Big Tobacco Lied About ‘Fresh Mountain Air’; Will Minnesota Now Expose Fake Climate ‘Science’?
Minnesota’s lawsuit put a spotlight on decades of deception by the tobacco industry. The state now is suing the fossil fuel industry for ‘fraud, deceptive practices and false advertising.’
The national deep freeze is a boon to climate change deniers. Just in the first few weeks of January, fans of the Kansas City Chiefs endured the fourth coldest NFL game in league history; Texans are bracing for blackouts as low temperatures once again test the reliability of the state’s power grid; and growers in central Florida are scrambling to protect their crops from potentially record low temperatures.
A warming planet, you say? Just look at the weather map. Here’s the deniers’ “told you so” moment, often supported by seemingly legitimate research and dubious science that flood social media. The doubters may as well enjoy their moment with a smoke. Light up a Camel. “More doctors smoke Camels than any other brand.” Throat a bit raw? Maybe try switching brands: “every case of irritation cleared completely or definitely improved” after smoking Phillip Morris. And, if the national weather maps call for a victory feast, then take a cigarette break between courses as an “aid to digestion.”
“Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em.” After all, ads, news stories and even congressional testimony by tobacco executives claimed “It has not been scientifically established that smoking causes any type of cancer.” The argument that smoking causes cancer “is not supported by many of the world’s leading scientists,” the industry told the public. But the tobacco industry was lying. An R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company internal document from 1962 declared unequivocally that “the amount of evidence accumulated to indict cigarette smoke as a health hazard is overwhelming…”
In 1994, the walls of deception protecting the tobacco industry started to tumble. The state of Minnesota and Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota brought a lawsuit against leading tobacco companies and their trade group that was different from previous claims.
“Our lawsuit was not about taking cigarettes off the market, because that's within the province of the government. And that's not going to happen," Mike Ciresi, the state's lead attorney, told Minnesota Public Radio on the 20th anniversary of the settlement. "If they had a legal product, they had to sell it legally. And our position was that they were selling it illegally and that they were targeting children and they were manipulating the nicotine, which is the addictive part of cigarette smoking. So we grounded our case on that theory, and that's what we stuck to all the way through and it was a long and arduous task."
In 1998, the industry agreed to settle the case for more than $6.5 billion. Some of the settlement funds were used to reduce tobacco use, but over time the temptation to use tobacco money for politically painless solutions to the state budget problems was too much of a bipartisan temptation. Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty and Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton both dumped the settlement funds into non-tobacco reduction programs.
What remains from the Minnesota case is the success Ciresi and co-counsel Roberta Walburn had in forcing the disclosure of some 70 million tobacco industry documents and nearly 20,000 other media materials.
The documents were essential to winning the case. They also have been the lawsuit’s most important legacy. “Only a few single events in the history of public health have had as dramatic an effect on tobacco control as the public release of the tobacco industry's previously secret internal documents,” according to a paper authored by Richard Hurt, M.D., a former Mayo physician, and other leading public health experts.
This history is relevant to today’s debate about climate change. To be sure, the misdeeds of one industry don’t convict another. But evidence is growing that the fossil fuel industry and its trade group, the American Petroleum Institute, have engaged tobacco-like campaigns to deceive the public and to convince some people that science remains uncertain about the impact of human activities on climate.
Last year, a research team from Harvard and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research published an analysis that revealed the accuracy of Exxon research from 1977 through 2003. Turns out, Exxon scientists were remarkably prescient. They were accurate with more than 80% of their 30-to-40 year projections showing a warming and rapidly changing climate.
Naomi Oreskes, the Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science, was part of the team that unveiled the extent and accuracy of the Exxon climate research. She called the finding the “smoking gun” in indicting the industry for years of deception. She told the Harvard Gazette, “ExxonMobil scientists knew about this problem to a shockingly fine degree as far back as the 1980s, but company spokesmen denied, challenged, and obscured this science starting in the late 1980s/early 1990s.”
One of the best-known fossil fuel campaigns denying what their own experts knew came from Mobile (which merged with Exxon in 1999). The long-running “advertorial” campaign featured ads designed to look like editorials. A 1993 ad in the New York Times is typical. Published under the headline, “Apocalypse No,” the ad claimed that models of the harmful impact of greenhouse gases on climate “don’t stand up to reality testing,” and concluded by saying “the jury’s still out on whether drastic steps to curb CO2 emissions are needed.” Even the language echoes Big Tobacco’s misinformation.
Lawyers for both the fossil fuel industry and state and local governments are paying attention to the lessons of the tobacco litigation. Minnesota is suing ExxonMobile, the American Petroleum Institute and three Koch Industry companies for “fraud, failure to warn, and multiple separate violations of state laws that prohibit consumer fraud, deceptive trade practices, and false statements in advertising,” according to Attorney General Keith Ellison.
While the industry has sought to move the cases to more favorable federal courts, the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this month denied an appeal of lower court rulings, effectively keeping the Minnesota trial in state courts.
In addition to the consumer fraud claims by Minnesota and others, lawsuits by groups representing young people in Oregon, Montana, Hawaii and elsewhere also have won favorable rulings and are poised to move forward in 2024 and 2025. Nothing is certain - the Oregon case initially was filed in 2015, for example - but the claim that public policy has failed to protect the right of young people to a stable climate could soon shine a bright spotlight on the ways in which fossil fuel companies and the American Petroleum Institute have deceived the public, withheld critical knowledge and conducted public campaigns to misinform.
Laying bare the audacity of the lies told to smokers and policymakers by Big Tobacco was a catalyst for change. A 1950 Gallup survey found that only 41% of those polled thought cigarette smoking caused lung cancer. In 2002, just four years after the Minnesota case was settled, 90% shared that opinion. With broader understanding of the industry’s campaigns of deception and lower acceptance of tobacco’s arguments, policymakers were better able to advance initiatives to reduce tobacco use, discourage young people from starting to smoke and protect all people from secondhand smoke.
Casting a light on the misinformation campaigns of the fossil fuel industry has the same potential to coalesce public opinion around effective public policy as it did for tobacco control. No doubt, there always will be the deniers. But most people resent being duped. Policymakers have much more latitude to act when their constituents learn they have been deceived.
And for those who prefer to see daily temperatures and industry obfuscation as justification to deny climate change, sit back and enjoy an Old Gold. It’s “Fresh as mountain air.” Seems like something ExxonMobile might say, doesn’t it?