Big Oil is Taking a Page Right Out of Big Tobacco’s Failed Playbook

It’s déjà vu all over again.

As more information comes to light about the fossil fuel industry’s scheme to deny the evidence of climate change, the strategy looks more and more familiar. Investigative books, journalists’ reporting, and academic studies repeatedly compare the fossil fuel industry climate denial playbook to the fraud scheme conducted by the tobacco industry to disguise the harms of smoking. Like their tobacco forebears, the fossil fuel industry and its array of front groups have conducted a decades-long campaign of misinformation, through a complex network of think tanks, foundations, public relations firms, trade associations, and other groups. The goal is the same: gin up doubt about the science and pollute the public mind.

More than a dozen state attorneys general, in the face of federal inaction, have stepped up to protect their states and investigate whether there has been fraud. The backlash has been harsh — but familiar. Republicans on the U.S. House Science, Space, and Technology Committee sent the attorneys general a barrage of demands to discourage and interfere with the inquiries. A group of Republican state attorneys general issued a letter decrying the efforts of their colleagues. A bloom of industry-backed commentary was launched in the media. All accused the investigations of infringing on the industry’s First Amendment rights, and of chilling legitimate debate about unsettled science.

We’ve seen this movie before.

The tobacco companies, and their front groups and Republican allies made the same argument against the Department of Justice’s civil racketeering lawsuit. The cigarette makers’ appeal in court argued that “Congress did not enact, and that the First Amendment would not permit Congress to enact, a law that so criminalized one side of an ongoing legislative and public debate because the industry’s opinions differed from the government or ‘consensus’ view.”

They lost. The courts, of course, stood firm that the Constitution holds no protection for fraud, and the tobacco industry had to stop lying to the public. Indeed, it would be a sorry world in which corporations engaged in fraud could pull the screen of the First Amendment over any investigation of their fraud.

It was a losing argument twenty years ago. We should not buy it today.