The denial industry

[spindrifter]

Tuesday September 19, 2006
The Guardian


ExxonMobil is the world's most profitable corporation. Its sales now amount to more than $1bn a day. It makes most of this money from oil, and has more to lose than any other company from efforts to tackle climate change. To safeguard its profits, ExxonMobil needs to sow doubt about whether serious action needs to be taken on climate change. But there are difficulties: it must confront a scientific consensus as strong as that which maintains that smoking causes lung cancer or that HIV causes Aids. So what's its strategy?

The website Exxonsecrets.org, using data found in the company's official documents, lists 124 organisations that have taken money from the company or work closely with those that have. These organisations take a consistent line on climate change: that the science is contradictory, the scientists are split, environmentalists are charlatans, liars or lunatics, and if governments took action to prevent global warming, they would be endangering the global economy for no good reason. The findings these organisations dislike are labelled "junk science". The findings they welcome are labelled "sound science".
Among the organisations that have been funded by Exxon are such well-known websites and lobby groups as TechCentralStation, the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation. Some of those on the list have names that make them look like grassroots citizens' organisations or academic bodies: the Centre for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, for example. One or two of them, such as the Congress of Racial Equality, are citizens' organisations or academic bodies, but the line they take on climate change is very much like that of the other sponsored groups. While all these groups are based in America, their publications are read and cited, and their staff are interviewed and quoted, all over the world.

By funding a large number of organisations, Exxon helps to create the impression that doubt about climate change is widespread. For those who do not understand that scientific findings cannot be trusted if they have not appeared in peer-reviewed journals, the names of these institutes help to suggest that serious researchers are challenging the consensus.

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http://environment.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,,1875762,00.html

[ProgressiveEconomist]

1. Interesting. This situation reminds of decades of denial of tobacco's

health effects. An industry that was killing 1000 people a day had the best lobbying operation in Washington (the Tobacco Institute) and armies of statisticians grinding out false studies to muddy the waters.

I've always wondered about the influence of location on the strengths of universities. New orleans has some very strong engineering programs, and the reason why is clear. Tobacco's need for statisticians might similarly be a big factor in the strengths of statistics departments at several North Carolina universities.

Who lobbies for Big Oil, and where do their obfuscatory studies of environmental effects come from?

[spindrifter]

2. Great points!