Which is the Next Big Tobacco - Petroleum or Facebook

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Which is the Next “Big Tobacco”: Big Oil or Facebook (Now “Meta”)

“In the first place, there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels.” 

July 1977 memo from Senior Exxon Scientist, James Black, to his management

This is a long blog today but hang in there; I think you’ll find it’s worth the read. Coal is slowly being squeezed out of the mainstream, although a recent surge in demand has temporarily increased its use. We know there is no such thing as “clean coal,” and in the world of electrical power generation, those plants will be the first to go. Shoving coal effluents into the ground after some attempts to filter, what cannot be completely filtered, is not an answer. And we know that we are going to have to ease into alternative energy replacements (“renewables”) through transitional use of the least polluting major fossil fuel, natural gas. See my recent An Ugly Transition blog and, to see how the US government actually subsidizes big oil, my Are We Getting a Big Lube Job from Big Oil blog. We just do not yet have the capacity to step into that clean “renewable arena” with current demand, and we just may have to accept a redefined “molten salt” nuclear reactor, a safer alternative with less waste issues than existing reactors, for longer than most of us would like.

But climate change will kill or harm far more human beings (add wildlife to that mix) than big tobacco. On July 21st, the World Health Organization reminded us of tobacco’s toxicity: 

• Tobacco kills up to half of its users.

• Tobacco kills more than 8 million people each year. More than 7 million of those deaths are the result of direct tobacco use while around 1.2 million are the result of non-smokers being exposed to second-hand smoke.

• Over 80% of the world's 1.3 billion tobacco users live in low- and middle-income countries.

In December of 2019, the World Economic Forum told us that every year 20 million people are displaced from the homes and livelihoods from climate change:

• Every two seconds, a weather-related disaster forces someone on the planet from their home, Oxfam says.

• Climate change is increasing the threat from extreme floods, droughts and wildfires, leaving millions displaced each year.

• Poorer countries are more at risk than wealthy nations.

The remaining big fossil offender is Big Oil. Beyond the OPEC producing nations. Sure, we are ramping up electrically powered vehicles, from trains, trucks and cars… maybe eventually ships and aircraft… but the mass of gasoline and diesel infrastructure, the number of old cars that just will continue demanding traditional fossil fuels, suggests a long ugly road ahead. So, let’s start assessing some legal and moral responsibility here. It does seem as if Big Oil is guilty, guilty, guilty. Every Big Oil player knew the stakes a long time ago. The October 26, 2015 Scientific American provides one clear example of that reality:

“Exxon was aware of climate change, as early as 1977, 11 years before it became a public issue, according to a recent investigation from InsideClimate News. This knowledge did not prevent the company (now ExxonMobil and the world’s largest oil and gas company) from spending decades refusing to publicly acknowledge climate change and even promoting climate misinformation—an approach many have likened to the lies spread by the tobacco industry regarding the health risks of smoking. Both industries were conscious that their products wouldn’t stay profitable once the world understood the risks, so much so that they used the same consultants to develop strategies on how to communicate with the public.  

“Experts, however, aren’t terribly surprised. ‘It’s never been remotely plausible that they did not understand the science,’ says Naomi Oreskes, a history of science professor at Harvard University. But as it turns out, Exxon didn’t just understand the science, the company actively engaged with it. In the 1970s and 1980s it employed top scientists to look into the issue and launched its own ambitious research program that empirically sampled carbon dioxide and built rigorous climate models. Exxon even spent more than $1 million on a tanker project that would tackle how much CO2 is absorbed by the oceans. It was one of the biggest scientific questions of the time, meaning that Exxon was truly conducting unprecedented research. 

“In their eight-month-long investigation, reporters at InsideClimate News interviewed former Exxon employees, scientists and federal officials and analyzed hundreds of pages of internal documents. They found that the company’s knowledge of climate change dates back to July 1977, when its senior scientist James Black delivered [the above] sobering message on the topic… A year later he warned Exxon that doubling CO2 gases in the atmosphere would increase average global temperatures by two or three degrees—a number that is consistent with the scientific consensus today. He continued to warn that ‘present thinking holds that man has a time window of five to 10 years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical.’ In other words, Exxon needed to act.” Big Oil knew, they continued to push their products, publicly deny ill effects even in testimony before Congress, build new capacities to extract and sell more product and accuse anti-fossil fuel activists as naïve and economically destructive tree huggers… deploying their own brand of intimidation.

