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A response to Elon Musk's latest climate talking point.
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The richest man in world has a new message about climate change: It’s real, but don’t knock the industry most responsible.
“I don’t think we should vilify the oil and gas industry,” Elon Musk said while speaking about climate change during his two-hour conversation with former president Donald Trump last week. It was a sentiment Musk repeated four times throughout the 10-minute climate discussion. “I don’t think it’s right to sort of vilify the oil and gas industry,” he said, using the same verb—vilify—every time.
“Vilify,” interestingly, has two different meanings. It can be a synonym of “defame,” which means to speak falsely about someone. Or it can be a synonym of “besmirch,” which means to paint as a villain, whether true or false.
It’s tough to know exactly what Musk meant with his verbiage. But if he was arguing that people shouldn’t lie about the oil and gas industry, then I agree. The truth is enough for people to come to their own conclusions.
But if Musk’s argument was as I interpreted it—that we shouldn’t make the fossil fuel industry out to be a villain—then I think that requires some further explanation. Because after more than 10 years of reporting on the fossil fuel industry and climate change, I’ve found quite a few legitimate reasons to paint Big Oil as the bad guy.
Why paint Big Oil as a villain?
For readers who are new to this newsletter, I think it’s important to note that I am not a climate activist. I’m a journalist who went went to college for journalism and have only held journalism jobs. I’ve worked at news outlets with both liberal and conservative leanings, and my beat has been climate change since 2013. My primary goal is to help people understand one of the most politically, economically, and ecologically complex issues we face as a society.
So I’m not afraid to say it: The fossil fuel industry has done a lot of great things for civilization. Industrialization and rising economic prosperity would have been impossible without oil, gas, and coal. Fossil fuels have been primarily responsible for propelling our cars, powering our businesses, and keeping the lights on in our homes—all things I personally am grateful for. And globally, the fossil fuel industry employs nearly 32 million people. (Interestingly, the clean energy sector employs even more than that, but I digress).
At the same time, however, the fossil fuel industry has created a lot of awful things that threaten the very prosperity it helped create. The toxic air and water pollution that comes from drilling, mining, transporting, burning, and refining coal, oil and gas are fueling rises in death and sickness across the world, including cancer, autism and Alzheimers. And fossil fuels are chiefly responsible for climate change, a humanitarian crisis which is fueling extreme weather, sea level rise, disease spread, and food insecurity across the world—not to mention ecosystem and ocean current collapse. Currently, fossil fuels are responsible for 75 percent of current anthropogenic CO2 emissions.
For some people, this alone is enough to “vilify” the fossil fuel industry. But perhaps surprisingly, it’s not enough for me. As a journalist, I understand that all energy production has negative—even sometimes catastrophic—environmental and human health effects. As long as industries are willing to be held accountable for those effects, and work in good faith to address them, I don’t think it’s fair to call them “evil.”
But here’s the thing: If an industry doesn’t acknowledge the massive harm of its products; then publicly denies those harms for decades while acknowledging them internally; then makes false promises to fix those harms once forced to acknowledge them; and then spends billions to delay time-sensitive solutions through advertising, lobbying, campaign spending, and public school educational material—then yeah. I think it’s fair to say an industry has entered villain territory.
The fossil fuel industry has done all these things and more.
Big Oil is the main reason for climate delay
Refusing to vilify an industry for the harm it’s knowingly causing may make you feel reasonable, like the adult in the room.
But when you begin to truly digest everything Big Oil has done—and continues to do—to delay time-sensitive solutions to the crisis it has caused, you begin to realize that reasonableness only makes you a sucker.
The oil and gas industry is the primary reason we haven’t done much to stop climate change over the last 50 years. Here are just a few pertinent examples since 1959, when the first oil company scientist raised alarm bells about catastrophic global heating from fossil fuel burning. (Most oil companies were well aware of climate change by 1977).
1960s-present: Major oil companies create and distribute public school material and Disney comic books that downplay climate change and celebrate the fossil fuel industry.
1980s-late 2000s: Major fossil fuel companies take out ads in major newspapers and magazines that say climate change isn’t real.
1989: Oil majors created the Global Climate Coalition, a lobbying group dedicated to denying climate science and opposing emissions reductions.
1990s-present: Oil company advertising strategy shifts “from outright denial to more subtle forms of propaganda, including shifting responsibility away from companies and on to consumers.” This is when BP started promoting the term “carbon footprint.”
1990-2020: Five oil companies spent a combined $3.6 billion on advertisements to convince the public it is solving climate change and other environmental problems on its own.
2015-2019: Following the Paris Agreement to limit global warming, the five largest oil companies spent $200 million a year on lobbying and campaign donations to block climate action.
2018: BP spends $13 million to block a carbon tax in Washington state.
2021: An Exxon senior lobbyist admits the company only publicly supported a carbon tax because they believed it would never pass.
2021: That same Exxon lobbyist admits that the company lobbied Democratic and Republic Senators to remove climate provisions from the bipartisan infrastructure bill
2023: After publicly promising to reduce emissions and getting a bunch of positive press for it, Exxon, BP and Shell said “never mind.”
2024: Investigative reporting finds that oil companies have been using “carbon capture”—which they market as a climate solution—primarily to extract more oil.
These are, again, just a fraction of examples that I put together in about 45 minutes. (Readers, please add more examples in the comments; perhaps one day I’ll make a more comprehensive list).
Today, the fossil fuel industry and its allies paint climate activists as villains for demanding a “rapid” transition away from fossil fuels—as if they aren’t the reason the transition needs to be “rapid” in the first place. Indeed, the transition away from fossil fuels and toward renewables could have started 50 years ago, when fossil fuel companies first found out about catastrophic climate change.
Instead, the industry collectively mobilized to deny climate science and delay climate action—and today, it uses that delay to argue that it’s too late for a wholesale shift away from fossil fuels. It’s a masterful exercise in emotional manipulation and blame-shifting, and it’s worked on the richest man on Earth. But it doesn’t have to work on you.
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