Behind the Bastards - How Exxon, Chevron and their buddies killed the world

Episode Date: March 10, 2020

Robert is joined by Molly Lambert to discuss the Bastards Who Covered Up Climate Change.FOOTNOTES: Exxon accused of misleading investors on climate change An investor enquiry: how much big oil spends on climate lobbying Column: A new study shows how Exxon Mobil downplayed climate change when it knew the problem was real Exxon’s Climate Concealment Shell Knew Fossil Fuels Created Climate Change Risks Back in 1980s, Internal Documents Show Shell and Exxon's secret 1980s climate change warnings On its 100th birthday in 1959, Edward Teller warned the oil industry about global warming Industry Ignored Its Scientists on Climate Did ExxonMobil Just Admit It’s Still Funding Climate Science Deniers? Corporate funding and ideological polarization about climate change Two-faced Exxon: the misinformation campaign against its own scientists Rex Tillerson to oil industry: Not sure humans can do anything to battle climate change Exxon May Have Erased 7 Years of Tillerson's 'Wayne Tracker' Emails, Witness Says Rex Tillerson Testifies, Denying Exxon Misled Investors About Climate Risk ‘All Rhetoric and No Action’: Oil Giants Spent $1 Billion on Climate Lobbying and Ads Since Paris Pact, Says Report The new science fossil fuel companies fear Report details how ExxonMobil and fossil fuel firms sowed seeds of doubt on climate change Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. But, oh, nope. Shit. Well, I'm Robert Evans. This is another failed introduction. I don't know. I don't know why I keep trying new things. It's a bad idea to try new things. I should just go back to what works.

But I am permanently trapped in a cycle of new attempts at success that end only in failure. Anyway, my guest today, Molly Lambert. Night call podcast host. How are you doing, Molly? Excellent. Molly. I like the new intro. Thank you. Just the word butts. Yeah. It's better than Hitler. Yeah.

This is a podcast where we talk about bad people, Molly. You know that because you've been a guest on here before. I'm ready. I'm ready to find out again who the worst people of all time are. I am not ready. I am strung at as fuck because I got back from a red eye from DC yesterday and I feel miserable. But it's appropriate that I just got off of a plane because planes are a major contributor to climate change. And today we're talking about the bastards who covered up climate change back when we could have done something about it more easily. Molly, how do you feel about ExxonMobil? Are you a fan? Are you a MOBA stan?

Aren't we all little Exxon Xs? Xs? Ooh, that's a good one. That was a band, right? In like the early 2000s? It's definitely a band. Probably, yeah. I remember listening to them when I was a depressed teenager. Well, Molly, if you had to choose between, let's say ExxonMobil, Chevron, what's another big one? Shell. Shell, yeah. Which is going to be like your, who are you going to like root for?

I mean, we're recording this on Valentine's Day. It's like, I feel like we're in a love quadrangle. Who can choose among so many great suitors? Fine products, yeah. I don't really know enough about the difference between the oil companies. I just know they're all pretty bad. I do remember, was Exxon responsible for perhaps an oil spill? They sure were, yeah, the Exxon Valdez. Now, in their defense, how could you hire a captain for a boat filled with volatile fluids and make sure he's sober at the same time? That's an impossible barrier.

I mean, I do know that people go out on the oil wells for like months at a time. Yes, the documentary Armageddon informed me of that. Is that the documentary about how people put animal crackers on each other's stomachs as well? Is that in Armageddon? Do I need to rewatch Armageddon? That's the one with Affleck, right? Yes, it definitely is. Oh yeah, that's definitely the animal crackers romantic sequence. I'm thinking back on it now and I've realized that in my memory, the movie Armageddon has been condensed to the scene where Bruce Willis points a shotgun at Ben Affleck.

The scene where they have that machine gun on an asteroid for some reason. They have to blow up an asteroid. They have to blow up an asteroid, but anyway, there's like three minutes from that movie. I think the movie's in the criterion collection. It should be. As it should be. We should get into this thing that I wrote about these people that I hate. I hope you'll hate with me because that's what this show is about, hating together.

Aw. Yeah. In 2015, an internal Exxon report from the 1980s which discussed the reality of climate change was leaked out to the public via The Guardian. In 2017, a Dutch news organization released a similar report from Shell. And I'm going to guess most of the people listening have heard at least a little bit about both of these disclosures. You've heard about this, right, Molly? Oh, for sure. Yeah, yeah.

The stories generally summarized in outraged social media posts as this. Exxon, Shell, slash whoever knew about climate change for decades and hid their research. And this is more or less accurate like it's close enough for Twitter. But you'll notice if you hop over to Google right now, those of you who aren't actively pooping or driving to work while you listen to podcasts. If you hop over to Google and you type in Exxon covered up climate change, the first two of the six million results you'll receive are articles from Exxon's own website with titles like Exxon Mobile. Don't be misled, understanding the facts and understanding the hashtag Exxon New Controversy by Exxon Mobile. So obviously unbiased. I mean, who can we trust for unbiased reporting on Exxon Mobile?

They gotta get it out there in the blogosphere. It's like how the very best people to report on whether or not police departments are responsibly using force are members of those police departments. Yeah. Which is why we have such excellent statistics on police use of force. Right. What could be better than an internal review? Yeah, I mean, at this job, I am responsible for making sure I am sober enough to work, which is why I have been sober enough to work 100% of the days when I've done this podcast, even the one where I was actively tripling on assets. Which one was that?

He refuses to say. It's a secret. It's a secret to everybody, which is proof that the self-monitoring thing is flawless. So. I agree. You won't even tell me his mom. I will not. I will not.

It's a secret for only me. So today I'm going to tell everybody the story of how this sorry state of affairs came to be. It didn't start in the 1980s, which is when all those now leaked reports were written. It actually starts further back in 1959 when physicist Edward Teller warned the oil and gas industry about global warming in a keynote address at the energy and man symposium. 1959 was seen as the 100 year anniversary of the oil and gas industry. And so the event was a celebration of petroleum and its cousins. But Edward Teller did not take to the stage to celebrate. Instead, he gave out a grave warning to the executives assembled.

He said, quote, ladies and gentlemen, I am here to talk to you about energy in the future. I will start by telling you why I believe that the energy resources of the past must be supplemented. First of all, these energy resources will run short as we use more and more of the fossil fuels. But I would like to mention another reason why we probably have to look for additional fuel supplies. And this, strangely, is the question of contaminating the atmosphere. Whenever you burn conventional fuel, you create carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide is invisible. It is transparent. You can't smell it. It is not dangerous to health, so why should one worry about it?

Carbon dioxide has a strange property. It transmits visible light, but it absorbs the infrared radiation, which is emitted from the Earth. Its presence in the atmosphere causes a greenhouse effect. It has been calculated that a temperature rise corresponding to a 10% increase in carbon dioxide will be sufficient to melt the ice cap and submerge New York. All coastal cities would be covered. And since a considerable percentage of the human race lives in coastal regions, I think that this chemical contamination is more serious than most people tend to believe.

So that's 1959. Worth. Yeah. Spot on. We might quibble with him saying that carbon dioxide is not dangerous to health, but he's saying specifically that you're not going to get sick from carbon dioxide poisoning because of gasoline. Right.

You won't be able to tell it's happening until it's too late. Yeah, exactly. So they have this warning in 1959. And we do not know how Teller's audience reacted in that moment, because nobody was really taking notes. But we know that they did not heed his warning. Eight years later, Robert Dunlop, head of the American Petroleum Institute, took to the halls of Congress to argue that electric cars were not a practical investment.

By the time they reached a point of utility, he said, science would allow for emission-free gasoline vehicles. You may notice that this has not happened, nor is it close to happening. Yeah, so he wound up being wrong. Now, this might not have been a lie at the time. People believed stupid things about the future back then, like the Jetsons was on the air. Flying cars. Yeah, exactly.

