Politicians and public manipulated by Fossil Fuel Industry
Fossil fuel companies lobby politicians to protect and subsidize their businesses, bail them out, and stop crucial climate policy from being passed. They have successfully shifted the blame onto the public, instructing us to “take responsibility” for our carbon footprint, even though emissions from individuals only account for 30% of global emissions.
Read a round-up of the headlines:
“Do campaign contributions from oil and gas companies influence legislators to vote against the environment, or do these companies invest in legislators that have a proven antienvironmental voting record? Using 28 y of campaign contribution data, we find that evidence consistently supports the investment hypothesis: The more a given member of Congress votes against environmental policies, the more contributions they receive from oil and gas companies supporting their reelection.”
PNAS, Oil and gas companies invest in legislators that vote against the environment
“The resolution effectively put a block on US ratification of any climate treaty ever since.
A quarter of a century later, Hagel acknowledges that fossil fuel companies manipulated Congress with a stream of false information, and accuses the oil industry of malignly claiming the science of climate change was not proved when companies such as Exxon and Shell already knew otherwise from their own research.
“What we now know about some of these large oil companies’ positions … they lied. And yes, I was misled. Others were misled when they had evidence in their own institutions that countered what they were saying publicly. I mean they, lied,” he told the documentary-makers.”
The Guardian, ‘What we now know … they lied’: how big oil companies betrayed us all
“If our collective philosophical literacy were better, we might notice that this fallacy seems to be working spectacularly well for the fossil-fuel industry, the petrochemical industry, and a bunch of other bad actors who would like to throw us off the trail that would lead us fully to grasp their transgressions. We shouldn't keep falling for it.”
Salon, How Big Oil is manipulating the way you think about climate change
“Exxon Mobil Corp. has used language to systematically shift blame for climate change from fossil fuel companies onto consumers, according to a new paper by Harvard University researchers.
The paper, published yesterday in the journal One Earth, could bolster efforts to hold the oil giant accountable in court for its alleged deception about global warming.
"This is the first computational assessment of how Exxon Mobil has used language in subtle yet systematic ways to shape the way the public talks about and thinks about climate change," Geoffrey Supran, a research fellow at Harvard and co-author of the paper, said in an interview with E&E News.
"One of our overall findings is that Exxon Mobil has used rhetoric mimicking the tobacco industry to downplay the reality and seriousness of climate change and to shift responsibility for climate change away from itself and onto consumers," he added.”
Scientific American, Exxon Mobil's Messaging Shifted Blame for Warming to Consumers
“Fossil fuel companies have a long history of adopting public relations strategies straight from the tobacco industry’s playbook. But a new analysis shows the two industries’ relationship goes much deeper — right down to funding the same organisations to do their dirty work.
MIT Associate Professor David Hsu analyzed organisations in DeSmog’s disinformation database and the Guardian’s tobacco database and found 35 thinktanks based in the US, UK, Australia, and New Zealand that promote both the tobacco and fossil fuel industries’ interests..
While reviewing the Guardian’s database, Hsu recognized many of the names among those fighting tobacco regulations were the same as “those working to foment climate science denial.’”
DeSmog, Revealed: How the Tobacco and Fossil Fuel Industries Fund Disinformation Campaigns Around the World
“As the public conversation on climate change evolves, so too does the sophistication and range of arguments used to downplay or discount the need for action (McKie, 2019; Norgaard, 2011). A mainstay of this counter-movement has been outright denial of the reality or human causation of climate change (Farrell et al., 2019), supplemented by climate-impact scepticism (Harvey et al., 2018) and ad hominem attacks on scientists and the scientific consensus (Oreskes & Conway, 2011). A fourth strategy has received relatively little attention to date: policy-focused discourses that exploit contemporary discussions on what action should be taken, how fast, who bears responsibility and where costs and benefits should be allocated (Bohr, 2016; Jacques & Knox, 2016; McKie, 2019). We call these ‘climate delay’ discourses, since they often lead to deadlock or a sense that there are intractable obstacles to taking action.”
Cambridge University, Discourses of climate delay
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