[In 4 billion years the sun will burn out...] A Major but Little-Known Supporter of Climate Denial: Freight Railroads

[Leroy N. Soetoro]

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/12/freight-railroads-
funded-climate-denial-decades/603559/

In the fight against climate change, the nation’s freight railroads have
painted themselves as heroes. Rail is the “the most environmentally
friendly way” to move cargo over land, says the Association of American
Railroads, the industry’s trade group. The industry’s four biggest
companies agree: “Railroads are essential to moving [climate] objectives
forward,” says CSX Transportation, the largest railroad east of the
Mississippi.

Yet for almost 30 years, the biggest players in the freight-rail industry
have waged a campaign to discredit climate science and oppose almost any
federal climate policy, reveals new research analyzed by The Atlantic.

The four largest American freight railroads—BNSF Railway, Norfolk
Southern, Union Pacific, and CSX—have sat at the center of the climate-
denial movement nearly since it began, documents and studies show. These
four companies have joined or funded groups that attacked individual
scientists, cast doubt on scientific consensus, and rejected reports from
major scientific institutions, including the United Nations–led
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Their effort has cost at least
tens of millions of dollars and outlasted individual leaders and
coalitions.

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It continues to this day. The four companies are members of a powerful
pro-coal trade association that in 2014 called climate change a
“hypothesis” and argued that carbon dioxide—the air pollutant that causes
global warming—was as much as 400 times more beneficial to humanity than
it was harmful.

“We can now identify railroads as an integral component of opposition to
climate action,” Robert Brulle, an author of the new research and a
professor of sociology and environmental science at Drexel University,
told me. “There’s no doubt in my mind about that.”

Why did railroads invest millions in climate-science denial? Perhaps
because coal makes up almost one of every three tons of American rail
freight. Nearly 70 percent of American coal is shipped by rail, often
along “dedicated” lines that can “operate around the clock,” the rail
association says on its website. The largest class of railroads made a
combined $10.7 billion, or 14 percent of their revenue, hauling coal last
year. So while rail companies say they emitted only about 0.6 percent of
U.S. greenhouse-gas pollution last year, their indirect carbon footprint
may be gargantuan.

If you take emissions embedded into coal into account, the railroads
facilitated 16.5 percent of total U.S. carbon pollution last year,
according to calculations by Rob Jackson, a geoscience professor at
Stanford. That’s more carbon pollution than was released last year by all
the farms in the United States, or by all the domestic flights, or by all
the commercial and residential buildings.

In separate statements, the four railroads said they were committed to
sustainability, and noted, correctly, that rail is the most efficient form
of ground transportation. CSX said that, as “common carriers,” railroads
are required by law to move “all forms of energy.” BNSF and Union
Pacific—the two dominant railroads in the American West—explicitly
rejected the premise that they had fostered climate denial: BNSF’s
statement said it “has never denied the science or existence of climate
change,” and Union Pacific said it has not worked to delay climate policy,
noting that it has “acknowledged the changing environment and climate risk
in public filings since 2007, while reporting fuel consumption and
greenhouse gas reduction initiatives in [filings] since 2009.”

But railroads’ efforts to keep coal burning—and all those tons of carbon
flowing into the sky—have been hidden in plain sight for decades. Two new
studies unearthed their influence this fall.

The first, by Brulle, compiled 25 years of data about companies and
nonprofits involved in “the organized efforts to oppose meaningful climate
action,” he said. He found that the railroads kept appearing in crucial
coalitions that blocked policy and pushed climate-science denial.

His results, published in the journal Sociological Inquiry in October,
showed that railroads often waged this fight alongside other coal-
dependent companies, including steelmakers, electric utilities, and coal-
mining firms themselves. Brulle now argues that this “coal-utilities-rail-
steel sector” makes up an important but little known coalition opposed to
climate action.

The second study was conducted by researchers who were not alive when the
railroads’ campaign began. A team at Brown University analyzed the four
major railroads’ ongoing political activity. It found that they are
members of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, or ACCCE, a
pro-coal group that touts the “social benefits” of carbon pollution. ACCCE
has also recently lobbied for a federal bailout of coal plants and
celebrated the repeal of the Clean Power Plan.

