The Power of Big Oil Part One: Denial (full documentary) | FRONTLINE

[Music] for more than 150 years oil and gas has played a critical role in our society improving human lives raising standards of living and enabling unprecedented economic growth what do you do when your industry can no longer exist without creating catastrophes worldwide the impacts of climate change are intensifying it's important to understand the past you can't understand where you are if you don't know how you got there in a special three-part series the epic story of our failure to tackle climate change the whole world is heating up and the role of the fossil fuel industry the big oil knowingly spread disinformation now in part one what big oil knew about climate change more than 40 years ago the fact that exxon had been doing rigorous peer-reviewed research in the 80s was staggering to me there were uncertainties but it certainly was when how fast and what happened as the science became more certain scientific evidence remains inconclusive as to whether human activities affect the global climate so there's simply no reason to take drastic action now they realized that it was going to be an existential threat to their business but they made a deeply unethical decision to try to obfuscate the reality we continue to maintain a position that has evolved with science and is today consistent with the science we won't solve the climate crisis unless we solve the misinformation crisis [Music] in 1978 my wife and i was just engaged six months prior so we were going to get married a year after i graduated from college i was kind of awkward a little bit reserved i was definitely a nerd i mean i grew up in a blue collar area in queens i went to cooper union and cooper union was very well known not to to my own horn but you had to be pretty good to get in so we were a draw for exxon exxon had a recruiting program they would go to colleges all around the country and every year they would take best graduates from my school and so when exxon offered me a position in their research division and doing environmental monitoring for me was a really good fit and the salary i got offered was about 18 600 which in those days was a lot of money somebody fresh out of school exxon was not just the largest oil and gas company in existence it was the largest company period in existence it did business all over the world it was enormous and the resources were gigantic and it had a very good reputation at the time i joined it they had a company making word processes fax machines there was a new division of the company exxon nuclear and they had exxon solar exxon wanted to become an energy company they were flush with funds the oil business was doing really well in the 70s and so they wanted to move into other fields related to energy the energy projects that they were doing were very well funded each one of them would have teams of five to 10 scientists and then technicians supporting them so the project i ultimately ended up working for them on was really blue sky they weren't going to make any money on it it was just research for the sake of doing research for somebody who was 22 or 23 years i was like wow am i i'm really happy here this is a really great place to be working i was really happy working for exxon [Music] in the mid 70s i was working for nasa it was a very exciting time because nasa was sending probes all over the solar system and the information that was coming back was very interesting things that we never knew for example we found out that venus was very hot it's at least 700 degrees there and the most plausible explanation came from the composition of venus's atmosphere venus is almost 100 carbon dioxide there was a kind of unified idea in the terrestrial planets of our solar system that greenhouse gas warming was caused by high concentrations of carbon dioxide at the same time some research scientists were making observations of carbon dioxide in our own atmosphere and we have seen this curve of increasing carbon dioxide it's become a classic icon of the carbon dioxide problem where co2 keeps going up and up a few parts per million every year and we can attribute that to greenhouse gases primarily fossil fuel burning it was a small group maybe 20 or 30 who were developing models independently and checking each other all of the models showed that the average temperature of the earth was going to warm the things that we didn't know were details we didn't know exactly where that was going to happen and how it was going to happen the question came up what are we going to do over 85 percent of our energy was generated by fossil fuels and about that time is when i had the opportunity to work as a consultant with the biggest company in the world at the time exxon [Music] today the evidence of climate change is everywhere frontline has been investigating the role of the fossil fuel industry and one of its biggest players exxon in delaying and preventing action on climate change over the past four decades this film is based on over 100 interviews and thousands of documents many of them newly uncovered it's a story that begins with a small team of scientists inside exxon so this is this is a presentation entitled the proposed exxon research program to help assess the greenhouse effect it's presented by edward garvey myself henry shaw wally broker and tara takahashi colombia university exxon wanted to do research related to climate change but they wanted it to be recognized that something that exxon can contribute that was unlikely anybody else could do the role of the ocean in the global balance of carbon dioxide was not well understood and so exxon saw an opportunity using an oil tanker to revolve itself in that line of research and make a really significant contribution to the understanding of the global cycle of carbon dioxide program goal use exxon expertise and facilities to help determine the likelihood of a global greenhouse effect march 26 1979. i wasn't dying to go to sea you know i was a city kid i wasn't a sailor but i think i understood from the very beginning that the oil tanker was going to be my baby so to speak i was going to make it work rationale for exxon involvement develop expertise to assess the possible impact of the greenhouse effect on exxon business form responsible team that can credibly carry bad news if any to the corporation the work that we were doing the company was interested at the highest levels they wanted the knowledge we wrote computer programs we planted graphs we analyzed the results we compared it with data with what nature was doing and we would compare our results with others results we would see if there's a consensus those papers would then get presented at meetings with the government people from industry people from the university and it would sort of be this sort of brick by brick advance in our understanding of how the system worked everything that we studied was basically consistent with the finding that the earth was going to warm significantly and we just was trying to say how it would warm i can only speak about the research group in exxon research and engineering everybody there accepted it roger cohen completely accepted it roger cohen who was the manager of the group that i was consulting for passed a lot of our results on to higher levels of management because that's what this is he's writing to his boss about what the guys working for him are doing there's unanimous agreement in the scientific community the temperature increase of this magnitude would bring about significant changes in the earth's climate including rainfall distribution and alterations in the biosphere but our results are in accord with those of most researchers in the field and are subject to the same uncertainties there was no separation between exxon's understanding and that of academia none yeah there were uncertainties but it certainly was when how fast that's what we were looking at we didn't reduce fossil fuel consumption in a significant fashion we were going to be facing significant climate change in the future and here he's saying that we should keep doing the research because it can inform our decisions our ethical responsibility is to permit the publication of our research in the scientific literature indeed to do otherwise would be a breach of exxon's public position and ethical credo on honesty and integrity within the exo research and engineering company at least we knew the changes were going to be necessary but i think exxon was afraid we would change too fast you just can't shut off the fossil fuels because all of society depends on it i was convinced that exxon was doing this research to understand it to get a place at the table to be part of the solution not so that we can deny the problem [Music] [Music] sometime in the 2000s exxon gave their archives to the library at the university of texas many truckloads of documents perhaps it was a pr effort to show that