While many in the Trump administration are concerned about their next job — “member of a violently seditious racist’s government” doesn’t look great on a resume, after all — apparently the American Petroleum Institute has no qualms with hiring terrorist-adjacent staff, and has hired Energy Dept press secretary Jessica Szymanski. Despite a tweet from an API executive condemning the violence (less than even other pro-polluter groups who issued full statements) given that API bankrolls Republicans (including insurrectionists) it’s not exactly a surprise to see they’ve rescued Szymanski from unemployment.
Because as a new study shows, API has been embracing denial for decades now. Dr. Ben Franta’s latest, in Environmental Politics examines an archival report published by API in 1980 that shows how “commercial fossil fuel interests played a more obstructive role in climate change discourse and policy throughout the 1980s than previously understood.”
In a twitter thread last week, Dr. Franta explained how the “Two Energy Futures” policy report lays bare three key aspects of the oil industry's long-term denial campaign. It ignored conclusions of its own internal reports showing an impending climate crisis, and instead deliberately downplayed the climate science’s certainty of negative impacts by invoking a false balance claiming that “scientists were more or less split” on the CO2-climate change link and misrepresenting Carl Sagan’s views on the issue.
Further, the API report portrayed a World Coal Study (funded, of course, by the fossil fuel industry) as credible and consistent with other expert assessments, and an independent validation that more coal would be a good thing, in part because of the coal-to-gas process API envisioned would be prevalent.
This combination of pretending not to know what its own scientists have found, misrepresenting what others say, and setting up your own front groups to launder self-serving opinions as expertise, Dr. Franta tweeted, “shows that by 1980 the fossil industry was not only paying attention to climate science but also actively intervening to prevent climate from becoming a public policy issue.”
Far from the perceived notion of an industry’s once-constructive research being buried and then turned into disinformation, Dr. Franta’s analysis shows that “from the inception of public awareness of global warming, the petroleum industry sought to pollute public understanding, manipulate science, and delay policy action.”
So please keep in mind the fact that the industry has lied about their responsibility for climate change for decades before treating them like good-faith actors in the policy arena.
Top Climate and Clean Energy Stories: