60 Minutes in denial over climate change

In the 60 Minutes story on climate change denial called Crunch Time, Rudd came off like he needs media-training on the issue.

PM KEVIN RUDD: I'm not going to lie to you and say this is going to be cost free. This is a tough decision, we need to take it for the country's long-term future and its long-term economic future. But economic cost of not acting is massive, it's through the roof. Think about food production, the Murray, think about the impact on tourism in QLD, no more Barrier Reef, Kakadu, no more Kakadu. Think about the impact on jobs, it's huge.

TARA BROWN: How certain are you that mankind is the cause behind global warming?

PM KEVIN RUDD: Well, I just look at what the scientists say. There's a group of scientists called the International Panel on Climate Change - 4000 of them. Guys in white coats who run around and don't have a sense of humour. They just measure things. And what they say to us is it's happening and it's caused by human activity.

Kevin Rudd, you have the broad brush-strokes down well, but if you are going to deliver on your election promises to implement an ETS, and politically remain in a position to be able to do so, then you have to pay attention to the many niggling details.

Firstly, you don't want to lose your franchise with the voters who support the ETS and who do understand climate change. Secondly, you can't afford to give professional denialists like L. Ron Bolt any traction. Their product, doubt, is an easier sell than action to tackle an unseen threat. By way of exmple, here's Bolt swooping in: Rudd feels the heat on 60 Minutes.

PM KEVIN RUDD: Well, I just look at what the scientists say. There’s a group of scientists called the International Panel on Climate Change - 4000 of them.

No, it’s actually called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And no, there are not 4000 IPCC scientists. Try 2500, instead. Rudd is lucky that this exaggeration wasn’t picked up by Brown. What’s more, a number of those 2500 don’t stand by the IPCC conclusion on man’s effect on the climate. Many others were not even consulted over the report’s bottom-line finding.

One mistake, and L Ron pounces, then thows red meat to his flying monkeys, to rip apart, who affirm these denialist talking point just as they have been programmed to.

Andrew Bolt is incorrect in his correcting Rudd, strictly speaking. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change IPCC is essentially the world's largest review of peer-review climate-science research by a panel of UN goverment member representatives and World Meterolical Organisation (WMO) scientists. They draw on the research of 2500 climate scientists.

In short, the IPCC reports on the body of scientific literature produced by 2500 climate scientists to develop policy responses. It is right Mr Rudd (and Ms Wong before him) should state he relies on this, and he needs to say it clearly and simply.

Especially when 60 Minutes is doing a clear Denier's Special. Here they are balancing the scientific views of 2500 of specialist climate scientists, with the unscientific view of one computer program architect.

TARA BROWN: No doubt the ice is melting, but the big question is - are we to blame? The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change reports it is 90% certain we are. But other equally eminent scientists believe what were seeing is just part of Nature's great cycle.

DAVID EVANS: Now since 1990, western governments have spent about $50 billion looking for evidence that carbon causes global warming and they haven't found any.

TARA BROWN: Dr David Evans has six university degrees and once worked for the Australian Government's Greenhouse Office. But he no longer thinks global warming is caused by our carbon dioxide and so isn't concerned about his or any one else's carbon footprint. So does that mean don't give up your V8 cars? Does that mean continue flying, don't worry about changing light bulbs, don't worry about trying to capture carbon or shutting down coal-fired power stations? Is that what that means?

As his resume shows, David Evans was just a computer programmer at the AGO. 60 Minutes missed out reporting that detail in favour of blowing hot air up his balloon.

UPDATE
Desmogblog clear the air: Evans is a self-promoting computer geek, not a science geek.

Oh the gravitas you lend this code-cowboy, 60 Minutes. You should be ashamed.

Global Warning Climate Change Energy

Thanks for global warming we didn't have to have

This caught my eye in a report recently tabled in the Australian parliament. It is the acknowledgements of a dissenting chapter. I pulled it out so your kids know who to thank for global warming when they grow up. Feel free to bookmark the page for them.

