Donald Trump’s pick of Rex Tillerson for Secretary of State sends a chilling message about the new administration’s commitment to addressing the challenges of a warming planet.

Who is Rex Tillerson? And why should he be asked to answer tough questions about climate change and climate-change denial at his confirmation hearing? As a life-long oil and gas man and an employee of ExxonMobil since 1975 and its CEO since 2006, Tillerson has worked for and then taken the helm of a company that has engaged for four decades in a deliberate, misleading, and well-financed public-relations campaign intended to hide what the company’s own internal climate studies concluded. ExxonMobil has been at the forefront of sowing doubt about the research and causes of climate change. It has been a major player in the effort to discredit the prevailing science and the scientists who engage in climate study. It has fought regulations intended to protect public health and security.

Let’s go back to those four decades of climate-change denial for a moment. The tragic impact of those lost decades of disinformation and suppression of scientific evidence cannot be overstated. During those years, the world lost the opportunity to address the challenges of climate change at an earlier stage by taking aggressive steps to limit fossil fuel consumption and devoting more time and money to research and develop renewable-energy technology that could have made the costs and large-scale conversion to clean energy more affordable. Lost, too, was the opportunity to mitigate, at that earlier stage, some of the most extreme of a warming planet’s destabilizing and destructive effects on the global community.

Tillerson’s public statements and personal history on climate change are mixed at best. After all, it wasn’t until 2007 – one year after Tillerson took the helm at ExxonMobil and forty years after the company had on record the conclusions from its own scientific studies that there was evidence of human-caused climate change—that ExxonMobil first disclosed to its shareholders the threat to future profitability that climate change would certainly pose.

Things might have turned out differently for ExxonMobil—one of America’s largest, wealthiest, and most internationally connected corporations. Beginning in 2004, the Rockefeller Family Fund, a large shareholder in ExxonMobil, tried—and  failed—to convince the company to officially acknowledge what the company’s own scientists had concluded years before, and to disavow climate denial and make the shift toward clean-energy generation. Famously, in 2013 – nine years after the Rockefeller family’s campaign—Tillerson responded coldly to a shareholder resolution calling for emissions reduction by asking, “What good is it to save the planet if humanity suffers?”

That same year, Tillerson belatedly acknowledged in a speech the reality of a warming climate and the fact that carbon dioxide levels were indeed increasing. In the same speech, however, he went on to defend the oil industry, claiming falsely that no viable alternatives existed and reaffirming ExxonMobil’s disastrous commitment to oil and natural gas production.

Tillerson should face tough congressional hearings on his appointment as secretary of state. If the senate does its job, Tillerson will need to be held accountable for his years at ExxonMobil during the corporation’s campaign to suppress the science on global warming. Because of Tillerson’s complicity in manipulating facts about an issue that will have devastating impacts on the nation’s national security, his appointment should be rejected.

To better prepare for listening to those hearings, here’s a timeline, courtesy of GreenPeace, that highlights the most egregious of the oil giant’s decades’ long campaign of deception and climate denial.

1977

ExxonMobil scientists undertake studies of the human causes of global warming.

1982

An internal ExxonMobil memo reports that “there are some potentially catastrophic events that must be considered . . . Once the effects are measurable, they might not be reversible.”

1988  

ExxonMobil joins a group of fossil-fuel companies and industry front groups under the auspices of the American Petroleum Institute to found the Global Climate Science Communications Plan. $2 million is spent in support of a plan to convince the media and the public of “uncertainties” in climate science and to ensure that the uncertainties would become part of “conventional wisdom.”

1980s–2000

Mobil and then ExxonMobil bankrolls a public-relations weekly advertorial blitz in the New York Times casting doubt on climate-change science.

2001  

ExxonMobil’s New York Times advertorial calls Kyoto Protocol “unrealistic” and “economically damaging” because of “fundamental flaws.”

2001

President George W. Bush adopts the ExxonMobil language nearly verbatim in his March speech on his reasons for rejecting the Kyoto Protocols.

2016  

New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey open investigations into whether ExxonMobil may have violated state securities and consumer fraud laws by deceiving consumers and investors about the impact of fossil fuels on the environment and the company’s business.

2016

Massachusetts and New York are joined by California, the District of Columbia, Vermont, Virginia, Maryland, and the Virgin Islands in support of investigations of possible consumer fraud by ExxonMobil.

Another trust-worthy source about climate disinformation is the Union of Concerned Scientists’ 2015 “Climate Deception Dossiers,” an exhaustive investigation into fossil fuel companies and climate denial that includes internal memos testifying to “carefully planned campaigns of deception.” The report concludes:

As the scientific evidence concerning climate change became clear, some of the world’s largest carbon producers – including BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, Peabody Energy, and Shell – developed and participated in campaigns to deliberately sow confusion and block policies designed to reduce the heat-trapping emissions that cause global warming.

Fossil fuel company leaders knew (emphasis added) that their products were harmful to people and the planet but still chose to actively deceive the public and deny this harm.

. . . With documents made public as recently as 2014 and 2015, the evidence is clear that a campaign of deception about global warming continues to the present.

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How much of science do people believe? In our 2016 survey, we did not ask “What weighs more, a ton of steel or a ton of cotton?” But we did ask people about their understanding of gravity and climate change and other topics. Here are the top findings:*

1. Only 81% of survey respondents believe what scientists say about gravity. What are the other 19% thinking?
2. When it comes to gravity, Republicans and Democrats are both on the same page.
3. Republicans have less faith in weather forecasts, whether or not a drug is safe to take, and yes, climate change.

