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remember when they sat you down in elementary school and made you do a survey to calculate you and your family's "carbon footprint"?

the term was actually coined by the company BP (British Petroleum) in order to shift the blame of climate change from big corporations to.... you! it's your fault the world is burning!!

the more you know! <3

#climate change #pollution #climate crisis #environmentalism #global warming #big corporations #british petroleum #greenwashing #climate misinformation #anti capitalism #corporate greed #climate justice #eco politics #⿻◞𝑽𝑽 𝓎𝒶𝓅𝓈 :>

Study: Utilities knew about climate change as early as the 1960s.

Excerpt from this story from Grist:

America’s electric utilities were aware as early as the 1960s that the burning of fossil fuels was warming the planet, but, two decades later, worked hand in hand with oil and gas companies to “promote doubt around climate change for the sake of continued … profits,” finds a new study published in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

The research adds utility companies and their affiliated groups to the growing list of actors that spent years misleading the American public about the threat of climate change. Over the past half decade, oil companies like BP and ExxonMobil have had to defend themselves in court against cities, state attorneys general, youth activists, and other entities who allege the world’s fossil fuel giants knew about the existence of climate change as far back as 1968, yet chose to ignore the information and launch disinformation campaigns. Recent investigations show the coal industry did something similar, as did fossil fuel-funded economists.

But while the role Big Oil played in misleading the public has been widely publicized, utilities’ culpability has largely flown under the radar. So researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara began collecting and analyzing public and private records kept by organizations within the utility industry.

The authors analyzed public reports authored by utility companies or their affiliated groups between 1968 and 2019, as well as collected documents from watchdog groups. They found 188 external and internal documents referencing climate change from utility companies, research groups, trade associations, and other organizations closely linked to the industry. Two of the affiliated groups, the Edison Electric Institute and the Electric Power Research Institute, which authored or distributed most of the documents in the study, are the utility industry’s main trade group and research arm, respectively.

Emily Williams, a postdoctoral student at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the lead author of the study, told Grist that the documents provide a sense of when the utility industry’s climate denial began — and how it has evolved over time. The takeaways are stark: Utilities became aware of the dangers of burning fossil fuels in the 1960s and ‘70s, and acknowledged the risks it posed for the industry. “If [climate change turned] out to be of major concern, then fossil fuel combustion will be essentially unacceptable,” an article by the Electric Power Research Institute stated in 1977. But for the next two decades, those same utilities promoted false doubt about humanity’s role in climate change and tried to delay action. An article from the Edison Electric Institute published in 1989 said that, “any plan calling for urgent and extreme action to reduce utility CO2 emissions is premature at best.”

#climate misinformation #corporate propaganda #electric utilities #climate change

An independent think tank, called InfluenceMap, found that in the first half of 2020, ads on Facebook calling climate crisis a hoax were viewed at least 8 million times in the US. Fifty-one climate disinformation ads were identified, including ones denying the reality or the need to take action of...

Excerpt from this story from EcoWatch:

A new report finds that views of climate misinformation posts on Facebook are reaching an average of 818,000 to 1.36 million views daily.

This estimate is up to 13 times more than the number of views that legitimate posts in Facebook's own Climate Science Center receive.

The report, On the Back Burner, examines 48,700 posts by 196 accounts from January to August 2021. The results confirm what many people already knew or suspected — that Facebook is allowing misinformation to easily be digested, shared, and added to.

Stop Funding Heat, an organization behind the report (along with Real Facebook Oversight Board, a group of activists), also found that Facebook isn't just a platform for misinformation. The social media giant also allows these misinformation campaigns to run as sponsored posts.

In the research, the team found 113 advertisements with an estimated 11.7 million to 14.1 million views. These sponsored posts contained phrases such as "climate change is a HOAX." Facebook has reportedly known about the posts since 2020, but both paid and organic climate misinformation content continues to spread.

