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In the leadup to the annual United Nations climate negotiations—known as the Conference of the Parties, or COP—it’s become increasingly common to see dismayed headlines about the 

number of fossil fuel lobbyists attending

 expected to be done on the sidelines of the conference, and the 

As former UN leaders Ban Ki-moon and Christiana Figueres join global climate leaders in 

, documents newly uncovered by Drilled reveal that the fossil fuel industry’s influence over the COP process was a foregone conclusion, embedded into its design from the very beginning.

The first UN meeting on global environmental issues—including climate change—was held in Stockholm in 1972. It was a new idea at the time to approach environmental issues from a global perspective, and one that many industries perceived as a threat. While the organizers of that Stockholm meeting did their best to keep polluting companies at arm’s length, documents 

released by the Climate Investigations Center 

in 2022 revealed that the U.S. government came to polluters’ rescue. In 1970, President Nixon created an industry-staffed advisory panel within the Department of Commerce that gave CEOs from companies including Exxon, Mobil, Dow Chemical, Pepsi and more direct access to the senior State Department official Nixon had tapped to lead US preparations for the Stockholm conference: a former Mobil public affairs executive named Christian Herter.

As the conference was underway in Stockholm, 

 that although industry heads were complaining about not having been given an official seat at the table, the U.S. government had made up for it by giving industry representatives “several seats on the 35-member U.S. delegation.” The Times went on to note that “the representatives included Frank Ikard, president of the American Petroleum Institute.”

New internal documents uncovered by Drilled from ExxonMobil, Eni and Total Energies reveal that the fossil fuel industry moved quickly to decisively counter any progress made at Stockholm, and to successfully gain permanent seats at the table during international environmental negotiations. Far from seeing the United Nations Environment Programme, or UNEP, as an obstacle to business as usual, polluters used it to coordinate the industry-preferred response to climate change and to embed that response amongst various heads of state and negotiators, influencing not just the eventual drafting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 1992, but also every Conference of the Parties (COP) to that convention since.

In the lead-up to Stockholm, looming global environmental challenges centered the fossil fuel industry in particular. In 1967, the British air force bombed the SS Torrey Canyon with napalm in a 

to contain a disastrous oil slick. Two years later, the U.S. experienced its largest oil spill at the time, an event that turned the beaches of Santa Barbara, California black and 

. Public awareness about the risk posed by the greenhouse effect was 

Against this backdrop, there was a growing feeling within the international community that given the global nature of various polluting industries, it would be helpful to have a point of contact on issues that concerned each industry. Documents show that one of the early agenda items for UNEP was the creation of an Industry Program that could enable UNEP to work directly with various polluting industries. By 1973, the petroleum-focused group 

—the International Petroleum Industry Environmental Conservation Association, or IPIECA. Even before the UN announced the official launch of IPIECA, Exxon had taken a leadership role in it, hosting one of the first meetings to discuss the group at its headquarters 

. Herter got involved here too, coordinating a 

 to “lay the groundwork for a potential initiative.”

It helped that the global oil industry had a friend in the founding director of UNEP, 

 named Maurice Strong. Although letters between Strong and various advisors show his concern over allowing polluting industries too much influence, and the need for guardrails, he also spoke throughout his life about industry as a force for change. His letters reveal an unshakeable conviction that companies would ultimately do the right thing, even as evidence to the contrary began to pile up.

IPIECA went from being a project of UNEP’s Industry Programme to securing consultative status as its own separate non-governmental organization in 1995. It has 

 and functions, in its words, as the “the oil and gas industry’s principal channel of communication with the United Nations (UN) for environmental and social issues.” In 2002, it changed its name to just “Ipieca”.

Today Ipieca presents itself as a “non-lobby” group that fills an observer role in international meetings, but this contradicts how the organization has long understood its own activities. In 2006, when the IPCC proposed limiting the role of observer organizations like Ipieca in climate negotiations, 

 to these changes, saying it had long been an “active participant” in the process, including helping to draft climate reports.

“IPIECA has been an observer of, and active participant in, IPCC since the First Assessment Report, supplying authors and reviewers for IPCC reports and experts for IPCC meetings. We are one of the very few NGOs that regularly sends observers to IPCC plenary sessions,” it said.

This “active role” is consistent with the organization’s activities from the time of its creation, where it has helped to set the global regulatory agenda on environment and climate issues. Although Ipieca has organized meetings, working groups and industry-wide protocols for 

, documents emphasize the organization’s role in strategizing around international environmental policy to ensure the least negative financial impact on the industry. In its organizing articles, Ipieca notes that its purpose is both to gather data and information on global environmental issues of interest to the industry and UNEP and for the UN to give the industry a heads-up on pending regulatory shifts, via “early notification and evaluation of programmes under consideration by UNEP which would have an impact on oil industry operations.” In its original constitution, Ipieca describes itself as “a voluntary association of petroleum enterprises concerned that governmental action for the international protection of the environment as it relates to or may affect the oil industry is taken on an informed basis.”

 published November 2021 in the journal Global Environmental Change, researchers Christophe Bonneuil at the Centre de Recherches Historiques in Paris, Pierre-Louis Choquet at the Centre de Sociologie des Organisations at SciencesPo in Paris, and Ben Franta at the University of Oxford confirmed via interviews with Bernard Tramier, a former executive with France’s state-owned oil company Elf (which has since been absorbed by Total Energies) and former Exxon scientist Brian Flannery that it was through Ipieca that Exxon initially briefed the industry in 1984 on the issue of global warming, at a meeting held in Houston.

Tramier described the meeting as the first time he had heard about the seriousness of the problem and what it might mean for the global fossil fuel industry.