Acknowledgements
We wish to thank the following people for reviewing the scientific accuracy of this report:
1. Professor R.S. Lindzen (Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology, Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, MIT)
2. Professor J.R. Christy (University of Alabama, Huntsville)
3. Professor G.W. Paltridge (Director of the Antarctic CRC and IASOS, University of Tasmania)
4. Professor R.M. Carter (James Cook University)
5. Associate Professor C.R. de Freitas (University of Auckland)
6. W. Kininmonth (Retired Head of the National Climate Centre, Australia)

Would you trust a report based on the science being vetted by this panel of subject matter experts? Well let's find out who they are, and then I'll tell you what the report is about?

1. Professor R.S. Lindzen

"the solitary plausible academic [the skeptics] can dig up, out of hundreds working in the field."

Dick Cheney's investment manager -- Jeremy Grantham

Other posts on exposing Lindzen's interests:

• ExxonMobil links to Dr Richard Lindzen.
  Who is paying this messenger?
• Fossil-fuel plants shut down.
  Pity the poor dissenter, persecuted into silence.

This post is a work in progress... more reason to come back later!


Global Warning Climate Change Energy

Cheney's money talks of an inconvenient truth

Dick Cheney is a scary guy to boldly express dissent to — no matter who your are.

If you are swarthy and have a beard, you run the risk of being rendered by the bloke's private army. Even if you are a CIA agent, you're not safe . A newly discovered hazard of the job — like you need more problems in that role — is that you risk being outed on his instruction for something you didn't do.

Like Valerie Plame was.

So if you were his investment funds manager you would pretty much tell him what he wants to hear, right?

Not, it seems, if your name is Jeremy Grantham, who is basically Cheney's money - talking - and the topic is global warming. :::[AOL News]

Step forward, Jeremy Grantham -- Cheney's own investment manager. "What were we thinking?' Grantham demands in a four-page assault on U.S. energy policy mailed last week to all his clients, including the vice president.

Titled "While America Slept, 1982-2006: A Rant on Oil Dependency, Global Warming, and a Love of Feel-Good Data," Grantham's philippic^* adds up to an extraordinary critique of U.S. energy policy over the past two decades.

What Cheney makes of it can only be imagined.

"Successive U.S. administrations have taken little interest in either oil substitution or climate change," he writes, "and the current one has even seemed to have a vested interest in the idea that the science of climate change is uncertain."

Yet "there is now nearly universal scientific agreement that fossil fuel use is causing a rise in global temperatures," he writes. "The U.S. is the only country in which environmental data is steadily attacked in a well-funded campaign of disinformation (funded mainly by one large oil company)."

That's Exxon Mobil.

As for Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Richard Lindzen, who appears everywhere to question global warming, Grantham mocks him as "the solitary plausible academic [the skeptics] can dig up, out of hundreds working in the field."

And for those nonscientists who are still undecided about the issue, Grantham reminds them of an old logical principle known as Pascal's Paradox. It may be better known as the "what if we're wrong?" argument. If we act to stop global warming and we're wrong, well, we could waste some money. If we don't act, and we're wrong ... you get the picture.

As for the alleged economic costs of going "green," Grantham says that industrialized countries with better fuel efficiency have, on average, enjoyed faster economic growth over the past 50 years than the U.S.

Grantham says that other industrialized countries have far better energy productivity than the U.S. The GDP produced per unit of energy in Italy is 50% higher. Fifty percent. Japan: 60%.

And China "already has auto fuel efficiency standards well ahead of the U.S.!" he adds. You've probably heard about China's slow economic growth.

Grantham adds that past U.S. steps in this area, like sulfur dioxide caps adopted by the late President Gerald Ford, have done far more and cost far less than predicted. "Ingenuity sprung out of the woodwork when it was correctly motivated," he writes.

There is also a political and economic cost to our oil dependency, Grantham notes. Yet America could have eliminated its oil dependency on the Middle East years ago with just a "reasonable set of increased efficiencies." All it would take is 10% fewer vehicles, each driving 10% fewer miles and getting 50% more miles per gallon. Under that "sensible but still only moderately aggressive policy," he writes, "not one single barrel would have been needed from the Middle East." Not one.

I repeat: This is not some rainbow coalition. This is not even Al Gore. Grantham is the chairman of Boston-based fund management company Grantham, Mayo, Van Otterloo. He is British-born but has lived here since the early 1960s.

