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snow of tomorrow

Snow of Tomorrow | Don't get distracted

Yesterday's snow is today's and tomorrow's snow

by Lea Hartl 11/22/2021
Today, we are not so much concerned with the future as with the past when it comes to Snow of Tomorrow. The French oil and gas company Total is the fourth largest player on the market after ExxonMobil, Chevron and Royal Dutch Shell. Total's management was demonstrably aware of the negative effects of burning fossil fuels on the climate over 50 years ago.

A recent environmental history study examines in detail how Total has used image campaigns and PR strategies to influence public opinion and policymaking since the company's first internal studies on climate change. (Bonneuil, Christophe, Pierre-Louis Choquet, and Benjamin Franta. "Early warnings and emerging accountability: Total's responses to global warming, 1971-2021." Global Environmental Change (2021): 102386.) This study is not the first of its kind. Similar findings on Exxon, BP and Shell have been known for a long time and the findings on Total are not surprising, but once again impressive in their depth of detail.

The 20 largest oil and gas companies have produced over a third of the greenhouse gas emissions of the last 70 years. Even in the years after 1945, the oil industry was repeatedly confronted with criticism regarding environmental pollution, especially air pollution and oil spills. By the time climate change began to emerge as a policy-relevant issue in the 1960s, many companies had already practiced managing public perception.

Industry advocacy groups such as the American Petroleum Institute (API), the Global Climate Coalition (GCC) and the International Petroleum Industry Environmental Conservation Association (IPIECA) have been known as opinion-making machines for decades. The study by Bonneuil et al., which is based on archival research and interviews with primary sources, focuses primarily on the exchange of information and strategy development in the IPIECA circle, to which the French oil companies Total and Elf belong.

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Conceptually, the study is in the field of agnotology, a branch of research that deals with the mechanisms and dissemination of ignorance. The Wikipedia definition specifies: "Its object of study is how ignorance can be created or secured through manipulation, misleading, false or suppressed information, censorship or other forms of deliberate or inadvertent cultural-political selectivity."

In the context of climate change, this often involves targeted lobbying campaigns and rhetorical and argumentative framing strategies in an attempt to distract from the topic and/or discredit climate science. In addition to these very aggressive forms of fake news production, there are also more subtle, more banal effects, some of which are unintentional, in particular "willful blindness", i.e. the more or less deliberate ignoring of the problem. In other words, loud messages about climate protection and supposed or actual commitment to more climate-friendly technologies distract from the main source of income and the main problem: the burning of fossil fuels. Internally, eyes and ears are firmly closed, unless there is a deliberate lie.

The study uses the example of Total to draw a chronology of the ever-changing corporate strategies, from direct climate change denial in the early 1990s to the current forms of strategic philanthropy and the promotion of peripheral "solutions".

Greenwashing, marketing and the personal footprint

What does this have to do with snow and winter? Not too much directly, but we're on Snow of Tomorrow here, where many issues blur into one another. The communication tactics outlined in the study are still being used in many sectors, including far from the obviously prejudiced oil and gas industry. In particular, the emphasis on supposed solutions that do not address the main problem is currently popular. On the one hand, this includes typical greenwashing, as we know it from the winter sports industry, for example. On the other hand, there are also laudable efforts that are good and right, but not enough to solve the problem.

BP invests in unicorn start-ups in the field of sustainability, such as an app that allows you to track your own carbon footprint. BP was also instrumental in establishing the term "carbon footprint" in the collective consciousness through advertising campaigns. Shifting responsibility away from the industry and towards individual decisions is a deliberate move. Is it good to think about your own lifestyle, fly less, recycle and take the bus to the ski resort? Of course it is. But above all, fossil fuels need to stay in the ground.

At the recently concluded COP 26 in Scotland, 105 countries agreed to reduce methane emissions by 30% by 2030. This is an important step in a good direction. It's also easy to achieve, doesn't cost much and won't hurt anyone. Methane emissions are a by-product of fossil fuel extraction, among other things. If the relevant infrastructure is brought up to scratch, methane leaks can be quickly eliminated without having to extract even a little less oil and gas. The methane agreement is certainly valuable and a significant reduction in methane emissions is effective, especially in the short term, to slow down the rise in temperature. However, there is a risk of creating the impression that reducing methane emissions will somehow offset CO2 emissions. To meet the very optimistic 1.5°C target, it is not enough to extract fossil fuels more cleanly. They have to stay in the ground.