Are you really sure that we'd hit that point? I think a lot of people are just sort of like, we'll figure it out later, you know, which is the problem with everything. Yeah. But especially with environmental issues. Yeah. This will be the burden of the people of the future to figure out. Not mine.

Just do my job. Making all the money by drilling all the oil out. Yeah. It's weird. There's always this idea that, okay, we'll figure out the technology necessary to, like, solve our environmental problems before they become critical. But then when it comes time to actually, you know,

use the resources capitalism has in order to devote manpower and brainpower towards, like, research, they all wind up making dick pills and doing baldness as opposed to making emissions-free gasoline. Capitalism doesn't want to do anything that doesn't just make a lot of money and is easy. Yeah. Yeah, there's a good documentary about Rachel Carson who wrote Silent Spring.

There sure is. Yeah. You seen that documentary? It's awesome. Because she was another person who was like, hey, DDT is like going to give people health problems. And it was, like, actively buried by the DDT lobby. But also because everyone around her was like,

it's a scientific innovation. We cannot stand in the way of progress. Each new thing we invent to exploit the environment is a miracle on the earth. So I don't know that we've gotten out of that mindset, really, either, judging by, like, what Silicon Valley thinks are the cool new things to invent. We never will get out of that mindset because we're very dumb. Or maybe we will when I'm just a pessimist because I spend all these hours researching ExxonMobil and Shell and Chevron.

Tell me more. So, yeah, Dunlop, like, gets up in front of fucking Congress and he's like, electric cars are stupid. We're going to have emissions free gasoline. That's what we ought to be working on. And, you know, the very next year after he does this, he receives a report that the American Petroleum Institute had commissioned from Stanford. And this report warned that carbon dioxide emissions

would lead directly to global warming and, quote, serious worldwide environmental changes. So, 1959, Teller gets up on Warren's People about this. 1967, Robert Dunlop takes to Congress and says that, you know, none of this is going to be a big issue. And then the very next year, his own organization gets a report saying, like, we need to immediately start reducing carbon dioxide emissions or horrible things are going to happen.

Now, Dunlop died in 1995. He had a son, Richard G. Dunlop, and a daughter, Barbara, neither of which I've been able to find much out about. One presumes they're quite well off. But since their dad shares the name of a member of an Irish motorcycle dynasty who died tragically, the Google results for them are kind of a mess. And we've got a lot more ground to cover here. So, while Dunlop deserves much blame for ignoring the early signs of climate change,

it must be noted that there were warnings the broader American populace could have accessed and heated if they had wanted to do so. In 1965, philosopher Maree Bookchin published Crisis in Our Cities, a book about the negative consequences of urbanization. In it, he noted, quote, Bookchin was well ahead of the curve on a number of environmental issues, including the damage modern agriculture was doing to soil structure. But no one listened to him.

Part of the problem was that, according to cultural critic Theodore Rozak, nobody cared to believe the problem was so vast. Another reason why Bookchin was ignored had to do with the fact that he was an anarchist. And he suggested a fundamental revolution in human civil organization as the way to combat climate change. So, while it's important to point out, and we're going to spend the rest of this episode talking about all the fuckery that oil and gas companies engaged to cover up this stuff,

we should note that there were people very accurately predicting the problems in the future as far back as the 1960s. And, yeah, it's just, it's very frustrating when you dig into all this, like the number of warnings that we had. But also, like, I do think you have to have a little bit of understanding for, like, our parents and grandparents, and the reason they didn't pay attention to this. Because in the 1960s, like, we had all these fucking nuclear weapons

that everybody believed were going to get fired any day. And, like, there was this, this very real worry that, like, the world was going to end at any moment. Like, my dad did, like, those, those, like, duck and cover drills where he'd get underneath a table because they were afraid that nukes were going to come. So, you can also, like, well, you have, well, like, it's frustrating that they had these warnings that they didn't heed. There was also a lot of shit going on at the time.

Yeah, totally. It would be, like, unfair. No, my dad also talks about the duck and cover drills. And there's a museum of nuclear history in Las Vegas that is, like, one of the best museums, the Smithsonian Museum of Atomic History that's all about that era that is really terrifying. Yeah. And just to stand around some of those bombs,

you're just like, oh, yeah, there was a lot going on. There was a lot going on. It was an immediate threat. And someone's saying, hey, in, like, 70 years, gasoline's going to be an issue. Like, you can see how, like, other, like, decent people could have been like, well, fuck it, we'll probably figure that out if we have the time to figure that out. I now understand why people always refer to the 60s as tumultuous. Yeah.

You know, because I'm like, oh, that is what it feels like now. It's fucking tumultuous. Oh, yeah. It really sucks. There's so much to do. There's a lot going on. Like, some of it good and some of it really, really bad. Yeah.

All right. Yeah, there's something happening here, but what it is ain't exactly clear. You know, that song's about the Sunset Strip Riots. And I read a really good essay about it by Mike Davis. What? Yeah. I know people make fun of it for being just like a riot of some kids, but it was really about the beginning of, like, just intense police militarization

in Los Angeles of being like, we're going to cut, and the cops are like beating up teenagers. And so some people, including Gilligan, Bob Denver, came to support the kids on the Sunset Strip against the Fash. Wow. Bob Gilligan is Antifa. Yeah. Gilligan's Antifa.

You heard it here. Gilligan is Antifa. Yeah. So civilization trundled along, no one paying attention to the warnings about climate change. And by the end of the 1970s, the American Petroleum Institute had established a committee to monitor the evolving field of climate science. That committee of scientists was allowed to work unimpeded, and they came to the inevitable scientific conclusion that, quote,

globally catastrophic effects would be evident by the middle of the 21st century if fossil fuel production wasn't halted. Now, Chevron did not exist at this point, but the companies that merged to form it were members of the API, and they knew all of this. In 1977, one of Exxon's senior scientists spoke to a gathering of oil industry executives. He warned them of a general scientific agreement that the use of fossil fuels was changing the climate.

In 1978, he updated his warning and stated unequivocally that, present thinking holds that man has a time window of five to 10 years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical. That's 1978. By the 1980s, the early signs of climate change had become very noticeable, and the newly formed oil titans of the day, Exxon and Shell, launched internal assessments to predict the impact of fossil fuels on the global climate. In a 1982 report, Exxon scientists predicted that by 2060,

CO2 levels would reach 560 parts per million, twice the pre-industrial level. This, they found, would raise average temperatures around the world by two degrees Celsius or more. In 1988, Shell came out with a report of their own. It came to the same findings, but also warned that CO2 could double well before 2060, possibly as early as 2030. You might expect oil and gas industry scientists to have been deeply compromised by their employer, but other climate scientists who evaluated their work seem to agree that it was all pretty top-notch.

They did not hold any punches when reporting to their corporate masters about the danger that these products were going to do to, like, society. So they had, like, really stark warnings about what was going to happen. Shell predicted a one-meter sea level rise at minimum, with a good chance that warming would cause the West Antarctic sheet to disintegrate, causing a five to six-meter worldwide rise in sea levels, resulting in the complete destruction of multiple nations. Their analysts predicted the disappearance of specific ecosystems or habitat destruction,

leading to an increase in runoff, destructive floods, and inundation of low-lying farmland. They pointed out that new sources of freshwater would be necessary in this climate, and that changes in temperature would drastically change life for most people. Shell scientists concluded the changes may be the greatest in recorded history. So that's pretty clear. And Exxon scientists were equally direct. They warned about desertification in the American Midwest and other parts of the world, and potentially catastrophic sea level rise.

Although they also noted optimistically that the problem is not as significant to mankind as the nuclear holocaust or world families. Look on the bright side. I mean, it's bad, but it's not as bad as the end of all life on Earth in atomic hellfire. Well, I'm sure if you're in the power industry, you must be like, well, we're not as bad as those guys. It's like, it's like cokeheads. They're like, oh, I'm not as much of a cokehead as that other cokehead.