“The moment I remember really being alerted to the seriousness of global warming was at an IPIECA meeting in Houston in 1984,” Tramier told Bonneuil. (Flannery later confirmed the existence of said meeting.) “There were representatives from most of the big companies in the world there, and the people from Exxon got us up to speed. […] They had remained very discreet about their own research [on global warming] […] Then in 1984, perhaps because the stakes seemed to have become too great and a collective response from the profession required, they shared their concerns with the other companies.”

From this moment, Ipieca’s role began to evolve. For years the organization, operating under the auspices of the United Nations, was a rich source of intelligence for industry. But it offered another benefit: access. Those carrying an Ipieca badge could attend global meetings of world governments without having to identify themselves as working for a particular oil company, enabling industry to interact with environment ministers and other global leaders in a less formal way.

This was a concept Strong embedded early on, not just in the official workings of UNEP but in his approach to getting things done, which 

 to ensure that official events ran smoothly. It was not uncommon for Strong to host a casual 

government ministers, think tank heads, and CEOs

 to hash out important world issues during an après-ski session.

These tactics may have been effective at securing diplomatic buy-in, but they also prompted criticism from the left of Strong’s personal relationship with those they saw as being responsible for the worst environmental problems, and outlandish conspiracies on the right alleging he was engaged in a global conspiracy to subvert property rights and usher in global communism.

Strong’s diplomatic instincts however, and naive faith in business leaders to do the right thing when called upon, meant that fossil fuel producers and their representatives were often included in decision making processes. Franta said it is important to understand that “from the very beginning” of international efforts to address climate change, “the oil industry was right there”.

“There’s never really been a time when there was a pure understanding of climate change that was unpolluted by the industry’s interference and involvement and influence,” Franta said. “Our whole understanding of the issue, from the very beginning – and by our, I mean ‘the world’ and by ‘the issue’, I mean ‘global warming’, was influenced by the oil and gas industry and the fossil fuel industry in general.”

“Ipieca fits into that because, again, the industry did this by having this sort of veneer of credibility on the issue that they could use to insert themselves into organizations like UN processes and influence them.”

The combination of intel, access and reach meant Ipieca could marshall the resources of trade groups, industry associations and individual companies across the globe to ensure they were all on the same page.

outlining Exxon’s leadership on the issue of “global change,” appended to a copy of a 1989 presentation of what the company knew so far about the “potential enhanced greenhouse effect,” highlights Exxon’s leadership role on climate in particular within Ipieca. “Through our expertise and long standing contacts, Exxon has taken the lead in the past year to develop a program of larger scale research, supported under the aegis of the International Petroleum Industry Environmental Conservation Association (IPIECA),” the report read. “ ...Through IPIECA Exxon has taken a leadership role within the international petroleum industry in efforts to address global change. Exxon chairs the Ipieca Global Change Working Group which coordinates activities and interactions. We organized several international symposia for education and dialog between key figures in the international public policy debate and representatives of industry.”

The report also detailed Exxon’s role in shaping various other industry organizations’ understanding of and response to climate change. “Exxon's long term public presence and contributions to the scientific field give us unique credibility within the petroleum industry, and the larger private sector,” it read.

“We use that capability to contribute to education and debate on global change within the private sector, and as a major focus in all discussions of public policy with private and governmental agencies. We provided briefings to management committees and major operating committees of the Chemical Manufacturers Association, the National Association of Manufacturers, and the American Petroleum Institute. We served on the task force of the American Petroleum Institute, and contributed significantly to development of the API position on global change, and to the formulation of their research program. Our advice and input influenced the positions of NAM, CMA and the Global Change Coalition [Global Climate Coalition]. We are engaged in several efforts to develop programs of scientific research supported by the private sector, including efforts by the Global Change Coalition [Global Climate Coalition] and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI).”

Over and over again, the report emphasized the point of Exxon engaging in all of these activities:

“Through many avenues, including technical and scientific interchanges, and through trade associations and Ipieca, Exxon works with organizations involved in shaping the public policy response to global change,” he wrote. “These contacts allow us to maintain awareness of public policy developments, and to contribute input from the petroleum industry.”

Cover letter of 1991 report on Exxon’s approach to “global change,” retrieved from the Briscoe Archive at University of Texas at Austin by Amy Westervelt in 2020.

Maurice Strong left UNEP in 1975, spent two years 

, PetroCanada, did a stint running a Denver-based oil promoter called 

to privatize Colorado water. By 1991, when the Exxon report was published, he had returned to the UN as head of the UN Conference on Environment and Development, which came to be known as the Rio Earth Summit. Conversations were underway for planning that event—not just with various politicians, but this time directly with industry as well, particularly through Ipieca and the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC).

 about how to amplify its newly adopted Sustainable Development Charter, the ICC notes that “certain specialized business organizations with which the ICC has close relations— for example CEFIC (chemicals), IPIECA (oil) and IPAI (aluminum)” would be briefing their member companies. The memo states that the group would be getting “special support” from Dr. Stephan Schmidheiny, who they described as “the leading Swiss industrialist”;  today, Schmidheiny is serving a 12-year prison sentence for aggravated manslaughter in Italy after his company 

 with asbestos waste. In 1990, though, the asbestos tycoon had been recently appointed as Principal Business Adviser to Maurice Strong at UNCED. Schmidheiny was also a Vice-Chairman of the ICC Commission at the time and a member of the Board of the ICC's International Environmental Bureau. In 1990, he began creating a 'Business Council on Sustainable Development,’ which the ICC described as “comprising some 40 leading chief executives known for their Interests in environmental matters.”

Stockholm had shocked the industry by locking it out. But for the Rio conference, Strong included industry as co-planners. He would later chastise world leaders for not making a strong enough commitment at the Summit, bitterly 

, “we have agreement without sufficient commitment.”

“When we thought we did it in Stockholm, we didn’t,” Strong said. ”And we don't have another 20 years now. I believe we are on the road to tragedy. As we leave Rio, we have not satisfied that concern. We have the basis for progress, but we have to push ahead."

