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Smoke and Fumes: Six Decades of Oil-Tobacco Nexus of Deception and Attacks on Science

http://www.desmogblog.com/2016/07/20/smoke-and-fumes-six-decades-oil-tobacco-nexus-deception-and-attacks-science

smoke-fumes

The Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) today expanded its website SmokeandFumes.org, featuring a new video and more internal industry documents dating back to the 1950s that reveal the nexus between the oil and tobacco industries’ shared campaigns to undermine science to delay accountability and political action to curtail their deadly products.

CIEL has uncovered new evidence showing that it was the work performed for the oil industry by PR firms (particularly Hill & Knowlton) that attracted the tobacco industry to follow suit — in contrast to the prevailing narrative that Big Oil deployed the Tobacco Playbook to ward off responsibility for climate change resulting from its fossil fuel pollution.

“Again and again we found both the PR firms and the researchers worked first for oil, then for tobacco,” said CIEL President Carroll Muffett in a statement. “It was a pedigree the tobacco companies recognized and sought out.”

ExxonMobil’s excuse in the face of #ExxonKnew has, in part, relied on the defense that oil is not the new tobacco. At the end of the day, as Muffett points out in the video below, the final result is the same, despite who was first to devise the strategies of deception and attacking inconvenient science.

The infamous “Doubt is our product” tobacco memo articulated the strategy most succinctly, but the whole package of deception, delay, and attacks on science have been shared, refined and endlessly deployed by both industries (and many others) since the 1950s.

It reminds me of that old “I learned it by watching you” anti-drug PSA. You’re both still busted, tobacco and oil industries. It doesn’t matter who came first.

Watch the video for the whole story, and check out SmokeandFumes.org for the incredible cache of internal documents uncovered by the Center for International Environmental Law

Déjà vu: as with tobacco, the climate wars are going to court

The fossil fuel industry copied Big Tobacco’s racketeering playbook. They’re following the same path to court, where tobacco lost

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2016/jul/18/deja-vu-as-with-tobacco-the-climate-wars-are-going-to-court

House Science Committe Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX) is coming to the defense of fossil fuel companies that are accused of deceiving the public on climate change to maximize their own profits. Photograph: Scott J. Ferrell

House Science Committe Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX) is coming to the defense of fossil fuel companies that are accused of deceiving the public on climate change to maximize their own profits. Photograph: Scott J. Ferrell

Investigative journalism has uncovered a “web of denial” in which polluting industries pay “independent” groups to disseminate misinformation to the public and policymakers. The same groups and tactics were employed first by the tobacco industry, then fossil fuel companies. Big Tobacco has been to court and lost; now it’s Big Oil’s turn. Political leaders are choosing sides in this war.

Research by Inside Climate News revealed that Exxon did top notch climate science research in the late 1970s and early 1980s, which revealed the dangers its products posed via climate change. Soon thereafter, Exxon launched misinformation campaigns by funding “think tanks” and front groups to manufacture doubt about climate science and the expert consensus on human-caused global warming.

What #ExxonKnew vs what #ExxonDid. Illustration: John Cook, SkepticalScience.com

What #ExxonKnew vs what #ExxonDid. Illustration: John Cook, SkepticalScience.com

Exxon wasn’t alone. Koch Industries, Peabody Energy, and other fossil companies have similarly funneled vast sums of money to these groups. Last week, Senate Democrats, including presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and vice presidential contenders Elizabeth Warren and Al Franken signed a Resolution expressing congressional disapproval of the fossil fuel industry’s misinformation campaign. 19 Senate Democrats also took to the floor of the Senate to speak out against the web of denial, with repeated references to the tobacco/fossil connections.

The climate battle goes to court

The fossil fuel industry has already put forth its best scientific argument in court, and lost. Now 17 state attorneys general, led by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, have formed a coalition to investigate ExxonMobil’s activities. As Schneiderman put it:

The First Amendment, ladies and gentlemen, does not give you the right to commit fraud

However, Lamar Smith (R-TX), chairman of the House Science Committee, along with his Republican colleagues last week issued subpoenas to Schneiderman and Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, accusing them of violating Exxon’s First Amendment rights. As Smith claimed:

The Committee has a responsibility to protect First Amendment rights of companies, academic institutions, scientists, and nonprofit organizations. That is why the Committee is obligated to ask for information from the attorneys general and others.

In this battle of First Amendment claims, Big Oil & Coal use the same argument as Big Tobacco, who lost.

The fossil fuel industry copied the tobacco playbook

Last century, we saw a similar battle with tobacco. By the 1950s, the tobacco industry knew that its products caused cancer and other diseases. They still marketed their harmful products to children, and soon created pseudo-academic institutes like the Council for Tobacco Research to cast doubt on smoking’s damage. However, the institutes’ connections to the tobacco industry were too obvious; they wanted “independent” voices.

In the 1980s the Koch brothers started creating a vast web of “think tanks” that could simulate credible independence, funded via dark money, often tax-exempt. Big Tobacco eagerly joined, to “quarterback behind the scenes.” They contributed great marketing talent, some later hired by Kochs.