That guy's a cokehead. Yeah, it's, yeah, the cokehead conundrum. You're all cokeheads. You're all cokeheads. That's the, that's the problem. I mean, I don't know. Maybe if we'd given these people some ecstasy or something back in the 80s, it might have increased their empathy.

I don't know. Isn't that why people wanted to put LSD in the water streams? Stop everyone from having nuclear war. But, you know, I've, in my research, come across a lot of Nazis who trace their development to acid trips they had. So maybe the solution is... Really? Yeah, yeah, it's not uncommon.

Like neo-nazis or like... Yeah, neo-nazis. Yeah, the original, the OG Nazis are on speed. They were doing speed. I don't think you should be allowed to use psychedelic drugs for evil. It's my personal feeling. But I have... I would support that too.

I have seen also just like, even with the rise of microdissing, the way people, when people started being like, I'm going to take acid to come up with better ideas for capitalism. That's... Yeah, that's not great. Was bad. I feel like the right thing might be mandatory MDMA trips for all boardrooms and executives at all multinational corporations.

You cannot sit down to discuss business unless you are rolling so hard you're chewing your goddamn lips off. It'll at least be entertaining. You can film it. Yeah, I'm sure those people are rolling their faces off when they go to their weird retreats on private islands. Oh my God. Yeah, yeah, but they need to be doing it while they're making

financial decisions about where to invest money and stuff. I want to have the CEO of fucking Shell announcing their new products while chewing on a fucking glow stick. Yeah. That would be fun, at least. So, all these studies noted the fact that the gradual nature of climate change would work to hide its effects from the world. Shell scientists wrote in 1988,

with the very long time scales involved, it would be tempting for society to wait until then before doing anything. The potential implications for the world are, however, so large that policy options need to be considered much earlier and the energy industry needs to consider how it should play its part. If the industry did not, they warned, it could be too late to take effective countermeasures to reduce the effects or even stabilize the situation.

That's... Hmm. Hmm. But despite this sober and accurate assessment of the stakes, Shell's report did not actually suggest the company do anything to fight climate change. That would have impacted their profitability after all. And I'm going to quote from The Guardian now.

In Shell's study, the firm argued that the main burden of addressing climate change rests not with the energy industry, but with governments and consumers. And that's not untrue. Like, legally, corporations that are public like this have a mandate to maximize profits and really nothing else. Yeah. It is the job of governments to regulate them in our current system.

The problem is that Shell did not just sit back and wait to be regulated, along with the rest of these companies. They actively sought to convince the governments that would regulate them that nothing was wrong when they knew the opposite was the case. And that's really like the core crime that's committed here. It's pretty bad. It's pretty cool. Pretty cool and good.

For the next 10 years, climate change pushed more and more into the mainstream. And an understanding about what was happening started to reach well beyond the cloistered halls of gas company research teams. Activists increasingly called for action. And despite knowing that all these people were essentially right, Exxon and Shell took every available effort to stymie them. In February 1995, Shell released a review of the scientific uncertainty and the evolution of energy systems.

This was a public review. Unlike the non-public reviews that they had released that had shown that all of this was a serious problem. And in this public review, their findings conveniently indicated that policies to curb greenhouse gases beyond no regrets measures could be premature. Divert economic resources from more pressing needs and further distort markets. So that's cool. But you know what won't distort markets, Molly?

Yeah. The products and services that support this podcast. That is right. Yeah. They are fundamentally different from the products and services that caused this climate change problem we're having for reasons that I don't feel the need to get into. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI

had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver.

At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen.

Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me

about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole.

My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus, it's all made up? Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back and we're talking about climate change. Fun times in 1989, seven years after their own report and one year after Shell's, Exxon spearheaded the creation of the Global Climate Coalition. This was a group made up of businesses from industries whose profits were tied to fossil fuels. They carried out a massive 13-year-long propaganda campaign

with the chief goal of preventing the U.S. from signing on to the Kyoto Protocol. More broadly, they also sought to drum up mass confusion over whether or not there was a scientific consensus on climate change. Even though all of their scientists had reached a consensus on climate change. In the early 1990s, they published a background for lawmakers and journalists, framed as an objective review of the scientific literature. It concluded that, the role of greenhouse gases in climate change is not well understood,

and that scientists differ on the question of whether human activity was warming the globe. The New York Times reports, even as the coalition worked to sway opinion, its own scientific and technical experts were advising that the science backing the role of greenhouse gases in global warming could not be refuted. The scientific basis for the greenhouse effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied. The experts wrote in an internal report compiled for the coalition in 1995. And this is where I'm going to spend a lot of this episode talking about corporate executives and stuff who were major drivers of this. Part of me wonders, to what extent do we call these scientists bastards? Because on one hand, they're doing really good scientific work to show very clearly the danger.

And on the other hand, they're watching the company that is hiring them to do this lie about what they know in order to maximize profits. Most of them aren't coming out and saying anything about it. They're scientists, they didn't get into that field to go sit in front of cameras and fight the power. But at the same time, there's a question of complicity there too, I think. That's like in the Theranose doc, they got into that a lot. It's like the people that hire scientists, and then the scientists are like, here's the deal, and they're like, no, no, no, we didn't want to hear that. Yeah, and at what point does the scientist have a responsibility to make waves? I don't know, it's a difficult question.

So the effort to basically spread the belief that there was like this massive disagreement over climate change among scientists was masterminded by a number of individuals, but probably the most prominent among them was a guy named Lee Raymond, who was the CEO of ExxonMobil for the bulk of this period. For reasons that elude me, mainstream journalists in the late 1990s considered him a credible source on whether or not scientists agreed about climate change. Raymond has been described as notoriously skeptical about climate change and fundamentally opposed to government interference on the matter. I think that's, there you go, the fundamentally opposed to government interference is why people took him seriously, listened to him. That's what they wanted to hear, and that is what happened. Because I remember Michael Crichton, too, as one of those guys, which was very surprising, but they were like, can't have the government meddling in our environment.

We're not as free if the government stops these companies from lying to us until the world floods. Yeah, it's very dumb. So Raymond was the chair of the American Petroleum Institute's Climate Change Committee for two terms. In March of 2000, he signed off on an ExxonMobil ad titled, Do No Harm. This ran in numerous magazines and newspapers, including the New York Times. The ad acknowledged that, while climate change was probably real, more needed to be learned about it before taking any action. It claimed that the Kyoto Protocol's goal for a 30% reduction in fossil fuel energy would, quote, require extensive diversion of human and financial resources that were critical to the well-being of future generations.

It noted that, although it is hard to predict what the weather is going to be this weekend, we know with certainty that climate change policies, unless properly formulated, will restrict life itself. He said some bitches. Very cool. Yeah, other unknown bastards, whoever the fuck wrote the copy for that, string them up. The next week, Exxon ran another ad, Unsettled Science, based off of a 1996 temperature study in the Sargasso Sea. The basic argument was that this showed the world had started warming before people had started burning fossil fuels.

Therefore, we couldn't really say that this was a man-made problem. Two months later, Raymond presided over a giant oil and gas industry meeting where he made the same point to his employees. He did this while ignoring the fact that the author of the study had said this about his ad two months earlier. I believe ExxonMobil has been misleading in its use of the Sargasso Sea data. Really no way these results bear on the question of human-induced climate warming. I think the sad thing is that a company with the resources of ExxonMobil is exploiting the data for political purposes. Now, Lee Raymond is still alive, 81 years young. He's a registered Republican, and he was succeeded in his job by Rex Tillerson, who we'll be talking about a bit later.

Lee Raymond's net worth is estimated to be $503 million. In addition to being a climate skeptic, Raymond headed Exxon while it was one of the very last large corporations to explicitly exclude gay employees from its anti-discrimination policy. This seems to have been very important to Raymond. He was in charge during the Exxon takeover of mobile when Exxon rescinded mobile's anti-discrimination policy, which had included gay people. So Raymond fucking sucks is what we're saying. Yeah, he really fucking sucks. He's a piece of shit. Even in a field of sucking. Like he fucking is worse than sucking.

