Planet Propaganda: Conceptualizing Climate Denial as a Core Environmental Issue

1. Introduction

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“Global Warming is Happening and Humans are the Primary Cause”. This statement, made by the Union of Concerned Scientists in 2017, should not be controversial. Repeated peer-reviewed studies have made clear that about 97% of climate scientists agree that human activity is altering the earth's climate (Oreskes, 1686, 2004; Cook et. al., 6, 2016). Despite this professional consensus, climate denial amongst citizens is widespread in the United States, and has serious consequences. In this paper, I first explore the roots of American climate denial, and highlight in particular the concerted efforts of propagandists to obscure the scientific consensus on global warming. Then, I assess the importance of this industry-produced ‘scientific uncertainty’ in shaping the modern landscape of climate change beliefs, and introduce three ‘climate belief factors’ that significantly shape Americans’ attitudes towards climate change. Finally, I draw from recent research on effective climate communication to propose a new strategy to address climate denial in the United States, arguing that climate communicators should shift their focus away from the scientific facts of climate change and instead emphasize the co-benefits of climate action, while working to associate environmental action with generally positive values and include messaging that targets audiences across the political spectrum.

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2. The History and Rhetoric of Climate Propaganda

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In order to assess modern opinions on climate change and explore potential paths forward, we must first understand the history of climate denial. Here, I provide a short review of the fossil fuel industry’s efforts to propagate climate denial, and focus in particular on the crown jewel of denialist efforts: undermining public perception of scientific certainty about human-caused global warming. From this analysis emerges a fact often missed by mainstream environmentalist narratives: that climate denial and resulting apathy constitute a crisis in and of themselves - and one that must be addressed in order for many political and policy solutions to proceed.

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The pre-history of the fossil fuel industry’s campaign against climate action starts in the late 1970s, when scientists at the Exxon Corporation presented predictions about climate change and its potentially catastrophic impacts to the company’s executives (Banerjee, Song, and Hasemyer, 2015). Exxon responded with impressive speed and ambition, launching massive research into carbon dioxide in the environment within months of receiving the reports. These efforts included a new research arm of the company devoted primarily to energy innovation, a trailblazing initiative to monitor carbon concentration in and above the Atlantic Ocean called the ‘tanker project’, and another innovative project that aimed to assess historical rates of carbon emissions by testing vintage French wines. Ed Garvey, a former climate researcher for Exxon who worked on the tanker project, recalls the consensus within the company at the time: “The issue was not were we going to have a problem. The issue was simply how soon and how fast and how bad was it going to be, not if. Nobody at Exxon when I was there was discussing ‘if’” (Westervelt, Drilled Episode 1, 2018). According to Garvey and Martin Hoffert, a second Exxon scientist, Exxon started these projects because it believed that sustainable innovation would enable the corporation to transition from a mere oil producer to a 21st century leader in the energy sector (Banerjee, Song, and Hasemyer, 2015). But over the next decade, everything changed. Oil prices tanked, leading to a budget crunch just as Exxon’s economists and policy experts were realizing that serious government regulation of their industry was likely a long way off (Cushman 2015). Exxon’s response was to end its ambitious studies into climate change and its potential impacts (Cushman 2015).

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Having ceased its attempts to become a leader in sustainable energy, Exxon now needed to block the transition away from fossil fuels in order to maintain its status as an industry giant. To accomplish this, the company banded with allies in the industry to change Americans’ minds about climate change. Instead of channeling money, time, and human resources into climate research, Exxon’s leadership switched tactics and spent the late 1980s meticulously designing a large-scale public relations campaign designed to sow uncertainty among the American public about the existence of climate change in the face of mounting scientific evidence (Cushman 2015). This campaign planted a seed of climate denial that, over decades, would take root in the American psyche as other companies and interests nurtured its growth. A 2000 quote from a memo sent by Frank Luntz, a United States Republican consultant, to clients in the energy industry, sums up the strategy: “Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue of the debate.” (Maxwell and Miller, 294, 2016). That line encapsulates the fossil fuel industry’s cold, strategic approach to controlling public perception of scientific agreement. But it is also essential to understand how the industry and its allies orchestrated this manipulation.

