‘Greenwashing’ Oil

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16475341/site/newsweek/

A report says the world’s largest corporation funded studies that cast doubts on the link between fossil fuels and climate change.

By Jerry Adler
Newsweek
Updated: 4:10 p.m. PT Jan 4, 2007

Jan. 4, 2007 - For more than three decades, the tobacco industry carried on a campaign of disinformation intended to mislead Americans about the health risks of smoking—a strategy that has been dubbed “manufacturing uncertainty” in the minds of consumers. And ever since global warming emerged as an environmental threat, there has been a well-funded public campaign to cast doubt on the scientific consensus about the danger of global warming and its source in fossil-fuel combustion. A report this week by the Union of Concerned Scientists finds a parallel between the efforts to whitewash tobacco and “greenwash” oil—and points the finger of responsibility at the world’s largest corporation, ExxonMobil.

Under its former chairman and CEO, Lee Raymond, who retired in 2005 as one of the best-paid corporate executives in history, ExxonMobil was well known for its hostility to government regulations on emissions of carbon dioxide. But, according to the report, the op-eds and position papers were only the visible tip of Exxon’s effort to fund a small group of researchers and an overlapping network of think tanks that could be relied on to spread the message that global warming was nothing to worry about—or at least, nothing the government could or should do anything about. Their frequently repeated call for “sound science” on global warming echoes the tobacco industry’s endless demand for more research on whether cigarettes really, truly, unquestionably cause cancer.

(snip)

For its part, ExxonMobil—after promulgating, and then withdrawing 20 minutes later, a statement that called the report an “attempt to smear our name and confuse the discussion”—wants you to know that it now accepts some responsibility for global warming. Specifically, and in boldface, it admitted that “It is clear today that greenhouse gas emissions are one of the factors that contribute to climate change, and that the use of fossil fuels is a major source of these emissions.” That would seem, on the face of it, to contradict the assertions of some of its favored researchers in the ever-shrinking coterie of global-warming skeptics. The question, of course, is what specific policies ExxonMobil is willing to accept to curb those emissions. With a new Congress taking office, climate change is likely to be a much more salient issue this year than it has been for the last six—so ExxonMobil will have the chance to show if it means what it’s saying now.

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And they had studies to "prove" that too.

I think we have come upon the point where most reasonable educated people believe the science between greenhouse gases and global warming is beyond serious dispute, similar to how most reasonable educated people believed that about the science of smoking and cancer (circa early 1960's). Everyone knew there were details to be worked out, but the basic facts were clear. The same thing seems to be happening with global warming and greenhouse gases.

There will still be plenty of chaff thrown up by the oil companies and car companies, just like with tobacco. Also, the "addicted" population will ignore science for some time (cognitive dissonance), just as many people did in relation to smoking in the 1960's and 1970's. But eventually most people will come around.

...if you should undertake to appeal or complain to one of these great
corporations on behalf of your community, you would discover something
most remarkable: you would find that these organizations are organized
expressly for the evasion of responsibility. They are structures in
which, as my brother says, "the buck never stops." The buck is
processed up the hierarchy until finally it is passed to "the
shareholders," who characteristically are too widely dispersed, too
poorly informed, and too unconcerned to be responsible for anything.
The ideal of the modern corporation is to be (in terms of its own
advantage) anywhere and (in terms of local accountability) nowhere.
Wendell Berry

"It is extremely difficult to exalt the usefulness of any productive
discipline as such in a society that is at once highly stratified and
highly mobile. Both the stratification and the mobility are based upon
notions of prestige, which are in turn based upon these reliquary social
fashions."
-- Wendell Berry “The Unsettling of America”

"...our country is not being destroyed by
bad politics, it is being destroyed by a bad way
of life. Bad politics is merely another result."
-- Wendell Berry (http://www.brtom.org/wb/berry.html)

"A change of heart or of values without a practice is only another
pointless luxury of a passively consumptive way of life."

You can best serve civilization by being against
what usually passes for it.
-- Wendell Berry