The world would get another chance a few years later for a Stockholm-esque moment with the 1997 COP in Kyoto, where several world leaders were committed to signing on to binding emissions reductions. Once again, Exxon executives pulled together 

, this time laying the groundwork for an economic argument against acting on climate change. In talk after talk, government and university economists presented their thoughts on whether the economic impact of acting or not acting on climate change was worse.

“Concern was expressed over how the negotiations are being carried out,” a report summarizing the late 1996 meeting reads. “Much of the negotiations are being handled by environmental ministries while there may be large economic costs of lowering CO2 emissions. …The meeting closed with the comment that it is more important to get the decision right than to rush to an agreement at Kyoto.”

The agreement to curb emissions made in the Kyoto Protocol was dead on arrival in the U.S., thanks to the preemptive 

, which leaned on exactly the types of arguments put forward by industry interests at the Ipieca symposium.

As COP 29 wraps up in Baku, we are once again 

, have come to the realization that industry will never act in good faith on climate, yet also see their sanctioned presence at COP as a moot point. Figueres noted recently 

that whether oil executives are at COP or not has little to do with their influence over government negotiators; that influence exists, she said, whether executives are physically present and having meetings around the COP negotiations or not. She has, however, joined calls for requirements that the host country at least be supportive of climate policy.

As Ipieca turns 50 and COP rounds the corner to 30, perhaps it’s time to try one more meeting like Stockholm, without CEOs invited to the party.

Anna Pujol-Mazzini and Karen Savage also contributed reporting to this article. Additional documents were contributed by Dr Marc Hudson. ENI documents were provided by Greenpeace Italy.

The Great COP Co-opting: New Documents Show Big Oil Has Been There All Along

 Hello, and welcome back to Drilled. I'm Amy Westervelt. Last week was Climate Week in New York, and I went for the first time, actually.

The main reason I was there was to do a panel with with Bill McKibben and Kendra Pierre Louis, moderated by Genevieve Gunther on the language of climate politics, which is also the subject and title of Genevieve's new book. In it, she looks at the dominant narratives around climate policy and politics and whittles it down to six key words that just keep showing up over and over again. Each chapter is devoted to one of those words and offers a deep dive into how that word and the narrative it's attached to became so dominant, how it's been weaponized to block climate policy, and what kind of messaging you could use to combat it.

I got to sit down with Genevieve after our panel as well and talk about the book, why it's made some people so mad on the internet, and a lot more. After the break, you'll hear her reading from a bit of the book, and then we're going to have that conversation. That's coming up after this quick message.

 Fossil fuel propaganda is spun out of six terms that dominate the language of climate politics: alarmist, cost, growth, India and China, innovation and resilience. Together these terms weave a narrative that goes something like this "yes, climate change is real, but calling it an existential threat is just alarmist. And anyway, phasing out coal, oil, and gas would cost us too much. Human flourishing relies economic growth enabled by fossil fuels, so we need keep using them and with climate change by fostering technological innovation and increasing our resilience. Besides, america should not act unilaterally on the climate crisis while emissions are rising in India and China."

This narrative is designed to foment the incorrect and dangerous belief that the world does not need essentially to stop using fossil fuels, either because climate change won't be that destructive or in some versions of the story because the world can keep using coal, oil, and gas and still halt global heating anyway.

 Yes. Awesome. Okay. I want to have you start by talking a little bit about where the idea from the book came in general and then how you whittled it down to these six key words that I do feel like really capture the essence of the sort of discourse that we're hearing

 so glad to hear Yeah. Yeah, because the book started out being much bigger. It was sprawling. I had like, you know, I don't know, almost almost 27 words that I was thinking about writing about. So definitely much smaller than it was in the beginning. But I conceived of this book in 2017, after the New York Times hired this commentator named Brett Stevens away from the Wall Street journal. favorite voice at the Times.

At the time though, Stevens was a pretty inveterate climate denier. Like he was definitely on the more extreme end of the skeptical spectrum, so to speak. Like he called, you know, climate change a religion or climate change science a religion, um, presided over by like, Singularly unattractive hairfans, which I just thought was a really obnoxious thing to say about anybody, right?

 And, you know, his hiring generated a ton of controversy, many climate scientists and activists tried to get the Times to rescind their offer to him because they just thought it was outrageous that someone who, you know, was spreading these overt falsehoods would take a position at the sort of paper of record. But, of course, the Times didn't want to... 

 respond to outside pressure very often or really ever so Stephens took his position and he wrote, arrogantly enough, his first column about climate change. And it was called the column was called a climate of complete certainty And what this piece did was sort of recycle the fossil fuel talking point that had been kind of dominant in the discourse . And that talking point as you know yourself You Was that the science of climate change is too uncertain to motivate or justify the kind of policy moves that we would need to make, or the behavior changes we would need to make in order to halt global heating and resolve the climate crisis because the climate crisis might not even be a thing.

 Now, I had just taken level course in climate science. so while I was reading this column, was like, wait a minute. this man is using the word uncertainty in a kind common sense, colloquial way. He's using the of word to say uncertainty means not enough information or knowing enough come to some sort of decision or judgment. Right. But this is actually the way that climate scientists use the word research. So in...

 or that scientists in general, like this is the language of science in which uncertainty means something very different.

 Exactly. And what it means is the range of outcomes you can project out of a model with confidence. I mean confidence and uncertainty are actually synonyms say the confidence interval or the uncertainty interval. So when scientists would talk about the uncertainty of their research, they were not saying they weren't sure whether their results were correct or that what they were studying was real. What they were saying was there's a range of possible outcomes from bad to really bad that they project confidence. But the problem was that because fossil fuel interests put this sort other meaning of uncertainty out into the public discourse through the mediasphere, anytime a climate scientist in his or her public communications would talk about uncertainty of their research, seem to be confirming that they weren't sure whether climate change was real or not.

