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‘People Are Demanding Accountability for the Fossil Fuel Industry’ - CounterSpin interview with Sriram Madhusoodanan about climate justice
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Janine Jackson interviewed Sriram Madhusoodanan about climate justice for the August 2, 2019, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
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Janine Jackson: Climate disruption presents a test for corporate news media: Will they act on the understanding that a conversation that doesn’t acknowledge that unprecedented measures need to be taken is an irresponsibly detached conversation? Will they vigorously expose the corporate actors, the fossil fuel companies and their executives, who continue to dissimulate and deny? Or will they go on giving those that profit from harm-causing industries pride of place in the conversation about how to mitigate that harm?
Corporate media’s response to some promising state-level developments in climate action is not itself very promising. Our next guest will explain work you might not know about, being done to push fossil fuel companies out of the way of climate justice solutions. Sriram Madhusoodanan is deputy campaigns director at the group Corporate Accountability; he joins us now by phone from Washington, DC. Welcome to CounterSpin, Sriram Madhusoodanan.
Sriram Madhusoodanan: Thank you so much, Janine; glad to be here.
JJ: I was alluding to the Supreme Court decision earlier this year that cleared the way for Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey to pursue her investigation of Exxon Mobil—about what it knew about climate change and when it knew it, essentially. It was on the wires, AP and Reuters, but it didn’t get the kind of major attention you would hope.
But before you talk about that, the background for such an investigation, the need for it, is that the fossil fuel industry is just vigorous in doing whatever it takes to resist change. They’re really quite aggressive and proactive, you might say.
Sriram Madhusoodanan: “There are very real solutions to addressing the climate crisis, and they’re being deployed by people around the world.”
SM: Absolutely. I think this is the story we’ve seen play out over decades, really, when we now see the internal documents that have come to light, for example, showing that Exxon, as far back as the 1960s, really knew the extent to which climate change was going to be the path that we were on, the modern kind of climate disruption that we’re seeing, almost a climate disaster happening every week, I believe, according to a recent UN report.
So it is very telling that this is the path the fossil fuel industry has been on for so long, and when faced with a choice of doing the better thing, in terms of advancing a just transition, or choosing a path of climate denial and political manipulation, the industry quite simply chose to protect the billions and billions of dollars a year in its own profit.
JJ: And this was part of that: Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey was investigating Exxon Mobil. So, as part of their strategy, they sued her. And that’s the case that the Supreme Court refused to hear?
SM: That’s right, yes. So the Supreme Court really refused to hear Exxon’s bid for dismissal on the Massachusetts AG case. And just to back up for a second, Exxon has really fought tooth and nail against every move to hold it legally liable, countersuing up a storm, not just with the Massachusetts attorney general investigation, but a number of different instances. And this is quite simply a tactic of delay and intimidation, and an attempt to use their considerable resources to delay, distract and fundamentally to obstruct this process.
JJ: Healey said that she thought the Supreme Court ruling might put an end to what she called Exxon’s “scorched earth campaign” to block these kinds of investigations.
As you’re intimating, this ruling, it’s heartening, not only for Massachusetts, though; Massachusetts is not alone in this sort of investigation.
SM: Absolutely. This is a big win for other states, cities and communities who want to hold Exxon accountable. We have an ongoing investigation and lawsuit from Attorney General James, now, in New York state. And there are a number of cities that are taking the fossil fuel industry to court. And this decision really does clear the way for Healy’s investigation into what Exxon has known for over 50 years about climate change, and brings us one step closer to finding out exactly what they knew, and what they did to cover it up .
JJ: So it’s having some echo effect, in some sense. It was a state attorney general that brought the big lawsuit, or one of them, that became the biggest lawsuit against big tobacco, was it not?
SM: Yes, and there’s absolutely a number of parallels to the history we saw with attorney general investigations into the tobacco industry. One, for example, is that, as we saw with the tobacco AG investigations, part of the settlement in the US, particularly from Minnesota’s state attorney general, was to bring to light and release a trove of internal documents that really illustrated the true story of what the industry had been doing to cover up what it knew about the addictive nature of nicotine and cigarettes.
