Fossil Fuel Propaganda and Lobbying, So Far Successful

(newly updated, originally published October 30th)

A YouGOV poll revealed this week that 60% of Americans say oil firms are to blame for the climate crisis.

Yet, in light of the evidence presented before a House congressional hearing last week, culminating in overwhelming evidence that fossil fuel companies participated in a decades long coverup of the facts as to the dangers of Global Warming, 40% of Americans are apparently ready to give the fossil fuel industry a pass; ignoring the evidence linking fossil extraction, production, and consumption to an unregulated global experiment in hubris and global climate modification.

In fact, even when it was revealed that oil and gas companies knowingly misled the public about their products which are driving climate change, most Republicans in the national poll said the public and the government should not hold those companies accountable.  At the same time, nearly two in three Republicans believe oil and gas companies are at least somewhat responsible for the climate crisis.

The poll findings suggest that much of the marketing campaigns that fossil fuel companies have released to paint themselves in a positive light have worked.

Big oil has bankrolled multimillion-dollar campaigns for decades which downplay the climate crisis and were designed to misled the public with misinformation campaigns and tactics, that included rebranding the scientific description of fossil fuel impacts on the environment from “Global Warming” to “Climate Change”, primarily because the term was less alarming to the public, previously validated through Big Oil financed focus groups. Repositioning reality, Big Oil for decades convinced a large segment of the public and policy makers that Global Warming was only a theory, not based in scientific fact. The same companies financing the media influence campaigns, knew better, as their own internal scientific studies continue to provide alarming evidence and conclusions linking fossil fuel emissions directly to global warming.

The same poll suggests the industry’s media efforts were especially effective with Republican voters, who were heavily influenced by misleading anti-science climate stories promoted through extreme conservative channels, e.g. Fox News and Newsmax.

Big Oil’s Message Contradicts its Own Research

The fossil fuel majors Exxon, BP, Shell message strategy was simple enough, change the narrative from Big Oil to individuals who are responsible for climate change, not corporations invested in fossil fuels.  The poll revealed these media efforts were and are working – even with Democrats.  The idea of a “carbon footprint” was introduced by fossil fuel companies to encourage individuals to reduce their emissions, and framed Earth’s runaway emissions as a problem that can be changed simply by changing consumer habits. But consumers are only a small part of the problem, rather, it is the dirty energy economy upon which the world depends which must change in order for the world to successfully mitigate the worst effects of a century of ever increasing global warming emissions on the climate.

For decades oil and gas companies ignored their own scientists who told them their products were harmful to people and the environment as early as the 1970s.

As early as 1958, the oil industry was hiring scientists and engineers to research the role that burning fossil fuels plays in global warming. The goal at the time was to help the major oil conglomerates understand how changes in the Earth’s atmosphere may affect the industry – and their bottom line. But what top executives gained was an early preview of the climate crisis, decades before the issue reached public consciousness.

What those scientists discovered – and what the oil companies did with that information – is at the heart of two dozen lawsuits attempting to hold the fossil fuel industry responsible for their role in climate change.

Many of those cases hinge on the industry’s own internal documents that show how, 40 years ago, researchers predicted the rising global temperatures with stunning accuracy.

ClientEarth lodged a complaint in 2019 alleging that BP’s advertising campaigns had misled the public by focusing on the company’s low carbon energy products, when more than 96% of its annual spend was on oil and gas. BP withdrew the ads before the complaint was assessed. ClientEarth said it was now putting other fossil fuel companies on notice over greenwashing adverts.

“We’re currently witnessing a great deception, where the companies most responsible for catastrophically heating the planet are spending millions on advertising campaigns about how their business plans are focused on sustainability,” said Johnny White, one of ClientEarth’s lawyers.   “We need to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, but instead of leading a low-carbon transition, these companies are putting out advertising which distracts the public and launders their image. Our research shows these adverts are misrepresenting the true nature of fossil fuel companies’ businesses, of their contribution to climate change, and of their transition plans.”

Big Oil’s Scientific Findings on Global Warming Were Correct

Dr Martin Hoffert, 83, physicist and Exxon consultant from 1981 to 1987, put it this way.  “When I started consulting for Exxon, I had already begun to understand that the Earth’s climate would be affected by carbon dioxide. There were only a small number of people in the world who were actively working on this problem because the global warming signal had not yet manifested itself in the data.

We were doing very good work at Exxon. We had eight scientific papers published in peer-reviewed journals, including a prediction of how much global warming from carbon dioxide buildup would be 40 years later.

We made a prediction in 1980 of what the atmospheric warming would be from fossil fuel burning in 2020. We predicted that it would be about one degree celsius. And it turned out to about one and half degrees celsius.

It never actually occurred to me that this was going to become a political problem. I thought: “We’ll do the analyses, we’ll write reports, the politicians of the world will see the reports and they’ll make the appropriate changes and transform our energy system somehow.”

I’m a research scientist. In my field, if you discover something and it turns out to be valid, you’re a hero. I didn’t realize how hard it would be to convince people, even when they saw objective evidence of this happening.

The Big Oil Justifies its Decades Old Campaign of Hiding the Truth

In a covert recording released by Greenpeace earlier this year, the Exxon lobbyist Keith McCoy is heard on camera saying the company is actively fighting the Biden administration’s efforts on climate change, and admits that Exxon pushed back against climate science.

“Did we aggressively fight against some of the science? Yes. Did we hide our science? Absolutely not. Did we join some of these shadow groups to work against some of the early efforts? Yes, that’s true. But there’s nothing, there’s nothing illegal about that,” he says in the recording. “We were looking out for our investments. We were looking out for our shareholders.”