Gaslighting (Big Oil Knew)

Ralph Levinson: Hi, I'm Dr. Ralph Levinson, Health Sciences Professor Emeritus at UCLA.

Luc Lewitanski: And I'm Luc Lewitanski, a French journalist covering technology, politics, and power.

Ralph Levinson: Welcome to Your Planet, Your Health, where we share stories about the environment without falling prey to despair. In these conversations, we explore the knowledge and tools that we can use to be good earthlings. Okay, Luc, today let's talk about the oil companies and their lies.

Luc Lewitanski: And to do that, we're going to look at a legal strategy that rests upon proving that the oil companies did in fact lie about the harm that they've been doing to the planet for decades, and we'll be delving into the historical record to prove it. So one way in which climate activists, stateside, are really taking matters back into their own hands is by organising a series of lawsuits against the oil company.

Ralph Levinson: Well, Luc, let me just interrupt you for a second. Remember, it's not just climate activists, it's governments that are suing.

Luc Lewitanski: And so this strategy rests upon the premise of saying that the oil companies are responsible. People's lives have been severely impacted by the way in which oil companies have knowingly poisoned the discourse about climate change.

Basically, you could argue they've hurt the species, they've hurt all of us earthlings to squeeze out their maximum profit out of what they could get in the short term. The legal argument to say that oil companies are on the hook for the damage that's caused by climate change implies that they knowingly misled the public about CO2's effect on the environment and thereby our survival.

Ralph Levinson: These lawsuits are trying to hold the oil companies responsible for the damage they've done. And part of doing this damage is predicated on the fact that the oil companies knew what was going on and that, you know, if it was inadvertent damage, there'd be no lawsuit.

Luc Lewitanski: So the whole premise of these legal cases that are coming up in the courts against the oil companies is that they need to prove that there was intent behind what the oil companies were doing to mislead the public about the effect of their business on the survival of the species. And so I'm already getting impassioned as you can tell, but I think maybe you can explain in more detail the series of lawsuits, both the new case coming out of California, right, and the other case of the multiple municipalities suing oil companies. Maybe you can give a little bit more clarity. Sure.

Ralph Levinson: There's been a couple of major developments in these last few months. First, in April of 2023, there was a Supreme Court decision that is really critical to this. Basically, what happened is some 16 states and municipalities, this included places like Hawaii, appropriately for what just happened in Maui, that have had lawsuits going back several years. And the oil companies to delay and have maybe a more favorable outcome decided they wanted it bundled into the federal courts. Well, even this very conservative Supreme Court in April said, what are you talking about? You have no federal case here.

There's nothing constitutional. This goes through the states. So that's a major, major win for the people who are suing, whether it's governments or environmental groups, because in this case, they have multiple lawsuits.

Some might hit, some may not. But once a precedent is set, and that's what the oil companies are worried about, the other cases become much easier. Plus, there's discovery, right? When you do a lawsuit like this, you uncover what's there. You put it into evidence and things that as much as we know, and that's what we're going to talk about, there may be more that we don't know. There probably is. It's hard to believe we found everything out up to this point. Now, the California one is very recent.

Luc Lewitanski: So this is another lawsuit we're talking about. There's the municipalities suing the oil companies about knowingly mislead the public about climate change. And now there's California that is suing five oil companies. Exactly.

Ralph Levinson: This was announced on September 17th of this year, 2023. First, let's say, let's remember, besides that I live in California, why we talk so much about California, it's a major oil producing state. Everybody thinks Oklahoma, Texas, whatever. Yes, that's all true. But California is a huge oil producing state.

So this is a big deal. And yes, they're suing Exxon, Mobile, Shell, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, BP, and the American Petroleum Institute, who we will be meeting several times in this podcast. And what are they suing them for, Ralph? They're suing them for money to pay for the damages that are coming up to adapt to what they did.

Luc Lewitanski: Well, the lawsuit specifically alleges that all these parties have known since the 1950s that the burning of fossil fuels would warm the planet. And instead of alerting the public about these dangers, they chose to deny and downplay the effects. I mean, it's specifically saying the oil companies mislead the public. That's the allegation of the lawsuit. That's what they're seeking damages for. Oh, absolutely.

Ralph Levinson: That's the only way you have a lawsuit. Otherwise, there'd be no case here. What they're saying is, you know, no, you hid. You not only hid, but you got in the way, even knowing, even knowing what you knew. Now, one of the things that about these lawsuits, they may seem farfetched. Are we really going to hold the oil companies responsible? Well, let's remember, there's precedence for this. Major lawsuits and changes in our society for lead paint, for tobacco. These are precedents that really fit the case here. So this is not just pulled out of some fantasy. There is legal precedent for holding companies responsible.

Luc Lewitanski: Yeah, these lawsuits aren't just about the vindication of being able to wag our fingers at these oil companies and be able to sort of hold a moral superiority over them and say, we know you were bad and you should feel shame.

You know, that's ultimately a peering victory. The idea is that this would set a real precedence, as you're saying, as it did with these other industries. Exactly.

And that's important. So the premise for these lawsuits, as you're saying, is they depend on demonstrating the harm and also demonstrating the fact that the people who caused the problems did so knowingly. And so Ralph, looking at these lawsuits, I think this is an interesting prism. Let's see to what extent, you know, these municipalities and also California's Attorney General, do they have a case?

Like, to what extent is it true? Do we know that the oil companies misled the public about what they were doing? To what extent can we say that the oil companies are responsible for profiting off environmental catastrophe? And therefore, can we say they're on the hook to pay back society and those affected? You know, what was the history of knowledge about the connection between oil, CO2, and the climate? Well, the answer is, uh,

Ralph Levinson: duh, yeah, they have a great case because there's well documented and that's what we're going to talk about.

Luc Lewitanski: Climate change is not like it's a truth that came down from on high. This is something we discovered, we observed it. Now, skepticism is at the heart of a scientific method, isn't it, Ralph?

Ralph Levinson: You're absolutely right. There's an authority. We're supposed to doubt what we know so we can learn more. Doubt is absolutely needed in any honest inquiry of any kind, but it's baked into science.

Luc Lewitanski: Yeah, I mean, the whole concept of empiricism rests on the idea of falsifiability. That's what distinguishes science from dogma. That's how you know that it's the result of this earnest process of challenging, questioning, and rethinking things because ultimately manufactured doubt is very distinct from the process of producing science. You know, it's moving away from earnest inquiry.

Ralph Levinson: In science and in fact, in all honest inquiry, we need some skepticism and empiricism, falsifiability, we need doubt, but doubt is a double-edged sword. It can be weaponized and we'll see that the oil companies did just that. There was a point where there was some reasonable doubt and that's not really been the case for really pretty much 70 years now.

Luc Lewitanski: Right, and so we can see the extent to which the quest for knowledge in this area starts out as most of the scientific process does with experiments, theories, tests, discussions, you know, impassioned academic debates. So perhaps you can give us a quick primer on the ways in which science first earnestly tried to wrestle with the question of climate change.

Ralph Levinson: Sure, I think that's totally what we should be doing here. And so let's start really early. Why did this first come up? And when did it first come up? Let's, it's a big picture. The whole idea of changing climate, that wasn't inherent. We don't have a manual for Earth. And what happened was about 200 years ago, this scientist and mathematician in France, Fourier, said, you know what, when you do the math and you look at the amount of sunlight coming in, the heat we're radiating out, we should basically be frozen. So why aren't we frozen? And he figured it was the atmosphere, the atmosphere was acting like a blanket. He didn't use greenhouse, but he did mention like a glass box.

So he had that metaphor really early. When was Fourier writing these discoveries? Fourier was about 1924. So really 200 years ago. This is before the Industrial Revolution really took off. He wasn't talking about things that man was doing.

He was talking about basically planetary science. Now, a little later, a scientist, a woman named Eunice Foot in 1856 came up with a very simple experiment. I love these brilliant, simple experiments. She basically put some water, some what they called carbonic acid then, and she noticed that the jar with CO2, when she put it out in the sun, got a lot hotter than the jar with anything else she put in it, including just air. Very interesting woman, lost a history really until about 10, 15 years ago. She was sort of rediscovered. She interestingly could not present this because she was a woman and not a member of the scientific organization she was presenting at.

And so her husband had to present it, which had to really frustrate her because she was into women's rights even back at that early time. Well, a few years later, in 1859, John Tyndall, an Irishman in England, a much better known scientist of renown, did a series of experiments. He was kind of looking at sort of the molecular physics of this, and he's the one who gets the credit for demonstrating that CO2 has this effect of absorbing infrared and radiating heat.

Luc Lewitanski: So three years after Eunice Foot, John Tyndall gets all the credit.

Ralph Levinson: Yeah, way the world. And now, in the 1880s, scientists were speculating about whether the burning of coal during the Industrial Revolution could affect the climate. They weren't exactly sure how they disagreed with each other. I've seen a few letters in scientific journals where they really don't know exactly what it would do. Some thought it would cool some areas, but melt the polar ice caps, which was prescient. They had some things right and some things wrong. And they admitted they didn't know how or how fast, but they were bringing up the idea in the 1880s that our Industrial Revolution could change the climate.

