Hello, and welcome back to Drill. I'm Amy Westervelt. This is our fourteenth, fourteenth season, and we're doing what I like to think of as the opposite of the Ezra Klein approach. We're digging deep and trying to understand.
The moment that we're in because we're at a really bad time on climate right now, and you know, democracy and justice and all sorts of other things, and we're only just starting to really understand some of the forces that have worked really hard.
To bring us to this moment. So you know, it's time to do the reading. For me, understanding the lack.
Of political will to act on climate has always begun with talking.
To social scientists, So for this season, I wanted to talk to some of the best, the folks behind an incredible new book from the Climate Social Science Network at Brown University that pulls together everything we currently know about climate obstruction, how it's happened all over the world. In the first four episodes of the season, we looked at how obstruction works, so we looked at pr and media
and the psychology of this stuff. In the next few episodes, we'll focus on who's doing it, which industries are working the hardest to obstruct climate action. First up, no surprise, the fossil fuel industry. They're not the only ones doing it, of course, but they are certainly one of the biggest
obstacles to climate action. Joining me today is a voice that might be familiar to longtime listeners, Kurt Davies, the investigator who read to us from so many great documents that he'd found back in season one of the podcasts. Kurt is at the Center for Climate Integrity. These days we also have Jeff Dembigie, global Energy editor of diesbog and author of the book The Petroleum Papers, and Christopher Eckberk from the University of Lund in Sweden. Let's get in to it.
I am Kurt Davies.
I am the Director of Special Investigations at the Center for Climate Integrity in Washington, d C.
Hi.
I'm kristofek but I'm associate Senior lecturer in Human Ecology at Lund University in Sweden.
Hi.
I am Jeff dam Bickie. I am Global Managing Editor with the Climate Investigation Side ds MOG.
I want to start out talking about this thing that you guys start with in your chapter, which is the oil and gas industry's sudden embrace post Paris of net zero and all that it entails. There's this this line from an email that came out during the government's investigations in the US on climate disinformation. That's from the BP global head of Sustainability and Climate Policy, and Kurt, I'm going to ask you to do what I always ask you to do, which is read documents. Could you read
this line from this guy? He kind of references embracing net zero and backing the Paris Climate Agreement is the most obvious course of action to take, and then he says, yes.
I was reading the whole thing again earlier. And so it's an internal discussion within BP about Trump what Trump is going to do with Paris in March of twenty seventeen. And that's important because we really didn't know what they would do yet. And there's an article they're referring to where it says Trump administration might stay in Paris but kill the Obama pledge, so effectively be in the agreement
without agreeing to do anything. And so the discussion within VP is Paul Jeffers' rights to Bob Stout and about six other people. He says, interesting Obviously I don't know what will happen, but this looks like the most obvious course of action to take all of the benefits and few of the risks. This is really why the Paris Agreement was designed the way it was to enable flexible transition from one political regime to the next. No one is committed to anything other than to stay in the game.
And that last line, wow, really applies to the oil companies, right. They don't have to really commit to anything, but they want to stay in the game.
Right, Okay, So why were oil and gas companies so into the idea of net zero comitment.
Well, I think it was a period when the global consensus really was in favor of climate action, aggressive climate action perhaps, or just the appearance of it. And the oil and gas industry always wants to look like it's on the side of what all global governments and everyone is going to do for climate and the economy. And so during this period, the companies are all coming out and saying, yeah, we like we like net zero two, this is great, We're going to transform our operations with
all sorts of new technologies. And it was also a period when a bunch of internal documents from the industry had been unearthed by journalists at the Los Angeles Times and other outlets, and a bunch of lawsuits were beginning to be filed against the industry that really scrutinized its past history of climate change denial and other obstruction tactics.
And so this this was a period when it just really made a lot of sense for a whole bunch of reasons for the industry to try to portray itself as a climate leader.
The only thing I would add to that, I think is that the net zero concept actually starts a few years earlier with the IPCC, with the scientists, and they are trying to figure out what dangerous climate change is, debating the two degree one point five degree limit, and it's originally a chart that shows if you're going to get to a safe climate, you have to have net zero emissions by some point in time to get there, And so governments adopt that language, and then the corporations say, well,
if we're saying the same thing, that'll be cozy. So I feel like it was of convenience that they started using the same verbiage to seem like they were in sync with the scientists. Commandment and the government effort.