The oil companies Total and Elf spent a lot of money on promoting art and culture until the end of the 1980s. These programs were discontinued. Since 1991, there has been "charitable" money exclusively for marine conservation initiatives, biodiversity projects, tree planting groups and the like. Trees are great, but: fossil fuels must stay in the ground.

With this in mind, let's not be distracted!

On the next page, there is a brief summary of some points from the aforementioned study, which traces how Total's climate strategy has evolved since the 1970s. --->

Summary of the Total timeline

In 1971, Total's company magazine published an article stating that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere had increased and would continue to increase due to the use of fossil fuels. According to the article, this would have a massive impact on the climate. The "catastrophic" consequences were "easy to imagine".

This was by no means new at the time, but reflected the current state of research. The basic connections between CO2 and temperatures had been known since around the turn of the century (18-1900, not 19-2000!), but the state of knowledge became much more differentiated after the Second World War. The problem was therefore well known, including quantitative estimates of future warming. The issue was already having an impact on far-reaching political decisions at the time; in France, for example, it was decided in 1968 to expand nuclear power for climate reasons, among others.

In the debate with environmental organizations about air pollution, oil companies increasingly shifted to the argument that new technologies were good for the environment and people's quality of life. Total and Elf set up internal departments to deal with environmental issues. According to interviews with a former Total employee quoted in the study, the purpose of the departments was to signal to the outside world that the issue was being taken seriously.

Internally, there was a turning point in awareness in 1984. The study quotes the "Environmental Director" of Elf, who remembers an international industry meeting at which Exxon presented its own research on climate change:

"The moment I remember really being alerted to the seriousness of global warming was at an IPIECA meeting in Houston in 1984. 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."

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After an IPIECA meeting in 1988, the "Working Group on Global Climate Change" was founded, consisting of representatives from various major oil companies. There was a consensus within the Working Group that existing uncertainties in climate research needed to be emphasized in order to prevent political decisions that would make life difficult for the industry through stricter regulations. In the 1990s, money was specifically invested in research that would either shed more light on the limitations of climate models or make climate change appear potentially less threatening (e.g. research on the cooling effects of aerosols and clouds and on CO2 storage in the oceans). Elf, the French oil company, placed young engineers through a volunteer program in research institutions (e.g. UCLA, MIT, NCAR) whose activities it wanted to know more about.

As early as 1989, the European Commissioner for the Environment presented a plan for a kind of eco-tax, which was discussed by the European Commission in 1991. The French government initially supported the idea, but the proposed eco-tax was blocked a year later by Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the newly appointed Minister for Industry. The then President of the Commission emphasized that the blockade was a result of lobbying by the oil industry.

There was a change of mood at Elf and Total from the early to mid-1990s. Climate change denial slowly became counterproductive due to the increasingly clear results of science and growing social skepticism towards the oil multinationals. The era of "sustainable development" and "corporate responsibility" finally began in the oil and gas sector.

Market-based instruments were increasingly promoted, such as offset trading and voluntary "commitments". This framing created a mood against actual, binding regulation. While Elf and Total had previously promoted art and culture as a philanthropic arm of the company, from 1991 onwards there was only money for biodiversity projects, marine conservation initiatives, etc.

A quote from a leading Shell employee shows that they did not want to make the same mistakes as the tobacco industry. At the time, the industry had already stumbled massively over its targeted disinformation campaigns and was facing mass lawsuits for health damage caused by smoking.

The message was now: climate change exists, but it's not that bad. In internal and external reports, climate change and the consequences of climate change were put into perspective and the anthropogenic influence was presented as uncertain.

In the mid-00s, there was another change in strategy. Science was no longer openly attacked, but was supposed to take care of the theory. Business, or in this specific case Total, was to deal with the practical solutions. Total's public image was increasingly brought into line, for example through public financial support for research in the field of sustainable development.

Between 2010 and 2014, Total invested $127 billion in oil and gas exploration and production. The company's own renewable energy division received 3 billion dollars.

In 2015, Total joined other oil companies in calling for international carbon pricing at the UN. Total has pledged to invest more in renewable energies and has been providing annual reports with highly technical, complex information in this regard since 2016. These are difficult for outsiders to understand and interpret, so Total usually goes unchallenged when it presents itself as climate-friendly.

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