This is not new. Now, around the turn of the century, that is, you know, 1800 to 1900s, it was coming into better focus. A scientist who was a physical chemist named Arrhenius in Sweden, he really quantified this and really made predictions that the burning of fossil fuels would cause global warming. And he called it the Hot House theory, at least as it's translated. And a friend of his in 1901, Nils Elkholm, seems to be the one who first actually used the term that would be translated as greenhouse.

They were writing in Swedish. So the greenhouse idea goes back now 120 years. There were still some doubts. There wasn't that much known about the atmosphere.

There weren't atmospheric and climate scientists like we know them now. And even Arrhenius was saying, Hey, maybe this will take a couple of hundred years and maybe it'll even be good. Sweden will, you know, be able to grow more food. Well, in the 1930s, a couple of scientists had better data, and they thought they were already seeing a bit of an effect. One scientist by the name of Hulburt in 1931 suggested that the amount of carbon dioxide that we're putting into the atmosphere could raise sea level temperature.

And he also alluded, by the way, to Tyndall as many other people had in the interim. And another scientist in 1938, Guy Callendar, who was a steam engineer, presented a paper at the Royal Meteorological Society. As a steam engineer, he was an outsider to this field.

Callendar chimed in saying that, Hey, I think we're already seeing some of this global warming. And as an outsider, he wasn't taken seriously by some of the scientific establishment. It wasn't, from what I can tell, very well received. But he was on track.

Luc Lewitanski: And yet he was passionate, right? This was a hobby of his. And he was building on the work of, as you mentioned, John Tyndall and Arrhenius. So he was Exactly. He was building on this foundation. He was engaging with the science, even though he wasn't initially taken seriously. His predictions in 1938, mind you, in front of the Meteorological Society were on the mark. What did he say specifically?

Ralph Levinson: I think the fact is that as an engineer, he was probably a numbers guy. And what he said is, and I'm quoting in part, by fuel combustion, man has added about 150,000 million tons of carbon dioxide to the air during the past half century. Approximately three quarters of this has remained in the atmosphere.

Now let me add here, this is an important concept. CO2 takes a long time to go away. So it really accumulates.

It takes as long as centuries to really go away. So he was pointing that out that this is cumulative. Then he goes on to say, from this increase in mean temperature due to the artificial production of carbon dioxide is estimated to be at the rate of 0.003 degrees centigrade per year at the present time. In other words, he was saying, Hey, it's not a big effect at this time. But I think we can see this effect. And that's major.

Luc Lewitanski: That is extremely major. And just to give a little bit of context, you know, when he's saying this, when when Guy Callender is saying this in 1938, humanity collectively as a species, we're emitting about four gigatons of CO2, which is about 10% of what we put out last year in 2022. But the irony is he could see the trend already because in 1900, it was half of that.

It was only two gigatons of CO2. So it doubled in 30 years between 1900 and 1930. And it's gotten it's been multiplied by 10 since then. So his calculations went off the mark. He just rightfully saw that there was a correlation between increasing temperatures and CO2. He just couldn't guess that we would increase a production of CO2 10 fold in the intervening 75 years. Right.

Ralph Levinson: When you look at the curves of the kind of data you're talking about gigatons per year, it really starts shooting up with the post war reconstruction in the 50s and building roads and cars and all the industrialization. It's not something that even Callender saw coming. You know, he wasn't sitting there going, and I think in 15 years, we're going to have a post war, you know, boom, and that'll be sustained and we'll have this new addiction. And it's going to be much faster than I can possibly predict now.

Luc Lewitanski: Yeah, yeah. The numbers got much worse. You know, in 1950, it went up to six gigatons. In 1960, it was nine gigatons. By 1981, we're up to 20 gigatons and up to the 37 gigatons of last year.

Ralph Levinson: And the rate of change had increased markedly. And of course, remember, it's cumulative. So any increase is there for the next sort of like, you know, compound interest. It's there for the next, you know, the next iteration. So, you know, we're still dealing with CO2 that was probably put in the air when Callender was writing and talking.

Luc Lewitanski: So that's putting Guy Callender's predictions in front of the Royal Academy of Meteorologists into perspective. But now he was talking in 1938, and something pretty major happened shortly thereafter.

Ralph Levinson: In World War Two, people suddenly became very interested in weather. Weather became very important when you're talking about things like radioactive fallout. And then scientists and the community became much more aware that we really can change the atmosphere with radioactive fallout. We were much more powerful than we thought we were. Suddenly the skies and oceans didn't look quite as huge and infinite as they used to.

Luc Lewitanski: And if you think about even the idea of the fallout of nuclear tests meant that it didn't take so much imagination to see these invisible ways in which humanity's destruction could mess things up. Stuff like radiation poisoning, you know, the idea of pollution starts to take a lot more salience. And it seems a lot less far-fetched to start thinking about humanity destroying itself at the time of atomic weapons and mutilational destruction.

Ralph Levinson: Nuclear fallout was invisible, and it could kill you. So that added a dimension that the public started to really understand. There was no longer a question as to whether humans can alter things.

And I think that changed the imagination and the vision. Scientists are part of a civilization. And when the vision of the civilization changes, the vision of the scientists change. You know, this was something that became part of the public discourse, part of the zeitgeist beyond just the scientists. So Gilbert Plass, now Gilbert Plass was a top physicist and he was one of the first scientists I could find that was writing not only in scientific journals, but in the popular press. The first public media coverage on climate change I found was in Time Magazine in May 1953.

Time Magazine reported on Dr. Gilbert Plass' presentation at the American Geophysical Union. The article quoted from Plass' presentation in that he said that, and I'll quote this, this was in May 1953 issue of Time Magazine, in the hungry fires of industry, modern man burns nearly two billion tons of coal and oil each year. Along with the smoke and soot of commerce, his furnaces belch some six billion tons of unseen carbon dioxide into the already tainted air. He goes on to say, this spreading of the envelope of gas around the earth serves as a great greenhouse. It's transparent to the radiant of heat coming from the sun that blocks the longer wavelengths of heat that bounce back. And at its present rate, the atmosphere will raise the earth's average temperature 1.5 degrees every 100 years.

Now that was a low ball. He actually increased his estimate in his 1955 academic paper to in centigrade 1.1 centigrade per century, which is closer to two degrees Fahrenheit. Plass increased his estimate again in 1959 when writing in Scientific American. I quote, if fossil fuel consumption continues to increase at the present rate, we will have sent more than a trillion tons of carbon dioxide into the air by the year 2000. This should raise the earth's temperature by 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Exactly.

Luc Lewitanski: So he was getting word out there. In 1953, Gilbert Plass writing in Time Magazine is clearly wanting to make this public knowledge. He is trying to put this information out there. He was working as a science communicator. Clearly he felt that this was worth sharing with people outside of his own field. He was clearly aware of the broad species wide implications of his findings and he was trying to popularize this. Absolutely.

Ralph Levinson: That's right. So also in 1953, at the same time Time Magazine was featuring Plass and his comments, there was an economist, a business consultant named William Baxter, and he self-published a book called Today's Revolution in Weather.

Luc Lewitanski: What it means to your business, your health, your stocks and real estate. So that tells you what the lens is.

Ralph Levinson: It shows his perspective, your business, your stocks, your health and real estate. His perspective was, hey, we're already warming up. It's going to melt the ice. The oceans are going to rise.

And in fact, it's a good business opportunity just, you know, buy real estate in Canada and it's all going to be good. But he did acknowledge that climate change is a man made and he quotes Arrhenius and he quotes Plass and he writes, man does it again. I am convinced that a good part of the increased heat is due to the activities of man. So this, this information was out there in the 50s.

Luc Lewitanski: Well, it emphasizes this very business perspective. You can already tell in 1953 at the cutting edge of climate science, you've got on one end, the science communicators are trying to say, look, this is a big deal.

And people like William Baxter are saying, this is a big deal. Here's how you should invest in accordance. You know, here's how you can apply it. Again, he notices that man is having an impact on the climate. Anything, as you said, like his, how your real estate portfolio will be impacted. He's not thinking about like, maybe there are things we could do to curb this or to try and mitigate it. It's more like, okay, no, let's adapt for us for the types of people that he was advising.

Ralph Levinson: Now he did acknowledge bad things would happen, that the sea levels will rise and that's going to displace people. But this was an infomercial in effect for, I have this insight. Yeah, he had picked up on a

Luc Lewitanski: trend that could influence people's investment decisions. And as we'll find out, some people's investment decisions were extremely influenced by climate research.

Luc Lewitanski: You know, the people on the inside, as it were. So maybe you can talk more about what was happening in 1959. While this was making its way out there into the popular post-war consciousness, what were the oil companies hearing about all this climate research?

Ralph Levinson: They may well have not read Time magazine, but I'll tell you that the first person in the post-war era that I really found in my reading that really called this to the attention of the oil companies was Edward Teller, who worked on the atom bomb and later is a father of the hydrogen bomb.

He was very anti-Soviet. This was not a environmentalist. As a matter of fact, his real theme here is we need nuclear energy. And we could debate that. That's a separate podcast.

Luc Lewitanski: But this is the first mention of oil companies being informed about the effects of their business on the climate, at least on the record. That I could find, yeah.

Ralph Levinson: Edward Teller actually spoke to the American Petroleum Institute about this in a conference called Energy and Man that was actually organized by the American Petroleum Institute at Columbia University in 1959. He laid it out. He said, guys, we got a lot of ice that's going to melt. This carbon dioxide burning these fossil fuels, it's going to raise the oceans. I don't know how much.

