News & Analysis
January 8, 2020
The American Petroleum Institute (API), the world’s largest oil and gas trade association, is launching a new ad campaign in an attempt to convince the American public that it is committed to solving climate change. While we all wish this were true — that the organization was invested in protecting lives, jobs, homes, and a liveable planet — past and present actions have made it abundantly clear that API is interested in profit alone, and that this latest campaign is part of a multimillion-dollar effort to deceive the public in order to protect their image and their business.
The reality is that the fossil fuel industry’s profits rely on climate destruction, not climate solutions. The burning of fossil fuels emits carbon dioxide that warms the planet, fueling extreme weather, rising seas, accelerated extinctions, ecological disasters and untold human suffering. The industry’s priority has always been to keep that very profitable business of destruction alive — a project it has poured its wealth into and reaped the benefits of over the last 50 years or more.
In fact, it was during a speech at the organization’s annual meeting in 1965 that its then-president, Frank Ikard, warned that “carbon dioxide is being added to the earth’s atmosphere by the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas at such a rate that by the year 2000 the heat balance will be so modified as possibly to cause marked changes in climate beyond local or even national efforts.”
An uncovered document from API’s multi-million dollar “Global Climate Science Communications Plan” targeting media, policy makers and the public to undermine confidence in climate science predictions they knew to be true. The plan was developed in April, 1998 — just months after the Kyoto Protocol was adopted.
API, along with the world’s most prominent oil and gas companies including Exxon, BP, Chevron and more, was keenly aware of the boundless hazards its products would unleash if extracted, sold and used at their current pace. Yet instead of taking the opportunity to modify their business model at the time, or transition towards clean energy alternatives and “combat climate change” (as they now, in response to unyielding popular demand, claim to do), the industry spent decades ramping up fossil fuel production while shielding their business and image behind expensive ad campaigns to promote climate denial and squash climate policy at its most crucial moments.
The organization’s funding of deception — and its behind-the-scenes lobbying to trample real efforts to stabilize the climate — continues to this day. When the Trump administration sought to roll back climate-wrecking methane emissions last year, the American Petroleum Institute was in support every step of the way. While the same administration readied itself to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement, API was connected to funding of a later-debunked study claiming that the agreement would lead to massive costs and job losses for Americans. Beginning in 2009, API helmed a coalition called “Energy Citizens” and financed rallies vehemently opposing the Waxman-Markey Climate Bill. And between 2000 and 2016, the industry as a whole spent over 2 billion dollars lobbying to kill climate legislation in the U.S.
And while the fossil fuel industry now declares concern for our future, its existing plans for fossil fuel expansion over the next decade would blast us past two degrees of warming and into irreversible climate catastrophe.
API’s “Energy for Progress” campaign is simply the latest chapter of a decades-long PR campaign to manufacture denial and deception about its responsibility for warming the Earth and wreaking havoc on our most vulnerable. The fossil fuel industry had its chance to lead the way to a clean energy future, and there is no time or reason left to give them the benefit of the doubt. As the astronomical costs of climate damages bear down on communities across the country, it’s time to demand that the richest, most-polluting industry on Earth is held accountable and made to put their money not toward more empty words, but toward paying its fair share of the damages to the communities suffering as a result of its actions.