I love this bit: "What Cheney makes of it can only be imagined." Apoplexy anyone?

==

^*Global Warming Word Watch: Phi·lip·pic

n.

1. Any of the orations of Demosthenes against Philip of Macedon in the fourth century b.c.

2. Any of the orations of Cicero against Antony in 44 b.c.

3. philippic A verbal denunciation characterized by harsh, often insulting language; a tirade.

==

Other unflattering things I've said about Cheney

==

Global Warning Climate Change Environment Science Kyoto Energy

Media Watch downs the Bolt whole

Sorry about the headline, but after the seminal Bulled by a Gore article by global warming skeptic dinosaur, Andrew Bolt, I became obsessed with his headline style.

So my blogs refuting each of the ten points carried the following headlines.

Gulled by a Bore? One Bolt burger coming up

Gulled by the Bore? Bolt-burger #2 coming up

Bolt burger #3 is a FUD dud

Bolt burger #4a is meat substituted

Gristle detected in Bolt burger #4b

Bolt burger #5 - snow burger

Bolt burger # 6 is undercooked and raw

I got to six and let the rest slide. These skeptics operate like scientific guerillas, and the battleground is the mind of the public. They try to keep the public from understanding that a scientific consensus exists, with roughshod but effective techniques like wheeling out known scientific contrarians, like S. Fed Singer, or Richard Lindzen, top opine that there is no concensus. This is a smoke and mirror trick for the readers of the likes of Andrew Bolt. A scientist publishing a sceptical argument in the opinion pages of a newspaper does not debunk the scientific consensus arrived out of the darwinian struggle for scientific validity that happens when research is published in a peer-reviewable forum, like scientific journals.

But the public is not to know that, and people like Bolt predate upon the greater public's understandable ignorance of scientific method. It works for the oil and coal companies that fund the thinktanks that hacks like Bolt like to get their sources from. The outcome is that the public is confused about climate change, so inaction seems reasonable.

If you are a rabbit in a spotlight.

That's why it was good to see Bolt's global warming stance so publicly disembowled on the institution he hates for it's apparent lack of bias, on the ABC, and worse, Media Watch.

I expect global warming skeptics like Andrew Bolt are quickly on their way to becoming coal and oil in a million years time. He's a dinosaur. If, in the future we are still silly enough to dig him up, hopefully by then we will have mastered the sequester of his harmful carbon dioxide byproduct.

I vote leave him in the ground and concentrate on solar, and using conservation strategies so base-line power generation is not so much of a problem.

Global Warning Climate Change Environment Science CO2 Carbon Sink Earth Australia Kyoto Energy

Why you aren't doing anything about global warming.

There is no doubt we are in an unprecedented predicament with rapid climate change on our doorstep. No scientific doubt:

For example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - an international group of hundreds of climate scientists - concluded in 2001 that "there is new and stronger evidence that most of the observed warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities." :::[ABCNews]

That important consensus was arrived upon in 2001, yet five years later we are bogged even deeper down in the quagmire of fossil fuel dependence, as our economies spew out more greenhousgaseses stressing the atmosphere into a series of worsening positive feedback loops from which, ultimately, there is a point of no return. We are facing the possibility of throwing our earth's natural cycles out of balance and destroying the climate that best sustains us, that we have evolved in, yet emissions reductions from the US and Australia, the world's biggest economy, and one of the biggest coal and gas exporters are further away than ever.

Why?

It's a question that our grandchildren will ask of us so, if only for that reason, it bears thinking about. The reason for business-as-usual in the face of scientific consensus of the harm is that a long and sustained campaign of misinformation about climate science by the fossil fuel companies has been waged for 15 years. It has been designed to confuse the public into accepting their proposition that switching from their product will cause economic disaster; don't risk it for unclear science.

