# Shaping Culture and Faith: How Big Oil Influenced Climate Conversations

An episode of [Drilled](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1439735906), 18 Sep 2018, 17 min.

Audio: https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/tracking.swap.fm/track/SxlTEPDY7xDg35RXkASs/pdrl.fm/3e5572/traffic.omny.fm/d/clips/e73c998e-6e60-432f-8610-ae210140c5b1/9a7ab5ee-ce11-48ff-a544-b3ec00ea9b1e/04c97822-5b51-415d-9ce2-b3ec00f5310c/audio.mp3?utm_source=Podcast&in_playlist=7f82f371-6316-4ea6-a108-b3ec00ea9b2d

To make media manipulation and lobbying truly effective, oil companies and their PR firms had to shift the culture, influencing everything from civil discourse to how religious groups viewed climate change. Support us: https://www.patreon.com/Drilled See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

## Transcript

[0:01] Speaker 1: Previously on Drilled.
[0:03] Speaker 2: I was on our radio show two hours. They called
[0:05] Speaker 2: and said, can you come in and talk about climate change? Sure,
[0:08] Speaker 2: and it was Katok Radio six thirty AM. And I
[0:10] Speaker 2: still remember this so well. And it was two hours
[0:13] Speaker 2: of live TV and they broke the call record and
[0:16] Speaker 2: everybody that called in was antagonistic toward me, nasty. It
[0:20] Speaker 2: was all, let me talk to that tree hug and
[0:21] Speaker 2: do gooder kind of guy. And that's how the whole
[0:23] Speaker 2: interview went. And I got done. I was like, why
[0:26] Speaker 2: are they so angry?
[0:27] Speaker 1: We learned in the last two episodes about the ways
[0:30] Speaker 1: in which oil companies influenced the media, But they were
[0:33] Speaker 1: spending tens of millions of dollars a year with pr companies,
[0:37] Speaker 1: and that money wasn't just being used on op ads
[0:39] Speaker 1: and influencing editors, It was also fueling a broader social
[0:43] Speaker 1: influence campaign. For the media strategy to work, fossil fuel
[0:48] Speaker 1: companies also had to shift how people think. They did
[0:51] Speaker 1: that by seating an anti science attitude amongst conservatives, continually
[0:56] Speaker 1: pushing the idea that you can't have innovation or progress
[0:59] Speaker 1: without oil well, and also shifting how people thought about
[1:02] Speaker 1: the connection between religion and the environment.
[1:05] Speaker 3: That's not a scientific argument, that's almost that's a theological
[1:08] Speaker 3: argument or religious. I don't know what you do with that.
[1:12] Speaker 4: Those who are the most to lose from climate legislation
[1:14] Speaker 4: sat up and said, it's war. We have to do
[1:17] Speaker 4: everything we can to stop this thing.
[1:19] Speaker 5: The idea is that fossil fuels become part and partial
[1:24] Speaker 5: of progress, a good life, economic gain, and jobs.
[1:31] Speaker 1: Remember the IC campaigns we covered previously. That social influence
[1:36] Speaker 1: campaign began in the early nineteen nineties, and it aimed to,
[1:40] Speaker 1: as Kurt Davies put it, move people away from a
[1:43] Speaker 1: sense of urgency around climate. One way to do that
[1:46] Speaker 1: was to discredit climate science. The most extreme promoters of
[1:50] Speaker 1: climate denial claim that climate science shouldn't even be called
[1:53] Speaker 1: a science. Here's Steve Molloy, a drafter of the Victory
[1:57] Speaker 1: Memo and founder of the website Juncts Science, saying exactly that.
[2:01] Speaker 6: To me, climate size pretty quickly clinicized quotes or science
[2:07] Speaker 6: pretty quickly re yield itself to be also not science.
[2:13] Speaker 6: And you know, the agendas were clear from the beginning.
[2:20] Speaker 1: A great ally to oil companies and pushing this message
[2:23] Speaker 1: were the dozens of conservative talk shows that sprang up
[2:26] Speaker 1: in the nineteen nineties, and that happened because conservatives and
[2:30] Speaker 1: industry trade groups pushed the FEC to get rid of
[2:34] Speaker 1: the fairness doctrine. It was sort of the net neutrality
[2:38] Speaker 1: debate of the eighties. In nineteen eighty five, pushed by
[2:42] Speaker 1: industry lobbyists and various conservative groups, the Federal Communications Commission
[2:47] Speaker 1: revoked the fairness doctrine. It was a policy that had
[2:54] Speaker 1: been in place since the late nineteen forties. The Fairness
[2:57] Speaker 1: doctrine required broadcast license holders to both present controversial issues
[3:01] Speaker 1: of public importance and to do so in a manner
[3:04] Speaker 1: that was honest, equitable, and balanced. At least in the
[3:08] Speaker 1: FCC's view. It was the original fair and balanced news.
