Energy Industry Activism

Introduction

The human activity that contributes most to global climate change is the burning of fossil fuels. These fuels— oil, coal, and natural gas—are extracted by a relatively small group of large companies, often run by governments (for example, the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation). For much of the last 20 years, many oil and coal companies have resisted the scientific mainstream view that global climate change is real and caused in large part by fossil fuels.

Since the 1980s, these companies have often seen concern about global warming as a direct threat to their business: if fewer fossil fuels are burned, they reason, demand for their product will go down and they will make less money. As a result, some energy companies have funded advertising campaigns, scientific research, front groups, and political lobbying efforts in an attempt to discredit the scientific view of global warming, or to at least create a sense that climate science is too uncertain for any action to be taken.

Historical Background and Scientific Foundations

In the mid 1970s, scientific opinion wavered briefly between theories of imminent global cooling and global warming. By the end of the decade, it had shifted decisively toward global warming, and scientific concerns had begun to influence public opinion. By 1980, more than a third of Americans had heard of the greenhouse effect. The energy industries and some other business interests became worried that concerns about global warming might lead to profit-injuring government regulations.

Starting in the early 1990s, some energy companies developed a variety of front groups and funding strategies to spread disbelief or doubt about the science of global climate change. A front group is an organization that is created by another organization, such as a business or government, to evoke a false appearance of independence. Front groups established by the energy industry have been given names to make them sound like scientific or environmentalist groups, such as the Global Climate Coalition (GCC), Information Council on the Environment, and the Greening Earth Society. A few of these groups and their relationships to the energy industry are outlined below.

The Information Council on the Environment

The Information Council on the Environment (ICE) was created in 1991 by utility and coal industry groups, including the National Coal Association and the Western Fuels Association. ICE at once began a $500,000 ad campaign to discredit the idea of global warming. According to a strategy advice document from Cambridge Reports, a polling firm hired to help design the ICE campaign, the goal of the ads was “to reposition global warming as theory rather than fact.” Cambridge Reports also created the name of the group to match the acronym ICE, which would suggest the opposite of warming; the name “Informed Citizens for the Environment” was also considered, but rejected because it did not sound as authoritative.

Print and radio ads were tested in several U.S. states. The ad that appeared in Minnesota featured a cartoon horse wearing a scarf and earmuffs saying, “If the Earth is getting warmer, why is Minneapolis getting colder?” (In fact, it had warmed.) Another print ad read, “Some say the Earth is warming. Some also said the Earth was flat.” Cambridge Reports also advised that the ads should tell people that “some members of the media scare the public about global warming to increase their audience and influence.”

These and other features of the ICE ad campaign were described in a July 1991 article in the New YorkTimes and in other media outlets, producing negative publicity that led to a stoppage of the campaign.

The George C. Marshall Institute

In early 1992, two months before the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) treaty was drafted, the George C. Marshall Institute, a conservative think-tank founded in 1984, issued a study claiming that global warming might well be caused by increasing radiation from the sun. Since 1989, the institute had been engaged in what its Web site describes as a “critical examination of the scientific basis for climate change.”

In 1992, the institute was funded entirely by private conservative foundations, but eventually it began to accept funding directly from the energy industry. For example, in 1999 it accepted a grant from the oil company Exxon (just before Exxon's merger with Mobil to form the world's most profitable company, ExxonMobil, in November 1999). The chief executive officer of the institute as of 2007, William O'Keefe, is a former vice-president of the American Petroleum Institute (an oil-industry advocacy group) and in 2002 registered as a lobbyist for ExxonMobil. As of 2007, the Marshall Institute continued to oppose mainstream science on climate change.

ExxonMobil Activism

ExxonMobil has been the most publicly visible of energy companies seeking to influence public and political opinion about climate change. In 1989, Exxon and other U.S. firms founded the Global Climate Coalition (GCC) to counter reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) indicating that global climate change is real and human-caused. The basic strategy of the GCC, like similar groups, was to create an exaggerated impression of uncertainty in climate science, implying that too little is known to justify any action—especially any action that might impinge on the well-being of large energy companies. During the 1990s, the GCC spent over $63 million on ads and lobbying to prevent action on climate change, including a 1997 ad campaign against ratification of the Kyoto Protocol that cost $13 million.

In 1996, U.S. Undersecretary for Global Affairs Timothy Wirth told a climate convention in Geneva, Switzerland, that groups such as the GCC were “nay-sayers and special interests bent on belittling, attacking and obfuscating climate change science” (Masood, 1996). In 1997, the GCC suffered a setback as British Petroleum (BP) and the Arizona Public Service Company pulled out of the group. The CEO of the latter company explained, “I was concerned that to continue to attack the science—which the GCC is basically doing—is not the way forward” (Masood, 1996). Other energy companies left in succeeding years, and despite president William O'Keefe's 1996 claim that “We're adding members, not losing them,” the GCC closed down in 2001.

In 1998, Exxon, the oil company Chevron, and the American Petroleum Institute considered setting up a $5 million Global Climate Science Data Center as what they called a “sound scientific alternative” to the IPCC. The proposed organization was never created, apparently due to the ongoing crumbling of the GCC (Shell Oil quit in 1998). Also in 1998 the American Petroleum Institute drafted a memo, later leaked, detailing a Global Climate Science Communications Plan for manufacturing public uncertainty about global warming.

WORDS TO KNOW

DENIALISTS: People who insistently refuse to accept a scientific or historical fact in the face of overwhelming physical evidence and near-universal expert agreement.

