The Gas Industry Is Gaslighting the Public about Climate Change (2024)

The Gas Industry Is Gaslighting the Public about Climate Change

A fossil-fuel executive blames consumers for the climate crisis

By Naomi Oreskes

In March 1969 Senator Henry M. Jackson of Washington State received a letter from an incensed constituent. The letter writer had watched an episode of a television talk show where the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg claimed that “the current rate of air pollution brought about by the proliferation of automobiles” could cause “the rapid buildup of heat on the earth.” This would melt the polar ice caps and eventually flood “the greater part of the globe.”

The constituent wanted the powerful senator to stop Ginsberg—one of America’s “premier kooks,” in his opinion—from spouting such nonsense, but the senator soon learned that it wasn’t nonsense. Jackson reached out to presidential science adviser Lee DuBridge, who affirmed that Americans were “filling the atmosphere with a great many gases and in very large quantities from our automobiles” and that these gases could indeed melt the ice caps and radically change the climate. It was of “great importance,” DuBridge explained, that we learned more about carbon dioxide and its impacts “before discovering them too late and perhaps to our sorrow.”

If you are surprised to learn that scientists have been warning about the dangers of greenhouse gases for more than half a century, you are not alone. The fossil-fuel industry has worked for decades to deny both climate science and its own history. Its latest move is to blame consumers for the climate crisis.

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Ginsberg may have learned about the threat of anthropogenic climate change from The Unchained Goddess, a 1958 made-for-­television movie produced by Frank Capra, one of America’s most famous filmmakers. The film featured “Dr. Research” (Frank Baxter, a professor at the University of Southern California) explaining that although scientists might one day be able to control both weather and climate, these were dangerous aspirations because “with our present knowledge we have no idea what would happen.” Even a few degrees of temperature increase could lead to enough sea-level rise that an “inland sea would fill a good portion of the Mississippi Valley,” and tourists in “glass bottom boats would be viewing the drowned towers of Miami through 150 feet of tropical water.” “Even now,” Dr. Research explained, “man may be unwittingly changing the world’s climate through the waste products of his civilization,” including “more than six billion tons of carbon dioxide” every year.

Ginsberg might also have learned about climate change from the New York Times, Fortune magazine, Time magazine or the children’s Weekly Reader, all of whom published popular articles on the topic. At the 1965 annual meeting of the American Petroleum Institute, the institute’s president specifically linked climate change to cars, which might force Americans to find alternatives to internal-combustion engines in automobiles. There was “still time to save the world’s peoples from the catastrophic consequence of pollution,” he asserted, “but time is running out.”

These various discussions eventually led to the creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988 and four years later to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change committing its signatories to preventing “dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.” Yet it wasn’t until last year that the U.S. federal government finally passed a bill to fight climate change.

This bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, offers a variety of strategies to support renewable energy, such as tax credits for utility-scale renewable energy, federal investment in rural electricity co-ops, and rebates for consumers who install energy-efficient heat pumps, windows or rooftop solar panels. According to the Department of Energy, “it’s the single largest investment in climate and energy in American history,” and it’s expected to cut our greenhouse gas emissions by around 40 percent by 2030 compared with 2005 levels. But the history of events leading up to the bill’s passage raises a big question: Why has it taken so long for us to act on this problem?

Recently the CEO of ExxonMobil suggested that the public is to blame. In an interview with Fortune in February, Darren Woods claimed that the main reason the world has waited too long to act on climate is that consumers are just not willing to pay for carbon reduction.

This is flat-out false. For one thing, renewable energy is now cheaper than fossil fuels in most places Moreover, poll after poll has shown that most Americans are worried about climate change and are willing to pay to do something about it. In a Gallup poll conducted earlier this year, 74 percent of respondents ranked climate change as either “critical” or “important” to the “vital interests of the United States.” A 2018 University of Chicago study found that two thirds of Americans would support a carbon tax if the proceeds were used for environmental restoration. A 2024 international study found that a whopping 69 percent of respondents would be willing to contribute at least 1 percent of their income to tackle climate change.

ExxonMobil spent years telling the public that climate change was highly uncertain even as the corporation’s own scientists were making accurate predictions about future carbon dioxide levels and the global warming they would cause. These days the industry is promoting false “solutions,” such as removing carbon from the atmosphere, which is extremely costly and hard to scale and which won’t work in any case if we keep using fossil fuels (because the removed carbon will just be replaced by new carbon). But this is what the industry intends for us to do. We know this is true because they are still exploring for yet more oil and gas, fuels that scientists tell us we cannot afford to burn.

In 1959 Esso (Exxon’s original name) debuted the slogan “Put a tiger in your tank,” and for decades the industry never changed its stripes. Now it evidently has: from denying that climate change is a problem to admitting that it is a problem but blaming the public for it. The industry that gave us gas for lighting is gaslighting us.

This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.