Unmasking Climate Deception - Fossil Fuel Companies' Deceptions Revealed

In 2007, thanks to a Freedom of Information request, it came to light that fossil fuel companies had hired Wei-Hock "Willie" Soon, among other climate change deniers, to author studies (now discredited), denying human-caused climate change, saying that the sun was the cause.

Recently, a cache of documents, spanning 30 years, was obtained by Greenpeace and the Climate Investigations Center (through FOIA) with much more information about what was known, when it was known and how the oil companies have paid to deceive the public, even though they were aware that their product was causing climate change as early as the 1980s, after which half of the dangerous greenhouse gases have been emitted!

Soon received his funding exclusively from fossil fuel interests, like ExxonMobil, Southern Company and Charles Koch. Soon's contracts explicitly stated that his funders not be disclosed.

www.ucsusa.org...

Spanning nearly three decades, these documents reveal that the world’s largest fossil fuel companies—BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, coal giant Peabody Energy, and Shell—were fully aware of the reality of climate change but continued to spend tens of millions of dollars to sow doubt and promote contrarian arguments they knew to be wrong.
...
All told, Soon received more than $1.2 million from fossil fuel interests over the last decade and failed to disclose that conflict of interest in most of the scientific papers that money underwrote. More than $400,000 came from a subsidiary of the Southern Company, a large utility holding company with a fleet of coal-fired power plants. ExxonMobil gave Soon $335,000. The Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation kicked in another $230,000. The API, meanwhile, contributed more than $100,000.
...
As a result, more than half of all industrial carbon emissions have been released into the atmosphere since 1988—after major fossil fuel companies indisputably knew about the harm their products are doing to the climate.

This is the same strategy the tobacco industry used to convince people that their product was not dangerous and didn't cause cancer.

www.ucsusa.org...

For many years, scientists and public health experts warned of smoking’s link to lung cancer and heart disease. But only after internal documents surfaced in the course of litigation did Americans come to understand how the tobacco industry had deceived them about the dangers of cigarettes. Among the damning documents leaked to the
press was a now-infamous 1969memo from the Brown and Williamson tobacco company. “Doubt is our product,” that memo famously boasted, “since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the minds of the general public.”
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These internal documents speak for themselves. Our report presents seven “deception dossiers” containing 85 separate internal company and trade association documents that have been leaked to the public, come to light through lawsuits, or been disclosed through Freedom of Information Act requests. UCS is making the complete collection available online.

I urge you to read them and draw your own conclusions.

www.ucsusa.org...
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a reply to: Benevolent Heretic True, it is all very clear, but sometimes people need to see there was an active cover-up, aka, conspiracy, to believe. Well, here it is.

a reply to: Benevolent Heretic

No surprise here. We should assume massive lies, cover-up and ongoing corruption within most century-old (or so) companies that are major players in our daily lives.

Too bad nothing will happen.

a reply to: Benevolent Heretic

out of curiosity, what is your alternative plan?

a reply to: network dude

There is none. We're screwed.

Perhaps a decade ago we might have done something to curtail things, but powerful people succumbed to greed and sold out the future of people who would live after they died.

Just to have a bit more money while they lived...

Sounds like this "miracle" discovery could be a classic case of planted information by cohorts of global warming.

FOIA requests are answered by a biased Administration.

a reply to: Benevolent Heretic



Shill pay seems pretty good.

a reply to: Greven

But what would you replace gas with? We still have to move around.

If there was an alternative, wouldn't we at least know about it by now?

originally posted by: network dude
a reply to: Greven

But what would you replace gas with? We still have to move around.

If there was an alternative, wouldn't we at least know about it by now?

Why does everybody pretend solar and electricity don't exist?

Huge swaths of solar fields and wind farms. Electric cars. No fuel needed. We've had this technology for decades.

originally posted by: Cuervo

originally posted by: network dude
a reply to: Greven

But what would you replace gas with? We still have to move around.

If there was an alternative, wouldn't we at least know about it by now?

Why does everybody pretend solar and electricity don't exist?

Huge swaths of solar fields and wind farms. Electric cars. No fuel needed. We've had this technology for decades.

Looks like all those conspiracies about the fossil fuel companies squelching mpg technology could be true as well now huh. I would like to FOIA that as well. Quadruple mpg efficiency plus alternate fuel ( solar, wind) would have been a good start.

originally posted by: Cuervo

originally posted by: network dude
a reply to: Greven

But what would you replace gas with? We still have to move around.

If there was an alternative, wouldn't we at least know about it by now?

Why does everybody pretend solar and electricity don't exist?

Huge swaths of solar fields and wind farms. Electric cars. No fuel needed. We've had this technology for decades.

LOL,

A few reasons. The Electrical Grid cannot handle it. It can barely handle today's power requirements. Solar and wind are fought by the environmentalist (yeah, go figure). The Kenedy's had a fit when they wanted to put wind farms in the ocean (bad for their liberal multi million dollar privileged beach side view)

www.washingtontimes.com...
abcnews.go.com...


Environmentalists Blocking Wind Farms? And Solar? And Geothermal?

As demonstrated by the legal battle blocking power lines to wind farms in Kansas, environmental groups are increasingly against all forms of energy production.

pjmedia.com...


