Abstract
Implementing public relations tactics of the chemical and tobacco industries, fossil fuel companies (Big Carbon) leverage dark money networks, right-wing media, and conservative think tanks to manufacture doubt about climate science. Discourses of science denial and solutions delay undermine scholars, academics, civil society, and governing bodies seeking to address the climate crisis. By design, conspiracy theories destabilise a coherent climate solutions narrative. This contributes to a larger “epistemic crisis” of untruth and political polarisation. The outcome of Big Carbon’s widespread climate disinformation is reduced climate literacy, which requires a systems-wide response to solve the climate crisis. This chapter maps the network of “fake climate news” and how it maintains a climate crisis “denial space.”
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Notes
- 1.
Often the term Big Oil is used, which refers to the major global oil firms BP, Chevron, Eni, ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, TotalEnergies, and ConocoPhillips. To encompass other significant players, such as Koch Industries, Big Carbon denotes an expanded group that includes other carbon fuel industries, such as gas and coal industries. While this study does not directly address the role of petrostates, such as Saudi Arabia and Russia, they do actively contribute to international trade groups and lobbies like the Gas Exporting Countries Forum (GECF) that benefit from the Big Carbon’s PR and political activities.
- 2.
Desmog.com has created an extensive database of actors: https://www.desmog.com/climate-disinformation-database/
- 3.
Ironically, museums are having to invest in protecting their collections from climate change (Cummins, 2017).
- 4.
“Sacrifice zones” are places designated as politically acceptable for pollution and ecological destruction. These populations are usually lower-income people of colour, referred by ecojustice critics as “disposable populations” (Hopkins, 2020).
- 5.
“The idea that decarbonisation is inherently elitist is a myth, peddled largely by political figures who have shown little concern for deprived communities in any other context, and who ignore the fact that without a net zero transition it is the very poorest—globally and domestically—who will suffer most severely. But like all effective myths, it is founded on a kernel of truth: namely that under successive governments, political decision-making has felt remote and unaccountable, the rich have got richer, and life for a great many of the rest of us has grown harder. … They’re inviting people to ask themselves: can the same government that made the poorest pay for the banking crisis really be trusted to design a fair climate policy?” (Shenker, 2021, para. 24)
- 6.
“Drawing from the same conspiracy theories on hidden governments and deep states that fueled the rise of QAnon, this fear tactic claims that climate policy is part of a large-scale plan for world control, depopulation, and technological dominance. It often depicts images of a technological dystopia where machines run the world and human life has no value. Many of the tweets in this category claim that any observable changes to the climate system are, rather than the logical result of centuries of humans releasing greenhouse gases, the result of governments manipulating the weather” (Levantesi & Corsi, 2021, Full on para. 4). Now, “Climate change, socialism, Covid-19, a new world order, and meat bans are all different sides of the same denial coin. And the message is a simple one: climate change is a dangerous plot to limit individual liberty, depopulate the Earth, and destroy national governments. In this scenario, discussing science is no longer relevant—climate change becomes exclusively a political matter, completely removed from science or facts” (Full on para. 9).
- 7.
“Once it had garnered attention, the notion was swiftly integrated into a pre-existing ‘culture war’ framework and related national offshoots—this was less driven by fringe bloggers, and more by high-visibility outlets like Fox News who transformed ‘climate lockdown’ into a vision of impending authoritarian doom … such ideas have crept into a broader swathe of far-right and conspiracy movements, most recently appearing in forums for the infamous QAnon cult” (Maharasingam-Shah & Vaux, 2021, p. 4).
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López, A. (2023). Gaslighting: Fake Climate News and Big Carbon’s Network of Denial. In: Fowler-Watt, K., McDougall, J. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Media Misinformation. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11976-7_11
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