As extensively documented at DeSmogBlog, Big Tobacco has long funded science-denying think tanks, such as the Heartland Institute, Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, George Marshall Institute, American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and Manhattan Institute, to name a few. ExxonMobil later funded these same groups.

The fossil fuel industry has adopted the tobacco industry’s playbook, and shared the same web of denial. The Senate Resolution made this point, calling out both the tobacco and fossil fuel industries for having:

(A) developed a sophisticated and deceitful campaign that funded think tanks and front groups, and paid public relations firms to deny, counter, and obfuscate peer-reviewed science; and

(B) used that misinformation campaign to mislead the public and cast doubt in order to protect their financial interest

Their tactics have grown more sophisticated, for example using money anonymizers like Donors Trust to ensure their “dark money” becomes even harder to trace.

The tobacco industry lost in court

In 1999, the US Justice Department filed a civil Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) lawsuit against the major tobacco companies and their associated industry groups. In 2006, US District Court Judge Gladys Kessler ruled that the tobacco industry’s campaign to “maximize industry profits by preserving and expanding the market for cigarettes through a scheme to deceive the public” about the health hazards of smoking amounted to a racketeering enterprise. She wrote a clear statement, appealed fruitlessly by tobacco companies:

The First Amendment Does Not Protect Defendants’ False and Misleading Public Statements

The attorneys general investigating Exxon have a strong case that the fossil fuel industry is similarly guilty of racketeering by deceiving the public in order to maximize profits. Exxon and other fossil fuel companies knew of the dangers of carbon pollution more than three decades ago, and yet funneled tens of millions of dollars to think tanks that disseminate misinformation to try to convince the public and policymakers otherwise.

Sharon Eubanks led the Justice Department trial team, as documented in the book Bad Acts: The Racketeering Case Against the Tobacco Industry and was a key contributor to the report Establishing Accountability for Climate Change Damages. Of the Exxon case, she said:

I think a RICO action is plausible and should be considered

The First Amendment defense of the fossil fuel industry by House Republicans simply doesn’t hold water. Defending the fossil fuel industry today is no different than defending the tobacco industry in the 1990s, as did Lamar Smith’s colleague “Smokey Joe” Barton (R-TX).

Unsurprisingly, oil & gas is the top industry donor to Lamar Smith. History books will reflect poorly on those who sold out millions of peoples’ health for personal gain or industry profits, and on those who worked to destabilize the climate on which future generations will rely for the sake of their own political power or ExxonMobil’s record profits.

While cities worldwide work together against global warming, Hong Kong stands aside

John Sayer says Hong Kong’s absence from international climate change initiatives destroys its own credibility as a centre for climate-smart investment funds and green bonds

It is now over six months since the landmark climate talks in Paris. City leaders and local governments have accepted the important role of city-level action in international efforts to reduce climate change.

More than 7,100 cities joined up last month to form the world’s largest city government alliance, known as the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy. They are pledging greenhouse gas reduction goals, renewable energy targets and better exchange of information and ideas on green energy. The new covenant brings together the Compact of Mayors and the Covenant of Mayors to form a worldwide grouping of cities, which are home to some 600 million people.

Michael Bloomberg is a co-chair of the initiative, and he believes this city-level action can be “a giant step forward in the work of achieving the goals that nations agreed to” on climate action.

On the Global Compact of Mayors website is a map showing thousands of cities in 119 countries which have signed up to the initiative. The map highlights participating cities in countries such as Korea, Japan, Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines as well as six cities in Taiwan. But regrettably there is a void on the south China coast.

Hong Kong is not represented.

The Chinese government played a positive role in ensuring that the Paris agreement was achieved. The agreement notes the importance of “sub-national” activity in slowing global warming. This has to be led by local and regional governments.

Yet more than six months after the signing of an agreement in which world leaders acknowledged that the timetable for change is very short, Hong Kong has neither prepared a more ambitious response, nor joined up to any significant international initiatives.

If Hong Kong joined other cities to set world-standard targets on renewable energy and carbon reduction, this could improve its credentials to become a hub for green finance. But Hong Kong’s conspicuous absence in this area diminishes its credibility as a centre to host climate-smart investment funds and green bonds. A city that displays little interest in renewables, zero-carbon buildings or green transport sends the message that we have not the motivation or capacity to be a leader of green finance.

Nations agreed in Paris that we must begin work immediately on a green transition. Among those cities recognising the challenge, Hong Kong ranks somewhere below 7,100th, behind many hundreds of cities in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

John Sayer is a director of Carbon Care Asia and was a member of the Hong Kong NGO delegation to the Paris Climate Change Conference in 2015
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Source URL: http://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/1988996/while-cities-worldwide-work-together-against-global-warming

Exxon’s Lawyer in Climate Science Probe Has History Helping Big Tobacco and NFL Defend Against Health Claims

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/05/13/exxons-lawyer-in-climate-science-probe-has-history-helping-big-tobacco-and-nfl-defend-against-health-claims/

Ted Wells, an attorney hired by ExxonMobil to represent the company against accusations it lied about the climate risks of burning fossil fuels, also represented the tobacco industry in the lawsuit brought by the U.S. Department of Justice in 1999 under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, DeSmog has found. Wells also defended the National Football League (NFL) in the infamous “Deflategate” matter as well as in litigation over the far more serious issue of concussions.