What fossil fuel interests had done was appropriate, weaponize, and kind of distort the meaning of the scientific term order kind manipulate scientists into confirming fossil fuel propaganda. So I saw this dynamic uncertainty, I started see everywhere.

 So I like, you know, I got all these folder files because I'm very old school. And I, you know, made files email and I started research into the words that seemed to have salience for me connected climate change. And I was doing sort of database academic style research. I was reading, research in the social sciences, in rhetoric, um, in climate science. But I was also sort of pulling news articles and like press releases and advertisements and tweets and sort of, high and low discourse, um, news media and I was dumping it all into files.

And after about 18 months of this kind of very broad, almost sloppy way of doing research, I noticed that the files for these words were much thicker than the other ones.

 And that in these files were often, um, you know, language that had been produced by policymakers, by scientists themselves in oil and gas advertisements, like all the things that we sort of centered and focused on. What we're going to do to try to resolve this crisis. And I was like, okay, these are the words that dominate the language of climate politics.

And I need to focus the book on these words. So that's what I decided to do.

 And they all kind of relate to each other in this way too, that I think is really interesting to create this, well, I think of it as like a narrowing of climate solutions too, it sort of puts these parameters on how we're allowed to even talk about or think about this issue that's very limiting.

 Well, it's interesting you say that because, you know, for the chapter on growth, it took a long time to write this chapter because, you know, first I had to sort of really get my head around kind of neoclassical resource economics, how standard economists talked about environmental concerns the climate crisis in order to understand you counter voices might be arguing

 And then I read all the degrowth literature. Um, and I sort of first thought to myself, well, am I going to try to talk about the language of growth in in degrowth framework?

What am I going to do here? And then I realized that actually, we can't even have the conversation about degrowth, I don't think, while everybody universally believes that growth itself is a climate solution. Like, as long as you believe that being rich will protect you from climate devastation, why would anyone embrace degrowth? And so I thought, okay, this is what I keep bumping up against as I'm researching this belief that growth itself is a climate solution that will be available to us. even if the planet sort of heats up three degrees or more

 and that will be available to everyone infinitely

 A hundred percent. Exactly. Like growth will never end. So I started digging into this, you know, because as you said, I felt like it was really kind limiting our imagination of how we might need to transform the world in order to halt global heating. Yeah, and I discovered as I say in the chapter that belief growth will just Yeah. no matter what we do to the planet is based on absolutely nothing. It's based on beliefs that have no empirical foundation whatsoever.

 It's almost itself a form of religious faith. So one of these beliefs is that human beings will be able to adapt to climate change no matter how bad it gets. And you know, humans are pretty ingenious. we are adaptable, but in fact, there is no research showing that any country, including developed nations in the global north, have to date adapted to climate change. And It's just going to get harder to do that. And there's something nonlinear about these climate change impacts. So, you know, if you have a seawall, it'll keep the water out until the day that the water gets so high that it won't keep the water out anymore. But none of those complicated risks that we're facing and none this sort of lack of historical evidence that 

 going to be able to adapt to the climate crisis, make it into economic models. In fact, what economists do is the opposite. They look at sort of historical relationships between say heat and GDP growth And try to project those out into the future. And then they adjust their results by using a mathematical variable called adaptation, which allows them to downplay or adjust the dangers that they project. by at the past and... And drawing it out into the future, by using this mathematical variable that they give value to, simply based on the economist's belief in how much we're going to be able to adapt in the future. So at the bottom, it's just about the individual economist's trust that adaptation is possible, and it's something that we're going to do. Not based any kind of empirical data whatsoever. And that's just one of the fantasies or the, the ephemeral beliefs that support, or at least, um, justify this fundamental belief of the entire planet, that growth will just continue even if we ruin our climate system.

 It's so interesting because a lot of the things in here had me also thinking about how a lot of this stuff gets painted in very gendered terms too, or even just science versus humanities kind of language too, where it's like, oh, economists are, , hard science, objective measurement, whatever.

But climate activists don't understand that or certain technologies. It's like, oh, well, you just don't understand the engineering behind it or whatever. I've had this experience of digging into an economic model and realizing that it's just based on, yeah, one person's assumptions or beliefs or whatever.

And being like, no, I must be wrong. It can't be that. You know, I must not be understanding the numbers or whatever. And like...

 I had that experience too, but let me be clear. Every single chapter in this book. Yeah. chapters on economics were read by some of the, Most respected climate economists working today and the chapter that I wrote on innovation, which turned out in climate discourse to be, code for carbon dioxide removal and carbon capture and sequestration. So CDR and CCS. So in that chapter I had. not only one of the most prominent scientists who's working on CDR read this chapter But I had two other climate scientists read this chapter. So I also thought is this possible like it it as flimsy as I think it is? Exactly. in fact It is. And it's hard to tell because very often when we encounter these things in our public discourse, it's through news media articles or sort of treatments that are decontextualized or just sort of touch on one thing. But they marshal these like ideological beliefs that I try to sort of disabuse in the book. And it only becomes clear how this ideology is very often based no information like in the growth case or false information like in the CDR case.

 So once you compile all the information and put it together, it becomes easier to show how a lot of the beliefs that we hold about growth and technological innovation are influenced or shaped by fossil fuel propaganda themselves.

 Yes, totally. One of the very compelling things about this book is that you see it. You're just like, Oh, thank That's

 like how that has shaped. Um, okay. I want to ask you about the Breakthrough Institute cause they, they've been very mad about your book and also, you mentioned them in the book and they have been, quite, adamant proponents of some of these ideas and particularly in the vein of kind of castigating climate people for not thinking about growth in the right way or innovation in the right way.

But anyway, I wanted to ask you about just kind of your thoughts on how much they have shaped the public discourse and how they have been able to do that.

