R
Roger
Guest
The denial industry
For years, a network of fake citizens' groups and bogus scientific bodies
has been claiming that science of global warming is inconclusive. They set
back action on climate change by a decade. But who funded them? Exxon's
involvement is well known, but not the strange role of Big Tobacco. In the
first of three extracts from his new book, George Monbiot tells a bizarre
and shocking new story
George Monbiot
Tuesday September 19, 2006
Guardian
ExxonMobil is the world's most profitable corporation. Its sales now amount
to more than $1bn a day. It makes most of this money from oil, and has more
to lose than any other company from efforts to tackle climate change. To
safeguard its profits, ExxonMobil needs to sow doubt about whether serious
action needs to be taken on climate change. But there are difficulties: it
must confront a scientific consensus as strong as that which maintains that
smoking causes lung cancer or that HIV causes Aids. So what's its strategy?
The website Exxonsecrets.org, using data found in the company's official
documents, lists 124 organisations that have taken money from the company or
work closely with those that have. These organisations take a consistent
line on climate change: that the science is contradictory, the scientists
are split, environmentalists are charlatans, liars or lunatics, and if
governments took action to prevent global warming, they would be endangering
the global economy for no good reason. The findings these organisations
dislike are labelled "junk science". The findings they welcome are labelled
"sound science".
Among the organisations that have been funded by Exxon are such well-known
websites and lobby groups as TechCentralStation, the Cato Institute and the
Heritage Foundation. Some of those on the list have names that make them
look like grassroots citizens' organisations or academic bodies: the Centre
for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, for example. One or two
of them, such as the Congress of Racial Equality, are citizens'
organisations or academic bodies, but the line they take on climate change
is very much like that of the other sponsored groups. While all these groups
are based in America, their publications are read and cited, and their staff
are interviewed and quoted, all over the world.
By funding a large number of organisations, Exxon helps to create the
impression that doubt about climate change is widespread. For those who do
not understand that scientific findings cannot be trusted if they have not
appeared in peer-reviewed journals, the names of these institutes help to
suggest that serious researchers are challenging the consensus.
This is not to claim that all the science these groups champion is bogus. On
the whole, they use selection, not invention. They will find one
contradictory study - such as the discovery of tropospheric cooling, which,
in a garbled form, has been used by Peter Hitchens in the Mail on Sunday -
and promote it relentlessly. They will continue to do so long after it has
been disproved by further work. So, for example, John Christy, the author of
the troposphere paper, admitted in August 2005 that his figures were
incorrect, yet his initial findings are still being circulated and
championed by many of these groups, as a quick internet search will show
you.
But they do not stop there. The chairman of a group called the Science and
Environmental Policy Project is Frederick Seitz. Seitz is a physicist who in
the 1960s was president of the US National Academy of Sciences. In 1998, he
wrote a document, known as the Oregon Petition, which has been cited by
almost every journalist who claims that climate change is a myth.
The document reads as follows: "We urge the United States government to
reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan, in
December 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on
greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science
and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind. There is no
convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide,
methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable
future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption
of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence
that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects
upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth."
Anyone with a degree was entitled to sign it. It was attached to a letter
written by Seitz, entitled Research Review of Global Warming Evidence. The
lead author of the "review" that followed Seitz's letter is a Christian
fundamentalist called Arthur B Robinson. He is not a professional climate
scientist. It was co-published by Robinson's organisation - the Oregon
Institute of Science and Medicine - and an outfit called the George C
Marshall Institute, which has received $630,000 from ExxonMobil since 1998.
The other authors were Robinson's 22-year-old son and two employees of the
George C Marshall Institute. The chairman of the George C Marshall Institute
was Frederick Seitz.
The paper maintained that: "We are living in an increasingly lush
environment of plants and animals as a result of the carbon dioxide
increase. Our children will enjoy an Earth with far more plant and animal
life than that with which we now are blessed. This is a wonderful and
unexpected gift from the Industrial Revolution."
It was printed in the font and format of the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences: the journal of the organisation of which Seitz - as he
had just reminded his correspondents - was once president.
Soon after the petition was published, the National Academy of Sciences
released this statement: "The NAS Council would like to make it clear that
this petition has nothing to do with the National Academy of Sciences and
that the manuscript was not published in the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences or in any other peer-reviewed journal. The petition does
not reflect the conclusions of expert reports of the Academy."