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Looking back, we understand that the propaganda campaign was carried out not just by individual agents, but also by groups composed of multiple industry actors. For example, in 1991, the Edison Institute, an electric utility trade association, teamed up with the Western Fuels Association to form the ‘Information Council on the Environment (ICE), whose explicit goal was to reposition global warming as “‘theory’, not a fact” (Greenpeace, 2, 1996). In 1998, Exxon helped create a ‘Global Climate Science Team’, the brainchild of Exxon-employed lobbyists and public relations representatives for the American Petroleum Institute. Once again, an internal memo summarized the organization’s goals: "Victory will be achieved when...recognition of uncertainty becomes part of the 'conventional wisdom.'" (Hasemyer and Cushman, 2015) 

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To accomplish their goals, these coalitions and their individual members took out full-page ads in major publications across the political spectrum, including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. The full-page ‘advertorials’ would appear in the op-ed section of the paper and often resembled real opinion pieces (Roberts 2017). Exxon alone placed one quarter of the New York Times’ total advertorials between 1972 and 2000, publishing one each week (Roberts 2017). One such advertorial was titled “Science: What We Know And Don’t Know” and outlined a theory of climate change that emphasized doubt and uncertainty, claiming that “other variables could be much more important in the climate system than emissions produced by man” and that it would take years to find the actual source of increased carbon emissions (The New York Times, A31, 1997). The coalitions also got more personal, sending out memos with similar messages to the advertorials to politicians, households, think tanks, and researchers they believed might be sympathetic. The now-infamous fossil fuels memos even found their way into the White House; in the early days of the Bush-Cheney Administration, Exxon lobbyist Randy Randol sent a memo to the President recommending that United States input to the IPCC be delayed and that federal officials in the energy and environment sectors be replaced with contrarian scientists, advice that was mostly followed (Hasemeyer and Cushman, 2015).

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In addition to its advertorials and targeted memos, Exxon, Shell, and their allies funded think tanks and other research units to produce science that either highlighted the uncertainty of climate science or outright denied that climate change was occurring. This is clear in Exxon’s $1 million grant to MIT to produce climate assessments "based on realistic representations of the uncertainties of climate science” (MIT News 1993). Evident in this language are the expectations attached to Exxon’s money--namely, that the research produced with grants from the corporation would contribute to the body of contrarian science that called into question scientific certainty about global warming. In 2006, The Royal Society of the United Kingdom, which acts as a judge of objectivity in research, accused Exxon of funding at least 39 organizations "featuring information on their websites that misrepresented the science on climate change, by outright denial of the evidence that greenhouse gases are driving climate change, or by overstating the amount and significance of uncertainty in knowledge" (Hasemeyer and Cushman, 2015).

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These examples illustrate how industry agents did not merely criticize existing science through advertising and letter propaganda, but also helped produce new research to cloud the sense of certainty about climate change even at elite research institutions.

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Importantly, no single corporation, utility, or political agent acted alone in this campaign against scientific understanding. Although Exxon catalyzed the movement, they received key help from trade associations, other companies, conservative research bodies, and individual ‘contrarian’ scientists. These groups also took up their own initiatives, as with the trade association’s ‘Information Council’, of which Exxon was not a part. When these various actors collaborated, they did so under new names, such as the Global Climate Science Team or the Global Climate Council, and this furthered the sense of a diverse, two-sided climate science debate. Rather than picturing a handful of company and industry representatives in a conference room with conservative politicians, the public would imagine a landscape populated by dozens of different groups and get the impression of a lively ‘contrarian’ movement.

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The fact that the names of these proxy organizations usually sounded pro-environment was no mistake. It added to the sense that both sides of the climate issue cared about the planet, which then allowed industry actors to dodge accusations of being uncaring or actively antagonistic towards the world’s ecosystems. This rhetorical sleight-of-hand effectively shifted the focus of the debate from ‘profit versus planet’ to ‘pragmatists versus alarmists’, a move that permanently impacted public perceptions not just of climate science certainty, but of the environmental movement as a whole. Thus, in their efforts to call climate science into question, Exxon simultaneously succeeded in painting a portrait of panicked, non-scientist environmentalists that has persisted to this day--just think of the often-caricatured tree-hugging hippie, vapid vegan, or economic ignoramus asking you to “save the whales” (Maxwell and Miller, 290, 2016). Through this analysis, we see that the fossil fuel industry’s campaign was not haphazard or accidental, but rather carefully crafted to produce a sea change in the American public’s understanding of science, climate, and environmentalism.

Having tackled the history and some key components of the fossil fuel industry’s campaign to disrupt the American public’s perception of a scientific consensus on human-caused climate change, we can assess the modern climate denial landscape. This will help to clarify the extent to which the fossil fuel industry’s efforts were successful and chart a path forward.

