Greg Zimmerman, an environmental activist, was scrolling through the Web site of a coal industry association when he came across a presentation that startled him: “Survival is Victory: Lessons From the Tobacco Wars.”
What surprised Zimmerman, the deputy policy director at the Center for Western Priorities, a conservation advocacy organization based in Denver, Colorado, was that the coal industry was, at least in this presentation, deliberately drawing a comparison between itself and the tobacco companies.
That is more typically the argument of environmentalists, who often compare fossil-fuel companies to the tobacco industry. They say that the tobacco giants for many years funded trumped-up science and advocacy groups to spread doubt about risks of smoking.
Fossil-fuel companies, they say, have engaged in similar efforts, and investigations by US state attorneys general have focused on the tactics of Exxon Mobil, which has funded groups that deny the scientific evidence that human activity has increased global warming.
Fossil-fuel companies and their allies generally ridicule the comparison to tobacco.
However, here was an internal document from the industry that, as Zimmerman said, “has sort of done our job for us.”
BINARY DEBATE
Others have taken note of it as well. After reviewing the presentation, shared with him by a reporter, the US state attorney general leading the investigation of Exxon Mobil, Eric Schneiderman of New York, called it important.
“This is just the latest example of the fossil-fuel industry explicitly adopting the big tobacco playbook,” he said.
Schneiderman reached a settlement last year with Peabody Energy, the giant coal company, after finding that it had not properly disclosed to the public and its shareholders the risks of climate change and regulation to its business — an investigation similar to Schneiderman’s efforts to determine whether Exxon Mobil had committed fraud in its public statements about climate change.
The 24-slide “Survival is Victory” presentation was given a year ago at the convention and annual meeting of the Rocky Mountain Coal Mining Institute, an industry group representing coal interests in Western states.
The author of the presentation, Richard Reavey, is the vice president for government and public affairs at Cloud Peak Energy, a mining company based in Wyoming. From 1990 to 2007, Reavey served as an executive with Philip Morris International, working in communications and government affairs.
The slides did not acknowledge the scientific consensus on climate change, but stated that public opinion had shifted so substantially that the question was moot.
“We need to get out of the binary debate on climate change,” one slide read. “Right, but dead, is not a victory.”
‘POLITICAL REALITY’
The presentation called on the industry to prepare for more stringent regulation and to build a better future for the industry and its workers by pushing for more research into technology that can capture carbon dioxide from smokestacks, which could extend the use of coal.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has recognized a possible role for carbon capture in meeting global goals for limiting carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, but commercial development of the technology has proved somewhat troublesome.
Reavey said that the tobacco industry had settled lawsuits with 48 US states in 1998 and agreed to regulation by the US Food and Drug Administration.
END OF DAYS
The deal looked to some like the “End of Days,” he wrote in a slide, but “a much more heavily regulated tobacco industry is viable and profitable.”
Like so many elements of climate change, coal is a polarizing issue for political parties.
This year’s Republican Party platform strongly supports a continued role for coal, referring to it as “an abundant, clean, affordable, reliable domestic energy resource” and calls for killing the administration of US President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which would continue the process of reducing dependence on coal for producing energy.
US Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton has promised to “defend and implement” the Clean Power Plan while providing economic opportunities in coal communities affected by it.
For its part, Exxon Mobil has said that it now accepts the validity of climate science and favors a carbon tax; it also said that since the mid-2000s, it has not funded groups that play down scientific evidence of the human role in global warming.
In an interview, Reavey, who developed the slide presentation, said it simply recognized the “political reality” that Americans accepted climate science in increasing numbers.
And while the presentation compared coal and tobacco, the two industries are “completely different,” he added. “At the end of the day, energy is something that we, as a society, require. Tobacco is not.”
COAL SURVIVAL
However, a string of recent bankruptcy filings by coal companies has shown the extensive support from the industry for groups that deny the scientific validity of climate change and oppose environmental regulations.
Reavey said that his company, Cloud Peak, “has never fought climate change — never fought it, never denied it or funded anyone who does.”
The executive director of the industry group, Judy Colgan, said that Reavey’s presentation delivered a message the audience was ready to hear.
The industry, she said, has recognized that the time for arguing over climate science has passed.
“We can fight this climate debate all we want to; it’s not going to help the industry survive,” she said, adding that very few people are going to change their minds.
Instead, she added, developing carbon capture should be the top priority.
Naomi Oreskes, a historian who has compared the science and public relations of the tobacco and fossil fuel industries, said that while much of the investigative attention in the past year has focused on Exxon Mobil, the coal industry presentation “is a reminder that this is a much more complicated story than just Exxon Mobil.”
Money the coal industry spent on attacking climate science might have been invested to develop effective carbon capture technology, she said.
“That, to me, is a little bit heartbreaking,” she added. “Now I think, ‘Guys, that’s a day late and a dollar short.’”
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