So the Big Lie rides on. How do they get away with it? I believe they play on the public's poor understanding of science, exploiting the potential confusion in meanings between "scientific consensus" and "consensus", for one example. Scientific consensus is the collective judgment, position, and opinion of scientists in a particular field of science at a particular time. This consensus is normally achieved through communication at conferences, the process of publication, and peer review. :::[Wikipedia/scientific consensus]. This is different to common garden consensus, or consensus vulgaris: agreement in the judgment or opinion reached by a group as a whole. :::[dictionary.com]. There is no explicit channel for establishing and communicating consensus implied in this definition, and that is what the PR fossil fuel groups omit when they claim that there indeed are climate scientists who dissent from the consensus. Joe Public hears some climate scientists saying, "look there has been a scientific consensus since 2001", and he sees some fossil fuel shill saying, "look Joe, I'm a scientist, and I dissent from these other scientists on man-made global warming, so logically, how can there be consensus?" The problem is that Joe Public is not responding with, "oh, that's very interesting, what peer-reviewed publication can I read about your research in?" because Joe isn't a scientist.

This gap in understanding is the classic domain the practitioners of oil industry lobby group love to inhabit and they have their exploitation of it down to a black art. One of them, Patrick Michaels, has his hand caught in the coal-industry cooky jar, or at least Colorado's electric cooperative Intermountain Rural Electric Association's: :::[Making Money By Feeding Confusion Over Global Warming]

The letter also says that in February of this year, IREA contributed $100,000 to Patrick Michaels, a professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia.

Michaels is one of about a dozen academics who for years have cast doubt on the science surrounding global warming while downplaying the scientifically accepted idea that humans are causing it.

"We have had many apocalypses through the ages that haven't shown up, and this is likely to be another one," Michaels said on CNN earlier this year.

'Michaels said on CNN', note, not in Nature, Science, PNAS or Physical Review Letters. The Professor's audience was not intended to be scientists, but consumers of energy. Also note, it is likely he said it in January. Boy did he have a good February. Took the gap, and scored.

The gap he took, I call this one apocalypso reincarnatis, refers to events like the ozone hole scare where scientists warned that CFCs were eating our ozone layer, increasing concentrations of harmful UV rays. The public remembers the scares of the 80s, and is aware that the problem has norecededed, but is rarely cognisant of the fact that CFCs were banned. Michaels is not saying, 'the reason why we turned around the problem is because we listened to the scientists and modified how we did business'. Truthful and complete disclosure is not worth a quick $100,000 in a good February.

In this case the disgrace is compounded by the fact that the co-operatives customers, 133,000 member-owners, were not told that IREA had given such a substantial sum to Michaels. Nasty, but this sort of practice has been going on for 15 years:

Experts and journalists, however, who have documented a 15-year campaign funded by major companies in the fossil fuel industry to cast doubt on global warming science say the intent is to create confusion.

"This coal industry disinformation campaign is a repeat of a similar campaign launched in the early 1990s by Western Fuels and other coal interests," said Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Ross Gelbspan.

Gelbspan says that continued efforts to confuse the public are "particularly sinister" given that they follow "by almost 10 years the conclusion of more than 2,000 scientists from 100 countries in what is the largest and most rigorously peer-reviewed scientific collaboration in history."

So that is why you aren't doing anything; you have been lied to and are confused. What should Joe Public do? He/she is not a scientist, but she/he is an energy consumer, and has rights; one being the right to not unwittingly buy goods and services that do not occasion harm predictable by the seller, in this case to the consumer's descendants.

The day is fast approaching when energy consumers can't claim ignorance of climate change, much like smokers can't claim ignorance of smoking related diseases today despite the misinformation campaigns of the past by big tobacco. The first species to be extinguished by global warming will be the climate change denialists and global warming skeptics, we can be sure of that. The sooner the better, for the rest of us. And our's. And their's.

And the way Joe Public can bring that day forward faster, whenever they see or read a skeptical scientist like Patrick Michaels, or Richard Lindzen, or Joe Spencer, is to note the media they use and see whether the research they quote is published in a peer-reviewed scientific publication. If this information is missing then the program or article is possibly nothing more than advertorial for fossil fuel and should be judged with that probability in mind. More conscientious consumers can communicate with editors and publishers expressing displeasure at having their intelligence insulted.

Other blogs on: global warming climate+change global warming skeptics fossil fuel

In defense of global warming 'alarmism'.

The Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal is devoting a fair few column inches to global warming skeptics lately. A few weeks ago Dr Richard Lindzen claimed that scientists are persecuted for dissenting from the scientific mainstream view that the global warming we are experiencing now is man made. And on Earth Day a hatchet piece called Breathe Easier told us not to believe global warming claims because, well, the past dire predictions of the greens in the 70s have not come to pass:

In the 1970s, prominent greens were issuing dire predictions about mass starvation, overpopulation and--of all things--global cooling. Since then, population-growth estimates have come way down, biotechnology advances have found ways to feed more people than the doomsayers believed possible, and the global-cooling crisis has become the global-warming crisis without missing a beat.

There's no doubt the greens have succeeded in promoting higher environmental standards, which in turn have contributed to cleaner air, water and land almost everywhere you look...........But environmental activists don't want to believe their own success, much less advertise it. They need another looming catastrophe to stay relevant, not to mention to keep raising money.

Much of the article is a vilification of those concerned about the environment. My first response is to laugh at how stupid the unknown author must think his audience is and move along, but when you remember that insidious pieces like these are funded by the fossil-fuel lobby to successfully sow confusion about global warming science, it is worth pars or two of effort to respond.

Name: Wadard
E-mail: j0hnp0p3@yahoo.com.au
City/State: Sydney, Australia
Date: Sun, April 23rd, 2006

Subject:
Re: Breathe Easier

Comment:
How do you congratulate them for the gains they have helped make - like enormous CFC reduction - but criticise environmentalists for that which did not come to pass, like total ozone depletion?

Surely it is more rational to take their warnings even more seriously?

Global warming 'alarmists', such as myself, are simply saying that if we keep putting more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere we will suffer dire consequences to the ecosystems that we depend on. Unfortunately the scientific consensus agrees.

Accusing us of alarmism is misrepresenting us though exaggeration. Our 'alarmism' makes as much common sense as pointing out that if one jumps off a big enough cliff that person is going to die a really unpleasant death. There is nothing scary in that, unless you think someone is planning to jump.

That's because, in my simile, we are all tied together by a rope at the edge of that cliff.

Wadard
Global Warming Watch

Other posts about global warming skeptics and how they work:

• Global warming state of the debate: Skeptics vs 'Alarmists'.
  ...it is not a real debate about the science or the causes or effects, but really a debate about what we should or shouldn't do in response...
• ExxonMobil links to Dr Richard Lindzen.
  Who is paying this messenger?
• 71% of Australians want to fight global warming
  Global warming skeptics are not being heard.
• Fossil-fuel plants shut down.
  Pity the poor dissenter, persecuted into silence.

global+warming, climate+change, media, global+warming+skeptics Science

ExxonMobil links to Dr Richard Lindzen.

Climate change deniers are having a ball lately. Dr Richard Lindzen does another opinion piece claiming that dissenting scientists are intimidated into silence: Climate of Fear: Global-warming alarmists intimidate dissenting scientists into silence.

So how is it that we don't have more scientists speaking up about this junk science? It's my belief that many scientists have been cowed not merely by money but by

fear.

So why is Dr Richard Lindzen, a professor of Atmospheric Sciences at MIT, being so brave and noble in his dissent? It turns out he has a dossier on ExxonSecrets.org which documents foundations he works for that receive funding from ExxonMobil. Ten years ago the guy was getting paid $2,500 a day to consult to the oil and coal industry. They got what they paid for, it is reported that he is a good climate scientist: Spinwatch: The global warming sceptics: Climate Change

In some cases, scepticism has been good for climate science. US scientist Richard Lindzen, regarded as an outstanding climatologist, has forced his colleagues to address issues such as the role of convection, cloud and water vapour. But most of the handful of scientists around the world that could be called sceptics - and they are mostly not climatologists - do not, as Lindzen does, publish in the recognised peer-reviewed literature, science's method of fact-checking and filtering out bad science.

However, Climate of Fear is not about Dr Richard Lindzen's scientific works, it is about policy, which is why it lands in the OpinionJournal of the WSJ.

...plus a willingness to debase climate science into a triangle of alarmism. Ambiguous scientific statements about climate are hyped by those with a vested interest in
alarm, thus raising the political stakes for policy makers who provide funds for more science research to feed more alarm to increase the political stakes.

Therefore it is reasonable to ask who may be behind Dr Lindzen's words while we consider them.

