Global Climate Coalition

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The Global Climate Coalition (GCC , German: Globale Klima-Koalition) was a lobbying organization funded by a number of large industrial companies that was founded in 1989 as an early representative of a front group of the organized climate denial movement . Their task was to combat evidence of man-made global warming and to prevent climate protection measures without drawing any direct conclusions about the companies financing them, primarily from the energy and automotive sectors. For her activities she used greenscamming , a PR technique in which groups pretend to be environmental protection organizations, but in reality fight against environmental protection interests.

history

The founding of the Global Climate Coalition went back to the American Petroleum Institute (API), the lobby association of the US oil industry. In response to James E. Hansen's speech to the US Congress in June 1988, the API had invested about $ 100,000 in a strategy to deal with the carbon dioxide problem. A small part of this went into the establishment of the Global Climate Coalition, which initially ran its business from the headquarters of the National Association of Manufacturers . In addition to the API, other members quickly joined it, such as the United States Chamber of Commerce and 13 other trade organizations, including the associations of the coal industry, the auto industry and the electricity industry. It also included the oil companies Exxon Mobil , Royal Dutch Shell , BP and Texaco as well as the car manufacturers Ford , General Motors and DaimlerChrysler . Other members were various railway companies , which profited greatly from the transport of coal , as well as an associated railway association.

Act

The GCC pursued its goals by sowing doubts about the scientific knowledge about global warming . On the one hand, she publicly questioned fundamental scientific findings and, on the other hand, presented the actually existing uncertainties of the state of research in detailed questions as fundamental uncertainties. She succeeded in placing so-called climate skeptics in public media discussions and thereby giving the public the erroneous impression that global warming was not a scientific consensus, but a scientific controversy. The GCC was particularly active in its opposition to the American signing of the Kyoto Protocol ; She also played an important role in the attacks on climate researcher Benjamin Santer , whom she accused of manipulating a chapter of the IPCC's Second Assessment Report . The aim of these unfounded attacks was to discredit the report and thus the IPCC as a whole.

Originally, it was designed to serve as a response body for the dissemination of notifications about potential regulatory measures. However, very soon after it was founded, it began a press campaign coordinated by the PR department of the American Petroleum Institute. For this purpose, the GCC passed on selected information to politicians who had weighed it down and asked scientists who had already questioned climate change in the past. These scientists included Fred Singer and Patrick J. Michaels, two men who had also previously denied the depletion of the ozone layer by CFCs, and Richard Lindzen . The API offered them $ 2,000 for the publication of opinion articles in newspapers. The first of these articles appeared in October 1989. In these, Lindzen, Singer and other scientists from the Global Climate Coalition disputed climatological statements that no one had previously doubted, which suddenly gave the public perception of the previously hardly controversial climate issue a completely different spin awarded even if the arguments presented were refuted. For example, Singer claimed that there were “serious doubts about the greenhouse effect in the scientific community ”. Many other media picked up on the claims, wrote articles about the "global warming panic" or asked whether "everything is just hot air" with climate change. Overall, the misbalance of many journalists led to a sudden preponderance of doubts about climate research in the US media, although at that point in time only about half a dozen scientists openly doubted the greenhouse effect.

In 1993, shortly after newly elected President Bill Clinton proposed an energy tax in response to the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in 1992, William O'Keefe , who was the API's deputy head , took over the Global Climate Coalition. Armed with $ 1.8 million from the API, O'Keefe began a disinformation campaign with the GCC against this proposal. As a result, Democratic senators from states where oil and coal played a major role allied with the Republicans against the bill. This alliance, in turn, is also considered to be the reason for a major electoral defeat for the Democrats in 1994, in which they lost both chambers to the Republicans for the first time in over four decades.

