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In the spring of 2019, Phil Goldberg, a lawyer and hired gun for a front organisation serving some of America’s most powerful oil firms, spotted an opportunity to serve his masters.
Goldberg was alarmed that representatives from the energy industry were not invited to a conference being held at the University of Hawaii. 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-upThe climate crisis. But a one-sided debate, Goldberg wrote, “does students and the general public a significant disservice”. He demanded that the meeting is postponed.
Denise Antolini, associate dean at the university’s law school who organised 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 successfully pressed Antolini into reading his objections to conference in her opening speech. He also persuaded the university to post his blogs along with a letter from the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, denouncing the meeting’s daring to suggest that there was a solid legal argument against the 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 dozenCities, states, and localities allege Americans were lied to by the industryFor decades, fossil fuels were downplayed or outright denied to have caused climate change. Companies are required to pay a portion of their huge profits to help pay for the human cost of the climate crisis, which includes rising sea levels and more severe weather events.
In an effort to avoid costly settlements the fossil fuel industry relies upon front organizations to discredit the litigation, and to sway 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 heads an independent initiative called Manufacturers Accountability Project, (Map), a lot of its funding comes primarily from the largest names in the oil business. Map hired 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 with that used by the tobacco company when it faced litigation over the knowledge it had about cigarettes causing cancer. She said that the strategy might be more successful for big 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.”
OUnexpectedly, Goldberg is the bearer of the torch to end climate lawsuits. The New Jersey-born lawyer characterises 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. This legal practice was even famous for being the inspiration for the fictional law firm of Smoot Hawking in the satirical film Thank You for Smoking.
Shook, Hardy pioneered a strategy toward avoiding corporate accountability – a denial strategy the oil companies followed not many years later.
The firm convinced cigarette companies to stop researching the dangers of nicotine. It warned them that they could be sued in court. To discredit the evidence that smoking causes lung disease, it also hired scientists with advanced degrees. 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 been a hardball player since 2003 when she joined Shook Hardy.
Goldberg has been a skilled litigator in public accountability cases for many corporate clients, including the asbestos industry, coal companies, and pharmaceutical companies that have been accused of medical malpractice.
He has also managed a wing, the Progressive Policy Institute of the Democratic thinktank. This group works to protect corporations against lawsuits and keep regulation changes out of the hands lobbyists and money from industry. 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 cultivate a progressive image. Although he claims to be dedicated and concerned about the climate fight, 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 used in the photographs for this article. Goldberg agreed to pose only while riding his bike. He refused to remove his helmet in order to take any of the photographs.
TGoldberg is now the face of a public relations campaign to squash climate litigation against 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.
Iron triangle strategy’s central principle is that its beneficiaries should not be viewed as those who pull the strings.
Companies fighting legal battles have learned that Americans don’t trust executives wearing suits. Major industries try to influence public opinion and change political action by funding front organizations that work for corporate interests under a different name.
It was a natural move by the fossil fuel industry to turn towards front groups, as it became increasingly alarmed in recent decades at a number of environmental issues. Increasing number of lawsuits demanding compensation for Climate crisis has caused 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 (Nam), 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 started a group called the Manufacturers Accountability Project four year ago to take the campaign for big oil defense to the streets. It recruited Goldberg to lead 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 mould public opinion – and potential jurors – before the cases come to court.
Local newspapers National Public Radio, 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 the New Jersey GlobeAfter three New Jersey senators asked the state to sue Big Oil to recover the deceit, the state obliged.
Goldberg followed similar steps after Connecticut’s attorneys general filed cases against the 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 state senators asked the state to sue oil companies for past and future 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.”
