Whether it’s the Biden administration, “Keep It In The Ground” activists, or the media, Earth Day 2022 is causing a lot of trouble in the messaging department.
President Biden continues to struggle with record high gasoline prices, and his administration keeps sending mixed messages on domestic production. Now, activists are calling out the White House for restarting leasing on federal lands, even though the acreage offered has been cut by 80 percent.
So, what is the media to do? Apparently, it’s time for PBS and CBS to roll out old climate litigation stories that tread the same ground that has been covered repeatedly for years.
We’ve seen this tactic before. EID Climate has previously reviewed how these stories keep getting recycled including from the BBC, InsideClimateNews, The Los Angeles Times, and The Guardian.
More Nothingburgers to Come at PBS?
Starting tonight, and running for the next two Tuesdays, PBS FRONTLINE is airing a 3-part series that it claims will “Reveal the Power of Big Oil.” But judging from the promotional video, it’s not clear if PBS will air anything new this time that wasn’t already covered from their previous documentaries.
That includes the “Climate of Doubt” documentary, released all the way back in 2012, and the review of climate science from the 1970s and 1980s back in 2015 – a topic that’s been debated time and time again.
That 2015 coverage even featured an interview with former New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who kicked off the since-debunked “Exxon Knew” investigation that was decisively defeated in court by a New York State Supreme Court judge in 2019.
Will PBS FRONTLINE Mention the Failed New York Case?
A media critic from the New York Times even previewed the miniseries, but it appears to be the same old talking points used all over again. The Times alluded to the work of Harvard researchers Naomi Oreskes and Geoffrey Supran, while a MinnPost columnist, called the series “epic,” but only props up the same information from the same sources like Neela Banerjee of InsideClimateNews and Stanford University’s Ben Franta – all part of the big money campaign that manufactured climate lawsuits with the help of activist groups, media outlets, lawyers, PR firms, and academics.
Maybe PBS FRONTLINE keeps running these documentaries because the program is funded by the MacArthur Foundation and the Park Foundation – two groups with explicit anti-oil and natural gas agendas. More to come on that later this week from EID Climate.
Will PBS FRONTLINE Disclose Links to Funding In Coverage?
CBS Airs Old Storyline, But Ignores Legal Defeats
Much like what’s expected from PBS, the CBS Sunday Morning Show aired an extensive story on climate lawsuits around the country over the weekend, yet not a single new piece of information was revealed, perhaps explaining why the story was buried on Easter Sunday morning when many Americans aren’t tuning into the news.
The story did have one glaring omission, however: it never mentioned that all three climate lawsuits that have been heard on the merits of the case have been decisively defeated in court.
CBS attempted to leave viewers with the impression that there is a groundswell of support behind climate lawsuits and that the plaintiffs have a slam dunk case. Yet the evidence cited, and the talking points used, by Charleston Mayor John Tecklenburg and Connecticut Attorney General William Tong – that energy companies hid climate change information from the public, are solely to blame for climate change, and should be held liable under public nuisance theory – have already been litigated and rejected.
Those three failed lawsuits include the cities of San Francisco and Oakland – which was defeated in the summer of 2018, New York City – which was also lost in summer of 2018 (and again in 2021 on appeal), and the New York Attorney General – which was defeated in late 2019. The latter was built on the debunked “Exxon Knew” theory that Sunday’s CBS story pushed despite the fact that the theory’s core arguments were reduced to an accounting question by the New York Supreme Court. The Washington Post covered the ruling of New York Supreme Court Judge Barry Ostrager, writing:
“In the harshly worded ruling, Ostrager said that the New York attorney general had not produced any investor who was harmed and that it failed to show ‘that ExxonMobil made any material misstatements or omissions about its practices and procedures that misled any reasonable investor.’
“Ostrager went on to call New York’s complaint ‘hyperbolic’ and ‘ill-conceived’ and said he did not find the testimony of any Exxon employee ‘to be anything other than truthful.’”
Furthermore, CBS featured Democratic elected leaders behind these lawsuits, but made no mention of other Democrats who have declined to join this effort, like Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser.
Industry Powering Innovation to Address Climate Change
Meanwhile, as these activist and media organizations continue to trot out worn-out talking points that accomplish nothing, the U.S. oil and natural gas industry is working hard every day to develop the technology needed to address climate change.
Thanks to this constantly improving innovation, the industry has boosted the production of oil and natural gas since 2005 while lowering emissions.
And as EID Climate highlighted during last year’s Earth Day, the industry is boosting the efficiency of existing operations, cleaning up the power generation sector, pioneering carbon capture technologies, funding billions of dollars of research and development projects.
If Washington, D.C. is looking for actual answers to bring down gasoline prices while improving the environment and not just more finger-pointing, they should turn to the industry that has been doing so for decades.
