Hosted and reported by climate journalist Amy Westervelt, DrilledNews.

Featuring: Naomi Oreskes, science historian at Harvard University; Marty Hoffert, a former Exxon consultant; Richard Werthamer, a former Exxon engineering executive; Morell Cohen, a former Exxon scientist; Ed Garvey, a former Exxon scientist; Noah Oppenheim, executive director for Pacific Coast Federation of Fisherman’s Associations ; and Bob Brulle, environmental sociology researcher at Brown University.

Previously on Drilled:

Marco Simons: They did such a good job that the public is more skeptical of climate change now than the oil companies.

Amy Westervelt: The world’s largest oil companies are embroiled in multiple lawsuits across the country and the globe at the moment. While the technicalities of these suits differ they’re all mostly about the same thing: These companies spent millions of dollars to manufacture doubt about climate change when they knew the science was sound. They knew it was sound because they funded a lot of it. They used the science to guide business decisions for themselves while paying PR agencies, front groups, and scientists for hire to tell everyone else it was bunk.

Naomi Oreskes: ExxonMobil posted on their Web site read the documents and so we did and they claimed that anyone who’d read these documents would see that they exonerated them. But in fact they didn’t at all. In fact if anything they painted a more distressing picture of how much Exxon knew about this problem scientifically and yet how much confusion they sowed in public about it.

Richard Werthamer: The mere fact that a climate modelling group was established, that the tanker project was funded, indicates that upper management felt this is a great idea and wanted to pursue it. Funded it. Then by about 82, the management changed.The issue was not were we going to have a problem. The issue was simply how soon and how fast and how bad was it going to be. Not if. Nobody At Exxon when I was there was discussing that.

Amy Westervelt: These influence campaigns were wildly successful. Climate change is here and its impacts are noticeable. It has intensified storms and wildfires to the extent that once rare natural disasters are happening every year. Those disasters are taking lives and some of those deaths have been directly linked to climate change.

In 2007 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change the IPCC estimated that 150,000 people per year were dying from climate change. That number has only risen in the decade since. As I talk into this mic, the death toll in California’s latest batch of catastrophic wildfires has reached 25 Entire communities have disappeared. Former Exxon consultant Marty Hoffert says he can’t help but see the oil industry’s fingerprints on that.

Marty Hoffert: Frankly it’s very depressing when I hear about the wildfires in California. Now some of those could be attributed to, I mean the climate. There’s no question that this is due to climate change and the warming of the oceans. Some of those could probably be attributed to Exxon’s product that became CO2 and went into the atmosphere. And that’s depressing.

Amy Westervelt: And since the argument is often made that it would be economically disastrous to act on climate, it’s worth noting that the impacts of climate change have cost billions of dollars in addition to lives lost. Scientists have calculated that $2 billion out of the $12 billion in losses caused by Superstorm Sandy can be laid at the feet of climate change, which raised sea levels and exacerbated storm surge.

In November, commercial crab fishermen along the West Coast came together under the Pacific Coast Federation of Fisherman’s Associations (PCFFA), the West Coast’s largest commercial fishing association, to file suit against 30 fossil fuel companies that they hold accountable for losses caused by four straight years of fisheries closures that have farmed crabbers, their families, their businesses, and local communities in California and Oregon. The key issue for crab fishermen is that warmer waters cause more algal blooms and those blooms release an acid called domoic acid. Domoic acid is a potent neurotoxin. So if it builds up in crabs, fishermen can’t fish those crabs and people can’t eat them. Here’s Noah Oppenheim, PCFFA‘s executive director, explaining the suit.

Noah Oppenheim: In 2015, testing of crabs pre-season showed that crabs were testing at far above safe levels for domoic acid, which is a potent neurotoxin produced by an algae in the ocean. It persists in warm temperatures and it shut down the fishery for five months. And it was devastating. It resulted in loss of opportunity. A lot of young fishermen who had just bought their boats and got their permits that year or the year before were just hung out to dry, absolutely stuck. And when the fishery was finally open, the damage was done. We saw tens of millions of dollars in losses. We’re expecting to see this as the new normal. Domoic acid is going to be an issue for this fishery and potentially others in the future. And the connection between carbon emisisons warming the oceans and domoic acid in our crabs is clear. Direct causal connection. So, when you have direct connection like that and you have a financial harm, we feel that the responsibility for ameliorating that harm lies not with fishermen and society but the companies and entitites that produced the problem in the first place.

Amy Westervelt: California’s ever-extending fire season saw the state burn through its annual budget for 2018—$442.8 million—by September. Fire agencies estimated they needed an additional $234 million to continue combating fires, and that was before yet another devastating complex of fires hit in November. If you want to talk to someone who knows for sure that climate change is happening, talk to a California firefighter. Here’s Cal Fire Chief Ken Pimlott on Good Morning L.A. earlier this year.