Facebook's parent company, now called Meta, has adopted third-party fact-checking practices since 2016 in order to remedy the long-standing issue of spreading misinformation on the platform. Yet only a small percentage, just over 3%, of the posts evaluated in the study were reviewed by Facebook's third-party fact checkers.

The company's response so far has been that the report relies on "made up numbers and a flawed methodology to suggest content on Facebook is misinformation when it's really just posts these groups disagree with politically," as reported by Grist.

#Facebook #climate misinformation

The question for the PR and ad business is whether a coalition of academics and advocates can get them to cut their ties with fossil fuel companies.

Excerpt from this story from the Washington Post:

The public relations giant Edelman vaulted to the top of its profession with clever campaigns that burnished the images of leading corporations. Now, under fire for its work on behalf of fossil fuel companies, Edelman is scrambling to bolster its own reputation.

On Wednesday, more than 450 scientists called on public relations and advertising firms, including the prestigious Edelman, to stop working for oil and gas companies. The firms’ ad campaigns for these companies, the scientists said, “represent one of the biggest barriers to the government action science shows is necessary to mitigate the ongoing climate emergency.” A group of 100 activists and former Edelman employees partnered with Clean Creatives, a campaign pressuring PR and ad agencies to quit fossil fuels, to issue the same demand.

The question for the PR and ad business is whether this emboldened coalition of academics and advocates can turn fossil fuel companies into social pariahs — a sort of New Tobacco.

Major financial institutions are trying to walk a similarly fine line. Last year, the asset and risk management firm BlackRock threw its considerable weight behind the election of three dissident directors at ExxonMobil, which on Tuesday said its own operations would reach net zero by 2050. In December, however, BlackRock was part of a multibillion-dollar deal to buy pipelines from Saudi Aramco. On Tuesday, BlackRock chief executive Larry Fink said his firm, which has $10 trillion under management, would not become the “climate police” or divest itself of fossil fuel firms.

“I do believe that extractive industry is going the way of tobacco, and for that same reason any [ad] agency who either claims ‘purpose’ or dabbles in sustainability will have to stop working with them,” said Henk Campher, who joined Edelman in 2009 to advise companies on developing corporate responsibility strategies and left in 2015 over what he said was Edelman’s lucrative work for the American Petroleum Institute. “Like CVS did — you can’t sell tobacco and medicine at the same time,” he said.

#ad agencies #climate change #climate misinformation #fossil fuel industry

The documents, subpoenaed in a House investigation of climate disinformation, show company leaders contravening industry commitments.

Excerpt from this story from the New York Times:

Documents obtained by congressional investigators show that oil industry executives privately downplayed their companies’ own public messages about efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and weakened industry-wide commitments to push for climate policies.

Internal Exxon documents show that the oil giant pressed an industry group, the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative, to remove language from a 2019 policy statement that “could create a potential commitment to advocate on the Paris Agreement goals.” The Paris Agreement is the landmark 2015 pact among nations of the world to avert catastrophic global warming. The statement’s final version didn’t mention Paris.

At Royal Dutch Shell, an October 2020 email sent by an employee, discussing talking points for Shell’s president for the United States, said that the company’s announcement of a pathway to “net zero” emissions — the point at which the world would no longer be pumping planet-warming gases into the atmosphere — “has nothing to do with our business plans.”

These and other documents, reviewed by The New York Times, come from a cache of hundreds of thousands of pages of corporate emails, memos and other files obtained under subpoena as part of an examination by the House Committee on Oversight and Reform into the fossil fuel industry’s efforts over the decades to mislead the public about its role in climate change, dismissing evidence that the burning of fossil fuels was driving an increase in global temperatures even as their own scientists warned of a clear link.

On Thursday, the House committee is expected to discuss some of its early findings. “It’s well established that these companies actively misled the American public for decades about the risks of climate change,” said Representative Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California who spearheaded the investigation with Carolyn B. Maloney, the New York Democrat who leads the House committee. “The problem is that they continue to mislead,” Mr. Khanna said.

#oil and gas industry #climate misinformation