“Black Gold”: Exxon’s Campaign of Deception - 219

“Black Gold” is a three-part documentary you can watch for free via Paramount on a trial basis. It is a collaboration by CBS NEWS, Time Studios, and PROTOZOA. This fast-paced documentary has three top notch directors: Emmy Award Winner Gabrielle Schonder, Oscar-nominee Zach Heinzerling and Oscar-nominated director Darren Aronofsky.

The first part of “Black Gold” is titled, “Apocalypse Later”. Apocalypse Later takes us back 40 years to the early 1980s when Exxon was an Energy Company doing research in wind, solar, nuclear power and petroleum engineering. Exxon eventually dropped the green energy program development and narrowed their focus to the search for, extraction, and refining of oil.

Exxon, in the 80s, was a science research powerhouse whose scientists were the best in the world. They were THE cutting-edge green energy company. Additionally, they had the best scientists studying global warming/climate change. In Black Gold, you meet scientists like Ed Garvey and Marty Hofert who sent warnings to Exxon’s top management detailing the dangers of climate change. These early scientist’s warnings, Exxon’s scientists, have been proven spot-on by current climate events.

The second section of the documentary is called, “Black OPS”. This Exxon Era is particularly sickening. In 1988 James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute testified to the United States Congress alerting us climate change was not science fiction, but that we were already warming, and it was caused by burning coal, oil, and gas.

In part two, “Black Ops” we, by means of official Exxon transcripts, sit in on top Exxon management meetings. Here, the leadership of Exxon who already knew the warnings, chose to hide Exxon’s evidence and create doubt by viciously and subversively undermining independent and government scientists.

Given the incredible resources Exxon had and the willingness to spend money by the millions, the government and the science community never had a chance. Exxon bought ad space in the editorial pages of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and other publications flooding the market with their propaganda. For every legitimate science opinion published, confused BIG Media published two denier columns.

They hired some of the same professional public opinion manipulating firms who perfected the doubt machine for Big Tobacco. Their anti-science lies kept Americans smoking cigarettes and dying of cancer for decades. 

Fake “think tanks” were created and existing “think tanks” were granted money to publish papers falsely professing there were uncertainties in the science community. Drexel University emeritus professor Bob Brulle studied the funding for the climate change "counter movement". He identified 91 institutions, funded by Big Oil, which either denied or downplayed the risks of climate change, including the Cato Institute and the now-disbanded George C Marshall Institute. These fake grass-roots organizations created the echo-chamber effect. It sounded like there was doubt in the science community.

Various sub-groups in the United States were identified and targeted separately for intense propaganda. One, now defunct, climate denying think tank was called the Information Council for the Environment or ICE. The ICE campaign identified two groups which would be most susceptible to targeted messaging. The first was "older, lesser educated males from larger households who are not typically information seekers".

The second group was "younger, low-income women," who could be targeted with bespoke adverts which would liken those who talked about climate change to a hysterical doom-saying cartoon chicken.*

Multi-billion-dollar, multi-national companies have no allegiance to any nation, religion, or people.  They have the money to hire the most skilled psychologists trained to manipulate us. With their wealth they can hire ten lobbyists for each politician. For every blue-collar writer with a love for truth and science, they can hire dozens of skilled writers with no loyalty to truth, but skilled at creating believable lies.

The final part of “Black Gold” is called, “The Reckoning” and I will leave this part for you to discover.

A note on information gathering: Reading is my favorite form of information gathering with books by experts and science magazines being my favorite sources of information. But how many have the time or desire to read?

Today, there are two additional ways to gather information which dramatically reduce our time commitment. One is podcasts. The other is documentaries. Whatever source of information or media you employ to seek information, it is important to be a savvy consumer. Be careful who you trust.

·         Directly from the BBC article, “How the Oil Industry made Us Doubt Climate Change.”

Here are additional information sources from reputable sources:

Documentary, three parts: “The Power of Big Oil” by PBS’s Frontline.

British Broadcasting Company’s 10-part Podcast: “How they made us Doubt Everything”

Book: “Triumph of Doubt” by David Michaels Professor of Public Health at George Washington University

Book: “Merchants of Doubt” by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway

Book: “Climate Cover-Up” by James Hogan

My note of thanks to these investigative organizations:

Columbia Journalism School

The Los Angeles Times

The Guardian

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