Big Oil Is Bad for Our Health
The same sketchy economists arguing for Big Oil in Washington State used to fight for Big Tobacco. Yes, seriously.
I know it’s incredibly hard to focus during the name-calling and outrage-peddling of the midterms, but the media completely failed to prioritize last week’s report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The report found that the world would see, as Coral Davenport at the New York Times characterized, “worsening food shortages and wildfires, and a mass die-off of coral reefs as soon as 2040.” This is big news. Even if the prediction is wrong by a decade, it’s still a horrifying vision of life in the years to come.
And those of us who live here in Washington already know at least part of the report’s findings to be true. August in Seattle—once the crown jewel of the calendar year, when you could count on day after day of beautiful weather—now transforms the city into a hellscape of eye-scratching smoke from wildfires. In Augusts past, we’d go swimming and barbecuing and gathering with friends to watch the sun set on our beaches, and now Seattleites have to stay indoors, away from the smoke and ash that burns our throats.
The good news is, there’s actually something Washingtonians can do to fight pollution on the ballot this year. Initiative 1631 will charge the state’s biggest polluters and put those fees toward protecting our water, air, and forests while also working to build a green-energy infrastructure that will create jobs for decades to come.
Will I-1631 single-handedly turn back the disastrous effects we’ve already seen? Obviously not. But it will position us to continue the fight for another generation, while also putting a cap on the worst offenders in the state. Ask any first responder and they’ll tell you that doing something is always better than doing nothing. This is a great first step toward a better future.
On the initiative’s site, you can find a long list of organizations (including the American Lung Association, REI, the Faith Action Network, and Ben & Jerry’s) that endorse I-1631. But I find you can learn a lot about a political cause by checking out its opposition.
So, who’s sipped the anti-1631 Kool-Aid? Who’s arguing against a fee on polluters? According to Neal McNamara at Patch, the list includes Big Oil companies like Chevron, BP, the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, and the US Oil & Refining Company, as well as the Koch Brothers. Turns out, polluters don’t want to be charged for their pollution, and they’re willing to pay over 20 million bucks to fight 1631.
The polluters hired a team called the National Economic Research Associates, Inc (NERA) to do their economic consulting for them, and NERA quickly got to work issuing a scary report claiming that consumer prices would rise if Washington voters approved 1631. NERA was founded by Irwin Stelzer, who is often referred to as Fox News founder Rupert Murdoch’s right-hand-man, and the firm is positively brilliant at framing any efforts to combat pollution as risky, unproven propositions.
NERA is the organization that Donald Trump quotes when he wants to sow doubt on the topic of climate change. Their reports, Jie Jenny Zou wrote last year in the Guardian, are based on proprietary data, so “in many cases they can neither be verified or debunked,” providing polluters with fact-free “unsupported arguments” that they can use in ads and editorials.
As we’ve seen when a city or state considers raising the minimum wage, trickle-downers love to use unsubstantiated threats to falsely claim that jobs will be lost and businesses will be destroyed. NERA are the people Big Oil calls to create anxiety when a city or state considers a new environmental law. When the Obama Administration put forth laws that would restrict deadly mercury and other toxic air pollution, for example, NERA was right there, threatening a loss of “tens of billions of dollars” and the death of “180,000–215,000 jobs.”
Of course, there’s no way to confirm NERA’s studies, and there’s no proof that one of their prophecies of doom has actually played out. NERA’s numbers never account for green energy job creation, only fossil fuel job losses. (Here in Washington State, green energy workers outnumber those employed in fossil fuels by a substantial number.)
And look—these people have a long history of lying to you in exchange for paychecks from some of the worst industries on the planet. Before they started cashing Big Oil’s checks in Washington, NERA was a regular defender of Big Tobacco in the 1980s and 1990s.
A NERA employee wrote a memo coaching cigarette manufacturer Philip Morris to argue against their responsibility in smoking-related deaths because “Had the individual not smoked, he would have eventually incurred health care costs associated with some other disease (or simply old age.)” They claimed that a compelling study about the dangers of tobacco use “turns a blind eye toward the satisfactions that induce smokers to put up with health hazards.”
NERA also helped Big Tobacco fight a proposed 1990 smoking ban in Los Angeles and a 1995 workplace smoking ban in Maryland. On that last subject, NERA argued that anti-smoking laws in the workplace were “draconian” and “patently ludicrous,” and that compliance with the smoking ban would cost business owners millions of dollars, thereby hurting the local economy.
It’s pretty clear that NERA was on the wrong side of history when they allied with Big Tobacco. And they were economically wrong, too. When the cigarette industry was finally defeated with anti-smoking legislation in most public places, the economy didn’t collapse. The world didn’t end. You know what happened, instead? People stopped smoking.
This is the same firm that argued for Big Tobacco, and now they’re taking Big Oil’s dirty money to make the same dirty arguments. I know it’s scary when some self-described “experts” in suits show up to argue that the economy would be shattered if we make even an incremental change toward a healthier, more stable world. But I also know that those same people have been on the wrong side of history every time, and that fear can’t stop progress forever.
Big Oil is spending tens of millions of dollars to convince you to vote against the health of your land and your community. To do so, they’ve hired the same people who happily promoted Big Tobacco’s harmful war on America’s health. Don’t believe their lies.