I don't know if it'll cover the Empire State Building or not. He actually said that. But let's listen to what he says. He says, carbon dioxide has a strange property. Its presence in the atmosphere causes a greenhouse effect. The result is that the earth will continue to heat up until a balance is reestablished. A 10% increase in CO2 will melt the ice cap and submerge New York.

All coastal cities will be covered. This is more serious than most people tend to believe. So in front of these oil execs, that's what he was saying. As I was saying, he was telling them, we got a problem here.

And it's the CO2 we're putting up in the air. That's again, 1959. This didn't fall totally on deaf ears, but it all seemed pretty far in the future, I suspect.

And of course, there was not a lot of motivation to change a really successful economy and business model. And then in 1968, the American Petroleum Institute, again, actually got a report from the Stanford Research Institute.

Luc Lewitanski: And so wait, the American Petroleum Institute, they're just like they represent the oil industry, right? Exactly.

Ralph Levinson: They're their trade organization.

Luc Lewitanski: Thank you. Yes. And so in 1968, the

Ralph Levinson: oil trade organization, the American Petroleum Institute, which will come up time and time again, got a report from the Stanford Research Institute. And in that report, it stated clearly that CO2 was a problem.

Luc Lewitanski: Yeah, specifically, the CO2 from fossil fuels are harmful to the planet.

Ralph Levinson: What the report specifically said about that is that rising CO2 would result in increases in temperature that would melt the ice caps, cause rising seas, and environmental damage worldwide. This is 1968. And I quote, none seems to fit the presently observed situation as well as the fossil fuel emanation theory. Now, remember, in science, theory is used differently. You know, the theory of gravity, you know, nobody doubts gravity. Theory is not like, oh gee, I think maybe theory is something that is really substantial and is the best fit for the data.

Luc Lewitanski: Yeah. The best way to explain

Ralph Levinson: the best they'd explain the phenomena is fossil fuels, creating CO2 and causing potentially serious global problems.

Luc Lewitanski: So this was a report commissioned by the trade organization for the oil companies, the American Petroleum Institute, and the Stanford Research Institute produced this report telling them that their activity, their fossil fuels were emitting CO2 in a manner that was harmful to the planet.

Ralph Levinson: That's right. And the hits keep coming. Yes, Ralph. The hits keep coming.

Luc Lewitanski: So meanwhile, what were the oil companies saying publicly? They had this good research behind the scenes, and publicly, after a 1969 oil spill off Santa Barbara in California, which sent an estimated three million gallons of crude oil into the Pacific Ocean, the National Petroleum Council put out a report. They were commissioned to write a report by the US government.

And so they did. And in this report, I don't think you can say they gave a fair representation of where the science was at at the time. In the report, they wrote, and I quote, carbon dioxide concentrations do appear to be increasing for reasons not well understood. And the scientists would have to wait until the year 2000 to determine whether or not a serious problem even exists. So contrast this between what was happening internally within the American Petroleum Institute in 1968, versus what the oil companies put in their official reports for the government and for public consumption in 1972.

You can see the contradiction is clear as day. And it goes on as far as the rise in CO2 levels. They said the problem was just simply not well understood. So again, this was pretty cutting edge science. Things were still being uncovered. And I think it's very interesting to see Exxon's reaction, obviously, was not to publicize this. But while this was bubbling, Exxon themselves invested in research, they started hiring their own climate scientists to look more into, you know, what is our business doing?

And they weren't doing this again out of the goodness of their hearts. They were thinking about what are the potential market evolutions. They were actually trying to get ahead of the government in this field. So flash forward to a decade later, there's been some recent reporting in 2015 by Inside Climate News that shows the internal record what the oil executives were saying internally. And so some internal communications from Exxon have been revealed. In this case, we have internal communications from the summer of 1977. The senior Exxon company scientist, James Black.

Ralph Levinson: James Black had been working at this time over a third of a century for the oil companies. And he was a senior company scientist. He was an oil guy. And he wrote to his bosses at Exxon, in the first place, there's general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through the carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels.

Luc Lewitanski: And he was telling this to Exxon's management committee directly because he was a senior company scientist. He was reporting up to his management and saying, there, we are influencing the global climate through the burning of fossil fuels. Exactly.

Ralph Levinson: And then in 1978, so the following year, he wrote, present thinking holds that man has a time window. Hear this, a five to 10 years before the need for decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical. This is a senior scientist from Exxon in 1978 saying, you know, by the end of the 80s, we better have a plan in place. Exactly.

Luc Lewitanski: And he was internally to Exxon executives, stressing the importance of this again, only because of a concern for the bottom line. This was coming from a culture in Exxon that was cautiously examining potential threats to their business model.

And since their revenues depended on oil and gas extraction, they had to be hyper vigilant about potential policy changes. And so Exxon scientists, Henry Shaw, wrote that the rationale for Exxon's involvement and commitment of funds and personnel is based on our need to assess the potential impact of the greenhouse effect on Exxon's business. So again, this is internal scientists saying, we need to see what the effect of our activities on the climate is, if only because it's going to have an impact on the business.

Now, again, Henry Shaw, this November 1979 to his boss, Harold Weinberg, and he said, we should be prepared for and ahead of the government in making the public aware of pollution problems. So you clearly see internally here, Exxon is thinking, it's as soon as this information about fossil fuels and climate is going to get out, people are going to go nuts, and the government is going to take action. And this is why Exxon was so strongly investing early on in research around the climate because they wanted to get ahead of government action. More from the 1979 memo that Henry Shaw wrote to his boss, advising internal Exxon company strategy, he wrote, it behooves us to start a very aggressive, defensive program in the indicated areas of atmospheric science and climate, because there is a good probability that legislation affecting our business will be passed. So here you can clearly see internally the strategy of Exxon is spearheading research that they can own the discourse so they can own the conversation ahead of the public and ahead of the government. And so this is November 79.

Ralph Levinson: You know, there were employees who later said that Exxon interestingly really wanted to understand about carbon dioxide levels because there was a corporate culture of farsightedness, but then they really cared in terms of risks to its bottom line.

Luc Lewitanski: Exactly. This was a form of market research. Interviews with former Exxon staff revealed that this culture of farsightedness wasn't coming from an earnest spirit of scientific inquiry, like we could say Guy Callender was doing back in the 30s, you know, as a hobbyist meteorologist. In this case, the Exxon scientists were being put to research these ideas about CO2 and atmosphere and climate, not out of some desire to feather the science, but because of a dogged commitment to protecting the bottom line.

So you have to look at it as a form of market research, basically. How can we protect our investment in this very lucrative sector of oil extraction? And that's the motivating factor behind the research that Exxon was commissioning all the way back into the 70s. And as further findings will reveal, this did in fact motivate Exxon to act, perhaps not in the fashion that one might have hoped, but they certainly took this research to heart.

They did not ignore it. And the irony is, if we look today, the predictions that they made back in 1977 were eerily accurate in terms of the level of temperature increase. They had very good science at the time, and obviously they were aware of the pressing need for action. And so it's all the more painful to see that there was a turning point and a real decision that could have been made by Exxon's management at that point. And well, in a way, they did make a decision. So about 50 years ago, the scientists that Exxon hired accurately predicted how badly their own activity would end up leaving us right now.

Ralph Levinson: Absolutely. They knew the stakes for all of us. And it wasn't just Exxon. The American Petroleum Institute had a task force from 79 to 83. And they monitored and shared research. So there's this period where their science was very good. Some of it was even published in academic journals. And as you say, their models were very accurate. So what did Exxon do? Did they say, oh, we better change our business model.

Maybe we could go into other forms of energy and that type of thing, change who they are, help out the civilizations that support them. It wasn't just passive. There was an active decision made not to pursue this. The fact is that they were members on that API task force that apparently were open to the idea that the oil industry might have to shoulder some of the responsibility for reducing CO2 emissions. And they may have to change their refining processes.

And they may have to develop fuels that emitted less carbon dioxide. Well, I guess you could guess that no, that's not at all what they did. They basically made a decision to bury this material.

Luc Lewitanski: And then Exxon put out a internal corporate primer in 1982.

Ralph Levinson: Exxon wrote a memo for internal use only.

Luc Lewitanski: This was marked not to be distributed externally. However, it was given wide circulation amongst Exxon's management. So this goes back to the claim that Exxon knew this information, were part of the uncovering of it, and very quickly were part of the concealing.

As soon as they found out, they figured, oh, this is not for public consumption. So in this 1982 internal memo, Exxon's researchers came to the conclusion that heading off global warming would require major reductions in fossil fuel combustion. Unless that happened, there are some potentially catastrophic events that must be considered.

Ralph Levinson: What their response was, and I love this, was to say nothing to the public. This was internal, and cut funding for research. That was their response.

Luc Lewitanski: The whole history of climate research is inexorably tied with these companies whose business is dependent upon extraction of fossil fuels, and they quickly pivoted from being at the forefront of funding climate research to being at the forefront of concealment and denial. And so Exxon starts in the 80s, creating this alliance of the world's largest fossil fuel companies called the Global Climate Coalition, which was trying to halt government efforts to curb fossil fuel production. So again, sounding very innocuous, the Global Climate Coalition sounds like a very legitimate institution.