I think it also relates to something that we probably will come back to, but this focus on emissions specifically that there was this was also a way to talk about climate action without having to talk about well extraction of fossil fuels basically or scope three emissions in more specific ways. So it was a sort of way out of more difficult discussions for fossil fuel companies.
Exactly.
Okay, so you guys talk in this chapter about climate obstruction in a few different ways, and specifically about three categories of obstruction tactics, denial, delay, and co optation. Can I have you define those terms for us and talk a little bit about the interplay between them. I thought this was really important, this point that you make that wasn't like first there was denial, and then there was delay, and then there was this sort of like all this
stuff happening all the time. So would love to have you explain that.
I think this is actually one of the most important things that we contribute with is just to focus on this that the responses from fossil fuel companies aren't really they're not linear in that sense, but very dependent on context, and we can show that, yeah, all companies in different regions use these different tactics throughout well basically from the
nineteen seventies and onwards, but depending on context. So it's not sort of this obvious development from denying scientific facts to delaying sort of obstructing the environmental policy or climate change policy discussions, but rather that these strategies change depending on the challenges specific challenges that oil industry face. And I think with the three categories it was one way to divide it. But I mean there's a lot of
different concepts floating around in these discussions. But I would say that perhaps with denial, we're talking specifically about well denying the scientific facts of climate change, global warming, and we delay. Our focus is primarily on the sort of economic scare tactics of fossil fuel company and sort of this idea that climate change action or action against climate
change will hurt different people regions in different ways. And with co optation, we trace basically the way that fossil fuel companies have been involved in framing the issue in coming up suggestions on how to perhaps tackle the question or not tackle the question.
And what I would add to that is there's sort of like two overriding things that are key to understanding these tactics. One is that no matter what tactic the oil and gas industry is using at any given time, the ultimate goal is to allow the industry to keep
producing as much oil and gas as possible. And what allows the industry to shift back and forth between these tactics depending on whatever the political or economic context is, is that the industry is always right on the vanguard of doing all of the research and establishing the expertise it needs to lead any given debate. So oil and gas companies were able to deny the science because they
had studied the science for so long. They were able to use convincing sounding economics scare tactics because they were some of the first organizations to really study the economics of climate change, and they were able to co op the process because the process of international climate negotiations, because from day one they were involved with it, learning all the nuances of it. And so I think that's really key to all of this as well.
And I think pointing out that these things are shifting around all the time and constantly being used helps people understand the resurgence of denial.
Now right, Yeah, that was I think we worked hard at that in the chapter to sort of break that, as you said, linear logic that people have used like that, it went from a period of denial into a period of play along, feel good co optation. And it really is whatever tactic is needed at any given time, they can play it, and that's what happens. And here we are now and you don't see any green washing because they don't need to have green washing right now.
It's not necessary any necessary.
Yeah.
You do talk about the evolution of denial a little bit too, and not just denial of climate change and the science behind what drives it and all that, but also of even more basic concepts like I don't know, this thing of we're yeah, we're totally committed to this stuff while continuing to increase production volumes and things like that, which, as you point out, has just becomes so normal that it's people don't even pay attention to it anymore. So, Yeah, I would love to have you expand on that a
little bit. What are some of the other ways that they use denial of basic science to their benefit.
Yeah, I think that the point here was that it's not just flat denial, it's not happening greening Earth, you know, which we still see, we see again even in the Trump report that just came out, but that we can denial can be just denying the urgency, denying what scientists are saying needs to be cut to save us. And
the slowing down is a form of denial. And you know, ultimately, you know, as we were saying, that the you know, denying helps them avoid the real discussion of the need for fossil fuel phase out, the need to cut production of their products, and that's what they really don't want, so they look for every other pathway that allows their business to continue, and that includes you know, carbon capture mythologies and treating with natural carbon credits and all these
other schemes that are in fact denying what the scientists say is urgently needed.
Now, I was just thinking about bringing it back to this Stanley Cohen, who's sort of been very influential in the discussion of denial and his idea of implicatory denial that is very much what we see basically people not acting others have talked about, yeah, refusal or other words, just to describe what we also show in the chapter that even though we have these promises of a climate action, we see that, Yeah, production just goes up, and there's
like in their own annual reports, there's no sign of cutting production.
