Routledge Handbook of Climate Change and Society by Lever-Tracy Constance

Author:Lever-Tracy, Constance
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Agriculture & Environmental Sciences
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2010-06-06T16:00:00+00:00

The war against climate science: key actors

Analysing the war against climate science and policy-making in detail warrants book-length treatment such as those provided by Gelbspan (1997, 2004) and Hamilton (2007), and thus our account must of necessity be limited. In what follows we highlight the key actors involved in the denial machine and then describe their primary strategy, noting changes in both as climate change denial has evolved.

Given that burning fossil fuels is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, it is understandable that the coal and oil industries have played an essential role in climate change denial from the outset, and have often been joined by a wide swathe of corporate America concerned about government efforts to control carbon emissions. Individual corporations such as Peabody Coal and Exxon Mobil, as well as industry associations such as the Western Fuels Association and the American Petroleum Institute, have provided direct funding for individual contrarian scientists such as Patrick Michaels (whose newsletter World Climate Review was funded by the Western Fuels Association) as well as several conservative think-tanks. Exxon Mobil has been the most important funding source for climate change denial, as documented in numerous sources and outlined in detail by the Union of Concerned Scientists (2007) (see also Chapter 3, this volume).

Coal and oil corporations and their industry associations have been joined by numerous energy companies, other resource-based corporations (e.g. in the steel, forestry and mining sectors), a wide range of manufacturing companies (e.g. auto-mobile and chemical corporations) as well as large national associations such as the US Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, in promoting climate change denial. A key mechanism has been to set up ‘associations’ such as the Information Council on the Environment, the Global Climate Coalition and the Cooler Heads Coalition to lead the charge against climate science and policy-making, thus shielding corporate sponsors from public scrutiny (see e.g. Gelbspan 1997, 2004; Lahsen 2005; Mooney 2005a, 2005b; Begley 2007).

Corporate support for climate change denial and opposition to climate policy have evolved in complex ways over the past couple of decades in response to growing evidence of anthropogenic global warming reported in IPCC assessments as well as to policy initiatives at various levels and market considerations. In retrospect it appears that the December 1997 Kyoto Conference was something of a watershed for the business community (Layzer 2007), as several oil companies gradually acknowledged the reality of human-caused global warming and abandoned the Global Climate Coalition. Perhaps embarrassment over the exposure of proposed strategies for undermining climate science, such as those by the American Petroleum Institute (Begley 2007: 25), contributed to their decisions.

Some companies, such as British Petroleum, increasingly adopted green discourse and developed green policies, possibly just for good public relations but perhaps also because adopting more ‘sustainable’ policies and practices seemed to make good sense economically. Regardless of their motives, by 2000 most multinational fossil fuels corporations – with the highly notable exception of Exxon Mobil – appeared to abandon efforts to undermine climate science (Kolk and Levy 2001).

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