What the oil industry doesn’t want you to know - Stephanie Honchell Smith
In summer 1997, a full-page ad appeared
in The New York Times.
The message, from the
Global Climate Coalition,
issued a dire economic warning about the
US embracing the Kyoto Protocol,
a treaty to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
But beneath the veneer of smiling children
was something much more insidious:
a multi-million dollar campaign
propped up by questionable data
and backed by some of the world's
most powerful companies.
The Global Climate Coalition was itself
a front for the oil industry—
established to sow doubt and confusion
about climate action.
But the real story starts decades earlier.
In the 1970s, oil companies employed some
of the world's top atmospheric scientists,
as they needed to understand
weather-related risks to their equipment
and to assess the environmental
impact of new projects.
By the late 1970s, these scientists,
along with their counterparts in academia,
had concluded that burning fossil fuels
created a build up of atmospheric carbon,
which would impact the climate
by trapping heat
and increasing surface temperatures.
They warned that an increase of even
a few degrees could be catastrophic
and accurately predicted events
such as rapid Arctic warming
and the melting of Antarctic ice sheets.
Throughout the 1980s, oil industry reps
met repeatedly to discuss these dangers,
acknowledging the risk that their product
posed to the future of humanity.
However, instead of warning the public,
or using this knowledge to pivot
towards renewable energy sources,
they doubled down on oil.
But in the late 1980s, scientists sounded
the alarm about climate change,
raising public awareness, and
leading to calls for government action.
In response, the oil industry launched
what would become a decades-long,
multi-billion-dollar PR campaign
to discredit the very science
they helped pioneer.
They utilized the same PR firms that had
previously helped the tobacco industry
mislead the public
about the harms of smoking.
Oil companies directly lobbied
government officials
and covertly funded dozens
of organizations
like the Global Climate Coalition,
whose objective was to obscure the
scientific consensus on climate change
and humanity's role in creating it.
They attacked credible scientists
and bankrolled advertisements
disguised as op-eds,
which falsely exaggerated the degree
and significance
of uncertainty in climate models
and used that uncertainty as an excuse
to dismiss the science entirely.
These "advertorials" grabbed
reader's attention with titles like
"Lies They Tell Our Children,"
and "Unsettled Science."
The industry also capitalized
on lingering Cold War anxieties
that equated government regulation
with socialism.
Thus, at the very moment
the world was poised to act,
oil companies shifted the conversation
away from the actual science
and turned it into a debate
about protecting freedom.
By doing so, they took a non-partisan,
uncontentious topic
and transformed it into a
hot-button political issue.
After George W. Bush became
president in 2001,
oil lobbyists successfully pushed his
administration to replace officials
who agreed with mainstream science
with ones who opposed
environmental regulations.
When Bush pushed the US
out of the Kyoto Protocol,
his administration credited
the Global Climate Coalition
with influencing his decision.
But the oil industry's PR campaigns
didn't end with their Kyoto victory.
They've continued to shape
the climate conversation,
pushing propaganda and co-opting
climate language.
British Petroleum, for example,
popularized the phrase "carbon footprint,"
an idea which in practice effectively
shifts climate responsibility
from the industry to the consumer.
To this day, the industry massively
overemphasizes their investment
in green energies,
such as biofuels,
which represent just 1% of their budgets.
And they employ legions of lobbyists,
who attend UN climate meetings
and work to water down the language
of IPCC climate assessment reports.
In this, they're allied with
oil-producing countries,
which also have a vested interest
in continued fossil fuel use.
While the oil companies now acknowledge
that burning fossil fuels
contributes to climate change,
they deny having misled the public,
arguing that their messaging always
reflected the scientific consensus.
But an extensive paper trail
shows otherwise.
While oil companies' profits
reach all-time highs,
climate change costs the public
billions of dollars each year.
Extreme weather events and decreasing air
quality kill millions of people annually.
Meanwhile, the culture of doubt the
oil industry created remains widespread,
polarizing the issue,
and delaying meaningful action.
But it doesn't have to be this way.
We can still reclaim the conversation
and change course,
embracing renewable energies
and sustainable practices
to protect both our planet and our future.