EARTH SUMMIT: Alternative name for the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, June 3–14, 1992, the meeting at which the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was developed.

FOSSIL FUELS: Fuels formed by biological processes and transformed into solid or fluid minerals over geological time. Fossil fuels include coal, petroleum, and natural gas. Fossil fuels are non-renewable on the timescale of human civilization, because their natural replenishment would take many millions of years.

GREENPEACE: Nonprofit environmental group formed in 1971, originally to protest nuclear testing and whaling. The group remains active, now addressing a wide range of issues, including climate change.

INTERGOVERNMENTAL PANEL ON CLIMATE CHANGE (IPCC):

Panel of scientists established by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in 1988 to assess the science, technology, and socioeconomic information needed to understand the risk of human-induced climate change.

KYOTO PROTOCOL: Extension in 1997 of the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), an international treaty signed by almost all countries with the goal of mitigating climate change. The United States, as of early 2008, was the only industrialized country to have not ratified the Kyoto Protocol, which is due to be replaced by an improved and updated agreement starting in 2012.

Exxon's primary public-relations efforts from the late 1990s through the early 2000s have been through contributing funds to groups that oppose the scientific consensus view of climate change. These groups include the American Enterprise Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the George C. Marshall Institute, the Cato Institute, and many more.

In 2006, the Royal Society (the United Kingdom's governmental science-advisory group, similar to the National Academy of Sciences) wrote to ExxonMobil to ask the company to stop funding such groups. The Royal Society found that ExxonMobil had given $2.9 million in 2005 alone to 39 U.S. groups that, according to the society, “misinformed the public about climate change through their websites.”

In 2007, news media reported that ExxonMobil had softened its stance on the climate issue. According to Kenneth Cohen, Exxon's vice president for public affairs, ExxonMobil already cut funding for the Competitive Enterprise Institute and other denialist organizations in 2006. A Greenpeace report in 2007 stated, however, that ExxonMobil had continued to fund the majority of the groups it had assisted in the past, giving $2.1 million in 2006 to 41 denialist groups, including $421,000 to groups listed in the American Petroleum Institute's 1998 Global Climate Science Communications Plan.

Impacts and Issues

There is no way to precisely measure the effectiveness of public-relations campaigns such as that conducted over the last 15 to 20 years by portions of the energy industry, especially some oil and coal companies. However, it appears that these efforts may have been successful in confusing the issue. As of 2001, only 15% of Americans could identify fossil-fuel burning as the main cause of global warming, compared to 26% of Mexicans.

As of 2007, the number of Americans who knew that the majority of scientists agree that anthropogenic carbon dioxide is the main cause of global warming was between 33% and 60%, depending on how the question was worded. However, as of 2006, 87% saw the threat of global warming as either critical or important—less than in some countries, more than in others.

Whatever its past successes, and apart from continued corporate contributions to denialist groups, energy-industry efforts to undermine the scientific consensus on climate change have largely faltered or even reversed. In 2001, the CEO of BP acknowledged publicly that human-released greenhouse gases cause global warming and urged that action should be taken. BP has collaborated in climate-change initiatives with Royal Dutch/Shell, making a commitment to reduce greenhouse emissions with specific deadlines and investing in alternative energy technologies.

See Also Climate Change Skeptics; Environmental Protection Agency (EPA); IPCC Climate Change 2007 Report: Criticism; Media Influences: False Balance; Public Opinion.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books

Weart, Spencer. The Discovery of Global Warming. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.

Periodicals

Adam, David. “Royal Society Tells Exxon: Stop Funding Climate Change Denial.” The Guardian (September 20, 2006).

Eilperin, Juliet. “AEI Critiques of Warming Questioned.” The Washington Post (February 5, 2007).

Krauss, Clifford, and Jad Mouawad. “Exxon Chief Cautions Against Rapid Action to Cut Carbon Emissions.” The New York Times (February 14, 2007).

Masood, Ehsan. “Companies Cool to Tactics of Global Warming Lobby.” Nature 383 (1996): 470.

“Oil Industry Lobby Plans Rival to UN Climate Science Panel.” Nature 392 (1998): 856.

Schrope, Mark. “A Change of Climate for Big Oil.” Nature 411 (2001): 516–517.

Wald, Matthew L. “Pro-Coal Ad Campaign Disputes Warming Idea.” The New York Times (July 8, 1991).

Web Sites

“ExxonMobil's Continued Funding of Global Warming Denial Industry: Analysis by Greenpeace USA Research Department.” Greenpeace USA. < http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/assets/binaries/exxon-secrets-analysis-of-fun.pdf> (accessed November 11, 2007).

George C. Marshall Institute: Better Science for Public Policy. < http://www.marshall.org/> (accessed November 11, 2007). “

Global Climate Science Communications Action Plan” (leaked oil-company documents). Denial and Deception: A Chronicle of ExxonMobil's Efforts to Corrupt the Debate on Global Warming, Greenpeace, 1998. < http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/assets/binaries/leaked-api-comms-plan-1998> (accessed November 11, 2007).

Jiang, Wenran. “Smoke, Mirrors, and Hot Air: How ExxonMobil Uses Big Tobacco's Tactics to Manufacture Uncertainty on Climate Science.” Union of Concerned Scientists, January, 2007.< http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/global_warming/exxon_report.pdf> (accessed November 11, 2007).

Ward, Bob. “Letter to ExxonMobil.” Royal Society, September 4, 2006. < http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/displaypagedoc.asp?id=23780> (accessed November 11, 2007).

Larry Gilman