Since 2012, three of the railroads have paid ACCCE a combined total of at
least $3 million to lobby on their behalf, according to their own
disclosure forms. Those same railroads—CSX, Norfolk Southern, and Union
Pacific—have also given at least $28 million to other groups that oppose
climate policy, including the Association of American Railroads and the
National Association of Manufacturers. The fourth and largest railroad,
BNSF Railway, does not disclose any funds it gives to trade associations
for lobbying expenditures, in accordance with the policy of Berkshire
Hathaway, its owner.

What inspired the Brown study? As Cole Triedman, the report’s lead
researcher, told me: “This was literally for a class.”

For the past three months, Triedman, who is 20, has worked with three
other undergraduates to study the political activity of coal-dependent
companies as part of a seminar on “Engaged Climate Policy.” (“I don’t know
how they pass their other classes, honestly, let alone sleep or have a
life,” J. Timmons Roberts, their instructor and the Ittleson Professor of
Environmental Studies at Brown, told me.)

The students—Triedman; Andrew Javens, 20; Jesse Sugarman, 22; and David
Wingate, 22—collated political-spending disclosures from corporate and
nonprofit disclosures. They also used data from the Energy Information
Administration to piece together the supply chains of roughly 25 of the
country’s largest coal-fired power plants. “Tracking the mine to the power
plant, we found that an elite cohort of coal companies is dealing with an
elite cohort of rail companies,” Triedman said. (I confirmed their
research on political spending with Michael Beckel, the research director
of Issue One, a nonpartisan group that studies money in politics.)

The rail industry has “been incredibly effective in hiding behind the veil
of their own cultural capital for decades,” Triedman said. The Association
of American Railroads has participated in “eight of the most effective and
toxically regressive, really harmful climate-denial front groups over the
last three decades.” But it has not mentioned climate change in any public
statement in recent years, and its website does not use the phrase climate
change.

The Association of American Railroads “and its member railroads take
seriously their responsibilities as stewards of the environment, which is
why railroads continue to implement numerous measures to reduce their
carbon footprint,” said Kristin Smith, its senior vice president, in a
statement. “Efforts to strengthen the industry’s environmental performance
in light of climate change have been noted as a success by the Carbon
Disclosure Project and the Dow Jones Sustainability Index among others.
Specifically, railroads in recent years have deployed low emissions
equipment and idle reduction technologies, increased fuel efficiency via
fuel management systems, and many more initiatives.”

She added that it had been “nearly twenty years” since the association was
a member of “the majority of the organizations” that Triedman was
referring to.

The scope of the railroads’s role surprised even experts, says Geoffrey
Supran, a Harvard researcher of global-warming politics, who was not
involved in the new analysis.

It’s now clear that railroads were “central” to the effort to deny climate
science and delay policy, he told me. “They’re not peripheral. These are
key cogs in a multidecade, well-oiled, well-funded denial machine. This is
a big deal.”

By the beginning of the 1990s, much of today’s climate science was already
clear to researchers.

In the first year of that decade, the new Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change—in its first-ever report—warned that “human-caused
emissions of carbon dioxide” were disturbing the climate. If humanity
failed to slow and stop this pollution, global average temperatures could,
by 2025, rise by 1 degree Celsius. (This prediction turned out to be too
optimistic.)

The rail industry’s first strike against this consensus came in 1991, when
its trade group—the Association of American Railroads—joined the Coalition
for Vehicle Choice, an early consortium of automakers and their allies
that opposed increasing federal gas-mileage standards. That group called
concerns about climate change “ridiculous and dangerous.”

Read: The true cost of coal

The following year, the rail association joined the now defunct Global
Climate Coalition, or GCC, the broadest and most powerful of the denial
front groups in the 1990s—“the very heart of the denial machine,” as
Supran called it.