In the land of the people who suck very hard, Lee Raymond sucks so hard that other people around him seem to suck less by comparison. Yup, that's also sucks. Lee Raymond's... I hate him. I hate him, Robert. He's not a good person. And his son, John T. Raymond, is active in the oil and gas industry today. He probably sucks too, right? He absolutely sucks too.

And his net worth is an estimated $588 million. Absolutely not. He had a billion or so of a Twixdom. Yeah. Well, Exxon and show both spun up increasingly elaborate and expensive disinformation campaigns to hide the truth from the public. Their internal reports continued to paint a dire picture of the future. Most startling is a 1998 planning document titled T-I-N-A for there is no alternative. Oh, yeah.

The document posi... Yeah. The document posited a series of massive damaging storms on the east coast in 2010 triggered by climate change. The company predicted that these storms would force action on climate change. Quote, although it is not clear whether the storms are caused by climate change, people are not willing to take further chances. After all, two successive IPCC reports since 1995 have reinforced the human connection to climate change. Following the storms, a coalition of environmental NGOs brings a class action lawsuit against the U.S. government and fossil fuel companies on the grounds of neglecting what scientists, including their own, have been saying for years that something must be done. So this is like a fake future that they posit where there's horrible storms caused by climate change and there's a massive groundswell of rage and lawsuits against these companies for doing exactly what they knew they were doing.

This is like the scientists telling them we could get in trouble for the shit that we've been doing, like we should change our ways. Unfortunately, their prediction of horrible hurricanes spurring climate action was wildly optimistic, a very inaccurate prediction about the level of fucks given by the people of the United States. The 2010 hurricane season was in fact devastating. It would go on to tie for third most active hurricane season in Atlantic history, tying with both subsequent years, 2011 and 2012. 392 people died and $7.4 billion in damage was done. This would be widely eclipsed by the 2016 hurricane system, which killed 748 people and did $17.49 billion in damage. The 2017 season was even worse, claiming $3,364 lives and doing nearly $300 billion in damage. Now, 2018 and 2019 were comparatively mild years, but both still did more economic damage than 2012 season.

So that's cool. Pretty cool. Horrible. Pretty cool. You'll know it didn't happen. A bunch of NGOs and activists bringing suit against the federal government and oil companies and forcing change on the matter. Because Exxon scientists overestimated how decent people are. Oh, that's why.

It's a real bummer. Because they will figure it out in the future thing is also like, those people in the future can get fucked as long as I'm here. I mean, I do hate the people of the future with a burning passion. No, I feel bad for them. I used to be jealous of them because I thought the future would be cooler, but now I'm just like, nope. Nobody's going to talk to anybody and then they're going to die. We got a little taste of the 20th century, which is honestly probably the best thing we could have had. Little bit of the prosperity before it all goes to hell, but you also get to be here to see it go to hell.

Yeah. By bolt cutters. Millennials rule. By bolt cutters. It's going to be a fun time. So Shell was also a member of the Global Climate Coalition, but to their very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very minimal credit. They left the Global Climate Coalition in 1999 because they actually agreed with the emissions targets set by the Kyoto Protocol. So that's something.

If you're going to pick the least shitty gas company, I guess it might be Shell. Although again, they still did a lot of this and are responsible for huge amounts of this. It's not a high bar. It's like picking which of your Nazis is least responsible for the Holocaust. Yeah. They're still all Nazis. So, yeah, before you give Shell too much credit, you should know that in 1996, despite having a very clear understanding of the consequences of climate change, Shell's annual management brief suggested, quote, although climate change is a long term issue, today's responses do not have to be long term.

Irreversible actions need to be avoided. So we shouldn't have people fixing this. Don't think about it. Just keep going. Beep, beep. As the millennium turned, it became increasingly obvious that scientific consensus suggested that irreversible action really did need to be taken in order to avoid irreversible consequences. Exxon and Shell both began investing fortunes into a series of think tanks, including many of the same think tanks that had helped the tobacco industry fight against stricter laws about cigarette marketing and smoking. Really, we talk about that big court case and the billions they paid in fines, but they made so much more money from lying to everybody about cigarettes for forever.

Look, can they all be bad? So it's very worrying when you start comparing people to the Nazis, because in terms of the personal level of responsibility or odiousness of these individuals as human beings, there's no comparison, but when you do talk about like one of the things that really interests me is the Nuremberg trials and the ethical arguments around them. So like part of one of the big questions that a lot of people fairly had about the Nuremberg trials is we are charging people for things that weren't crimes when they committed them, where they committed them. And that is an unsettling precedent because it can be used to justify some really messed up shit potentially. And the reason that most folks came around on that is they were like, well, if we don't try these people and punish them all very publicly, this will keep happening. And nothing was done. They punished them and it still kept happening.

Well, not the same way. No, but when you look at where we are now in terms of like people doing full scale, like technologically aided genocides. Yes. And also it feels like we're at a really scary point right now where Holocaust survivors are almost all gone and like civil rights era people are going to be gone soon. And when those people are gone, you know, how do you convince people this stuff even happened, let alone that it is like relevant and the same thing is happening now? I think we got about 60 or 70 years of people like the worst people in the world being slightly more careful as a result of the Nuremberg trials. And then they started to push again and they found out, you know, there were actually a couple of moments where there was pushback against them. But overall the neoliberal world order failed and reigning in that kind of thing. And now it is becoming more common.

It does require you can't just punish them once publicly, but you do have to punish these people publicly. They punish them too late was what the other problem was. There was a lot of opportunity for other countries for the world to step in and say, hey, this is fucked up. I've probably talked about this before, but my grandmother was a German Jew who was an athlete who was supposed to be in the 1936 Olympics. And Hitler kept her on the team for a long time because they were like unsure if the world was going to boycott the Olympics if the Germans were just very upfront about wanting to do genocides. And ultimately they cut her from the team because they didn't want a Jew to win and embarrass them. But also nobody pulled out. I think maybe one country pulled out, but everybody just let the Nazi Olympics happen.

And they maybe did know what Germany was doing and just didn't care because people are bad. Yeah. And some Americans like Henry Ford were like into it also. A lot of Americans were into it. Yeah. So I think we also underestimated that. It takes a level of to stop all of this kind of behavior. It takes a lot of aggressive commitment to fucking people up when they do this stuff.

Right. And I have to wonder if when it came out what that the tobacco industry had suppressed the truth about the health dangers of tobacco. If a bunch of those guys had gone to prison, if I don't know, maybe some of those guys had been fucking like literally sentenced to to hang for their crimes for what is effectively mass murder. Would the same shit have happened in the oil and gas industry might some of those executives been like oh shit instead of hiring the same firms that had protected cigarette companies with some of these guys been like we have to be really fucking careful. I think rich people are just so protected that even when they do get punished, they get punished in such a different way than a regular person or a poor person that it doesn't have the same effectiveness. They get golden handcuffs to stay in their mansion or whatever. That doesn't have the same effect on people as if they were going to go to solitary confinement or as you say be hung in the public square. I personally feel like maybe that kind of public execution will come back at some point because things have gotten so medieval. Why not? Why wouldn't that come? But I'm also worried it'll be of like the people that we like are going to.

No, no, no, that's part of the problem. Yeah, but I do. I think that. Yeah, we'll talk about that a little bit later. So yeah, these guys hire a bunch of tobacco industry like former tobacco industry think tanks to like do the same thing that they done to argue against more laws about cigarette marketing and smoking. And I'm going to read a quote from the Guardian on this. Why to hide their fingerprints. Exxon, which quickly proved to have the deepest pockets, at least until the Koch brothers surpassed it in 2005, kicked off at Spending Spree on these think tanks and other nonprofit advocacy groups in 1998. A year before it merged with mobile and Kenneth Cohen became the company's VP for public and governmental affairs. In January 2007, UCS issued a report that revealed that between 1998 and 2005, Exxon Mobile had spent at least $16 million on a network of more than 40 anti-regulation think tanks and advocacy groups to launder its message. A few years later, when asked about the report by a Green Wire reporter, Cohen said that Exxon Mobile had stopped funding them. That claim is as preposterous today as it was eight years ago.