Ken Pimlott: It really is going to get worse. The last several years have just shown us every year it continues to progress and things are changing. If you ask career firefighters out on the fire line who’ve been doing this 30, 35 years, these are not the kinds of fires and weather conditions we were facing you know just a few decades ago. Climate change is real and it’s happening everywhere. We’re seeing again more intense fires fires are burning more rapidly and they’re getting larger. That 100000 acre or more fire used to be the exception to the rule. We might get one of those every few years. Now we’re getting multiple one hundred thousand acre fires each year.

Amy Westervelt: Last year Pimlott told me that one new thing that’s made firefighting harder is that it’s not getting reliably cooler and wetter at night anymore. Nighttime was historically when firefighters would get ahead of a fire. But recent data indicates that nights are warming faster than days. We’re seeing record-breaking natural disasters all the time now not just once a decade. And they do seem to be breaking through the noise a bit. It gets a lot harder to say climate change isn’t happening when people can see for themselves that heat waves are hotter and longer or that storms seem bigger and more regular than in decades past. In the last year or so, climate change has regularly made the covers of magazines and the front pages of newspapers as it did back in the 90s. And that’s a positive step forward because for decades the industry successfully blocked the first critical step toward taking action on climate: acknowledgement.

According to most of the literature on human psychology, in order to move past our general tendency to freeze when we’re facing huge and scary challenges or big losses is to acknowledge that the problem is there and that it’s tough to deal with.

Instead, the industry put the American public on a pathway to denial. They did so knowingly and with purpose. Hoffert says that’s what drove him to break ties with the company.

Marty Hoffert: I am not sure if I quit or was fired. There was a disagreement let’s put it this way when I first started working with Exxon I was pretty idealistic. I thought that if Exxon actually had the information on climate change and was up to speed with the researchers and the only way that that could happen would be to publish papers in the peer reviewed literature, so I kind of insisted on that as a condition of my consulting. And we did publish papers and they did develop a certain expertise. So but my thought was that based on that since we were in the research division that this would inform the management of directions that the company should go in. And I thought they should pursue alternative energy. And I thought that they would. That didn’t happen. They actually hired— it was probably not the same people hired us, the people like me were in the research division, I have a feeling the other guys were in public relations—and they were if they were funding climate change deniers. First of all I was, frankly, pissed that they were funding these climate change deniers because I didn’t think they had the credentials of scientists. None of these people had published peer review journal articles on climate science whereas we had. So there was an asymmetry here. I mean I can understand that companies want to put the nicest face on these things so you know that will have the least impact on their bottom line. But you know I didn’t think that was a good thing for them to do.

Amy Westervelt: One things I’ve heard from all of the former Exxon employees I spoke with is a sense of regret, of an opportunity lost.

Ed Garvey: I really think we had something at Exxon. Yeah OK we’re going to be an energy company and we recognize this problem and so we’re going to help direct the country away from fossil fuels and we’re standard just said well we just we just want to make money on oil and we don’t really care what happens. I mean it upsets me, I don’t know what else I can say. It was definitely a missed opportunity to lead.

Morrel Cohen: Exxon is attacked in this way because it cannot plead ignorance. All the other companies at least can plead ignorance but they cannot plead ignorance when it becomes generally scientifically accepted and it’s well known that they’re spending a great deal of money to misrepresent the science as being grossly uncertain.

Marty Hoffert: Of course the basic problem is that we’re still treating the atmosphere as an open sewer to dump CO2 into.

Amy Westervelt: Hoffert in particular says he and some of Exxon’s staff scientists tried to warn the company decades ago. He takes no comfort in being able to say I told you so.

Marty Hoffert: If they had listened to me, they would have instituted some research in alternative energy. They’re doing some of it now. They’re working on algae but they could have gotten started on electric batteries lithium batteries because they did the initial research on it. They could have been the ones to build the biggest battery plants in the world like Elon Musk is doing in Nevada now. This was way ahead of that.

Amy Westervelt: That didn’t happen and we’re behind now and the feat in front of us is that much harder. Not least because the United States currently has a president who regularly refers to climate change as a hoax.

Trump: Obama is talking about all of this with the global warming and that is a lot of it’s a hoax it’s a hoax. I mean it’s a money-making industry. OK? It’s a hoax.

Amy Westervelt: It’s important to acknowledge that that’s the result of an industry-backed, decades-long information war. Particularly as Exxon attempts to fight various climate liability suits with a First Amendment defense. The company has argued in Massachusetts, New York and now California that the fraud probes and liability cases against it infringe upon its rights to free speech. That argument hinges in large part on the notion they created that climate change and its impacts are political ideas to be argued about, not science to be acted upon.

