Hello, Welcome to Drill. This is Amy Westerveldt. I'm here today with a bit of an update to the history we chronicled in season three, where we looked at the last one hundred or so years of fossil fuel propaganda.
A new study from Harvard researchers Jeffrey Supran and Naomi A. Risquez highlights how Exonmobile in particular, has used language both to undermine climate action and to push the idea that it's an individual consumer problem, not anything to do with them or the systems they helped to create and continue
to profit from. Lead researcher Jeffrey Supran join me to talk through the studies' findings and what they mean for climate action more broadly, and what they might mean for the two dozen ors so climate cases making their way through the courts at the moment. That conversation coming up after this quick break.
So basically, if if you run a do some code to say what words appear? I think within plus or minus five words of the words climate change and global warming, there is literally no word or phrase that is more
common than risk or risks. So it basically became their their watchword throughout throughout the two thousands, and likewise, in terms of the words that individualized responsibility, all the same keywords pop up regarding meeting the energy demand of consumers, you know, meeting the needs, all these kinds of words.
Did you find that you know, the word risk was used to in a way to introduce doubt, like it's a risk, but it's uncertainty. Was it that kind of framing or how how is it being used?
Yeah? Right, So essentially they describe they talk about climate risk risks, you know, long term risk, potential risks, potential long term risks, all permutations on the word risk. And our interpretation is that Exomobile used risk just as they have used other rhetorical cousins like uncertainty and more research and sound science, essentially the same intention of what's sometimes
called strategic ambiguity. It's exactly what the tobacco industry did, which is to shift the conversation from semantics, from concepts of reality to concepts of risk. And it's a very clever trick because you inject uncertainty into the narrative into the discourse about climate change while superficially not appearing to do so so. Essentially, rather than correcting the record and acknowledging how they previously promoted out. They just changed the
subject a little bit. You know, risk is something that may may not happen, and by characterizing climate change as a risk, they implicitly implied that it was not a reality, even after clearly climate scientists had demonstrated that it was happening, that it is happening. And yeah, the thing that I think really gives us confidence in the use of this rhetorical tool is that it exactly mirrors the tobacco industry strategy.
They did exactly the same thing, both for as a public relations tactics and also as a legal defense one.
That's interesting. So can you talk a little bit about that part, how you mapped this to what the tobacco industry was doing as well.
Sure. Yeah, Well, the way it first came up was running these so called Corpus comparison algorithms, so looking at, you know, what terms appear over or underused in one set of documents compared to another. And this term risk and risks started jumping out very early to us. And I just happened to know that Robert Procter, who's a tobacco historian, had written quite extensively about the use of risk as what he calls a legal having it both ways.
So essentially, you know, an admission strong enough to ward off accusations of failing to warn the public, but at the same time weak enough to kind of exculpate them from charges of having just marketed this deadly product. And it was that parallel that I noticed with the word risk that really started to encourage me to latch on to, you know what, other parallels, what might we be seeing.
And so it was in the process of looking at other terms and other discourses that are constructed, that we started to realize they were also promoting this shift of responsibility away from the company and onto consumers by publicly fixating on consumer energy demand rather than the fossil fuels that the company supplies. And in that regard too, I then came across another study from just a few years ago that really in detail laid out exactly how the
tobacco industry had done this too. In the case of the tobacco industry, they played a two pronged approach where in public they used so called demand as liberty, and in litigation in defense against lawsuits, they flipped it flip the script and basically talked about Demander's blame And what we've essentially found is Exo Mobile have done exactly the
same thing in a slightly different way. The nuances are slightly different, but the overall pattern is the same, which is that demand is used in public to very subtly put the responsibility on the shoulders of the public, and then when it comes to defending itself in court, the gloves will come off a little bit and they'll really double down on that Demander's blame rhetoric. So this is
really exciting. This is interesting to us because not only are the existing patterns evident, but it also these insights allow us to begin to foresee how their defense against litigation and activism is going to expand in the coming years. So we're just starting to see the first early warning signs of that strategy, that that blame game that they're playing.
That was actually like a big part of the decision in San Francisco exactly. Yeah, Judge Alsop's ruling, like he kind of talked about that, It's like, well, sure, you know, and that was very much the argument that was being made too, is that you know, hey, we're just fulfilling it, right, and without us, the industrial revolution wouldn't have happened all this, right.
