The heartbreaking, disgusting, and brutally tragic story of how we got to where we are today…
"Why Action on the Climate Crisis is All Hot Air"
How did we reach this point of abject failure: where the greater the scientific consensus and real-world evidence, the smaller the impact that consensus has on decision-making?
The astonishing disjunct between threat and response is possible only because the oil lobby has historically shaped, and continues to shape, popular understanding of the gravity of what lies ahead.
Cognitive dissonance reigns.
It is true that the establishment media has, very belatedly, started to diagnose more unpredictable and extreme weather patterns as symptoms of a wider climate crisis. It is hard to deny reality when reality keeps slapping you in the face.
But otherwise, the media has been, and continues to be, the core of the problem. It still plays cover both for the oil lobby and for the global corporations whose bottom line depends on a continuing addiction to over-consumption and “economic growth.”
That should be no surprise, because media corporations, whose job it is to frame our understanding of the world, are themselves deeply embedded in corporate profiteering at the planet’s expense.
Under the capitalist system, the primary duty of oil corporations – like other corporations – is to maintain profitability and guarantee value for investors and stockholders. Ethics never got a look-in.
So the fossil-fuel industry spent part of its vast profits pursuing a twin-track: first, muddying the waters about the climate science, then channeling attention towards largely meaningless, small-scale fixes that fell to the public to implement.
For the critical years when urgent, state-backed action was needed on a massive scale, climate denial, funded by dark money from Big Business, was given regular airtime on influential media channels like the BBC. Ordinary people were left, as they were supposed to be, confused and unsure.
We are still encouraged through advertising to consume as much as possible and throw away items of new technology – from personal computers to phones – every few years through planned obsolescence.
But this individualised, competitive, wasteful way of life is being given a makeover. Cars are now hybrid or electric. Holidays are “carbon offset” somehow. Plastic on our food is described as recyclable. Advertising now explains to us how all the stuff we buy is saving the planet.
Living ever more of our lives online supposedly helps too, because it reduces our carbon footprint. It is a green revolution in which everything stays pretty much the same – including the ability of giant corporations to make massive profits.
Armed with warnings – decades in advance – from their own scientists, the oil industry had enough of a head-start to invent a self-serving narrative. It's one in which ordinary people are encouraged to consume as much as before, while being persuaded either that they are making a difference or that the damage they are causing will be reversed by imminent technologies.
The new watchword is “net zero”. But in truth, it is a giant psy-op, as climate scientists have gradually started to appreciate.
In 2021 a group of three leading academics admitted that for years they had been duped into championing the promises of the Green New Deal. Technological fixes, such as carbon capture, offsetting and geoengineering, were “no more than fairy tales”, they warned. Net zero policies “were and still are driven by a need to protect business as usual, not the climate”.
James Dyke, an expert in global systems at Exeter University, observed: “It’s astonishing how the continual absence of any credible carbon removal technology seems to never affect net zero policies. I've now realised that we have all been subject to a form of gaslighting.”
There's much more in this brilliant piece by Jonathon Cook, and I hope you will read the whole thing.
