In 2007, the Union of Concerned Scientists published an article called Smoke, Mirrors, and Hot Air: How Exxon Mobil Uses Big Tobacco’s Tactics To Manufacture Uncertainty On Climate Science. In this article, the scientists point to strategies used by tobacco companies in an attempt to convince people that the science linking tobacco use with cancer and other diseases was inconclusive. The authors make a strong case that oil companies have adopted these strategies to create doubt in the public’s mind about climate-change science. I would like to suggest that GE has now adopted these strategies in fighting any attempt to make that corporation clean their PCBs from the Housatonic River.
The article focuses on 5 tactics. The first is that tobacco companies “…sought to manufacture uncertainty by raising doubts about even the most indisputable scientific evidence showing their products to be hazardous to human health.”
“Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the minds of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.” (Brown and Willimason tobacco company).
ExxonMobil has taken a similar approach in bankrolling their front organizations that present the view that there is an active debate going on in the scientific community and that climate scientists are in disagreement on whether or not our climate is changing and on whether or not any changes are caused by human activity. Take the case of Frederick Seitz.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Frederick Seitz oversaw research for the R.J. Reynolds tobacco company. By the 1990s he was working for organizations funded by ExxonMobil. One of these organizations was the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine. On behalf of this group, Seitz circulated a petition asking the US to reject the Kyoto Protocol. The petition included a report purporting to show that carbon emissions were not causing atmospheric temperature increases. The report was not peer reviewed, but it was formatted to look like it was from the prestigious The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The petition included the names of 17,000 scientists. Investigation showed that the petition contained many fictitious names. Scientific American reported that only 1% of the signatories actually had Ph.D.s in climate science fields. The National Academy of Science issued a statement that despite the misleading formatting of the petition’s research paper, the Academy had nothing to do with the paper or the research. Despite the misrepresentations of this petition, it still is often cited by the climate denier community.
Has GE been trying to “manufacture uncertainty” in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary? GE recently distributed a video entitled Fate of the Housatonic River. In it they misrepresented facts and misled the public to an extent that rivals that of the tobacco industry and the oil industry. (BEAT recently wrote an in-depth analysis of this video.) In addition, in their report to the Environmental Protection Agency in which they proposed the corporation’s solution to the PBC cleanup, GE repeatedly claimed that there is no scientific evidence that PCBs cause harm to wildlife or to humans. According to the corporation that dumped PCBs into the river, buried barrels of PCB-laden waste throughout the floodplain , allowed PCBs to drain directly into the river, gave away PCB-laden fill as clean fill, and created a toxic waste dump next to an elementary school, “PCBs have not been shown to cause cancer in humans or to cause adverse noncancer effects in humans at environmental levels.”
At the direction of Congress, EPA conducted a study of health risks of PCBs to wildlife and to humans. Their study included a thorough review of the existing scientific literature. According to the review:
“There is clear evidence that PCBs cause cancer in animals. EPA reviewed all of the available literature on the carcinogenicity of PCBs in animals as an important first step in the cancer reassessment. An industry scientist commented that “all significant studies have been reviewed and are fairly represented in the document”. The literature presents overwhelming evidence that PCBs cause cancer in animals. An industry-sponsored peer-reviewed rat study, characterized as the “gold standard study” by one peer reviewer, demonstrated that every commercial PCB mixture tested caused cancer. The new studies reviewed in the PCB reassessment allowed EPA to develop more accurate potency estimates than previously available for PCBs. The reassessment provided EPA with sufficient information to develop a range of potency estimates for different PCB mixtures, based on the incidence of liver cancer and in consideration of the mobility of PCBs in the environment… In addition to the animal studies, a number of epidemiological studies of workers exposed to PCBs have been performed. Results of human studies raise concerns for the potential carcinogenicity of PCBs. Studies of PCB workers found increases in rare liver cancers and malignant melanoma. The presence of cancer in the same target organ (liver) following exposures to PCBs both in animals and in humans and the finding of liver cancers and malignant melanomas across multiple human studies adds weight to the conclusion that PCBs are probable human carcinogens… EPA’s peer reviewed cancer reassessment concluded that PCBs are probable human carcinogens. EPA is not alone in its conclusions regarding PCBs. The International Agency for Research on Cancer has declared PCBs to be probably carcinogenic to humans. The National Toxicology Program has stated that it is reasonable to conclude that PCBs are carcinogenic in humans. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health has determined that PCBs are a potential occupational carcinogen.”
Other agencies agreeing with EPA are the American Cancer Society, the World Health Organization, and the National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences. EPA’s study went on to document the non-cancer effects of PCBs, including immune effects, reproductive effects, neurologic effects, and endocrine effects. GE’s contention that PCBs pose no risk to humans or to wildlife sound strikingly like the claims of the tobacco industry. Their tactics in presenting misinformation to the public are strikingly similar to those used by the oil industry.
The second tactic pointed out by the Union of Concerned Scientists is that the tobacco industry and then the oil industry “…adopted a strategy of information laundering by using seemingly independent front organizations to publicly further its desired message and thereby confuse the public.” In the minds of the public, the message is more believable if it comes from a seemingly independent source. Has GE used this tactic?