But it was too late. Seitz, the Oregon Institute and the George C Marshall
Institute had already circulated tens of thousands of copies, and the
petition had established a major presence on the internet. Some 17,000
graduates signed it, the majority of whom had no background in climate
science. It has been repeatedly cited - by global-warming sceptics such as
David Bellamy, Melanie Phillips and others - as a petition by climate
scientists. It is promoted by the Exxon-sponsored sites as evidence that
there is no scientific consensus on climate change.
All this is now well known to climate scientists and environmentalists. But
what I have discovered while researching this issue is that the corporate
funding of lobby groups denying that manmade climate change is taking place
was initiated not by Exxon, or by any other firm directly involved in the
fossil fuel industry. It was started by the tobacco company Philip Morris.
In December 1992, the US Environmental Protection Agency published a
500-page report called Respiratory Health Effects of Passive Smoking. It
found that "the widespread exposure to environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) in
the United States presents a serious and substantial public health impact.
In adults: ETS is a human lung carcinogen, responsible for approximately
3,000 lung cancer deaths annually in US non-smokers. In children: ETS
exposure is causally associated with an increased risk of lower respiratory
tract infections such as bronchitis and pneumonia. This report estimates
that 150,000 to 300,000 cases annually in infants and young children up to
18 months of age are attributable to ETS."
Had it not been for the settlement of a major class action against the
tobacco companies in the US, we would never have been able to see what
happened next. But in 1998 they were forced to publish their internal
documents and post them on the internet.
Within two months of its publication, Philip Morris, the world's biggest
tobacco firm, had devised a strategy for dealing with the passive-smoking
report. In February 1993 Ellen Merlo, its senior vice-president of corporate
affairs, sent a letter to William I Campbell, Philip Morris's chief
executive officer and president, explaining her intentions: "Our overriding
objective is to discredit the EPA report ... Concurrently, it is our
objective to prevent states and cities, as well as businesses, from
passive-smoking bans."
To this end, she had hired a public relations company called APCO. She had
attached the advice it had given her. APCO warned that: "No matter how
strong the arguments, industry spokespeople are, in and of themselves, not
always credible or appropriate messengers."
So the fight against a ban on passive smoking had to be associated with
other people and other issues. Philip Morris, APCO said, needed to create
the impression of a "grassroots" movement - one that had been formed
spontaneously by concerned citizens to fight "overregulation". It should
portray the danger of tobacco smoke as just one "unfounded fear" among
others, such as concerns about pesticides and cellphones. APCO proposed to
set up "a national coalition intended to educate the media, public officials
and the public about the dangers of 'junk science'. Coalition will address
credibility of government's scientific studies, risk-assessment techniques
and misuse of tax dollars ... Upon formation of Coalition, key leaders will
begin media outreach, eg editorial board tours, opinion articles, and brief
elected officials in selected states."
APCO would found the coalition, write its mission statements, and "prepare
and place opinion articles in key markets". For this it required $150,000
for its own fees and $75,000 for the coalition's costs.
By May 1993, as another memo from APCO to Philip Morris shows, the fake
citizens' group had a name: the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition. It
was important, further letters stated, "to ensure that TASSC has a diverse
group of contributors"; to "link the tobacco issue with other more
'politically correct' products"; and to associate scientific studies that
cast smoking in a bad light with "broader questions about government
research and regulations" - such as "global warming", "nuclear waste
disposal" and "biotechnology". APCO would engage in the "intensive
recruitment of high-profile representatives from business and industry,
scientists, public officials, and other individuals interested in promoting
the use of sound science".
By September 1993, APCO had produced a "Plan for the Public Launching of
TASSC". The media launch would not take place in "Washington, DC or the top
media markets of the country. Rather, we suggest creating a series of
aggressive, decentralised launches in several targeted local and regional
markets across the country. This approach ... avoids cynical reporters from
major media: less reviewing/challenging of TASSC messages."
The media coverage, the public relations company hoped, would enable TASSC
to "establish an image of a national grassroots coalition". In case the
media asked hostile questions, APCO circulated a sheet of answers, drafted
by Philip Morris. The first question was:
"Isn't it true that Philip Morris created TASSC to act as a front group for
it?
"A: No, not at all. As a large corporation, PM belongs to many national,
regional, and state business, public policy, and legislative organisations.