[3:13] Speaker 1: It wasn't a perfect policy, of course, who was fairly
[3:16] Speaker 1: arbitrary and almost impossible to enforce. Still, as soon as
[3:20] Speaker 1: it was revoked, we saw the rise of AM talk radio,
[3:23] Speaker 1: dominated by far right conservatives like Russian Limbaugh. Rush's show
[3:28] Speaker 1: was a favorite outlet for social influence campaigns. In fact,
[3:31] Speaker 1: it's in the IC campaign plan to advertise. Regularly in
[3:35] Speaker 1: his show, Rush would rile people up about liberal hoaxers
[3:39] Speaker 1: trying to use this made up global warming stuff to
[3:41] Speaker 1: stop American business, and they need to get them to
[3:44] Speaker 1: sign up for an information packet to learn more, at
[3:47] Speaker 1: which point the various oil companies and coal companies funding
[3:50] Speaker 1: the IC or other types of campaigns would send out
[3:53] Speaker 1: essentially propaganda to these listeners.
[3:56] Speaker 7: Now this message from the EIB Department of Protection from Environmentalists.
[4:00] Speaker 8: Enough of this bad press EIB is getting for what
[4:03] Speaker 8: misguided kami libs are calling our anti species position. Even
[4:07] Speaker 8: nowlies and gentlemen, are scientists are in the field studying
[4:10] Speaker 8: the mating habits of a rare species because we care
[4:13] Speaker 8: about preservation. This rare species is the Arkansas broadbeam.
[4:18] Speaker 9: Sh listen, listen to their meeting calls.
[4:22] Speaker 10: You can hear them.
[4:23] Speaker 8: Now as you have plainly heard, ladies and gentlemen. Environmentalists
[4:33] Speaker 8: of the Limbo Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies have unearthed
[4:37] Speaker 8: this amazing discovery, the mating habit of the Arkansas broadbeam.
[4:41] Speaker 8: It happens every four years. It roughly corresponds to that
[4:45] Speaker 8: period from the day after the Democratic Convention to the
[4:49] Speaker 8: evening before election day.
[4:53] Speaker 3: As a public service from the EIB Department of Protection
[4:55] Speaker 3: from Environmentalists.
[4:56] Speaker 8: By the way, the sound that we've used to identify
[4:59] Speaker 8: the art ark broadbeam gentlemen gears the laughter of Hillary Clinton.
[5:07] Speaker 1: Hear that misguided commie libs bit at the beginning there
[5:11] Speaker 1: if that sounds a lot like the part in the
[5:12] Speaker 1: Victory memo where fossil fuel industry groups and oil companies
[5:16] Speaker 1: wrote that their goal was to make people who believe
[5:19] Speaker 1: we need to act on climate change seem quote out
[5:22] Speaker 1: of touch with reality. That's no coincidence. It was a
[5:26] Speaker 1: key talking point for oil company funded campaigns. A key
[5:30] Speaker 1: target of the IC campaigns played into this too. Their
[5:34] Speaker 1: strategy documents cite older, less educated men as a choice
[5:38] Speaker 1: demographic for anti climate science campaigns. That target turned out
[5:42] Speaker 1: to be right on. This group ate up the messaging
[5:45] Speaker 1: around climate denial and were easily mobilized by conspiracy theories.
[5:49] Speaker 1: To this day, the vast majority of climate deniers fit
[5:52] Speaker 1: this demographic.
[5:54] Speaker 4: There's a lot of research that has actually showed there
[5:56] Speaker 4: is a strong getor component to rejecting climate science, the
[6:00] Speaker 4: majority of men.
[6:01] Speaker 1: That's climate scientist Catherine Hayhoe again noting that the vast
[6:05] Speaker 1: majority of climate deniers are men. That's not just from
[6:09] Speaker 1: the anecdotal evidence of who tends to harass her. It's
[6:12] Speaker 1: also backed by multiple studies. One from Michigan State University
[6:17] Speaker 1: sociologist Aaron mcwright and Oklahoma State University sociologist Riley Dunlap
[6:22] Speaker 1: looked at public opinion polls from two thousand and one
[6:25] Speaker 1: to twenty eleven and found that white conservative men in
[6:28] Speaker 1: particular are far more likely to be climate denialists than
[6:32] Speaker 1: any other type of American, and those who identify as
[6:35] Speaker 1: having a great understanding of climate science are even more likely.