Wells has represented ExxonMobil since at least December 2015, following New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s announcement that his office would probe Exxon’s role in funding climate change denial despite its long-held understanding and pioneering research into climate change.

Wells’ name also appears on an April 13 legal filing Exxon submitted in response to a subpoena issued by the Virgin Islands’AG Office, a sign the “private empire” has retained him for the wider probe being carried out by a group pf Attorneys General.

Wells has made a career out of working on behalf of clients with legal claims often flying in the face of well-established science, with legal industry trade publication Inside Counsel referring to him as a top attorney-for-hire for crisis situations in an April 2007 article.

A DeSmog investigation has also found parallels in legal and public relations defense tactics deployed by Wells on behalf of those past clients and the tactics currently being utilized for his current big-ticket client, ExxonMobil.

Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard historian of science who has long studied the denial industry and wrote the indispensable book “Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming,” sees Exxon’s hire of Wells as a positive and as a potential sign the company sees the writing on the wall.

“Call me an optimist, but I think this is good news,” she told DeSmog. “The tobacco industry was successfully prosecuted, and, perhaps with that history in mind, the NFL has recently agreed to a major settlement with its players. So perhaps Mr. Wells will guide Exxon towards a sensible path towards the future, rather than a misguided retreat into the past.”

Dan Zegart, a senior fellow at the Climate Investigations Center and author of the book “Civil Warriors: The Legal Siege on the Tobacco Industry,” told DeSmog: “Bringing in Ted Wells is a sign that ExxonMobil isn’t thinking settlement — they’re going to fight these attorney general actions tooth and nail. This is a guy who will throw up every possible defense for Exxon, like he did for tobacco. Every move in this playbook has been pressure-tested over decades.”

Exxon Representation

This is far from the first prominent lawsuit for which Wells has offered his billable services to Exxon, a company which funded climate denial to the tune of $31 million, by conservative estimates, between 1998 and 2014.

In the early 2000’s, Wells counseled ExxonMobil in a federal corruption case, with an ex-Mobil official named J. Bryan Williams pleading guilty to tax evasion and conspiracy as part of corruption that was at the time endemic in Kazakhstan.

Wells proclaimed Exxon’s innocence in the case outside of the courthouse after Williams’ guilty plea, distancing himself from Williams by stating that “Exxon Mobil had no knowledge of the over $7 million in secret payments that he received and hid in secret bank accounts.”

Wells, too, provided legal representation to Exxon in the lawsuit filed against it by citizens of Indonesia who alleged they had been tortured by private security guards on the company payroll.

That case, which reached the U.S. Court of Appeals, became somewhat moot when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum case that the Alien Tort Statute does not offer non-U.S. citizen victims of human rights abuses committed abroad by U.S.-based corporations a path to legal justice in U.S. courts.

More recently, Wells represented Exxon in New Jersey in a lawsuit filed against the company by the State of New Jersey in 2004, which alleged the corporation’s responsibility for rampant statewide pollution. This culminated in an August 2015 $225 million settlement, far less than the $8.9 billion asked for by the plaintiffs.

NFL Science Denial

Yet for most of the U.S. population, Wells is best known for the “tough guy” role he has played in the “DeflateGate” case on behalf of the National Football League (NFL). It turns out that story, like Exxon and like the tobacco wars, has an anti-science spin too.

In that case, famed New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady faces a four-game NFL suspension for allegedly deflating footballs in a 2015 playoff game against the Indianapolis Colts in order to gain a competitive edge. Wells has provided theNFL with legal representation for the ongoing saga.

But contrary to the NFL‘s crackdown on cheating narrative, the science points to the fact that Brady and the Patriots actually may not have cheated. It all centers around what is known as the “Wells Report” — an investigation by Ted Wells of the allegedly deflated footballs.

That report’s findings have come under question by numerous scientists, the NFL Players Association (NFLPA) and even the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute.

The most ardent criticism of the study centers around the scientific report outsourced to a firm called Exponent Inc. that the Wells Report relies upon to make its case. The tobacco industry also used Exponent Inc. research to claim secondhand smoke does not cause cancer.

“The first thing you know is that when Exponent is brought in to help a company, that company is in big trouble,” Cindy Gage, owner of an environmental and agricultural consulting firm in California, told the Los Angeles Times in 2010.

While Wells represented the NFL for “DeflateGate,” he also provided his legal services for the much more scandalous — from a human health and public interest perspective — concussion lawsuit the NFL faced, brought against it by over 4,800 former players. That lawsuit ended with a $1 billion settlement, which some players have appealed, and some have pointed to as being rife with loopholes allowing the NFL to get out of trouble on-the-cheap.

A recent New York Times investigation pointed to myriad links between the tobacco industry and the NFL, including overlap in lobbyists and legal representation, though Wells’ name goes unmentioned in the article. Wells’ law firm, though,responded

to the article in a letter published by Politico.