So yeah, and what I would say is, like with the implicit denial, it's basically like the same obstruction mechanism, Like in the hardcore denial days in like the nineties, industry would be like, climate change isn't happening, and then they would keep producing more and more oil and gas at the same time. So obviously they got a lot
of flack that they looked kind of crazy to the public. Eventually, so the company is just like deleted that like really in your face denial, but just kept doing basically the exact same things. So now they say, oh, yeah, we acknowledge climate change is real and urgent, and then their production keeps going up and up and up. So despite a lot of rhetorical change over the years, the sort of material circumstances of what they're doing remain almost exactly the same.
And it might be also important to say that this sort of more obvious science denial hasn't disappeared. I mean, it might have disappeared from the fossil fuel company strategies or rhetoric, but it has appeared in other places, like in for right environments, and I mean with Trump and others like we see see those kind of claims still there, but perhaps not as much from fossil fueled companies as before.
Well, if you consider that the current Energy Secretary, Chris Wright, used to be a fracking executive until very recently, and now he's sponsoring a report saying that the human contribution to climate change is I think we're.
Like that sure, And adding to that, I would credit Exon's money and coke Industry's money with keeping denial alive.
You know, Exon.
Paid a fortune to keep these voices active in the late nineties and into the early two thousands. Coke industries paid a lot of money to these same organizations. So the whole reason that Chris Wright has learned those things is because of megaphones that the oil companies bought.
Yeah, yeah, well, Chris Writ's been brown down with the cokes for a long time. Okay. So I realized that this question could take like the whole hour to answer,
so feel free to just give me the headlines. But I do want to talk a little bit about the role that industry led an industry funded research has played into all of this as well, like the extent to which they have tried to use credible seeming science or credibly adjacent science to earn themselves a seat at the table and then use that seat to mess things up.
Along the way. You know, it's actually different for each company.
We don't know a lot about what the individual companies were studying, except for Shell and Exxon especially. We have evidence that the American Patrolling Institute as a body was monitoring the science very very broadly, and through the GCC. They were sending people to the Governmental Panel and climate change meetings, were reporting back to all of them what was going on in the science. But as far as their own research, we know exem was doing its own modeling,
it knew what was going on. We know Shell looked at all the science in the early eighties and determined that by the time the science was unequivocal, it would be too late, in their words, which is kind of grim and they actually proposed a more precautionary approach internally,
but never said that out loud to the world. Shell but this is kind of crucial that they were playing along and part of what they started to lead research on was things like carbon capture, which is the ultimate holy grail now for the oil industry is that we can keep burning fossil fuels as long as we capture some of the carbon and tuck it back in the ground, and which they have never done effectively, but that's on
the horizon. Dream has allowed them to keep producing in selling oil because they're working on it, because they're researching it.
Yeah, and I would give the example of Exon and carbon pricing. So in part of the period that we're looking at in the chapter following the twenty fifteen Paris talks, Exon was part of organizations that we're calling for a price on carbon and said, you know, this is the
type of policy we could potentially support. And then of course the Exon lobbyist Keith McCoy was secretly recorded by Greenpeace researchers saying that the company only supports a carbon price because it gives it a nice talking point and it actually knows that this is probably never going to happen in the US. And that was just such a fascinating admission because it sort of confirmed what a lot
of people thought. But it also came as Exon was going to war with basically every major substantial climate policy that was proposed in the US, and then as a defense it could say, well, we support this carbon pricing thing. And so of course after that interview came out, Exon kind of dropped any pretense of that. But I think I think that shows what this co opting dynamic is all about.
Also another example with that Learonovskiaez looked at the SHELL sponsored research by James Lovelock, for example, which is I think that adds another bit to it that is not always and this is historical research, so it's not always that the industry let research have been like instrumental or specifically targeting climate change or climate science. But sometimes it's sort of a broader perspective where they can sort of pick and choose later on specific things that they bring
to the fore. So in this case, the adapt ability of natural systems or the fact that some organisms emits CEO two that later on could be used as a part of science. Ton So I think it's also important to like, not everything is very instrumental. They have a lot of resources so can actually fund quite broadly in a sense.
Yeah, just sort of like shape basic understandings and things too. Actually, relatedly, can I have you guys speak to how important it was for these companies to get academics, especially academics connected with elite universities, to carry water for some of their ideas, or even just to do research along with their scientists.