this company has a proud history and it's all transparent it's all in the library and so it was a revelation when journalists uncovered documents showing how deep the conversation was about climate change within exxon we came across letter after letter after letter two leaders of the company about carbon dioxide and not only letters but we came across a memo that said that if carbon dioxide concentrations continue to grow at this rate this could be catastrophic that was the word used anybody who covered climate knew that exxon had played a critical role in developing and funding a narrative of climate denial that began in the 1990s so the fact that exxon had been doing rigorous peer-reviewed research in the 80s was staggering to me well i've become a curator of documents the evidence from the exxon documents is that there was a cadre of really smart scientists putting exxon in a position of authority on the science of climate change gasoline and fuel oil prices fell two percent last month the third consecutive monthly decline in the price of gasoline that set the stock markets getting into its worst loss in three months and the fallout continued as the week progressed now we're in 1982 and in 1982 oil prices dropped the bottom fell out of the oil market and so exxon was having a hard time staying profitable and it began layoffs one of the things that was dropped overboard was a tanker project basically just said the market's too poor no longer can afford this level of research we're going to keep the modeling team together and shut down the tanker project and by 1984 lee raymond was senior vice president with broad oversight for exxon research and engineering raymond believed exxon would always be an oil and gas company it would never be anything else when exxon retrenched and sold off its research and lithium batteries sold off its solar energy it's like you're throwing the baby with the bath water these are all important lines of research for the potential for the company and you're just getting rid of them you're not trying to shrink them down saying okay we have to make do with a smaller budget no this is gone we're done with this we're done with this we're done with that alternative fuels there was a time in the late 70s that your company spent a lot of money at that time to say is there an alternative fuel that will work so that we don't have to burn fossil fuels right and put all that co2 in the earth we were the fir we were the first oil company that really spent a lot of money looking at all that and the results were what none of these technologies and we looked at everything i mean we looked from soup to nuts that none of these technologies were going to be competitive against oil the conclusion we came to charlie was that fossil fuels had such an economic first of all such an economic advantage and secondly such a relatively ease of use that it was going to be very difficult to displace them [Music] i didn't stay there that much longer after they shut down the tanker project i know that exxon did some really good climate-related modeling work and was still funding research at columbia university but effectively they turned the corner and well i just i knew that the place that i worked in was gone i was heartbroken exxonmobil declined to give us any interviews in a written response to questions the company said for more than 40 years we have supported development of climate science in partnership with governments and academic institutions and exxonmobil has never had any unique or superior knowledge about climate science let alone any that was unavailable to policy makers or the public [Music] i didn't learn about climate change until i was in graduate school these are documents from the 80s the 70s talking about climate change and to only learn about it in 2010 shows that knowledge doesn't necessarily go in a unidirectional fashion that we lose knowledge we forget things all the time both as individuals and as a society there are many people working on this now and we're getting a better and better understanding all the time we now know that shell for example had a sophisticated understanding of the climate issue also by the end of the 1980s the coal industry too so there is a level of foreknowledge by the fossil fuel industry that business as usual would lead to disaster around the world my fellow americans with summer coming a lot of americans will be driving more than ever in everything from vans to buses to motorbikes this is a good time for it because gas prices continue to fall corporate profits surged in the first quarter individual winners were ford exxon general motors ibm retail sales jump reflecting a surge in demand for new cars there's more with sellathon three starlets corollas the aircraft company unveiled their new 67 jet launchers sharp fare reductions by american airlines they turn out to be a major turning point in the history of airline pricing who is making the excess buck here primarily us refiners of petroleum products most of these companies have announced huge increases in their refinery profits over the last nine months exxon had an idea of how soon governments would start to act about global warming the company predicted that policy action would occur around the late 1980s which it did so this is really when a huge battle began [Music] [Laughter] [Music] 1988 was the year that the issue of climate change moved from scientific journals into the realm of public policy i was a 26 year old on the lower end of the totem pole in a senate office and senator were said you want to work on the environment because that's where all the action is going to be our climate is changing very dramatically and it's time for us to start acting on it you know we identified early on how important this was and you know we're probably one of the first to bang away at it senator wurtz said i want to write a piece of legislation that addresses global warming the first person i reached out to was dr hansen the distinguished senior scientist at nasa a lot had changed between the middle 1970s when we first got interested in the problem and the 1980s the late 1980s because the real world was beginning to show signs that humans were affecting climate that implies that we're really going to get a significant change a few decades downstream my response was pretty immediate this is a big deal you know we need to get working on a hearing seattle and other parts of the northwest had their driest february in history irrigation reservoirs are 40 to 85 below normal levels by the spring of 1988 there was a full-scale drought the earliest fire season in memory has been declared they're dredging around the clock on the once mighty now shrunken mississippi to free hundreds of bargains it was my perception that the media wanted to explain this drought and seem to be at a tipping point on the issue of climate change the evening before i was lying on my bed in a hotel in washington writing my testimony and listening to the yankees baseball game and i wrote my testimony out by hand i do think that scientists have a moral obligation to point out the implications of their findings and try to do it as clearly as possible [Music] i had a sense that it was going to be a good hearing and that his statement would be important you could feel it in the room that this was a significant moment thank you for the opportunity to present the results of my research on the greenhouse effect which has been carried out with my colleagues at the nasa goddard institute for space studies i would like to draw three main conclusions number one the earth is warmer in 1988 than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements number two the global warming is now large enough that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship to the greenhouse effect and number three our computer climate simulations indicate that the greenhouse effect is already large enough to begin to affect the probability of extreme events such as summer heat waves altogether this evidence represents a very strong case in my opinion that the greenhouse effect has been detected and it is changing our climate now that was a kind of a magic sentence this was not environmental groups this was not some green cabal this was probably the lead climate scientist in the federal government making this statement i realized i was going out on a limb it's not all scientists agreed with me that we were ready to say those things but they were based on sound physics and observations and models it was as if the rocket had lifted off i wrote on the hearing transcript historic and some experts are saying now that the whole world is heating up because of a global greenhouse effect in the long run it could mean devastating changes to all life on earth the next morning the story was on the front page of the new york times there are no easy solutions we're talking here about the use of gas and coal and oil scientists urge heavy