Sacred Headwaters #22: Fossil Fuel Companies

Fossil fuel companies are largely responsible for our lack of meaningful climate action over the last few decades. Are they just evil, or driven by structural factors?

Sacred Headwaters is a bi-weekly newsletter that aims to guide a co-learning process about the existential issues and planetary limitations facing humanity and about how we can reorient civilization in a way that will enable us to thrive for centuries to come. If you’re just joining us, consider checking out the first issue for some context and head over to our new table of contents to browse the whole library. The newsletters are not strictly sequential, but this exploration is meant to build on knowledge and understanding over time. Subscribe below if you haven’t already, and please share with friends, family, and colleagues who may be interested:

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Issue #22: Fossil Fuel Companies

For a while, I thought it was common knowledge that fossil fuel companies have been the architects of the “debate” over climate change, but I’ve come to realize that fewer people are aware of this than should be, and even of those who are aware, many do not realize the degree to which they’ve controlled the conversation and our behavior. So, I’m writing this issue in part just to paint a clear picture. Fossil fuel companies are responsible for the fact that we have to have conversations about “believing in science” and whether or not climate change is human caused. They’re responsible for the rapid proliferation of plastic products in the latter half of the 20th century and the public perception that recycling plastic actually works (it doesn’t). They’re responsible for our inability to pass even the most modest climate legislation from the municipal level to the international level. They’re even responsible for the concept of the individual “carbon footprint,” a way of individualizing blame for climate change, something that has a side effect of actually reducing our desire to act on climate change.

Honestly, that’s barely the half of it. But I’m not just writing this issue to demonstrate that fossil fuel companies have played a star role in the demise of life on Earth; there’s been plenty of great coverage about that. Instead, as you read about these tactics, I want you to think about why things played out this way: is it because of evil CEOs at the top of each company? The Rex Tillersons of the world just acting with no regard for anything but profit? Maybe yes, in some cases, but look beyond the fossil fuel industry and the immediate scope of greenhouse gas emissions. Consider some other prominent incidents of corporations acting directly against the public interest:

Philip-Morris knew about tobacco’s health impacts and addictive nature for decades but waged a public campaign against scientists and public health advocates. They didn’t admit nicotine was addictive until 2000. The same story is playing out again today with vaping. Purdue Pharma and Johnson & Johnson knew about the risks of opioid addiction, buried that information, and spent huge amounts of money promoting opioids as a pain management solution. In what is probably the only example that matches the scale of the fossil fuel deception, Monsanto sold Roundup and used a combination of marketing and the deliberate proliferation of genetically modified crops to ensure that its use spread everywhere, all while knowing that it causes cancer, along with a variety of other disastrous impacts that are threatening Earth’s life support systems. A similar case could easily be made about Facebook with phone addiction and the amplification of violent hate groups, though I haven’t heard of any lawsuits against them for either of these yet.

You know what they say: fool me once, etc. etc. Are these examples all the result of a so-called “bad actors” or perhaps a bad “corporate culture,” whatever that means? Or are they indicative of systemic problems, suggesting that corporations may actually be incentivized or even forced by structural constraints to, essentially, be evil?

As you read about a variety of different fossil fuel company disinformation and lobbying — a word which here means “exercising political control to advance corporate interests” — campaigns, by all means, get angry. You should be angry. I’m angry. But beyond just being angry, ask yourself: would our problems be fixed if the executive teams at ExxonMobil, BP, Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron, Monsanto (Bayer), Facebook, Purdue, Philip-Morris, etc., were in jail? Or are the issues more fundamental than that — issues with the structure of corporate ownership, our cultural understanding of “success” and value, the economic growth imperative, and more? Can a corporation ever be trusted to behave with society’s best interests in mind in our current global capitalist model — or, even framed with a lower bar, can they even be expected to choose to not actively cause harm?

Significant temperature changes are almost certain to occur by the year 2000, and these could bring about climatic change…If the Earth’s temperature increases significantly, a number of events might be expected to occur including the melting of the Antarctic ice cap, a rise in sea levels, warming of the oceans and an increase in photosynthesis... the potential damage to our environment could be severe.

This is a quote from a report called “Sources, Abundance, and Fate of Gaseous Atmospheric Pollutants” prepared for the American Petroleum Institute in 1968. I’m going to type that again: 1968. 1968. 1968. 1968!!! There’s documentation demonstrating that the oil industry has been aware of this from at least 1959, if not earlier.

The Climate Deception Dossiers (15 minutes)

You don’t need to read all the case studies — it’d be about an hour if you did. Feel free to just read “The Real Climate Hoax” and the conclusion.

