The fossil fuel industry replicated the tobacco denial playbook

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. — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying, 246

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Naomi Klein and climate disinformation literature; the tobacco-to-climate denial pipeline is well documented elsewhere. — connects to: Corporate misinformation can be refuted; hoax conspiracism cannot — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New…, 243; Corporate climate deniers are corrupt, not confused about reality; Climate denial led Congress to bar military climate planning — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New…, 252 (+9 more)

Broader Connections

• Tobacco’s manufactured doubt predated and enabled climate denial playbooks #corroborates (0.95) — Jamal Awil, The Whispering Archive, 788
• The tobacco industry manufactured public doubt as its primary defense strategy #expands (0.85) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1658