:: DOSSIER::RICHARD LINDZEN

DETAILS
Richard Lindzen
Professor of Meteorology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Member, Annapolis Center Science and Economic Advisory Council.Member, National Academy of Sciences.

Dr. Lindzen was a member of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but takes issue with the general conclusions drawn from the IPCC's report. His prolific writings assert that climate change science is inconclusive, and has testified multiple times before Congress.

Ross Gelbspan reported in 1995 that Lindzen "charges oil and coal interests $2,500 a day for his consulting services; his 1991 trip to testify before a Senate committee was paid for by Western Fuels, and a speech he wrote, entitled 'Global Warming: the Origin and Nature of Alleged Scientific Consensus,' was underwritten by OPEC." ("The Heat is On: The warming of the world's climate sparks a blaze of denial," Harper's magazine, December 1995.) Lindzen signed the 1995 Leipzig Declaration.

ORGANISATIONS
The Annapolis Center for Science-Based Public Policy
Member, Science and Economic Advisory Council
Source: Annapolis Center website 3/04
http://www.annapoliscenter.org

Tech Central Science Foundation or Tech Central Station
Contributing Writer
Source: Tech Central Bio Lindzen

Cato Institute
Contributing Writer, Reason Magazine
Source: Cato Institute website 4/04
http://www.cato.org

The Annapolis Center for Science-Based Public Policy receives funding from ExxonMobil:

Total funding to The Annapolis Center for Science-Based Public Policy from Exxon corporations since 1998: $US NaN

1998 - $183,500 ExxonMobil Corporate Giving
Source: ExxonMobil 1998 grants list

2000 - $190,000 ExxonMobil Foundation40K project support 50K 'policy conferences'.100K 'discussion making light of scientific uncertainty'
Source: ExxonMobil Foundation 2000 IRS 990

2001 - $27,500 ExxonMobil Corporate Giving
Source: ExxonMobil 2001 Annual Report

2001 - $35,000 ExxonMobil Foundation
Source: ExxonMobil 2001 Annual Report

2002 - $50,000 ExxonMobil Corporate Giving children's asthma
Source: ExxonMobil 2002 Annual Report

2002 - $70,000 ExxonMobil Foundation general support
Source: ExxonMobil 2002 Annual Report

2003 - $27,500 ExxonMobil Corporate GivingGeneral Operating Support/Annual Dinner
Source: ExxonMobil 2003 Corporate Giving Report

2003 - $75,000 ExxonMobil Corporate GivingProject Support
Source: ExxonMobil 2003 Corporate Giving Report

2004 - $75, 000 ExxonMobil Foundation
Source: Exxon Giving Report 2004

Tech Central Science Foundation gets their bit:

2003 - $95,000 ExxonMobil FoundationClimate Change Support
Source: ExxonMobil 2003 Corporate Giving Report

As does the Cato Institute.

2001 - $20,000 ExxonMobil Foundation
Source: ExxonMobil 2001 Annual Report

2002 - $25,000 ExxonMobil Foundationgeneral support
Source: ExxonMobil 2002 Annual Report

2002 - $5,000 ExxonMobil Corporate Givingannual gala dinner
Source: ExxonMobil 2002 Annual Report

2003 - $25,000 ExxonMobil Foundation
Source: ExxonMobil 2003 Corporate Giving Report

2004 - $15,000 ExxonMobil FoundationEnvironmental Education and Outreach
Source: Exxon Giving Report 2004

He is very strong in his condemnation of global warming alarmism.

But there is a more sinister side to this feeding frenzy. Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse. Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science that supposedly is their basis.

One is left feeling Climate of Fear would have been more balanced if he also acknowledged that the top climate scientist in the US, James Hansen, speaks out strongly of White House censorship of climate science. How could he miss that when his charge is so similar. Methinks a campaign of climate science obfuscation is underway.

More articles on the global warming skeptics and how they operate.

• Global Warming Watch: Fossil-fuel plants shut down.
  Oil lobby shrill Miranda Devine caught out.
  

Tags: Global warming, climate science, climate change, skeptics, sceptics, global warming skeptics, ExxonMobil, XOM, oil, oil industry, oil lobby