Ralph Levinson: Yeah, I'm ready to send them money right now.

Luc Lewitanski: Yeah, who wouldn't, right? There's been global coalition tackling on climate issues. Now what they were tackling again was spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt on these issues, so that they could push a denial movement.

Ralph Levinson: It was created to oppose mandatory reductions in carbon emissions. It was something to give lawmakers a tool to do the oil company bidding.

Luc Lewitanski: And they also used the American Petroleum Institute and right-wing think tanks, such as the Marshall Institute, to disseminate these arguments for doubting a link between burning fossil fuels and climate change.

Ralph Levinson: And the Marshall Institute definitely cherry-picked their data. It's well documented. And the Cato Institute, which is a libertarian think tank, which is also funded by the oil industry family, the Koch brothers, used this distorted data that the Marshall Institute published. So stop and review that for a second. The Marshall Institute, cherry-picked data, the Cato Institute quoted them so they become this echo chamber. You see, they're all saying it.

Luc Lewitanski: It's more than an echo chamber. They're giving each other legitimacy by giving the imprimatur of these these big institutions and saying, look, it's said by this person, this institute. And but ultimately, they're just laundering the same piece of manufactured cherry-picked evidence in order to purposefully try to sow doubt in the debate. Basically, they're trying to create the impression of a vivid debate where there was none, right?

Ralph Levinson: You're totally right. These are groups that are meant to confuse the public with very benign sounding names. This is not, hey, we're the oil company. And this is what we have to say, you know. And I didn't go a step further because by having different groups do this, groups with these very benign, neutral names, it looks like...

Luc Lewitanski: Well, it's more than that. You know, it's like very official names like the Marshall Institute, you know, the Cato Institute. These sound like serious institutions.

Ralph Levinson: They do, don't they? Absolutely. It says nothing, but it says, but it sure comes off like...

Luc Lewitanski: It sounds old-worldy. It sounds fancy. There's something about it that sort of sounds like an old society, you know. And ultimately, yeah, these are just oil front groups.

Ralph Levinson: An example the Union of Concerned Scientists gave was, quote, California Driver's Alliance, unquote, that's the name of a group. Sounds perfectly innocuous. So does Washington Consumers for Sound Fuel Policy. Who doesn't want sound fuel policy? But these organizations were secretly run by the Western States Petroleum Association. And look, this is the basis of why people want to hold the oil companies responsible. It's not that they can say, well, we just didn't know that there'd be these harms. It's documented.

Luc Lewitanski: So the oil companies are commissioning research at just of extremely high quality, it turned out, but that was not being used in a good faith inquiry. It wasn't in the spirit of science as we were talking about.

So here's just for a little bit of breath of fresh air from all this disingenuousness. Here's a British documentary. This documentary was broadcast in December 1981 on ITV on British television. And so in this clip, you'll hear two voices.

You'll hear first the voice of Tom Vernon, who was the presenter for this ITV television program. And then you'll hear the climate scientist David M. Burns. And basically, you'll hear that the public discourse for those who were willing to pay attention on climate issues was actually becoming quite advanced in 1981.

Tom Vernon (presenter for the ITV programme "Warming Warning"): fossil fuel to sustain the growth of industrial societies. When fossil fuels, which contain carbon are burnt or combusted to produce energy, the carbon combines with oxygen to produce carbon dioxide CO2. Meteorologists now believe that increased quantities of CO2 in the atmosphere will lead to a significant warming of the planet within decades. Great technology strives the planet. But the need for energy so central to our society is threatening to alter the climate of the globe.

David M. Burns: We're talking about a fundamental alteration of one of the givens of the globe that we inhabit caused by man himself.

Tom Vernon (presenter for the ITV programme "Warming Warning"): The call for restraint in a society built on the exploitation of energy may meet irresistible forces. There is, for example, the vested interest that many of the world's great corporations have in fossil fuels and the power they can make on their behalf.

Luc Lewitanski: Now, I don't know if you could quite make that out at the end. I tried to clean up the audio as well as I could. But the British presenter Tom Vernon in 1981 was telling us the call for restraint in a society built on the exploitation of energy may meet irresistible forces. There is, for example, the vested interest that many of the world's great corporations having fossil fuels and the power they could wield on their behalf. Well, now you can hear just how clear the implications were of the connection of burning more fossil fuels and raising temperatures.

Ralph Levinson: But it goes to what you were saying. This is kind of like mind blowing that this was just by 1980. Why were we still circling the drain? There was a committee formed for the National Academy of Sciences in 1980. And they called this committee changing climate. And they did have top scientists. But somehow, there were also two factions in gathering this report. They were the scientists who were really concerned. They really wanted action.

Luc Lewitanski: And there were the most national Academy reports are written collectively. They're reviewed by all the committee members and then reviewed again by outside reviewers. But that didn't happen here. Specifically, the Carbon Darkside Assessment Committee could not agree on an integrated assessment. And so they settled on individually signing and authoring the chapters. And it just so happened that the two chapters by the economists were the ones that were the introductory chapter and the conclusion chapter. And then the five chapters contributed by the natural scientists, the expert in the field in terms of what actually the phenomenon was. Those were sort of sandwiched in the middle. So the economists had an approach that emphasized delaying, sort of assuming that there would be natural technological solutions that would emerge of the sort of the market will cure at all.

There was very much this ideology within the economic profession at this time. And so it's very interesting that none of the physical scientists suggested that we should simply wait and see. And yet this was the only conclusion that came out of the report. The meat of the sandwich, as it were, was completely dismissed.

Ralph Levinson: You are absolutely right. And indeed, the New York Times wrote that the committee found there was no politically or economically realistic way of heading off global warming. Now, that's not really what they found, but that's the message they got. One of the most prominent voices was an economist named Thomas Schelling.

Luc Lewitanski: And this guy was no slouch. He's a very respected, serious economist who actually later won a Nobel Prize for his work on game theory. And so let's look at the way that Thomas Schelling, who is in charge of the economic side of the report, wrote about this issue. He insisted it would be a mistake to assume a preference for dealing with causes rather than symptoms.

Ralph Levinson: His conclusion was that emphasizing causes rather than symptoms was a mistake.

Luc Lewitanski: It would be wrong to commit people to the principle that if fossil fuels and carbon dark sites are where the problem arises, then it must also necessarily be where the solution lies. So it's essentially saying that they shouldn't be looking at the causes. They should only be treating the symptoms. And I think as a physician, Ralph, you might have a word or two about this philosophy. Is this an effective way of treating people?

Ralph Levinson: Well, sometimes it's the only thing you can do. It's true. But in fact, like end of life care, sure. And then some other things. But the chronic, some chronic diseases and so on, diseases that we don't know the cause of. But I don't think anybody would treat appendicitis with a painkiller and not go to the root cause, which is an inflamed, possibly necrotic and infected appendix. So if somebody has appendicitis, you don't give them a couple of aspirin and say, come back in the morning, you do surgery. And anytime you could go to the root cause, you know, I'm now to prevention is worth a pound of cure. It's just a basic principle in medicine. You go to the root cause when you can.

It just is amazing to me that anybody would argue this. Now, that's not to say that you don't address symptoms. There's a lot of either or thinking in these kinds of fields, right? Oh, we either do a or we do B. Well, you know, sometimes you do A N B, you know, and sure, take care of the symptoms.

You know, worry about floods, do what you can to adapt. But anytime you could go to the root cause, it's always more efficient. So yes, this just makes no sense.

Luc Lewitanski: And that's how he set a big part of the narrative.

Ralph Levinson: I mean, the historians, historians who wrote a wonderful book called merchants of doubt, Oreskes and Conway.

Luc Lewitanski: Speak of this as being a pivotal moment, the publication of this report in 1983 changed the terms of the debate, right?

Ralph Levinson: Absolutely. Oreskes and Conway are quoted as saying that this report quote arguably launched the climate change debate unquote. And the way it did that is by making it a debate when there really wasn't one. There was no scientific debate. As you said, Luc, the report was music to many powerful ears. The scientists did listen as well. And they did continue their research. It didn't change policy in the 1980s, but they continued their research.

The issue really heated up again in the later 80s, because a couple of things happened. One was the intergovernmental panel on climate change. In 1988, the United Nations created the intergovernmental panel on climate change, the IPCC. And then in 1990, they produced a report. This really up the ante, because this was now international news. And another was James Hansen, testified before Congress.

Luc Lewitanski: For over three decades, James Hansen was the director of NASA's Goddard Space Institute.

Ralph Levinson: That he testified at a hearing before the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources of the United States Senate.

Luc Lewitanski: James Hansen said that the expected global warming is of the same magnitude as the observed warming. Since there's only a 1% chance of an accidental warming of this magnitude, the agreement with the expected greenhouse effect is of considerable significance.

James Hansen: Altogether, this evidence represents a very strong case, in my opinion, that the greenhouse effect has been detected and it is changing our climate now.

Luc Lewitanski: So basically, he sounded the alarm in front of the Senate.

Ralph Levinson: There was also a memo from Exxon again, our favorite memo producers, in 1988 where they explicitly said, emphasize the uncertainty, right? Now, look, previously we said that the scientists suggested Hansen that it was a 1% uncertainty.

