Let me answer this obviously rhetorical question right up front: as an industry fossil fuels is a goddam liar.

This conclusion isn’t a matter of cherry-picking information. Various internal documents—hell, even entire departments—from fossil fuel corporations themselves have emerged as matters of record, and those documents, ranging from 1960s timeframes through 1970s and later, report these corporate scientists’ own words about the relationship between fossil fuel combustion and greenhouse gas global warming.

On this matter, I’ve included several articles worth reading, especially if you like to lose sleep. The first article, “Tracing Big Oil’s PR war to delay action on climate change,” comes from Harvard Review’s September 28, 2021, edition, by Alvin Powell. A couple of damning quotes from an interview with Geoffrey Supran, a research fellow in the History of Science, who, together with Naomi Oreskes, the Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science, published a series of studies in recent years, the most recent one in May 2021, on the climate communications of ExxonMobil.

…behind closed doors and in academic circles, Exxon has known that its products would likely cause dangerous global warming since at least the 1970s. By way of its trade association, the American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry as a whole has been on notice even longer — since the 1950s.

…

In 2017, our research was the first peer-reviewed analysis of ExxonMobil’s 40-year history of climate-change communications. And what we discovered was that there were systematic discrepancies between, on the one hand, what Exxon and ExxonMobil scientists said about climate-science privately and in academic circles, versus what Exxon, Mobil, and ExxonMobil said to the general public in The New York Times and elsewhere. That analysis showed that ExxonMobil misled the public about basic climate science and its implications. They did so by contributing quietly to climate science, and loudly to promoting doubt about that science.

If you like your history in quickly scanned timeline form, try “Exxon’s Climate Denial History: A Timeline,” from Greenpeace website, with (unfortunately) no author attribution, because I’d like to send the writer a thank you note; also weirdly, for an article that is a timeline, there is no publication date, but I’m assuming this because the kind of bullshitting covered (ew) is ongoing and regularly updated, except that the last date in the timeline is toward the end of 2016. Care to hazard a guess as to how much farther down you’d have to scroll if this timeline was brought current?

A study [November 23 and 30, 2015] in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds that organizations that received funding from corporations like Exxon were more likely to argue against climate change science than organizations that did not receive such funding. Another study in Nature Climate Change finds that climate-denying organizations funded by Exxon and the Koch brothers are the most successful at inserting climate denialism into media stories.

If you are more graphically inclined you might enjoy a pictorial piece in The Guardian titled “The forgotten oil ads that told us climate change was nothing,” by above-mentioned Geoffrey Supran, along with Naomi Oreskes, published on November 18, 2021. The first ad shown is a two-page, four-color spread in Life Magazine from 1962. The ad shows glaciers, with the headline “Each day Humble [Exxon pre-cursor corporation] supplies enough energy to melt 7 million tons of glacier!” Here is the accompanying editorial text by the authors (emphasis theirs):

The truth behind the ad: Three years earlier, in 1959, America’s oil bosses had been warned that burning fossil fuels could lead to global heating “sufficient to melt the icecap and submerge New York”.

Their knowledge only grew. A 1979 internal Exxon study warned of “dramatic environmental effects” before 2050. “By the late 1970s”, a former Exxon scientist recently recalled, “global warming was no longer speculative”.’

How about an NPR report from February 18, 2023, titled “An activist group is spreading misinformation to stop solar projects in rural America,” airing on February 18, 2023 (at 8:41 PM ET, if you must know), by Miranda Green, Michael Copley, and Ryan Kellman. The article’s set-up is a farmer in Shenandoah Valley agreeing to lease land for a solar farm. Here is what happened next:

But soon after he got the offer, organized opposition began a four-year battle against solar development in the county. A group of locals eventually joined forces with a nonprofit called Citizens for Responsible Solar to stop the project on Houser’s land and pass restrictions effectively banning big solar plants from being built in the area.

Well, big deal, just NIMBY, right?

But what is Citizens for Responsible Solar? Here are some quotes from this article:

Citizens for Responsible Solar was founded in an exurb of Washington, D.C., by a longtime political operative named Susan Ralston who worked in the White House under President George W. Bush and still has deep ties to power players in conservative politics.

…

…when Ralston was launching the group, a consulting firm she owns got hundreds of thousands of dollars from the foundation of a leading GOP donor who is also a major investor in fossil fuel companies.

Is there a smoking gun? Maybe not, but that’s how dark money works, and if you don’t have a good idea of how dark money plays in today’s America, try listening to some speeches—many speeches, actually—from the floor of the U. S. Senate, by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D) RI. He outlines and names names involved in a scheme of hard-right billionaires and corporations to capture the Supreme Court. It’s fascinating stuff (and easily accessed on YouTube, via C-Span), and a central actor named is Leonard Leo. Leo shows up in connection to Citizens for Responsible Solar:

When there’s official paperwork that has to get to Citizens for Responsible Solar, it goes through a firm created by a lawyer named Jason Torchinsky. The same firm has been the registered agent for at least two dozen conservative organizations based in Virginia. One of them was a voter-focused group headed by Leonard Leo, who helped remake the federal judiciary through the Federalist Society.

…

Torchinsky has worked as a lawyer for Americans for Prosperity, an influential activist group that promotes conservative causes. And he’s represented the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), an association of companies and Republican state legislators that has engineered and spread anti-climate messaging and draft legislation.

