With the New York case moving to trial, the Supreme Court ruling that Baltimore and two other cases against Big Oil can move forward in local courts, a House hearing featuring Exxon’s own former science consultants testifying along side the prosecutor who brought down Big Tobacco, and a report being published that explains how to debunk their disinformation, it’s safe to say that last week was not a good one for ExxonMobil.
On Thursday, it got even worse. After a judge denied ExxonMobil’s plea to prevent Massachusetts from suing, the state did just that. It filed a complaint against the company for not only misleading investors, like New York, but also for misleading the public and consumers with its decades-long campaign of disinformation as well as greenwashing advertisements for its products that supposedly help fight climate change.
The filing itself is something to behold. The “context” section is a 40 page endorsement of the “ExxonKnew” investigative journalism from InsideClimate News and others. It goes through the timeline of Exxon’s understanding, how “In the late 1970s, Exxon developed and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars” on researching climate change, noting that a 1978 internal Exxon memo “confirmed that ‘there is general scientific agreement’” that fossil fuels are changing the climate and warning that there is “a time window of five to ten years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical.”
It describes a 1980 API meeting, which Exxon attended, where experts explained that there would be “globally catastrophic effects” if we continued to burn fossil fuels, and a 1982 memo “given wide circulation to Exxon management” that warned of “potentially catastrophic events” that may be inevitable “once the [greenhouse] effects are measurable.”
So what did Exxon do? The complaint tells us that “by the late 1980s and early 1990s, Exxon began to disavow” that understanding, and “like the tobacco companies before it,” the company “began a sophisticated, multi-million dollar campaign to sow doubt about whether climate change was occurring, and what role, if any, fossil fuel use played in causing climate change.”
The Mass complaint explains how Exxon and others “funded the operations of the Global Climate Coalition,” which “distributed messaging material” that claimed, “contrary to Exxon’s internal knowledge, the role of greenhouse gases in climate change was not well understood.”
The company, through GCC, began attacking the consensus it had recognized a decade earlier, “to create the false impression of a scientific debate,” which “directly contributed to deception of investors and consumers about the risks of climate change and the harmful consequences associated with the production and use of Exxon’s fossil fuel products.”
But Exxon didn’t just let GCC do its dirty work. The complaint details how in 1996, 14 years after an internal memo warning of catastrophic impacts of burning fossil fuels, Exxon’s CEO Lee Raymond said in a speech that the science is “inconclusive as to whether human activities are having a significant effect on the global climate.” (An entire section of the report is dedicated to the company’s other advertisements with messages to that effect.)
Raymond also used the disputed Oregon Petition Project in a speech to claim that thousands of scientists opposed the consensus. However, as the complaint points out, “by that time, this petition had been thoroughly discredited, counting among its supporting ‘scientists’ numerous fake signatories such as fictional characters from the ‘Star Wars’ movies and op singer ‘Dr.’ Geri Halliwell of the Spice Girls.”
The complaint even mentions Steven Milloy by name as one “veteran of the tobacco industry’s deception campaign” who helped Exxon and others form the Global Climate Science Communications Team “for the express purpose of causing the public and decision makers to doubt the science of climate change.” Milloy’s group, at the time known as The Advancement of Sound Science Center, “went on to become a corporate and Exxon-funded fake grassroots citizen group spreading doubt about climate science.”
Twenty years later, TASSC is dissolved, but Steve Milloy is still working to spread doubt with op-eds and in the Trump administration, while Geri Halliwell and the Spice Girls are fighting to remain relevant.
If there is true justice in this world, we’ll soon see the Spice Girls thriving, Steve struggling, and Exxon taking a MASSive hit.
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