PM has contributed to TASSC, as we have with various groups and corporations
across the country."
There are clear similarities between the language used and the approaches
adopted by Philip Morris and by the organisations funded by Exxon. The two
lobbies use the same terms, which appear to have been invented by Philip
Morris's consultants. "Junk science" meant peer-reviewed studies showing
that smoking was linked to cancer and other diseases. "Sound science" meant
studies sponsored by the tobacco industry suggesting that the link was
inconclusive. Both lobbies recognised that their best chance of avoiding
regulation was to challenge the scientific consensus. As a memo from the
tobacco company Brown and Williamson noted, "Doubt is our product since it
is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the
mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a
controversy." Both industries also sought to distance themselves from their
own campaigns, creating the impression that they were spontaneous movements
of professionals or ordinary citizens: the "grassroots".
But the connection goes further than that. TASSC, the "coalition" created by
Philip Morris, was the first and most important of the corporate-funded
organisations denying that climate change is taking place. It has done more
damage to the campaign to halt it than any other body.
TASSC did as its founders at APCO suggested, and sought funding from other
sources. Between 2000 and 2002 it received $30,000 from Exxon. The website
it has financed - JunkScience.com - has been the main entrepot for almost
every kind of climate-change denial that has found its way into the
mainstream press. It equates environmentalists with Nazis, communists and
terrorists. It flings at us the accusations that could justifably be
levelled against itself: the website claims, for example, that it is
campaigning against "faulty scientific data and analysis used to advance
special and, often, hidden agendas". I have lost count of the number of
correspondents who, while questioning manmade global warming, have pointed
me there.
The man who runs it is called Steve Milloy. In 1992, he started working for
APCO - Philip Morris's consultants. While there, he set up the JunkScience
site. In March 1997, the documents show, he was appointed TASSC's executive
director. By 1998, as he explained in a memo to TASSC board members, his
JunkScience website was was being funded by TASSC. Both he and the
"coalition" continued to receive money from Philip Morris. An internal
document dated February 1998 reveals that TASSC took $200,000 from the
tobacco company in 1997. Philip Morris's 2001 budget document records a
payment to Steven Milloy of $90,000. Altria, Philip Morris's parent company,
admits that Milloy was under contract to the tobacco firm until at least the
end of 2005.
He has done well. You can find his name attached to letters and articles
seeking to discredit passive-smoking studies all over the internet and in
the academic databases. He has even managed to reach the British Medical
Journal: I found a letter from him there which claimed that the studies it
had reported "do not bear out the hypothesis that maternal smoking/ passive
smoking increases cancer risk among infants". TASSC paid him $126,000 in
2004 for 15 hours' work a week. Two other organisations are registered at
his address: the Free Enterprise Education Institute and the Free Enterprise
Action Institute. They have received $10,000 and $50,000 respectively from
Exxon. The secretary of the Free Enterprise Action Institute is Thomas
Borelli. Borelli was the Philip Morris executive who oversaw the payments to
TASSC.
Milloy also writes a weekly Junk Science column for the Fox News website.
Without declaring his interests, he has used this column to pour scorn on
studies documenting the medical effects of second-hand tobacco smoke and
showing that climate change is taking place. Even after Fox News was told
about the money he had been receiving from Philip Morris and Exxon, it
continued to employ him, without informing its readers about his interests.
TASSC's headed notepaper names an advisory board of eight people. Three of
them are listed by Exxonsecrets.org as working for organisations taking
money from Exxon. One of them is Frederick Seitz, the man who wrote the
Oregon Petition, and who chairs the Science and Environmental Policy
Project. In 1979, Seitz became a permanent consultant to the tobacco company
RJ Reynolds. He worked for the firm until at least 1987, for an annual fee
of $65,000. He was in charge of deciding which medical research projects the
company should fund, and handed out millions of dollars a year to American
universities. The purpose of this funding, a memo from the chairman of RJ
Reynolds shows, was to "refute the criticisms against cigarettes". An
undated note in the Philip Morris archive shows that it was planning a
"Seitz symposium" with the help of TASSC, in which Frederick Seitz would
speak to "40-60 regulators".
The president of Seitz's Science and Environmental Policy Project is a
maverick environmental scientist called S Fred Singer. He has spent the past
few years refuting evidence for manmade climate change. It was he, for
example, who published the misleading claim that most of the world's
glaciers are advancing, which landed David Bellamy in so much trouble when
he repeated it last year. He also had connections with the tobacco industry.
