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Lobbying against climate protection: the power of doubt

2022-04-11T19:58:27.149Z


The new IPCC report that has just been published shows once again that we must end the age of fossil fuels very quickly. It also shows that we can do it. Why haven't we done it long ago?


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Campaign against oil company ExxonMobil 2001: $200 million spent lobbying against climate change

Photo: Sion Touhig/Getty Images

When asked about the major omissions of the last few years, I hear publicly – from politicians as well as journalists – the assessment again and again: The outstanding importance of the climate crisis for our lives has only really arrived in people’s minds for two or three years .

And it may even be true that the great public interest in the topic is still comparatively young.

But that can hardly be allowed to pass as a real excuse for not providing help with climate protection.

For well over half a century we have known that the use of fossil fuels increases the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

As early as 1965, an official expert report for the US President expected CO2 to increase by 25 percent by the year 2000 and warned of climate change that would be harmful to us humans.

One might expect that decision-makers could have accessed this knowledge.

Finally, since 1988 it has been clear: global warming is here.

The first report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was published in 1990, and in June 1992 - almost thirty years ago - almost all countries on earth agreed on the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change with the aim of preventing dangerous climate change.

So why are we still burning fossil fuels - even more than ever?

Probably the most important reason is the massive defense campaign against climate protection by fossil energy companies and by countries like Russia and Saudi Arabia, which live from the sale of fossil energy.

This campaign started back in the 1980s.

The main weapon of this campaign was doubt.

Climate science should be portrayed as controversial and its credibility undermined by the public.

Documents from the American Petroleum Institute show that a strategic plan was developed with PR experts, the Global Climate Science Communications Plan – the leak of which even made it onto page 1 of the »New York Times«.

Lobbyists bought some fake experts like US astrophysicist Willie Soon, who claimed global warming was caused by solar activity.

But the sun has been weakening in recent decades and has even slightly counteracted the warming.

The wrong thesis about the cold sun

My colleagues and I have often wondered about Soon's technically more than questionable publications - until it turned out that he was secretly funded almost exclusively by the fossil energy lobby for more than a decade.

The evaluation of public sources shows that the five major oil companies alone, BP, Shell, ExxonMobil, Chevron and Total, spend around 200 million dollars a year lobbying against climate protection.

In Germany, the false sun theory was spread by Fritz Vahrenholt, a former manager at RWE, Europe's largest CO2 emitter.

Because of the cold sun (that's the title of his book), he predicted an imminent global cooling ten years ago - as expected, the forecast very quickly turned out to be wrong.

Twenty years ago, Harvard science historian Naomi Oreskes wondered why the media portrayed climate change as controversial, because she didn't know any scientist who considered the matter controversial.

She decided to look into the matter.

In a scientific publication database, she found 928 studies from the period 1993 to 2003 on the search term global climate change - and among them not a single work that questioned the global warming caused by our greenhouse gases.

The broad consensus on this has been repeatedly confirmed since then, and reflects the direct experience of researchers who, like me, have been working in this field for decades.

In the Arte documentary "Climate Change - The Power of Lobbyists," which is well worth seeing, Oreskes describes how her life changed after the publication of her article: "I immediately received hate mail and threatening phone calls, people complained to my university." I've had similar experiences , since I began to point out the factual errors in the theses of the self-proclaimed »climate skeptics« .

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.)

The 2009 climate summit in Copenhagen was finally supposed to bring about a breakthrough in climate protection: US President Obama, the Chinese head of government Wen Jiabao and over a hundred other heads of state made the trip.

But shortly before that, thousands of climate researcher emails and documents stolen from the University of East Anglia appeared on a server in Tomsk, Siberia, and were exaggerated by well-known anti-climate protection lobbyists and some media into a pseudo-scandal ("Climategate").

Saudi Arabia and Russia played an important role in spreading this story in the run-up to the climate summit.

The British media speculated that the Russian secret service FSB was involved in the hack, but it was carried out so professionally that the British police were unable to identify the perpetrators.

Vladimir Putin has also repeatedly downplayed global warming

Although there was nothing in these emails that would have justified any doubts about the results of climate research - but with the help of sentence fragments taken out of context, an abstruse conspiracy theory was spun out of it.

As is well known, the climate summit of 2009 failed, although certainly not because of that.

But as recently as 2016, in a New York Times interview shortly after his election, Trump cited "those terrible emails between scientists" as the reason for his doubts about the climate crisis, and appointed leading representatives of the anti-climate protection lobby to his government.

Even Putin, whom Trump admires, has repeatedly downplayed global warming.

“Two or three degrees wouldn't hurt.

We spend less money on fur coats, and the grain harvest would increase,« he announced in 2003, when the devastating consequences of warming, especially for Russia's permafrost regions, had long been known.

And in 2017 he claimed volcanoes release more CO₂ than human activity.

An age-old climate denier tale that colleagues and I have been countering since the 1990s – in truth, anthropogenic emissions are about 50 times higher than those from volcanoes.

The story was also spread on German television in the TV documentary »Der Klimaschwindel«.

In 2018, Putin attributed global warming to “cosmic changes.”

He then swung from denying the cause of warming to discrediting the solution: renewable energy.

He lamented that windmills kill birds and that their vibrations drive worms out of the ground.

Switching the fossil propaganda machine from fake news about climate research to fake news about the solutions is a global trend that can also be observed in Germany.

Wind turbines are said to endanger the population of red kites (no), cause dangerous infrasound (wrong) and are not recyclable (yes), electric cars are said to be more harmful to the climate than combustion engines (no) or cause the power grid to collapse (njet).

Trump and Putin are perhaps extreme examples, but unfortunately many politicians still see their role as an extended arm of the fossil energy lobby - in Germany by no means only Gerhard Schröder.

The interrelationships between the energy industry and politics are manifold.

Some journalists in the German media also saw and unfortunately see their role in making scientifically nonsensical claims from the climate lateral thinker corner socially acceptable without checking, and even try to sell this as critical journalism.

After the flood disaster, one could read that the German weather service saw no increase in extreme rain events - even while the spokesman for the DWD declared: "They have become more frequent, we can see that in our radar data".

And as late as January, ZEIT editor Josef Joffe was still raving about »climatism« as a new religion (a defamation that has been popular with climate deniers for many years) and revealed a shocking ignorance about the results of climate research.

He doesn't even know that the cause of modern warming is proven by

that we physically understand and constantly measure the energy balance of our planet.

"What is the cause, what is the effect?" he asks about the connection between CO₂ and temperature rise, as if this question had not long since been unequivocally answered.

The pro-fossil fuel, anti-climate science lobbying campaign launched in the 1980s was a phenomenal success for its initiators.

It has delayed the necessary phase-out of fossil fuels by decades.

A small group of very wealthy people were allowed to influence politics and public opinion in their favor.

The world is already paying a high price for this in the form of heat, flood, drought, fire and hurricane damage and in the form of dependence on fossil energy suppliers in autocratic states.

If we do not end this very quickly, it will endanger the livelihoods of mankind, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report once again urgently shows.

UN Secretary-General Guterres sums it up like this:

Source: spiegel

All tech articles on 2022-04-11

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