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Oil derricks in Three Rivers, Texas.Nick Wagner/Xinhua via ZUMA Pres
This story was originally published in the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
In the spring of 2019, Phil Goldberg, a lawyer and hired gun for a front organization serving some of America’s most powerful oil firms, spotted an opportunity to serve his masters.
Goldberg was alarmed at the inability of the University of Hawaii to host a conference on a wave of lawsuits against oil industry. Goldberg sent an email to university the day before, demanding that big oil be heard in the same way as its critics.
The event was to interrogate the oil industry’s decades-long cover-up involving the climate crisis. But a one-sided debate, Goldberg wrote, “does students and the general public a significant disservice.” He insisted the meeting be postponed.
Denise Antolini, associate dean at the university’s law school who organized the conference, said in her 23-year-career as a law professor, she had never received such demands. “Your request to disrupt our public event was quite surprising, especially coming from far across the continent, from someone I’ve never heard of, on behalf of a private client with an apparently direct financial interest in chilling debate about climate litigation,” she replied.
Goldberg hailed his intervention as a victory. He had succeeded in influencing Antolini to recite his objections about the conference in her opening remarks. He convinced the university to publish his blogs on their website along with a letter published in Honolulu. Star-AdvertiserThe meeting was denounced for suggesting that there was a solid legal case against oil companies.
Goldberg is part of a network of enablers working to preserve big oil’s power and reputation as it faces a barrage of litigation. More than two dozen cities, states and municipalities allege The industry lied about Americans for decades by downplaying and outright denying that fossil fuels caused climate change. The lawsuits require that companies pay some of their enormous profits to pay for the human toll caused by the climate crisis. This includes the damage caused by rising sea levels and increasing severity of weather disasters.
In an effort to avoid costly settlements the fossil fuel industry relies upon front organizations to discredit litigation and influence public opinion in its favor. So nearly three years ago, the friends of big oil turned to Goldberg, a former Democratic congressional aide and self-described “committed environmentalist,” to persuade Americans that the companies responsible for the growing climate disaster are now the ones to fix the problem.
Although Goldberg is the head of an independent initiative called The Manufacturers Accountability Project (or the Manufacturers Accountability Project), much of its funding comes directly from the largest names in the oil industry. MAP is available for hire Goldberg to push back against litigation on the fossil fuel industry’s behalf, allowing oil companies to keep their hands clean in the process.
Goldberg is leading a charge in local media to discredit those suing the fossil fuel industry as a “fringe litigation movement” conspiracy of opportunistic politicians, environmental extremists, and money-grasping lawyers who pose a threat to the American way of life.
“There are two goals of this litigation—drive climate policy and wage a public relations campaign against the energy industry,” Goldberg told the Guardian. “It has no foundation legally and, more to the point, is not the right way to fight climate change.”
Loyola University law professor Karen Sokol compares the strategy to the one used by the tobacco industry in the face of litigation regarding the dangers of cigarettes causing lung cancer. However, she believes that the strategy may be more successful for large oil.
“The fossil fuel industry has this ability to really take command of the societal narrative on a whole level that the tobacco industry just didn’t because, although we were definitely a cigarette culture for a time, not everybody was so dependent on cigarettes in the same way we are on fossil fuels,” she said.
Kert Davies, founder and director of Climate Investigations Center, is scathing about Goldberg’s part in that. “Phil Goldberg is a useful pawn on a much larger chessboard. If he doesn’t know that, it’s a shame,” Davies said. “If he does know his role, it’s worse.”
Outwardly, Goldberg looks likeA rare bearer of the torch to end climate lawsuits. The New Jersey-born lawyer characterizes himself as a “progressive, pro-environmentalist” with a long commitment to Democratic causes. With that, he has positioned himself as a voice of reason as he leads the fossil fuel industry’s campaign to distract Americans from the scene of the crime and embrace big oil as a necessity in the struggle to contain global heating.
But Goldberg is also a former coal lobbyist now working as an attorney for a Kansas City law firm—Shook, Hardy and Bacon—that made its name decades ago as the cigarette industry’s attack dog. The fictional law practice inspired the film satirical Smoot, Hawking. Thank You for Smoking.
Shook, Hardy pioneered a strategy toward avoiding corporate accountability—a denial strategy the oil companies followed not many years later. In the mid-80s, the firm persuaded cigarette companies to stop research on the dangers of nicotine. They warned that this could be used against them in court. It also hired experts with advanced scientific degrees to discredit the evidence of lung cancer caused by smoking. The firm’s lawyers soon developed a reputation for probing the lives of people who dared to sue the tobacco firms and for using court procedure to draw out cases until plaintiffs ran out of funds.
All of this so disgusted one federal judge, Gladys Kessler, that in a damning 2006 civil judgment against the cigarette makers she said Shook, Hardy and other firms played “an absolutely central role in the creation and perpetuation” of a 50-year campaign of deceit.