Here’s a promotional video from the Competitive Enterprise Institute positioning the subsequent probes as infringing on free speech.

CEI video: No American should fear being singled out and harassed by a government official who takes a different point of view on public policy questions. President Obama’s Justice Department may be going after your business if he does not like the way you think about global warming. Democratic attorneys general for more than a dozen states fired off subpoenas seeking decades of records from climate change skeptics including the Competitive Enterprise Institute. What’s happened here is unlawful and it’s un-American. This is what happens when you can’t win a debate. They couldn’t pass it through Congress. So instead they’re imposing their agenda on everyone else. Our first reaction was Hell no. This thing is one unconstitutional fishing expedition. The real thing that thereafter is to shut down the global warming debate.

Amy Westervelt: The first of these suits, against Massachusetts and New York, is ongoing but hasn’t stopped the fraud probes from continuing or acting New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood from filing suit against Exxon for misleading shareholders about its actions on climate.

News report: New York’s attorney general has filed a lawsuit against Exxon Mobil alleging that the company defrauded shareholders by downplaying the expected risk of climate change.

Amy Westervelt: Holding the industry accountable for manufacturing climate denial isn’t about finding a bad guy or even strictly about justice. Although of course we love a good bad guy and they imagine lawyers like winning cases more than they like losing them. It’s about putting climate mail to rest once and for all and removing key obstacles to action. The IPCC has warned in its latest and most alarming report to date that we have roughly 12 years to keep climate change in check. Authors of that report called for urgent and unprecedented change.

And to accomplish that, we need systems and capital environmental sociologist Bob Brulle points out:.

Bob Brulle: The idea that we’re all responsible for climate change because of our individual decisions, is a profoundly un=sociological understanding of how behavior is formed through cultural influences and behavioral influences and economic factors. It’s blaming the victim for the real decisions that are made about how do we structure our cities, how do we how do we set energy policy, how do we set the costs of automobiles. Things like that. It obscures the power of vested interests to be able to shape our lives.

Amy Westervelt: The idea that companies deserve more protection than people. That, for example, Exxon’s desire to say whatever it wants about climate change is more important than the public’s need to understand the reality of the situation, is one that’s been repeated over and over again in recent decades. It’s become a cornerstone of conservatism. But It doesn’t need to be. Conservatives were once among the nation’s most ardent conservationists. It was only a few decades ago that conservatives backed policy aimed at dealing with global warming. To The extent that denying climate change has become part of the conservative identity, that was entirely manufactured by an industry trying to protect its earnings. It’s not an immutable truth.

And those unprecedented changes the IPCC has recommended? They’re not as far out of reach as they may feel. And radically changing the energy system may not be as radical as it sounds or as harmful to the “American way of life” as the oil industry has made it out to be the technology already exists to tackle climate change. The obstacle now is political will and catalyzing massive social change. But this country is not unfamiliar with massive social change. We’ve seen it every 20 or 40 years since the founding of the US which was in itself a pretty radical act. We might take heart in the words of Walter Munk, a 100-year-old oceanographer renowned for helping to invent the science of wave forecasting, which was critical to winning World War 2. He speaks often about how quickly things changed in order for the allies to win that war and draws parallels with acting on climate change. Here he is talking about that at Scripps Institute recently.

Walter Munk: And I hope we can all work effectively together to do something about it. It’s a job about as difficult or maybe more difficult than the one we faced beginning in1941. At that time we had no idea what we were going to do. And we changed from being in a very very difficult position to landing in Normandy in three and a half years. I’m still amazed at how quickly things changed.

Amy Westervelt: Things need to change that quickly again. And they can. The world is waking up again. The fossil fuel industry is reacting to both legal and public pressure. And politicians are finding that running on climate action is a winning strategy. As the country begins to acknowledge fully where we are and how we got here; as people begin to understand that it’s not our fault, but that we do hold more power to catalyze change than it may seem; as we break through the fear and grief and paralysis, we can change the tide and win the war.

Drilled is produced and distributed by Critical Frequency. The series was reported by me, Amy Westervelt. Our producer and composer is David Whited. Richard Wiles is our executive producer. Our story and concept development consultant is Rekha Murthy. Lucasz Lysakowski designed our cover art. Katie Ross, Michaelanne Petrella, and Julia Ritchie provided additional editing. Drilled is supported in part by a generous grant from the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development. You can find Drilled wherever you get your podcasts. Please remember to rate and review the Drilled podcast. It helps us find listeners. Thanks for listening.