Greens say oil industry taught tobacco ‘playbook’

The tobacco industry’s attempts to deny its product’s harms originated with the oil industry, an environmental group says in a new report.

The Center for International Environmental Law says it found new documents showing that as early as the 1950s, major oil companies were working alongside tobacco to try to show that their products were not harmful, and were in some ways beneficial.

{mosads}The report released Wednesday also seeks to tie the industries together through shared strategies, officers, funding and more, over the course of decades.

“From the 1950s onward, the oil and tobacco firms were using not only the same PR firms and the same research institutes, but many of the same researchers,” CIEL President Carroll Muffett said in a statement. 

“Again and again we found both the PR firms and the researchers worked first for oil, then for tobacco. It was a pedigree the tobacco companies recognized, and sought out,” he said.

The Wednesday report is part of an overall effort by greens to paint the oil industry with the same negative tone that tobacco has received. From a legal standpoint, the greens also hope that the punishments tobacco faced for misleading the public could be applied to fossil fuels.

Energy In Depth, a blog project supported by the oil industry, downplayed the report, calling it the “most desperate pitch” by greens to draw parallels between tobacco and oil.

The industry blog said the documents have been publicly released before, and there’s nothing new in them.

As an example of the ties, CIEL highlights the Stanford Research Institute, which has a history of furthering oil fights against pollution research. But it was also being funded by tobacco for carbon monoxide research, the group said.

Theodor Sterling, a mathematician, worked for oil companies both before and after the tobacco industry, the researchers said.

“Big Oil created the organized apparatus of doubt,” Muffett said. “It used the same playbook of misinformation, obfuscation, and research laundered through front groups to attack science and sow uncertainty on lead, on smog, and in the early debates on climate change.”