This is one of those things, is it 99% full or 1% empty? You know, and in science, we essentially never talked about 100% certainty. Yeah, it's a question of probabilities. But the question is, what uncertainties are you talking about? Are you talking about quibbling about, maybe there'll be some more modifying effect from clouds? Maybe we need to, you know, we need to fine-tune this or that observation, but not uncertainty as to whether it was happening.

Luc Lewitanski: What you have in this 1988 internal memo from Exxon is the clear outlining of this strategy, this bad faith reading of what is a natural fact of science, the presenting of probabilities and uncertainties, and trying to twist that to imply that things aren't as sure as they are. It's a twisting of the science for nefarious ends. And you can see that the internal memo says, like, the science shows the greenhouse effect is real, and what we need to do is emphasize the uncertainty, as you say.

Like, basically, try and muddy the waters, try and make it impossible to actually get the truth. You know, as the public is getting informed about this, Exxon's move is to put PR out there, confuse people about how clear it was that climate change was a real thing, by emphasizing this 1% of the uncertainty.

Ralph Levinson: Recent reporting by The Wall Street Journal in September 2023 uncovered even more of Exxon's reactions to James Hansen's alerting the public about climate change. Frank Sproul, Exxon's head of research at the time, sent a memo to his colleagues also in 1988. If a worldwide consensus emerges that action is needed to mitigate against greenhouse gas effects, substantial negative impacts on Exxon could occur. Any additional R &D efforts within corporate research on greenhouse should have two primary purposes. One, protect the value of our resources, oil, gas, coal, to preserve Exxon's business options.

Luc Lewitanski: And as for NASA's James Hansen, the one who initially sounded the alarm about this, how did he react to all these efforts? Well, you know what? Let's hear it directly from him. He was interviewed in 2014, reflecting on his testimony and the tactics of those who were involved in the climate change.

James Hansen: I think that's a very important aspect of this problem, because I was very uncomfortable in that role. And I thought, as the story becomes clearer, we will then take the actions that are needed. By the year 2000, it had become so clear that we were not doing anything. The science has become so clear. The things that we predicted are actually happening. We know as much about how the climate works as doctors know about how your body works. The scientific method is you have to continually reassess your conclusions. As soon as there's new data, you ask, well, how does that affect my interpretation? And you're open-minded. What we're up against is people who have a preferred answer. And so then they take the position of a lawyer. They're going to defend their client, and they will only present you with the data that favors their client.

Luc Lewitanski: By 1988, this was clearly getting out there. And as a response to this, oil companies felt a need to start communicating. Now here, we're going to be taking a listen to a clip from Royal Dutch Shell from 1991. And here you'll see they're acknowledging the reality of climate change in their promotional video. But let's hear what their bright solutions were.

Royal Dutch Shell 1991 Infomercial "Climate of Concern": To combat global warming does not mean scrapping an entire way of life. But it does mean changing public perceptions and attitudes to its extravagances. If everyone switched to the new low-energy lights, cities the size of New York, Moscow, or Bombay could each cut over a million tons of carbon dioxide emissions every year.

Luc Lewitanski: Perhaps this clip is also illustrative of the limited imagination of the solutions proposed by these companies. And there was a Royal Dutch Shell in 1991 talking about light bulbs being the panacea to any potential issue we might have with the climate, just by more efficient light bulbs.

Ralph Levinson: It's deflection. The light bulb issue is deflection. The oil companies don't have to change. What are you guys, the consumers, going to do?

Luc Lewitanski: So, going back to this two-faced approach to public relations that the oil companies were having all the way into the 90s. Now, going back to our good old friends at the American Petroleum Institute, the API, it's president, actually, Charles de Bonheur, who actually joined the Institute after working for Richard Nixon in the 70s as an energy policy advisor.

So, the president of the API, Charles de Bonheur, said during the API's annual meeting in 1996, he said, You heard the claim that a scientific consensus on warming now exists. That is beyond misleading. It is dead wrong. So, the president of the API was saying there was no scientific consensus on climate change, all the way out in 96. Even worse, actually, he compared climate models to Ouija boards. He said that this is junk science, this superstition. The president of the API was trying to misrepresent what the nature of the scientific discourse was. Remember, this is in 1996.

Ralph Levinson: So, be that as it may, they started really using some of the deniers for hire. This was their reaction to the IPCC, right, and the better science. The front groups for oil decided to bring out the attack dogs and up the volume on denial. Let me quote from the book The New Climate War. By the climate scientist Michael Mann. He says that there was a conference that he considered the very first known climate change denial conference.

This was done in June 1991. It was titled The Global Environmental Crisis, Science or Politics. And this was funded in part by the Koch brothers, who are an oil industry family. One of the people who was part of that was S. Fred Singer, who Michael Mann calls a denier for hire. He was part of the attack dogs for the tobacco companies trying to fight regulations. He was busy trying to cast doubt on acid rain and the solutions for acid rain.

Luc Lewitanski: How do you think he slept at night?

Ralph Levinson: On a very comfortable pillow, because he could afford it. Fred Singer was actually interviewed in 2014. Let's listen to his frustration as he is reminded that he was a so-called expert for big tobacco before moving on to climate denial.

S. Fred Singer: I still think that the EPA has cooked the data on secondhand smoke. I'm annoyed by the fact that this tobacco business comes up every time when I speak about global warming, which has nothing to do with tobacco.

Luc Lewitanski: This goes right into the research that Oreskes and Conway have done. You can see this is the same tactics that were employed by the tobacco industry before them and the chemical industry.

Ralph Levinson: Exactly. That's the point. Not only did they use the tactics, they literally used some of the same supposed experts. It's funny how an expert who isn't really a scientist in these fields can be an expert on tobacco chemicals and atmospheric sciences, but they sure could if you paid them right.

Luc Lewitanski: Yeah, and the oil companies had a huge Rolodex by then that had been well established from the deniers for hire. These fake experts that you could put out there, they'd sound very serious and they would confuse the public.

Ralph Levinson: The oil companies knew who in their Rolodex would say what they needed said.

Luc Lewitanski: Yes, and ultimately these people were usually handsomely paid. This is not conjecture.

Ralph Levinson: Oh, absolutely. As a matter of fact, the oil companies' payouts were substantial. For instance, there was $1.2 million to an aeronautic engineer masquerading as an astrophysicist, Willie Soon, between 2005 and 2015. During this decade, he published at least 11 articles denying that climate change was caused by greenhouse gases, but never disclosed that he was funded by big oil.

That's a major academic sin. In his correspondence with the fossil fuel companies, Willie Soon referred to his papers and testimonies as quote deliverables, unquote for them. Essentially works for hire to the tune of $1.2 million.

Luc Lewitanski: So this is the price tag that they put on these deniers for hire, these fake experts that we're talking about.

Ralph Levinson: More recently, a historian of science at Harvard, Geoffrey Supran, who has worked with Oreskes, estimated how much money the oil companies paid to manipulate public opinion and political activities. And Geoffrey Supran found that in the last decade, the oil companies paid over a billion dollars on PR firms and advertising companies. So one example of what this money bought the oil companies is what they did in their communications.

Luc Lewitanski: So here I thought this could be an opportunity for us to actually take a look at what these oil companies money bought. What did they pay for? You mentioned advertorials. An advertorial is a cute word as a portmanteau between advertisement and editorial. It's basically an advertisement that's meant to be disguised as editorial content.

An advertorial is a way in which a company can camouflage an advert inside of a newspaper by making it look like an article that mimics the font, not unlike what we today call sponsored content. And anyways, back in the day, while we have all this plethora of documented communications of what the oil companies were saying internally, we see that they were spending untold amounts over a billion in a decade on PR and advertising. And so we thought it could be quite interesting to see what this money was actually buying, like what were these ads saying? There's a series of advertorials from 1991 that I thought were quite striking. Now the front group that the oil companies used in this instance is called Informed Citizens for the Environment. Again, a front name, it's a complete shadow group, just it's a way for the oil companies to funnel their money. And what were some of the things that this 1991 Informed Citizens for the Environment ad campaign said? Ralph.

Ralph Levinson: One of the ones I really like is a one that's a picture of a frenzied chicken and the headline is Who Told You the Earth Was Warming Chicken Little?

Luc Lewitanski: Calling environmentalists chicken littles in 1991 is pretty bold from the company that was directly suppressing this information at the time. It's part of how they suppressed it by trying to make people seem alarmist.

Ralph Levinson: It's the idea of panicking for no reason. And it is probably not a coincidence that 1991 was right after the first IPCC report. You know, they knew exactly who was telling us this, the international scientific community.

Luc Lewitanski: Yes, it said it's a defense strategy. This was a reaction, though trying to stall the public finding out by actively pushing out disinformation. And they were aided and abetted by news publications like the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, which were totally willing to mislead their readers by publishing these advertorials by the oil companies disguised to look like editorial content. So this is one example from 1991. We also have an example in 1997. They took out a series of advertorials urging the president not to sign on to the Kyoto Treaty, the environmental treaty.

The front group that the oil companies used this time was called the Global Climate Coalition. It looks like a united colours of Benetton ad. It's like a multi-racial picture of children and saying, don't risk our economic future. Please don't sign on to the Kyoto Treaty. This 1997 advertorial arguing against the Kyoto Treaty goes on to say, We still don't know what role man-made greenhouse gases might play in warming the planet. The science of climate change is too uncertain to mandate a plan of action that could plunge economies into turmoil. Committing to binding targets and timetables now will alter today's lifestyles and tomorrow's living standards. And it goes on to say, carpooling in, sport utility vehicles out.