Yeah, right, right, right, yeah, yeah, no, So that's actually I mean, we point this out in the paper that the reason Judge us Up made that decision was very much, you know, in response to the argument being made by Chevron's lawyer and defense of x On and other companies, where he very explicitly said, it's not production that is causing greenhouse gas missions, it's consumers. It's the demand. It's
quote the way that people are living their lives. Yeah, yeah, And you know, of course we're the first to acknowledge that demand is a legitimate part of the climate problem and its solution, but it's not the only part, and it's not actually the business focus of Exomobile, which is a supplier company. So this this very intriguing. This is
very intriguing and convenient. I came across a few years ago the fact that BP had first promoted the concept of carbon footprint in two thousand and four, two thousand and six, and so that you know, I think has really helped to kind of anecdotally demonstrate the role of the fossil fee industry in promoting these individualized responsibility narratives.
But what we think we're doing for the first time with this work is to actually systematically and empirically prove in this case Exo Mobile's role in encouraging and embodying those discourses. It's not to say, you know, of course the X mobile has done this alone. It's it's been part of a massive individualization effort by the fossil free industry seemingly writ large, and also just industries in general.
That comes and it's so subtle, Like you know, Naomi and I analyze these advertorials previously from you know, through the lens of analyzing explicit doubts and climate denial, and it basically escaped unnoticed that there was this systematic usage of of of terms and topics to to yeah, to
to shift responsibility away from the company. But for me, that's what makes it all the more important, because we're starting to be able to flag genuinely insidious and subtle propaganda that is shifting the way everyone thinks about this, whether they realize it or not.
It sort of like laponizes American identity in a way too.
That's right, that's right, that's right, that's right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We we briefly touch on near the end of the paper how you know it too. It's too massive of a separate thing to go into the details of how sociologically that sort of quote unquote rugged individualism has has entrenched itself in American culture and ideology, but it really has.
And so we briefly note that what it really seems like Examobile did was to tap into that individualizing of society and risk that has been happening of the last few decades and really bring it to bear on climate change. So, yeah, it's one piece of the puzzle, and we think it's an important one because it's the first definitive proof of these kinds of subtle strategies, which, by the way, I
think you would enjoy. We include a quote in here from Herbs Schmertz where I don't know if you saw it, but yeah, yeah, where he specifically in his book says he calls the first guiding principle of He says, the first guiding principle of public affairs is to quote unquote quote grab the gro words and stick your opponents with
the bad ones. And he specifically talks about the power of I think he calls it semantic infiltration, whereby he says it's the process, whereby language does the dirty work of politics, and that is exactly what we're seeing here.
That's really interesting, well, because you know, I mean I I do. You see it all the time that like the industry really tries to position itself as like the only demand side only industry in the world.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Yeah, that's right. It's the it's the only it's the only problem and the only industry where the only solutions are demand side. There is nothing to be done on the supply side.
Yeah, it's crazy.
Framed in the context of anything else, it would sound ridiculous, right, Yeah, it's totally ridiculous.
And you see just how much bullshit it is when you look at what they did, you know, in the eighties, when there was no longer sort of restricted supply problem, but Americans had gotten really good at energy efficiency. I found all these old Chevron shareholder magazines where you were really freaking out about the fact that, Okay, we have more supply now, but demand is remaining flat because people
have gotten so good at conserving energy. They were like, what are we going to do to get demand back up, and they are dropped prices. Whenever there's a of some kind, they fiddle with the pricing to drive demand. Or I mean, even if you look at what's happening with the natural gas glut and the plastics stuff, you know, they just found another criket for it.
And also just more at the at the human scale that I think people can relate to, you know, I mean I've been I've given many talks where some guy at the back has stood up and said, I'm a hypocrite because my shoes contain you know, rubber or something. Those accusations of hypocrisy level that climate academics and activists alike who criticize the fossil food industry. That's that's the
ground level manifestation of this this brainwashing. Frankly, Yeah, and so I think it kind of that's the really profound thing about this that it manifests itself at all scales and all segments of society, whether it be the way scholars and you know, scientists think about the kinds of problems they're asking to the kind of stories journalists, right, you know, and it's only really like you and Emily and a few others who are kind of countering that now,
and whether it be you know, the average joe who when you bring up climate change the number one thing they think about is changing their light bulbs and stuff.
