In a now infamous April 1998 memo, the main trade association for the U.S. oil and gas industry ― the American Petroleum Institute ― laid out plans for a multi-year, multi-million dollar campaign to sow doubt about the scientific consensus on climate change. The U.S. and dozens of other nations had recently adopted the Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty to reduce planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions. Fossil fuel giants and allied right-wing think tanks mobilized to stymie the effort to rein in emissions, pledging to “identify, recruit and train a team of five independent scientists to participate in media outreach,” according to the draft plan, first obtained by The New York Times. The institute’s team would produce a “steady stream” of opinion pieces for newspapers, develop a media kit with research papers that “undercut the ‘conventional wisdom’ on climate science,” and set up a data center to serve as “a one-stop resource on climate science for members of Congress, the media, industry and all others concerned.” “Victory will be achieved,” the group wrote, “when average citizens ‘understand’ (recognize) uncertainties in climate science.” Two decades later, human-caused climate change is a full-blown emergency. In response, President Donald Trump is leading an attack on climate science that mirrors the misinformation campaign industry hatched two decades ago ― and includes some of the same players. At the center of the White House plan is an initiative to recruit scientists to challenge the all-but-irrefutable consensus that planetary warming is an immediate threat driven by the world’s fossil fuel addiction. The ad-hoc panel is expected to conduct ”adversarial scientific peer review″ of climate science, emphasizing uncertainties in a formidable body of research, The Washington Post and E&E News reported in February, citing a leaked White House document. The landscape, though, is different than 20 years ago. Now, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has soared past 415 parts per million, the highest levels in human history, and deadly extreme weather events are becoming a new normal. Even fossil fuel companies have come around on the science, abandoning outright climate denial for more calculated approaches. Team Trump isn’t even aligned with the industries they’ve worked so hard to prop up, but rather with crank bloggers and fringe ideologues. Kert Davies, director of Climate Investigations Center, a fossil fuel industry watchdog, called Trump’s approach a “kamikaze hit on climate science.” “That’s what the [1998] memo said they would do, recruit scientists who will talk about uncertainty,” Davies told HuffPost. “It was leaked 20 years ago and now here we are.”

Kevin Lamarque / Reuters President Donald Trump refers to amounts of temperature change as he announces his decision in June 2017 to pull the U.S. from the landmark Paris climate accord.

Yves Herman / Reuters Myron Ebell, a climate change denier at the right-wing Competitive Enterprise Institute, led the Trump administration's transition team on the Environmental Protection Agency. He was also part of the team that crafted an oil industry plan in 1998 to undermine the science of climate change.

The link between Big Oil’s 1998 campaign and Trump’s latest initiative to undercut climate science is less direct ― but still apparent. Spearheading the planned White House climate panel is William Happer, a 79-year-old retired Princeton University physics professor and seasoned climate denier with no expertise in climatology. He has called climate science a “cult,” claimed the Earth is in the midst of a “CO2 famine,” and said the “demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler.” Trump appointed Happer late last year to serve as the deputy assistant for emerging technologies on the National Security Council. He is a co-founder of the CO2 Coalition, a right-wing think tank that essentially serves as a cheerleader for carbon dioxide, arguing that Earth and humans benefit from pumping the planet-warming greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. The group was established in 2015 out of the defunct George C. Marshall Institute, one of the conservative nonprofits that devised and stood to benefit financially from the industry campaign two decades ago. Happer was a Marshall Institute board member for several years before it shuttered, according to his profile on DeSmog blog, which tracks global warming misinformation. The institute received at least $865,000 from ExxonMobil between 1997 and 2005, half of which was earmarked for climate change programs, according to data compiled by Climate Investigations Center. A quarter of the CO2 Coalition’s funding in 2017 came from the mega-donor Mercer family, which plowed more than $15 million into Trump’s 2016 campaign and has dished out big money to a number of groups that peddle climate misinformation, as HuffPost previously reported. In other words, the folks who arguably did as much as anyone to put Trump in the White House are also bankrolling the dangerous, anti-science rhetoric that the president has embraced and worked to legitimize. In March, for example, Trump took to Twitter to parrot longtime climate contrarian and industry shill Patrick Moore after Moore went on “Fox & Friends” and dismissed the climate crisis as “fake news.” Last month, the CO2 Coalition announced Moore as its new board chairman.

Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace: “The whole climate crisis is not only Fake News, it’s Fake Science. There is no climate crisis, there’s weather and climate all around the world, and in fact carbon dioxide is the main building block of all life.” @foxandfriends Wow! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 12, 2019

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), who has taken to the Senate floor since 2012 to give weekly speeches about the climate threat, told HuffPost in a recent interview that “every crank eccentric and industry shill desires, like oxygen, to have some veneer of legitimacy.” “When the Trump White House opens its doors, in they flock,” he said. “They have this incredibly bizarre concentration of peculiar foot people who have been attracted to the weird pulses that have been sent out by the White House. ‘So we will actually give you a government position that will confer the legitimacy that you’ve been looking for all the years you’ve been laughed at by everybody who knows what they’re talking about.’” Other long-standing leaders of the climate-denial movement are reportedly being considered for the White House panel. These include retired MIT professor Richard Lindzen, a member and former board director of the CO2 Coalition and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank founded and funded by the billionaire oil tycoon Koch brothers; John Christy, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville who often argues burning fossil fuels benefits the planet and was appointed in February to serve on the EPA’s Science Advisory Board; and Judith Curry, a former professor at Georgia Tech’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences with a long history of questioning the role humans are playing in driving up global temperatures. “It’s the same old individuals,” Davies said. “They haven’t built their bench at all.” Lindzen and Christy’s names have been floated to a Republican White House before. In February 2001, two weeks after President George W. Bush took office, ExxonMobil lobbyist Randy Randol ― also a member of the team that hatched the 1998 industry plan ― sent a memo to an administration official recommending the two men be appointed to lead the U.S. team working on the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, the leading international body of researchers studying anthropogenic climate change.

The Washington Post via Getty Images William Happer in the lobby of Trump Tower in Manhattan on Jan. 13, 2017. The retired physicist is leading a White House effort to challenge the science that shows climate change caused by human activity has become an immediate threat.

The prime target of the new White House panel appears to be the National Climate Assessment, a congressionally mandated report that scientists from 13 federal agencies released in November. That dire report, which the Trump administration signed off on but the president said he doesn’t believe, concluded that planetary warming “could increase by 9°F (5°C) or more by the end of this century” without dramatic emission reductions. The White House and the National Security Council did not respond to requests for comment. API spokesman Scott Lauermann told HuffPost that the trade group is “not involved in any discussions with the White House regarding the scientific consensus on climate change.” “The risks of climate change are real and the U.S. natural gas and oil industry is meeting the challenge head-on,” including by investing billions in carbon capture and other technologies, he said via email. Laudermann did not respond to questions about similarities between the White House initiative and API’s own campaign in 1998. Milloy chuckled when asked about the industry memo. He said he attended the API meeting 20 years ago hoping the trade group would push a bold plan, but, in his view, it became clear the industry wasn’t serious about fighting widely accepted science. The effort never went anywhere, Milloy said. And he doubts Happer or anyone else at the White House has looked at the API plan for guidance ― or even knows it exists. “There could not be anything more meaningless than that memo,” he said. “I wish it had been more, you know, nefarious. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. That’s kind of the problem.” Milloy said he’s “all for” the White House climate panel and applauded Happer for his perseverance, but refused to say whether the White House has consulted him on it. In a brief email response, Ebell said only that he does not see much of a parallel between Happer’s effort and “what little I remember” of the API campaign.

ASSOCIATED PRESS Trump visited a neighborhood in California devastated by wildfires last year. In a comment that gained much attention, he broached raking as one way to prevent future blazes.