Just last year, the company spent $1.9 million on 15 climate science denier groups, including the American Enterprise Institute, the American Legislative Exchange Council, Manhattan Institute, and U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and 10 of last year's grantees were among those cited in UCS's 2007 report. All told, Greenpeace has documented that Exxon Mobile has spent $31 million since 1998 on denier groups, but there is good reason to suspect that that's not even half of it. And in fact, the numbers on this are really hard, but it could be like 5-10 times that much. We'll never know, really. Now, like any good, unfathomably evil company, Exxon and its comrades hid much and perhaps most of what they spent on disinformation. In 2015, an anonymous former executive with a conscience revealed to the Union of Concerned Scientists that Exxon Mobile had paid $10 million per year from 1998 to 2005 on what he called black ops. And we have no idea what form all of this black ops took, but I'd be fucking shocked if some of it didn't wind up into the pockets of guys like Ben Shapiro.

The goal here, as always, is to make it seem like there is a lively debate about whether climate change is dangerous and action needs to be taken, which they know is not true. But my dad still believes that, that there's not scientific consensus, and it's because these companies succeeded very, very well in brainwashing them. Don't you think there's also just contrarians, just people that will just think the opposite of whatever is true, you know, will just be like... Yes, but those contrarians only are able to have an impact on the public discourse when they receive funding. Funding that allows them to buy Facebook ads, funding that allows them to influence these algorithms to pay for the reach that they need. If it's just this guy who has no credentials thinks climate change is bullshit, that doesn't mean anything. But if it's the chairman of the Climate Research Committee, this company with enough money to put out ads in the New York Times, this guy says... Could we say it's the New York Times fault also for taking those ads?

Oh, absolutely. They bear some complicity. For sure. For running any of these things as though there's both sides to this debate. Absolutely. 100% the New York Times is partly copable in this, for sure. Just state and facts. It's frustrating because, like, I don't know who exactly... There's so much additional research to be done this. I don't know who...

Because it's someone's... Some individual person or group of people at the New York Times made the choice to take that money. And in fairness to the Times as an organization, a lot of the evidence for this article came from incredible reporting done by Times reporters who clearly are furious about all this. Yeah, well, I think a lot of these big organizations, one thing that's key to understanding them is that they're actually totally disorganized, you know? Yes. They think that a place with a big name is going to be the most well-organized ship because they will have been doing it for so long. But even from, like, section to section, there's total... People don't know what anyone's doing in another chemical over.

So I think decisions like that, some of the really bad decisions made by newspapers, especially this year, I think they're just coming from somebody at the top who's just like, you know what? I like Bloomberg. Let's give him an editorial or something, you know? He's my friend, which, again, comes back to the rich people all protecting each other. And that's why things don't change. I just got really angry. But you know what doesn't need to change because it's perfect, Molly? What's that?

The products and services that support this podcast. Amen. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good-bad-ass way.

He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart.

And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back! We're talking about how the system that we live under both economically and in terms of the way our media organs work is fundamentally fine and doesn't need to have anything but minor changes made. And you certainly should not be, for example, purchasing machetes, boat cutters, other forms of munitions, armor, none of that's necessary. Things are good. Tiny changes will solve everything. I'm not using plastic bottles so much.

If we get rid of straws, we're going to fix this shit. That's right. Glass straws are lovely. Glass straws. Everything made of glass. Make cars out of glass. Glass cars to go to Mars. Glass cars, glass hearts, like that Abba song. Abba's great. Perfect. Solve the problem. You know what? We can end this episode early. Sophie, let's play this out. It's done. Bye.

Everybody just listen to Abba. We'll be fine. If you change your mind. Wait, that's not Abba, is it? Yes, it is. That is Abba. Take a chance. She's never said follow me, I have you. They have so many hits that I forget.

They have so many hits. It's weird that one of the most popular songs in the history of human music is a song by like a Scandinavian band about a bunch of Mexican revolutionaries. Hell yeah. It's such a weird and it's based off of another completely different like a weird like a like a Spanish love song or something. Swedish pop is amazing. Yeah, it's great. Exxon Mobil is close lipped about their Black Ops budget and I guess it wouldn't really be a Black Ops budget if they weren't. But they've actually admitted to a surprising amount of what they've done in a 2015 PBS News Hour interview.

Kenneth Cohen, Exxon Mobil's vice president of public and governmental affairs was asked by host Judy Woodruff about an allegation New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman made during a taped segment aired before Cohen's interview. Schneiderman had announced a week earlier that he was investigating Exxon Mobil for misleading shareholders and citizens about climate change and he had accused the company of funding climate denial. Woodruff asked Kenneth Cohen, has Exxon been funding these organizations? And Cohen replied, well, the answer is yes, and I will let those organizations respond for themselves. So that's cool. Tight. Now, I'm going to quote from a Huffington Post article on the matter now discussing the fallout to that 1982 climate change report leaking out back in 2015. Quote, Cohen and other Exxon Mobil officials, including CEO Rex Tillerson and the aforementioned Richard Keele, hit back with a flurry of press releases, newspaper columns, TV and radio interviews and tweets.

Right out of the box, they attacked the credibility of Inside Climate News and the Los Angeles Times, calling them activists and mischaracterizing their reporting. Activists deliberately cherry-picked statements attributed to various company employees to wrongly suggest definitive conclusions were reached decades ago by company researchers. Cohen said in an October 21st press release, for example, these activists took those statements out of context and ignored other readily available statements demonstrating that our researchers recognize the developing nature of climate change at the time, which in fact mirrored global understanding. So let's talk about Kenneth Cohen for a little bit, since we've just established the role that he had in all of this. Cohen is a lifetime Exxon employee and a lawyer. He joined the company back in 1977 and was present on its spin team in 1989 during the nightmarish Exxon Valdez crash, which deserves its own separate episode. When all the inconvenient information about Exxon blatantly spreading this information about climate change came out, Kenneth wound up on the front lines of the company's spin team again. I found a largely positive interview with Ken on the corporate shill website Provoke Media, it's framed as a Q&A.

To Kenneth, their question, what's the best advice you ever received? Kenneth responds, never stop trying to learn, there's always more to know. What do you enjoy most about working in PR? To which Kenneth responds, the daily challenge of explaining what we do, why we do it, and the benefits we bring to society. And lastly, who inspires you? My daughter, Devin. That's nice, the guy loves his daughter, we all love our daughters. Right?

My dad left me a voicemail in the middle of this recording saying, hey, it's dad, have a Valentine's Day, call me back. There you go. Nice dad moment. I bet Kenneth sends his daughter Devin messages like that. And when I think of Kenneth's daughter Devin, I can't help but recall a passage from Shell's 1988 report on climate change. Quote, the changes in climate being considered here are at an unaccustomed distance in time for future planning, even beyond the lifetime of most of the present decision makers, but not beyond intimate family connection. So they're saying the people making decisions at our companies about what to do about climate change will not live to see the effects of climate change, but their children will. That's right.

As a fun fact, Kenneth's daughter Devin has never lived through a year that was cooler on average than the year before it. And her dad has dedicated much of his life to obscuring this fact. That's neat, isn't it? Pretty cool. That I take back my awe. Now, the fact that climate change's impacts are undeniable now, even to the bennest of Shapiro's, means that the PR flags for Exxon and Shell and their fellow oil and gas giants have had to work overtime to counter an increasing stream of negative publicity. One of ExxonMobil's tactics has been to point out, over the last 30 years, that the company's scientists have published a huge amount of peer-reviewed climate research. Quote, our scientists have contributed climate research and related policy analysis to more than 50 papers of peer-reviewed publications, all out in the open.