Carpooling in, SUVs out. They also were trying to frame the debates. There was a series of advertorials taken out by ExxonMobil presenting the situation as unsettled science. And this looks just like a very serious article.

It has a graph in the middle and everything about it is trying to portray the science of climate change as uncertain. This is also in coordination with the PR campaign that the oil companies pushed around ensuring that President Bush would not sign on to the Kyoto Treaty. And they were successful. Ironically enough, the Bush White House specifically cited these advertorials as being a turning point in influencing their decision to ultimately pull out of the Kyoto Treaty in 2001.

Ralph Levinson: It's very interesting to look at what the oil companies said to the public and what they said in more internal communications. So looked at this pretty much the same period.

In this case, it was 1977 to 2014. And they found that four out of five of internal documents acknowledged that climate change is real and human caused. But only one out of nine of their advertorials acknowledged that. And as a matter of fact, four out of five of these public facing advertorials expressed it out.

So there was a clear choice of language. And the way Supran and Oreski summarize this is, and I'm quoting here, they have used the rhetoric of climate risk and consumer energy demand to construct a frame that downplays the reality and seriousness of climate change, normalizes fossil fuel lock in and individualizes responsibility, which as we know, we saw that's individualizing responsibility in that clip we heard about light bulbs earlier.

Luc Lewitanski: This idea of deniers for hire brings to mind a clip from a June 2023 interview with another Naomi, not Naomi Oreski's, the author of Merchants of Doubt. This is Naomi Klein, a big thinker around the climate justice movement. And so she infiltrated a conference of climate deniers, she went in person, and she investigated what the climate deniers were saying to each other.

And the truth is, none of it had to make sense. And this is a fascinating thing. So there's a little clip that I excerpted from an interview with Naomi Klein in which she gives us a window into the minds of the types of people who are hired to be professional deniers for the fossil fuel industry, trying to sow doubt.

And yeah, she talks about the Clermont Institute, which is not unlike the Cato Institute or the Marshall Institute, you know, it's one of these fronts. These places are about creating false evidence. And the truth is, it doesn't even have to be internally consistent. That's the maddening thing, you know, we started this talk with thinking about how does the scientific process work? What is knowledge, you know, these very epistemological thoughts about how do we get to know the things that we know? And here are people who are actively just making a mockery of the process of academia and science.

Ralph Levinson: Absolutely. Oh my gosh.

Luc Lewitanski: Because the only goal that they have is to make sure that the business model of the oil companies never gets called into question. I think if we listen to Naomi Klein right here, she will outline in extremely clear terms what the motives behind these types of investment decisions by the oil companies are.

Ralph Levinson: I say let's listen to Naomi.

Naomi Klein: This is the strategy, you know, doubt is our product borrowed from the tobacco, you know, industry by the fossil fuel industry. And, you know, where you really see it is the Heartland Institute, which a lot of these guys are associated with a lot of these so-called like dissident scientists, right?

So the Heartland Institute is a free market think tank, what a quote, free market that hosts this annual climate change denial conference. I've been to it. It's insane. It's people like this who get trotted out to just sprinkle down around.

It's all in all contradicts. Like you'll have one person say climate change is happening, but it's not that bad. We can just get air conditioning and then there'll be somebody else who says like it's some spots and then there'll be somebody else who is like, you know, an retired astronaut who's just like it, you know, it's not happening.

Things are actually getting cooler and somebody else says like carbon is good for you, you know, like it's we're gonna have more plants and there's no attempt to resolve any of it. It's just like, let's throw stuff at the wall to confuse people.

Luc Lewitanski: Trying to grapple with the idea of all these people being in the same room and talking to each other like they believe what they're saying.

Naomi Klein: It's a lot of old men, you know, and there's like a lot of hobby, like whether hobbyists and there's just like a real small handful of actual scientists, all of whom are funded by fossil fuel companies in one way or another. And I think it's a bit of an ego trip, right? Because they've published this rival IPCC report.

So you have this. IPCC report is thousands and thousands of scientists all kind of aggregated and it's actually very conservative because when you collaborate on that scale, it's going to round down to, you know, the most conservative estimates about counts and also it has to be approved by governments. And so they changed like one letter in the acronym so that gets sort of confusing. But the main thing to understand is like the Heartland Institute is not a scientific organization. Like their goal is just to like impose austerity and privatize public services. And what they realized was that climate change was a huge threat to that, you know, far right kind of Chicago school economic agenda because you do need to regulate, you do need, you know, you need governments to be able to govern. And so their whole project of dismantling the public sphere is threatened by the reality that we are actually overheating the planet and endangering the support systems for life on this planet.

And that means we actually have to like intervene in a pretty forceful way, which makes their heads explode. So they found like the three scientists who would say it's not happening so that they can, but that's not the goal. The goal is not science. They care about the implications of the science because all their other stuff then is, you know, falling apart in their head. The science of climate change is real, right? And then actually government and all of their scare tactics around socialism and the rest of it, you know, become a lot less appealing. I would argue.

Luc Lewitanski: So there you go. I mean, you have it right there. That's, I don't think these people believe they're in BS. I think these are very cynical actors, just as you said, trying to exhaust our capacity for critical thinking and making people check out.

Ralph Levinson: It's not hard to be pretty cynical about it. I was just reading in a book about somebody whose father-in-law said the Democrats just paid all the scientists in the world. And there was no way he could be budged from that. He seemed to really believe that.

Luc Lewitanski: He didn't come up with that thought out of nowhere. I mean, this is where my moral outrage and this issue comes from is that the only reason we are at this point is because they have spent untold amounts of resources to make people like that guy who believes that every single scientist is paid off by Democrats. I believe this.

Ralph Levinson: Preach, brother! Exactly. They were basically just exaggerating and lying. This, in 1997, the CEO of Mobile, Lee Raymond, he questioned whether the earth was warming at all because scientists had predicted a new ice age, he claimed, which was not really true. In 2001, ExxonMobil had a press release quote, there is no consensus about long term climate. During the 1970s, people were concerned about global cooling. Senator Inha famously took $2.3 million from the oil and gas industry and he claimed, oh no, the scientist was far from settled. In 1970s, we were warmed about cooling. In 2004, the Exxon-backed Cato Institute alluded to this claim. So we see a pattern. Be that as it may, Exxon claimed to have stopped funding climate outright climate deniers in 2007. Do they want a medal or something? Yeah, exactly.

Luc Lewitanski: You know, thank you. Yeah, and that's what they'll admit to because here goes the work of investigative journalists. Obviously, more payments were found to a climate denier directly from Exxon in 2010. Actually, if you want to figure, going back to our good old pals from the API, the American Petroleum Institute, in 2015, the API spent an estimated $65 million on funding climate denial efforts. So in spite of them claiming that they'd wash their hands of such things, this is according to the Center for Public Integrity. In 2015, the API spent an estimated $65 million on climate denial efforts to delay action on something that, bare in mind, it had known about for over half a century by then.

Ralph Levinson: And of course, they didn't stop there because, sure, we've talked about these climate groups that were really oil company groups, the funding that went into these advertisements and public statements. But it went deeper than that. It went into buying politicians. That's where a lot of their money goes. And of course, that's a really big deal.

Luc Lewitanski: So OpenSecrets.org recently uncovered that in 2022 alone, the oil and gas industry spent $125 million on federal lobbying. So not only did they have record profits, they also redirected a lot of the surplus value that was extracted by their workers into directly misleading the public fervor. They spent $125 million within a year on lobbying.

That's directly trying to influence legislation, trying to poison the discourse through legal ways, but again, back channel ways. Thinking about why a price is so high at the pump, those margins for those oil companies go directly towards funding all this lying to try and push their agenda through the legislature. Then again, gas prices are heavily subsidized in the US. So it's more like these PR efforts by oil companies are indirectly being funded by US tax payers. Again, these things are very valuable to these oil companies. Remember, they spent $125 million within the last year.

Ralph Levinson: And this was helped a lot in 2010. The Supreme Court decided to go with Citizens United.

Luc Lewitanski: Basically lifted any spending caps on federal elections by allowing people to funnel their money through side organizations such as SuperPacks. And so long as you did not directly claim coordination, you're able to funnel extremely high amounts of money into the American electoral system. And you can see since Citizens United, the spending has ballooned. And oftentimes, especially in local elections, whoever spends most wins.

Obviously, thankfully, that's not always the case. But there is a huge glut of wasted money that goes through the American federal election system as a result of the Citizens United decisions. Massive amount of money is pouring into campaign consultants.

And this is largely aided by the use of these shadowy organizations and side groups that was permitted by this 2010 Supreme Court decision, the Citizens United Court case, which you're quite likely familiar with. Consultants were handsomely paid to come up with this language and put it in the mouths of very serious people. This is a purposeful tactic that, you know, I'm thinking back, you know, they're saying, oh, it's too costly to change. Well, you know what, it cost them a lot of money to come up with all these consultants and these strategies and these talking points, you know, that money could have been used. Yeah, but it was still a goodbye. It was a drop in the bucket compared to what it would actually cost them to change the business model.

