as apologetics, talking chicken or no. Let me know how the auto-da-fe works out for you, Naomi. Every eyeball-minute spent trying to sell or refute “climate change” is an opportunity wasted on addressing today’s concrete issues in global water quality, water supply, fire management, air quality, soil quality and the like. It’s a perverse sort of global irresponsibility. I guess so many folks are salivating over a multi trillion dollar global slush fund, with no practicable short or middle term accountability, that they don’t care about the hundreds of thousands of excess deaths, young and old, occurring over the next few years by not focusing on fundamental issues today. (They are probably the wrong color of victims for those folks to care about anyway.) And if “climate change” proves to be an unsound waste of global talent and resources that could have been better spent on direct near-term water, air, soil projects...well, they got their pot of gold or egoboo, didn’t they? Imagine, trillions of dollars going to any despotic global regime smart enough to preload GPT-3 with global warming essays, and with no practical means of holding them accountable, since any impacts will be decades into the future and a tiny interconnected impact at that. What could possibly go wrong? Meanwhile another child died of lung disease in Delhi. Are you aware the near-term impacts of bad air quality on health and quality of life? Now consider no clean water, or no water at all, for major global cities. These are hard enough problems on their own but any climate effect is a compounding one, not a core one. Too many people, not enough land, too few trees, too much polluting economic activity, poor agricultural practices, not enough clean water, over urbanization...a few Trillion on these core elements might get the world somewhere. Again, maybe for the slush fund people this may affect the wrong color people. There is the international political benefit of blaming decades of political mismanagement on some mysterious outside element with deep pockets, instead of taking responsibility for local actions. But local action is the most critical element in addressing the issues. Of course, once the slush fund money is doled out, I don’t think they would care if kids’ lives were ever spared. Just a guess. BTW...this is not a classic Red-Blue issue.
steve76 6y ago
Get two sides to fight, then walk right through the middle of it. Wouldn't be the worse thing profiteers did either. You would be surprised at how far people would go for power. Big things, Wars. Depressions. All just because of some power mad jerk who has all the money anyways. Perhaps they look at their own contributions and leave other people alone? Siccing mobs on others. Burning down a hundred USA cities because of fentanyl. What's the carbon footprint of that? Think Escape from New York, which still sucks up the wealth of a nation. Trillions spent to build a cruel malicious hell hole. Not a word about China or India. They say they are poor. In fact they are richer than any corporation will ever be. The oceans are absorbing the warming now, right? 70% of the Earth? More CO2 and a degree warmer means more algae. More algae means more photosynthesis. Not just on a small patch of land around humans. 70% of the entire planet and layered on top of it. The USA uses less energy, not just per capita but overall. Aged population and better design mostly. Leave me alone. You don't want to know find out what I'm capable of when I'm freezing to death or starving.

72 points by willvarfar 6y ago

"They ran advertising campaigns designed to undermine public support, cherry picking the data to say, 'Well if the world is warming up, why is Kentucky getting colder?' They asked rhetorical questions designed to create confusion, to create doubt," argued Naomi Oreskes. (...) The ICE campaign identified two groups which would be most susceptible to its messaging. The first was "older, lesser educated males from larger households who are not typically information seekers". The second group was "younger, low-income women," who could be targeted with bespoke adverts which would liken those who talked about climate change to a hysterical doom-saying cartoon chicken. " Brutal.

Hokusai 6y ago

> "What he wrote is the same memo we have seen in multiple industries subsequently," says David Michaels, author of The Triumph of Doubt, which details how the pesticides, plastics and sugar industries have also used these tactics. Meanwhile big corporations go unpunished for killing people in the thousands and making live worse for millions things would not change. The result of their actions is death at a scale that most criminals cannot even imagine. But, as they commit their murders with several degrees of separation from the consequences it seems that many people don't hold them accountable (and dirty money also helps). Related news: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24535241 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24535241 (Global banks defy U.S. crackdowns by serving oligarchs, criminals and terrorists )

acqq 6y ago
The new book mentioned: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-triumph-of-doubt-9780190922665 https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-triumph-of-doubt... "The Triumph of Doubt -- Dark Money and the Science of Deception" David Michaels, April 2020 "- An insider's look at the machinations of manufactured doubt in science — bogus studies, congressional testimonies, think-tank policy documents — and how they have risen to prominence in American life and government - Details how corporations manipulate science not just to defend dangerous products and activities, but also to market them as safe - New details around high-profile cases of manufactured, misleading uncertainty, including in car manufacturing, professional sports, our food and drink, and the air we breathe"
ncmncm 6y ago
Laws already on the books permit prosecution of those executives. The Justice Department only needs to apply them, as written.

