Climate conferences are likes buses; you wait all year for one then three arrive all at once. We are still sifting through the wreckage of COP16 and COP29 for any positive biodiversity or climate related nuggets. Meanwhile, the full might of the Petrochemical Resistance Front has descended upon Busan, Korea to try and snuff out any remaining hope of an effective and robust international plastics treaty at INC-5.
You have to hand it to Big Oil; they are absolute masters of environmental disinformation. This column is becoming a veritable archive of fossil fuel related greenwashing, lobbying, science denial, obfuscation, diversion tactics, and other shenanigans designed to slow down or sabotage global efforts to tackle the climate, biodiversity, and plastic pollution crises. When money is no object, you can literally buy entire sports to detract from your gargantuan oil and gas expansion plans, or convince governing bodies to grant you the 2029 Asian Winter Games despite being a country where temperatures in the shade hit 52 degrees in 2021, and where your artificial snow resort has not yet been built. Outside of blatant sportswashing, much fossil fuel money goes into a longstanding and relentless campaign of climate disinformation.
Following a policy of ‘know your enemy,’ environmental NGOs – the veritable Davids to Big Oil’s Goliath – have endeavoured to analyse and understand the communication tactics used in fossil fuel greenwashing and lobbying. The Laundromat previously compiled some of these in a ‘Handy How-to Guide to Effective Greenwashing.’ One of the latest such studies is the Fossil Fuel Misinformation Tracker published earlier this month by InfluenceMap.
The NGO analysed 2,400 instances of anti-low-carbon transition narratives put forward by fossil fuel companies and their industry associations. This impressive output is just the product of the 12-month period since COP28. Most sustainability professionals will be familiar with constant drip-drip-drip noise of climate disinformation on social and conventional media, on industry conference stages, and from the mouths of politicians. It is worth noting that InfluenceMap have been overly charitable in referring to misinformation rather than the more deliberate act of disinformation. While individual firms like ExxonMobil are quite happy to openly spread their own disinformation, many large oil producers prefer to protect their own greenwashing efforts by delegating this dirty task to their various industry associations as shown in InfluenceMap’s report. The fossil fuel industry’s thousands of anti-transition threads can be captured under 3 broad categories:
Solution scepticism
This tactic aims to spread unfounded doubts about proposed alternatives to fossil fuel use, or to downplay the harms caused by hydrocarbon use.
Policy neutrality
Advocates against government-led climate action, with a free market mantra supposedly aimed at protecting individual consumer choice.
Affordability and energy security
This is an attempt to make a hard, pragmatic economic argument to protect ongoing fossil fuel use and avoid ‘taking the world back into caves,’ as expressed last year by Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) CEO and COP28 president Sultan al Jaber.
Trying to counter all the sub-narratives within each of these categories can feel like whack-a-mole. Solution scepticism alone has begat multiple evil offspring such as the various ways that fossil fuels like liquefied natural gas (LNG a.k.a. methane with a dash of ethane) are presented as sustainability-friendly ‘transition fuels.’ It is also under this umbrella that the fossil fuel industry spreads fear, uncertainty, and doubt about vehicle electrification.
Until recently the Laundromat had been attempting to engage directly with fossil industry-funded climate denialists on LinkedIn. The aim of this experiment was to explore the various narratives used by the opposition and to use a foray outside of the sustainability echo chamber as some sort of virtual educational field trip. The subsequent interactions included lengthy debates with supposed ‘academics’ representing US-based think-tanks such as the National Center for Energy Analytics (NCEA). A quick online search uncovered the fact that the NCEA was created by the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), another think-tank with a revealing range of funders including the Koch Foundation and ExxonMobil. What also became obvious from their sheer volume of output is that some of these fossil fuel advocates are funded as literal full-time online disinformation spreaders. They surely cannot have time for any other job. It was interesting to see the breadth of arguments put forward, ranging from the fairly conventional ‘free market versus political interventionism’ to the downright comical ‘CO2 is great’ theory. The latter left the Laundromat perplexed by its infantile insistence that CO2 cannot be bad ‘because photosynthesis.’
What remains clear from the serious efforts of NGOs like Planet Tracker and InfluenceMap and the slightly less academic online experiments of the Laundromat is that disinformation by the fossil industry is a massive threat to climate action and frustratingly effective and ubiquitous. It is therefore crucial to ‘know your enemy’ by understanding the fossil industry’s tactics, which is the only way to have any hope of effectively countering at least some of this anti-climate transition disinformation at the micro (e.g. social media) and macro (e.g. COP process) levels. Meanwhile, for sanity’s sake the Laundromat is taking a deliberate hiatus from its interactions with climate denialists.