I think starting with the GCC, we see that they were participating in scientific processes industry, especially Exon scientists were co authors and part of the IPCC process. It was important for them, they felt too, to be in that room to know where the science was. They heavily focused
on the modeling. They still do because they know that the forecasting is really what drives the urgency, and they start to form partnerships with academic institutions BP at Princeton, EXON at Stanford, Exon at MIT to bring those logos
next to theirs. Then they also have third party surrogates like Richard Lindzen at MIT or Pat Michaels who was at UVA, who will say the things that they don't want to say, but they have an incredible academic label, and they were more useful than just the pundits at the think tanks because it made it look like serious people disagreed with the urgency of climate change or the Jim Hanson. It was a counter to the jimhnns and
mode of speaking about the issue, or Steve Schneider. So it was a I think a very deliberate effort to again just cast doubt.
All.
Their whole objective is to have some shred of doubt around the issue, which gives somebody in the policy arena, some politician, the ability to say, let's wait and study this, let's look at this a little bit more.
It's not that urgent. Look this guy at MIT just said, it's not that bad.
That's ongoing and has been going heavily for thirty years now.
Yeah, I would argue it's maybe even increasing now that public funding is getting good too. Anyone else want to add to that.
Yeah, I'd say having these prestigious academic institutions attached to denial really helps influence policymakers. But from the very earliest days of public denial, a lot of these spokespeople were encouraging Americans and whoever else to spread these ideas in their own social or family networks. So some of the earliest denial ads on the radio, people would say change begins at the dinner table. You should you should share these ideas with people close to you because it's such
an important discussion to have. And so I think the only way that you can really convince a ton of people to accept something as crazy is what the companies were pushing with denial is if it comes from someone you trust, and so I think that's what this whole process is all about. And then, of course, when this whole discussion shifted online onto big digital media platforms, I think that really allowed all of this to supercharge because it wasn't necessarily some big evil oil company telling you
to distrust scientists. It was like your uncle who you meet with once a week, posting something on Facebook.
Right, right, Okay, we mentioned economics before and how the industry was amongst the earliest, if not the earliest, to study the economic implications of climate policy. So would love to talk about that a little bit more. What they did and how important that was to obstruction and efforts.
Well, I always point to this study that Exxon's Canadian subsidiary, Imperial Oil, created in the early nineteen nineties, and so Imperial and Exon were like so far ahead of the curve in understanding climate change, that they were hiring consultants and actively studying solutions to climate change in the early nineties, and this was only a few years after James Hansen had given his testimony to Congress and turned climate change
into sort of like a big mainstream issue. And so in one of these were ports that Exxon and Imperial commissioned, they determined that a price on carbon emissions in Canada could potentially stabilize greenhouse gas emissions in the country without a hugely negative impact on the economy because governments would
have so much additional revenue from taxing carbon. The company and its consultants determined, however, that carbon pricing would be specifically bad for Imperial's bottom line, and therefore they came up with a strategy to portray carbon pricing and any other climate solution in the worst possible light to media and policy makers, and so that this approach was tried out in kind of an experimental sense in places like Canada and other regions, and then it really started to
go mainstream throughout the nineties, to the point where any discussion about climate change always contained this reflex of response from industry saying that any solution will destroy the economy.
And here we are in twenty twenty five.
I know, it's like the consistent talking point even from a lot of people who say that they think we should act on climate.
I think that's important that they wanted to feather this in because it allowed even people who cared to hedge by saying, but we shouldn't hurt the economy. And that's also the basis of really the bird Hagel stuff and the stuff that the American Patrol means to push after Kyoto was Yes, but we shouldn't hurt the American economy. And that's really a powerful message, and of course resonates more with average people than environmental benefit if you're going
to hurt the economy. And it even came down to very deliberate scare tactics when they started doing these so called economics reports where ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, did a report that showed all the bad things that would happen state by state. I think it was ALEC, you know that, you know you if you do Kyoto, it's going to raise the price of energy by one two hundred and twelve dollars in Iowa and total made up numbers, but very effective local headlines they could create
with these economic so called studies. And one of the people who did those studies admitted in a documentary recently that they failed to include the economic downside of climate change, the damages in their equations, So not very good math in the end.