They participated in the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change since its inception in 1988 and were involved in the National Academy of Sciences Review of the Third U.S. National Climate Assessment Report. And all this is technically correct, the best kind of correct. Exxon scientists did in fact publish 53 climate papers between 1983 and 2014. And you may remember earlier when I said that the climate research done for these companies internally was top notch. That is true. I found a review of these 53 studies by Dana Nusatelli for The Guardian. Quote, I reviewed all 53 of the papers referenced by Exxon spokesman and they indeed consist of high quality climate research. Most of them implicitly or explicitly endorsed the expert consensus on human-caused global warming, none minimized or rejected it.

This means that there is a 100% consensus on human-caused global warming among Exxon's peer-reviewed climate research, even higher than the 97% consensus in the rest of the peer-reviewed literature. So Exxon cites this and they do not do so inaccurately. But it is not as exculpatory as the company seems to think it is. A recent study in the proceedings of the National Academies of Science found that, after promising to stop funding climate denial groups in 2007, Exxon gave $2.3 million to the American Legislative Exchange Council and several Congress members who denied climate consensus and fought against climate policies. They also continued to fund scientists who published work disputing the global warming consensus, even though their own paid scientists were completely in agreement about the reality. Exxon gave contrarian scientists willy soon over a million dollars and that's just what they spent on one guy. Exxon and Shell and their fellow corporations spent tens of millions of dollars hiring contrarian scientists and skeptical journalists to confuse the issue of climate change.

And the research shows that this campaign was startlingly effective. I found a 2015 study published in the National Academy of Sciences by researchers from Harvard and Cambridge. They note, The comprehensive data include all individual and organizational actors in the climate change counter movement, 164 organizations, as well as all written and verbal texts produced by this network between 1993 and 2013. 40,785 texts and more than 39 million words. Two main findings emerge. First, that organizations with corporate funding were more likely to have written and disseminated texts meant to polarize the climate change issue. Second, and more importantly, that corporate funding influences the actual thematic content of these polarization efforts and the discursive prevalence of that thematic content over time.

A more recent 2017 report by Joffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes from Harvard expanded on these findings by analyzing hundreds of ExxonMobil's internal reports and research papers and comparing them to its paid advertorials, most of which were placed in the New York Times op-ed section from 1972 to 2001. They found the company consistently spread information that directly contradicted the findings of its own scientists. And it must be said, the New York Times let them do this without any meaningful fact checking. So that's cool. Pretty cool. You happy about all this? Oh, so happy.

We're just frowning at each other. Yeah. It's good stuff. I don't have many jokes about this, but I do want to emphasize that I am not joking about the bolt cutters. I did enjoy your bennist of Shapiro's line, but I didn't want to interrupt you. Thank you. I take a lot of pride in that. Sometimes dunking on old Benny Shaps is the only good part of my day.

So I try to do it regularly. Word. Someone should dunk him in a trash can. Word. Someone should. And you would have ample room left in the trash can. I was thinking one of those mini trash cans, like for a dorm, a little paper, paper one. Yeah.

Like, yeah, one of those would fit. Now, you know what wouldn't fit? I don't have an ad transition, but I am going to put some tamales in the microwave because I have to go to the gym after this. So I'm going to ask for like 30 seconds here. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys.

As the FBI, sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And on the gun badass way. And nasty sharks.

He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left offending the Union's last outpost.

This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI.

How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. We're back. And we were talking about how, though I talk about bolt cutters because they are both symbolically powerful and have utility, if you really want to get through locks and even fences most effectively, an angle grinder is going to be a lot more practical for a sizable amount of the population, in part because of the arm strength and upper body strength that bolt cutters require to really get through a thick lock. An angle grinder is going to cut through a lot of those much easier.

These are just pieces of information that I hand out for no reason. Angle grinder. Angle grinder, yeah. And you're going to want like a solar battery or something that can at least run it for a couple of minutes at a time so that you can get through stuff and potentially charge if the grid's down. There's a lot of things to consider here. Good to know. Good to know. Always good to know about angle grinders for no specific purpose.

So, yeah, big companies like the companies we've talked about today are very good at obscuring the precise individuals responsible for their most shady activities. For example, that a rescue supran paper that I cited a little earlier does not mention Rex Tillerson directly or in neither does the NAS paper that came before it. And you might conclude from that that Tillerson, you know, big company, maybe he didn't have anything to do with the cover up of climate change. But Rex Tillerson was the production general manager of ExxonMobil starting in 1999. He was a director starting in 2004 and the chairman and CEO starting in 2006. And thanks to a super fun lawsuit launched by the state of New York, we do know a quite a lot about how he obscured his role in all this and why there's not a lot of direct information on what he may have done to further obscure the reality of climate change. So, starting in 2015, New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, my very favorite cop, launched an investigation into ExxonMobil's history of lying to the entire world about climate change, which is in an ideal world, what police would spend most of their time doing is looking into guys like this.

Like, this is what I want that brainpower going towards, not, I don't know, stopping fair jumpers. So the actual case wound up being mostly about whether or not Exxon had misled shareholders by hiding the real costs of climate change and thus overvaluing their stock. And it is profoundly dumb and a powerful symbol of how fucked our civilization is that ExxonMobil did the moral equivalent of drunk drive the planet into a brick wall and the only thing they got tried for was maybe lying to shareholders. But that's not on Schneiderman. If you read about the case and what he did, his goal was very clearly to take as big a swing at ExxonMobil as he possibly could because it would lead to a bunch of documents getting released upon discovery and put as many of the assholes as possible on the stand to answer for their actions. In other words, Schneiderman was creating a record of their perfidy, even if he wasn't actually able to punish them for much. And in this, he was successful. One of the billiest bastards he got on the stand was Rex Tillerson.

Under oath, Tillerson denied that Exxon had misled investors about the risks it faced from future climate change regulations. He described a detailed system he had ordered created in order to manage those risks. Notice, there was no system developed to manage the actual risks of climate change. That was not Rex's job. And even then, Rex claimed repeatedly to have forgotten important details that were critical to the case. And I'm going to quote now from a write-up on Inside Climate News. Quote, The Attorney General's office obtained notes connected with an internal presentation given to Exxon's management in May 2014 that listed reasons for making the change, including that recent reports to investors had implied that Exxon was using the higher estimate when evaluating investments, when in fact it used the lower one. So Tillerson was asked, do you recall anyone recommending that corporate management aligned the costs for this reason?

And he responded, I don't recall any discussion of that nature. He was asked, do you recall any discussion about aligning the two estimates? He said, I don't. He was asked, do you recall why they were aligned? He said, I don't. And you get the picture. He just basically denied as often as possible and said he didn't recall any of the things that were done by Exxon that were potentially criminal. This pattern repeated itself over and over with Rex's answers. And during the trial, New York's attorney stumbled across something even more damning that explains why there's just not much documentation as to what Rex Tillerson may have illegally ordered.

During discovery, Exxon was obligated to hand over a huge tranche of emails from Tillerson. The CEO of a publicly traded company like this, you cannot delete their emails because it's potentially actionable in a wide variety of lawsuits and stuff. You have to maintain that stuff. It's like a legal requirement. But when Exxon handed over Rex's emails, Schneiderman and his lawyers were shocked to find that there weren't very many of them. A lot of stuff that you would have expected a CEO to weigh in on, we have no record of Rex Tillerson saying anything about. This is not because he was a hands-off boss. This is because for seven years, the CEO of Exxon Mobile used a fake email address to do his business. Using the alias Wayne Tracker, he handled all of his official communications with this email address.

He had Tracker as his last name for his... Wayne Tracker was the name of another employee. But he had Tracker for an email he didn't want to be tracked. Yes, I understand the irony here, but it wasn't. Wow. Yeah, so Tillerson's justification for why this was not clearly criminal is that his official CEO email just got too many messages and he needed a fake account so he could get some work done. Now... Molly just made her face like, huh?