To this day, Exxon Mobile uses severe tactics to silence its climate change critics. For example, there is a bizarre statute in fossil-fuel-Texas that allows companies to demand documents and depositions before filing a lawsuit. This places an incredible financial burden on critics, so guess which company delights in intimidating its critics? Yup. As Michael Hiltzik, writing for the October 27th Los Angeles Times, tells us, reviewing Exxon’s abusive use of this law: “Serge Dedina is the mayor of Imperial Beach, a surfers’ haven on the Mexican border that is one of the poorest municipalities in San Diego County.

“Exxon Mobil is the nation’s biggest oil company, with more than $214 billion in revenue over the last 12 months and nearly three times as many employees as Imperial Beach has residents… So when Exxon Mobil pleads in court that Dedina and his city have been engaged in a nearly decade-long conspiracy to stifle its 1st Amendment free-speech rights, that’s a claim that should make you go, ‘Hmm.’... The oil company has asked the Texas courts to order compliance from Dedina and 14 other California municipal officials.

“What put them on Exxon Mobil’s enemies list is that they represent California cities and counties that have sued Exxon Mobil and other oil companies over the consequences of global warming, which stems from the burning of the companies’ products… ‘What has people concerned is what’s next, what’s the next strategy,’ Dedina told Hiltzik. ‘These are companies with unlimited resources, and they’ve decided to use them against beach communities without these resources.’” Big Oil is big bad, but are its practices worse than social media giant Facebook? It is renaming itself as “Meta” (for metaverse), but it is still the same-old toxic Facebook to me.

Facebook may be less responsible for killing people and creating homelessness, but it is dramatically responsible for the massive spread of disinformation that clearly created resistance to COVID vaccines and is/was exceptionally politically destabilizing all over the planet, especially here in the United States. We’ve learned from former Facebook employees, especially former Facebook product manager and data scientist Frances Haugen, that the company routinely and knowing does little more than token culling of clearly dangerous postings – extreme and dangerous content generates more traffic on the social media platform. and hence higher ad revenues – just enough to present evidence to regulators that it is handling the problem.

We learned that while Facebook claims they take down 90% of such offensive material, a slight dive into those numbers shows the actual takedown rate to be about 5%. Taking such material down is bad for business. It is unlikely that the Big Lie (Trump won the 2020 election) would have had such traction, the right-wing insurrectionists would have been able to invade the Capitol on January 6th, or that Russia would have had such easy access for its campaign of election disinformation if Facebook had actually done what it claims. Young girls have faced serious self-image problems from Facebook’s Instagram service. Facebook simply preys on the gullibility of its users, which it ascertains from their personal usage patterns. See also my October 18th The Disinformation Train – Hey, It’s Not Me! blog.

My last example of Facebook’s knowing toxicity comes from this October 26th article from the Associated Press: “In March, as claims about the dangers and ineffectiveness of coronavirus vaccines spun across social media and undermined attempts to stop the spread of the virus, some Facebook employees thought they had found a way to help. .. By altering how posts about vaccines are ranked in people’s newsfeeds, researchers at the company realized they could curtail the misleading information individuals saw about COVID-19 vaccines and offer users posts from legitimate sources like the World Health Organization. 

“‘Given these results, I’m assuming we’re hoping to launch ASAP,’ one Facebook employee wrote, responding to the internal memo about the study… Instead, Facebook shelved some suggestions from the study. Other changes weren't made until April. .. When another Facebook researcher suggested disabling comments on vaccine posts in March until the platform could do a better job of tackling anti-vaccine messages lurking in them, that proposal was ignored… Critics say the reason Facebook was slow to take action on the ideas is simple: The tech giant worried it might impact the company’s profits.” Big Oil doesn’t have the color of the First Amendment to hide behind, but then, Facebook should know you cannot avoid liability by falsely yelling “fire!” in a crowded theater. What Facebook actually does is much, much worse. 

I’m Peter Dekom, and I will leave it up to my readers to decide which threat is more dangerous: Big Oil or Facebook (hint: “both” is a very acceptable response).