In the following years the GCC continued its activities and spent at least one million US dollars every year on the fight against climate protection. In 1997 she coordinated the activities of the US economy and the Republicans in the fight against the Kyoto Protocol , in which she ran a $ 13 million advertising campaign against the treaty. In the end, a Clinton delegation signed the protocol, but it was never ratified by the United States after a trial vote was unanimously rejected in the US Senate.

The Global Climate Coalition carried out its lobbying and PR activities against climate research despite the knowledge of the member societies that their results were scientifically sound. For example, an internal assessment of the state of affairs had shown that the claims of climate skeptics “did not offer convincing arguments against the conventional model of climate change caused by greenhouse gases”. In this way, the GCC deceived decision-makers about the scientific facts and delayed decisive climate protection measures for years. Al Gore accused the GCC of "committing a more serious fraud than Madoff ". The GCC lied to people who trusted them to make money.

Triggered by the great success of the Global Climate Coalition, a large number of similar lobby groups were quickly founded, many of which, given their activities, had massively misleading names. These included B. Citizens for the Environment , the Information Council on the Environment , the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition , the Cooler Heads Coalition or the Global Climate Information Project .

When George W. Bush became US President in 2000 , the Global Climate Coalition and many other climate denial organizations changed their PR strategy: they had previously only asserted that the "extent and timing" of global warming were uncertain, and thus the occurrence Not generally excluded from a climatological catastrophe, they now began to dispute the basics of climate research itself ; the foundation of a science, the basis of which goes back to John Tyndall and Svante Arrhenius in the 19th century . For Nathaniel Rich, "a rhetorical volte comparable to a historian who goes from claiming that slavery was not the main cause of the [American] Civil War to claiming that slavery never existed".

In 2002 the Global Climate Coalition disbanded after members were convinced that the George W. Bush administration was pursuing its goals. Before that, many important members who no longer agreed with the GCC's approach had resigned. For example, a Shell executive commented that they "didn't want to fall into the same trap as the tobacco companies who at some point got caught up in their own lies."

See also

Web links

literature

  • Spencer R. Weart : The Discovery of global warming . Harvard University Press, Cambridge 2008.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c Riley E. Dunlap, Aaron M. McCright: Organized Climate Change Denial. In: John S. Dryzek, Richard B. Norgaard, David Schlosberg (Eds.): The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society . Oxford University Press 2011, pp. 144-160, 150.
  2. ^ Haydn Washington, John Cook : Climate Change Denial. Heads in the sand. Earthscan, 2011, pp. 72f.
  3. ↑ a b c d e Cf. Nathaniel Rich : Losing Earth , Berlin 2019, pp. 204–211.
  4. ^ Christiane Frantz, Annette Zimmer: Civil society international: old and new NGOs. Leske + Budrich Verlag, 2002, ISBN 3-8100-3009-0 , p. 219ff.
  5. ^ Robinson Meyer: A Major but Little-Known Supporter of Climate Denial: Freight Railroads . In: The Atlantic , December 13, 2019. Retrieved December 14, 2019.
  6. ↑ Pascal Bader: European greenhouse policy with tradable emission rights: Recommendations for the implementation of the Kyoto obligation against the background of US-American licensing experiences. Duncker & Humblot Verlag, 2000, ISBN 3-428-10115-4 , p. 32.
  7. ^ David Miller, William Dinan: Resisting meaningful Action on Climate Changes. Think tanks, 'merchants of doubt' and the 'corporate capture' of sustainable development . In: Anders Hansen, Robert Cox (Eds.): The Routledge Handbook of Environment and Communication . London 2015, pp. 86–99, here p. 90.
  8. ↑ Stefan Rahmstorf: How much CO2 is too much? April 29, 2009.
  9. ↑ Washington Post: Industry Group Excised Own Experts' Climate Findings From Report , April 25, 2009.
  10. ↑ Nathaniel Rich : Losing Earth , Berlin 2019, pp. 210f.
  11. ↑ Nathaniel Rich : Losing Earth , Berlin 2019, p. 210.