That's pretty frustrating, and what's more frustrating is that when they found out about this, the state of New York demanded access to the Wayne Tracker emails. And jeez shucks, wouldn't you know it? Exxon realized then that they'd accidentally deleted all of them. Oh, what a goof! What a goof! What a goof! Of course, this is not at all shady. Since the CEO was communicating under a fake email, Exxon just forgot to preserve his emails because he wasn't using his official CEO email account.

Anyone could have made this mistake! Yeah, okay. Who couldn't see that coming? It's fine! It's fine! Nothing's wrong! He wasn't committing blatant crimes and then coming up with an incredibly obvious justification for why he hid the evidence of those crimes. That can't be what happened.

Cool. Cool stuff. On February 4th, 2020, Rex Tillerson spoke at an oil and gas industry conference in Houston. During his speech, he revealed that he has grave doubts as to whether or not human beings can do anything to fight climate change. Quote, With respect to our ability to influence it, I think that's still an open question. Our belief in the ability to influence it is based upon some very, very complicated climate models that have very wide outcomes. I want to note here that Rex Tillerson is worth an estimated $300 million.

Ew. Yep. Just three? Just three. Most of these guys aren't really super, super, super rich. They're just super, super rich. Yeah. Ew.

The state of New York eventually lost its case against ExxonMobil. According to Forbes, The lawsuit failed because the notion that the company was attempting to obfuscate the impact of future governmental actions to address climate change and cheated shareholders was simply untenable. Now, this is a major bummer, but the good news is that numerous lawsuits are still underway across the country. Rhode Island, the Pacific Coast Federation of Fisherman's Associations, and a number of other groups and governments have started tossing lawsuits at the oil and gas companies responsible for covering up the crisis. Chevron, who we have not talked enough about today, is a defendant in at least eight of these lawsuits. They are guilty of essentially the same basic shit as Exxon and Shell. Their CEO, Michael Worth, is new to the field and he's made vague statements about wanting to move into renewables and fight climate change while increasing the rate at which Chevron sucks out gas and shits out poison into the atmosphere.

His network is probably around $50 million minimum, but is off, like, good chance is much higher. Now, a few CEOs back for Chevron. Kenneth T. Der was the guy in charge. Here's something he said in 1994, That's distressing. Here's something else he said. I hate this guy. On an unrelated note, here's something else Kenneth T. Der said publicly prior to the Iraq war.

Quote, Iraq possesses huge reserves of oil and gas. I'd love Chevron to have access to them. Cool. Pieces of shit. Now, the folks that I've named today are just the very tip of the iceberg and some of the most culpable people out of the hundreds and maybe thousands of villains. It's clear that Eric Schneiderman's strategy, while better than nothing, is not going to bring any of these people to justice. But there are some promising leads into how we can. Richard Heade, a Norwegian academic, has spent more than 10 years trying to figure out the start to the answer of the question, how do we make these people pay?

He actually helped to create a new branch of scientific research called attribution science. And the goal of attribution science is to take the blame for things like climate change off of the individual consumer and figure out who is actually responsible for the bulk of the consumption. According to Politico, quote, Over time, he recognized there was a flaw in that approach. Individual consumers can make choices only among what's already on the market. But who determined what was on the market? Other larger forces had shaped an economy dependent on fossil fuels, he realized. Companies who developed the markets for fossil fuels and influenced decisions to build the infrastructure that supported them. He asked himself, shouldn't the companies who profited from those decisions play a role in mitigating them?

Without world governments making a little progress towards reducing emissions, perhaps pressuring companies whose products were causing the harm might have more effect. In 2013, Heade's research revealed that 90 companies had contributed two thirds of the world's industrial emissions. He could pinpoint directly the share of emissions for which modern industrial companies are responsible. Chevron is number two on that list of 90. Exxon is number four. Shell is number seven. The data about what precisely these individual companies are responsible is out there.

We know how much of the coming catastrophe we can blame on each of them. The only question left is, what are we going to do about it? The oil and gas industry has answered that question for itself. Since the Paris Agreement in 2015, the world's five largest oil and gas companies has spent a combined $1 billion at minimum, lobbying to stop climate change regulations. $195 million a year has been spent by these companies on branding campaigns to suggest that they support an ambitious climate agenda. While they are funding efforts to stop any regulations from them polluting the environment, they also have a massive branding campaign aimed at making people think that they're hard to work researching alternative methods of fuel.

You've probably seen the results of this in billboards and bus stop ads that brag about, for example, ExxonMobil's algae biofuels research. You've seen some of that? I've seen a lot of that, even especially in the city of Los Angeles. They claim that algae biofuels offer some of the greatest promise for next generation biofuels. Their tiny organism ad campaign features colorful, central illustrations of bright green, healthy-looking algae under microscopes and in specimen jars. They brag that their goal of 10,000 barrels of biofuel a day represents the future of clean energy. And that sounds like a lot, right? They're like, look, we're going to be making 10,000 barrels a day of biofuel. That's a lot, right? That's so much fuel, isn't it?

Yeah. What they don't like to bring up is that this would equal 0.2% of their current refinery capacity. It's just nothing. It doesn't matter. 0.2%, got it. 0.2%. The American Petroleum Institute still exists and currently spends its time lobbying against things like subsidies for electric cars. They spent an estimated $539 million during the 2018 election cycle. According to InfluenceMap, quote, during this time, ExxonMobil was by far the most prolific spender, racking up over $400,000 in four weeks on over 360 individual political ads. The ads urged rejecting specific ballot initiatives while promoting the benefits of increased fossil fuel production.

Facebook's data indicates that ExxonMobil's ads made over 10 million impressions in this time with users in Colorado, Texas, and Louisiana. They put together a really fun map showing that, for example, BP, Chevron, and the Western States Petroleum Association spent $1.5 million in the state of Washington to convince people to vote no on ballot initiative 1631, which would have placed an annual rising fee on CO2. This ballot initiative was in fact defeated in the state of Washington. They spent $200,000 in Alaska. On the stand for Alaska vote no on one campaign. That money was contributed by ExxonMobil and BP. The ballot initiative in that campaign would have increased environmental protections and impacted resource development. It would have reduced the amount of places they could suck oil out of, and that ballot initiative was defeated. They spent another $200,000 in Colorado. The Coperts there were the ExxonMobil and the American Petroleum Institute.

This was to defeat a ballot initiative that would have limited areas available for oil and gas development, and they succeeded in defeating this ballot initiative. In Texas, ExxonMobil and some other petroleum industry companies spent about $100,000 supporting the campaign of Ted Cruz to defeat Beto O'Rourke in the midterm elections. In Louisiana, Exxon alone spent $100,000 trying to prevent more regulations on drilling off-shores. This is an example of where all this money goes. It's not just trying to obscure the debate over climate change by making it look like there is a debate. It's very targeted in stopping specific ballot initiatives. I don't think there's much understanding of what is actually going on at the local level to increase the fuckery these companies are able to go after, but it's extensive. They get a lot of bang for their buck. $100,000 is not a lot of money in the context of national politics, but it's enough that Exxon can stop a little law in Louisiana aimed at reducing the amount of places they can drill. It's not a lot, but it's enough to help Senator Ted Cruz defeat Beto O'Rourke and continue to give them an open hand on whatever the fuck they want to do in Texas.

So the question we're left with at the end of this is, what do we do about these people? How do we actually fight back? Are we doomed to just lob a series of mostly hopeless lawsuits at them and the vain belief that one of them might net a couple of million dollars in fines? Even if they were fined a billion dollars, ten billion dollars, that wouldn't be enough to punish any of these companies or the people behind them. The only answer I can see is something our current legal system does not make room for, something unprecedented. Attribution Science offers us a chance to actually determine the relative levels of guilt for each of these companies and the individuals inside them. What we need is a modern equivalent of the Nuremberg trial for these people, a comprehensive sweeping attempt to actually do justice by charging the individual human beings responsible for the crimes they've committed and levying criminal penalties against individuals like Rex Tillerson rather than just fining their companies a pittance of the amount of money they made committing crimes. Now, as with the Nuremberg trials, this will require a number of things that are not considered legally ideal.

