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The Silencing Power of Big Oil’s Climate Lies

A new report suggests that the majority of people think new economic rules are required to curb climate change. The issue is that those majorities think they are a minority.

“We’re seen as one of the bad guys,” says an internal document from BP, written in 2020. Climate change was by then attracting significant public concern and protest, and BP officials were asking themselves how to counter the negative perception they faced.

First revealed by the investigative news outlet Drilled, the quote from this document resurfaced in a report released yesterday by the watchdog group Clean Creatives that analyzes how Big Oil’s public messaging around climate change has evolved in recent years. The news media has always been a principal target of the fossil fuel industry’s PR machinations—meaning this analysis is something all journalists reporting about climate change should know about.

The climate emergency has long posed a vexing PR problem for the fossil fuel industry. Burning oil, gas, and coal is the primary driver of global temperature rise and the heat waves, droughts, storms, and the rising seas that follow. It’s only natural that people threatened by those impacts would resent the companies most responsible for causing them.

Over the years, companies like BP and ExxonMobil have employed various strategies to deflect public anger and the changes in policy it might encourage. For decades, the strategy was simply to lie. By the 1970s, their own scientists were telling senior management that burning fossil fuels would threaten the survival of civilization. But the industry chose to hide the truth anyway, spending millions of dollars on advertising, phony research, and other forms of propaganda to convince the public, government officials, and the press there was no cause for alarm.

Those efforts continue today, though the content of the propaganda shifts in response to evolving circumstances, as the Clean Creatives report illustrates. The group reviewed 1,859 public-facing messages—ads, social media posts, statements to investors and........

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