“Tossing around unsubstantiated allegations of links between an industry and Big Tobacco is reckless and dangerous. Like all broad-brush attacks, it undermines reasoned, fact-based debate,” reads the March 28 letter. “In short, there is nothing in the Times’s story that can fairly, credibly and objectively support the false and defamatory charge that the NFL had ties to the tobacco industry.”

Wells and Big Tobacco

Just over a decade ago, Wells went to bat for Philip Morris in the United States v. Philip Morris lawsuit filed against the company by the DOJ in a case ending with a prosecution, but with actual penalties tantamount to kid glove treatment. The treatment, which came from DOJ political appointees, motivated lead DOJ prosecutor for the case Sharon Eubanks to resign from her post.

In court documents reviewed by DeSmog, Wells’ tobacco arguments parallel, in many ways, those Wells made for Exxon in its April 13 response to the Virgin Islands’ subpoena. Much of that line of argumentation over a decade ago in the tobacco case centered around proving or disproving that Philip Morris would likely commit fraud in the future if left unprosecuted, a key tenet of a successful RICO prosecution.

Throughout the tobacco RICO case, in legal filings and in the courtroom, Wells emphasized how Philip Morris’ behavior had changed and how it had become more a socially responsible corporate entity. In the main, Wells said Philip Morris had done so by withdrawing from the industry-manufactured debate on smoking as it relates to health and addiction, as well as by deferring to the judgment of the public health community on smoking’s human health impacts.

As a document obtained from University of California-San Francisco’s (UCSF) Legacy Tobacco Documents Library details, Wells cross-examined Philip Morris’ “point person“ — General Counsel Denise Keane — about its public relations website. That site attempted to convey that the company no longer participated in the scientific denial of tobacco’s human health impacts.

“The company’s purpose was, number one, to make in a very public way its commitment to no longer being part of what I would call an old world, but to take a step that would codify really for all purposes going forward the fact that it was going to be aligned with the public health community, that it was going to communicate the message of the public health community,” Keane testified under oath at a January 19, 2005 hearing. “And when we talk about what’s on the website, you know, to me, the guiding principle is communicating the message of the public health community.”

But first and foremost, it appears the website existed for Philip Morris’s public relations purposes. A 2008 academic paper published in the journal Public Health Nursing by Ruth Malone and Elizabeth Smith, both professors at UCSF, concluded the website’s existence did not signify any sort of radical shift in company culture on public health.

That paper cites a June 1999 memorandum published in the UCSF tobacco archives, which describes the rationale behind the website.

exxon

“The objective of this is to increase the awareness of our social programs and to improve the public perception of our company in the US during these very challenging times resulting from the very negative environment for our tobacco business,” reads the memo. “Hence, we want to capitalize on this advertising campaign by inviting viewers to a Website, where they can learn more about these programs and Philip Morris in general.”

ExxonMobil currently appears to be positioning itself as having moved away from the “old world,” announcing it would be hiring a new climate change researcher in the midst of New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announcing his office had opened an investigation on Exxon.

Keane also declared, under cross-examination by Wells, that her company had, under the auspices of an October 2, 1997 Statement of Position, withdrawn from the debate it had manufactured on the human health impacts of tobacco use. As Wells put it in his opening statement for the federal trial, this served as proof Philip Morris had entered into a ”permanent irreversible” dawn of a “new era.”

PM

A similar notion of involvement in public policy “debate” before it had reached an overwhelming scientific consensus arose in Exxon’s response to the Virgin Islands’ subpoena signed off on by Wells on April 13, with the word “debate” used 11 times by the company’s legal team.

Free Speech Attack?

Like with the Philip Morris precursor, Wells and the Exxon legal team attempted to convey the company’s shift from student of climate change science, to funder of climate denial and attacks on science, and then the shift back again to being a responsible corporate citizen concerned about climate change impacts and policy solutions.

“ExxonMobil has publicly and repeatedly acknowledged risks related to climate change” in recent years, Wells and his legal team wrote in response to the Virgin Islands’ AG Office subpoena, citing three example of such acknowledgment in recent years. In so doing, Exxon also claimed the Virgin Islands’ AG Office had launched an attack on its free speech rights and its ability to take part in such debates in earlier years.

“The chilling effect of this inquiry, which discriminates based on viewpoint to target one side of an ongoing policy debate, strikes at protected speech at the core of the First Amendment,” wrote Wells and the Exxon legal team.

The Virgin Islands rebutted Wells and Exxon in an April 25 response.

“Your argument that this investigation targets protected speech mirrors arguments that were decisively rejected in the United States’s case against tobacco, which held tobacco companies financially responsible for and imposed sweeping injunctive relief to address a decades-long scheme by those defendants to misrepresent the scientific facts regarding smoking,” reads the letter signed by Virgin Islands Attorney General Claude Earl Walker. “If ExxonMobil knowingly deceived consumers and investors about climate change, it, too, is not above the law.”

Numerous conservative groups — some with ties to the climate change denial echo chamber such as Koch-funded groups like Competitive Enterprise Institute, Pacific Legal Foundation, and Heritage Foundation — have also called the Virgin Islands subpoena a First Amendment attack.