And I think as coming from from history always, I have a pH d in history, So that's why it might be a way that I said. I'm in human ecology, but I'm a historian by training, and I think this is sort of a anti environmental talking point already from the nineteen seventies. I guess with already with the oil crisis, that if something hurts basically energy industry largely, then that will affect your possibility for transportation, for heating, for electricity.
So it's a very close by topic or I don't know how to say it correctly in English, but yes, you can sort of feel it right away. So I think that's the way it has been very effective, and it's been used. I mean, now we talked about the US, but as we show in the papers, we talked about the basically oil industries attacks on the suggestion to have a joint carbon tax, in the European in early nineteen nineties,
where Yeah, basically the same talking points were used. So it's an effective around the world tactic.
I guess making it look like sacrifice instead of progress is really what right they tried to do the whole time.
Yeah, well, and I think another important part of that was dismantling this conservative consensus that protecting the environment is also good for the economy, which took a lot of deliberate work on the part of oil and gas because even up into the nineties, you know, some of the most consequential environmental initiatives came from conservative politicians, Republican administrations, and so the oil and gas industry. By using these
scare tactics, it wasn't just rhetorical. They could reorient an entire side of the political spectrum to get the kind of anti regulatory policies that they wanted. Yeah.
I mean, I feel like we could almost point to the current abundance discourse is the ultimate success here.
Yeah. I just came back from a conference and we talked about this, like, should we under stand climate change denial as primarily an environmental issue or something developed in relation to environmental issue, or if we should see it as an energy issue. I think that really makes a
difference in how we see that. We can see that well, basically some part of the Conservatives could actually agree on environmental stuff, but when it came to questions on energy and basically economic growth and those kind of issues, then yeah, there's a much stronger pushback.
Which has always made it harder than solving the ozone layer or toxic waste or other things that other environmental challenges.
Right, so not at all. Unrelatedly, can I have you walk through a quick history of the Waxman Marquee Act and how I don't know, sort of a combination of these obstruction tactics work to kill it.
Yeah, I can take this. I mean the evolution of wax and Marquee. Of course, it's in two thousand and nine, so Obama has just been elected. There's been a bit of a sea change in the US in the second Bush term where more climate action is inevitable. So Obama gets elected and both the House and the Senate are
in Democratic hands. So we're going to I heard someone say we're going to run the table on climate and the first play was, of course, they went after healthcare first and that was a mistake, so it got the enemy riled up, including the Koch brothers. But Waxman Marquee was constructed in the same form as all other climate policy at the time, a sort of cap and trade mentality of putting a cap on carbon and then figuring out a way to get.
To those goals.
The mistake was that many the people who ran the game thought that the coal fired utilities and coal interests were going to be the biggest obstruction and therefore needed the biggest handout to get them to not try to kill the bill. So there were a lot of handouts for coal fired power plants if they could get to carbon capture, and I'm calling them handouts, but the smart people who wrote it probably thought they were really clever devices to get some action out of those industries, and
there was nothing in it for big oil. So after the bill passed the House in the early summer, then the oil industry got really mobilized and went after it, and we see the birth of the Energy Citizens campaign by American Petroleum Institute with Edelman PR's help, where they went after it hard and they basically knew they could kill it in the Senate and that's where it died.
It never evolved. The importance of two thousand and nine can't be underestimated because we were headed towards the Copenhagen meeting of the UNF Triple C, and that was going to be what Paris eventually was was a rebirth after Kyoto fizzled, and it was supposed to be then. And then because the Obama administration had nothing to bring because Waxman Marquee didn't evolve into law, then that meeting fizzled, also Climategate, but it was it was really a failure
of the US to lead. And then we're you know, of course into a whole mess the next year with the Deep Water Horizon. But the Wasston Marquee, you know, the concept was good, and it was the first major attempt at an economy wide you.
Know, law in the US, and it didn't didn't get there.
