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Comment by ttctciyf | Hacker News Reader

This took about 30 seconds to find:

"ExxonMobil‘s $33 million campaign to sow doubt and denial about global warming"

> [...] We know this $33M figure is an underestimate of the total spending by Exxon to fund opposition work on climate policy. For example, the Chamber of Commerce appears for the first time on Exxon’s Worldwide Giving report in 2014 at $1 Million. We assume this is not the first (or the last) contribution Exxon has made to the US Chamber of Commerce.

> On this page, you’ll find the total amount of funding from ExxonMobil and its foundations to dozens of organizations that worked to spread climate denial. Hyperlinks will take you to further detail about each organization’s funding specifics and activities.

https://www.desmog.com/exxonmobil-funding-climate-science-de...

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1. That list contains items like "Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory", "Congress of Racial Equality", "Chemical Education Foundation", the "Independent Women’s Forum" and so on, in fact not one of these organizations is specifically about climate, yet your source claims all $33M was spent exclusively on climate change. So already this website is lying to you in its very first sentence. Not a great start.

2. This $33M appears to be all charitable giving by Exxon spread over more than 20 years. That's not much, nowhere close to billions of dollars.

3. The tiny amounts are a problem for them, so they say they "know" it's really a lot more. As befits a site that just makes things up, the reason they "know" is: "We assume this is not the first (or the last) contribution Exxon has made to the US Chamber of Commerce". Brilliant. Assumptions, facts, what's the difference?

Again, this isn't evidence for "billions of dollars" being spent on "increasing public ignorance". It's not even evidence for any money being spent on climate, because the reasons they donated to these various foundations isn't really known to the desmog guys. It's just more assumptions.

I find the desmog website more credible than a random HN account, thanks.

But I'm not asking you to find me credible. Why would I, this is an anonymous account, as is yours. If you can't reason about things except via who's saying them, then this really isn't the site for you. That's why we have to debate issues and facts.

Your "facts" are not, as you appear to believe, counter evidence but merely misleading and goalpost-shifting distractions from the claim that inordinate sums have been spent by the fossil fuel industry supporting organizations whose entire purpose is to produce insidiously distorted argumentation and PR, aimed at producing misinformation and disinformation on fossil fuel impact on climate change.

For example, your argument that one incomplete list of a single company's "charitable activity" is "nowhere close to billions of dollars" when the claim was "probably billions" across the entire industry, where "probably billions" is pretty obviously no more than a vague gesture at "huge amounts of money".

That you find a climate-disinformation spend even in the $10s of millions acceptable is something you might ponder before you start lecturing people on what sites they should post on.

Projection, your honor! We started with "probable billions" on climate-related PR and you replied with evidence of millions, much of which isn't on climate related stuff. Now you're saying what you meant wasn't billions at all. That's goal post moving!

Yes you hedged your claim, but so what? It's still wrong. You don't get to make wild and totally false claims by sticking "probable" onto everything.

> That you find a climate-disinformation spend

You haven't shown that or even laid the groundwork for that. Even if these firms were spending the amounts you claim, which they apparently aren't, did it occur to you that they might be right? Nope. You just assume anything they say must be wrong, because you've been brainwashed by propaganda. You can't even find any specific campaign!? If you could we could then debate the real issues, but didn't even get that far.

> We started with "probable billions" on climate-related PR and you replied with evidence of millions,

Again you omit the salient detail that "probable billions" referred to an entire industry and the (conservative) $33m (offered as a simple example in relation to your claim of "I could only find $10k!") is the contribution from only a single component of that industry. Classic goalpost shifting, which is why it's fruitless to engage.

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