Before anyone had ever heard of “An Inconvenient Truth,” Portsmouth-based documentary filmmaker Tom Jackson (“World’s Apart”, “Greetings from Missile Street”) got it into his head to tell the story of the connection between “the largest problem the world has ever faced” and “the biggest private company in the history of humankind.”

“When I first started calling the organizations and the people involved, I thought someone must be already working on it. If anything, we were met with a lot of enthusiasm and people were really glad to show people the level of power and influence the largest company in world has, and it goes around the world actually,” Jackson says.

Like Al Gore’s film, the hour-long “Out of Balance: ExxonMobil’s Impact on Climate Change” details the science and consequences of global warming. Its focus, however, is on ExxonMobil’s financing of media campaigns and global warming skeptics. To tell the story, he interviewed leading writers and scientists on the topic, from Cameron Wake at the University of New Hampshire’s Climate Change Research Center to Rajendra K. Pachauri, chair of IPCC.

Locally, the film premiered at the Dover Friends Meeting on Nov. 13. Jackson is traveling around the Northeast in his vegetable-oil fueled 1988 Ford van to appear at screenings, and will take his road show national in Feburary. The film is also in the Sierra Club’s Energy Film Fest, which is traveling around the country, and a Greek TV news magazine just included about five minutes of the film in one of its broadcasts. More information, and copies of the film, are available at www.joepublicfilms.com.

I was surprised to discover that ExxonMobil is still appealing the punitive damages it owes local fisherman for the Valdez spill in 1989. Six thousand of the 24,000 plaintiffs have since passed away, dramatically reducing the price the company will ultimately pay to the local community, while it’s earning record-setting profits. What types of facts did you find yourself surprised by?

I did a huge amount of research in advance of doing the interviews, and there were a number of revelations that came out for me during the interviews that I wanted to share with people who would be watching. I geared the questions toward bringing out the most powerful things each person had to say.

With (author) Bill McKibben, I had read that he’d stated that in 1995 an overwhelming amount of scientists had concluded humans were having an impact on global warming. He’s been watching this issue since the late 1980s. This film is about how understanding has progressed and hasn’t progressed with the public. If scientists agreed this was a key problem 10 years ago, why haven’t we done something about it? A big part of it is ExxonMobil leading the way on confusion around the issue.

With the scientists, the film gets a little deeper in helping lay people understand how global warming is caused, how it’s come about. For people who have no familiarity with the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that’s a tremendously important organization. Who knows about it? But their decisions and what they say are absolutely crucial. A couple of thousand leading climate scientists from around the world have been vetting this report and going over and over it, and they’ve been saying for years this is a serious problem. 

One more example is Ross Gelbspan. He’s written two really important books, “Boiling Point” and “The Heat Is On,” getting into the fossil fuel industry’s impact on our understanding of global warming. In “The Boiling Point,” he calls some of the leaders of the misinformation campaign perpetrators of “crimes against humanity.” I wanted people to hear that. I realize it may be shocking or outright offensive, but I thought it was important. The folks who are behind the misinformation and fostering confusion about this issue don’t seem to realize or care that they’re gravely endangering future generations, not a thousand years from now, but in the next generation or two.

Why focus on  Exxon Mobil?
I had actually had my eye on Exxon going back to the Valdez oil spill. It turns out they have been a major force in getting the Bush administration to throw their weight behind Rajendra K. Pachauri as chair of IPCC (because they didn’t like what current chair Robert Watson was saying). It made me realize the power ExxonMobil has. Pachauri surprised ExxonMobil and the administration in supporting the report of the IPCC, saying that this is a very serious problem, the same thing Watson had been saying. That was a story that got very little attention, and was the first story that came to mind when I began talking to Peter Vandermark, who is the executive producer.

In a nutshell, what else has ExxonMobil been up to?
They’ve confused the public for years, when there’s been a definite urgency to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from the use of fossil fuels, by funding foundations out of which the skeptics come. They have a huge influence over the Bush administration and governments around the world, among other things saying the Kyoto Protocol is going to destroy your economy. Their influence continues. Since “Out of Balance” was completed, the Bush administration’s energy secretary has started a study on the current energy situation in the United States. Who was appointed head of the study? Lee Raymond, the former CEO of ExxonMobil, who is rabidly opposed to alternative energy. Their power continues, no matter what lip service Bush gives to our “oil addiction.” For them to continue to make record profits while standing in the way of change is, as Ross Gelbspan says, unconscionable.
 
You point out that the mainstream media played a role in this misinformation campaign. Should they be held accountable?
Dave Hamilton from the Sierra Club says the media just didn’t understand. I think he’s being fair and generous in saying this, that they didn’t understand the situation and felt an obligation to show both sides of the argument. While I agree to a certain extent, the media knows where Pat Michaels and the other so-called skeptics come from. They know the foundations they work for, from the CATO Institute to the American Enterprise Institute, and they know where the money that supports those foundations comes from. It’s ridiculous that the media presented these things as fair and balanced when it was pretty clear who was behind the words these so-called skeptics were saying.

Maybe a piece like “Out of Balance” will spawn something else that actually does call certain media people on the carpet and say, “Why were you doing this?” What I could have put in there—and we are planning to include entire interviews on a deluxe DVD and extended portions of them for podcasting—is Ross Gelbspan saying how he encouraged a weatherman at a Boston TV station to talk about how amped up storms are arguably a result of global warming, which is the result of human activity. They did it once, and then stopped. He contacted the president of the station, who said that the automobile and gasoline advertisers threatened to stop doing business with them. Films like “Who Killed the Electric Car?” also help answer those questions.

What do you think is the most important message people get out of the film? For me, the most difficult aspect to get my mind around is how these corporations work behind-the-scenes in Washington. Isn’t that just typical Washington politics?
Yes, in the sense that big companies or individuals with huge amounts of money have always had a level of influence. In this case, we’re talking about literally the future of civilization. We’re talking about the ecosystem, and lots of different species, and the fact that resource depletion from climate change is likely to lead to fighting over resources. As Ross Gelbspan says in the film, there have always been problems with corporations and defective products or looted pension funds. Compared to this, that’s relatively small.

I don’t think anyone who worked on this film is anti-capitalist. I’m not. But what I’m against is this unbridled, hyper-capitalism that says, “Who cares what’s going to happen in the next generation and the one after that? We’re just going to focus on the next quarter’s profits.”

What’s your next project?
I have no shortage of ideas, but for the time being, I’m very committed to working on this piece, talking about it wherever possible until there’s signs of real change starting to happen. I’m sure there will come a point after a year or maybe longer where I’ll want to work on other things, too, but for now, the sense of urgency is still there. Hopefully one of the things that may change in Washington is action toward renewable energy, but we can’t assume that’s going to happen. We have to make sure it does. I’m also talking to people about being vigilant to “greenwashing.” ExxonMobil could spend millions of dollars to change their image when they’re not doing anything. Convincing people you’re “working on it” is a great way to slow things down for a significant period of time.