Right, that came up even with the crab fishermen that doing the oil companies, even the ones actually that was an interesting case because a lot of them didn't and still don't believe that humans contribute to climate But the whole thing was the companies had information that they were using to make their companies more resilient to climate change, and that they were keeping that information and that it really doesn't matter what causes climate change, that they were
covering it up. But even the ones who who were more you know, like actually like yes, think that climate change is real and that we need to do something about it and all that kind of stuff, they were actually slower to join that suit because they were like, but I'm a hypocrite because I drive a big boat that burns diesel.
Wow.
Yes, it was crazy to me. I was like, Wow, the people who are actual climate dryers are joining this suit, and the people who actually believe that we need to act on climate are the ones dragging their feet because this hypocrisy thing is so strong.
That's the thing that if you're really focused on your own sense of guilt and responsibility, you become hamstrung from acting on what you know in order to hold the systemic failures to account that are locking us into this fossil fuel status croo society.
That's how powerful it is. So like, yes, it's subtle, but that you're totally right that, I think that's what makes it so much more powerful. Yeah, and especially it like plays into all of these sort of societal structures too. It's like that much effective.
Right, Yeah, well exactly that was and is the really clever thing about Well, now we found the strategies that both tobacco and fossil fuels are using, which is that they cannot be pointed to so clearly, so blatantly as you know, lying or falsehoods or anything like that, because they basically draw on common and often correct pilance you know, of journalists and academics and the public. It's just they're kind of spinning these words in a in a confusing way.
But one other thing, just to flag out of interest, is that we actually also likewise find sets of distinctive terms that together communicate various other discourses of delay, as we call them. So, you know, we find these systematic usages of terms that together, for example, constitute greenwashing, that constitute what we call fossil fuel solutionism, or that promote concepts of energy poverty, and you know, things like that, and these all weave together, you know, to construct this
fossil fuel savior frame that we that we identify. But but yeah, I thought I really felt like the risk and responsibility parts are the ones that haven't been kind of hammered like people hasn't quite been kind of encapsulated properly yet. So that's why we kind of focus on that.
I think that's super interesting. Well, I have this like long running obsession with the idea that like the sort of very entrenched personal responsibility narrative is sort of like at the root of every problem in the US. Yeah, basically, we're constantly asking individuals to solve systemic problems just with therapists, right, usually consumer choices.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean that's the thing that kills me too, is that individual action doesn't even get painted and political action or activism or whatever, it's one hundred percent stuff.
You back, right, Yeah, Yeah, and we yeah, yeah, we's that's our concluding point in the paper actually that we quote another scholar who kind of wrote about this in a more anecdotal way way back like in two thousand and one. He calls it the narrowing of our environmental imagination, you know, to consumers first and citizen second. And that's our bottom line really that that's what's happened here, and you're absolutely right. The other thing, just to flag with
the hypocrite thing is that someone called Jen Schneider. She wrote a book called under Pressure, and we found that useful in doing this work because that book, it's a group of rhetoricians, you know, academics looking at specifically coal industry rhetoric, and we draw on some of their terminology for naming these discourses that we identify. One of their terms that we don't actually use because we classify it under individualized responsibility. But I think is really great is
they talk about the hypocrites trap. That's their name for that rhetoric of hypocrisy. I'm just mentioning that because that I think that's quite a cool book and one of the only ones I've seen that also takes the time to identify and name these things, because that's important, you know, just developing this typology, just putting it out there.
Yeah, well, just making it clear that it's not like, I think there's this thing that happens where people think that it is some kind of natural.
Adotation or like organically.
Created you know, identity or whatever, and it's like, no.
This was this was like really this was engineers engineered.
And I think once people know that, then they can evaluate it in that context and form opinions that way, as opposed to just sort of that they're handed.
That's kind of what we want, what we hope people will take from this study.
That's it for today. Big thanks to Jeffrey Supran for joining us. You can find a link to the full study in the show notes. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next week.
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