So too did the editorial boards of the Wall Street Journal and the National Review Magazine. The Free Speech in Science Project, a group whose funding stream has yet to be revealed, has also pushed a First Amendment argument.

“Doubt is Our Product”

The tobacco industry is now infamous for writing in a 1969 memo that “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.” Yet, Exxon has even said in its own late 1970s studies that “there is no doubt” that pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere was harmful.

If doubt is the product, then Wells has produced a legal career representing and defending doubt — from the tobacco wars, through to the NFL‘s concussion crisis and now into today’s “ExxonKnew” saga.

Wells did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this article.

This piece first appeared at DeSmogBlog.

AGs’ motives questioned as Exxon climate change ‘fraud’ probe recalls tobacco windfall

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/may/12/exxon-climate-change-fraud-probe-recalls-tobacco-w/?page=all

After winning an $800 million settlement last year against Hess Oil, Virgin Islands Attorney General Claude E. Walker was eager to find what he described as other litigation “targets.”

He found one such deep pocket in Exxon Mobil. But his investigation into whether the company engaged in climate change “fraud” is drawing accusations that the end game for Mr. Walker and other like-minded attorneys general is a mammoth payday modeled after the 1998 tobacco settlement.

Mr. Walker has been the most aggressive member of AGs United for Clean Power, an unprecedented coalition of 17 attorneys general aimed at pursuing fraud accusations against Exxon Mobil and other fossil fuel companies.

“I believe this $800 million settlement gives the Virgin Islands Attorney General a lot of credibility in being involved in the inner circle of this because he’s proved that he can shake down a major company,” said Myron Ebell, director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, one of Mr. Walker’s targets.

And the Exxon investigation may be just the beginning.

“In talking about widening the investigation, the goal is to bring in the entire oil industry. It’s not just Exxon they’re after,” Mr. Ebell said.

Already comparisons have been drawn between AGs United for Clean Power and the state officials who secured the 1998 deal in which five major tobacco companies agreed to pay $10 billion per year indefinitely to the states.

“It was a combined effort in which the state attorneys general played the crucial role in securing a historic victory for public health,” said former Vice President Al Gore Jr. at the coalition’s March 29 press conference in New York City.

“From the time the tobacco companies were first found out, as evidenced by the historic [Surgeon General’s report] of 1964, it took 40 years for them to be held to account under the law,” Mr. Gore said. “We do not have 40 years to continue suffering the consequences of the fraud allegedly being committed by the fossil fuel companies where climate change is concerned.”

Pushing for a parallel effort at the federal end is Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, Rhode Island Democrat, who reiterated his call Wednesday for the Justice Department to launch a probe into the oil-and-gas industry.

“There are obvious similarities between the fossil fuel industry’s denial of its products’ climate effects and the tobacco industry’s denial of its products’ health effects,” Mr. Whitehouse said in a speech on the Senate floor. “These similarities are sufficient that a proper inquiry should be made about pursuing a civil lawsuit like the one the Justice Department brought and won against Big Tobacco.”

Given the sizes of the industries involved, however, the tobacco settlement could look like peanuts next to the prospect of a financial windfall from the fossil fuel business.
“You need to compare the relative size of the oil industry and the tobacco industry,” Mr. Ebell said. “Tobacco is tiny compared to oil. So if they could get $10 billion out of the tobacco industry, think of what their goals are for the oil industry.”

A questionnaire obtained by the free market Energy & Environmental Legal Institute shows that Mr. Walker had already served Exxon Mobil with a subpoena and was actively seeking other companies to investigate when coalition members met in March.

“We are interested in identifying other potential litigation targets,” Mr. Walker said in response to a question asking for input on the coalition’s goals “beyond the federal/EPA advocacy and litigation.”

The only independent in the coalition — the rest are Democrats — Mr. Walker also said he was “eager to hear what other attorneys general are doing and find concrete ways to work together on litigation to increase our leverage.”

Born in England and educated in New York, Mr. Walker was appointed attorney general in August 2015 by Virgin Islands Gov. Kenneth E. Mapp. Months later Mr. Walker secured an $800 million settlement with Hess after the company closed its St. Croix refinery despite receiving what he called “billions of dollars in tax breaks.”

He said the settlement would be used in part to create an “environmental response trust that will deal with cleanup of the site and help convert part of it to solar development, we hope.”

At the press conference he described Mr. Gore as “one of my heroes,” while New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman said Mr. Walker brought “tremendous energy” to the climate change coalition.

“We have launched an investigation into a company that we believe must provide us with information about what they knew about climate change and when they knew it, and we’ll make our decision about what action to take,” Mr. Walker said.

He described the investigation as “David and Goliath, the Virgin Islands against a huge corporation, but we will not stop until we get to the bottom of this and make it clear to our residents as well as the American people that we have to do something transformational.”

Mr. Walker has issued three subpoenas, including one to Exxon that calls for its communications with more than 100 universities, academics and think tanks. Exxon is challenging the subpoena, saying it violates the company’s First Amendment rights.

Matt Pawa, a lawyer affiliated with the Climate Accountability Institute who briefed the attorneys general before their press conference, said that Exxon needs to “come clean about its commercial relationships with those it has paid to peddle its message of climate denial.”

