Yesterday, Chris D’Angelo at HuffPost wrote about how Trump’s approach to climate change “echoes Big Oil’s 1998 denial campaign,” framed mainly around a document exposed two decades ago detailing the denial gameplan that we’ve seen the Trump administration roll out.
Fortunately, there are now a ton of similar documents available to those interested in charting denial’s history. The Climate Investigations Center has provided UC San Francisco with over a thousand documents from their database.
UCSF is already home to the Tobacco Industry document database, where millions of documents detailing Big Tobacco’s denial operations are kept as a result of the industry’s major loss in court. Now, they’ve added a fossil fuel section to accompany the documents from tobacco, drug, chemical and food companies.
Over at DeSmog, John Mashey this week described the sorts of stories one can write with these kinds of internal documents. The Chamber of Commerce’s tobacco advocacy is one opportunity, and a quick perusal of the documents provides plenty of other potential options for further digging.
Curious about what Heartland told ALEC about its NIPCC impersonation of the IPCC, or who the members of ALEC’s Environment and Energy taskforce have been through the years? Here’s 79 pages of ALEC materials!
Wondering how closely Exxon worked with Heartland and other front groups? In 2006, it looks like Heartland and Exxon collaborated on an event held by DCI to discuss the Clean Air Act. Exxon gave CFACT $70,000, and also gave Frontiers of Freedom, a group mentioned in D’Angelo’s story, at least $90,000 (the same amount it gave Heartland that year.)
Now, D’Angelo is in no way wrong to call out Trump’s reliance on deniers, but here’s a question: is Trump’s deference to denial groups really all that unique for a Republican president? Apparently not. In 2001, when an undersecretary in the George W. Bush State Department spoke to the Global Climate Coalition (housed in the American Petroleum Institute,) he was given talking points that included the claim that the president “rejected Kyoto, in part, based on input from you.”
What did Shell think about climate change in 1998? Well, it acknowledged that “the temperature of the Earth has been rising over the last century,” but then claimed “the causes are not clear,” even though “human activities have caused [ghg] concentrations in the atmosphere to increase,” leading to concentrations in the atmosphere that “far exceed levels the planet has seen in at least the last 150,000 years.”
Or, going further back, one might wonder how the media handled deniers when the climate issue was still emerging in the mainstream, and find answers in a booklet with CEI’s press clips in 1990.
So dive in, friends! Thanks to the fossil fuel industry, the water’s never been warmer!
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