Right on cue, activists have placed a climate attribution story in Politico yesterday as the trial between the New York Attorney General and ExxonMobil begins in New York. As Energy In Depth noted yesterday, the trial isn’t even about the much vaunted – but thoroughly underwhelming – “Exxon Knew” PR campaign. Nor is it even about climate change. It’s an accounting case about how the company applied proxy costs of carbon to its investment decisions.
But with their legal strategy falling flat on its face, activists are already trying a new angle of attack before the trial even begins in an attempt to save face – climate attribution. Simply put, climate attribution is the theory that an exact amount of carbon and methane emissions can be “attributed” to certain energy companies and therefore those companies can be linked to specific weather events that are blamed on climate change.
Unsurprisingly, Politico terms this work “attribution science” in an attempt to give it academic credibility, but the truth is that it wasn’t born out of objective research. It was organized by activist Richard Heede, who features prominently in the story as a supposedly impartial researcher but has admitted that he began studying climate attribution because he wanted to “confront” fossil fuel companies, and he has generated research at the request of plaintiff’s attorney Vic Sher looking to link emissions with specific companies.
It All Goes Back to La Jolla
As with nearly everything done by climate activists attacking energy producers, it all goes back to the activist-organized conference in La Jolla, Calif. in 2012. It was at this conference where activists agreed that attribution research should be developed to support future litigation. According to a summary document from the conference:
“Several participants agreed to work together on some of the attribution work already under way, including efforts to help publicize attribution findings in a way that will be easy for the general public to understand, and build an advocacy component around those findings.”
Right there, participants at the conference admitted this research wasn’t in the pursuit of science, but instead to progress their political agenda. It was part of the conference’s goal to develop a legal and PR strategy to go after energy companies by finding a “single sympathetic attorney general.” This plan has since been implements in places like New York and Massachusetts, where La Jolla participants pitched attorneys general to undertake unfounded investigations into energy producers.
Richard Heede’s Lack of Credibility
Politico relies heavily on the work of Richard Heede, the activist primarily responsible for the climate attribution and co-founder of Climate Accountability Institute, which co-hosted the La Jolla conference and focuses on attacking fossil fuel companies.
Heede constructed the Carbon Majors Database – a project to trace the historic emissions of specific major energy companies. He recently updated his database on September 30 after the anti-energy UK paper The Guardian paid him to crunch the numbers for their flop of a story. But Politico treats him as an objective, credible scientist despite the fact that he has been clear about his intentions to provide the research used to support litigation.
His own quotes in the story reveal his bias. In two separate comments, Heede shows his true intentions. He wanted to “pressure” oil companies:
“With federal policy being unsupportive and still emphasizing continued energy development, I just thought it would be a new lever to look at the companies that have their hand on the tiller. And pressure can be exerted in a number of ways.”
And he wanted the research to be used for litigation:
“I didn’t know that the legal interest would pick up so fast. I didn’t know how this data was going to be used. But I knew that for any legal action — or, for that matter, shareholder pressure or regulatory pressure — we had to know who the companies were and what they contributed.”
Heede also produced research at the request of plaintiffs’ attorney Vic Sher, who is representing municipalities that have brought climate liability litigation against energy companies and said he worked directly with Heede:
“So how do we link emissions to specific corporate emitters? Obviously if you can’t tell who’s doing it, you have a problem. Well here we’ve been working primarily with an expert named Rick Heede who is with an outfit called the Climate Accountability Project in Colorado. Rick published in a peer-reviewed article in 2014 which is known in the literature as the Carbon Majors article…”
Politico never discloses the fact that he’s funneling his work directly to lawyers to support their litigation against energy companies. Furthermore, in an op-ed written by Heede in that Guardian series, he states that his Climate Accountability Institute was in the businesses of attacking oil companies:
“The Climate Accountability Institute was formed in 2011 to confront fossil fuel companies. … We work with investigators, human rights commissioners, advocates and lawyers in an effort to curb the carbon industry’s enthusiasm for unabated fossil fuel development.”
Politico also doesn’t disclose that Heede and the Climate Accountability Institute’s work is funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund – a group that is focused on putting fossil fuel companies out of business and has funded every component of the climate litigation campaign. Most recently, the director of the related Rockefeller Family Fund published an op-ed in the New York Times disclosing that his organization is directly financing the lawyers suing energy companies and the research they use to support their cases.
Somehow, despite devoting over 2,700(!) words to Heede and his work, Politico failed to connect any of these dots.
