How the oil industry made us doubt climate change | Hacker News Reader

How the oil industry made us doubt climate change

bbc.co.uk

72 pointswillvarfar24 comments

"They ran advertising campaigns designed to undermine public support, cherry picking the data to say, 'Well if the world is warming up, why is Kentucky getting colder?' They asked rhetorical questions designed to create confusion, to create doubt," argued Naomi Oreskes.

(...) The ICE campaign identified two groups which would be most susceptible to its messaging. The first was "older, lesser educated males from larger households who are not typically information seekers".

The second group was "younger, low-income women," who could be targeted with bespoke adverts which would liken those who talked about climate change to a hysterical doom-saying cartoon chicken. "

Brutal.

Let me recommend the book "Toxic Sludge Is Good For You" - despite the rather silly title that book is an extremely thorough historical examination of PR, AstroTurfing and in general a rather shocking unveiling of an aspect corporate power that most people know very little about - from Edward Bernais right up until about when the internet really took over.

Lobbying, policy writing, press release creating, corrupting and local power infiltrating hidden complexes was already completely all encompassing and dangerous to everything "scientific" and everything "true" 20 years ago.

I can't even begin to imagine how advanced that system has become today with social media, fake grassroots, corporate sponsored think tanks and targeted advertisement. Rather scary.

This comment shows the same strange (to me) bias that I see so often now, of using "corporate" as a scary or negative thing.

Would a think tank sponsored by a religious organization be inherently better than one with corporate sponsors? Is lobbying by the prison guards union more beneficial to society than lobbying by a trade group? Is the grassroots anti-vax movement more trustworthy than the corporate vaccine producers?

Interesting, but we need a book that explains what we can do about it.

Simple. Overthrow both dominant political parties in the US and replace them with altruistic "save-the-world" type politicians who are impervious to lobbying/bribery. Er, nevermind, not simple.

Stop your support of it. Simple.

I really wish there were public trust crimes with penalties of dissolving a corporate charter.

Currently unscrupulous people face no consequences except for extremely limited brief public shaming.

When we got rid of kings, I don't think this was an intended replacement.

All right, then lets doubt it. Lets try to massively cut emissions until we're sure they won't have catastrophic climate effects.

If you're not sure whether you'll have a car accident or not, you still take precautions and put on your seat-belt. Only if you're sure you won't have one, can you go without.

For anyone looking to dive even deeper I highly recommend the Drilled podcast (https://www.criticalfrequency.org/drilled) in particular season 3 which gets into the formation of PR and advertising around oil companies.

In all seriousness, wouldn't doubting climate change mean supporting the idea of a constant climate?

Perhaps I'm being obtuse, but "climate change" seems so amorphous as to be irrefutable.

Clean air, clean water, and a safe environment are positive arguments that sane adults can support.

Tell me about the latest nuclear reactor designs.

Global warming is the root of the issue. Global warming is causing climate change. Because we've caused a 40% increase in atmospheric co2 by releasing tens of billions of tons of it into the atmosphere every year. Yes nuclear probably has a role to play, but it isn't a silver bullet. we should be putting a price on co2 emissions and letting the market decide how best to decarbonize. Different markets will almost certainly choose different things depending on their climate, topography, economy, available capital, and level of development.

The idea of carbon markets as such is well worth discussing.

Of particular interest is who 'we' are and who is controlling 'we'.

The act of carrying out decisions is substantially less concerning than who is managing the decisions.

Cap and trade was effective in ending the emissions of ozone depleting gasses in the 1980s and it's kind of cool to see legacy automakers buying carbon credits from Tesla effectively subsidizing their own replacement, but I really think putting a price on carbon helps to reduce the difficulty of having to worry about who is administrating the carbon market. It's much simpler and harder to game the system if governments just put a tax on fossil fuels at their source. Then the regular markets will decarbonize without the need for administration of a complex regulatory scheme.

“They asked rhetorical questions designed to create confusion, to create doubt.”

The same complaint made against every scientist and every intellectual who significantly challenged the Church or the State in a public forum. When this becomes your complaint, you’ve moved from reasoned discourse into the area of theology known as apologetics, talking chicken or no. Let me know how the auto-da-fe works out for you, Naomi.

Every eyeball-minute spent trying to sell or refute “climate change” is an opportunity wasted on addressing today’s concrete issues in global water quality, water supply, fire management, air quality, soil quality and the like. It’s a perverse sort of global irresponsibility.

I guess so many folks are salivating over a multi trillion dollar global slush fund, with no practicable short or middle term accountability, that they don’t care about the hundreds of thousands of excess deaths, young and old, occurring over the next few years by not focusing on fundamental issues today. (They are probably the wrong color of victims for those folks to care about anyway.)

And if “climate change” proves to be an unsound waste of global talent and resources that could have been better spent on direct near-term water, air, soil projects...well, they got their pot of gold or egoboo, didn’t they? Imagine, trillions of dollars going to any despotic global regime smart enough to preload GPT-3 with global warming essays, and with no practical means of holding them accountable, since any impacts will be decades into the future and a tiny interconnected impact at that. What could possibly go wrong?

Meanwhile another child died of lung disease in Delhi. Are you aware the near-term impacts of bad air quality on health and quality of life? Now consider no clean water, or no water at all, for major global cities. These are hard enough problems on their own but any climate effect is a compounding one, not a core one. Too many people, not enough land, too few trees, too much polluting economic activity, poor agricultural practices, not enough clean water, over urbanization...a few Trillion on these core elements might get the world somewhere. Again, maybe for the slush fund people this may affect the wrong color people.

There is the international political benefit of blaming decades of political mismanagement on some mysterious outside element with deep pockets, instead of taking responsibility for local actions. But local action is the most critical element in addressing the issues. Of course, once the slush fund money is doled out, I don’t think they would care if kids’ lives were ever spared. Just a guess.

BTW...this is not a classic Red-Blue issue.

> "What he wrote is the same memo we have seen in multiple industries subsequently," says David Michaels, author of The Triumph of Doubt, which details how the pesticides, plastics and sugar industries have also used these tactics.

Meanwhile big corporations go unpunished for killing people in the thousands and making live worse for millions things would not change.

The result of their actions is death at a scale that most criminals cannot even imagine. But, as they commit their murders with several degrees of separation from the consequences it seems that many people don't hold them accountable (and dirty money also helps).

Related news: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24535241 (Global banks defy U.S. crackdowns by serving oligarchs, criminals and terrorists )

The new book mentioned:

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-triumph-of-doubt...

"The Triumph of Doubt -- Dark Money and the Science of Deception" David Michaels, April 2020

"- An insider's look at the machinations of manufactured doubt in science — bogus studies, congressional testimonies, think-tank policy documents — and how they have risen to prominence in American life and government

- Details how corporations manipulate science not just to defend dangerous products and activities, but also to market them as safe

- New details around high-profile cases of manufactured, misleading uncertainty, including in car manufacturing, professional sports, our food and drink, and the air we breathe"

Laws already on the books permit prosecution of those executives. The Justice Department only needs to apply them, as written.

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