“Commercial speech is different, and the First Amendment does not protect fraud,” Mr. Pawa said in an email. “Exxon paid various individuals and groups as part of a sophisticated and far-reaching disinformation campaign on global warming.”

Despite his position as the Virgin Islands‘ top law enforcement official, however, Mr. Walker isn’t necessarily waiting for all the evidence before making a judgment on the oil industry’s guilt.

“We cannot continue to rely on fossil fuel. Vice President Gore has made it clear we have to rely on renewable energy. That’s the only solution,” Mr. Walker said. “It’s troubling that as the polar caps melt, you have companies that are looking at that as an opportunity to go and drill, to go and get more oil. Why? How selfish can you be? Your product is destroying this earth.”

Mr. Schneiderman launched his own state investigation last year into whether Exxon covered up its knowledge of the risks of global warming and lied to investors about the impact to its bottom line from catastrophes produced by climate change.

Exxon has denied suppressing climate change research, while skeptics argue that no scientific connection has been established between disasters like hurricanes and elevated levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Mr. Ebell said the playbook for the climate change investigation mirrors that used in the tobacco litigation: First, stop Exxon from defending itself and funding its supporters, and then make a deal.

Exxon officials have come out in support of a carbon tax and announced that the company would no longer fund skeptics’ groups, “so what’s left, except to get a settlement?” he asked.

The difference is that there are many more reputable scientists and researchers today disputing the impact of greenhouse gases than there were disputing the health effects of smoking.

“Now with the tobacco settlement, there was an actual basis for that case. The tobacco industry had concealed things, it knew about the health effects of smoking tobacco for a long time, and it had lied under oath,” Mr. Ebell said. “This is entirely different, but you can see we’re going down the same road here.”

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Tax Me, Says Exxon Mobil, in Declaring Support for Climate Talks

Exxon Mobil Corp., a favorite target of global warming activists, said Wednesday that it’s hopeful for a deal out of the climate-change talks in Paris and still thinks the best solution is a tax on carbon pollution.

As the United Nations negotiations moved into a third day, the world’s biggest oil explorer said in an blog post that it supports “meaningful action to address the risks of climate change” as long as it preserved access to the reliable and affordable energy.

“The long-term objective of climate-change policy should be to reduce the risks of serious harm to humanity and ecosystems at minimum societal cost, while recognizing shared humanitarian necessities,” Exxon Mobil General Counsel Ken Cohen wrote in the post.

In the run-up to the Paris talks that began Nov. 30, Exxon has been under heavy assault by environmentalists and politicians who say it misled the public by promoting uncertainties about climate science. New York State’s attorney general has subpoenaed company records about its research going back decades, and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, in a Rolling Stone interview published Tuesday, said Exxon’s actions would amount to “a betrayal” of humanity if it’s found to have suppressed knowledge about climate risks.

Revenue-Neutral Tax

Exxon has said it made its research public and did nothing wrong. The Irving, Texas-based explorer takes climate change seriously and has taken steps to reduce its own emissions, Cohen said in today’s post.

The most effective solution would be a revenue-neutral tax on greenhouse gas emissions, Cohen wrote, reiterating a position Exxon has held for years.

“Instead of subsidies and mandates that distort markets, stifle innovation, and needlessly raise energy costs, a carbon tax could help create the conditions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in a way that spurs new efficiencies and technologies,” he said.

“The revenue-neutral carbon tax could be a workable policy framework for countries around the world.”

Long a hard-line opponent to climate-friendly carbon limits, Exxon began to soften its outlook and embrace the need to curb greenhouse gases in 2006 when Rex Tillerson succeeded Lee Raymond as chairman and CEO. The company’s $35 billion takeover of XTO Energy in 2010 was inspired in part by expectations that stricter climate rules would spur natural gas demand as a replacement for dirtier coal.

Hong Kong will arrive at the Paris climate talks empty handed; let’s make sure it leaves with bold ideas to cut the city’s rising emissions

Gavin Edwards says the UN meeting in Paris offers an ideal opportunity for our environment secretary to learn about, and adopt, other cities’ pioneering efforts

Hong Kong’s Environment Secretary Wong Kam-sing will travel to Paris at the end of this month for the UN climate negotiations, where world governments will come together to agree a bold new set of targets and actions on climate change. The key outcome will hopefully be a new international agreement on the climate, applicable to all countries, with the aim of keeping global warming below 2 degrees Celsius. In preparation for the meeting, more than 150 countries have already indicated a number of pledges they may be willing to make – their Intended Nationally Determined Contributions – that can form part of the agreement. For example, the European Union pledges to cut its emissions by 40 per cent (from 1990 levels) by 2030, Costa Rica is aiming to be carbon neutral by 2021, and China aims to lower its carbon intensity by 60 to 65 per cent by 2030 (from 2005) and ensure its emissions peak by 2030.

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As we approach the final weeks in the lead-up to the Paris agreement, a couple of challenges are emerging – one global, one local. The global challenge is that the intended contributions by all countries have been modelled by climate scientists and policy experts at Climate Action Tracker (an independent group of four leading research organisations), and they forecast that the world will see a 2.7 degree rise by late in the century if the Paris agreement succeeds and is implemented.