conservation a switch to solar energy and a search for new power sources pragmatists would argue that we cannot change our energy habits overnight scientists say we had better get going in those years there was still a spirit of bipartisanship when really important challenges to the public interest appeared you could work across the political aisle i felt like tremendous progress was being made there was greater awareness there was public policy emerging there was international negotiations developing momentum is on our side and it kind of opened up the world and you had the feeling oh wow you know this is really going to change but the minute targets and timetables began to appear you know those were magic signals to the industry uh oh this is serious little did we know how devastating the counter attack was going to be [Music] i've collected documents from every place where i've worked my basement looks like a trash bin and a fire hazard but nevertheless i knew that having access to original documents that were in my view critical to certain decisions being made would be enormously valuable i'm terry yossi i'm vice president for health and environment at the american petroleum institute i want to thank the api at that time was tremendously influential it was a chief lobbying organization for the petroleum industry and had representation from some of the major oil companies exxon mobil chevron shell bp companies like that by early 1989 the newspapers the television networks were bombarding api with questions such as well what do you think of hansen's testimony what is your view of climate change in general what do you think needs to be done about climate change terry what do you make of all of this [Music] the decision was made that a briefing needed to be prepared for industry ceos global warming the knowns and unknowns by terry f yossi american petroleum institute there is scientific consensus that the atmosphere is changing due to human activities there are three schools of thought that characterize the scientific and public debate over global warming the first is that a crisis exists and that immediate measures are needed to ameliorate it through strong government actions second school of thought is that the problem will go away by itself the third school of thought and one that reflects api's present thinking was expressed by a scientist named patrick michaels in a recent article in the washington post our policies noted michaels should be no more drastic than the scientific conclusions they are based upon i'm not uh i hate this word i'm not a denier i'm a lukewarmer totally different and people get that wrong the lukewarm view on climate change which means climate change is real people have something to do with it but it's probably not the end of the world i'm probably a lukewarm libertarian too there is a real problem with this so-called global warming apocalypse projection the earth may in fact be going in the other direction and until we solve that it seems to me that we ought not take any very expensive remuneration pat michaels was not a major voice in the scientific community on climate change but i think he was primarily useful to the industry as an external voice of doubt creating more skepticism about policymakers taking action in that vein api must become an active participant in the scientific and policy debate we are well on our way to doing that we must make policymakers fully aware of the uncertainty surrounding the global warming issue it's amazing i mean it's it is um it's almost it's a call to action they're realizing it's going down we need to be in the room talking about uncertainty and downplaying the urgency effectively that that is the call can i ask you to take a look at the document in front of you this thing yeah which we found in the exxon archives this says it all right here this paragraph starts exxon's long-term public presence and contributions to the scientific field give us unique credibility within the petroleum industry we served on the task force of the american petroleum institute and contributed significantly to the development of the api position on climate change so essentially what we see as the api position is the exxon position on climate change our advice and input influenced the positions of nam the national association of manufacturers cma the chemical manufacturers association and the global change coalition which is probably the global climate coalition these trade associations are key they're working with other shields and other umbrellas their focus is trying to emphasize uncertainty and we can show that they pretty much did that in following years in response to questions api said critics were cherry-picking information from decades ago to support a misleading predetermined narrative and that as climate science has evolved so has the industry exxonmobil has denied that its policy at that time was to emphasize uncertainty a man standing beside me today has what it takes to lead this nation from the day we take office senator al gore of tennessee when bill clinton announced that his running mate was going to be al gore that was very exciting there was an anticipation of a much greater effort to tackle climate change we will finally give the united states a real environmental presidency then president-elect clinton understood clearly that that's why i was on the ticket that's why i agreed to run as vice president he has won this presidential race along with senator al gore now the vice president-elect now you're in the white house yeah to tackle it did you feel a sense of responsibility oh absolutely that was the principal uh task that i set for myself entering the white house and i went to work right away to try to get a carbon tax in our first budget plan senator gore asked me to produce some quantitative results of how much various energy taxes would reduce emissions our plan does include a broad-based tax on energy it is environmentally responsible it will help us in the future as well as in the present with the deficit i was excited that a fairly bold step had been proposed it's called a btu tax the tax is likely to be levied at the producer or distributor level though consumers would feel it as energy companies passed it along in their prices it's a tax policy you don't expect everyone to love it but the opposition to this particular proposal was very strong very strident very aggressive coke industries has been called the biggest company you never heard of the sprawling giant includes pipelines petrochemicals asphalt plants trading floors based in wichita kansas it sells everything from gasoline to beef i would say that virtually no one in the early 1990s had never heard of coke industries coke's core business is distribution it owns 37 000 miles of international pipeline they can take the heaviest oil the dirtiest oil the hardest to turn into a useful product and refine it and they became the best in the world at doing that i think it's still probably the second largest privately held company in the world the two brothers who ran koch industries were charles and david koch they had their sights set on how they were going to deal with issues that were existential to their industry it's the heart of what they do so they're gonna they're gonna fight and hang on to that till the bitter end the cato institute was a public policy thing tank he was founded by charles koch and charles was heavily invested you know on energy policy uh discussions back in that time particularly the emergence of climate change the cato institute position was that climate change is real but the climate change that we're seeing today is far far more modest than what the computer models say we should have seen by now we need to know a lot more before we should be spending trillions of dollars to address them so the koch's head funding directed at the cato institute as a libertarian think tank they also had funding that went to citizens for sound economy which was built for a slightly different purpose which was to be a quote grassroots mobilizer coming out of the gate we then get served up with a proposed btu tax it was obvious to us at the cato institute that once that tax is in place it's going to be very hard to get rid of you know we walked over from citizens for sound economy over to the american petroleum institute and we met with the entire leadership of api and the meeting was all about let's just knock out the btu tax in its infancy we would be meeting in various locales in washington with over 100 people in the room it was a real war room situation this coalition is one of the fastest growing and strongest that i've seen we will stop the btu tax and i believe substitute spending cuts in its place thank you very much for coming [Music] we were known and i think we made ourselves known that way as the oil capital of the world almost everywhere you looked had behind it oil industry dollars i thought that the tax was a bad idea