Doubt is our Product

by Contributor | October 7, 2025 8:52 am

In 1971, Brown & Williamson Tobacco (B&W) initiated Project Truth. B&W admitted, “Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public. With the general public, the consensus is that cigarettes are in some way harmful to the health. If we are successful in establishing a controversy at the public level, then there is an opportunity to put across the real facts about smoking and health.”

For decades, the tobacco industry deliberately lied to the public that its products caused cancer and killed people.

Inside Climate News wrote, in 1977, “In Exxon corporate headquarters, a senior company scientist named James F. Black addressed an audience of powerful oilmen.” Black told the oil men, “Carbon dioxide from the world’s use of fossil fuels would warm the planet and could eventually endanger humanity.” Black told Exxon’s Management Committee, “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.”

The Climate Deception Dossiers revealed that “for nearly three decades, major fossil fuel companies have knowingly worked to distort climate science findings, deceive the public, and block [climate] policies.”

“The fossil fuel companies, mimicking the tobacco companies, adopted a strategy that sought to ‘manufacture uncertainty’ about global warming even in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence.”

In April 1998, a secret plan by the American Petroleum Institute leaked. It was the Global Climate Science Communications Plan. Climate Files wrote, the plan included “strategies to install ‘uncertainty’ in the public policy arena.” “Victory Will Be Achieved When Average citizens ‘understand’ (recognize) uncertainties in climate science.”

In 1995, Leonard S. Bernstein, a climate expert at Mobil Corporation, wrote, “The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied.”

The science was clear. Burning fossil fuels drove the climate crisis into chaos. “Fossil fuel company leaders knew that their products were harmful to people and the planet but still chose to actively deceive the public and deny this harm.”

In 1982, an internal memo by Exxon’s environmental affairs office was “given wide circulation to Exxon management.” Exxon recognized “that heading off global warming ‘would require major reductions in fossil fuel combustion.’ Unless that happened, ‘there are some potentially catastrophic events that must be considered.”

The Los Angeles Times wrote that Exxon knew about one of these catastrophic events in 1991. Exxon knew about the Earth’s melting Arctic. “Ken Croasdale, senior ice researcher for Exxon’s Canadian subsidiary,” led “a team of researchers and engineers that was trying to determine how global warming could affect Exxon’s Arctic operations and its bottom line.” Croasdale told an audience in 1991, “[global] warming will clearly affect sea ice, icebergs, permafrost and sea levels.”

Today, there is record glacial melting and record sea level rise.

 

Anton Porcari

Source URL: https://oswegocountytoday.com/opinion/letters-to-the-editor/doubt-is-our-product/

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