[6:39] Speaker 1: There's that perfect mix of denialism with just enough actual
[6:43] Speaker 1: science that the oil companies perfected in the nineteen nineties.
[6:47] Speaker 1: These campaigns got people fired up and fed into a
[6:49] Speaker 1: desire to avoid the complexities of dealing with climate change.
[6:53] Speaker 1: Cycle of outrage and the linking of conservative identity to
[6:57] Speaker 1: it carried into the creation of Fox News in the
[6:59] Speaker 1: mid nineteen nineties, which brought more of the same. It
[7:02] Speaker 1: seems normal to us now, but just listen to the
[7:04] Speaker 1: difference between this Walter Cronkite in the eighties.
[7:08] Speaker 11: There's another warning today about the greenhouse effect That build
[7:11] Speaker 11: up of carbon dioxide scientists fear could create a global
[7:14] Speaker 11: warm up. Energy department consultants say future cold use by
[7:18] Speaker 11: the United States, China, and the Soviet Union could create
[7:21] Speaker 11: an impact beyond human experience, creating average surface temperatures likely
[7:26] Speaker 11: to be warmer than at any time during the last
[7:29] Speaker 11: one hundred thousand years. Because some regions would benefit from
[7:33] Speaker 11: the greenhouse effect, the report warns climate changes could pit
[7:37] Speaker 11: nation against nation and group against group. The report calls
[7:41] Speaker 11: for continuing study of the greenhouse.
[7:43] Speaker 1: Effect, and this rush Limbaugh just a few years later.
[7:47] Speaker 12: This is not the first kind of the story we've had.
[7:50] Speaker 12: We've had numerous stories in recent years.
[7:51] Speaker 9: About expedition stan at Arctica to study climate change, in
[7:56] Speaker 9: global warming, getting stuck in ice so thick that icebreakers
[8:02] Speaker 9: couldn't even reach them, and they were shocked, and they
[8:05] Speaker 9: were stunned.
[8:06] Speaker 12: They believe their own nonsense that the ice at the
[8:09] Speaker 12: North and South Pauls is melting when it's not, it's
[8:11] Speaker 12: getting bigger.
[8:13] Speaker 1: By the early two thousands, not believing in climate change
[8:17] Speaker 1: was a key part of the conservative identity. After more
[8:21] Speaker 1: than a decade of social influence campaigns, a large number
[8:24] Speaker 1: of people had been convinced that climate science was really
[8:27] Speaker 1: just an ideology that you either believe in or not.
[8:30] Speaker 1: Never mind that the same people funding. Those campaigns had
[8:33] Speaker 1: acknowledged the scientific consensus on global warming several years earlier,
[8:38] Speaker 1: but keeping people outraged about science is no easy feat,
[8:42] Speaker 1: and so climate scientists and environmental groups became targets. Here's
[8:47] Speaker 1: environmental sociologist Bob Bruligan.
[8:50] Speaker 5: It's a matter of trying to what they called have interactions,
[8:55] Speaker 5: fruitful interactions and partnerships with environmental organizations, bringing the environmental
[9:01] Speaker 5: groups inside of the tent, making them feel as if
[9:03] Speaker 5: they have power, and in the process they become compromised
[9:07] Speaker 5: to lower their expectations of demands and become tamed. On
[9:12] Speaker 5: the other hand, those organizations that can't be brought into
[9:16] Speaker 5: the tent and co opted are subjected to harassment campaigns,
[9:22] Speaker 5: and that there are public relations companies that specialize in
[9:26] Speaker 5: going through the trash cans of environmental groups and engaging
[9:30] Speaker 5: in harassing activities of environmental groups.
[9:34] Speaker 1: The smear campaigns reached their peak around the Global Climate
[9:37] Speaker 1: Summit in Copenhagen in two thousand nine. Climate scientist Catherine
[9:41] Speaker 1: Hahoe says efforts ramped up around Copenhagen. In fact, she
[9:45] Speaker 1: cites it as an inflection point similar to James Hansen's
[9:48] Speaker 1: testimony in nineteen eighty eight and the pushback around Kyoto
[9:51] Speaker 1: in the late nineteen nineties.