In March 1993, APCO sent a memo to Ellen Merlo, the vice-president of Philip
Morris, who had just commissioned it to fight the Environmental Protection
Agency: "As you know, we have been working with Dr Fred Singer and Dr Dwight
Lee, who have authored articles on junk science and indoor air quality (IAQ)
respectively ..."
Singer's article, entitled Junk Science at the EPA, claimed that "the latest
'crisis' - environmental tobacco smoke - has been widely criticised as the
most shocking distortion of scientific evidence yet". He alleged that the
Environmental Protection Agency had had to "rig the numbers" in its report
on passive smoking. This was the report that Philip Morris and APCO had set
out to discredit a month before Singer wrote his article.
I have no evidence that Fred Singer or his organisation have taken money
from Philip Morris. But many of the other bodies that have been sponsored by
Exxon and have sought to repudiate climate change were also funded by the
tobacco company. Among them are some of the world's best-known "thinktanks":
the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the Heritage
Foundation, the Hudson Institute, the Frontiers of Freedom Institute, the
Reason Foundation and the Independent Institute, as well as George Mason
University's Law and Economics Centre. I can't help wondering whether there
is any aspect of conservative thought in the United States that has not been
formed and funded by the corporations.
Until I came across this material, I believed that the accusations, the
insults and the taunts such people had slung at us environmentalists were
personal: that they really did hate us, and had found someone who would pay
to help them express those feelings. Now I realise that they have simply
transferred their skills.
While they have been most effective in the United States, the impacts of the
climate-change deniers sponsored by Exxon and Philip Morris have been felt
all over the world. I have seen their arguments endlessly repeated in
Australia, Canada, India, Russia and the UK. By dominating the media debate
on climate change during seven or eight critical years in which urgent
international talks should have been taking place, by constantly seeding
doubt about the science just as it should have been most persuasive, they
have justified the money their sponsors have spent on them many times over.
It is fair to say that the professional denial industry has delayed
effective global action on climate change by years, just as it helped to
delay action against the tobacco companies.
For years, a network of fake citizens' groups and bogus scientific bodies
has been claiming that science of global warming is inconclusive. They set
back action on climate change by a decade. But who funded them? Exxon's
involvement is well known, but not the strange role of Big Tobacco. In the
first of three extracts from his new book, George Monbiot tells a bizarre
and shocking new story
George Monbiot
Tuesday September 19, 2006
Guardian
ExxonMobil is the world's most profitable corporation. Its sales now amount
to more than $1bn a day. It makes most of this money from oil, and has more
to lose than any other company from efforts to tackle climate change. To
safeguard its profits, ExxonMobil needs to sow doubt about whether serious
action needs to be taken on climate change. But there are difficulties: it
must confront a scientific consensus as strong as that which maintains that
smoking causes lung cancer or that HIV causes Aids. So what's its strategy?
The website Exxonsecrets.org, using data found in the company's official
documents, lists 124 organisations that have taken money from the company or
work closely with those that have. These organisations take a consistent
line on climate change: that the science is contradictory, the scientists
are split, environmentalists are charlatans, liars or lunatics, and if
governments took action to prevent global warming, they would be endangering
the global economy for no good reason. The findings these organisations
dislike are labelled "junk science". The findings they welcome are labelled
"sound science".
Among the organisations that have been funded by Exxon are such well-known
websites and lobby groups as TechCentralStation, the Cato Institute and the
Heritage Foundation. Some of those on the list have names that make them
look like grassroots citizens' organisations or academic bodies: the Centre
for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, for example. One or two
of them, such as the Congress of Racial Equality, are citizens'
organisations or academic bodies, but the line they take on climate change
is very much like that of the other sponsored groups. While all these groups
are based in America, their publications are read and cited, and their staff
are interviewed and quoted, all over the world.
By funding a large number of organisations, Exxon helps to create the
impression that doubt about climate change is widespread. For those who do
not understand that scientific findings cannot be trusted if they have not
appeared in peer-reviewed journals, the names of these institutes help to
suggest that serious researchers are challenging the consensus.
