Naomi Oreskes Impresses Big Oil Climate Change Ads – Profits From It?

Guest essay by Eric Worrall

Naomi Oreskes, who believes Climate Change is a problem, has written a dramatic reveal of old Big Oil ads that actually tell the truth about global warming.

Forgotten oil ads tell us that climate change is nothing

Since the 1980s, fossil fuel companies have run ads touting climate denial messages – many of which they now want us to forget. This is our visual guide

via Geoffrey Supran and Naomi OreskesSupported by

About this content Thursday, November 18, 2021 21.00 AEDT

Why is meaningful action to avert the climate crisis so difficult? That is, at least in part, due to advertising.

The fossil fuel industry has spanned decades, propaganda and lobbying worth billions of dollars campaign delay climate action by confusing the public and policymakers about the climate crisis and its solutions. This has involved a series of notable advertisements – with headlines ranging from “The Lies They Tell Our Children” to “The Life of an Oil Pump” – that seek to convince the public that the climate crisis is not real, not man-made, not serious, and unsolvable. The campaign continues to this day.

Most recently last month, six major oil CEOs were summoned to the US Congress to answer questions about climate science’s history of discrediting – but they lied swear on it. In other words, the fossil fuel industry is currently misleading the public about its history misleading the public.

We are experts in the history of climate misinformation and we want to set the record. So here, in black and white (and color), is a selection of thousands of major oil majors’ climate deceit ads from 1984 to 2021. This is not an exhaustive analysis, that we have published few, but it’s a brief, illustrated history – like the “hot reel” advertisers use to highlight their best work – of the more than 30-year evolution of propaganda in the fossil fuel industry. This is the PR wheel of a big oil company.

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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/enosystem/2021/nov/18/the-forgotten-oil-ads-that-told-us-climate-change-was-nothing

To be fair, some of the commercials questioning whether the world is warming, may have been wrong – though I’d love to see the full text to be sure. Maybe they just said the gentle warming we went through wasn’t the problem.

But the underlying theme of most of those ads, that climate change is no big deal, is contested only by those who think that Broken computer climate model is proof.

The only real threat that global warming poses to our civilization is a crypto-communist economy that destroys policy responses.