It seems that Republicans have more trouble with scientific knowledge if it is sanctioned by the government. Only 34% of Republicans believe weather forecasts, even though data indicates that 48-hour forecasts from the National Weather Service are remarkably accurate. A similar number of Republicans believe information about whether or not a drug is safe, which might in part explain why Republicans are not so supportive of the Federal Drug Administration (FDA). Contributions from pharmaceuticals might also influence Republicans (and Democrats) in Washington.

But as might be expected, in our survey, Republicans were less than half as likely to believe what scientists say about climate change (35% to 86%). A clear question is whether or not Republicans are just skeptical of scientists who write about climate change, or if this is a different kind of “learned behavior?” Is their thinking influenced by church teachings? What about what Republican office-holders say? If that is so, does it mean that campaign contributions from fossil fuel companies to Republican candidates have a “trickle down” effect of polluting the thinking of rank-and-file Republicans on climate change? This question is one for further exploration.

Here are a couple of other observations from the survey:

Figure 2

The blue vertical bar represents the thinking of 18-29 year olds. This group has more confidence across the board in what scientists say. This raises two related questions:

1. Did the people in the other three age brackets used to have more faith in what scientists said when they were younger?
2. Will the current group of 18–29 year olds have less faith in science as they get further removed from school? If so, why?

A final finding is very tentative because of sample size. But we found that the African-Americans who took the on-line survey showed less belief than others in what scientists say.

Most profoundly, only 6% of African-American Democrats believe that the number of calories listed for a food is accurate. The sample size of African-Americans was only 50, so this will certainly require more study.

But the most vexing question is the one we cited first. Why do so many people not believe what scientists say about gravity. To try to answer that question, we refer them to several experiments on gravity conducted by non-scientist David Letterman in 1986, while dropping “stuff” off a “five-story tower” in New Rochelle, NY.

*Occasional Planet interviewed 550 Americans on January 14-15, 2016, using the services of the online-site Survey Monkey. The sample size is reliable +/- 4.5%, 95% of the time. It is demographically balanced by gender, ethnicity, age, income and geographic region.

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Perhaps it’s always been this way; humankind has been more motivated by emotions than reason and the primary emotion that generates beliefs is fear. The more that we’re driven by fear the less space we have in our brains to try to deal rationally with issues.

Two recent items from very different parts of the world struck me as providing evidence for this contention.

Chris Mooney, author of The Republican Brain and The Republican War on Science, wrote an article in the December 2, 2015 edition of the Washington Post entitled “This is why sowing doubt about climate change is such an effective strategy.” He begins:

For some time, social science researchers have been studying an oddity about the U.S. — compared with many other nations, we’re a hotbed of global warming doubt and denial. Accordingly, and to counteract this, a variety of messages or ways of “re-framing” the issue have been proposed, often with the goal of appealing to the ideology of political conservatives, which is where most of the doubt lies.

He cites a study of Americans reading various newspaper accounts of climate change. He summarizes the findings as:

“while the positive messages weren’t particularly impactful, the negative message was considerably more powerful in changing people’s beliefs when it was present. In an overall comparison between those who read articles containing the negative message and those who read articles that didn’t, the negative message led to less belief that global warming is real or that climate science is reliable, and also lessened participants’ support for climate change solutions.

“It’s not that the denial counter-frame is more powerful when matched with one type of positive frame versus another, it just has a consistent effect over all the subjects,”

The negative framing utilized arguments that played on fear of legislation by liberals and that addressing climate change would be bad for the U.S. economy.

The day before Mooney’s article, Liz Sly wrote an article in the Washington Post entitled, “Iraqis think the U.S. is in cahoots with the Islamic State, and it is hurting the war.” She reports from Baiji, Iraq:

On the front lines of the battle against the Islamic State, suspicion of the United States runs deep. Iraqi fighters say they have all seen the videos purportedly showing U.S. helicopters airdropping weapons to the militants, and many claim they have friends and relatives who have witnessed similar instances of collusion.

Ordinary people also have seen the videos, heard the stories and reached the same conclusion — one that might seem absurd to Americans but is widely believed among Iraqis — that the United States is supporting the Islamic State for a variety of pernicious reasons that have to do with asserting U.S. control over Iraq, the wider Middle East and, perhaps, its oil.

In the interest of balanced reporting, we must say that perhaps the suspicions of many Iraqi fighters are correct. However, it seems that such a view can only be seen through highly conspiratorial lenses. Regardless of how much U.S. policy may have unintentionally benefited ISIL, it seems rather preposterous that the U.S. is directly supply the Islamic State with weapons and other supplies. But apparently that is what many Iraqis have come to believe. As Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Propaganda Minister said in denying the Holocaust, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” Obviously that can only happen when people either do not have access to facts or choose to ignore them.

It is indeed a frightening world when so many people, particularly Americans, deny the truth or importance of climate change. When the Iraqi soldiers in opposition to ISIL think that the U.S. is helping their opponent, that too is frightening. And all of this is happening when a large minority of Americans, mainly Republicans, think that “our prayers and thoughts” are the best answer to gun violence in the U.S.

Of course, by stating that these misperceptions of others are frightening, I run the risk of my own arguments being motivated by fear. It’s quite a struggle for all of us to balance our emotions with our powers of reason. It just seems that some of us are more aware of this conflict than others, and the ones who deny the conflict often are weak at trying to secure the closest thing we can find to the truth.

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