Bad Gas: IARC’s Latest Gift to the US Tort Industry
The La Jolla Tobacconization Playbook Takes a Third Swing at the Fossil Fuel Industry
IARC, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer, has a unit that produces practically pointless monographs (literature reviews monitored by panels of pre-selected researchers). These documents only seem to be used by NGO campaigners and US tort lawyers suing industry on large mass tort lawsuits like glyphosate, benzene, and talc. Most recently, the law firms and IARC attempted the same strategy on aspartame, but their playbook was becoming too predictable.
IARC’s monographs should be the first step in a risk assessment, but they treat their work as a definitive conclusion for precautionary regulations. They are pointless because they take a hazard-based approach, only considering if a substance is a carcinogen, without considering the exposure level. At extremely high doses, any substance can cause cancer (and to no surprise, almost every substance IARC has examined receives a “carcinogen” classification).
The reality is that for any risk, it is the level of hazard times exposure that matters. You have to be exposed to an enormous amount of glyphosate to be put at risk, compared to similar risk levels from much lower exposure levels of basic dietary substances like salt or baking soda.
The pointlessness of IARC publishing studies with no exposure considerations explains why:
no other government risk assessment agencies agree with IARC monograph conclusions;
only US tort law firms use IARC monographs to scare scientifically illiterate juries into awarding significant damages against industry;
NGOs regularly quote IARC, via its better known WHO parent, to amplify their scaremongering;
activist scientists use their network to get a post on IARC’s monograph panels so they can then profit from being a litigation consultant in the following years of lawsuits (usually netting around $500/hour for their advice, briefs and testimonies).
IARC management knows all of this, knows the purpose of their monographs and often hold these kangaroo court panels upon the request of scientists on behalf of law firms they work for. These activist scientists have been long-time members of IARC’s inner circle (via membership in a private club of scientists known as the Collegium Ramazzini) and use both of these organizations to manufacture evidence they rely on in lawsuits.
A Case of Bad Gas from a Bad IARC Monograph
Last month, the unaccountable international cancer agency was at it again, publishing Monograph 138 concluding that breathing fumes from pumping gas can cause certain types of cancer (classifying gasoline as Group 1: carcinogenic to humans). This monograph not only studied a selection of the existing research on gasoline, but certain additives (which were also determined to be carcinogenic, but at a lower level of likelihood: Group 2B). IARC was the first scientific agency to come to this conclusion, as well as the only agency to base their conclusions on a pure hazard-based approach (which does not consider the level and means of exposure to gasoline).
While the IARC headlines claim that gasoline is carcinogenic, their studies included components in gas like benzene, a known carcinogen which most countries now limit to less than 1% of a fuel’s contents (a level of exposure deemed safe by regulators). Once again, IARC is not considering the level or means of gasoline exposure in this study. Regulatory risk assessments, that consider real-world exposure scenarios, have drawn completely different conclusions.
The EPA’s position on risks from occupational exposure to gasoline is that: “the evidence for evaluating gasoline as a potential carcinogen is considered inadequate” (adding that animal studies suggest a link but that the tests go well beyond plausible exposure levels).
The ATSDR did a review of the body of existing epidemiological research suggesting a carcinogenic link, concluding there are “inherent limitations that preclude their use as evidence for an association between gasoline exposure and cancer.”
Even California’s Proposition 65 does not draw a direct link between cancer and gasoline (although gas can contain other carcinogenic chemicals like benzene). That may soon change as the Prop 65 office is staffed by multiple Ramazzini-IARC alumni.
Law firms could not sue oil companies without scientific evidence so they got IARC to produce some litigation-friendly data. As the saying goes: “If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything”.
For IARC, that torturing needed a little added support to get the conclusion they wanted. Fixing the parameters so the exposure realities wouldn’t contaminate their hazard-based conclusion. This ensures that practically every substance going under the IARC scientific meat grinder will prove to be carcinogenic. And just for good measure, true to form, IARC stacked the deck of their scientific panel to include activist scientists who have been working to establish a link between gasoline and cancer (while excluding anyone with the remotest ties to industry).
The law firm, Nelson Mullins, noted the obvious conflicts of interest in the IARC gasoline monograph panel selection.
In the case of IARC Working Group 138, the makeup of the group suggested a lack of balance in viewpoints. For instance, an epidemiologist named Julia Heck was included on the Working Group. She had previously published on traffic pollution and byproducts of gasoline – arguing that exposure to those byproducts is associated with childhood leukemia and breast cancer. Likewise, a scientist named Sunisa Chaiklieng was a member of the Working Group. She had previously published on research claiming gasoline station workers were at an increased risk of all cancer. Apparently, no researchers were included on the Working Group who had opined gasoline exposure or byproduct exposure did not lead to an increased risk of cancer.
It should be added that Heck, a UCLA adjunct, is also well-known within the IARC network, having done a postdoctoral fellowship at the agency.
This, of course, is not the first time IARC stacked the panel with scientists who would guarantee the goods. Scientists from IARC’s Ramazzini inner circle like Martyn T Smith, Bernie Goldstein and Chris Portier have used the hapless agency while under the pay of tort law firms, and IARC looked the other way at these flagrant conflicts of interests.
It doesn’t take a giant leap to conclude that the only practical value of IARC’s monograph unit is to serve as the sole source of evidence for the tort law industry, NGOs and the activist science community. And they performed impeccably with Monograph 138 on gasoline.