This is not to claim that all the science these groups champion is bogus. On
the whole, they use selection, not invention. They will find one
contradictory study - such as the discovery of tropospheric cooling, which,
in a garbled form, has been used by Peter Hitchens in the Mail on Sunday -
and promote it relentlessly. They will continue to do so long after it has
been disproved by further work. So, for example, John Christy, the author of
the troposphere paper, admitted in August 2005 that his figures were
incorrect, yet his initial findings are still being circulated and
championed by many of these groups, as a quick internet search will show
you.
But they do not stop there. The chairman of a group called the Science and
Environmental Policy Project is Frederick Seitz. Seitz is a physicist who in
the 1960s was president of the US National Academy of Sciences. In 1998, he
wrote a document, known as the Oregon Petition, which has been cited by
almost every journalist who claims that climate change is a myth.
The document reads as follows: "We urge the United States government to
reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan, in
December 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on
greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science
and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind. There is no
convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide,
methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable
future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption
of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence
that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects
upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth."
Anyone with a degree was entitled to sign it. It was attached to a letter
written by Seitz, entitled Research Review of Global Warming Evidence. The
lead author of the "review" that followed Seitz's letter is a Christian
fundamentalist called Arthur B Robinson. He is not a professional climate
scientist. It was co-published by Robinson's organisation - the Oregon
Institute of Science and Medicine - and an outfit called the George C
Marshall Institute, which has received $630,000 from ExxonMobil since 1998.
The other authors were Robinson's 22-year-old son and two employees of the
George C Marshall Institute. The chairman of the George C Marshall Institute
was Frederick Seitz.
The paper maintained that: "We are living in an increasingly lush
environment of plants and animals as a result of the carbon dioxide
increase. Our children will enjoy an Earth with far more plant and animal
life than that with which we now are blessed. This is a wonderful and
unexpected gift from the Industrial Revolution."
It was printed in the font and format of the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences: the journal of the organisation of which Seitz - as he
had just reminded his correspondents - was once president.
Soon after the petition was published, the National Academy of Sciences
released this statement: "The NAS Council would like to make it clear that
this petition has nothing to do with the National Academy of Sciences and
that the manuscript was not published in the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences or in any other peer-reviewed journal. The petition does
not reflect the conclusions of expert reports of the Academy."
But it was too late. Seitz, the Oregon Institute and the George C Marshall
Institute had already circulated tens of thousands of copies, and the
petition had established a major presence on the internet. Some 17,000
graduates signed it, the majority of whom had no background in climate
science. It has been repeatedly cited - by global-warming sceptics such as
David Bellamy, Melanie Phillips and others - as a petition by climate
scientists. It is promoted by the Exxon-sponsored sites as evidence that
there is no scientific consensus on climate change.
All this is now well known to climate scientists and environmentalists. But
what I have discovered while researching this issue is that the corporate
funding of lobby groups denying that manmade climate change is taking place
was initiated not by Exxon, or by any other firm directly involved in the
fossil fuel industry. It was started by the tobacco company Philip Morris.
In December 1992, the US Environmental Protection Agency published a
500-page report called Respiratory Health Effects of Passive Smoking. It
found that "the widespread exposure to environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) in
the United States presents a serious and substantial public health impact.
In adults: ETS is a human lung carcinogen, responsible for approximately
3,000 lung cancer deaths annually in US non-smokers. In children: ETS
exposure is causally associated with an increased risk of lower respiratory
tract infections such as bronchitis and pneumonia. This report estimates
that 150,000 to 300,000 cases annually in infants and young children up to
18 months of age are attributable to ETS."
Had it not been for the settlement of a major class action against the
tobacco companies in the US, we would never have been able to see what
happened next. But in 1998 they were forced to publish their internal
documents and post them on the internet.
Within two months of its publication, Philip Morris, the world's biggest
tobacco firm, had devised a strategy for dealing with the passive-smoking
report. In February 1993 Ellen Merlo, its senior vice-president of corporate
affairs, sent a letter to William I Campbell, Philip Morris's chief
executive officer and president, explaining her intentions: "Our overriding
objective is to discredit the EPA report ... Concurrently, it is our
objective to prevent states and cities, as well as businesses, from
passive-smoking bans."
To this end, she had hired a public relations company called APCO. She had
attached the advice it had given her. APCO warned that: "No matter how
strong the arguments, industry spokespeople are, in and of themselves, not
always credible or appropriate messengers."