“They devised and coordinated both national and international strategy; they directed scientists as to what research they should and should not undertake; they vetted scientific research papers and reports as well as public relations materials to ensure that the interests of the (tobacco industry) would be protected,” She wrote. “What a sad and disquieting chapter in the history of an honorable and often courageous profession.”
The chapter cemented Shook, Hardy’s reputation for vigorously defending clients and drew other contentious industries to the firm. Goldberg has lived up its reputation for playing hardball since 2003, when he joined Shook Hardy.
Goldberg’s career has seen him become an expert in the field of public accountability litigations for many corporate clients. This includes coal companies, asbestos companies, and pharmaceutical firms accused of medical negligence.
He has also led the Progressive Policy Institute, a Democratic think tank, over the past 20 years. This wing works to protect corporations from lawsuits as well as to keep regulation changes out of the hands of politicians who are susceptible to lobbyists and industry money. Goldberg also advised the right-leaning American Legislative Exchange Council in drafting laws that would make it easier to sue large corporations.
Goldberg’s current defense of the fossil-fuel industry is equally focused. He deflects questions about Big Oil’s cover-up of its own scientific research on global heating by claiming that raking over the past is not going to help find solutions to the climate crisis. He also avoids answering questions about parallels with the tobacco industry’s actions.
Instead, Goldberg has tried to create a progressive image. Although he claims to be dedicated and concerned about climate change, he is also concerned that suing oil corporations is hindering the progress of solutions. He goes out of his way to say that he “cares deeply about climate change” and, in his answers, returns repeatedly to “the important work that needs to be done on the climate.”
This image was carried on to the Guardian‘s photographs for this article, which Goldberg agreed to pose for only while riding his bicycle. He declined to remove the helmet for any of these pictures.
Goldberg is todayHe is now the face of a PR Campaign to Suppress Climate Litigation against Big Oil. He calls his strategy the “iron triangle defense.” One side of the triangle is dedicated toward shaping the public narrative, the second is for pressuring legislatures to write laws that discourage corporate accountability litigation, and the third side influences the judicial process with amicus briefs in cases that might have a bearing on those lawsuits.
The iron triangle strategy’s key component is that its beneficiaries shouldn’t be seen as those who pull the strings. Companies fighting legal battles have learned that Americans don’t trust executives in suits. So, major industries attempt to influence public opinion by funding front organizations that work on behalf of corporate interests but under a different title.
It was a natural move by the fossil-fuel industry toward front groups, as it became increasingly alarmed in recent decades at a number of environmental issues. An increase in lawsuits demanding compensation for Climate crisis has caused severe damage. Oil executives feared a repeat of the tobacco industry’s fate when public opinion turned sharply against the cigarette makers, forcing the largest civil settlement in US history.
Major oil firms, including Exxon, Shell and Chevron, looked to the National Association of Manufacturers, one of the US’s most powerful business lobby groups, with a long history of creating front organizations at the behest of various industries, to help “combat frivolous, politically motivated lawsuits against energy manufacturers.”
NAM created the Manufacturers Accountability Project four years ago to bring the campaign to defend big oil to the streets. It recruited Goldberg to head the initiative a year later. While much of their strategy is an attempt to intimidate litigants through the legal process, Goldberg’s role is to take the fight to local communities in an attempt to mold public opinion—and potential jurors—before the cases come to court.
From local newspapers to NPR, Goldberg pushes arguments designed to deflect from the fossil fuel industry’s responsibility for the climate crisis. “Those of us who care deeply about climate change, our economy, and our way of life must focus our elected leaders on game-changing innovations, not these politically-driven litigations,” He wrote in the New Jersey Globe after three New Jersey senators pressed the state to sue Big Oil to pay up for the costs caused by their deceptions.
Goldberg followed similar steps after Connecticut and Vermont’s attorneys general filed cases against oil industry. “We should be fighting climate change instead of each other,” he reasoned in the local press.
Sokol, the law professor and climate litigation specialist, said she saw Goldberg’s intervention tactics everywhere there is a lawsuit against the fossil fuel industry. “Say a new locality files a suit… Suddenly the local press is infiltrated with Goldberg quotes. He fires out op-eds,” she said. “It’s a concerted battle against this litigation, which in many ways is a testament to how powerful the industry suspects this could be if it’s allowed to have its day in court.”
Still, even in Goldberg’s home state, there are plenty who are not buying it. Three New Jersey senators demanded that the state sue Big Oil in 2020 to recover the deceitful past and present damages.
“Rather than alert the public and help usher in the transition to clean energy, big oil took a page out of big tobacco’s playbook and funded and led a decades-long campaign to lie, deceive, and confuse the public about the science of climate change,” two of the senators, one Democrat and one Republican, wrote in USA Today. “It’s only fair that these fossil fuel companies who got rich while igniting the climate crisis are made to pay their fair share of the costs to our communities.”