A Tort Lawyer’s Honeypot
Of course, some US tort law firms dutifully followed IARC’s lead and started trolling for plaintiffs to sue Big Oil. See below, for example, a web-page from Locks Law Firm published two weeks after the IARC publication on gasoline.
In the last two decades, the close ties between IARC’s monographs and mass tort litigations have become commonplace. Some egregious examples include when Bernie Goldstein forced IARC to hold a third monograph on benzene because the law firm he worked with could not make a direct link between the chemical and Non-Hodgkin lymphoma (see image above), or when the herbicide, glyphosate, and Chris Portier, were added late to a monograph originally on insecticides while Portier was consulting for several American tort law firms planning lawsuits against Monsanto. In such cases, lucrative lawsuits (and rewarding litigation consulting fees for IARC panel members) ensued from this evidence-generating scam.
Legal experts are expecting nothing less this time.
Climate Lawfare 3.0
The Firebreak has been covering the lawfare strategy developed since 2012 with a conference in La Jolla, California organized by the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Climate Accountability Institute (a group created by Naomi Oreskes). The strategy meeting included academics, lawyers and NGOs who argued that the tobacco industry only submitted to the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement in 1998 because of the existential threat from massive numbers of lawsuits and a jury pool made angry from unending anti-tobacco activist campaigns. Oreskes argued that the same strategy of a coordinated attack of scientists, lawyers and NGO activists could be implemented against the oil industry. By holding the industry liable for climate change, countless lawsuits would follow. This became known as the La Jolla Tobacconization Playbook.
The expected wave of tort law firms suing Big Oil led to the ever-opportunistic zealots at the Union of Concerned Scientists to try to cash in on the money train by setting up The Union of Concerned Scientists’ “Science Hub for Climate Litigation”. Seeing how tort law firms pay their litigation consultants, on average, $500 an hour, it is no surprise that these greedy activists would try to get a slice of the pie. On their website, the Union of Concerned Scientists try shamelessly to hawk their wares.
“As experts, we can conduct robust and timely litigation-relevant scientific research, help inform courts via amicus briefs and legal interventions, and consult on cases or appear in court as expert witnesses. … We work to connect scientists and legal experts advancing climate litigation. We create legally relevant scientific research, provide legal teams with research, and introduce them to experts. We make science accessible to communities affected by climate change so they can hold bad actors accountable.”
Someone should hold the ambulance chasers at the Union of Concerned Scientists accountable.
But after the Exxon subpoenas and the activist Exxon Knew activist campaigns were executed as flanking operations, the wave of tort lawsuits against the oil companies for the consequences from climate change did not materialize. Strike One! The La Jolla strategists then had to rely on foundations to create a climate nuisance tort law firm, Sher Edling, to sue oil companies on behalf of governments rather than individual plaintiffs. To date, they have underwritten Sher Edling’s office costs to the tune of at least $14 million.
After ten years, as Sher Edling looks nowhere near making the progress the La Jolla opportunists had foreseen (Strike Two), the strategy now seems to be shifting to individuals with cancers caused by pumping gas. Third time lucky?
My Bet’s on the Defense
The US tort law industry is not a charity or faith-based organization. Their goal is not to deliver justice to victims but rather to generate large volumes of cash to pay off the complex tort ecosystem that has grown out of control over the last decade (and still keep their private jets in the air). The objective of the large multidistrict litigations is to overwhelm the accused with hundreds of thousands of plaintiffs, usually against only one targeted company (like Bayer/Monsanto, J&J or Syngenta) to the point where shareholder pressure will force companies to settle out of court. As activist groups are running relentless campaigns against the companies, working in tandem with law firms (or even from inside the firms), the public outrage is so great that the payouts can be secured even if the cases are built on bad science (like an IARC hazard assessment).
This is pure extortion, but it has proven to be a profitable strategy netting small firms like WisnerBaum or the Miller Firm with unimaginable settlements in the tens of billions.
Law firms won’t invest in, and build up these cases if there is little likelihood for success in a lucrative settlement. The debts these firms accumulate with the litigation finance loan sharks is considerable. The original La Jolla tobacconization strategy of suing fossil fuel companies for the financial consequences of climate change was too risky of an investment for the tort law firms.
Juries don’t react to environmental damage in the same way as personal injuries and cancers so ecocide was never going to pay off the tort lawyer’s expense accounts. Using manufactured IARC monographs as the basis for large-scale tort extortion campaigns proved successful with Bayer/Monsanto on glyphosate and with J&J on talc, so the “Gasoline Gives You Cancer” strategy seems like the best available Plan C for the relentless La Jolla tobacconization opportunists.
It is possible, with a significant investment in ad-spend, litigation consultants, NGOs and plaintiff screening and acquisition, to assemble hundreds of thousands of cancer victims who have, at some time in their lives, pumped gas (based solely on IARC’s monograph as evidence).
But would the big oil majors balk or cut and run at the extortionary attacks of the tort law firms and award them their desired settlement payouts? This is an entirely different kettle of fish compared to the skittish chemical and pharmaceutical companies who settled at the first whiff of shareholder revolt. The oil companies are digging in for a long fight that, I suspect, the tort law firms will not be able to afford. And while the climate foundations are blinded by bias, they aren’t that gullible this time.
Pass the popcorn! I’m looking forward to watching these distasteful extortionists being relegated back to the strip malls.