for america but predominantly a bad idea for oklahoma oklahoma was not in a good spot at that time at all the oil wells were being shut that meant a lot of lost jobs a lot of lost companies and that this was putting the heel of the boot down hard i got a call from koch industries telling me the industry is very concerned about this but we're worried that this word isn't getting out our particular goal was to focus on senator bourne david bourne was a moderate democrat who chaired the relevant committee that would deal with the clinton budget we were hearing that he wanted to be left to do his own revising of it behind closed doors they basically said if we can get david born to flip we win so they said what we're going to do whatever it takes we set about what i would call a grass tops and a grassroots campaign the grassroots were encouraged to call senator bourne and let him know that you do not want a tax after seeing an ad that showed take shower pay attacks start your car pay a tax and everybody was given their marching orders out of this playbook people would stand up behind politicians with signs about no btu tax there were rallies to the average household in oklahoma is going to be roughly about 500 a year my main role was what i would call the grass tops you may be a civic leader you may be a ceo often it would be mr coke would call them or myself and talk them through did you know it does this this this and this encourage strongly senator boren kill it what they told the public and what the policymakers were led to believe was that there was an army of folks who were ready to march in the streets maybe there were a handful of folks who thought oh gosh i should call my senator and register my complaint but they had no such grassroots army it was funded and fueled by the corporate interests cse says its work isn't done yet it's joined forces with other lobbying groups stoking the flames of the prairie fire hoping they'll spread and burn the btu tax for good i remember a very late night or early morning phone call and it was actually senator bourne communications guy we want those ads to stop and we want the ceos to quit calling us and in return senator bourne's going to announce his intentions to vote against it our proposal is fairer than that put forward by the administration that is the btu tax which is the tax which is a part of the administration's plan that does hit lower and middle income americans he folded right away it's like wow this can really work we can pick our targets strategically and win even when we're not in political power [Music] at the time david bourne disputed he was influenced by the oil industry he said he was responding to concerns from the american public and he opposed the tax because it would hurt consumers and business people president clinton has pulled the plug on his proposed btu energy tax critics said it would cost jobs and devastate the economy and there weren't enough votes in the senate to pass it besides who the heck knew what it was as this is after all a nation addicted to its cars into the idea of driving down the open road it was extremely disappointing to not get the votes it was just the raw power of all the money that they threw into this but we just decided to regroup and try to skin the cat a different way they never proposed another energy tax it was just considered radioactive i think some of the leadership of the koch network were really quite excited that it worked so well so that's how that playbook first began it was developed right then what i didn't know at the time was that it would become the beginning of something much bigger and that playbook is still in use today i don't feel embarrassed or regretful in hindsight i shouldn't have done that there's no question i shouldn't have done that but they were my client i was a contractor i was paid i'm going to do my job my job was to was was to do that charles koch did not respond to questions about the campaign against the btu tax in 1994 a top koch executive said our belief is that the tax over time may have destroyed our business yep as more and more scientists are confirming our world is deficient in carbon dioxide and a doubling of atmospheric co2 is very beneficial i was aware that this emerging industry of naysayers was growing this effort to cast doubt you had reams of material coming out of the government they were at noaa at nasa this expanding network of people working on this day in and day out saying that this was a legitimate issue and that we needed to do something about it and on the other hand you had two or three guys who went around to conferences and said i'm not sure oh maybe there's clouds i would like to show you the warming that the satellite sensed over the same region from 1979 to now which is the next slide if you could thanks nothing it quickly became apparent that these were private interests who had a stake in the status quo a respectable body of opinion in the international scientific community believes that any climate warming is as likely to be beneficial as harmful i remember seeing in the press this skeptic fred singer saying that global warming was not a problem for the planet you saw that he had worked on tobacco and a number of other issues he was sort of a specialist in denial i thought that's odd when i brought that up to some of my peers in the environmental movement they really didn't think it was that important but then every time a new piece of science comes out the same story will have somebody you'd never heard of saying no that's completely wrong so you start to think well who are these people and where are they coming from oh interesting they're funded by exxon's foundation and then you see this pattern repeated over and over and over it was coming from the coal-fired power utilities western fuels association the koch brothers global climate coalition and they're funding climate deniers [Music] we are not an ad hoc group anymore but as a matter of fact the global climate coalition formalized not too long ago the global climate coalition consisted of every major manufacturing trade association that produced or consumed fossil fuels and every major company that was in the fossil fuels industry and so it's a considerable coalition of business interests the global climate coalition put out a bid for a contractor to provide communication services i left api in the late spring and i had come over to the harrison firm the public relations firm devoted exclusively to environmental issues communication proposal prepared for the global climate coalition by the e bruce harrison company i was asked to be a part of the pitch team because i was well known in the petroleum industry everybody wanted to get the global climate coalition account because it was a coalition of the biggest industries in america i was brought in to handle press relations for the global climate coalition a lot of reporters were assigned to write stories and they were struggling with the complexity of the issue so i would write backgrounders so that reporters could read them and get up to speed it is important for gcc to continue to emphasize the scientific uncertainty surrounding climate change scientists economists academics and other noted experts carry greater credibility with the media and general public than industry representatives communication efforts should be directed toward expanding the platform for third-party spokespersons the idea behind a third party is that you form a relationship with somebody who already has some stature or or standing around a particular topic in this case climate change and you recruit that person you pay that person to give a speech or write an op-ed the global climate coalition would do the background work of placing that op-ed or maybe editing it i mean i met some really brilliant climatologists and meteorologists met pat michaels he struck me as someone who was very smart he loved talking about this issue what was your relationship with the gcc the global climate coalition oh god not much you were on the scientific advisory board yeah what does that mean i don't think we ever had a meeting i i understand you did we did it wasn't much of a relationship at all i mean when you when you bring up gcc it's like oh wait a minute who are those guys how does the funding that you receive from the fossil fuel industry and impacts what you were able to do work wise and impact the views that you took it didn't change what i do it didn't change the way i think how much do you think you did receive from industry i don't know do you feel like in a way you were sort of used by them um that you were no i was using them you got you got that wrong what what i'm somewhat verbal and i like to write and i have an overestimation of my ability my sense of humor but can you imagine somebody giving you a little bit of money to say write whatever you want every two weeks uh and we had a blast doing that [Music] we weren't doing