…

And Ralston’s consulting firm, SBR Enterprises, got almost $300,000 from The Paul E. Singer Foundation between 2018 and late 2020 — the period when she was setting up Citizens for Responsible Solar. Paul Singer, the foundation’s president, is chairman of the Manhattan Institute, a think tank that has criticized government support of renewable energy. His investment firm, Elliott Management, is the largest shareholder in the coal producer Peabody Energy Corp.

Fun, right? There’s a lot of coverage, although, thanks to a particularly self-serving interpretation of Citizen’s United, funders are obscured.

All the above is a fraction of the work bringing light to corporate disinformation about climate change, which is why I find it curious that Robert Bryce tries a rather nice turnabout, when he accuses Bill McKibben of lying about, well, there not being home-grown rural renewable energy opposition. Here’s that article’s title: “Bill McKibben’s Dishonest Claims About The Rural Backlash Against Renewables (And Me) In The New Yorker,” published December 29, 2022, and which carries the deck “In which McKibben repeats the fiction that rural Americans are opposing big renewable projects because of ‘front groups’.” (Hey, is it a legal requirement to use deck lines with articles on Substack? Just curious.)

Now I am pretty sure there are homegrown opposition to many things, including, I can too easily imagine, my practicing the clarinet. Local opposition can be people that push back on EVs, just like those efforts to complain and protest against wind farms or solar farms or regulations that drop gas appliances from new construction codes, which, by the way, I’m pretty sure is not the work of One-World conspiracies or the mark of Satan. However, I am very sure that many so-called grassroots protests along these lines are indeed supported by fossil fuel groups, and I believe it because there is compelling track records and just plain old records of such entities doing such support. What argue, that there is no American Legislative Exchange Council going around writing laws for State legislatures on many Far Right agenda items?

Like right. Did I mention that the above-described Citizens for Responsible has exported its playbook to 12 states. I didn’t catch a total number of CSR local assists, but, hey, we can safely conclude there are at least a dozen. Somehow Bryce seems unaware of this sort of activity and he is not all that forthcoming about the piling evidence about Big Oil’s nefarious withholdings of information about fossil fuel’s connection to greenhouse gases and climate change and such mis-directions regarding an crisis that literally threatens human culture. But let’s not let the future interfere with next quarter’s profits.

Bryce’s conclusions about McKibben is almost like that Shakespeare quote “The lady doth protest too much, methinks,” from Hamlet, and you can change gender as you see fit to fit this application.

Whether rural communities, about which Bryce “compil[es] data on the communities that have rejected or restricted wind projects in an Excel spreadsheet” and is “one of the only reporters in America covering this beat” come to resist such projects, that can mean any number of things, including, as I’ve discovered as my years tick by, the common response to change being “No.” Even if some of these nay-sayers to renewable projects are home grown, this doesn’t mean they’ve no access to the disinformation out there or have somehow escaped exposure to it. There are plenty of books now in print about the impressive use of disinformation by businesses, including case studies of how Big Tobacco spent decades helping people make bad choices and dying, basically by lying. Some of the experts from that effort have long ago found their way to the service of Big Oil, big surprise.

If Bryce is making the argument that disinformation is widely used in our corruption-soaked world, he’ll get no argument from me, except, well, business has been at this far longer, and is better funded, than such efforts that may exist on the climate change progress side. Saying that “They do it, too,” is, as a false equivalent, itself a nice piece of misinformation.

Bryce writes, “But there’s a problem: McKibben doesn’t provide the name of a single ‘front group’ involved in this nefarious activity.” Not much of a problem, really, other than the FUBAR nature of Citizen’s United, which is sleight of hand on a grand scale when it comes to hiding money, which is why the term of art is “dark money.” Bryce concludes that “[t]he reason Norris and McKibben can’t name any front groups is obvious: there aren’t any,” although this is misleading, since the article isn’t about the general and widespread problem of astroturfing nor a directory of who is doing what. If you want that information, it is around, although—Citizen’s United again—in the shadows. You might want to check out the hearings Congress has held on the topic of fossil fuel’s complicity and trickery, or, maybe, look at academic research on the subject, such as the academic research cited earlier.

Bryce doesn’t bother linking to McKibben’s The New Yorker article (December 27, 2022), “From Climate Exhortation to Climate Execution: The Inflation Reduction Act finally offers a chance for widespread change.” If you read McKibben’s piece, you’ll see that it mentions local opposition to renewable projects and that these can be aided, influenced, or even lead by outside groups, but he doesn’t name names because the article is about the opportunity for expanding renewables projects because of the then just recently passed Inflation Reduction Act, and potential roadblocks to such projects get considered, but the biggest such is permitting problems and yes, permitting tends to happen at the local level too.

There’s even a correction at the end of The New Yorker article, as follows:

An earlier version of this article incorrectly outlined the North Carolina Utilities Commission’s role in renewable capping, incorrectly named Robert Bryce’s database, and misattributed a statement about Bryce’s funding to Tyler Norris.

So, jeeesh. Bryce’s peevishness is curious. His writings are often iconoclastic, but not in interesting or helpful ways.

But, of course, don’t you know, what I really want is to get my hands on that dark money, and, of course, please, can I have some?

I just might become a Bryce fan.