How vested interests tried to turn the world against climate science

This The Guardian article discusses how vested interests tried to turn the world against climate science. For decades fossil fuel majors tried to fight the consensus – just as big tobacco once disputed that smoking kills.

In 1998 a public relations consultant called Joe Walker wrote to the American Petroleum Institute (API), a trade association representing major fossil fuel companies, with a proposed solution to a big problem.

In December the previous year, the UN had adopted the Kyoto protocol, an international treaty that committed signatory countries to reducing their greenhouse gas emissions in order to avert catastrophic climate breakdown.

Reducing emissions represented a direct threat to the profits of fossil fuel companies and the API was working on an industry response.

“As promised, attached is the Global Climate Science Communications Plan that we developed during our workshop last Friday,” Walker wrote. The workshop had involved senior executives from fossil fuel companies, including the oil multinationals Exxon – later part of ExxonMobil – and Chevron, and the gas and coal utility Southern Company, and a handful of rightwing thinktanks.

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