[9:53] Speaker 4: Her starting in nineteen eighty eight, they had our mobilized
[9:57] Speaker 4: if AFA field to see the coachbeathers of those tink
[10:01] Speaker 4: tanks and for dark money funded organizations. They had already
[10:05] Speaker 4: mobilized the extent that when Kyoto came along, they knew
[10:09] Speaker 4: what to do and it was dead in the water
[10:12] Speaker 4: before it came home. But then with Copenhagen, they had
[10:15] Speaker 4: Obama and so they're like, oh, oh, you know, this
[10:17] Speaker 4: guy can actually make something happen. We don't have a
[10:20] Speaker 4: Republican president. So they had to really pull out the stops.
[10:23] Speaker 4: And when I say they, it was not just the US,
[10:25] Speaker 4: I mean the emails that were hacked from the scientists,
[10:28] Speaker 4: you know, that home kind of climate gate thing, that
[10:30] Speaker 4: was directly in preparation for Copenhagen, and it likely came
[10:36] Speaker 4: from the Russians. I mean, there's no defend an answer yet,
[10:39] Speaker 4: but it's more than likely if you had to pick
[10:41] Speaker 4: a country or be the Russians.
[10:43] Speaker 1: The climate gate scandal involved the hacking of several scientists emails,
[10:47] Speaker 1: pieces of which were then released and linked together to
[10:50] Speaker 1: make normal back and forth between scientists sound like some
[10:53] Speaker 1: sort of nefarious plot to mislead the public. It kicked
[10:57] Speaker 1: off a wave of harassment, and scientists with no experience
[11:00] Speaker 1: with the limelight had their personal lives, mind exploited and upended,
[11:04] Speaker 1: all in an effort to discredit their field. Like the
[11:09] Speaker 1: industry backed media strategies, these cultural campaigns focused on influencing
[11:14] Speaker 1: the influencers. In addition to pushing anti regulation or climate
[11:19] Speaker 1: denihilist rhetoric, these campaigns also relied heavily on pro oil propaganda.
[11:24] Speaker 1: Here's Bob Brule on that.
[11:26] Speaker 5: Literally. Since after World War Two, the fossil fuel companies
[11:32] Speaker 5: have actively engaged in public relations campaigns to sell the
[11:37] Speaker 5: automobile and fossil fuels as the American way of life
[11:41] Speaker 5: and as the good life. And the idea is that
[11:45] Speaker 5: fossil fuels become part and partial of progress, the good life,
[11:52] Speaker 5: economic gain and jobs. And I have a published report
[11:58] Speaker 5: for Mobile that talks about how they ceded the collective
[12:02] Speaker 5: unconsciousness with these ideas.
[12:05] Speaker 1: While the pro oil propaganda had been going on since
[12:08] Speaker 1: Standard oil first worked on cleaning up its reputation in
[12:11] Speaker 1: the early nineteen hundreds, the eighties and nineties brought with
[12:14] Speaker 1: them a new context. Reagan was the conservative answer to
[12:18] Speaker 1: the nineteen sixties social justice movements, and the backlash he
[12:22] Speaker 1: brought with him was no accident. Conservatives had begun mobilizing
[12:26] Speaker 1: on the war of ideas amid the nineteen sixties protests,
[12:29] Speaker 1: so by the time Reagan was elected in nineteen eighty
[12:32] Speaker 1: they were in prime position to capitalize on a republican government.
[12:36] Speaker 1: New conservative think tanks, many of them funded by fossil
[12:39] Speaker 1: fuel interests, including Exon Coke Industries and Peabody Coal, emerged
[12:43] Speaker 1: in the early nineteen eighties, and they behaved very differently
[12:47] Speaker 1: than the mainstream think tanks, most of which were started
[12:49] Speaker 1: by progressives in the early twentieth century. In the same
[12:52] Speaker 1: way that the new conservative media was bloated and angry
[12:56] Speaker 1: where its predecessors had been straightforward and calm, this new
[12:59] Speaker 1: breed of the think tank was aggressive and opinionated, where
[13:02] Speaker 1: the established think tanks had tended to be more scholarly
[13:05] Speaker 1: and measured. I recently interviewed Ken Caldera, a long time
[13:09] Speaker 1: software programmer turned atmospheric scientists and one of the first
[13:12] Speaker 1: guys to get into geoengineering a while back when it
[13:15] Speaker 1: comes to science. He says he likes to be the
[13:17] Speaker 1: first at the party and the first to leave. But
[13:20] Speaker 1: he's been thinking a lot about whether and how science
[13:22] Speaker 1: contributes to social change.
[13:25] Speaker 13: You know, I don't understand how social change happens when
[13:30] Speaker 13: it challenges the interests of a well entrenched and powerful minority.
