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This is the story Original publication in The GuardianCovering Climate Now is a global journalism collaboration that strengthens climate coverage.
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 when he saw that representatives of the energy industry were not invited to a conference at the University of Hawaii. He sent an email to the 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-upa discussion on the climate crisis. But a one-sided debate, Goldberg wrote, “does students and the general public a significant disservice.” He insisted that the meeting should be postponed.
Denise Antolini, associate dean at the university’s law school who organized the conference, said that, 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 getting Antolini to read his objections to the conference during her opening speech. He convinced the university to publish his blogs on its website along with a letter published in Honolulu Star-Advertiser decrying the meeting for suggesting there was a strong 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 dozenCities, states, or municipalities allege that The industry lied about AmericansFor decades, fossil fuels were downplayed or outright denied to have caused climate change. These lawsuits demand that companies contribute some of their huge profits to 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 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, (MAP), most of its funding comes directly from the oil industry’s biggest names. 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 to the one used by the tobacco industry in the face of litigation regarding the dangers of cigarettes causing lung 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 chess board. If he doesn’t know that, it’s a shame,” Davies said.
“If he does know his role, it’s worse.”
OTo the untrained eye, Goldberg appears to be a rare bearer of flame to extinguish 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. This legal practice was even famous for inciting the fictional law firm of Smoot Hawking in the satirical novel. Thank you for smoking.
Shook, Hardy pioneered a strategy toward avoiding corporate accountability—a denial strategy the oil companies followed not many years later.
Starting in the mid-’80s, the firm convinced cigarette companies to shut down research into the dangers of nicotine, warning that it 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 been a hardball player since joining Shook Hardy in 2003.
Goldberg’s expertise in the field of public accountability litigations has helped many clients, including those from the coal industry, asbestos industry, and pharmaceutical companies, who are accused of medical malpractice.
He has also led a Progressive Policy Institute wing over the past 20 years. This think tank is a Democratic think-tank that works to protect corporations and keep regulation changes out of the hands of politicians who are susceptible to lobbyists and industry money. Goldberg also advised right-leaning American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) on the drafting of laws to make it more difficult 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 sought to cultivate a progressive image. He claims to be committed to the fight against climate change but is concerned about the fact that suing oil companies is preventing solutions from being found. 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.
TToday, Goldberg is the face of a PR campaign against Big Oil’s climate litigation. He calls his strategy the “iron triangle defence”: one side of the triangle is dedicated to 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 principle is that its beneficiaries shouldn’t be seen as those pulling the strings.
Companies fighting legal battles have learned that Americans don’t trust executives in suits. Major industries have been trying to influence public opinion by funding front organizations that work in corporate interests. However, they do so 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. An increase in lawsuits demanding compensation for Climate crisis causes 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 created the Manufacturers Accountability Project four years ago to bring the campaign against Big Oil onto the streets. One year later, Goldberg was recruited to lead the initiative.
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.
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 in New Jersey GlobeAfter three New Jersey senators asked the state to sue Big Oil, the state agreed to pay the deceitful costs.
After the Attorney Generals of Connecticut and Vermont filed cases against oil industry, Goldberg pursued similar goals.
“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. The local press suddenly becomes infiltrated by 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 past and current costs resulting from their deceptions.
“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.”
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