Exxon deliberately reversed its climate research to fund denial when regulation loomed

Evidence

The corporate attack on climate science is tangled and secretive, so that ferreting out and exposing these machinations has been difficult. Nevertheless, the charge of corporate conspiracy has proved to be warranted. Exxon (which in 1998 merged with Mobil to form ExxonMobil) modeled its deception on the original strategy of the tobacco industry: a systematic effort of a small group of corporate-funded scientists to counter medical findings that smoking was a cause of cancer. Employing some of the same scientists, the fossil fuel industry funded so-called experts to cast doubt on global warming. Earlier, Exxon had itself done state-of-the-art climate research, but the company reversed itself in 1988 when legislative efforts to address climate change by regulating carbon emissions were gathering force. — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying, 246

Categorization

• XREF: Corporate deception modeling on tobacco-industry tactics connects to broader literature on manufactured doubt (Oreskes and Conway’s Merchants of Doubt). — connects to: ExxonMobil planned Arctic drilling to exploit the very melting its funded skeptics denied — Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, 73; Climate-change denial organizations were directly funded by tobacco and fossil-fuel interests — Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, 71; Climate denial has moved from disputing data to defunding its collection — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New…, 252 (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• Fossil fuel companies knowingly obscure climate science rather than believe their denial #corroborates (0.95) — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying, 247
• Corporations manufacture doubt as a deliberate product to block climate action #corroborates (0.85) — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 108
• Fossil fuel funding manufactured doubt that made climate change a partisan media issue #corroborates (0.84) — Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, 160
• Climate denial has moved from disputing data to defunding its collection #expands (0.82) — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying, 252
• Climate denial trades on manufactured doubt, not persuasion of scientists #corroborates (0.82) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 927
• The fossil fuel industry replicated the tobacco denial playbook #exemplifies (0.80) — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying, 246
• Industries hid their rebuttals of harm evidence behind proxy organizations #expands (0.80) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1769
• Industries used proxy institutes to secretly fund biased research #expands (0.78)
• Denial’s second stage concedes warming but disputes causes and models #complicates (0.72)