Desperation Grows: ’Exxon Knew’ Activists Publish ‘Report’ Ahead Of NY Trial

A group of activist researchers, known for their biased studies and their collusion with attorneys general and municipality leaders to target energy companies, released a new study that rehashes an old and debunked argument: that fossil fuel companies knowingly misled Americans about climate change.

The timing of the report comes as a desperate attempt to gain attention during the NY AG’s trial against ExxonMobil, a case that now deals with accounting practices and stands as wholly separate from the “Exxon Knew” campaign.

Potentially in recognition of the trial’s diminished prospects for their radical anti-energy campaign, researchers Naomi Oreskes, Geoffrey Supran and Ed Maibach are nevertheless using the trial as an opportunity to dust off their threadbare and false arguments.

New Name, Same Debunked Argument

The newly released report, “America Misled,” provides little new information and builds on a study from Naomi Oreskes and Geoffrey Supran in which the authors, making continuous references to their own prior work, analyzed a small, cherry-picked sampling of advertorials published by Mobil and later ExxonMobil in an attempt to conclude that ExxonMobil promoted a public position on climate change contradictory to its own internal documents.

In “America Misled,” the authors write that “Science denial continues unabated—in the last decade, content analysis of online misinformation has found the prevalence of science denial has been on the increase.”

Despite this claim, the authors only examine four internal company documents from 1977-1998 and a single ExxonMobil advertorial from 2000.

The paper does not mention that it is extrapolating ExxonMobil positions from separate Exxon internal documents (Exxon and Mobil did not merge until 1998).

What follows this “content analysis” are charts that use strawman arguments to present the side of “climate deniers,” attempting to connect these arguments with the single ExxonMobil advertorial presented.

It’s a cute exercise, cleverly designed to boil their debunked arguments down to simple, easily digested chunks of text with accompanying, colorful graphics. Left undisclosed is who funded and produced the slick paper.

Biased Scholars Seek Attention

Although the authors of the report claim to “offer insights of more than a decade of peer-reviewed research,” their past scholarly work as well as their advocacy and direct coordination with politicians, including the New York attorney general, raises questions about the credibility of their work as well as their ability to produce unbiased scholarship.

Naomi Oreskes and Geoffrey Supran have worked with each other in the past to produce biased scholarship which they claimed proved that ExxonMobil misled the public about climate change.

In fact, their research was biased, did not follow the best research practices and received criticism from other academics.

It’s unsurprising that this report, published in 2017, was not objective—Oreskes and Supran received partial funding from the Rockefeller Family Fund, a philanthropy that has repeatedly financed media outlets, other non-profits and activists who advocate for climate liability litigation.

Yet issues with the report went further than the bias of the funding source.

The report, which claimed to use ExxonMobil advertorials to demonstrate that the company held different internal views on climate change than it publicized, concluded that ExxonMobil’s internal documents and research “published from 1977 to 2014, were in line with the scientific thinking of the time,” yet the company’s public communications tended to sow doubt about the existence of climate change 80 percent of the time.

Yet, as EID reported at the time of the report’s publication, their sample size was not only small—comprised of only 36 “advertorials” published in the New York Times between 1989 and 2004, they also were not accounting for the fact that Exxon and Mobil were two separate companies that didn’t merge until 1999—a full decade into the years that comprised their puny sample size.

When broken down, only 11 of the advertorials examined by the researchers were published by ExxonMobil. Mobil—an entirely different company—had published the rest. But wait, there’s more:

“If Mobil and ExxonMobil were publishing these advertorials every Thursday for 15 years, why did the researchers only look at 36 of them? The authors claim that’s the number of advertorials published during the time frame that discuss global warming or climate change. But they didn’t pull these documents by themselves—they relied on a Greenpeace-run website called PolluterWatch to do that for them.”

Oreskes and Supran’s bias was inherent in the structure of their survey—they used a paltry sample size, selected by a biased third-party, to conduct academic research.

But their study’s methodology was also poorly constructed and received criticism from other academics.

Kimberly Neuendorf, a professor of communication at Cleveland State University with more than 40 years of experience with quantitative content analysis research, reviewed the Supran/Oreskes study.

Her published rebuttal found serious flaws and called the data analysis “unreliable, invalid, biased, not generalizable, and not replicable.”

Neuendorf was also critical about the study’s application of a method called “consensus measurement,” which she said was only used by a small group of researchers and was “not a standard, time-honored research technique.”

She wrote that because “the investigators using consensus measurement seem to be a relatively small group, with inter-citation and self-citation notable … [consensus measurement] has the potential to create an ‘echo chamber’ of reinforcing ideas, without critique and correction.”

The newly released report makes a similar error, with the authors self-citing more than a third of the time.

When Academia Meets Activist Litigation

The questionable academic rigor is not the only potential issue with this new report. Many of the researchers have had histories advocating for climate litigation.

Co-author Ed Maibach, director of George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Education, demonstrated his bias in 2015 when he led his colleagues in writing to U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch and President Barack Obama, urging them to pursue RICO charges against climate “deniers” and their funders.

Maibach also corresponded with other climate litigation activists like the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Peter Frumhoff.

In his note to Frumhoff, Maibach asked for help in having activists from every congressional district sign his letter to Lynch and Obama, also admitting that he was exploring options to approach state attorneys general with similar demands.

Yet long before Maibach was forming plans to influence attorneys general to use RICO laws against energy companies, Oreskes was helping to create this very strategy.

In 2012, Oreskes was one of the lead activists who orchestrated the conference in La Jolla, Calif., that would be the inception of the climate liability litigation campaign, originally focusing on how RICO laws—used to prosecute tobacco companies—could be similarly used against energy companies.

According to a New York Times story, Oreskes conceived the workshop.

Original #ExxonKnew Journalists Promote Research

The new study “America Misled” doesn’t just rely on the same cast of characters for authorship, it also relies on the same journalists to promote it in an attempt to give it credibility as academic research.

Susanne Rust, who wrote the first coverage of “America Misled” for the LA Times, was also the editor on the original Columbia School of Journalism “Exxon Knew” reporting for the LA Times, which attorneys general cited as influencing their decisions to pursue investigations against ExxonMobil.

Like her original reporting to support the “Exxon Knew” campaign, Rust continues to fail to disclose her connections to the activists and funders of this campaign.

Rust not only fails to disclose the fact that she was the editor on the very LA Times reporting that she references, but she also fails to fact-check portions of her story.

In the press release for “America Misled,” the authors of the report incorrectly claim ExxonMobil’s trial begins on October 23—it begins October 22—a mistake which Rust has copied and pasted into her own story, in addition to uncritically parroting Oreskes et. al.’s contrived narrative.

Conclusion

The release of a study from biased researchers like Oreskes, Supran and Maibach mere days before the New York attorney general’s trial against ExxonMobil is set to begin is hardly a coincidence.

Instead, it is from the same playbook that these activists have been using for years to attempt to gain attention for their thoroughly debunked theories.

These researchers have continuously demonstrated how they’ve allowed their own bias to influence and taint their work, calling into question the credibility of their work.

Read more at EID Climate