Knowns and Exxons and Unknowns
Two decades of climate inaction and the two damning quotes that bookend them.
Two bits of news from yesterday: A senior ExxonMobil lobbyist was caught on camera more or less explaining how the company has spent decades fighting against climate change action; and former Secretary of Defense and Forever War architect Donald Rumsfeld died at 88. These are not completely unrelated.
“Did we aggressively fight against some of the science? Yes.” That was Keith McCoy, the oil company lobbyist, in a call with what he thought was a head-hunter looking for lobbying help but was actually someone with Unearthed, the investigative arm of GreenpeaceUK. “Did we join some of these shadow groups to work against some of the early efforts? Yes, that’s true.”
As reported by Channel 4 News, McCoy went on to explain his “fishing” techniques for reeling in susceptible lawmakers, the ways in which his company have watered down or fought against legislation—including the still-pending infrastructure bill—and even how they use industry groups as “whipping boys” to take the public punishment instead of ExxonMobil itself. None of the techniques in question should come as any sort of surprise, but hearing them so casually laid bare by their perpetrators is at very least jarring.
To Rumsfeld: The man who is responsible for more suffering over the last two decades than all but a handful of other people in the world also gifted us a bit of rhetorical maneuvering that, though it was wielded back in 2002 on an entirely different topic, has come to be used over and over again in climate discussions. This, of course, is the concept of “known unknowns” versus “unknown unknowns.”
For years, scientists and policy makers have argued that climate change’s biggest threats lie in realm of those unknown unknowns. “Rumsfeld had a point,” reads one New Scientist piece from 2008. “Yet the really alarming changes are those that come completely out of the blue—the unknown unknowns that we never even imagined.” More than a decade later the term still rang out, with a New York Times op-ed titled “Climate’s Troubling Unknown Unknowns” arguing that the field may be “strewn” with such issues. “They pose daunting tests for how we face the future,” it read. Other examples abound, and you can almost hear the phrase’s echo in McCoy’s cavalier revelations.
When he says that the company has fought “aggressively against some of the science,” he is positioning the oil industry in a specific space within the known/known-unknown/unknown-unknown continuum. The bread and butter for the industry and denier politicians has always been to hype the uncertainty (so much so that the technique got an entire chapter in my book)—basically, they skip past the knowns (or just lie about them, but that’s another story) and don’t bother with the unknown unknowns, spending decades and countless dollars convincing people that because we cannot see with intricate precision how high the sea will be in 2070 that strong action is futile. They take advantage of the fact that science is more than willing to admit and discuss what things we don’t know to make them seem unknowable. A clear gap in knowledge becomes a vacuum that their disinformation and obfuscation can fill.
Interestingly, it was Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon that produced one of the earlier calls from the military to take climate change seriously (they have since been among the only parts of government to consistently sound the alarm). A secret report in 2004 outlined a worst-case scenario where abrupt climate change more or less throws the world into chaos by 2020—in some ways an attempt to take stabs at the unknown unknowns and what they might look like.
Obviously, this most dire possibility (the report deemed in unlikely but “plausible”) did not come to fruition, but the unprecedented heat wave currently baking big chunks of the country is a fairly solid symbol of just how big a failure the seventeen years since that report have been. The ExxonMobil sting operation stands in equally well as an explanation for why that failure occurred—entrenched, powerful companies, “fighting aggressively against the science.” The tactical specifics of oil industry lobbying against climate action could be considered its own form of a known unknown—we were already well aware that they were doing this sort of thing, but every bit of sunshine on the details might help put an end to it eventually.
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