 I mean, i, you know, I got the climate movement, as I said, in 2017. so I perceive them as people who are instrumental in shaping the discourse. I do see them kind of, um, exemplifying a a kind of centrist position, center position climate crisis, which is why they're very with many centrist journalists, and leaders because they put the of imprimatur of environmentalism on this centrist position. Right. And the problem with this position, in my view, is not that it's, you know, advocating for developing new technologies. Clearly, we will need that. Like, I am a proponent of lab grown meat, To me, it is not that they are pushing for nuclear. I actually also think that nuclear energy would be an excellent alternative thing to bring into our energy mix, maybe for thermal heat things that are harder to produce with solar or wind, for example.

You know, like 8 million people a year die from fossil fuel pollution, right? And the number of people, that we can trace, of course, who have died from nuclear accidents is probably a lot smaller than that. So if you want to just judge two different forms of energy based on the number of people it kills historically, then obviously nuclear wins, right? problem with the Breakthrough Institute is they promote expanding fossil fuels.

That is my problem with them because this is to me, the belief, the false belief that is really preventing our politics, our, business leaders, even our, climate advocacy from Solving problem or even really knowing there is this idea we can do We can develop clean energy and we can support expanding fossil fuel extract extraction. We can have more evermore. more and gas and ever more clean energy. And somehow we're gonna deal with climate change anyway. So this is the false belief that is not just coming from fossil fuel interests on the right. It's also coming these center left groups, which give a permission structure for these fossil fuel interests to seem legitimate and not like the murderous monsters they really are. And so the Breakthrough Institute argues for increased fossil fuel production. They say that coal plants in the global south, quote, save lives.

Let's be clear, it's electricity that saves

that electricity does not need to be generated by coal, which is killing. Millions of people a year, mostly in the global south. And for them, they justify their argument for increasing fossil fuel production, not by even saying that with CDR, um, which is something that they, support.

It's a position that they support, and they platform people who do make that argument. But really, the reason they say we can to expand our fossil fuel production and consumption is that climate change will never be that bad, right?

It's never gonna be worse than I think Nordhaus called it a case of planetary right? Um, that you can just sort of manage with with what he calls, you know, medicine, which what he means is adaptation or whatever. Now, climate scientists like Joelle Gerges, the Australian climate scientist, who's one of the lead authors of the last IPCC report. She figures climate change as a cancer, as a disease in our planetary body has been established and is now getting worse and that we have to cure cut out. Before it metastasizes out of control. but Nordhaus and the Breakthrough Institute are very often um, on the opposite side of that. They would call her an alarmist, and they would claim that actually, People who think that climate change is like a cancer or will be very dangerous as the planet continues to heat up are emotional, hysterical, very often women in the climate movement people who aren't serious.

 And their kind of, um, lukewarmer position that, Oh, climate change isn't going to be that bad is actually somehow the serious position. But what I try to argue in the book is that in fact, it is. a dishonest position. It misrepresents what the science says is happening to our planet and will happen if not phase out fossil fuels, bring our emissions down to real zero , and halt global heating. So it's not a realism, it's actually a falsehood that they are advancing

 it's fantasy. Yeah. Yeah. I do find it really interesting that Nordhaus in particular takes these really strong stances on science when he has no scientific background. You know, He was a PR guy forever and then

 I know. I love that he was a that he's a PR guy.

 Yeah. And then started the breakthrough and like, you know, now kind of does PR for their ideas.

 Right? Right. Exactly. But like, um, I mean, I just say that. They've been coming after me for couple of weeks now, at the point we are recording this. They've been coming after for a couple of weeks now. And first he tried to suggest that I didn't have the credentials to write this book.

 And then I thought, wait a minute, I'm go look at his academic credentials. I have a Ph. D. in English literature from UC Berkeley, and he has a B. A. in history

 from UC Berkeley. So I don't understand how he's, you know, just on that metric, more credentialed to talk about the climate crisis than I am.

And I'm talking about the rhetoric that leads to political beliefs, which is literally something I've been studying since I went to graduate school, because that was what I was studying in the English Renaissance too. Like, it's not a different topic for me. It's just a different domain into which I'm bringing my expertise. But it's interesting because other ways, so, so once I sort of like disabused him of that strategy.

Then they started to suggest that somehow I wasn't a serious scholar because there were some, you know, sloppy errors in the footnotes. Um, they found what I would claim are two errors among 300 in three chapters.

The book has 600 footnotes and it's been peer reviewed and extensively fact checked and every single book in the world will have one or two details that are are wrong,

What they're doing is they're trying to come after me to suggest that I'm not serious I'm all vibes. I don't have research credentials, because they don't want to engage with my arguments they have never defended their position on supporting fossil fuel use.

They have never explained why they believe that economic growth will just continue indefinitely and shield the wealthy from climate devastation. They have never engaged any of the arguments that I make in the book and defended them. They have only come after me with these ad hominem attacks because they know they don't have a position from which to argue. In fact, Nordhaus on Twitter or X or whatever you want to call it these days-- he got mad at me because I quoted him as having said that the agenda to phase out fossil fuels was impossible. And so I said, Okay, does that mean right here that you're gonna say that it is possible to phase out fossil fuels and he he sputtered and fulminated But then reiterated that the climate movement's agenda to phase out fossil fuels in the next decade is impossible And then I like tweeted a screenshot of my book which is quoting him saying that exact thing and I was like, what? Dude, what is your problem?

 Their problem is, is that they're scared of what I say in the book because I honestly think, and not to be arrogant about this, but I think this is the first book that ties what we think of as traditional climate denial on the right to these centrist democratic positions showing that actually the reason our climate politics is blocked is not that it's polarized, even though that's a problem, too, but because it's weirdly unified on this belief that we don't need to phase out fossil fuels when we absolutely do.

 Yes, I have been seeing this in the last couple of years, you know, increasingly, this weird hesitancy to just say, yeah, we need to phase out fossil fuels and almost a shift towards acting like that's a radical stance

 Well, there's comms, I mean, it's a, I'm not saying it's an easy problem. Because there is comms research that shows that people don't like it when you tell them they can't use something they're already using, right?