Take the case of 1Berkshire. This economic development group appeared out of nowhere, and as its first endeavor, decided it needed to save the Housatonic River from environmentalists. When asked if they took money from GE, they answered, “No.” But in fact, they did. This new group, which entered the world advocating for GE’s please-don’t-make-us-clean-the-river position and without any environmental expertise mentioned on their website or in their communications, has now acknowledged that GE is a founding partner and that the group received $300,000.00 from the corporation whose cause they are championing. The board member who leaked this information to the press said that 1Berkshires received a promise from GE of millions more in funding.
This revelation would not have surfaced had a board member remained silent. Are there other stories out there? The chairman of 1Berkshires is Michael P. Daly who is also the chief executive of Berkshire Bank. Berkshire Bank is responsible for creating the Smart Clean-up Coalition internet social network and website that disseminates 1Berkshires message. According to Bloomberg Businessweek, the Non-Executive Chairman of Berkshire Bank is Lawrence Bossidy, who was GE Credit Corp’s Chief Operating Officer from 1979 to 1981 and who held other management and board positions with GE from that time until 1991.
When all of this information first surfaced, two of 1Berkshires directors, Eugenie Sills and John Whalen, resigned in protest, saying that they had not been consulted regarding the decision to back GE’s position in the cleanup of the river. According to an article by David Scribner appearing in the May 2011 issue of the Hill Country Observer,
“Whalen said he was particularly incensed at the tactics of nonprofit Berkshire Bank Foundation, upon which many local cultural organizations rely, in part, for their support. The foundation’s director, Peter Lafayette, sent repeated e-mails to his nonprofit applicants and grant recipients urging them to write the EPA endorsing a minimal PCB cleanup.”
“’It’s unconscionable and unethical,’ Whalen said, noting that nonprofit agencies might well feel obligated to write such letters so as not to jeopardize a foundation grant upon which they depend, especially given that the recession has slowed donations from other sources.” (Hill Country Observer, May 2011, p. 7)
The third tactic pointed out by the Union of Concerned Scientists is that the tobacco companies and the oil industry promoted scientific spokespeople who misrepresented scientific findings or cherry-picked facts to mislead the public. Would GE do such a thing?
In GE’s video The Fate of the Housatonic River, Professor Robert Brooks makes the case that a vernal pool in Pittsfield was destroyed when GE was made to remove PCBs from it. He claims that trees around the pool were removed and that this allowed more sunlight in. The increased sunlight allowed predatory green frogs to invade the pool and this in turn led to the demise of wood frogs. The fact of the matter is, only one tree was actually removed from around the pool. Also, the wildlife survey done at the pool before remediation clearly indicated that the green frogs were there before any work was done. in addition, according to surveys, wood frogs were there at the pool both before and after remediation. They were never displaced by green frogs. So although Professor Brooks saw green frogs invading, wood frogs disappearing, and all because of the removal of large numbers of trees, all of this was untrue. Despite Professor Brooks’ predictions that the pool was doomed, it was home to wood frogs, fairy shrimp, and other typical vernal pool species the very first spring season after remediation. Many other misrepresentations of fact in GE’s video are presented on BEAT’s website.
The fourth tactic in the Union of Concerned Scientists report was recasting the debate to say that the opposition’s case was not based on sound science. According to GE, …”the scientific evidence demonstrates that the toxicity values that EPA uses to assess cancer risks and non-cancer effects, which are based on studies of laboratory animals, do not reflect such effects in humans, and that, based on the human studies, there is no credible evidence that PCBs have caused cancer in humans (even in highly exposed PCB workers) or have caused adverse non-cancer effects in humans at environmental levels.” So flying in the face of worldwide scientific opinion, GE says that PCBs are not harmful. Sound like the tobacco industry?
Part of GE’s reasoning is that laboratory-based, controlled studies are done on animals, which they argue are more sensitive to PCBs than are humans. So do they therefore believe that those overly sensitive animals are in danger in the wild along the banks of the Housatonic River? Of course not. Let’s not follow arguments to their logical conclusions. We are to believe that animals are sensitive to PCBs in the laboratory and insensitive to PCBs and “thriving” in the wild.
We tell our children to look both ways before crossing a street – not because it’s impossible to make it safely to the other side without looking, but because we know that the odds of making it safely to the other side improve when we adopt good-pedestrian practices. Cancer research and the research related to many other diseases and disorders are similarly statistic-based. Although a link can seldom be made between a given person’s cancer and a given contact with an environmental toxin, we know that our odds of living long and healthy lives increase when we adopt PCB-safe practices. It is this statistical uncertainty that GE points to when they say that EPA is ignoring science in claiming a link between PCBs and cancer and non-cancer diseases and disorders. EPA isn’t ignoring science, and neither are the host of other national and international agencies and organizations that list PCB as a probable carcinogen and point to its connection to reproductive, neurological, endocrine, and other types of health problems. To their credit, EPA is stating its position in a way that is consistent with the guidelines of science. Although crossing the street without first looking both ways cannot be said to inevitably lead to an accident, we do see a statistical correlation between poor pedestrian practices and bodily injury.
The fifth and final tactic pointed to by the Union of Concerned Scientists is that the tobacco industry and big oil cultivated close ties with government officials and members of congress. Forgive me if I leave this final topic for my next blog. This blog is already quite long, and this final topic will take more space than any of the four topics I’ve addressed here. Please read the Union of Concerned Scientists’ paper if you get a chance.