Internal documents from the major fossil fuel companies— including BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, Peabody Energy, and Shell—reveal an irrefutable story: for nearly three decades, as the scientific evidence concerning climate change became overwhelmingly clear, these companies and their allies developed or participated in campaigns to deliberately sow confusion and block action to address global warming.

This report presents the most complete and up-to-date collection yet available of this deception campaign through seven dossiers—collections containing some 85 internal company and trade association documents that have either been leaked to the public, come to light through lawsuits, or been disclosed through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. The evidence demonstrates that the world’s largest fossil fuel companies knew the reality about the harm their products were causing since 1988; their own scientists warned 20 years ago in an internal memo that human caused global warming “cannot be denied.” And yet the deception campaign continued, with documents revealing secret funding of purportedly independent scientists, internal strategy memos outlining intentional misinformation campaigns, and even evidence of the use of forged letters to members of Congress.

During this same time period since 1988—after major fossil fuel companies indisputably knew about the harm their products were causing to people and the planet—more than half of all industrial carbon emissions have been released into the atmosphere.

Deception Dossier 2: American Petroleum Institute’s “Roadmap” Memo

Among the most revelatory documents to have emerged about the fossil fuel companies’ campaign of deception is an internal strategy document written in 1998, a roadmap memo outlining the fossil fuel industry’s plan to use scientists as spokespersons for the industry’s views [see Fig.1]. The memo was written by a team convened by the API [American Petroleum Institute], the country’s largest oil trade association whose member companies include BP, ConocoPhillips, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Shell. The innocuously titled “Global Climate Science Communications Plan,” written with the direct involvement of fossil fuel companies including ExxonMobil (then Exxon) and Chevron, details a plan for dealing with climate change that explicitly aimed to confuse and misinform the public.

Articulating an Accurate Understanding of Climate Science

The API’s Global Climate Science Communications Team consisted of representatives from the fossil fuel industry, trade associations, and public relations firms. At the time, the team’s attention was focused on derailing the Kyoto Protocol—the international agreement committing participating countries to binding emissions reductions—that had been adopted by the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in December 1997. In response to this development, and to stave off approval of the treaty by the U.S. Senate and other climate action in the United States, the API team’s 1998 memo mapped out a multifaceted deception strategy for the fossil fuel industry that continues to this day—outlining plans to reach the media, the public, and policy makers with a message emphasizing “uncertainties” in climate science.

According to the memo [see Fig.1], “victory” would be achieved for the campaign when “average citizens” and the media were convinced of “uncertainties” in climate science despite overwhelming evidence of the impact of human-caused global warming and nearly unanimous agreement about it in the scientific community.

The timing of this document—1998—is important to note, as an earlier internal memo from 1995 shows that Mobil’s own climate scientist had informed the industry that global warming was undeniable. . . . Thus, this memo cannot be interpreted as a legitimate call for “balance” in the understanding of climate change.

In fact, the words eerily echo the strategy developed and implemented by the large tobacco companies to deceive the public about the hazards of smoking and to forestall governmental controls on tobacco consumption. As an infamous internal memo from the Brown and Williamson tobacco company put it: “Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the minds of the general public.”

The fossil fuel companies, mimicking the tobacco companies, adopted a strategy that sought to “manufacture uncertainty” about global warming even in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence that it is human-caused, is accelerating at an alarming rate, and poses myriad public health and environmental dangers. The fossil fuel industry not only took a page from the tobacco playbook in its efforts to defeat action on climate change, it even drew upon a number of the key players who had contributed to the tobacco industry’s deception campaign and a remarkably similar network of public relations firms and nonprofit “front groups,” some of whom continue to actively sow disinformation about global warming today.

Identifying, Recruiting, and Training Undercover Scientists

Given that scientists are a trusted source of information for policy makers and the public, it is not surprising that the API roadmap memo calls for cultivating and deploying them. Importantly, the API’s communication team realized that scientists seen as spokespeople for the fossil fuel industry would lack credibility. They aimed to “identify, recruit and train a team of five independent scientists to participate in media outreach,” and their deception depended on ensuring that these scientists’ financial ties to the fossil fuel industry remained hidden from the public—precisely the arrangement they ultimately made with Dr. Wei-Hock Soon. . . . According to the leaked memo, “These will be individuals who do not have a long history of visibility and/or participation in the climate change debate. Rather, this team will consist of new faces who will add their voices to those recognized scientists who are already vocal.”