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3. Modern Climate Denial

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With a solid grasp on the origins of anti-climate science propaganda and the strategy taken by the fossil fuel industry in its campaign to obfuscate scientific agreement, we can now ask two important questions: First, what does the modern American public feel about climate change, as compared to 1991? Second, what factors play the biggest role in predicting American attitudes towards climate change?

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First, let’s examine how public concern over climate change has evolved over time. In the early 1990s, ICE (the organization of electricity and coal trade associations discussed previously) conducted a phone survey in Arizona on adult climate beliefs for an internal assessment of American climate attitudes. They found that 85% of adults surveyed had heard of climate change, 80% believed it to be serious, and 45% considered it very serious (Westervelt, Drilled Episode 2, 2018). By contrast, the 2018 installment of Yale’s ongoing “Climate Change Beliefs and the American Mind” survey found that 29% of Americans were very worried about climate change, the highest proportion since the question was first asked in 2008 (Leiserowitz, et. al., 15, 208). If we assume that considering climate change very serious is a fair approximation for being very worried about it, the proportion of people who are very worried about climate change is about 75% of what it was in the early 1990s, despite the fact that the scientific evidence for human-caused climate change has strengthened considerably since then, while climate change impacts (such as extreme weather events) have become more visible (McCright et. al., 112, 2013). The Yale data also suggest that around 25% of Americans do not believe in climate change at all; there is no equivalent number for the late twentieth century, likely because when those surveys took place, the accuracy of scientific evidence was not considered a political issue (Nisbet, 2019).

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That’s interesting enough, but it’s also important to understand what contributes to these numbers, especially because the factors that shape citizen perception of climate change can help us trace the effects of fossil fuel industry propaganda and, ultimately, guide our path to the future. Here, I will discuss three major factors that have been found to significantly impact public perception of climate change: political ideology, perception of scientific agreement, and identification with the environmental movement. First, it turns out that public opinions on climate change are strongly politically polarized: self-identified liberals and Democrats are significantly more likely to report both agreement with the scientific consensus on climate change and personal concern for the issue than are self-reported conservatives and Republicans (Oreskes and Conway, 2010). Social scientists (Dunlap and McCright 2011; Oreskes and Conway 2010) have cited this as a result of the mutual influence between the fossil fuel industry and conservative lobbyists and politicians such as Luntz and President Bush, suggesting that the impact of anti-climate science propaganda was strongest on the right. Perhaps an even more revealing recent finding, however, is the strong effect positive effect that a second factor, perception of scientific consensus, has on support for climate policy. This was demonstrated by Ding et. al. in 2011 and replicated by McCright, Dunlap, and Xiao in 2013. The latter team concludes that what they call the ‘climate change denial machine’ has been effective in generating a perception in the American public that scientists disagree about global warming. They further call the role of perceived scientific agreement on climate beliefs and policy support both ‘crucial’ and ‘robust’ (McCright et. al. 7, 2013). Thus, we can again trace modern climate beliefs to the strategies employed by Exxon and its allies in their campaign. The same study also demonstrated that a third factor, identification with the broader environmental movement, as a strong predictor of support for governmental action, even more so than perceived scientific agreement. That harks back to efforts on the part of Exxon and its allies to portray environmentalists as fringe alarmists with whom the average citizen could not identify. At the same time, however, it is difficult to separate the impact of these propagandist efforts from the self-fashioned otherness of the environmental community, which is historically an important part of effective environmental activism--consider, for instance, Greenpeace’s historically disruptive demonstrations, or the introduction of previously fringe ideas like degrowth and ecocentrism (Maxwell and Miller, 290, 2016). 

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In the data representing modern climate denial and analysis of the contributing factors, it is evident that attempts on the part of the fossil fuel industry to obfuscate climate science have had a lasting impact both on the proportion of American adults that take climate change seriously and on the factors that impact climate beliefs, like partisanship, perception of scientific certainty, and sense of personal identification with environmentalism. It is equally obvious that climate change is an ever-growing threat; oft-cited United Nations projections from 2019 suggest we have just 8 years to prevent irreversible damage; this year’s IPCC report also paints a grim picture in the absence of substantive action (United Nations General Assembly, 23rd Session). In light of all of this, the need to bring the nation to common ground on climate issues is clear. But how do we promote climate policy and action, given the prevalence of denial? 