So that, I mean, it's, it's a fiercely challenging problem to communicate that we do need to phase out fossil fuels. I don't want to downplay that. And so I think people shy away from saying it because it does seem like like tricky or radical. Um, and it has radical implications for our whole world. economic system for sure. but if you believe that climate change is real, if you understand what the science is saying about what's going to happen to our climate system and our, the links between our planet and our economy, if the planet just keeps heating up, and if you understand that the planet will keep heating up until emissions. get to net zero or real zero, then, you know, every scientist will tell you that we need to stop using coal, oil, and gas. It's really not up for debate anymore.

 Including like, you know, the IEA, the IPCC, like it's,

 So this is what I quote in the, this is what I quote, In the introduction to the book In 2023, in synthesis report, IPCC said that we already have enough fossil fuel infrastructure. Because that infrastructure is projected to emit the total carbon budget for two degrees Celsius, which means that we actually have to like strand some that infrastructure, strand some of those assets, because the total carbon budget has to include like agriculture right and wildfires and other things. So people, so to me, you can say yes climate change is bad, yes I believe in climate change until the cows come home.

But if you are denying that fact, you are a climate denier. I mean, just think about being an alcoholic. Right. You're drinking a lot of booze. Your liver is about to croak and your doctor says to you, you're an alcoholic, you have to stop drinking. And you say, okay, yeah, I'm an alcoholic, but I'm not going to stop drinking.

Like we all know that that person is still in denial. If you say climate change is real, I want to help stop it, but I'm going to ignore the fact that we already have too many fossil fuels to halt global heating at a relatively safe level. I'm sorry. You are a climate denier.

 I want to talk about the innovation chapter in more detail because we've been doing this series too on like on CDR and carbon capture and we'll eventually get to like hydrogen and biofuels and all that stuff too.

 Yeah, exactly, exactly. But it is like, um, I find it interesting how the industry and then like people who are kind of carrying water for them do really. mess with the building blocks of information in this way of like because I feel like there's been um there has been like this real focus on on disinformation, which I almost see as like The end result of all of this stuff, right?

You know, it's like yeah, like that's what we end up with but like that gets built by very strategic investments in particular types of research or white papers from thought leaders or whatever it is, you know, it's like it gets built in that way. So, um, I'm curious how you honed in on CDR and, um, CCS as like the things that you wanted to focus on in that chapter.

 Yeah. I really, didn't set out to focus on those two technologies in particular, at all. I was just like, why are people talking about innovation in this way? Why are people talking about innovation as a independent climate solution? What does this word mean? That's so vague. And usually when you drill down, this was often in sort of, you know, climate journalism or, um, even just political journalism or business journalism. and you would drill down and it would be about these that would either capture or remove emissions. And then I started to see Exxon Mobil and other oil and gas companies use the word innovation in their advertising and on their websites and whatever, and then drilling down into that. I was like, Oh, for them, innovation also means carbon capture.

And, yeah, to some degree, also carbon dioxide removal. I was like, wow, this word is actually code in climate discourse for CCS and CDR. And it's interesting because I don't think it is anymore because I think that oil and gas companies were really Greenwashing themselves with very thick paint right after the IPCC report on 1.5 in 2018 and the rise of the global climate movement, blah, blah, blah, blah. They all came out with net zero, um, targets. They, you know, and they

 but partly because of all of this rhetoric that

 We can... it's fine because we can decarbonize oil and gas

 Exactly. Thank you. That's exactly the point. So what happened was around this question of innovation, oil and gas companies started to claim that they were going to turn themselves into carbon management companies. they were going to be able to either capture the emissions of their products, or they going be able decarbonize their products, decarbonize oil by removing the emissions, carbon from the atmosphere after their products have been used and combusted.

So, you know, usually I don't start with the research. Usually I start with the rhetoric. But I started this chapter with the research into how challenging it's going to be. Well, first, the historical account of the fact that most, I mean, if not all carbon capture projects, which is, you know, the technology that captures emissions at the source, most, if not all carbon capture products, to date have failed.

 a very large scale. They have captured nothing close to their targets. And very often they've had to build an additional fossil fuel plant to power the technology, which if you do a full life cycle assessment, they're actually carbon additive and not carbon neutral. neutral.

 That's right. There's really good research from Mark Jacobson on that in particular.

 So insofar as you use methane gas as a kind of, you know, firm generation instead of batteries or something else, you might want to slap CCS on that, but it would be very challenging to do it in a way that would actually be carbon neutral and it would be much, much more expensive, even potentially than building out a system of redundancy and lots of storage. or a nuclear or something else. So, and even if the economics pencil out better for CCS, CCS just doesn't work. So that's really what you need to come back to.

 And. The technology has been around for a really long time. Like exactly. It's it doesn't mean it's impossible that it will improve at some point, whatever. But yeah, there are a lot of plans being made with the assumption that CCS will somehow magically start to work better than it ever has.

 You know what's so interesting? So the rhetoric And I'll get to CDR in a minute. But the rhetoric about CCS from oil and gas companies and from advocates um, trade advocates, is that CCS is a proven technology, right? That's what they say. Because it's been around for so long, right? And it's a proven technology. They've been using it for decades. This is great. And so now, The EPA has come up with a new regulation saying that by a certain date fossil fuel power plants need to have CCS

 And then in their public comments, they're all like, but it doesn't work. You can't hold us to this. It's

 So the climate guy at the Cato Institute requested a review copy of my book because he said he wanted to write a review about it. I don't know if he's actually going to write a

Transcription

Guenther digs into six key rhetorical devices that are being used to slow or block climate action. For an academic book, it's made some folks on the Internet awfully mad. In this episode we talk about why, what went into her research, and what it tells us about the coming months.