So the fight against a ban on passive smoking had to be associated with
other people and other issues. Philip Morris, APCO said, needed to create
the impression of a "grassroots" movement - one that had been formed
spontaneously by concerned citizens to fight "overregulation". It should
portray the danger of tobacco smoke as just one "unfounded fear" among
others, such as concerns about pesticides and cellphones. APCO proposed to
set up "a national coalition intended to educate the media, public officials
and the public about the dangers of 'junk science'. Coalition will address
credibility of government's scientific studies, risk-assessment techniques
and misuse of tax dollars ... Upon formation of Coalition, key leaders will
begin media outreach, eg editorial board tours, opinion articles, and brief
elected officials in selected states."
APCO would found the coalition, write its mission statements, and "prepare
and place opinion articles in key markets". For this it required $150,000
for its own fees and $75,000 for the coalition's costs.
By May 1993, as another memo from APCO to Philip Morris shows, the fake
citizens' group had a name: the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition. It
was important, further letters stated, "to ensure that TASSC has a diverse
group of contributors"; to "link the tobacco issue with other more
'politically correct' products"; and to associate scientific studies that
cast smoking in a bad light with "broader questions about government
research and regulations" - such as "global warming", "nuclear waste
disposal" and "biotechnology". APCO would engage in the "intensive
recruitment of high-profile representatives from business and industry,
scientists, public officials, and other individuals interested in promoting
the use of sound science".
By September 1993, APCO had produced a "Plan for the Public Launching of
TASSC". The media launch would not take place in "Washington, DC or the top
media markets of the country. Rather, we suggest creating a series of
aggressive, decentralised launches in several targeted local and regional
markets across the country. This approach ... avoids cynical reporters from
major media: less reviewing/challenging of TASSC messages."
The media coverage, the public relations company hoped, would enable TASSC
to "establish an image of a national grassroots coalition". In case the
media asked hostile questions, APCO circulated a sheet of answers, drafted
by Philip Morris. The first question was:
"Isn't it true that Philip Morris created TASSC to act as a front group for
it?
"A: No, not at all. As a large corporation, PM belongs to many national,
regional, and state business, public policy, and legislative organisations.
PM has contributed to TASSC, as we have with various groups and corporations
across the country."
There are clear similarities between the language used and the approaches
adopted by Philip Morris and by the organisations funded by Exxon. The two
lobbies use the same terms, which appear to have been invented by Philip
Morris's consultants. "Junk science" meant peer-reviewed studies showing
that smoking was linked to cancer and other diseases. "Sound science" meant
studies sponsored by the tobacco industry suggesting that the link was
inconclusive. Both lobbies recognised that their best chance of avoiding
regulation was to challenge the scientific consensus. As a memo from the
tobacco company Brown and Williamson noted, "Doubt is our product since it
is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the
mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a
controversy." Both industries also sought to distance themselves from their
own campaigns, creating the impression that they were spontaneous movements
of professionals or ordinary citizens: the "grassroots".
But the connection goes further than that. TASSC, the "coalition" created by
Philip Morris, was the first and most important of the corporate-funded
organisations denying that climate change is taking place. It has done more
damage to the campaign to halt it than any other body.
TASSC did as its founders at APCO suggested, and sought funding from other
sources. Between 2000 and 2002 it received $30,000 from Exxon. The website
it has financed - JunkScience.com - has been the main entrepot for almost
every kind of climate-change denial that has found its way into the
mainstream press. It equates environmentalists with Nazis, communists and
terrorists. It flings at us the accusations that could justifably be
levelled against itself: the website claims, for example, that it is
campaigning against "faulty scientific data and analysis used to advance
special and, often, hidden agendas". I have lost count of the number of
correspondents who, while questioning manmade global warming, have pointed
me there.
The man who runs it is called Steve Milloy. In 1992, he started working for
APCO - Philip Morris's consultants. While there, he set up the JunkScience
site. In March 1997, the documents show, he was appointed TASSC's executive
director. By 1998, as he explained in a memo to TASSC board members, his
JunkScience website was was being funded by TASSC. Both he and the
"coalition" continued to receive money from Philip Morris. An internal
document dated February 1998 reveals that TASSC took $200,000 from the
tobacco company in 1997. Philip Morris's 2001 budget document records a
payment to Steven Milloy of $90,000. Altria, Philip Morris's parent company,
admits that Milloy was under contract to the tobacco firm until at least the
end of 2005.