This falls well short of the 2 degree target governments are aiming for, and is a long way shy of the generally accepted safe temperature rise which our planet can tolerate: 1.5 degrees. And this is not just some academic numbers game. At 2.7 degrees warmer, we could experience significant food shortages globally as crops fail in sub-Saharan Africa, and our own major source of food – the Pearl River Delta – experiences increasing flooding. Even a 2 degree rise – the stated aim of the Paris agreement – spells the end of the world’s coral reefs and a whole host of other impacts driven by increasingly extreme weather patterns.

At 2.7 degrees warmer, we could experience significant food shortages globally as crops fail in sub-Saharan Africa

Second, the local challenge: Hong Kong’s contribution to averting catastrophic climate change. Wong gathered key government, corporate and NGO representatives together on November 6 to launch the Hong Kong Climate Change Report, outlining government efforts. However, instead of articulating a plan of action for the decades ahead, he summarised existing policies and efforts, and is taking a wait-and-see approach to the Paris climate negotiation so the government can then consider its next steps. This is odd, given that China (which reports and commits globally on its greenhouse gas emissions, including those of Hong Kong) has outlined its plan well beyond 2020. On a recent trip to the US, President Xi Jinping (習近平) articulated a range of measures, including greenhouse-gas emissions targets, investments in renewable energy, a national emission trading scheme to regulate large carbon dioxide emitters, and clear targets for green buildings.

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Here in Hong Kong, the current plan is to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 19 to 33 per cent by 2020 (from 2005), but that’s all. With current efforts, we’ll only achieve the low end of this target, and only if the long-promised initiative to reduce the burning of coal for electricity generation is implemented. Contrast this with cities around the world which will come together at a special event during the Paris negotiations, share their ambitious plans, and learn from each other. Greater Taipei will cut its emissions by 20 per cent by 2026 (from 2006), Yokohama will cut by 80 per cent by 2050 (from 2005), London by 60 per cent by 2025 (from 1990) and New York by 40 per cent by 2030 (from 1990). However, Hong Kong’s greenhouse gas emissions have been steadily rising over the past decade, by 23 per cent from 2002 to 2012.

The development of renewable energy in the city has barely begun. And CLP Power is proposing new gas-fired power generation instead of using renewable energy. The social cost of fossil fuel has never been mentioned, even in the latest document of the electricity market regulatory regime review. If our electricity market is not going to change, there is no chance for us to stop climate change. Under the Air Pollution Control Ordinance, carbon dioxide is not even considered a pollutant, even though it is widely agreed that ever-escalating carbon dioxide emissions are one of the largest threats to our planet and our city. Our electricity market is not ready to tackle climate change.

So, if the past decade was something of a lost decade for Hong Kong in terms of making a meaningful and commensurate contribution to tackling climate change, what should we do in the next decade, to catch up?

If our electricity market is not going to change, there is no chance for us to stop climate change

First, the Environment Bureau has a huge opportunity to address the lack of renewable energy development by adopting a comprehensive feed-in tariff policy to reward anyone who installs solar panels on rooftops or wind turbines in coastal waters. As the government wraps up its review of the Scheme of Control Agreement which governs our electricity production, it must include a renewable energy support policy, even if we are one of the last cities in Asia to adopt such a policy.

Second, it’s time for our private sector to put funding into renewable energy and energy efficiency development. Globally, there are more new investments in renewable energies such as wind and solar than there are in coal, gas and nuclear combined. They are effectively winning against these dirty energy sources, because governments around the world realise the importance of supporting safe, low-carbon energy. Some US$270 billion is being invested in low carbon development.

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So instead of supporting CLP’s pitch to build another gas plant, the government should encourage future investment in renewables, and greater investment in energy efficiency. For example, a simple scheme to encourage all grocery and convenience shops to put doors on their display fridges will cut their fridge energy consumption by 50 per cent, according to recent WWF research.

Lastly, we need a plan for Hong Kong that goes beyond 2020. Our environment secretary arrives in Paris empty-handed without a longer-term plan while other cities profile theirs. However, it does not have to be a wasted journey – he will have an incredible opportunity to learn about the pioneering efforts of other cities, and to bring back ideas to adapt to Hong Kong. This can start with a plan to substantially cut our city’s emissions by 2030, and a plan to adopt a new scheme of control to encourage renewable energy development.

The difference between a world that is 2.7 degrees warmer and one that is only 1.5 degrees warmer is the difference between a liveable planet and a planet that is thrown into chaos. It’s time for Hong Kong to step up its efforts by leaving Paris with new ideas and bolder pledges to do much more. And when Hong Kong attends the next big climate conference in a few years’ time, I very much hope that these efforts will earn us international recognition as Asia’s sustainable city.

Gavin Edwards is conservation director at WWF-Hong Kong

Source URL: http://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/1880805/hong-kong-will-arrive-paris-climate-talks-empty-handed-lets

Exxon Knew about Climate Change Almost 40 Years Ago

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-climate-change-almost-40-years-ago/

A new investigation shows the oil company understood the science before it became a public issue and spent millions to promote misinformation

The company’s knowledge of climate change dates back to July 1977, when its senior scientist James Black delivered a sobering message on the topic.