Genevieve Guenther on the Language of Climate Politics

Information Pollution

La Lucha En La Jungla

Denial to Delay

The Real Free Speech Threat

Opening day of COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan got off to a contentious start. Rules for the new UN carbon market (

) were approved without a discussion among countries as to what exactly the new rules are and whether they contain loopholes that could undermine the point of the mechanism: reducing carbon emissions.

Typically, such important matters are negotiated at length, sometimes stretching beyond scheduled COP days. Incidentally, no agreement was reached on these same rules at COP28 when negotiations on carbon market rules ended in a deadlock. But they got a very different treatment this time around: COP29 leadership bypassed governmental scrutiny and undermined international negotiation processes by doing away with inter-governmental discussions and debates.

 the swift adoption of the decision as an enabler of climate action that will “help direct resources to the developing world” while Tuvalu 

 at the plenary on opening day (November 11th). They said the adoption of decisions at the very start of COP29 without prior consultation with governments sets a bad precedent and is not in line with the party-driven processes mandated under the UN. “We are very uncomfortable with this trend. And we sincerely hope that this trend does not continue.”

The rules that were approved were framed by a UN 

 composed of twelve people. The Supervisory Body is in charge of overseeing carbon markets under Article 6.4 of the Paris Agreement which allows both countries and companies to trade in carbon credits.

While the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015, key rules and standards to operationalize the UN-governed global carbon market proposed within it had remained stalled. The COP29 presidency presented these rules for governments to rubber stamp without formal debate in the opening plenary of the negotiations, even though they were hardly different from documents that governments rejected just last year at COP28, when many countries, including the European Union and Coalition for Rainforest Nations (CfRN) and Independent Association of Latin America and the Caribbean (AILAC)—coalitions of forest-dense nations that will be deeply impacted by badly governed carbon markets—called proposed rules for the global carbon market insufficient.

Nevertheless, the COP29 presidency slammed through wording that world governments were to “take note” of the Supervisory Body’s adoption of the rules, creating a dangerous precedent.

On November 13, CfRN began negotiations on carbon markets with a scathing remark that hasty adoption of the rules set a “horrible precedent” to good governance and long standing practice under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. They also added that the mandate given to twelve people who are supposed to represent all parties to the Paris Agreement—200 countries—was based on trust that had now been broken.

“Given that the country parties requested recommendations from the Supervisory Body and reviewed and rejected them for two years, these recommendations were significant enough to merit discussion before adoption as standards,” said Trishant Dev, Programme officer, Climate Change, Centre for Science and Environment, New Delhi.

 published last year on the functioning of the voluntary carbon market in India which showed that offset mechanisms neither reduced emissions significantly nor benefited local communities who are often forest-dwelling and in some cases, adversely impacted them. “The UN market mechanism is very important to ensure that community rights are sufficiently addressed and safeguarded, as other markets (like the voluntary carbon market) will take cues from the guidance that the UN comes up with,” he added.

There are two kinds of carbon markets: voluntary markets where companies, governments and non-governmental organizations can buy and sell credits in a decentralized market, and compliance markets which are governed by laws and regulations framed by governments. The new UN-governed global market is a compliance market as is 

Myriam Douo, senior campaigner at Oil Change International, said market mechanisms require scrutiny in general and that's particularly true for carbon markets because they have “a track record of failure to deliver the scale, distribution, and quality of funding needed, and incentivize big polluters to game the rules and craft shady schemes to continue business as usual."

"Nothing in the standards put forward by the Supervisory Body would stop that here," Douo added. "High risk technologies like geoengineering where, for example, a country attempts to deploy technologies to improve its ocean territories' storage of carbon aren’t excluded. Robust safeguards for people and nature are missing. Instead, there’s just vague references to 'credible methods'."

As of today, the risks of “ocean alkalinity enhancement” projects like the ones Douo referred to have not been thoroughly assessed. For instance, they could adversely impact marine species. The newly approved rules effectively allow credits from such projects to be traded on a UN-governed system without robust risk assessment.

There’s also nothing to prevent a country from setting up a scheme to sell offsets from carbon capture and storage (CCS) being used for enhanced oil recovery, a process by which compressed carbon is injected underground to extract more oil. "So increasing climate pollution," Douo said. "That’s not a small risk because 79 percent of current CCS operating capacity is used for enhanced oil recovery to produce more fossil fuels. This is a gift to big oil, and to the countries that enable it. It was a bad process and a worse outcome.”

The COP29 presidency team has not yet responded to our request for comment about criticisms of the rules and the manner in which they were rushed through. This story will be updated if and when we receive a response.

Effective carbon dioxide removal requires the removed carbon to be stored durably. One of the issues with the rules approved at COP29 is that it does not provide a science-based definition of durability; in other words, does durability mean a few decades or centuries or millennia? 

 this week sets the mark at 1,000 years stating “our findings suggest that a CO2 storage period of less than 1,000 years is insufficient for neutralizing remaining fossil CO2 emissions under net zero emissions.”

“The paper is right to highlight the unhelpful vagueness of much of the discussion on the 'permanence' or 'durability' of storage of removed carbon," said Jonathan Crook, policy expert on global carbon markets at Carbon Market Watch.

"It makes it abundantly clear that potentially short-term and vulnerable storage of carbon in soils and vegetation cannot compensate in any way for continued fossil emissions.”

Much of the credits generated today from carbon removal activities like tree-planting do not require high durability standards. And the 

too shows that country plans over-rely on land-based carbon removals without adequate emphasis on how such removals will be delivered. More specifically, it says tree-planting (both afforestation and reforestation) accounts for about 50% of land-based carbon removal pledges by countries, which in turn could be in conflict with other goals like food security, ecosystem resilience, and the rights of local communities.