what we were told we were doing what we wanted [Music] the global climate coalition is seeding doubt everywhere sort of fogging the air with these counter arguments that are contradictory and nonsensical running this propaganda across the country putting millions of dollars into this media effort and environmentalists really don't know what's hitting them did it cross your mind or give you any kind of late night worries that you were being paid by a group that had a vested interest in delaying action blocking action creating doubt in the minds of the public and policy makers the backgrounders i was writing the narrative that i represented as the communications lead for the global climate coalition was not a popular narrative there's no question about that um was there truth in all the materials yes there was there was a lot we didn't know at the time and part of my role was to highlight what we didn't know it wasn't just that we that is the global climate coalition needed to come up with contrarian voices the media needed them to have balance you want to make an assumption that it's a meritocracy a good argument will prevail and it will it will displace a bad argument but what the geniuses of the pr firms who work for these big fossil fuel companies know is that truth has nothing to do with who wins the argument if you say something enough times people will begin to believe it [Music] finally tonight some new word on the temperature of the world charlene hunter galt has that story it's warmer than ever and last year set a record that's what british meteorologists report that 1995 was the warmest year since records first were kept in 1856 you have ice slowly melting you have sea levels rising you have places like the maldives islands that's only a meter above sea level that could be completely underwater [Music] we knew we knew in 95 that humans were affecting the global climate in 1990 the first report of the intergovernmental panel on climate change the ipcc concludes that it's too soon to tell definitively whether there is or is not a human-caused global warming signal five years later a very very different finding people at different institutes using different statistical methods different models formally identified a human-caused global warming signal this was a paradigm shift in scientific understanding of the reality of human effects on climate i was 40 years old i had spent one and a half years working as convening lead author for chapter eight of the ipcc's second assessment report it's detection of climate change and attribution of causes we were in plenary in the beautiful palacio de conclasos de madrid delegates from nearly 100 countries were all there to discuss the language that was relevant to chapter eight some of the industry scientists were involved in the process haroon keshky from exxon was there from the beginning of our work on chapter 8 right through to the end the global climate coalition and the saudis and kuwaitis dominated the plenary sessions they're saying if you say something's uncertain then it can be overturned which led to all of these sometimes heated exchanges because uncertainty is an irreducible part of climate science the notion that uncertainties mean you can't say anything useful about anything is preposterous there were these extraordinary back and forth discussions and my job was to implement those changes that we had discussed and agreed upon i think the most critical part of the changes after madrid was the deletion of the concluding summary chapter 8 had a summary up front and a summary at the end no other chapter had a summary at the end now the second summary discussed many of the uncertainties essentially repeating much of the upfront summary so some of the government comments that we received said you need to delete the second summary which we did [Music] the bottom line finding agreed upon by all countries present in madrid was 12 words quote the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate unquote madrid was a triumph of the science the science won it was a big deal [Music] hi i'm joey chen an international panel of scientists agrees we can blame ourselves for global warming madrid where 2500 scientists from around the world have finally agreed with one another and are convinced that burning oil and coal is causing the world's temperature to rise which may bring with it environmental disaster how do you think this is going to affect policy action on this because certainly ammunition for those that would like more government regulation of industry to move away from fossil fuels to other forms of energy in retrospect those 12 words were the handwriting on the wall [Music] what happened next was that the global climate coalition really came onto my radar screen in the spring of 1996 they published this report the ipcc institutionalized scientific cleansing they were arguing that i had purged all discussion of uncertainty from the document which was patently untrue twenty percent of chapter eight was specifically devoted to the discussion of uncertainties the changes quite clearly have the obvious political purpose of cleansing the underlying scientific report of important information and scientific analysis that would lead policymakers and the public to be very cautious if not skeptical about blaming human activities for climate change over the past century i had grandparents who were cleansed because of their religion in the second world war people were being cleansed because of their religion in bosnia and the global climate coalition through this odious scientific cleansing was arguing that i was guilty of a crime these revisions raise very serious questions about whether the ipcc has compromised or even lost its scientific integrity i certainly had a probably a role in the creation of this there's a there's a level of detail here i just i i don't remember but what i do i do remember the gist of this um where things were said at one point in the process and then they disappeared at the next and that struck me as troubling and so i noted that to the folks in the coalition this stuff caught on like wildfire patrick michaels devoted substantial time to amplifying the global climate coalition's allegations others picked up that report and repeated bits of it verbatim things became worse when professor frederick seitz wrote an op-ed in the wall street journal i was accused of the worst abuse of the peer-reviewed system that professor seitz had seen in his 60 years as a scientist folks who were calling for my dismissal with dishonor from my position a gentleman intimated that i was about to be indicted by the hague international court of justice for quote falsification of international scientific documents that document set in motion public attacks on the lead scientists the lead author of that chapter wow he was particularly shaken by the accusation that he was guilty of scientific cleansing he found yeah that that wouldn't have been terminology by the way that i would have used how this was used and what others did with it was outside of my control and and purview and it troubles me to to hear that this had such an impact on an individual that's not something i would want to do to to anybody this attack on individuals on their integrity decency honesty involved high personal cost and the global climate coalition knew what they were doing sow those seeds of doubt and watch them grow and mature and they did clearly one of the gcc's main missions was to blunt the scientific urgency driven by scientific reports simultaneously there's an assessment done written by a mobile scientist within the gcc so it says you know can human activities affect the climate and the answer is the scientific basis for the greenhouse effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as co2 on the climate is well established and cannot be denied what's really interesting about this document is the back six pages and this is just a draft this was never published as far as we know several arguments have been put forward attempting to challenge the conventional view of greenhouse gas induced climate change patrick michaels named as one of the people putting forward these arguments and concludes they do not offer convincing arguments against the conventional model of greenhouse gas emission induced climate change so don't use their don't use their voice the science was growing more certain and exxon's own scientists were working with scientists in academia to discern the human fingerprint on a changing climate i am looking at an article written by lee raymond who was chairman of exxon corporation and it looks like this is from the mid-1990s global warming who's right facts about a debate that's turned up more questions than answers lee raymond was certainly the person with the greatest stature in the oil industry to push forward this narrative that the science around climate change was uncertain and therefore we shouldn't act