“Big Oil Is the New Big Tobacco” (Remembering the 2012 La Jolla Legal Plan)

From MasterResource

By Stephen Heins

“Let’s be clear: the frequent comparison of the fossil fuel and tobacco industries is nonsense. Fossil fuels are a valuable energy source that has done yeomen service for humankind.” – James Hansen (below)

At the time, this environmental workshop was not secret. That is the first thing worth saying about the June 2012 meeting at the Martin Johnson House, on the grounds of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla.

On June 14 and 15, the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Climate Accountability Institute brought together about two dozen scientists, lawyers, historians, and public-opinion hands. The workshop was conceived by Naomi Oreskes, then at the University of California–San Diego; Peter C. Frumhoff and Angela Ledford Anderson of the Union of Concerned Scientists; Richard Heede of the Climate Accountability Institute; and Lewis M. Branscomb.  Seth Shulman of UCS wrote the summary. In October 2012 they published it under a title that did not bother with code: Establishing Accountability for Climate Change Damages: Lessons from Tobacco Control.

They said what they were doing. The fossil-fuel industry, they argued, had copied the tobacco companies’ old trick of manufacturing doubt. The remedy, they proposed, was to copy the tobacco control campaign in return: find internal documents, build a public story of knowing deception, attach particular damages to particular companies, and take the fight into court.

Oreskes put the assignment in one sentence that still reads like a brief. “When I talk to my students I always say, tobacco causes lung cancer, esophageal cancer, mouth cancer. My question is: What is the ‘cancer’ of climate change that we need to focus on?”

That was the agreed propaganda. Not a slur. A plan, written down.

The report’s own highlights are plain. A breakthrough against tobacco came when internal documents showed the industry had misled the public. Similar documents, the group said, “might” sit in the vaults of fossil-fuel companies and their trade associations. Any corporate talk about climate could certainly be used against them.

They discussed how a forthcoming “carbon majors” analysis could let advocates attribute sea-level rise and other changes to named producers. But, a compelling public narrative was still missing, and litigation, science, and advocacy should reinforce one another.

Stanton Glantz, a veteran of the tobacco document wars, was in the room. So was Sharon Eubanks, who had led the Justice Department’s racketeering case against the cigarette makers. So were trial lawyers and legal scholars, including Mary Christina Wood. The point was not a seminar. The point was they were looking for a transferable methodology to demonize energy.

However, this method had a hole in it the size of a nuclear power plant, and the hole is still there.

A cigarette is a product that harms the person who buys it, sold by companies that spent years denying the harm their own scientists had measured. A barrel of oil, a ton of coal, and a thousand cubic feet of natural gas are the inputs of modern life. They heat the house in Sheboygan in January. They move us from place to place. They move the grain. They make the fertilizer, the steel, the plastic in the hospital equipment. James Hansen, father of the alarm, put the mischaracterization in its place:

Let’s be clear: the frequent comparison of the fossil fuel and tobacco industries is nonsense. Fossil fuels are a valuable energy source that has done yeomen service for humankind.

Treating the seller of that energy as the legal twin of the seller of cigarettes required a story that ignored the difference. The La Jolla group set out to build that story before the attribution paper even existed. Heede’s carbon-majors work came after the meeting that had already decided it would be useful.

What followed tracked the actual memo. The PR came first.

InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles Times, with Columbia Journalism School, published the 2015 investigations that became #ExxonKnew. Rockefeller family philanthropies helped fund the work. New York’s attorney general opened an investigation of the kind the workshop had sketched.

State and city lawsuits followed, many of them filed by the same small circle of firms, pleading public nuisance and consumer fraud, and seeking money for sea walls and adaptation. The Center for Climate Integrity and allied groups kept the public script running.

Oreskes stayed on the case, later co-authoring the 2023 Science paper on Exxon’s old internal projections. Frumhoff and UCS stayed in the briefing business. Heede’s producer-by-producer accounting became a standard exhibit. The “cancer” they settled on was not one disease. It was every flood, fire, and heat wave that could be passed through an attribution study and handed to a plaintiff.

That is the current green propaganda, and it has chief proponents rather than a single author.

The legal wing is the plaintiffs’ bar that lives on these cases, backed by the Center for Climate Integrity and by funders who have been open about wanting industry documents and industry money. The scientific wing is attribution research put to work as exhibit A, with Oreskes as the historian of the indictment.

The advocacy wing runs from the Union of Concerned Scientists through 350.org and the larger climate NGOs, which still frame the problem as a conspiracy of sellers rather than a physics-and-engineering problem of supply. The media wing, led for years by the New York Times, the Guardian, and the specialty climate outlets, treats the La Jolla theory as settled background. The political wing is the attorney general or the city council that files, then poses.

The script has been updated, not replaced. Where La Jolla said “find the documents,” the update says “they knew.” Where La Jolla asked for a cancer, the update supplies a weekly one: this hurricane, this wildfire, this heat dome, with a percentage attached.

Where La Jolla wanted courts to do what legislatures would not, the update keeps filing after federal judges have thrown cases out, and keeps hoping a state jury will do the regulating. The tobacco line is still the prestige analogy. It still does the work of making a complicated energy system sound like a pack of Marlboros.

What the script leaves out is the part a Midwest reader notices first. It leaves out that the same fuels under indictment are why infant mortality fell and why a Wisconsin winter is survivable. It leaves out that the United States has cut emissions while growing, largely by swapping gas for coal and by not shutting the nuclear plants that still run.

It leaves out that China builds coal plants on a scale that makes a San Francisco lawsuit look like a press release. It leaves out the woman in a kitchen in Lagos or rural India whose “transition” is still a wood fire and a bad lung. And it leaves out the price of the remedy on offer: intermittent power, higher bills, and a planning system that treats reliability as a moral failure.

La Jolla was candid about means. The current campaign is candid about villains. Neither has been candid about the product. Energy is not tobacco. A strategy that needs them to be the same thing is a strategy for the courtroom and the headline, not for the energy grid.

The 36 pages from October 2012 are still the best field guide to what followed. Compare them against the lawsuits, the attribution briefs, and the evening news. The plot has not changed. Only the stationery has changed.

Stephen Heins writes commentary at The Word Merchant, where this slightly revised post originally appeared. For other analyses of ‘ExxonKnew’, see Big Oil, Exxon Not Guilty as Charged (a rebuttal in six parts).