4th Podcast: Gaslighting
We’ve just released the fourth episode of our podcast “Your Planet, Your Health”, titled Gaslighting. It’s quite a long one, so you may want to digest it in parts. It’s about how the oil companies lied and sold our future for profit – but we’d also like to lift your spirits by telling you about how people are holding them accountable!
You can listen at yourplanetyourhealth.com/4 or right here:
Shownotes:
We delve into what the oil companies knew about CO2’s impact on the climate, and how they lied to you to sustain their fossilized business model – even if it risks drilling us into oblivion… This argument will soon be heard in court as part of a series of lawsuits against Big Oil.
We start by looking into the history of scholarship on this issue, dating back to the 19th Century.
We highlight the record of what the oil companies such as Exxon and the American Petroleum Institute were saying behind closed doors – and contrast this with their contemporaneous public statements.
Sources:
• If you would like to read California's lawsuit against ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, BP and the American Petroleum Institute for deceiving the public for decades, you can access it here:
https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/FINAL-9-15-COMPLAINT.pdf
• We quote from the 2010 book Merchants of Doubt; How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Climate by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway.
• We also sample a couple clips from the 2014 documentary derived from it, also titled Merchants Of Doubt, directed by Robert Kenner and co-written by Kim Roberts.
• We cite reporting from this 2017 article from the Center for Public Integrity: “The United States of Petroleum” by Jie Jenny Zou, accessible at
https://apps.publicintegrity.org/united-states-of-petroleum/
• We sample a couple clips from the 1981 British TV documentary by Thames Television called “Warming Warning”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMjnvfkeJJ0&list=PL7WD0g9dS3jlkXemuiPdoj4RF416JTpn6&index=3
• We read from Exxon's 1982 internal primer on the CO2 "Greenhouse Effect", which was made accessible thanks to reporting by Inside Climate News in 2015, and is accessible here:
https://insideclimatenews.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/1982-Exxon-Primer-on-CO2-Greenhouse-Effect.pdf
• We also read from the oil companies' advertorials, as highlighted in a 2017 research article: "Assessing ExxonMoblil’s climate change communications (1977-2014)" by Naomi Oreskes and Geoffrey Supran:
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa815f
• We refer to elements from the 2021 book The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet by Michael E Mann.
• We also cite the 2023 Science article "Assessing ExxonMobil’s global warming projections" by Geoffrey Supran, Stefan Rahmstorf, and Naomi Oreskes:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abk0063
• We excerpted a clip from Naomi Klein's June 2023 appearance on the podcast "The Audit", hosted by Dave Anthony and Josh Olson on David Sirota's Lever Network, which you can listen to in full here:
https://www.levernews.com/the-audit-the-climate-change-misinformation-machine