Exxon was aware of climate change, as early as 1977, 11 years before it became a public issue, according to a recent investigation from InsideClimate News. This knowledge did not prevent the company (now ExxonMobil and the world’s largest oil and gas company) from spending decades refusing to publicly acknowledge climate change and even promoting climate misinformation—an approach many have likened to the lies spread by the tobacco industry regarding the health risks of smoking. Both industries were conscious that their products wouldn’t stay profitable once the world understood the risks, so much so that they used the same consultants to develop strategies on how to communicate with the public.

Experts, however, aren’t terribly surprised. “It’s never been remotely plausible that they did not understand the science,” says Naomi Oreskes, a history of science professor at Harvard University. But as it turns out, Exxon didn’t just understand the science, the company actively engaged with it. In the 1970s and 1980s it employed top scientists to look into the issue and launched its own ambitious research program that empirically sampled carbon dioxide and built rigorous climate models. Exxon even spent more than $1 million on a tanker project that would tackle how much CO2 is absorbed by the oceans. It was one of the biggest scientific questions of the time, meaning that Exxon was truly conducting unprecedented research.

In their eight-month-long investigation, reporters at InsideClimate News interviewed former Exxon employees, scientists and federal officials and analyzed hundreds of pages of internal documents. They found that the company’s knowledge of climate change dates back to July 1977, when its senior scientist James Black delivered a sobering message on the topic. “In the first place, there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels,” Black told Exxon’s management committee. A year later he warned Exxon that doubling CO2 gases in the atmosphere would increase average global temperatures by two or three degrees—a number that is consistent with the scientific consensus today. He continued to warn that “present thinking holds that man has a time window of five to 10 years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical.” In other words, Exxon needed to act.

But ExxonMobil disagrees that any of its early statements were so stark, let alone conclusive at all. “We didn’t reach those conclusions, nor did we try to bury it like they suggest,” ExxonMobil spokesperson Allan Jeffers tells Scientific American. “The thing that shocks me the most is that we’ve been saying this for years, that we have been involved in climate research. These guys go down and pull some documents that we made available publicly in the archives and portray them as some kind of bombshell whistle-blower exposé because of the loaded language and the selective use of materials.”

One thing is certain: in June 1988, when NASA scientist James Hansen told a congressional hearing that the planet was already warming, Exxon remained publicly convinced that the science was still controversial. Furthermore, experts agree that Exxon became a leader in campaigns of confusion. By 1989 the company had helped create the Global Climate Coalition (disbanded in 2002) to question the scientific basis for concern about climate change. It also helped to prevent the U.S. from signing the international treaty on climate known as the Kyoto Protocol in 1998 to control greenhouse gases. Exxon’s tactic not only worked on the U.S. but also stopped other countries, such as China and India, from signing the treaty. At that point, “a lot of things unraveled,” Oreskes says.

But experts are still piecing together Exxon’s misconception puzzle. Last summer the Union of Concerned Scientists released a complementary investigation to the one by InsideClimate News, known as the Climate Deception Dossiers (pdf). “We included a memo of a coalition of fossil-fuel companies where they pledge basically to launch a big communications effort to sow doubt,” says union president Kenneth Kimmel. “There’s even a quote in it that says something like ‘Victory will be achieved when the average person is uncertain about climate science.’ So it’s pretty stark.”

Since then, Exxon has spent more than $30 million on think tanks that promote climate denial, according to Greenpeace. Although experts will never be able to quantify the damage Exxon’s misinformation has caused, “one thing for certain is we’ve lost a lot of ground,” Kimmell says. Half of the greenhouse gas emissions in our atmosphere were released after 1988. “I have to think if the fossil-fuel companies had been upfront about this and had been part of the solution instead of the problem, we would have made a lot of progress [today] instead of doubling our greenhouse gas emissions.”

Experts agree that the damage is huge, which is why they are likening Exxon’s deception to the lies spread by the tobacco industry. “I think there are a lot of parallels,” Kimmell says. Both sowed doubt about the science for their own means, and both worked with the same consultants to help develop a communications strategy. He notes, however, that the two diverge in the type of harm done. Tobacco companies threatened human health, but the oil companies threatened the planet’s health. “It’s a harm that is global in its reach,” Kimmel says.

To prove this, Bob Ward—who on behalf of the U.K.’s Royal Academy sent a letter to Exxon in 2006 claiming its science was “inaccurate and misleading”—thinks a thorough investigation is necessary. “Because frankly the episode with tobacco was probably the most disgraceful episode one could ever imagine,” Ward says. Kimmell agrees. These reasons “really highlight the responsibility that these companies have to come clean, acknowledge this, and work with everyone else to cut out emissions and pay for some of the cost we’re going to bear as soon as possible,” Kimmell says.

It doesn’t appear, however, that Kimmell will get his retribution. Jeffers claims the investigation’s finds are “just patently untrue, misleading, and we reject them completely”—words that match Ward’s claims against them nearly a decade ago.