Ralph Levinson: Yeah, it's a drop in the bucket. But now, the oil companies really give most of this money to Republicans. They know who's going to speak up for them, who's going to be obstructionist for them in the halls of Congress.

Luc Lewitanski: Yeah, Republicans are reliable on that, but it's more than just Republicans. That's true. You know, we keep talking about the Republican party being at full tier, but actually, I think some of the people who are most liable to be bought in this happen to be on the other side. I mean, this is truly a bipartisan issue in terms of oil money, corrupting politicians. I think Joe Manchin, who's been a swing vote on a lot of issues for the Democratic party, he's the number one senator who's taken the most oil money in 2022. He took $768,000, you know, from these companies.

Ralph Levinson: Manchin, this senator from West Virginia was on the top of the list at $768,000.

Luc Lewitanski: Joe Manchin, the senator from West Virginia, has been an infamous thorn in the side of climate activists for a long time, including with the latest IRA bill. It was his waffling that ultimately extracted concessions from the more ambitious parts of Biden's climate agenda. So as you're saying, this was a return on investment for the oil companies because he topped the list of donations for senators in the United States Senate by oil companies. And in 2022, the oil companies donated to Joe Manchin at the height of $768,000, three quarters of a million dollars.

So it was one quarter shy of a million dollars just in the pockets of Joe Manchin directly, well, somewhat shadily indirectly sometimes, from the oil companies into his pockets. And he's been a good soldier for this money, you know, he's been very good at obstructing Biden's climate agenda. And he's ultimately the reason why he tops the bill above all the Republicans is because he is the one where the return on investment is greatest because of his unique position as sort of the pivot vote among the Democrats. He's very necessary and useful to the oil companies. And that's why they're willing to invest so much into his good fortunes. And obviously, it just so happens, Joe Manchin personally is quite heavily invested in the coal industry. And so he personally stands to benefit a lot from sort of protecting it.

Ralph Levinson: Oh, no, and his family is there's no question about it. And there was he's not the only Democrat taking money and who has been an obstruction cinema from Arizona got $214,000. She took this money as a Democrat and was also a barrier to having as aggressive a climate legislation as we could.

Luc Lewitanski: And I'm sure that, you know, you don't have to demonstrate a direct quick approach. I think that, you know, there might be something to do between, you know, them handsomely rewarding him every year and him doing policies that just happen to directly get in the way of anything that would inconvenience these companies. You know, again, on their end, it's a very reasonable investment, 768 K isn't that much. And cinemas up there in the top 10 of senators who received the most money from oil up there with 214 K herself.

So, you know, she's a she's also making a pretty penny of her very public waffling on these issues. And one has to wonder if this isn't if there isn't sort of a causal link here.

Ralph Levinson: Well, it's hard to believe there's a coincidence that they were the ones who basically torpedoed a lot of the legislation that the Democrats tried to get through to control climate change. And they were responsible and particularly mansion for some of the compromises that had to be made. Absolutely.

Luc Lewitanski: Yeah, caving into the demands of industry, yes, which are particularly being fought for by these people who just happen to receive a lot of money every year from the industry. They've been very influential buying politicians left and right. This is the truth of American politics, you know, money has been dominating. And, you know, there are ways out of this, but there are different campaign funding systems, and there are different ways of thinking about getting elected.

And it's certainly very encouraging. There are organizations like Justice Democrats, the primary conservative Democrats who are brought into these interests and oftentimes doing so with less money, but with grassroots activism and people who actually care about what they're doing. This seems like reengaging the activity of politics and taking it away from the hands of these oil producers. I mean, I think there are real ways of resisting, and I don't mean to imply that all is lost. But I also don't think a mannequin narrative that implies that the good guys are on one side and the bad guys are all in the Republican Party is going to help us be wise and hip to the nefarious strategies that oil companies will use to distort, delay and do muscle.

Ralph Levinson: Well, that's a very important discussion. And your basic premise is absolutely true. Oil money does not always know red from blue. There's no question about it.

Luc Lewitanski: Ultimately, I have little faith that the Democratic Party as an institution wants to fight this tooth and nail in the way that it needs to be fought. But I do know that they're the only of your two political parties that can be pressured into fighting this.

Ralph Levinson: I don't want to be apologizing for Manchin. He really was instrumental in putting some very bad things in the IRA. But he did ultimately help us get it through. I certainly wouldn't want him to change into being Republican with the same negatives, but without at least being willing to work with the Democrats.

Luc Lewitanski: At least you can work with these people. At least they can be pressured. That's that's the distinction.

Ralph Levinson: At least to some degree, not as much as we'd like. Now, besides buying the politicians and remember what we're talking about when we talk about this three quarters of a million dollars, this is just part of it. There's much money cycling that's not through these lists that we get, you know, through the American Petroleum Institute and through private families. This doesn't count the Koch brothers. They were oil barons. It was a family owned company. Politicians, this isn't their only source of money. There's a lot of money going to politicians at every level.

Luc Lewitanski: I think a mindset that keeps coming up as these oil companies pivoted away from explicitly trying to fight the denial fight was a move towards portraying any action on climate as too coercive, which was on full display in 2013. In 2013, there was a board meeting from the oil company Exxon Mobile and the CEO of the company at the time was Rex Tillerson, whom Trump later appointed to be Secretary of State.

Ralph Levinson: You know, in 2013, Rex Tillerson, who we many of us may know because he was the Trump Secretary of State and he was the CEO of Exxon Mobile,

Luc Lewitanski: you know, I mean, choosing an oil man to run foreign policy in the US was its own sort of big signal that the Conservatives was ending in the first place.

But I think he really embodied this shift in sort of trying to make climate change. If they weren't going to try to have us disbelieve it, they're going to try and make the whole thing seem way too inconvenient. Obviously, the oil companies would find it inconvenient for them.

Ralph Levinson: Rex Tillerson said, and this is a quote, what good is it to save the planet if humanity suffers? Meaning, oh, you know, you're going to suffer if we work on this issue.

Luc Lewitanski: Well, that's the euphemism, humanity suffering. You know, this quote wasn't a public statement, obviously, wouldn't have been that bold. This is, you know, back when Rex Tillerson, before Trump sort of swooped him in 2017 to be American Secretary of State, he was running Exxon Mobile, the oil company. And during an internal shareholder meeting, it was leaked that in response to considering the question of climate change and whether or not they should do anything about it, he said, what good is it to save the planet if humanity suffers?

Surely, yes, humanity suffers here is a euphemism for slightly making the very wealthy oil executives inconvenient, slightly less richer. And even then we're talking about like, you know, that third house in Malibu, damn it, maybe not. Maybe they can't buy it.

Ralph Levinson: Trust me, they'll be able to still buy the house in Malibu for a long time.

Luc Lewitanski: I know, I know, well, nothing happened. They didn't have to change anything. His whole premise is putting in opposition these two ideas, even though they're intrinsically linked, this false dichotomy that was set up by Rex Tillerson at the Exxon Mobile shareholders meeting, in which he said that he did not think that it was worth tackling climate change if humanity had to suffer. So again, it's making this assumption that the only way in which we can address our climate crisis is human suffering.

But that's getting the equation completely the wrong way around. Now we know billions of people will suffer because of climate change now. Now it's a question of scope and extent, but already the cat's out of the bag.

Ralph Levinson: Here we are. And let's not forget that lots of people are already suffering from climate change and from air pollution.

Luc Lewitanski: You know, so humanity is already going to suffer because of this. Now the suffering that Rex Tillerson was talking about in that 2013 Exxon shareholder meeting is very different. He's talking about the suffering of a tiny class of exploiters, a tiny class of executives who take the extraction of this resource and who have profited massively of it.

Ralph Levinson: You know, you can't take that little grain of truth that it will be painful to undergo transitions and ignore the fact that already millions of people are suffering even now. And it's just going to get much worse no matter what we do. The best we could do is make it not get much much worse. We can mitigate it.

Luc Lewitanski: There are real things that we can do. You and I will never fall to despair or doomism here. This is not what it is about. It's very much on the contrary. It's about animating us to see the mechanisms of power that got us to this place and then to empower us to think about other ways of organizing, right? And I think the reason why this Rex Tillerson comment sticks out is because it's so calculated to drive a wedge amongst climate activists. The shift in messaging towards the inconvenience of mitigation of climate change is a devilish one because it's an appeal to selfishness. And ultimately people are so atomized in our society.

It's very hard for us to think about collective action problems like climate change, you know? Already thinking about like how am I going to make ends meet? How am I going to like put food on the table by the end of the month?

How am I going to pay these medical bills? Well, I wonder about that. So, you know, there are a lot of stresses on individuals in society that make it impossible for us to look at the bigger picture.

And that's again completely by design. Now, you know who is looking at the bigger picture? The ExxonMobil shareholders. But I think this goes back to this. It's very interesting if you think about it. It's there is no alternative in that framing. There is no thinking of like, oh, the government can massively subsidize public transport, create EVs.

There are many ways in which it doesn't have to be painful for individuals. I mean, currently your government has decided to subsidize people's purchases of electronic vehicles as a way of trying to move people away from fossil fuels. And that's that's certainly a nudge among others. But I think I would argue it's small pickings, although I'm not opposed to the efforts. I think they are an insufficient step, partially because of the work of people like Manchin and Cinema, who took out some of the strongest provisions out of these bills. I mean, oh, yeah, they definitely, design those carve outs are the direct results of the investment of those oil companies in the campaign funds of these politicians.

