Disinformation and climate denial are funded by the same forces: carbon fuel interests
a conversation with Dave Troy
This Thursday House Oversight Committee chair Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), head of the environment subcommittee, have called the CEOs from the major oil companies operating in the US, ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, and Shell, to appear before them. The stated objective is to obtain sworn testimony and how each of the companies dealt with available data linking their oil extraction activities to CO2 emissions, as well as their ongoing ties to climate denial groups.
Disinformation and climate denial are funded by the same forces. To get a bit of perspective on this I reached out to Dave Troy. Dave is a tech entrepreneur whose current projects use social network data to map cities and analyze disinformation campaigns.
He is also the organizer of TEDxMidAtlantic in Washington, DC.
Frederic Guarino: you are very active in unearthing the roots of disinformation and the way it's funded. Are you seeing the same forces at work maiming, potentially fatally, climate action in America especially with how Joe Manchin is identified as the voice for the oil and gas lobby ?
Dave Troy: Just for context I started studying social media data back in around 2007 and really looking at how people were interacting online, what kind of information they were putting out.
Where there were certain different kinds of information campaigns I was seeking to understand what those were what their intentions were and over the course of the last 14 years or so, what I found was that a lot of the people that were driving these various disinformation campaigns all kind of boil back down to the same network of interests and a lot of it has to do with the oil lobby. I've come to understand this by reading a lot of history, which I studied in school.
What I found are some very deep historical trends that go back to the turn of the 20th century and arguably before that: the same folks that are pushing disinformation are the same that are pushing climate disinformation and it boils down to capture of governments and private industry by the oil and carbon fuel industry.
I run the TEDxMidAtlantic conference where I curate ideas and select speakers and get a pretty wide overview of a lot of different disciplines and get a chance to talk with a lot of different practitioners from different fields. I’ve invited Adrian Bejan to speak, who is an interesting physicist out of Duke University. He posits a new first principle in thermodynamics, dubbed the Constructal Law: for a system to flow and survive over time, it needs to have easy and continuous access to resources that flow through it. This is a somewhat controversial proposed law of thermodynamics: if something is going to survive and continue to move resources through it, it has to make it easier over time or eventually it will just die out because it won't be able to access more resources. You can think about this in terms of flames that burn over time, in terms of the human body, any kind of living system, or flow system e.g. rivers and weather systems.
You could make the argument that the carbon fuels themselves have taken over people as agents of their will to continue to live
If you think about oil, we basically launched onto planet Earth the cheap and easy extraction of liquid petrofuels, coupled with slightly less easy to access carbon fuels like coal and tar sands, it sets up this situation where you have this flow system organized around the extraction of and delivery of this resource into the marketplace for its consumption.
This system very much wants to live, to persist through time and you wouldn't think of a system having agency or intention or desire, but in terms of physics, it actually does have motivation to continue to exist. All of this invested capital and the humans working in the system have a vested interest in realizing return on that capital.
Humans all along this system become oriented around its survival, so if you couple that insight with the work of Edward Bernays and how cults work and how influence works to create networks that exert influence over regulation and over industry, you have a very powerful system that simply doesn't want to die.
You could make the argument that the carbon fuels themselves have taken over people as agents of their will to continue to live. We like to think that we individual humans have agency and free will and we can do what we want we make decisions and democracies about our future and that all is you know kind of sounds okay on paper but in practice what's really happening is this carbon fuel system has become animate and it is trying to run itself out to completion, because it doesn't know how not to do that.
For us to try to combat that is going to be probably the biggest challenge thus far faced by humanity, and the real question is can we do it in time before we permanently ruin the ecosystem and the ecosphere that we rely on to live. My big picture view of what's happening here is that the carbon fuel ecosystem itself, the system of delivery and construction and delivery and consumption has become animate and is going to run itself out to completion unless we kill it.
Frederic Guarino: Big Tech and its billionaire founders (I include Elon Musk) have a vested interest in securing the energy that powers their assets. What good is a computer fortune and a silicon fortune if there's no energy to power it and we're back to pre-industrial age ? How would you describe their ability talking about influence to move the needle right now in the public discourse in a fractured Congress and more generally a fractured american society ?
Dave Troy: There are a lot of different levels of interaction at play here with respect to these companies. First, what makes for good PR, what can they claim to say that they are paying attention to the problem and doing good things and thus earn good will with the public. You see that in some of the current actions from companies like Apple and Google where they're talking about first being carbon neutral, and then finding ways to generate renewable electricity.
That's certainly laudable and a step in the right direction. I don't know to what extent an Apple and a Google is really going to move the needle on a global scale from a centralized data center's perspective. I do think that their move towards considering ecosystem implications of all of their products and using recycled materials and making sure that there's easy ways to recycle phones and computers is a reasonable thing to do and part of their corporate responsibility. I don't know how much they can do in terms of killing this carbon beast that's come to control us all, they can wield some influence with the government and on other companies to do better, up to a point.
I see Elon Musk as a transitory figure, sitting on the throttle between carbon and renewables, and in that role he is incredibly vulnerable to influence of various kinds.
You mentioned Elon Musk, he's in an exceptional situation relative to Apple or Google, although Apple could be in a similar situation if they are serious about rolling out electric vehicles or something. I see Elon Musk as a transitory figure, sitting on the throttle between carbon and renewables, and in that role he is incredibly vulnerable to influence of various kinds. He is able to be shaped in terms of what he's pursuing and the speed at which he does it and whether it's fair to say that he has as much as much control as people think he does. To the extent that he's seen as having control, he is somebody who is potentially compromisable by being in that position. It would be in the best interest of the oil and carbon fuel industry to have a lot of control over someone like him and you wonder if that's happening.
It's hard to know what that would look like necessarily but at the same time like, if you think about Tesla's fast growth but relative to the total number of cars in the world, it's a tiny number and not really consequential so there's almost some value in spinning him up as like a PR machine to demonstrate “hey look good stuff's happening, we really don't have to worry because Tesla's going to take care of it all !”
What's really going on is we're continuing business as usual. There was a good piece in the Guardian by Rebecca Solnit about how the carbon fuel industry spent decades pushing the idea of individual responsibility and telling people they need to reduce their carbon footprint, but all of the l personal responsibility change in the world isn't necessarily going to affect this situation at scale the way it needs to be affected. Whether it's Elon Musk or personal responsibility, we are keeping doing the same things that we've always been doing, and that's something we need to be very aware of.