Big Oil would like to 'Thank you for smoking'
Here’s a great report from the American News Project that looks at how Big Oil’s slick marketing campain has helped stall global warming legislation. From ANP:
Recently, it was reported that the rate of carbon dioxide emission during the last seven years exceeded even the IPCC’s worst-case scenario. Both Barack Obama and John McCain have offered their support to global warming legislation in the past, but climate legislation continues to stall, as it has for more than a decade. Why? In large part, because of an expensive, prolonged propaganda campaign waged by producers of big oil. And what did they look to for inspiration? Big tobacco.
You can see the video report, which interviews Public Citizen’s Energy Program Director Tyson Slocum, here. The report, “Global Warming: Heated Denials” by Lisa Chiu, can be found on The Center for Public Integrity’s Web site. Chiu writes:
The roots of organized skepticism about global warming date to the late 1980s, when the issue first began to garner regular headlines. The American Petroleum Institute, ExxonMobil, and other energy and automotive companies formed the now defunct industry lobbying group, the Global Climate Coalition, in 1989 to organize contrarian scientists to speak about uncertainty in climate science.
“The scientists who worked for the tobacco companies, who cut their teeth on these secondhand smoke studies, are now working for chemical producers, for the oil companies, [and] the coal companies,” said David Michaels, professor of environmental and occupational health at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and author of Doubt Is Their Product: How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health.