While the funding of the hand-selected scientists was to remain secret, their intended mission was clear: Exxon, Chevron, and the other fossil fuel industry representatives needed these scientists to produce “peer-reviewed papers that undercut the ‘conventional wisdom’ on climate science.” They intended to fund and train the scientists to get their crafted message of uncertainty out to print, radio, and TV journalists.

Targeting Teachers and Students

Another section of the API roadmap memo outlines a plan to target the National Science Teachers Association. Exxon, Chevron, and the other Global Climate Science Communications Team members recognized that the tide might turn against fossil fuels unless they could reach the next generation. So, under the guise of “present[ing] a credible, balanced picture of climate science,” they opted to push out materials for teachers and their students that directly countered the scientific evidence. As the memo explains, their assumption was that emphasizing “uncertainties in climate science will begin to erect a barrier against further efforts to impose Kyoto-like measures in the future.” The leaked memo also outlines a tactic of working through grassroots organizations to promote debate about climate science on campuses and in communities during the period mid-August through October 1998. In the years since this memo, many of the activities outlined in the memo have been carried out, as evidenced by the API’s online curriculum for elementary schools that presents nonrenewable energy sources such as oil, natural gas, and coal, as “more reliable, affordable, and convenient to use than most renewable energy resources.”

Fossil Fuel Company Involvement: Direct and Indirect

Fossil fuel companies contributed to the campaign indirectly, through their membership in and funding of the API, and directly, through the participation of their own employees. Joseph Walker of the API facilitated the process, and the largest fossil fuel companies were implicated in this memo. BP, ConocoPhillips, and Shell were members of the API at the time. Along with ExxonMobil and Chevron, all these firms remain API members today. Exxon and Chevron contributed directly to the development of the plan through their representatives Randy [Arthur G.] Randol and Sharon Kneiss, respectively. Exxon, Chevron, and Occidental Petroleum also exerted influence through a team member, Steve Milloy, who was the executive director of a front group, called The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, funded by these companies. (Milloy had previously aided tobacco firms with their deception campaign.) BP and Shell, among other fossil fuel companies, indirectly supported this deception campaign via their API memberships. It is noteworthy that these companies began to publicly acknowledge the threat of climate change around this time. Shell, for example, publicly acknowledged in its 1998 corporate sustainability report that rising global temperatures were “possibly due in part to greenhouse gas emissions caused by human activity.” The report also noted that “human activities, especially the use of fossil fuels, may be influencing the climate, according to many scientists, including those who make up the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.” Despite such comments, however, fossil fuel companies’ broader campaign to sow confusion continued.

Funding the Campaign

The fossil fuel companies knew that a disinformation campaign of the scope they intended would not be cheap. The Global Climate Science Communications Team estimated the budget for the program at $5,900,000, which included a national media program and national outreach as well as a data center. The roadmap identified an array of fossil fuel industry trade associations and front groups, fossil fuel companies, and free-market think tanks to underwrite and execute the plan, including:

The API Today: Still Fueling Uncertainty

The trade association continues its misinformation efforts today. For instance, since October 2002, the API has carried out its plan to distribute curriculum materials that question the established science through the National Science Teachers Association by maintaining the website Classroom Energy!, which offers lesson plans and materials for teachers of kindergarten through high school. Additionally, the API funded now well-known contrarian scientists such as Wei-Hock Soon, whose work sought to discredit the scientific evidence of human-caused climate change. In 2009, the API attempted to undermine the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009— often known as the Waxman-Markey climate bill and a key federal attempt to regulate carbon emissions—by mobilizing front groups to hold staged “energy citizens” rallies in roughly 20 states, rallies designed to suggest that there was significant public opposition to regulating carbon emissions where little actually existed. An API memo leaked to Greenpeace reveals that API urged fossil fuel company executives, including from BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Shell, to send their employees to the staged rallies.

More recently, in 2011, the API protested the EPA’s decision to regulate carbon pollution under the Clean Air Act, joining a coalition of industry groups to file a lawsuit challenging the EPA’s authority to regulate global warming emissions. The API’s lawsuit challenged the EPA on the grounds of the very doubts about climate science the trade group had worked for years to manufacture, stating that the “EPA professes to be 90–99% certain that anthropogenic emissions are mostly responsible for ‘unusually high current planetary temperatures,’ but the record does not remotely support this level of certainty.”

Source: Union of Concerned Scientists, The Climate Deception Dossiers: Internal Fossil Fuel Industry Memos Reveal Decades of Corporate Disinformation, July 2015, pp. 48, 9-12, and 38.