precipitously to address it what's the date of this my god is this 82 no this says 1996. i am just flabbergasted by this the unproven theory this policy if implemented has ominous economic implications yet scientific evidence remains inconclusive as to whether human activities affect global climate it's just total baloney this person should never be the ceo of [Music] an energy company i think it's outrageous that he would say such a thing because he has a world-class climate and carbon cycle research group in his own laboratory in exxon research and engineering he could pick up the phone and ask one of the people in that group if that statement is true and they would tell him that it isn't he's using something which is a lie to justify a policy which is bad for the world and i would have to say that on an ethical basis it's it's actually evil i think he should be ashamed of himself and i think he should apologize to the world for saying that lee raymond did not respond to interview requests in its statement to us exxonmobil insisted that its public statements about climate change are and have always been truthful fact-based transparent and consistent with the contemporary understanding of mainstream climate science until his retirement in 2005 lee raymond continued to publicly question the science of climate change there is a natural variability that has nothing to do with man the climate the climate has changed every year for millions of years now the question is is part of what's happening related to something other than natural variability and if so how do you determine what that is and the reality is the science isn't there to make that determination [Music] two weeks from now this issue of global climate change will be discussed by more than 120 different countries in berlin this administration will be at the forefront of this global effort i wanted the united states of america to lead the world community to agree on a set of global initiatives and policies the united states is committed to reaching 1990 levels of greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2000. let us make sure that our next steps are the right ones thank you very much thank you we said that the united states was prepared to engage in targets and timetables i mean that was obviously a massive threshold for us to cross i declare open the first session of the conference of the parties the convention is coming of age the question was who goes first it was in no way possible to get a global treaty with a proposal that the poorest countries in the world would have to take the same obligations that the wealthy countries were undertaking and the idea was those who developed the most and had contributed historically the most to the problem should step up to the plate first in the effort to reduce emissions i should thank the hammer now that was the formula that the world agreed was the only way to make progress toward a truly global agreement at a follow-up in kyoto japan negotiators hope to agree on binding limits the negotiators did agree they would exempt developing countries from the caps negotiated in kyoto but the fossil fuel companies took that feature of the agreement and made that a better noir they made that a politically salient issue that they used to to to great effect this is a plan from the pr firm uh ebruce harrison after berlin prepared for the gcc board this is the strategy of the grand fog third-party recruitment and op-ed placement efforts will continue although with a new emphasis on economists so the strategy is evolving in 1996 i finished up grad school and accepted a job at charles river associates we were doing work for the american petroleum institute so they had a particular point of view if the u.s goes ahead and reduces its emissions and countries like china and india don't do anything the u.s puts itself at a competitive disadvantage to try and put numbers on what those damages would do how much they were hurt i think is important right we wrote a couple papers on our findings i had general surprise of how much attention it got it was finding its way into the airwaves our president must decide if he'll sign a u.n climate treaty that could increase the cost of gasoline by 50 cents a gallon and raise electricity and natural gas prices by 25 to 50 percent meanwhile countries like china india and mexico are exempt we pay the price and they're exempt it's not global and it won't work there's great pressure that came from the clients to talk about jobs we've tried to tell clients we really can't measure jobs accurately but you know you have to get paid at the at the end of the day so you know we ended up doing the best we could talking about jobs but you don't really you don't really know the first people that will lose their jobs are the american coal miner it would cost probably five six seven hundred thousand jobs a year that would hurt the us automobile industry and it would hurt the us economy every independent and i say every independent economic study has come to the same conclusion that the impact is negative and it's going to cost jobs [Music] although the studies themselves acknowledge their funding from the industry that funding is often not acknowledged when the results are presented to the public through advertorials that oil companies would take out in big venues like the new york times without saying that the industry had paid for the study or what the limitations of the studies were so it gave an impression that there were independent economists coming to this conclusion when in reality they were hired by the fossil fuel industry the analysis completely ignored the benefits of taking action about climate change [Music] neither the api nor charles river associates responded to questions about their work together i had misgivings about just telling half the story right you know what do we get if we reduce emissions we get less damage from climate change right and we're not putting that in there yeah i wish i weren't a part of that looking back i wish i weren't a part of delaying action you know clearly on the wrong side of history 18 weather and climate-related disasters with a damaged total of more than 1 billion each global damages estimated at around 280 billion these natural disasters could push the nation's infrastructure to the brink [Music] please welcome our chairman lee raymond [Music] [Applause] right now a united nations effort is moving forward toward decision in 1997 to cut the use of fossil fuels based on the unproved theory that they affect the earth's climate if implemented such a policy could inflict severe economic damage so it's critical that we in the industry provide a voice of common sense on this important issue it means cooperating more closely with other associations within our industry and it extends to the circle of logical allies outside our industry that stand with us on any given issue one example is our close cooperation with the automobile industry recently they have become engaged in the global climate issue and are active aggressive allies if we all work toward the same goal i believe we can change the perceptions of the american people about energy it's a call to arms he's trying to rally the oil industry to speak as one to oppose climate change action to fight basically with a run-up to the kyoto protocol this is when it really ramps up we know exxon has been funding a bunch of right-wing and libertarian conservative think tanks suddenly in 97 the sums in those grants goes way up they know that this is the big fight on the run up to kyoto you're seeing these ad campaigns the denial ad campaigns you're seeing tv ads you're seeing print ads there's op-eds millions and millions of dollars worth of advertising why is the us being obliged to do more than everyone else it's not global and it won't work and everybody sung from the same song sheet the administration had just completely misread the political situation there was no way in heck that the american public was going to accept regulating greenhouse gases in a fashion which would disadvantage american industry that's an easy argument to make politically you can make that in your sleep the biggest loser in all of this will be science and i'm here to defend science and then the senate issues this bird hegel resolution which passes 95 to zero esres 98 puts the administration on notice that an overwhelming and bipartisan majority of the united states senate rejects its current negotiating position on a proposed new global climate treaty for me it was it was a it was a big deal as a freshman senator it was my first year in the senate with bob byrd any effort to avoid the effects of global climate change will be doomed to failure from the start without the participation of the developing world this treaty would be a lead weight on our nation's future economic growth killing jobs and opportunities for generations of americans to come bert hagel got 95 votes 95 senators