Environmentalists Sue to Block Oregon Wind Project
news.heartland.org...

articles.latimes.com...

You can't win. You TRY to put up windmills and solar plants the damned Environmentalists or Rich Elitist Politicians sue to block the project or the power lines needed to get the power from point A to point B.

Sadly, there are no surprises here from me.

In my high school years in the late 1980s and early 1990s I studied horticulture. As part of the curriculum, weather and climate came up.

We were shown that they began to question climate change in the very early 1970s. The first scientists to publish anything on the matter were discredited so inhumanely that it was repressed for at least another decade.

Our teacher was a firm green fanatic and we were shown a lot of evidence, even way back then that showed this was an alarming problem, totally manmade and avoidable if we did the right thing.

Shame nobody listens to these pioneers really.

This is "the elephant in the room" of all conspiracies on ATS.

The evidence is overwhelming: not only oil companies, but all sorts of plutocrat front groups have been actively engaged in denying the dangers of man made emissions on our climate for decades. They've done this by hiring fake scientists to undermine the science - in addition to Willie Soon other notorious shills like Fred Singer, Richard Lindzen, Patrick Michaels, Frederick Seitz, just to name a few. Google any of these names to learn more about the extensive denier fraud at play here.

Or look up the shady stories behind all the PR people hired to attack legitimate scientists and manufacture fake scandals like "climategate". Research names like Steven Milloy, Marc Morano, Christopher Monckton, or anyone in The Heartland Institute...

Meanwhile UCUSA, Greenpeace, Desmogblog, Sourcewatch & many others have tons of explicit info showing these organizations caught red-handed through leaked memorandum and other paper trails. They've literally gone out and said they were going to reframe global warming "as theory not fact", and that they wanted to specifically target dumb people with their propaganda:





And yet what do we have on boards like this - still so many deniers that continue to ignore all this important evidence, refuse to educate themselves on any scientific facts because they're so afraid of them, and prefer to sleep on a pile of lies fluffed by right wing elitists who want them to believe basic science is just a buncha liberal propaganda.

So pathetic how many people desperately hold their own intellectual freedom hostage because of their politics.

Even with total proof people here still argue against the truth?! Amazing.

originally posted by: network dude
a reply to: Greven

But what would you replace gas with? We still have to move around.

If there was an alternative, wouldn't we at least know about it by now?

I personally like this option which would filter out the co2 then use it as fuel no longer adding additional co2 to the environment.

As far as the alternative fuel that is at 5:43

Works for me.

However, the climatology department at my university (featured several times on NPR programs concerning climate change) are F'ing loony. Every time they come by for tutoring in maths my confidence in the field suffers critical damage. Numerical analysis has too many opportunities for error or misreading the data and they seem to delight in taking every . . . single . . . one . . .

This pretty much puts the nail in the coffin does it not? Even disregarding much of the rhetoric and emotional appeals involving tobacco.

But then again this should really be investigated far more deeply. 1.2million dollars derails the entire
grobawlwerminapocalypse movement for decades? For credibility's sake I hope far more is revealed.

-FBB

I didnt know this, but climate change by human activity was first theorised way back in 1896 by Svante Arrhenius

www.lenntech.com...

originally posted by: Cuervo

originally posted by: network dude
a reply to: Greven

But what would you replace gas with? We still have to move around.

If there was an alternative, wouldn't we at least know about it by now?

Why does everybody pretend solar and electricity don't exist?

Huge swaths of solar fields and wind farms. Electric cars. No fuel needed. We've had this technology for decades.

I would LOVE an alternative to burning gas. But, to switch over to electric, brings a new issue. How do we deal with all those toxic batteries when they die? It's like Nuclear, fantastic way to produce energy, but what to do with the waste? (we still don't have a good answer for that)

I believe hydrogen is a wonderful fuel, but every time I bring that up, I am chastised by the science crowd that smashes my dreams by explaining how much energy it takes to make it. I still think if you had a home energy station using solar power, you would be doing a better thing for everyone by making your own hydrogen, but I am sure there is a reason that won't work either.

originally posted by: Grimpachi

originally posted by: network dude
a reply to: Greven

But what would you replace gas with? We still have to move around.

If there was an alternative, wouldn't we at least know about it by now?

I personally like this option which would filter out the co2 then use it as fuel no longer adding additional co2 to the environment.

As far as the alternative fuel that is at 5:43

Awesome! Where is this at? And can we really make this for 1$ a gallon? Sure would be nice.

originally posted by: network dude
a reply to: Benevolent Heretic

out of curiosity, what is your alternative plan?

Greven is exactly right. It's too late for an alternative plan. We're screwed.

The time for change was 20 years ago. People today live with short term vision only. They're only concerned with what's happening in the next few minutes. They can block out the reality of the future with the satisfaction of short-term gain - all for money... The love of money.

The best thing we COULD have done would have been to cut our use of fossil fuels drastically (regardless of the impact) and put huge efforts into alternative fuels and power sources, as so many have said all along.

I feel sorry for people with children and grandchildren who are going to have to live through what's coming... And to know "we" brought it on ourselves is the worst part. Talking alternatives at this point is moot.