And another important piece of that, and that's a great summary, Kurt, is that this really came during a moment when a lot of conservatives were sort of cautiously embracing climate action publicly, including even Rupert Murdoch, who said he wanted to use his media empire to push out pro climate messages at one point, which just seems insane now, but you had the heads of oil companies coming out saying climate change
is real. Lindsey Graham was backing the cap and trade effort, and so the smart oil and gas people realized they needed to break that emerging consensus on the right. And so when all of these Tea Party protests started erupting around healthcare, that's when coke industries and other oil and gas money kind of got involved in trying to steer that grassroots right wing movement again that's climate action. And
they were very successful in doing that. And as the Tea Party progressed, one of its major policy goals was to repeal Wax and Marquee. And in the process of all of these like angry revolts and far right people screaming at their representatives, Lindsey Graham got spooked. He pulled his support for the bill. Fox News went fully in bed with the Tea Party and was pulled even further
to the right. A lot of these sort of conservative thought leader people backed off and started embracing climate denial again, and within a few years, this consensus that we needed to do something about climate change, even among conservatives was sort of like lying in tatters on the ground.
It's interesting and depressing story.
McCain also needs to be mentioned there. McCain, who lost to Bush in the Republican primary for two thousand comes back and becomes a climate champion and pushes a bill for years that was losing again and again and again. But that was part of what Jeff was mentioning that there was there were actually a lot of conservatives who realized something had to be done on this, and that was pushing Bush, and that was pushing the politics on it.
You know, even Mitt Romney, who ran for president against Obama, was better on a climate change than any Republican had been. So there's an inevitability in two thousand and nine that I think we squandered collectively.
Despite this consistent effort to push against any kind of action, and you know, the billions and billions of dollars and lobbying and marketing and fogus research and all of this stuff, the industry does still position itself as part of the solution on climate And I wonder if you could speak to I guess see how and why that is still happening.
Well, I think more than anything else. The oil and gas industry is in the business of managing risk. And so despite this like full fledged turn towards insane, hardcore climate change denial under the Trump administration, a lot of major oil and gas companies they're still kind of hedging
their bets politically, I think a little bit. They can kind of like implicitly support a lot of the things the Trump administration is doing, but they won't come out and say, yeah, all of this climate stuff was like totally bullshit and we actually think it's fake because they know the political wins could turn again and then that's suddenly going to become a liability for them, and so I think it's in their best interest to sort of maintain this very kind of like hollow facade that they
are climate leaders while kind of quietly racing everything that Trump is pushing.
Well, and there are global companies too, right, so they still have deal with other governments.
I think the example that we have on equin or the state owned company Norway is quite telling. Actually the Utanists contributed with the an old company that is sort of bound by a lot of climate legislation in Norway and the carbon tax, but still sort of yeah, produce a lot of oil, but then have had to change their model and talking about producing green oil, basically electrifying all of their production, but still pumping up oil and gas.
And that's very much like how they have been able to well portray themselves as part of some kind of solution being greener than other oil companies. Again, coming back to this focus on emission that really offers an opt out in or an opt in to continue to produce fossil fuels.
Perhaps, Yeah, I mean going to the chapter and the time frame we're talking about here. Just before Paris, the oil industry, many big oil companies form the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative, the OGCI, and they you know, it's a total pr effort, but they form a new trade
association internationally to help to solve climate change. On its face, and you know, it includes a lot of happy talk about natural gas as a cleaner form of energy and how it's a bridge fuel, and then it talks they talk about carbon capture a lot, and they are trying to get a seat at the table.
They effectively do.
Initially excellent and Chevron did not join that, and eventually they've realized that's the way to go. But it's again having credibility, needing to look like they are part of the solution is the whole game, to not look like an obstruction, to look like they care too. That's really what they That's what they say in they're advertising, by the way, we care. But it's really important, and they
also have us. All hostage is the other truth, right, All governments of the world are hostage to the oil industry at some level, and whether as a producer or a consumer, they can use this economic blackmail anywhere anytime.
Okay, Christopher, I have a history question for you. I want to talk about a little bit of the history of just, you know, any kind of efforts to a dress environmental problems at an international level in general, and
how the industry gets involved right from the beginning. So you talk about this in the chapter of pulling to the other of efforts through the International Chamber, and then how the industry deals with the Brutland Commission and the formation of IPKA and all of this stuff, which I find really interesting, and I'm sorry to distill it all down to just one question, but I can I talk a little bit about that period of the early seventies to the early nineties and how they ingratiate themselves into
these international efforts.
Yeah, I think that's and you have also written about this, I know, but I think it's such an important part for understanding this idea of co option, that they were there from the start, As you say, old men like Marris Strong was part of we're sharing the Stockholm conference in nineteen seventy two. And actually what some scholars have shown that the industry position was actually sort of a sort of after competence, that these people we're seen as
people that could well do stuff, make things happen. So oil industry was already in Stockholm and in later conferences.
