Big Oil and the far right have been lying to you about climate change for decades | Opinion

It’s not getting any easier for climate change deniers to convince us that this climate thing is a hoax. No matter how credible they might seem or how much money they throw at denial, changing weather patterns are beating them to the punch.

It’s either hurricanes in Florida, or deadlier tornadoes in the South and Midwest or atmospheric rivers of snow and rain in California, not to mention the forest fires that engulfed California and the West Coast for the last few years. Now with snowpack at record levels in California, flooding looms on the horizon for those in the wake of melting snow.

For those whose homes escape the path of a weather event, smoke appears as a reminder that climate change takes no vacation and spreads its detritus far and wide. That certainly has been the experience in Idaho where smoke travels from west to east and north to south even when Idaho’s own forests are not burning.

As a former Midwesterner, I always thought I could escape to my old hunting grounds in the upper Midwest and breathe the clean air of summer. But lately, that doesn’t work, as smoke from the raging fires burning in Canada have now arrived in the cities and towns of the Midwest.

We’ve done a great job talking about climate change over the years. The experts weigh in regularly, and the evening news reports the dire consequences of climate change. Electric cars may now be on the scene and fields of solar and wind power are basking in the sun over the fields and hillsides of rural America, but it sure seems like too little too late.

And it still doesn’t get to the bottom of how so many in public office got away with denying there was such a thing as human-caused climate change. Did we not have the science to convince even the most doubting Thomases?

Should we not know more about how we could have missed the warnings? Wouldn’t that at least allow us to learn from history, so we don’t repeat it?

Geoff Dembicki’s recent book, “The Petroleum Papers: Inside the Far-Right Conspiracy to Cover Up Climate Change,” answers those questions. He documents the role of Big Oil and the role of the Far Right and the Koch brothers in their efforts to bury the science and research behind climate change. Powerful energy and automobile lobbies were busy at work in Washington assuring us that no drastic changes in law were necessary. They did not want to discourage the sale of those gas-guzzlers or the carbon-based fuel that ran them. Politicians were bought and sold by lobbyists who stood in the way of tough environmental standards that could have lessened the damages now inflicted on us by climate change.

It’s how these powerful lobbies stood in the way that is now becoming clear as we listen carefully to those who have done their homework and traced the origins of the climate change discussion.

Dembicki happens to come from Alberta, Canada, home of the largest oil sands deposits in the world. The Canadian Tar Sands project engulfs an area as large as New York City. It holds waste ponds that leach heavy metals into groundwater and processing plants that emit nitrogen and sulfur dioxides creating a foul odor that stretches for miles.

As I heard news of the recent wildfires in Alberta, Canada, I couldn’t help but think the chickens had come home to roost.

Big Oil extracts some of the dirtiest crude out of the Tar Sands, making Canada the fourth-largest oil producer in the world and the top exporter of oil to the United States. That crude is then converted to fuel that throws more carbon in the air and heats up the atmosphere and causes climate change and weather events like the Western Canadian wildfires.

Those wildfires cause thousands to flee their Canadian homes, destroy the Canadian landscape, but also cause the very tar sands project that started it all to halt some of its production. Now that is coming full circle if there ever was such a thing.

From the earliest warnings of the impact of climate change in 1988, delivered by James Hansen, a NASA scientist, oil executives and the Kochs made a concerted and strategic effort to distort and lie about their own research and findings on the consequences of their product throwing carbon into the atmosphere that would destabilize weather patterns over time.

As early as 1981, Shell commissioned a study from one of the world’s leading research institutions in England, the University of East Anglia. Shell learned there had been global warming over the last hundred years, and it was caused by carbon dioxide build-up and warming was likely to continue for the next 40 years. By the end of the decade, Imperial, Suncor and Shell would embark on one of the largest and most consequential corporate misinformation campaigns in modern history to deny what they learned.

So much of our conversation about the false narratives of the far right today seem to land on how former President Donald Trump perfected and spread the art of lying and distortions of fact. Science based on observation and research was ignored time and time again as Trump-induced fiction took the place of the facts. What is less known is the role of Shell, Exxon Mobil, Sun Oil, BP, Chevron, the Petroleum Institute and the Koch brothers in spreading disinformation and lies about climate change long before Trump ever arrived on the political scene.

But it didn’t take Trump long to get in on the act. Both he and progressive Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau fell in line with the so-called facts spewed out by the disinformation machine perfected by Big Oil.

How many extreme weather events due to a changing climate will we see before we take more drastic action?

How many homes destroyed and families uprooted across the globe as the result of what can only be considered corporate crimes of cover-up, misinformation and lies?

And how many of the CEOs and those in their executive suites paid any price for their lies and cover-ups? Zero is the answer, but you can find them basking in the sun of their retirement homes now worrying about when the next weather event takes their homes out. Maybe that’s the only hope for justice.

Bob Kustra served as president of Boise State University from 2003 to 2018. He is host of Readers Corner on Boise State Public Radio and he writes a biweekly column for the Idaho Statesman. He served two terms as Illinois lieutenant governor and 10 years as a state legislator.