kristopolous 6y ago

I really wish there were public trust crimes with penalties of dissolving a corporate charter. Currently unscrupulous people face no consequences except for extremely limited brief public shaming. When we got rid of kings, I don't think this was an intended replacement.

sunseb 6y ago

Yeah and 16 years old Greta Thunberg is telling the truth of course and we should blindly trust her.

xtian 6y ago
The only people with strong opinions on Greta Thunberg as a celebrity figure are those completely ignorant of the scientific consensus on the climate crisis. Go read the IPCC report and then decide how much you need to care about Greta Thunberg.
ManuelKiessling 6y ago
Why listen to a 16 years old girl, or even blindly trust her? You'd be an idiot if you did that. You might, however, consider listening to / reading the IPCC reports, and then start to form an opinion.
- steve_adams_86 6y ago
  I agree with you, but there is no shortage of people who believe the IPCC is no more credible than Thunburg. Asking people to read those reports doesn’t seem to motivate anyone to do so. I often wonder what a valid alternative would be. It’s a hard problem.
  - acqq 6y ago
    IPCC is a huge report and it is a result of a work of international cooperation of more than a hundred of countries. As such it's not an easy read. Here are some book suggestions, some of them could be easier to read: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/climate/climate-change-books.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/climate/climate-cha... But the typical people denying the thing even existing will seldom be willing to hear from anybody but those they trust -- it's a kind of tribal thing. You can try to give the facts to somebody, but for that you should first learn yourself enough answers to the issues they will typically raise. Basically you should really expect all the arguments like in the links and learn enough to understand the topic and be able to give a reliable answer: https://grist.org/series/skeptics/ https://grist.org/series/skeptics/ or https://opr.ca.gov/facts/common-denier-arguments.html https://opr.ca.gov/facts/common-denier-arguments.html But people don't tend to believe just the "facts" if these are just told to them, even the opposite happens, they have to be involved in the process of learning -- the whole process of coming to new perspectives they can relate -- and that takes a lot of time and patience.

kossTKR 6y ago

Let me recommend the book "Toxic Sludge Is Good For You" - despite the rather silly title that book is an extremely thorough historical examination of PR, AstroTurfing and in general a rather shocking unveiling of an aspect corporate power that most people know very little about - from Edward Bernais right up until about when the internet really took over. Lobbying, policy writing, press release creating, corrupting and local power infiltrating hidden complexes was already completely all encompassing and dangerous to everything "scientific" and everything "true" 20 years ago. I can't even begin to imagine how advanced that system has become today with social media, fake grassroots, corporate sponsored think tanks and targeted advertisement. Rather scary.

amelius 6y ago
Interesting, but we need a book that explains what we can do about it.
- klyrs 6y ago
  Simple. Overthrow both dominant political parties in the US and replace them with altruistic "save-the-world" type politicians who are impervious to lobbying/bribery. Er, nevermind, not simple.
- loopz 6y ago
  Stop your support of it. Simple.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
floor2 6y ago
This comment shows the same strange (to me) bias that I see so often now, of using "corporate" as a scary or negative thing. Would a think tank sponsored by a religious organization be inherently better than one with corporate sponsors? Is lobbying by the prison guards union more beneficial to society than lobbying by a trade group? Is the grassroots anti-vax movement more trustworthy than the corporate vaccine producers?

thisjustinm 6y ago

For anyone looking to dive even deeper I highly recommend the Drilled podcast (https://www.criticalfrequency.org/drilled https://www.criticalfrequency.org/drilled) in particular season 3 which gets into the formation of PR and advertising around oil companies.

rbecker 6y ago

All right, then lets doubt it. Lets try to massively cut emissions until we're sure they won't have catastrophic climate effects. If you're not sure whether you'll have a car accident or not, you still take precautions and put on your seat-belt. Only if you're sure you won't have one, can you go without.

smitty1e 6y ago

In all seriousness, wouldn't doubting climate change mean supporting the idea of a constant climate? Perhaps I'm being obtuse, but "climate change" seems so amorphous as to be irrefutable. Clean air, clean water, and a safe environment are positive arguments that sane adults can support. Tell me about the latest nuclear reactor designs.

