Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Understanding how opponents of climate action employ these discourses of delay is essential to recognizing climate disinformation and misinformation, Arena said, and ultimately to disrupting it.
In recent years, while fracking’s supporters were shouting “drill baby drill” the oil industry began lobbying behind the scenes to undercut programs designed to make vehicles more fuel efficient or less reliant on fossil fuels.
Shell might believe its empire is too big to fall, but so did the absolutist monarchs at one point. So let’s continue imagining how Shell could, and eventually will, meet its end.
For decades, fossil fuel companies have been using PR firms to polish, reinvent, and fabricate their image; protect their reputation; and greenwash their activities, in ways that we are still trying to fully understand.
On Wednesday, a group of more than 450 scientists called on advertising agencies to cut off their fossil fuel clients and to end their ties with an ongoing misinformation campaign that has time and again killed progress on addressing the climate crisis.
As Judith Enck and others have explained, business as usual is like skydiving and not pulling the parachute. The longer we take to pull the chute and start seriously addressing plastics in the environment, the harder our landing is going to be.
In her new book, Overheated: How Capitalism Broke the Planet – And How We Fight Back, Kate Aronoff describes how a new type of denialism is taking hold in the fossil fuel industry, a bid to ward off systemic change and protect the business model.
When advocates support NZ2050 they are tacitly supporting a dangerous agenda leading up to COP 26 in Glasgow that will codify an unsustainable pathway with continuing high fossil fuel use, dangerous “offset” trade-offs, and unacceptable risks of unstoppable climate warming.
The companies that used to spend millions to deny that climate change even existed, now, since it is no longer possible to cover up the elephant in the room, seek to promote these doubts about the origin of it, emphasizing that the earth has always changed, that it is no big deal, etc.
Fossil fuel companies could face legal challenges over their misleading advertising, after a DeSmog investigation uncovered the extent of their “greenwashing”.
Six Extinction Rebellion activists have been acquitted in a landmark verdict at Southwark Crown Court this afternoon.
We are disappointed that our university, an influential institution with a moral obligation to lead by example, is so deeply involved in this industry and hope our report will act as a wake-up call, setting an agenda for change.