In 1995, when the IPCC released its second report, it found that the
evidence suggested a “discernible human influence” on the climate. The GCC
pounced. It attacked Benjamin Santer, one of the report’s lead American
authors, falsely accusing him of misleading the public by concealing
scientific uncertainty. In fact, the IPCC report spent considerable space
discussing and quantifying scientific uncertainty. The GCC also said the
panel was guilty of “institutionalized ‘scientific cleansing.’” This was a
“disgusting and not-so-subtle reference,” Supran said, to “ethnic
cleansing,” the euphemism for genocide used in the Bosnian War a few years
earlier.

The Association of American Railroads helped lead the GCC through this
period. Richard Briggs, then the executive vice president of the rail
association, was the GCC’s chairman in 1995, and Edwin Harper, the rail
association’s president, was GCC’s secretary in 1996, according to IRS
documents. All four of the big railroads were themselves members of the
GCC in one or both of those years.

In 1997, the GCC spent more than $13 million on ads opposing the Kyoto
Protocol, an international climate treaty. When President George W. Bush
formally withdrew from Kyoto in 2001, a senior State Department official
told GCC that it had changed history: Bush “rejected Kyoto, in part, based
on input from you,” she wrote in a memo.

During this period, the railroads joined other groups opposed to climate
science and policy, many of which had a specifically pro-coal bent.

By 1996, all four railroads and the rail association had joined one such
group, the Center for Energy and Economic Development. CEED attacked the
basics of climate science, falsely claiming that carbon dioxide was “NOT a
pollutant” while asserting that “global warming theory” was “based on a
computer model.” The railroads and their trade group remained in the
organization for 11 years. In 2007, they joined another pro-coal group,
Americans for Balanced Energy Choices. Formed in part to fight a
bipartisan climate bill coming together in the Senate, it spent $35
million on ads that showed images like “a power cord being plugged into a
lump of coal,” according to The Washington Post.

Both of these groups often used a misleading phrase, clean coal. The
problem is that clean coal does not, in any wide-scale sense, exist. Every
coal-fired power plant on the grid in the United States releases
billowfuls of air pollution—with one exception. In the past few years, a
single plant in Texas has claimed that it has cut carbon pollution by 90
percent. But the cost of that upgrade came at $1 billion, and nearly half
of that funding came from the federal government as well as foreign
governments.

Read: Dirt coal, clean future

These same groups also argued that coal was cleaner than it had been in
the past, eliding the difference between toxic air pollution (which has
decreased from coal) and carbon pollution (which has not). And
environmental regulation—which those same groups usually opposed—is a main
reason toxic air pollution has fallen.

In 2008, the two pro-coal groups merged, forming the American Coalition
for Clean Coal Electricity. The four railways and their trade group joined
that year.

ACCCE would play a fateful role in climate policy. In 2009, as Congress
was debating an aggressive bill to reduce carbon emissions, Representative
Tom Perriello of Virginia received a memorable letter from the leader of
the local NAACP office.

The letter revealed an intimacy with arcane electricity data that would
make an energy lobbyist shiver with pleasure. “Our state gets 56% of its
electricity from coal,” it told Perriello, a first-term Democrat in a
vulnerable seat. It asked him to amend the legislation to “protect
minorities and all your constituents from unaffordable energy cost
increases.”

Soon, nearly identical letters arrived from other local civil-rights
groups. The letters were fake—forged by a public-relations firm
subcontracting for the clean-coal coalition. The coalition had learned
about the fake letters within days of their being sent out, but said
nothing until after representatives had voted on the bill, a congressional
investigation later found.

In the years since, ACCCE has pushed outright denial of climate science.
In 2014, it published a report that called human-caused climate change a
“hypothesis” and “debate.” It claimed that the future benefits of carbon
pollution may exceed its costs by “400-to-1”—arguing, essentially, that
climate change might be an overwhelmingly good thing for humanity.
Increased atmospheric carbon would be a “biospheric benefit,” it said. And
it falsely asserted that rising atmospheric carbon dioxide was “exerting
no discernible influence on the rate of sea-level rise.” (In fact, the
IPCC had found a year earlier that sea-level rise was speeding up.)

Since 2017, ACCCE has lobbied in support of President Donald Trump’s plan
to bail out coal plants. It has also celebrated Trump’s repeal of the
Clean Power Plan, which would have dramatically cut U.S. carbon pollution.

