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PBS’s investigative public relations program “Frontline” specializes in reminding us of what we prefer to forget. On Tuesday begins a three-part dive into the potential species-killer that’s been taking a back seat to climate change and more traditional scourges like disease and war lately.
titled Weekly mini-series “The Power of Big Oil” The fossil fuel industry—especially Exxon Mobil and Koch Industries—focuses on climate change denial as it’s enforced and paid for by its allies in business and, increasingly, politics. Additionally, it’s a depressing, rather than illuminating, history of why little has been done about an existential crisis that we’ve been aware of for at least four decades.
The beacon posts of our innate insight and alarm are well known, among them climatologists. James Hansen’s 1988 testimony to CongressKyoto and Paris agreements, documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” and increasingly grave United Nations reports. The meticulous response by “Frontline” – a disciplined, coordinated campaign of disinformation and diversion that began in the industry and embraced by conservative political groups – was less familiar but always clear.
Part of the campaign is a barrage of public, televised, and mainstream media (including The New York Times) columns and adverts that don’t strictly deny global warming but portray it as the attention-mongers’ night terrors. Behind the scenes, thinly disguised lobbying groups paid for by Big Oil put pressure on key politicians at key moments—when the United States looks like it will pass a law that affects profits.
A lesson the show offers almost in passing is that the refusal to accept the reality of climate change prefigures the broader attacks on science and knowledge in general that will characterize the Trump years and the response to Covid. -19 epidemics. Republican politicians take heart in the successful but lonely war waged by the oil and gas industries as they see how climate denial and the specter of unemployed miners and drillers coincide with efforts to demonize President Barack Obama and radicalize conservative voters. At this point the fig leaf of scientific discussion falls and pure emotion kicks in.
And the bigger lesson of the program is about the cunning manipulation of emotions. It was clear from the very beginning that the oil industry’s campaign was not about persuading us on scientific grounds, but about using the basic human desire to avoid difficult and inappropriate actions. It was sadly and unsurprisingly easy to find a political cover to continue making huge profits.
“Frontline” tries to add dramatic tension to this sad history in several ways. One is bland and nosey: When it needs a pass or just an injection of emotion, the program starts a “I told you so” montage of wildfires, hurricanes, and floods.
The other is more involved and also more frustrating. Lobbyists, media consultants, researchers, and politicians involved in questioning climate change witness their actions and then offer varying degrees of apology—a series of aha moments whose sincerity is questionable and also pointless. “Yeah, I wish I wasn’t a part of that, looking back.” “I would have chosen a different path.” “I can understand when people say to me, ‘You’re a traitor. Oh well.
(It will not go unnoticed by some viewers that those with second thoughts are, without exception, middle-aged white men.)
As the infantrymen present their vexing crimes, the program silently takes note of individuals and organizations that refused to appear or comment, including Koch Industries and Lee Raymond and Rex Tillerson, executive directors of Exxon Mobil, during the “lost decades” in which the action may have taken place. taken to limit carbon emissions. Exxon Mobil offers a statement that its public statements have always been “consistent with the contemporary understanding of mainstream climate science” – an understanding that it does as much as anyone else does to shape it.
“The Power of Big Oil” provides no comfort; It comes to a hasty end with the energy crisis facing the Biden administration due to environmental returns enacted by President Donald Trump and Russia’s war in Ukraine. The final note is a predictably poignant note: A professor whose work has facilitated the growth of hydraulic fracturing and thereby prolonging the life of the fossil fuel industry wonders what the hell his grandchildren will have to pay for. If they’re watching, it’s doubtful they’ll sympathize.
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