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.