And similarly, we can see, really, to what extent Exxon and others hid from the public the causes and severity of the climate crisis. And I think, more importantly, when those tobacco documents were released, and the truth of what the industry did was revealed, it really ushered in a whole new era of accountability and legislation to hold the industry accountable.
And at the international level, at the UN, at the state and local level here in the US, people are similarly demanding accountability for the fossil fuel industry. And this is exactly the kinds of investigation and moves to hold the industry accountable and liable for its actions that we need in this moment.
JJ: Yeah, documents make things harder to deny, even if they’re things that seem like they’re going on in broad daylight anyway. Documentation is always important.
And fossil fuel companies are kind of a big PR operation; they do their own research, they offer these “market-based” solutions. And for corporate media, that’s enough cover — you know, “Oh, this didn’t come from BP, it came from the ‘Energy Futures Institute,’” or whatever horse hockey — to present that as a valid position in a debate: “Some people say, X, Y or Z.”
And I kind of wonder what it will take for extractive industry to be presented that way in the media, instead of this kind of credulity that we see. I feel like media have to take a turn, in the same way that it did with tobacco, in terms of the way it presents these corporate actors.
SM: Yeah, I think you’re absolutely right there. Media have an incredibly important role to play in telling the story. And it shouldn’t be understated, we cannot talk about climate change enough. And it’s important that when we talk about it, we tell the story in the right way.
So to, one, foreground the fact that the industry has known about the severity of climate change for decades. I mentioned as far back as the 1960s, but a recent document came to light, within this initial trove of documents from Exxon, that showed that in the 1980s, they knew, and had predicted with a fair degree of accuracy, what the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere would be in 2019.
And that’s just astounding, to think that before I was born, for example, that Exxon had known exactly what it was doing if it kept on this path of extractive economy and of climate disruption. And so media have an absolutely critical role to play in foregrounding who was responsible, and that where we are today, in a moment of upheaval and climate disruption, was also a deliberate choice on the part of a number of incredibly powerful entities, corporations and CEOs at the helms of those entities as well.
JJ: Yeah, you can’t keep bringing these folks forward as credible actors, once you know that dissimulation has been part of their modus operandi, it seems to me. It should affect the way they’re treated as sources on the stories.
SM: Absolutely, absolutely. And then to take it one step further, to really address and to have a much more skeptical eye to the trade associations, which you mentioned earlier, that are driving their agenda, seemingly under the guise of being nonprofits or acting in the public interest, simply putting forth “innovative solutions,” when, in fact, they were set up for very intentional purposes by the industry to advance an industry-driven agenda, and to feed these false, market-based solutions that, at the end of the day, don’t do anything to actually shift the industry’s business model, which is fundamentally at odds with the direction we need to go as a collective species on this planet, if we’re going to weather the storm, so to say.
JJ: A recent piece by your Corporate Accountability colleague, Patti Lynn, that I saw on Truthoutreminded us that
under today’s global power structures, the people who will be the most affected are the same ones who are currently experiencing the harshest effects of climate change.
No wonder then, that women, communities of color, communities in the global South, youth, low-income communities and Indigenous communities around the world have been developing just climate solutions that will address this crisis. What we need now is to move the fossil fuel industry and its backers out of the way so these solutions can be implemented.
There really isn’t a scientific, or even an environmental, response to climate disruption that is not a political response to current relationships of power, is there, really?
SM: You know, that’s absolutely right. And I think it’s a really critical point to bear, that there are very real solutions to addressing the climate crisis, and they’re being deployed by people around the world and in the US most impacted by this crisis today. Solutions like energy democracy, agroecological practices, ecological restoration to recover natural carbon sinks. And you imagine where we could be today in implementing these kinds of climate solutions if the industry had not for so long really stood in the way. It’s damning when you think about it from that perspective. But absolutely, what’s needed in this moment is for the industry to get out of the way, and for us to make sure that these real solutions that are already being deployed in communities around the world are given the center of focus and the scale that they need in order to really be the focus of a global response to this crisis.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Sriram Madhusoodanan, deputy campaigns director at the group Corporate Accountability. You can find their work online at CorporateAccountability.org. Sriram Madhusoodanan, thanks so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
SM: Thank you.
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