nobody voted against it even using conservative assumptions charles river associates the leading economic modeling firm for example has estimated that holding emissions at 1990 levels would reduce economic growth by one percent a year rising i was not going to support a treaty that would affect our economy everything else when we didn't have the absolute scientific evidence first of all to prove it and second and maybe even more important let all these other countries off if anything has become clear during congressional hearings on this issue it is that the science is unclear is that the scientific community has not even come close to definitively concluding that we have a problem i'm not a scientist i'm not a climatologist i listen to a lot of people i ask uh for a lot of opinions i i had scientists come in and i had other people come in we unearthed documents that show a series of meetings and briefings oh wow [Music] it's quite amazing here's a memo from the american petroleum institute they're putting on a luncheon they're hosting senator hagel and they're going to brief him scientists do not have a precise understanding of this issue doubt doubt meeting with senator hagel and the ford motor company it's the american automobile manufacturers association the aluminum association chemical manufacturers association you know i'm emphasizing senator hagel but this is happening all throughout the senate 95 senators voted this certain way but if you pull that lens back you're going to see their they're working politicians with the most sophisticated legislative campaigns what were they saying to you in those meetings and did you learn anything that did help to shape your views well they made their case they made their point so you listen to them like you you would anybody i wasn't surprised by anything i heard you met lee raymond the chairman of chick senior and so on what kind of relationship did you have well lee raymond was a south dakota boy i remember that um i didn't have a close relationship with him i um but i listened to him he's head of the largest oil company in the country i listened to everybody's opinions so this is a page from a a briefing document and it's uh the title is the dilemma for congress draft resolution is attached for your consideration so the american automobile manufacturers association is putting forth on behalf i think of the global climate coalition the draft resolution for the senate to preemptively kill the kyoto protocol mean the bird hagel resolution they didn't draft that we had many people coming forward with written examples of why don't you do this that's not unusual at all uh because our staffs work with them and so on but that that resolution wasn't an ama resolution that resolution was decided by us by the senators vice president al gore is on his way to kyoto japan to attend the global warming summit now the goal of the conference is an international treaty to protect the environment but so far it's been hard to find anything the diplomats can agree on i think bird hagel really destroyed any hope of getting something done in kyoto there was no argument by the administration against the bird hegel resolution the clinton administration certainly didn't want to go into open war to those who seek to obfuscate and obstruct we say we will not allow you to put narrow special interests above the interests of all humankind [Music] corporate american leadership will not save the world it was just an unbelievable mess he did broker a deal and got as much out of kyoto as he could have but we were not going to get steep cuts in co2 emissions out of a global agreement with all the industry fighting against them delegates from the u.s and 149 other countries have approved the treaty known as the kyoto protocol president clinton is praising the agreement but he may have trouble getting it ratified the clinton administration never even put the kiddo protocol up for a vote in the senate it was a doa and i think they understood that within a week of return from kyoto [Music] i feel that at the end of the day the clinton gore administration was not able to deliver on the lofty promise of american leadership the door closed for the next 10 years so it was a significant missed opportunity when i became part of that world we thought the odds were pretty long against us we did not expect to prevail uh in the climate debate that's the problem that most scientists don't say exist by the end of the decade however the climate skeptics and denialists were in a position of strength now they had that pretty much run the table in every decisive fight we had won they won the battle i was intent that they would not win the war uh it became clear to me at that point that it was going to be a longer war we approached multiple members of the industry coalition that campaigned against kyoto none would sit for an interview for its part exxonmobil has stated publicly that we recognize that our past participation in industry coalitions to oppose ineffective climate policies subjects us to criticism by climate activist groups and that the kyoto protocol was unrealistic and economically damaging [Music] it is unequivocal that human activities are responsible for climate change that's the finding of a new study by the un's intergovernmental panel on climate change a dire warning and a stark reality the head of the un referred to this as code red for humanity global temperatures are the hottest in a hundred thousand years and many effects of climate change are already irreversible if we want to avoid catastrophe we have to drastically cut emissions now we now know that exxon was making a concerted effort through the 1990s to cast doubt on the science do you feel that you were misled well what we now know about some of these large oil companies positions they lied and yes i was misled others were misled when they had evidence in their own institutions that countered what they were saying publicly i mean they lied if they had said that if they held their hands up there and said yes this is real could it have been different oh absolutely it would have changed everything i would have i think it would have changed the average citizen's appreciation of climate change and and mine of course it would have put of the united states in the world on a whole different track and today we would have been so much further ahead than we are it costs this country and it costs the world [Music] exxonmobil continues to defend its record on climate change my name is darren woods i'm the chairman and chief executive officer of exxon mobil corporation exxonmobil has long recognized that climate change is real and poses serious risks but there are no easy answers our position in this space has been consistent with the general consensus in the scientific community [Music] [Music] i am 83 years old three or four decades ago we predicted it as a scientist to have those predictions come true that's sort of the golden icon that you look for however as a human being and as an inhabitant of planet earth i'm horrified to watch the lack of response to this i am trying as much as possible to distance myself emotionally so you're angry yes i'm furious [Music] it's heartbreaking to me i saw all of that potential there at least at that point in time to really solve the problem in many different ways had exxon chosen to pick up the ball then and begin to lead the discussions would have been about how to do it we had solar scientists doing research we had lithium battery chemists doing research think of how important these sciences are to the world currently parts of the world are going to suffer enormously unnecessarily so and for for something that we could have done something about not doing anything for decades that that's just that's just squandered time and we're gonna pay for it next time the plan says victory will be achieved when recognition of uncertainties becomes part of the conventional wisdom the fossil fuel industry continues its fight emphasizing doubt is a critically important speed bump to ambitious policy i don't think this is happening lee raymond is salient because he's hammering away the idea of scientific uncertainty even as the science grew more certain and the political struggles for the future of the planet we do not know how fast change will occur there just was no appetite economically politically to go forward with a cap on carbon my brother charles and i provided the funds to start the americans for prosperity our job was to fight back against the progressive agenda this was the end of climate legislation in the us congress for a long time we had a shot at it and we got beat part two of the power of big oil next time on frontline [Music] for more on this and other frontline programs visit our website at pbs.org frontline [Music] to water front lines the power of big oil on dvd visit shop pbs or call 1 800 play pbs frontline is also available on amazon prime video [Music] you