breakyerself 6y ago
Global warming is the root of the issue. Global warming is causing climate change. Because we've caused a 40% increase in atmospheric co2 by releasing tens of billions of tons of it into the atmosphere every year. Yes nuclear probably has a role to play, but it isn't a silver bullet. we should be putting a price on co2 emissions and letting the market decide how best to decarbonize. Different markets will almost certainly choose different things depending on their climate, topography, economy, available capital, and level of development.
- smitty1e 6y ago
  The idea of carbon markets as such is well worth discussing. Of particular interest is who 'we' are and who is controlling 'we'. The act of carrying out decisions is substantially less concerning than who is managing the decisions.
  - breakyerself 6y ago
    Cap and trade was effective in ending the emissions of ozone depleting gasses in the 1980s and it's kind of cool to see legacy automakers buying carbon credits from Tesla effectively subsidizing their own replacement, but I really think putting a price on carbon helps to reduce the difficulty of having to worry about who is administrating the carbon market. It's much simpler and harder to game the system if governments just put a tax on fossil fuels at their source. Then the regular markets will decarbonize without the need for administration of a complex regulatory scheme.

onecommentman 6y ago

“They asked rhetorical questions designed to create confusion, to create doubt.” The same complaint made against every scientist and every intellectual who significantly challenged the Church or the State in a public forum. When this becomes your complaint, you’ve moved from reasoned discourse into the area of theology known as apologetics, talking chicken or no. Let me know how the auto-da-fe works out for you, Naomi. Every eyeball-minute spent trying to sell or refute “climate change” is an opportunity wasted on addressing today’s concrete issues in global water quality, water supply, fire management, air quality, soil quality and the like. It’s a perverse sort of global irresponsibility. I guess so many folks are salivating over a multi trillion dollar global slush fund, with no practicable short or middle term accountability, that they don’t care about the hundreds of thousands of excess deaths, young and old, occurring over the next few years by not focusing on fundamental issues today. (They are probably the wrong color of victims for those folks to care about anyway.) And if “climate change” proves to be an unsound waste of global talent and resources that could have been better spent on direct near-term water, air, soil projects...well, they got their pot of gold or egoboo, didn’t they? Imagine, trillions of dollars going to any despotic global regime smart enough to preload GPT-3 with global warming essays, and with no practical means of holding them accountable, since any impacts will be decades into the future and a tiny interconnected impact at that. What could possibly go wrong? Meanwhile another child died of lung disease in Delhi. Are you aware the near-term impacts of bad air quality on health and quality of life? Now consider no clean water, or no water at all, for major global cities. These are hard enough problems on their own but any climate effect is a compounding one, not a core one. Too many people, not enough land, too few trees, too much polluting economic activity, poor agricultural practices, not enough clean water, over urbanization...a few Trillion on these core elements might get the world somewhere. Again, maybe for the slush fund people this may affect the wrong color people. There is the international political benefit of blaming decades of political mismanagement on some mysterious outside element with deep pockets, instead of taking responsibility for local actions. But local action is the most critical element in addressing the issues. Of course, once the slush fund money is doled out, I don’t think they would care if kids’ lives were ever spared. Just a guess. BTW...this is not a classic Red-Blue issue.

steve76 6y ago

Get two sides to fight, then walk right through the middle of it. Wouldn't be the worse thing profiteers did either. You would be surprised at how far people would go for power. Big things, Wars. Depressions. All just because of some power mad jerk who has all the money anyways. Perhaps they look at their own contributions and leave other people alone? Siccing mobs on others. Burning down a hundred USA cities because of fentanyl. What's the carbon footprint of that? Think Escape from New York, which still sucks up the wealth of a nation. Trillions spent to build a cruel malicious hell hole. Not a word about China or India. They say they are poor. In fact they are richer than any corporation will ever be. The oceans are absorbing the warming now, right? 70% of the Earth? More CO2 and a degree warmer means more algae. More algae means more photosynthesis. Not just on a small patch of land around humans. 70% of the entire planet and layered on top of it. The USA uses less energy, not just per capita but overall. Aged population and better design mostly. Leave me alone. You don't want to know find out what I'm capable of when I'm freezing to death or starving.