The oil and gas industry has been lying about global warming for decades — accountability is long overdue

By Gordon McBean, Western University

The science is clear: the planet is warming at an alarming rate and we need to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions.

For decades, effective actions have lagged behind the needs of the moment. The 2022 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report suggested that at least part of the reason for this inaction has been “due to misinformation about climate science that has sowed uncertainty.”

The full scale of this misinformation was revealed in May 2024, when the United States House Committee on Oversight and Accountability completed its three year investigation into how U.S. oil companies sought to avoid accountability for climate change.

The report — tellingly titled Denial, Disinformation and DoubleSpeak: Big Oil’s Evolving Efforts to Avoid Accountability for Climate Change — explores Big Oil’s decades-long campaign of deception and denial finding that:

“Documents demonstrate for the first time that fossil fuel companies internally do not dispute that they have understood since at least the 1960s that burning fossil fuels causes climate change and [that they] then worked for decades to undermine public understanding of this fact and to deny the underlying science”.

Even with what we know about the scale of climate misinformation, these findings make for truly shocking reading.

The committee found that “Big Oil’s deception campaign evolved from explicit denial of the basic science underlying climate change to deception, disinformation, and doublespeak,” and that the fossil fuel industry deliberately spread confusing and misleading narratives, lobbied against climate action and strategically funded under-resourced universities while silencing opposition voices.

The report concluded that, as the climate science became stronger, Big Oil shifted its strategy to one of public support for action while privately avoiding it as part of an “elaborate campaign of deception."

https://youtu.be/QAAbcNl4Lb8?si=UY4tE_4-ZsDAo9ES

While the findings of this report were centred around the U.S., it is likely that many of the same conclusions would apply here in Canada.

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