He has done well. You can find his name attached to letters and articles
seeking to discredit passive-smoking studies all over the internet and in
the academic databases. He has even managed to reach the British Medical
Journal: I found a letter from him there which claimed that the studies it
had reported "do not bear out the hypothesis that maternal smoking/ passive
smoking increases cancer risk among infants". TASSC paid him $126,000 in
2004 for 15 hours' work a week. Two other organisations are registered at
his address: the Free Enterprise Education Institute and the Free Enterprise
Action Institute. They have received $10,000 and $50,000 respectively from
Exxon. The secretary of the Free Enterprise Action Institute is Thomas
Borelli. Borelli was the Philip Morris executive who oversaw the payments to
TASSC.
Milloy also writes a weekly Junk Science column for the Fox News website.
Without declaring his interests, he has used this column to pour scorn on
studies documenting the medical effects of second-hand tobacco smoke and
showing that climate change is taking place. Even after Fox News was told
about the money he had been receiving from Philip Morris and Exxon, it
continued to employ him, without informing its readers about his interests.
TASSC's headed notepaper names an advisory board of eight people. Three of
them are listed by Exxonsecrets.org as working for organisations taking
money from Exxon. One of them is Frederick Seitz, the man who wrote the
Oregon Petition, and who chairs the Science and Environmental Policy
Project. In 1979, Seitz became a permanent consultant to the tobacco company
RJ Reynolds. He worked for the firm until at least 1987, for an annual fee
of $65,000. He was in charge of deciding which medical research projects the
company should fund, and handed out millions of dollars a year to American
universities. The purpose of this funding, a memo from the chairman of RJ
Reynolds shows, was to "refute the criticisms against cigarettes". An
undated note in the Philip Morris archive shows that it was planning a
"Seitz symposium" with the help of TASSC, in which Frederick Seitz would
speak to "40-60 regulators".
The president of Seitz's Science and Environmental Policy Project is a
maverick environmental scientist called S Fred Singer. He has spent the past
few years refuting evidence for manmade climate change. It was he, for
example, who published the misleading claim that most of the world's
glaciers are advancing, which landed David Bellamy in so much trouble when
he repeated it last year. He also had connections with the tobacco industry.
In March 1993, APCO sent a memo to Ellen Merlo, the vice-president of Philip
Morris, who had just commissioned it to fight the Environmental Protection
Agency: "As you know, we have been working with Dr Fred Singer and Dr Dwight
Lee, who have authored articles on junk science and indoor air quality (IAQ)
respectively ..."
Singer's article, entitled Junk Science at the EPA, claimed that "the latest
'crisis' - environmental tobacco smoke - has been widely criticised as the
most shocking distortion of scientific evidence yet". He alleged that the
Environmental Protection Agency had had to "rig the numbers" in its report
on passive smoking. This was the report that Philip Morris and APCO had set
out to discredit a month before Singer wrote his article.
I have no evidence that Fred Singer or his organisation have taken money
from Philip Morris. But many of the other bodies that have been sponsored by
Exxon and have sought to repudiate climate change were also funded by the
tobacco company. Among them are some of the world's best-known "thinktanks":
the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the Heritage
Foundation, the Hudson Institute, the Frontiers of Freedom Institute, the
Reason Foundation and the Independent Institute, as well as George Mason
University's Law and Economics Centre. I can't help wondering whether there
is any aspect of conservative thought in the United States that has not been
formed and funded by the corporations.
Until I came across this material, I believed that the accusations, the
insults and the taunts such people had slung at us environmentalists were
personal: that they really did hate us, and had found someone who would pay
to help them express those feelings. Now I realise that they have simply
transferred their skills.
While they have been most effective in the United States, the impacts of the
climate-change deniers sponsored by Exxon and Philip Morris have been felt
all over the world. I have seen their arguments endlessly repeated in
Australia, Canada, India, Russia and the UK. By dominating the media debate
on climate change during seven or eight critical years in which urgent
international talks should have been taking place, by constantly seeding
doubt about the science just as it should have been most persuasive, they
have justified the money their sponsors have spent on them many times over.
It is fair to say that the professional denial industry has delayed
effective global action on climate change by years, just as it helped to
delay action against the tobacco companies.