Koch Industries no relation tobacco industry playbook
Lobbying
Efforts to lobby against environmental regulation have included campaigns to manufacture doubt about the science behind climate change, and to obscure the scientific consensus and data. These efforts have undermined public confidence in climate science, and impacted climate change lobbying.The political advocacy organizations FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity, funded by brothers David and Charles Koch of Koch Industries, were important in supporting the Tea Party movement and in encouraging the movement to focus on climate change. Other conservative organizations such as the Heritage Foundation, Marshall Institute, Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute were significant participants in these lobbying attempts, seeking to halt or eliminate environmental regulations.This approach to downplay the significance of climate change was copied from tobacco lobbyists; in the face of scientific evidence linking tobacco to lung cancer, to prevent or delay the introduction of regulation. Lobbyists attempted to discredit the scientific research by creating doubt and manipulating debate. They worked to discredit the scientists involved, to dispute their findings, and to create and maintain an apparent controversy by promoting claims that contradicted scientific research. "'Doubt is our product,' boasted a now infamous 1969 industry memo. Doubt would shield the tobacco industry from litigation and regulation for decades to come." In 2006, George Monbiot wrote in The Guardian about similarities between the methods of groups funded by Exxon, and those of the tobacco giant Philip Morris, including direct attacks on peer-reviewed science, and attempts to create public controversy and doubt.Former National Academy of Sciences president Frederick Seitz, who, according to an article by Mark Hertsgaard in Vanity Fair, earned about US$585,000 in the 1970s and 1980s as a consultant to R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, went on to chair groups such as the Science and Environmental Policy Project and the George C. Marshall Institute alleged to have made efforts to "downplay" global warming. Seitz stated in the 1980s that "Global warming is far more a matter of politics than of climate." Seitz authored the Oregon Petition, a document published jointly by the Marshall Institute and Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine in opposition to the Kyoto protocol. The petition and accompanying "Research Review of Global Warming Evidence" claimed:Effect
Manufactured uncertainty over climate change, the fundamental strategy of climate change denial, has been very effective, particularly in the US. It has contributed to low levels of public concern and to government inaction worldwide. An Angus Reid poll released in 2010 indicates that global warming skepticism in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom has been rising. There may be multiple causes of this trend, including a focus on economic rather than environmental issues, and a negative perception of the United Nations and its role in discussing climate change.Another cause may be weariness from overexposure to the topic: secondary polls suggest that the public may have been discouraged by extremism when discussing the topic, while other polls show 54% of U.S. voters believe that "the news media make global warming appear worse than it really is." A poll in 2009 regarding the issue of whether "some scientists have falsified research data to support their own theories and beliefs about global warming" showed that 59% of Americans believed it "at least somewhat likely", with 35% believing it was "very likely".According to Tim Wirth, "They patterned what they did after the tobacco industry. ... Both figured, sow enough doubt, call the science uncertain and in dispute. That's had a huge impact on both the public and Congress." This approach has been propagated by the US media, presenting a false balance between climate science and climate skeptics. Newsweek reports that the majority of Europe and Japan accept the consensus on scientific climate change, but only one third of Americans considered human activity to play a major role in climate change in 2006; 64% believed that scientists disagreed about it "a lot." A 2007 Newsweek poll found these numbers were declining, although majorities of Americans still believed that scientists were uncertain about climate change and its causes. Rush Holt wrote a piece for Science, which appeared in Newsweek:Kathy Mulvey (January 2017). "Tillerson Refuses to Acknowledge ExxonMobil's Efforts to Deceive the Public on Climate Change"
Hausfather, Zeke (January 2017). No 'Pause' in Global Warming: Oceans Heating Up and Sea Levels Rising at Alarming Pace. "Details the findings of a new report that confirms NOAA data about climate change."
David Kaiser and Lee Wasserman (December 2016). "Part 1" and "Part 2", New York Review of Books
"Frontline: Climate of Doubt". PBS. 23 October 2012. Retrieved 25 October 2012.
"Dealing in Doubt: The climate denial industry and climate science – a brief history of attacks on climate science, climate scientists and the IPCC". Greenpeace. 24 March 2010. Retrieved 22 September 2014.
Bowen, Mark (2008). Censoring Science: Dr. James Hansen and the Truth of Global Warming. Plume. ISBN 0-452-28962-9
McCright, Aaron M.; Dunlap, Riley E. (2003). "Defeating Kyoto: The Conservative Movement's Impact on U.S. Climate Change Policy" (PDF). Social Problems. 50 (3): 348–373. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.189.3388. doi:10.1525/sp.2003.50.3.348.
Shearer, Christine (2011). "Kivalina: A Climate Change Story" Haymarket Books. ISBN 978-1-60846-128-8
Montlake, Simon (2019) What does climate change have to do with socialism The Christian Science Monitor
Oreskes, Naomi, "History Matters to Science: It helps to explain how cynical actors undermine the truth", Scientific American, vol. 323, no. 6 (December 2020), p. 81. "In our 2010 book, Merchants of Doubt, Erik M. Conway and I showed how the same arguments [as those used to cast doubt on the link between tobacco use and lung cancer] were used to delay action on acid rain, the ozone hole and climate change—and this year [2020] we saw the spurious 'freedom' argument being used to disparage mask wearing [during the COVID-19 pandemic]."
Supran, Geoffrey; Oreskes, Naomi (18 November 2021). "The forgotten oil ads that told us climate change was nothing". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 18 November 2021.
"Climate fight 'is undermined by social media's toxic reports'". The Guardian. 21 March 2021.
no relation