After Decades Of Funding Climate Lies, NAM Wants Us to Know That "We're All In This Together"

On Monday, the Manufacturers’ Accountability Project, the National Association of Manufacturers’ special project to fight #ExxonKnew and similar climate lawsuits, put out a statement about how “we are all in this together,” as though it were a friendly actor on board with climate action. “Only by working side-by-side to tackle climate change,” the front group wrote, “can we make a real difference.” The statement concludes by reiterating that kumbaya unity, saying that “on Earth Day, let’s stop looking backward and start moving forward to work collaboratively on substantive policies. Only then will we have any real impact.”

But NAM’s already had quite a real impact on climate, and that impact is why it doesn’t want people looking backwards to see if anyone mislead the public about climate change. As it turns out, NAM was a key convener of one of the earliest organized climate change denial networks, the Global Climate Coalition. As a new trove of documents hosted at ClimateFiles reveal, the oil, coal, gas and utility-funded group was instrumental in early efforts to inject doubt into the public’s perception of climate science throughout the 1990’s and played an obstructive role in the early IPCC and UN COP meetings.

In a new post at DeSmogBlog, Mat Hope describes how the GCC went after the IPCC in the ‘90s, spending hundreds of thousands of its energy-industry-provided dollars on an “IPCC Tracker fund” in the run-up to the 1997 Kyoto meeting to make sure the group knew everything that was happening in the protracted IPCC process. Despite being keenly and intimately involved in the peer-review process, to the extent that it bragged about how “language proposed by the GCC was accepted almost in its entirety,” it nonetheless publicly attacked the peer review process.

Over at Climate Liability News, Karen Savage reports this week that GCC appears to have coordinated a series of attacks on IPCC author Dr. Ben Santer in the Wall Street Journal and similar outlets. Santer, of course, was the lead author of the chapter in the 1995 IPCC report that ultimately declared that “the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on climate.” Those 12 words were negotiated at length in a process that GCC (and their allies in the Saudi and Kuwaiti delegations) was a part of, but once the sentence was published in the report, deniers claimed it was cooked up by Santer alone in some smokey back room, in violation of IPCC rules.

Savage also provides documents showing a draft of a primer on climate change, written by a real climate scientist for GCC’s Science and Technology Assessment Committee (STAC), which reads in no uncertain terms that climate change science “is well established and cannot be denied.” The primer also pointed out that the work of deniers like Patrick Michaels and Richard Lindzen “raise interesting questions about our total understanding of climate processes, but they do not offer convincing arguments against the conventional model of greenhouse gas emission-induced climate change.”

So the GCC was told plainly that the science was undeniable, and deniers’ work was unconvincing. Yet instead of adopting a position the group purports to be taking now, nearly three decades later, it instead removed those statements altogether. In its place, the GCC added attacks on Santer’s findings and further language focusing on uncertainty of the science. It’s no surprise, then, that NAM is concerned enough about climate liability lawsuits to set up a whole new project to fight them--a project that writes Earth Day bromides about the importance of focusing on the future, and not the past.

EDIT

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/4/26/1853314/-History-Of-Denial-Belies-Present-Day-Position-of-Nat-l-Assoc-of-Manufacturers