The carbon market guidelines are not yet entirely set in stone. Country parties do still have the mandate to provide the Article 6.4 Supervisory Body some additional guidance on crediting standards during negotiations at COP29. “It is essential for them to request the Supervisory Body to define durability in alignment with science, including peer-reviewed papers such as this one,” Crook said.

COP29 Kicks Off with a “Bad Process and Worse Outcome” on Carbon Market Rules

If you browse the Internet or watch TV you've probably heard of Project 2025, the blueprint for a second Trump presidency, mapped out by a coalition of 100 conservative think tanks, spearheaded (publicly at least) by the Heritage Foundation, which also had a hand in shaping and staffing the first Trump administration. Nothing written down in the Project 2025 manifesto is new, per se, nor is it new that they've written it down (Heritage put out a similar "Mandate for Leadership" in 2016, gearing up for the first Trump term. For that matter, they've been 

 updated, though, and it's handy to have it all written out, side by side, a clear window into what lies behind the door on the right.

One thing that’s important to note is that once again we see that those pushing against climate action are not just aligned with those attacking trans rights, racial justice, labor rights and reproductive rights, but are in the same organizations, being funded by the same universe of backers.

The complete Project 2025 manifesto is 900 pages (?!!), which might explain why it sometimes feels like we're hearing about this thing all the time yet don't know much about it. I haven't quite finished it yet, but I have managed to get to page 500, including Chapter 13, in which the plan for the Environmental Protection Agency is laid out.

The first thing I noticed is the chapter's author: Mandy Gunasekara. Today, Gunasekara is a visiting fellow in the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment and senior policy analyst for the Independent Women's Forum, a conservative women's organization funded by the Bradley Foundation, Sarah Scaife Foundation, and the Koch-backed donor-advised fund Donors Trust. A lawyer by training, 

 been a member of the CO2 Coalition (you might recognize her as the Republican witness during Rep Jamie Raskin's 2019 Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties' 

 on "The Oil Industry's Efforts to Suppress the Truth about Climate Change"), worked for Trump's EPA (first as principal deputy assistant administrator at the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation and then as chief of staff to EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler), where she claims to have been "the chief architect of the Paris Accord withdrawal and the repeal of the Clean Power Plan", and was famously the Senator James Inhofe staffer who handed him a snowball during a 2015 hearing in which he claimed the existence of snow meant global warming wasn't a problem. She was Majority Counsel for the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works when Inhofe chaired it from 2015-2017, and led committee actions and policy development on Clean Air Act and climate change issues.

It would not be remotely surprising to see Gunasekara tapped as EPA chief in a second Trump administration. Following is a rundown of her key proposals. It's a long read, but not 32-pages long, so...you're welcome? 

First, the broad strokes. A Trump EPA would:

Cut any program focused on climate (including climate czars);

Limit the agency's ability to regulate under both the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act;

"Pause for review" (aka cut) anything that references "environmental justice" (because "reverse racism") and eliminate the stand-alone Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights;

 that didn't quite make it last time around, which specifically targets the long-term epidemiological studies that linked air pollution to shorter lives and were used to justify air-quality regulations;

Repeal or curtail the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which incentivizes the energy transition
and has led to a renewable energy boom in the US.

Incorporate "a diversity of scientific viewpoints" in decision-making (including those with no real scientific basis, a la climate denial)

Curtail consideration of the social cost of carbon

Politicize the agency, giving all authority to political appointees over scientists;

Cut EPA funding of university research and Support repeal of the Global Change Research Act, which supports research into the impact of climate change.

Move away from anything supporting energy transition

Move away from regulating pesticides and agrichemcials

Revisit the designation of PFAS chemicals as “hazardous substances” under CERCLA.

Climate and Air Pollution Go Hand in Hand

I've written before about Steve Milloy, the tobacco and coal lobbyist, and his longtime war on 

. This proposal has his fingerprints all over it. Which makes sense for a few reasons: First, Gunasekara has no scientific background whatsoever, so she'd need someone like Milloy to outline a plan like this. Milloy got a BA in natural sciences and then a masters in biostastics from Johns Hopkins University. Although he's never actually worked as a scientist, those qualifications still make him uniquely science-y in the climate denier-sphere. Milloy went to Georgetown law school after Johns Hopkins, had a brief stint at the Securities Exchange Commission and then got a job with infamous industry lobbyist Jim Tozzi after he “ran into” him one day. “He had an unusual lobbying practice where he lobbied regulatory agencies, so he hired me to work on risk issues because of my background in biostatistics and law,” Milloy told me.

Gunasekara and Milloy have both been visiting fellows at the Heritage Foundation, and Milloy was on the Trump EPA transition team when Gunasekara was an early appointee for the agency. "I was the only person on the team with a background in EPA science, so I was brought on to write the science part of the transition plan,” Milloy told me in 2020.

The Great COP Co-opting: New Documents Show Big Oil Has Been There All Along

COP29 Kicks Off with a “Bad Process and Worse Outcome” on Carbon Market Rules

Everything You Need to Know About Project 2025's Plan for the EPA

Dispatch: For a Preview of Project 2025, Look to Argentina

Fossil Fuels Fund Academia. Now What?

Information Pollution

La Lucha En La Jungla

Denial to Delay

The Real Free Speech Threat

Genevieve Guenther on the Language of Climate Politics

We are a global team investigating the obstacles to action on climate change, all over the world

The Great COP Co-opting: New Documents Show Big Oil Has Been There All Along

COP29 Kicks Off with a “Bad Process and Worse Outcome” on Carbon Market Rules

Everything You Need to Know About Project 2025's Plan for the EPA

Dispatch: For a Preview of Project 2025, Look to Argentina

Fossil Fuels Fund Academia. Now What?

Information Pollution

La Lucha En La Jungla

Denial to Delay

The Real Free Speech Threat

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Genevieve Guenther on the Language of Climate Politics

We are a global team investigating the obstacles to action on climate change, all over the world