Many of the things these people did were not crimes in the law code when they committed them. The same was true of the crimes of men like Julius Stryker, General Alfred Yodel, and Hans Frank. But the world decided that the crimes those men committed were too grave and that caused too dear to risk letting them get off without punishment. And I think you can make the same argument in this situation. So that's my fucking rant. I don't know. I agree. I totally agree. Maybe maybe hanging isn't a bad idea sometimes. I would go with something more appropriate for these people like some kind of eco death, you know, put them in a mushroom suit.

If I'm honest, yeah, I like I get frustrated and seek more objectively barbaric penalties. Yeah, hanging has too much baggage culturally. Too much baggage culturally. Like digging a hole in the earth and letting these be these people be consumed by the earth that they destroyed would be nice. I actually think if you really wanted to penalize them in the maximum way, you take away all of their money and you make them spend the rest of their lives living in like random towns in America working 40 to 60 hour jobs. I definitely think that the solution to everything is to undercover boss all the workplaces. Well, yeah, and just have like every time there's a hot day, you know, as Rex Tillerson goes into his shift at the Waffle House, his fellow coworkers are like, thanks, motherfucker, like, or whenever there are a hurricane hits and it damages people's houses, they're like, yeah, thanks for that fucking Rex. And he has to just deal with that every day goes home smelling a fucking hash browns and stuff as he works like a normal person and is never violently attacked for his crimes but lives every day with everyone around him knowing what a piece of shit he is and how he contributed to their shared misery.

That that I think would be a really fair penalty. I agree. Molly, how are you feeling? Feeling feeling a little depressed. Not going to lie. Yeah, it's not great. It's not great. Kind of just makes you want to go like eat a cheeseburger and use a plastic single use plastic bottle and just fuck it man.

Or invest in angle grinders. The only grinder solution for grinding angles. That's very useful information actually very, very useful information. I mean, I do want to know more like leftist prepper facts from Robert. Avoid a harbor freight, you know, they're more affordable, but they tend to be pretty low quality. If you just roll into roll in and like an off hour into a home depot, you can usually find some like old dude kind of crusty looking with a beard who can tell you everything you need to know about angle grinders. Yeah, especially if you live in Los Angeles, great town to buy an angle grinder. LA is the best fucking home depots in the world.

Love those home depots. I don't. They're open 24 hours. I don't like places with really tall shelves. Oh, I love home depots. I find it so soothing. I don't like Costco. I don't like home depots.

I don't like those like. What about Target? But their shelves aren't like super duper, duper, duper high. Yeah, but don't you ever feel like to feel like a tiny speck of dust in a home depot verse? No. No. I do like their plant department. Yeah, I like to get lost in the plants.

The plant department is, I take it back home depot. That's right. The plant zone is great. Plant zone is great. Especially during Christmas tree season, just wander around those trees. They got the best cheap trees. Best cheap trees in LA for sure. This is turned into a home depot ad.

Yeah. Home depot. Angle grinders. That will sell you the tools you need to rebel against constituted authority. Great. Yeah. Cool stuff. Cool stuff.

Well, Molly, you want to plug your plugables? Please everybody listen to night call podcast also on the I heart radio podcast network and also check out nolympics at nolympicsla.com would love to see the international Olympic committee roasted on bastard sometime because truly a cabal of supervillains. The true monsters in human history. And honestly, like part of fucking up the environment real bad. They are gearing up. Now, can you believe that they're holding events at Fukushima for the 2020 games and

they have not finished irradiating the soil. So it's almost like they just plow ahead with their plans. Even as climate change makes it harder and harder to hold outdoor sports events because of the temperature going up so much in the summer. Molly, I feel like what you're trying to tell me, which is fundamentally ridiculous, is that the city of Los Angeles, a city that bakes in the summer much of the year that has severe drought problems that is surrounded regularly by horrific wildfires and that has the worst traffic of anywhere in the nation.

You're telling me this is a bad place to hold the Olympics in the future. Would you believe that a city that can't deal with its own housing crisis and has perpetually failed the most vulnerable people in the city and failed to give them proper housing and shelter would think they should be doing anything else but working on fixing that by building housing. For that to be relevant, you would have to be able to cite to me evidence from, I don't know, let's say more than eight cities that the Olympics increases the cost of housing in a city that holds it. Wow. And I doubt you can honestly name more than nine or 10, maybe 12.

Why don't you check out nolympicseller.com. I've got at least 30 to 40. How long has the game been going on? That's how long they've been fucking shit up. Fuck the Olympics. Fuck the Olympics. The Nazis invented the torch relay. Nazis like torches?

You're saying so much crazy stuff, Molly. Nazis like weird, free masonic fascist assemblies of bodies all moving in in synchronicity. I mean, nothing you're saying is familiar to me as someone who researches all of this professionally. Please do. I don't know if you've done Lenny Riefenstahl yet either, but please. Oh, we're going to, we have a, that's going to be a fun, the problem is that like. Hate her. It's kind of hard to, yeah, yeah, it'll be, we'll get to her.

She's a bad director. A tall list. She's a bad director. And then she was wrongly brought back as like a feminist hero filmmaker. Feminist icon, that Nazi lady? Yeah, the Nazi lady who's not even good at making movies. Strong takes. Strong.

Strong takes. You know, you're going to catch some hell in Twitter for that because we have a lot of Lenny Riefenstahl fans. You know what? There's more than you think because I do say this all the time and people are always like, but the shots in the prime of the world. And I'm like, yeah, they're fucking shitty and it's a boring movie. Such a boring movie. Anyone who's watched that whole thing ever.

But if you look at how the Olympics are shown on television, it's just like triumph of the will. They just uncritically sort of, you know, praise the idealized human form. And I don't talk about all the fucked up shit they're doing in the cities or they hold them. So thanks for letting me do my spiel. I liked it. Thanks for letting, thanks for that spiel. And I just, I feel like you are unreasonably slandering an event that I don't know. I don't have a joke.

Let's replace the Olympics with people failing to ski and harming themselves. Make it a real amateurs convention. Only if you want to have a skiing competition, only people who have never put on. Let's replace the Olympics with a worker owned jackass game. Exactly. But for skiers that have never skied. Yeah. And I think we should really gear it towards Instagram influencers with the goal of thinning out their numbers.

I think they're doing that themselves. I will say a little bit. Wow. We have really gone on the warpath today. Well, I want to say last time I did this podcast, I believe the other Robert Evans was still alive. And now you're the only Robert Evans. So congratulations on being the sole Robert Evans. I am the last bearer of the name.

You could start wearing a cravat and just embody. I do. You do. And I am regularly inhaling my body weight and cocaine to honor his memory. Great. Yeah. RIP to the other Robert Evans. And long may you live real Robert Evans.

Not with all this cocaine I'm doing. I'm going to tell you that much right now. Are you sure it's not a ski jump? No, never. I will watch ski fails, but I will never go skiing. Everybody has to do a lot of cocaine and then do skiing. Those are the future games. The new Olympics rules.

And the only place it's legal to hold the new Olympics is... We might just be describing the Nazi Olympics again. Just doing a lot of speed and skiing. Yeah, but the goal is to watch people agree to do something dangerous and then get hurt. And that's fine. That's noble and beautiful. That's going to be when we get to the Hunger Games, which will be any moment now probably.

Yeah, well. Yeah. On that note. On that note, I'm Robert Evans. He wants to say... And I'm Molly Lambert. He wants to say you go follow him on Twitter at iRateOK. You can follow us at bastardspot on the twins to Graham.

And we have a TV public store. And he's doing a live show with Billy Wayne Davis in LA on March 8th at Dynasty Typewriter. Did I do it all, Robert? I don't know. I have forgotten my name in the face of my father. Great. The episode is over. Great.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse were like a lot of guns. Are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your

podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know. Because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down.

With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest?

I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.