This report compiled in 2015 by the Union of Concerned Scientists documents indisputably that the fossil fuel industry has a) known about the impacts of climate change and their direct role in causing it for decades, if not longer, and b) knowingly spread disinformation and lobbied against climate action in order to maximize and perpetuate their profit models. I’ve known about this stuff for a while and still, every time I read a new piece of it, I’m baffled. President Lyndon Johnson said this to Congress in 1965:

This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through radioactive materials and a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.

Newspapers throughout the US were reporting on the urgent need to reduce fossil fuel use in 1988. And public opinion was right there with it: 88% of Americans believed global warming was a serious issue and wanted government to take action in 1992. An internal report at Mobil Oil stated,

The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied

and an Exxon scientist worked on the first IPCC report in 1990.

I get carried away when I read pieces like this because every single date and data point is so absurd given the context of where we are today. If there’s any doubt in your mind, I hope this report can help prove to you that we didn’t get here because of poorly educated voters who “don’t believe in science.” We got here because the most profitable companies in human history spent millions — probably billions — of dollars deliberately obstructing our efforts to prevent catastrophic climate change. And they’re still doing it.

Podcast: “Waste Land,” Planet Money (25 minutes)

This is also available as an article: “How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled.”

Many of you are probably already aware that recycling doesn’t work. But you may be under the impression that this is because China stopped buying our recyclables. Unfortunately, even when China was willing to buy our plastic waste, we never successfully recycled even 10% of it. So — how did we end up in this strange world where we all practice this meaningless ritual?

Surprise, surprise, the plastics industry — which is just another name for the oil industry — has their hands all over it. In the late ‘80s, the public image of plastic products was flailing. People were concerned about the environmental impact of plastic waste and it was impacting demand. The oil industry had studied recycling and realized it was not cost effective — and never would be — for most plastic products. The NPR reporters behind this piece have documents from oil companies and trade associations that make this unequivocally clear. But the industry realized that the belief that plastic was being recycled would be enough to rehabilitate the product’s image. So they did two things: first, they put that little triangular symbol with the number inside — the one that you think indicates a plastic is recyclable — on every plastic product, despite knowing that the majority of them couldn’t be recycled. Then, they embarked on a marketing campaign, convincing the public that plastic would be recycled and disrupting the existing recycling process with non-recyclable materials while they were at it. Perhaps the most powerful part of this piece is that the reporters interview some of the architects of this marketing campaign who today, 30 years later, are willing to speak about it.

You might see the tide of public opinion turning against single-use plastics as a positive sign. But the industry sees it too, and they’re going as far as to leverage unfounded public health fears to lobby against plastic bans. It’s working.

The carbon footprint sham (15 minutes)

Every twist in this story gets a little bit crazier. In 2004, around the same time they tried to rebrand themselves “Beyond Petroleum,” British Petroleum invented the individual carbon footprint. They launched a “carbon footprint calculator” for individuals to calculate just how much they were emitting. It might not be immediately obvious how this marketing campaign worked to prevent climate action, and it takes a few different paths to get there. First, it individualizes blame. Beverage manufacturers did the exact same thing in the 1970s with litter; suddenly, you, me, my cousin, we’re the people responsible for climate change. We just need to change our behavior and the problem will be solved! The idea — and I think it’s obvious how deeply this frame has taken root over the last decade and a half — allowed BP and the fossil fuel industry to abdicate responsibility for the climate crisis in the public eye. There’s a secondary, more nefarious component, too: it’s now been shown that climate change messaging that proscribes individual behavioral change actually causes people to be less supportive of climate policy and more doubting of climate science. The author of this piece sees the same parallels in other industries that I’m asking you to recognize and gives a number of examples of other harmful industries using marketing campaigns that individualize blame to paralyze societal action. “Bad actors?” Or is society working as designed, successfully optimized for the consolidation of wealth and the externalization of costs?

Book Recommendation: Merchants of Doubt, Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway

This book looks at how corporations have worked with a surprisingly small group of conservative scientists to obfuscate and hide their role in environmental and public health crises including climate change, tobacco, and more. The authors dive deep into a number of case studies and identify the same playbook that Exxon et al have used for the last 30 years: cast doubt on consensus-based science and keep the discourse focused on whether or not the problem really exists. The climate crisis is only reflected in a small portion of this book, but it’s almost more powerful to see the same tactics applied by a variety of corporations across many industries and multiple decades. Something is wrong here, but we’re still focused on “believing science” rather than identifying why so many corporations act knowingly in ways that threaten the very existence of humanity on Earth.

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