Part of the discussion about how well basically how we understand sustainability or sustainable development, and particularly in this part that Ankle Symbticus has contributed to a lot and also written about in other parts, is how basically these international business organizations coordinate, through international Chamber of Commerce and other venues like and conferences and such basically to come up with their own position, to come up whe their position
or already made answer that they could actually use in discussions about central concepts like sustainable development or precautionary principles or those kind of important topics throughout sort of nine
eighties and ninety nineties. But if they're part of that discussion up until maybe the ninety nineties, something clearly changes after the establishment of IPCC, and yeah, that climate change really becomes more of a salient issue, but yeah, a more important issue in the nineteen nineties, and that's when we see this more aggressive push against any type of
climate action. So I think it's important to have in mind that they were there from the start, and they have in all of these organizations from the start.
The Paris Agreement comes up, of course a lot throughout this whole book and in this chapter, and I do feel like this thing has happened where it's pointed to, is this big success, But in some ways it seems like a real win for industry as well. So I'm going to throw that thorny question at you. Who is Paris a win for?
If anyone, it's pretty grim.
I mean, I think that goes back to that quote at the top that no government really still wants to commit to anything that you know everybody else isn't doing. There's so much selfishness embodied in the Framework Convention or it'll never leave. It's not it's also part of it, but it will never leave. And the industry knows. The
industry knows they can prey on that. So to have an agreement that relies on government pledges that have to be met by the governments takes the burden off of the industry really, because it's then the government's fault if
they don't meet the pledge, and they know that. And also pretty much every pledge included magical solutions like carbon capture as part of the pledge, so they kind of built their survival into the UK Pledge, the US Pledge, other big government policies to sort of show or try to make an oil future inevitable.
And the main thing they want there is.
You know, yeah, yeah, yeah, we care, but you're not going to turn off oil and gas tomorrow, right, And then they haven't yeah, and the government has to say, well, yes, of course, we're reasonable, we're not going to turn it off tomorrow, and then you buy time and then you have a way out, and by the time we get back to another agreement, all those other politicians are dead and buried and they start again with denial and that's pretty grim.
But that is the best they could do. I think in twenty fifteen they probably if you talk to.
Someone like the Obama administration or Al Gore even they would say, we got the best we could out of that moment. And there's some very smart, practical people who try to push the international agreements as hard as they can and get what they can. But it's a tough sport because you're up against a mountain of resistance.
So you say at the end of the chapter, if far right and authoritarian politics continue to gain hold, this trend may herald a new form of denial and obstruction that is not passive or opaque, but blatantly refuses to comply with the scientific warnings about climate change. I think we're there in the US. So where are you seeing this turn up? And what are you sort of anticipating to see in the next couple of years.
Well, it's funny because when we had that prediction at the end of our chapter, it did feel like a little bit like edgy or like looking out a little bit to include something like that. And now, of course, like hardcore climate denial is the mainstream in the US, and of former fracking executive is the head of the Department of Energy, and he commissioned climate deniers active during the heyday of denial in the nineties to come back and write a report saying that humans may not be
the primary cause of global temperatureize. And now the Trump administration is using that to demolish US climate policy and deregulate oil and gas. So we in the US at least we're fully there. But I think versions of this are kind of like echoing out across the world. In the UK, Nigel Farage and Reform have like fully gone
in on climate denial. There's like slightly more subtle forms of it in Canada and the big like Tarzans producing areas, and so I think it shows that like whatever the mainstream political context is will determine how the oil and gas industry is going to react, and the big companies haven't so far are fully jumped back into the climate denial mode. But it's this has shifted the whole center of gravity in terms of how these companies are going to react to what's going on in politics.
I think also one important context for this is basically Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the geopolitic, like the political concerns that followed after that in terms of energy policy, that made both this well refusal or denial, but also a very mainstreaming of the economic scare tactics that basically open up for this kind of denial that we are we have other priorities, we have other things that we need to think about right now, so we cannot deal
with this messy topic of climate change, your climate action. So I think that really shifted the balance. And in Sweden, well, I mean the Sweden, the far right Sweden Democrats have been sort of the closest allies to the more denialist groups from well basically twenty tens. But yeah, now it's their policies that dictates much of what is happening today.