[13:37] Speaker 13: And I mean, it seems to me that that's the
[13:39] Speaker 13: central question of how that happens. And it's not climate sciences,
[13:45] Speaker 13: its political strategy.
[13:47] Speaker 1: If you want to understand how to drive rapid social change,
[13:51] Speaker 1: looking at the conservative movement from the nineteen sixties to
[13:54] Speaker 1: today is a great place to start, and a big
[13:57] Speaker 1: part of that movement has been to quash environmental initiation.
[14:01] Speaker 1: One of its biggest successes has been to stop any
[14:04] Speaker 1: real action on climate change. In addition to the think
[14:08] Speaker 1: tanks and various messaging efforts, an increased push was made
[14:11] Speaker 1: to tie conservative policies to religion during this timeframe too,
[14:15] Speaker 1: and climate change was a perfect issue for this strategy.
[14:20] Speaker 1: While early conservative environmentalists had used religion and a biblical
[14:24] Speaker 1: calling to be stewards of the planet as a reason
[14:27] Speaker 1: to protect the environment, in the eighties and nineties, the
[14:31] Speaker 1: religious argument changed in keeping with the whole manifest destiny idea.
[14:36] Speaker 1: That prevailing argument in conservative circles became that God had
[14:39] Speaker 1: given us oil and coal and that we're meant to
[14:42] Speaker 1: use it. Here's our document guy Kurt Davies on that.
[14:45] Speaker 3: The most outlandish quote on this is Fred Palmer, who
[14:49] Speaker 3: was at Peabody Coal eventually, but was part of the
[14:52] Speaker 3: Ice campaign. He was one of the chair of the
[14:55] Speaker 3: Ice campaign. He's recorded in the late nineties via television
[14:59] Speaker 3: crew from me US Europe, and he says, when you
[15:03] Speaker 3: step on the accelerator, you're doing the work of the Lord.
[15:06] Speaker 3: This is God's plan to put the carbon dioxide in
[15:08] Speaker 3: the atmosphere. And basically that he says that today he's
[15:12] Speaker 3: at Heartland Institute now and there are a number of
[15:14] Speaker 3: them that believe full hearted. This is not deception. This
[15:19] Speaker 3: is not like the paid tobacco sciences. They believe that
[15:23] Speaker 3: oil and coal were put here in the United States
[15:27] Speaker 3: by God for us to use. And I don't know
[15:30] Speaker 3: how you that's not a scientific argument, that's almost that's
[15:34] Speaker 3: a theological argument or you know, religious. I don't know
[15:37] Speaker 3: what you do with that.
[15:38] Speaker 1: And here's that documentary he mentioned.
[15:42] Speaker 10: You're doing God's work every time you turn your car
[15:46] Speaker 10: on and you burn fossil fuels and you put CO
[15:48] Speaker 10: two in the.
[15:48] Speaker 3: Ear, you're doing the work of the Lord.
[15:50] Speaker 10: Absolutely, that's the system, that's the ecological system we live in.
[15:57] Speaker 1: Really solidifying this ideology in those minds would require not
[16:01] Speaker 1: just media and cultural influence, though Exxon, the American Petroleum Institute,
[16:07] Speaker 1: the Koch brothers and their ILK would also need to
[16:09] Speaker 1: get at the research and regulatory institutions with power. The
[16:13] Speaker 1: links they've gone to are pretty shocking, and we've got
[16:17] Speaker 1: some never before published information on how entrenched these companies are,
[16:21] Speaker 1: from even county level politics on up to the nation's
[16:24] Speaker 1: most prestigious universities. More on that in the next episode.
[16:31] Speaker 7: Next time on Drilled, they find just the right person
[16:35] Speaker 7: who goes to the Judges country Club, someone who knows
[16:40] Speaker 7: his brother, and they wait until the right period of
[16:44] Speaker 7: time and then they make the approach.
[16:49] Speaker 1: Drilled is produced and distributed by Critical Frequency. Reporting for
[16:54] Speaker 1: this series was done by me Amy Westervelt. Our producer
[16:58] Speaker 1: and composer is David Wan. Our executive producer is Richard Wiles.
[17:03] Speaker 1: Our story and concept consultant was Raka Murphy. Our cover
[17:07] Speaker 1: art was designed by Lucas Lisakowski. You can find Drilled
[17:11] Speaker 1: wherever you listen to podcasts. Please remember to rate and
[17:14] Speaker 1: review the podcast. It helps us find new listeners. Thanks
[17:17] Speaker 1: for listening, See you next time.

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