So I think that's that's why you want to draw these these links is we do not have to suffer in order to tackle climate change. In fact, the government has ample money that it uses to subsidize all companies that it could use to subsidize greener solutions. And this is a political choice that's being made. Just as Obama's choice was to massively expand fracking, you know, we we can't discount the ways in which American politics has been under the thumb of big oil for decades now.

Ralph Levinson: It's funny to hear you use the under the thumb phrase, which I agree with. And I had recently been listening to a presentation by Al Gore. And he used that exact same phrase, he said, the politicians and it was and he grimaced and used his thumb pushing down like pushing hard down on a button. The politicians are under the thumb of the oil companies. So Al Gore agrees with you. Let me tell you, I

Luc Lewitanski: think he encountered those people because he was also early on these issues.

Ralph Levinson: I'm sure he did plenty.

Al Gore: The fossil fuel industry is the polluted heart of the climate crisis. For decades now, the companies have had the evidence, they know the truth, and they consciously decided to lie to publics all around the world in order to calm down the political momentum for doing something about it so they could make more money.

Luc Lewitanski: Another interesting reaction by Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson came from an internal memo that the Wall Street Journal uncovered in September 2023. Now Exxon's reaction to 2015's Paris Accords externally was to play along, but internally, they made fun of them. Rex Tillerson is on record dismissing their target of limiting warming to two degrees as magical thinking. And he sarcastically added, who's to say two and a half degrees isn't enough? You know why stop at two? Again, deriding the very concept of countries getting together to try and tackle climate change.

Now, I'd like to remind you that all this was the result of deliberate choices. Oil doesn't take itself out of the ground. The climate doesn't warm itself. None of these are natural processes.

They're the direct results of continued actions by individuals. And I don't think the individual holding the pick-ups. I don't think the worker is deciding where we're mining, right? These decisions are ultimately made by a very small number of individuals who happen to be getting very wealthy off the status quo. Well, before we start the French Revolution here, we're putting in the opposition this idea that we suffer is really only looking at it from the perspective of oil executives. And some of these oil executives, you know, before these lawsuits came to bear, there was a real moment where the heads were in the spotlight, you know, Congress in October of 2021 to be specific, Congress convened the heads of Exxon, Chevron, Shell and BP, British Petroleum, to ask them some questions about their role in climate disinformation. This was a hearing specifically trying to get all executives on the record about the fact that they knew and lied about climate change and their role in it.

Ralph Levinson: It was Democrats trying to hold the oil executives feed to the fire. They were trying to get oil executives to admit that they lied and that they are harming the environment.

Luc Lewitanski: So the head of the hearing, Coma, asked each oil executive if they'd ever approved a disinformation campaign. And they all repeated, oh, no, no, no, I know of such thing. You know, they all kind of had their denial ready to go.

Ralph Levinson: And they were very sophisticated. They were prepared and the Democrats didn't get much traction, especially the American oil executives just lied. They just denied very sophisticated, very smooth. That's why they make the big bucks. That's why they make the big bucks. We do have a soundbite here from Naomi Oreskes, who was commenting about this.

Luc Lewitanski: And so let's listen. We'll hear the preeminent scholar in this field. You've heard her name quite a bit up to now. It's Naomi Oreskes. You can finally hear her voice. Naomi Oreskes, a prominent historian of science, is the one who wrote Merchants of Doubt and then worked with Geoffrey Supran on this research about the internal communications of oil companies, specifically Exxon. And so here, let's listen to her talk as the preeminent scholar on this very issue. Let's hear her comments on what this hearing of oil executives in October 2021 in the US Congress yielded. So this is her reacting on cable news right after the hearing. And you'll see, she was not impressed. Let's literally hear her voice.

Naomi Oreskes: We know from my own research, the work of other academics and investigative journalists, that for more than 30 years now, the fossil fuel industry has promoted disinformation, half truths, and in some cases outright falsehoods about climate science in order to confuse the American people and undermine support for climate action. And if we're subject to a bombardment of disinformation and propaganda, it makes it extremely difficult for us to understand even what kinds of policies could be effective. And we saw that today with a lot of tap dancing by the fossil fuel executives about low carbon and reduced carbon and carbon intensity, none of which is a meaningful solution to the climate crisis. The two most effective things that I think experts agree on that Congress could do tomorrow is to eliminate subsidies for fossil fuels and put a stiff price on carbon. The fossil fuel industry is heavily subsidized. Independent sources estimate that direct subsidies to fossil fuels in the United States alone are at least $20 billion every year. Globally, those direct subsidies are at least $650 billion, and that does not include the indirect subsidies in terms of the unpaid health costs or the cost of military protection of oil and gas shipping lanes. So the fossil fuel industry is a hugely subsidized industry. And so one thing that Congress could do beginning tomorrow is to phase out those subsidies so that renewable energy and efficiency could compete on a level playing field. And this is something that the industry has opposed over and over again. They say they believe in free enterprise, and even today they are fighting to continue to maintain those subsidies. The fossil fuel industry makes billions of dollars in profit, and we are left with tens of billions of dollars in damage from floods and fires and hurricanes. So we can fix that, and as I said, virtually all economists agree by putting a price on carbon, but it needs to be a stiff price.

Ralph Levinson: Ralph, what did you think? First of all, she's brilliant and she's right. She's certainly right about the subsidies. Carbon tax is a complicated issue. Some people are concerned it's a regressive tax.

Although I think it was totally right on the money. The oil executives remind me of mafia dons, heads of mafia families. They could keep their hands cleaned. Oh no, I never said we should do this. They don't have to say it. They just have to fund the people, the PR groups, the special front organizations to do the dirty work for them. However, what we do know is that there's plenty of documentation that they all companies have done this, and watching these oil company executives dance around and hide the truth was just insane. These guys really felt like they had control because they did, because they were just lying. Now that's not going to be so easy in the future.

Luc Lewitanski: It's beyond comprehension, how clearly these executives chose profits over truth. It's a form of death cults sacrificing lives for money. The issue of oil lies is critical now, as these lawsuits use them as the basis for them. Let's just put this into perspective. The only reason that we all experience this is because of the very concerted decisions by a group of executives.

Ralph Levinson: They have really made it that we've lost decades of action that they knew need to be taken.

Luc Lewitanski: And maybe we can think about how sometimes wealthy interests try to manipulate the truth. And this is evidently, as we have documented through our meticulous uncovering of research and internal communications through the decades, we've seen oil companies have knowingly lied. They've hidden the truth long after they know it.

You might call this a form of gaslighting. And they manufactured doubt. They exaggerated minor uncertainties all the while making a profit at the expense of our collective future.

And this is really the point. The driving force behind these lawsuits rests on this idea of to what extent do we know that oil companies knew what they were doing and profited off it. And I think after having spent about an hour with us going I hope that you will come with this fight up and enlightened about the nefarious ways in which the companies will stop at no end to try and stall efforts to be regulated.

Ralph Levinson: There's a lot of reasons to phase out oil. They want us to do it as slowly as possible. They want to maximize their profits and their longevity. Lawsuits are a way for them to be held responsible. At least the oil companies will be confronted in public on the record with their misdeeds and lies.

Luc Lewitanski: Well, on that note, Ralph, we certainly have the elements for putting together a strong case about the ways in which oil companies lied to us. And we have reasons to be hopeful that more of their deceptions could come to light with these types of court cases. And ultimately, I am very hopeful. As you've said, it's been a long road to get us to understanding these things. And it's been an arduous road because roadblocks have been put in place by oil companies who've tried to, you know, blind us from the truth. And it's important for us to understand the choices that led us to this point. This has not been the result of natural processes. These are things that we are doing and that we have been discovering. And we would have gotten there a lot faster if it wasn't for these dastardly oil companies getting in our way. And on that note. Yeah.

Ralph Levinson: Okay, let's let's end on that note. Well, in our next podcast, we're going to stay optimistic. We're not going to just continuously dwell on these people and their evil deeds. And their mansions. And their mansions and their wealth. We're going to keep positive and we'll take it from there.

Luc Lewitanski: Anyways, if you like this podcast, you know, we are not sponsored by anyone. We are very impassioned about what we talk about. And we are not corrupted by any financial influence, unlike some of the people we've talked about. But to that end, if this is something that you liked, if you found this valuable, if you want to spread this, review us on your podcast, App of Choice. So whether you're listening in Apple podcasts and overcast and pocket cast, wherever you choose to listen to us. So if you want to be part of this conversation, please reach out to us and spread the word, you know, again, putting it so that the robots and the algorithms can see that you liked it is one step.

The next step you can do is send it to someone you care about. You know, if someone that you know wants to know more about the history of the ways in which oil companies have lied, you can just be like, well, do you have an hour and do you like the sound of a British guy and a New York person arguing it out?

Ralph Levinson: And you could share our gleeful righteous indignation with them.

Luc Lewitanski: And on that note, Ralph, this has been quite a ride, but I hope you stay planet and stay healthy.

Ralph Levinson: Thank you, Luc. I'll do everything I can to do that.

Luc Lewitanski Singing:
Ooh child
Things are gonna get easier
Ooh child
Things'll get brighter
Ooh child
Things are gonna get easier
Ooh child
Things'll get brighter