Channel: FRONTLINE PBS | Official

Views: 1,781,344

Keywords:

Id: QAAbcNl4Lb8

Length: 84min 19sec (5059 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 19 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/CollapseBot]

The following submission statement was provided by /u/txtphile:

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Submission: First of a three part docuseries from Frontline. This one details, with original reporting, how climate denial came to be a force in American politics. This is long (1:24:18) but I think it's important to see behind the scenes, to examine how bags of money and very smart PR firms probably doomed us all. Part one covers from when Exxon was doing legit climate science, and trying to get started in renewables, in the 70s, to the failure of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997.

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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/u86c8n/the_power_of_big_oil_part_one_denial/i5j67a9/

[u/txtphile]

Submission: First of a three part docuseries from Frontline. This one details, with original reporting, how climate denial came to be a force in American politics. This is long (1:24:18) but I think it's important to see behind the scenes, to examine how bags of money and very smart PR firms probably doomed us all. Part one covers from when Exxon was doing legit climate science, and trying to get started in renewables, in the 70s, to the failure of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997.

[u/TemporalRecon177]

There are 38 years of oil left. You can't decrease consumption without decreasing consumers. You can't maintain consumers without supplying product.

[u/ItyBityGreenieWeenie]

"Video Unavailable" :( This is ridiculous.

Anyone know a way to view PBS content outside the US? Other than VPN to the USA - which I won't do.

PBS (and the BBC) should make content freely available worldwide! If they don't want to pay the bandwidth and server costs, put it on youtube or another service that will.

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