On April 26 1998 the New York Times ran a front page story. It began thus.
Industry opponents of a treaty to fight global warming have drafted an ambitious proposal to spend millions of dollars to convince the public that the environmental accord is based on shaky science.
Among their ideas is a campaign to recruit a cadre of scientists who share the industry‘s views of climate science and to train them in public relations so they can help convince journalists, politicians and the public that the risk of global warming is too uncertain to justify controls on greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide that trap the sun’s heat near Earth.
An informal group of people working for big oil companies, trade associations and conservative policy research organizations that oppose the treaty have been meeting recently at the Washington office of the American Petroleum Institute to put the plan together.
Cushman, J. 1998. Industrial Group Plans to Battle Climate Treaty. New York Times, 26 April, p.1
The context is that the US had signed the Kyoto Protocol (this in itself was a meaningless gesture – it only had force if ratified, and the Clinton administration had no intention of trying to get it through the Senate, especially given the previous year’s Byrd-Hagel resolution, which had insisted the US should not sign any treaty that didn’t put emissions constraints on developing countries (looking at you, China). This was of course exactly the opposite of what they’d signed off on in 1992 (Rio) and 1995 (Berlin Mandate) but hey, consistency and hobgoblins, amirite?
On one level, this was hardly “news” – anyone who had been paying any attention at all from 1989 onwards; the George Marshall Foundation got going on climate, and then the Global Climate Coalition and the “Information Clearinghouse on the Environment” (1991) and the attacks on IPCC second assessment report by various well-connected loons, and THEN the attacks on Kyoto in the run up to the meeting in 1997.
See for example Cushman’s report on 7th December 1997, during the Kyoto meeting – “Intense Lobbying Against Global Warming Treaty: U.S. Negotiators Brief Industry Groups and Environmentalists Separately in Kyoto”
Why this matters
A part of the reason (not the most important part necessarily, and not the part we can do that much about) “we” have done so little on climate change is because of staggeringly successful campaigns of predatory delay.
See also – Ben Franta’s work on the American Petroleum Institute.