Big Oil’s Disinformation War
Big Oil has waged a decades-long disinformation war to prevent the transition to renewable energy, resulting in obscene profits for fossil fuel companies, soaring bills for consumers and a climate crisis that threatens the planet.
Big Oil's disinformation is driving the cost of living and climate crises. (David McNew/Getty Images)
The energy regulator Ofgem announced last week that the energy price cap would reach £3549 from the 1st October—an increase of more than triple the January 2019 to September 2021 average.
The cost of living crisis, which has culminated in 11 percent of British households having to take out loans to cover energy bills, has been significantly exacerbated by Britain’s dependency on natural gas, whose volatile prices are, according to new data from the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), responsible for 95 percent of the energy bill hike. The spike in gas prices, owing to the war in Ukraine and rising post-pandemic energy demand, has demonstrated the consequences of Britain’s lack of energy sovereignty.
Yet the four biggest oil and gas firms in Europe—Shell, BP, Total and Equinor—despite raking in £74 billion in profits during the first 6 months of 2022, reinvested just 5 percent of these profits in renewable forms of energy which would not only accelerate the decarbonisation of the economy, but would reduce energy bills dramatically. Moreover, recent data has shown that renewables are 9 times cheaper than gas, and that scrapping climate policies over the past decade has added £2.5 billion to energy bills.
For decades, fossil fuel companies have conducted a sophisticated campaign of disinformation, prolonging their dirty investments by publicly downplaying the risks posed by ecological breakdown, and convincing governments and consumers that renewable technologies are costly and ineffective. These campaigns, which mutated from denying the role played by human activity in climate change to acknowledging that it existed while portraying oil and gas as viable solutions to the problem, have proved remarkably successful in influencing government policy, stymying our approach to both the cost of living crisis and climate change.
From denial to delay
Documents show that Shell was aware of the causes and dangers of climate change as early as 1988, when a confidential document entitled ‘The Greenhouse Effect’ stated that ‘There is reasonable scientific agreement that increased levels of greenhouse gases would cause a global warming’ adding, ‘such relatively fast and dramatic changes would impact on the human environment, future living standards and food supplies and could have major social, economic and political consequences’.
By the mid-1990s, Shell, aware of how their profit margins would be affected by decarbonisation, touted the expertise of a ‘significant minority’ of ‘distinguished scientists’ who maintained that burning oil and gas did not contribute drastically towards ecological breakdown. While a 1994 report entitled ‘The Enhanced Greenhouse Effect’ acknowledged that ‘human activities have contributed to an increase in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations,’ it continued; ‘however, it is not possible to quantify the consequences for global climate with respect to timing, magnitude or regional distribution’. The paper concluded that policies intended to reduce carbon emissions ‘could be premature, divert resources from far more pressing needs and further distort markets’.
By disputing the anthropogenic causes of climate change while acknowledging its existence, Shell continued to invest in heavily polluting fuels while feigning environmental consciousness for PR purposes. By 1998, the company appeared to explicitly recognise the need for concerted action to drive down greenhouse gas emissions, releasing a report which claimed that ‘we in Shell share the concern over the possible impacts of using fossil fuels. We believe that prudent precautionary measures are now necessary’.
However, in a 1998 document entitled ‘Climate Change: What does Shell think and do about it?’, the oil giant’s three primary ‘solutions’ for climate change were to ‘continue to produce oil and gas,’ to ‘provide more natural gas,’ and to further develop its gas fired power generation.
To this day, Shell continues to employ subtle measures to avoid reorienting its production strategy in a sustainable direction; back in 2021, a court in the Hague ordered the firm to cut its emissions by 45 percent by 2030 compared with 2019 levels. Environmentalist NGO Friends of the Earth had sued Shell, claiming that its climate proposals, which included merely reducing the intensity of its carbon emissions by 20 percent by 2030 compared with 2016 levels, would permit the company to increase its overall emissions.
Corporate lies
Back in June, the government permitted Shell to continue developing the Jackdaw gas field in the North Sea, which could yield 40,000 barrels of oil at peak production, and is projected to account for half of Scotland’s total emissions. The project has drawn criticism from environmental campaigners including Philip Evans, oil and gas transition campaigner at Greenpeace UK, who told Left Foot Forward that ‘if the government keeps approving new fossil fuel projects like Jackdaw it should ready itself for a struggle every step of the way, from the protests we’ve seen this week to the courtroom’.
The acceleration of North Sea oil and gas development, however, directly contravenes the warnings issued by reputable climate science bodies such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), who in 2021 released a report which called for ‘rapid and deep reductions in energy system CO2 and GHG emissions,’ advocating ‘decommissioning and reduced utilisation of existing fossil fuel installations in the power sector as well as cancellation of new installations’.
Despite this, a meagre windfall tax issued by the government earlier this year following considerable public pressure contained loopholes which effectively subsidised future oil and gas development. The tax of 25 percent, which only accounted for firms’ North Sea profits, rather than their total UK profits, coincided with an 80 percent tax break on new fossil fuel investment, effectively giving big polluters a saving of 91p for every £1 invested in oil and gas. It is estimated that Shell, which paid no tax on its North Sea production last year, will likely pay £200 million less in windfall tax as a result.
Greenpeace political campaigner Ami McCarthy excoriated the Chancellor’s ‘completely unjustifiable’ plans, arguing that Sunak had chosen to ‘pour fuel all over the climate crisis,’ and to ‘turbo-charge climate destruction’. Indeed, Sunak’s Prime Ministerial bid has involved promises to ramp up domestic gas and oil production; his campaign has pledged to ‘immediately’ issue a new round of licences as part of a strategy to secure ‘energy independence’ by 2045.
Meanwhile Liz Truss, a former commercial manager at Shell, has defended the obscene profits made by the oil giant. If elected, she promises to embark on an explosive increase in North Sea projects, granting 130 new drilling licences despite warnings that it is likely to only aggravate the cost of living crisis.
The chronic underinvestment in clean energy and the expansion of domestic gas production which threatens to aggravate the cost of living crisis is a consequence of a protracted, devastatingly effective disinformation campaign built by major oil and gas firms. Both Conservative leadership hopefuls, while paying lip-service to the goal of net zero carbon emissions by 2050, have nonetheless chosen to accelerate Britain’s dependence on heavily polluting fossil fuels, to the detriment both of the people experiencing skyrocketing energy bills, and of the planet itself.