Exxon funds "misleading" climate change lobby groups

Feeling confused about whether or not climate change is really a threat? Good. That's exactly what they want you to feel. Confused.

I was having a conversation about this with a friend over lunch during the week and he explained to me how the big oil companies fund hundreds of small lobby groups who purport to be scientists and who put out misleading and contradictory evidence deliberately to confuse the general public.

Here's an interesting statement I read tonight:

According to Ward's own analysis of Exxon's Corporate Giving Report, the company last year funded 64 groups conducting climate change research, of which 25 were in line with mainstream climate science and 39 were "misleading." The latter category included the Centre for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, to which Exxon gave $25,000 in 2005, the Exxon website shows. The Centre's website says: "There is no compelling reason to believe that the rise in temperature was caused by the rise in CO2."

This is from an article in Al Jazeera stating that The Royal Society, Britain's national academy of science, is criticizing Exxon's attempts to mislead the general public by confusing them with contradictory reports.

So, here's how it seems to work. You give money to both the dodgy groups who make up their science off of the back of a breakfast cereal box but you *also* give funding to the real scientists so you can't be accused of just funding the bad guys. You can say

"These organisations do not speak on our behalf, nor do we control their views and messages. They may or may not hold similar views to ours."

But what you *really* want to do is create confusion. It's Alexander of Macedon's old "divide and conquer" strategy updated for the 21st century corporation. Plausible deniability.

Now, when you read about the confusion in the newspaper, all you read is that Politician X said "Climate change is important and we need to do something about it now" but then you read that Politican B said "Such-and-such a group of scientists says it isn't as big a problem as everyone is making out, go back to your Reality TV". Of course, what you *don't* read is that the group Politican B quoted from was funded by Exxon.

Who has the responsibility to tell you this last fact? The newspaper? You would think so.

Comments

[Grant]

Hey Cameron. Nice pick up - there's been a lot of momentum in "outing" this practice of late, which is good to see.

You mention reading about this confusion in the newspaper - in An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore makes the point that although none of the peer reviewed scientific papers contest that climate change isn't real and caused by humans, 53% of the news articles in a similar period did express that there was some doubt.

In the interview David Suzuki did with WWF the other week (disclosure: I work for WWF) - on YouTube here: http://youtube.com/watch?v=acqiViltz-c - he makes a similar point - about the use conflict as a device to sell a story, and the human need to see "both sides of the story".

The problem, as David says, is that one side is a vast majority of the scientific community (who we must remember, like the insurance industry, is quite conservative - they don't make brash "alarmist" statements without some serious supporting evidence), whereas the other is a small handful of scientists. The issue is that in a news article, the handful are given as much power as the majority. And thus confusion is sewn...

We need scientists that dissent and contest the majority view. We need them to test and poke holes in theories, and present alternatives. It is an essential part of the scientific process. And it needs to happen on the issue of global warming as well. But when the small handful are presented with equal weight as the majority we are likely to get into a great deal of trouble.

[gnoll110]

Yep.

"They", Big Oil and Big Coal are using the same tactics on the leading end of the problems too. That problem being "Peak Oil"

People, grab the podcasts from the fuelling the future (that's fuelling with two "l"s) conference in 2005. (Sorry to divide a podders time mate ;)

[Buff]

You shouldn't be surprised. With ExxonMobil spending over $16M to keep the confusion going. An excellent site to check is www.exxonsecrets.org It has this really nice interactive site where you can build a web of corporate funded scientists and other various hacks and link them with all the PR groups and the amounts those groups get from JUST Exxon.

There is also a nice report put out by the Union of Concerned Scientist in PDF format. It demonstrates how many of the same hacks hired to cause confusion over tobacco smoking are the same ones working to cloud the issue of Global Warming.

http://www.ucsusa.org/

Happy Earth Day