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4. Solutions

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The intuitive answer, of course, is to fight fire with water--given that public perception of scientific disagreement is a major factor contributing to climate change beliefs, it would be tempting to formulate a solution based on more science education, in order to help the general population understand the factual basis for the scientific consensus on global climate change. Unfortunately, however, this may not be the most effective approach when it comes to combating public sense of scientific uncertainty.

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Stewart Lockie put it well in his 2017 editorial in Environmental Sociology on post-truth politics: “when factual claims are judged according to their emotional and ideological consistency, we cannot expect that lobbing more factual claims into the public domain will necessarily challenge anyone’s beliefs” (Lockie, 1, 2017). That is to say, precisely because of the involvement of things like partisan values and personal identity in determining beliefs, we should not allow ourselves to believe that simply providing the public with more climate facts will alleviate climate denial or lead to a mass understanding of the scientific consensus. This is echoed by more quantitative assessment: Bain et. al. found in 2012 that it is very difficult to convince climate deniers of climate change using facts, and other researchers have echoed that finding (Bain, et. al., 1, 2012). In 2016, McCright found that counterevidence tends to reinforce existing beliefs, rather than changing people’s minds (McCright et. al., 2016). 

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That is certainly frustrating if you value scientific education and want to believe that climate facts can fix climate lies. Fortunately, however, the news isn’t all bad. Emerging research suggests that it may be possible to use the other two ‘climate belief factors’ we’ve identified, partisan ideology and sense of identification with the environmental movement, to move the needle on public perception of climate change, rather than simply relying on more science to do the job. For example, the 2012 study by Bain et. al. suggested that it is possible to convince climate deniers to both engage in environmentally friendly behavior and support environmentally progressive policy just by emphasizing the co-benefits of climate action while promoting positive views of the environmental movement (Bain, et. al., 1, 2012). Specifically, the data showed that framing climate change action and, by extension, the environmental movement as warm, considerate, and dependable led individuals who did not even believe in climate change to express plans to act in more environmentally friendly ways. Interpreted in the context of our ‘climate belief factors’, this amounts to promoting identification with the environmental movement and reducing the ‘othering’ of environmentalists. Interestingly, the study also showed that describing societal co-benefits of reducing emissions, such as change in crime rates, poverty, and cleanliness, significantly increased climate deniers’ intention to engage in environmentally friendly behavior and support environmentally friendly policy. With regards to the partisanship factor, studies suggest that climate change communication that employs traditionally conservative frameworks like purity can help make it more accessible to those on the political right (Maxwell and Miller, 292, 2017). For instance, using messaging with a classically liberal emphasis on the inherent moral value of nature and simultaneously incorporating images that conservatives are likely to find disgusting or otherwise ‘impure’, may be effective in reaching both liberal and conservative audiences (Schreiber et. al., 2013). 

Taken together, these findings paint a hopeful portrait. Although the intuitive approach of fighting misinformation with information by inundating public discourse with climate facts may not be an effective strategy, we are increasingly finding other ways to evoke pro-climate action in climate skeptics and deniers, and that’s something to celebrate.

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5. Conclusions

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In conclusion, climate denial should be of serious concern to environmentalists in the United States. The roots of American climate denial can be traced to the late 1970s, when executives at the Exxon Corporation received then-breaking news about climate change and, along with other fossil fuel industry interests, launched a decades-long propaganda campaign to obscure Americans’ perception of the same science they knew to be true. Today, the landscape of climate belief has still not recovered from those decades of obfuscation. That much is demonstrated by the proportion of Americans who are seriously concerned about climate change, which is lower than it was in the early 1990s. An analysis of national beliefs about climate change reveals three major factors that impact how people feel about the issue: partisan ideological bent, perception of scientific consensus, and identification with the larger environmental movement. Based on our understanding of these key factors, we can chart a path towards a more climate-friendly society--but the solution may be counterintuitive. Given recent evidence that science education is not an effective means of persuading climate deniers, and in fact that any evidence in opposition to climate deniers’ existing beliefs is likely to reinforce their positions, we must find a different tactic. By emphasizing the co-benefits of climate action, associating the climate movement with socially positive values, and ensuring that climate messaging targets a broad segment of the political spectrum, we can avoid the trap of ineffective education and take concrete steps to promote positive climate action in the United States.

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Ruby Rorty is a recent graduate of the college. She majored in Economics and Environmental Studies, and her thesis on strategic environmental justice litigation and movement-building was awarded UChicago's Chicago Studies Thesis Prize. While at UChicago, Ruby served as editor-in-chief of the Chicago Maroon, the university's independed student-run newspaper, and interned for organizations like the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, the Field Museum, and USAID.