Effective oil company disinformation on climate change

The AP and other sources are reporting that the CEO of Exxon-Mobile is disputing allegations that for decades his company has spread disinformation about climate change. AP writes:

WASHINGTON (AP) — ExxonMobil’s chief executive said Thursday that his company “does not spread disinformation regarding climate change″ as he and other oil company chiefs countered congressional allegations the industry concealed evidence about the dangers of it. 

In prepared testimony at a landmark House hearing, CEO Darren Woods said ExxonMobil “has long acknowledged the reality and risks of climate change, and it has devoted significant resources to addressing those risks.″ 

The much-anticipated hearing before the House Oversight Committee comes after months of public efforts by Democrats to obtain documents and other information on the oil industry’s role in stopping climate action over multiple decades. The appearance of the four oil executives — from ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP America and Shell — has drawn comparisons to a high-profile hearing in the 1990s with tobacco executives who famously testified that they didn’t believe nicotine was addictive.

“The fossil fuel industry has had scientific evidence about the dangers of climate change since at least 1977. Yet for decades, the industry spread denial and doubt about the harm of its products — undermining the science and preventing meaningful action on climate change even as the global climate crisis became increasingly dire,″ said Reps. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., and Ro Khanna, D-Calif.  

“Today’s staff memo shows Big Oil’s campaign to ‘greenwash’ their role in the climate crisis in action,” Maloney said. “These oil companies pay lip service to climate reforms, but behind the scenes they spend far more time lobbying to preserve their lucrative tax breaks.″

Maloney and other Democrats have focused particular ire on Exxon, after a senior lobbyist for the company was caught in a secret video bragging that Exxon had fought climate science through “shadow groups” and had targeted influential senators in an effort to weaken President Joe Biden’s climate agenda, including a bipartisan infrastructure bill and a sweeping climate and social policy bill currently moving through Congress.

In 2020, the BBC reported:

To understand what's happening today, we need to go back nearly 40 years.

Marty Hoffert leaned closer to his computer screen. He couldn't quite believe what he was seeing. It was 1981, and he was working in an area of science considered niche.

"We were just a group of geeks with some great computers," he says now, recalling that moment.

But his findings were alarming.

"I created a model that showed the Earth would be warming very significantly. And the warming would introduce climatic changes that would be unprecedented in human history. That blew my mind."

Marty Hoffert was one of the first scientists to create a model which predicted the effects of man-made climate change. And he did so while working for Exxon, one of the world's largest oil companies, which would later merge with another, Mobil.

Hoffert shared his predictions with his managers, showing them what might happen if we continued burning fossil fuels in our cars, trucks and planes.

But he noticed a clash between Exxon's own findings, and public statements made by company bosses, such as the then chief executive Lee Raymond, who said that "currently, the scientific evidence is inconclusive as to whether human activities are having a significant effect on the global climate".

"They were saying things that were contradicting their own world-class research groups," said Hoffert.

Angry, he left Exxon, and went on to become a leading academic in the field.

"What they did was immoral. They spread doubt about the dangers of climate change when their own researchers were confirming how serious a threat it was."

A 14 minute BBC podcast describes the tactics the oil industry used to sabotage efforts to tell the public about climate change and to begin responding to it. The oil industry used the same tactics to deny or downplay climate change science as the tobacco industry used to deny or downplay the addictiveness and dangers of cigarette smoking. Ruthless propaganda tactics and subversion of government by both oil and tobacco interests worked for decades to keep the public disinformed and divided, and government significantly paralyzed. Republicans but not Democrats went from ~50% believing in 2001 that human activity was the main cause of climate change, but by 2011 that had dropped to 30%. 

There were two separate realities, Republican and Democratic. By injecting political ideology and confusion over facts into climate change, inconvenient facts were easier to sweep aside. Tribal loyalty and deceptive propaganda, not facts, dictated perceptions of climate change reality for most Republicans. 

Last July, Politico wrote this:

A recently leaked draft report written by some of the world’s top climate scientists blamed disinformation and lobbying campaigns — including by Exxon Mobil — for undermining government efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increasing the dangers of global warming to society.

On Wednesday, Britain's Channel 4 broadcast a video of Exxon lobbyist Keith McCoy telling Greenpeace UK activists who were posing as headhunters that the oil giant would “aggressively fight against some of the science” including by using third-party “shadow groups.” McCoy also noted his lobbying efforts to strip climate provisions from President Joe Biden’s infrastructure proposal, many of which were dropped in a $1.2 trillion compromise framework.

The IPCC report said disinformation tactics have created “risks to society” because they have prevented governments from responding to the dangers from climate change.

Questions: 

1. Is Exxon's CEO a liar?

2. Has the fossil fuel industry deceived the American people by spreading lies and disinformation about the role of carbon fuels in climate change?

3. Has the fossil fuel industry money and lobbying significantly or mostly impaired government efforts to deal with climate change?