Read: Trump’s coal bailout is dead

In a statement, Michelle Bloodworth, the president and CEO of ACCCE, said
the organization “has never opposed climate change policies for scientific
reasons; when necessary we have worked to highlight the potential adverse
economic impacts of proposed policies.” She also said that ACCCE had a new
name: America’s Power. (The group’s website uses both names.)

“The members of America’s Power are committed to working with policymakers
to help maintain the nation’s fleet of coal-fueled power plants,” she
added, saying that coal provides “fuel security” and “grid resilience,”
and ensures a “diverse portfolio of electricity resources.”

There are no electricity companies in ACCCE. Last week, its final two
utility members fled the group under investor pressure. The Association of
American Railroads also left ACCCE in 2015.

But all four rail companies are still members. None of the four railroads
revealed any plans to leave ACCCE when directly asked by The Atlantic. And
since ACCCE touted the “social benefits” of carbon pollution in 2014,
Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern have paid it more than $2 million to
lobby on their behalf, according to their own voluntary disclosures.

It is “likely” that the railroads’ spending in ACCCE and other groups
actually exceeds that amount, Michael Beckel, the expert on money in
politics, told me. The three railroads are not forced by law to disclose
most of their spending in trade associations, so “each company gets to
dictate the terms of what they want to share,” he said.

Apart from ACCCE, rail companies have also tried to block states from
passing climate policy. BNSF, CSX, and Norfolk Southern spent a total of
$85,000 to oppose a 2012 ballot referendum in Michigan that would have
required local utilities to get more power from renewable sources. Voters
rejected the initiative.

Over the past decade, researchers have revealed the extensive scope of
efforts to muddy the public’s understanding of climate change. Historians,
activists, and state attorneys general have focused mostly on the role
played by ExxonMobil and other oil and gas companies.

“In many ways, the rail industry’s track record of funding ‘denial and
delay’ tracks the record of the fossil-fuel industry itself,” Geoffrey
Supran told me.

In at least one crucial respect, though, the railroads differ from Exxon.
By the late 1970s, climate scientists at Exxon had told executives about
the risks of global warming, according to a 2015 Pulitzer-nominated report
from InsideClimate News. Exxon then launched an “ambitious” internal
research program that was able, by 1982, to confirm the basics of climate
science; one lab director warned that it was “distinctly possible” that
rising carbon pollution would have “catastrophic” consequences by 2030.
But Exxon ramped down that research in the late 1980s, the report found.
It then helped found and lead the Global Climate Coalition. (Earlier this
week, a New York judge ruled that Exxon had not misled its investors when
communicating about climate science and policy.)

There is no evidence that the rail companies rejected their internal
scientific assessments of climate science in the same way.

Yet climate science was a well-developed field by the time the rail
industry’s campaign began. More than 25 years earlier, President Lyndon B.
Johnson warned that coal and other fossil fuels could “modify the heat
balance of the atmosphere.” And scientists and engineers within the coal
industry itself fretted over the risks of climate change as early as 1966,
a recent investigation in HuffPost found.

“There is evidence that the amount of carbon dioxide in the earth’s
atmosphere is increasing rapidly as a result of the combustion of fossil
fuels,” the president of Bituminous Coal Research wrote in a mining trade
publication that year. “Such changes in temperature will cause melting of
the polar icecaps, which, in turn, would result in the inundation of many
coastal cities.”

An engineer at Peabody Coal, one of the world’s largest coal-mining
companies, responded to that article in the same issue of the journal.
Coal firms were “in effect, ‘buying time’” until federal pollution rules
got stricter, he said. “We must use that time productively to find answers
to the many unsolved problems.”

Coal use in the United States has halved since 2005, according to research
published this month by Rob Jackson and his colleagues. Today, no new
coal-fired power plants are under construction anywhere in America.

*Collage photographs by: Alan R Harris / Camilo Morales / catnap72 /
Hulton Archive / Ken Petch / Smoky Shin / Getty

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Congratulations President Trump. Thank you for cleaning up the disaster
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Under Barack Obama's leadership, the United States of America became the
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Obama increased total debt from $10 trillion to $20 trillion in the eight
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