The Climate Engagement Conundrum 3 – the External Barriers to Action (aka What Sun Tzu Has to Teach Us!)
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. – Sun Tzu
This is the third article in a four-part series examining why climate engagement has fallen so far short of what the science demands. The first article explored the foundations of climate concern, why apparent mass support was not translating into effective action; the second looked at the internal barriers — the values, perceptions and cognitive biases — that prevent people from acting on what they know. This article turns outward, to examine the powerful external forces that have deliberately exploited those internal barriers to stall meaningful climate action. The fourth and final article will look at what a more effective engagement strategy might look like in light of all of this.
The above quote from Sun Tzu in the Art of War, the classic ancient Chinese text on strategy, may be taken as a direct warning to the whole climate movement. If the oil and gas lobby has stalled effective climate action, particularly in the United States over the past 50 years, and now also in the EU and the UK in recent years; then it is correct to drop the blinkers and call that sector, its companies and lobby groups out for what they are, the committed adversary, the ‘enemy’.
Following Sun Tzu, it is essential to understand the fossil industry tactics and success for otherwise as he says for every battle won, another is lost. This fairly accurately reflects the experience of the climate movement in the past decades. For all the effort and talk (but not forgetting some significant achievements too) we have not reached our goals of a sustainable and secure climate; a key element of which is the stopping of all carbon dioxide and methane emissions as soon as possible.
50 years should have been enough, especially with the technological and financial resources now available, but carbon emissions, principally from the burning of fossil fuels are still rising and if anything global will to change appears to be weakening, even as the climate effects and risks become more acute.
In this third article in the series, I will explore when, where and how the fossil industry exploited all those internal barriers discussed in the last article time and again to effectively stall the phasing out of fossil fuels. I will look at the impacts of those efforts generally and in relation to the climate action movement itself.
This article may seem to be a low point in the examination of climate action but as Sun Tzu would agree, within it lie the seeds for truly effective climate engagement, with purpose and direction, knowing the opposition strategy and their modes of action. Those seeds and the scope to overturn the fossil industry propaganda machine will be looked at in the next article but first we must as Sun Tzu admonished understand the nature of the foe!
This analysis primarily relies on the analysis presented in chapter 2 of the text Climate Obstruction (J Timmons Roberts ed. et al) titled The Global Role of Oil and Gas Industry in Climate Delay and Denial by Geoff Dembicki and others.
Playing with our perceptions and priorities
As we discussed in the last article; people have a tendency to believe that things will continue as they always were, at least in the course of our lifetimes. The fossil fuel companies have played directly into this bias for normalcy and optimism by denying the urgency, the impacts and, at least initially, the actual existence of climate change itself. The alternative, acknowledging the severe consequences of carbon emissions, is so discomfiting both in its direct climate effect as well as the clear implication that we must fundamentally adjust our lifestyles to stop burning oil for our transport and coal and gas for almost everything else including heating and industrial activity.
Dembicki and others outline how the leading lobby group through the decades, the American Petroleum Institute, (API), commissioned the earliest report on carbon emissions in 1968 which accurately predicted temperature changes by 2000 and Exxon oil corporations own analysis on carbon emissions from the early 1970s was ‘sophisticated and precise’.
The early 1970s was the first time that the oil and gas industry was presented with a clear moral choice – to acknowledge its own research and pivot away from fossil fuel extraction towards development of new and cleaner forms of power or doubling down on fossils, smoke screening the decision. They emphatically chose the latter approach, establishing the Global Climate Coalition in 1988 with a mandate to block and delay the shift away from fossil fuels by emphasizing scientific uncertainty ( exploiting an inherent feature of the scientific research methodology).
Secondly, they unleashed a concerted campaign to frame the fight against climate change as ‘an attack on US living standard and lifestyles which would be seriously damaged by many of the greenhouse gas abatement proposals’ . The attack was epitomised in the national press advertising campaign, paid by Mobil which read:
‘Let’s face it: the science of climate change is too uncertain to mandate a plan of action that could plunge economies into turmoil’ .
The attack here intentionally exploited scientific uncertainty, the hallmark of its methodology used to advance knowledge, but with the bad faith political purposes to undermine its findings. A classical and highly effective ploy of the fossil industry to confuse and weaken climate action resolve.
These were not isolated instances of the fossil fuel industry hitting back against a threat to its economic model, but a sustained, well-funded and concerted campaign which firmly entrenched a narrative that ‘regulating GHGs is bad for growth’. Dembicki reports how in one year from 2009 to 2010, the top listed oil and gas companies spent an average of $25 million dollars each on lobbying efforts; in the EU it reports 251.3 million Euro spent in 8 years to 2018 lobbying EU institutions against effective climate action.
Often the attack was led by front groups set up to appear as community grassroots action groups but funded by fossil fuel interests which has even been given a name; ‘astroturfing’. One famous example of astroturfing was the so called ‘Energy Citizens’ set up as a pretended popular movement front to oppose the Waxman-Markey carbon cap and trade legislation proposals under the Obama administration in 2009.
In recent years, this concerted attack on climate action has become more frequent and has extended through the United States – Grist reports on the recent efforts by another lobby group Americans for Prosperity to stymy climate directed policy. Pushing hard a dubious affordability message in the left leaning state of Vermont, it attacked an increase of tax and regulation ‘to advance their own radical agenda’. Repeating and relentlessly reinforcing the framing of any action to either restrict fossil fuels or tax carbon emissions as an attack on ordinary Americans’ independence and on affordable energy. A clear connection back to peoples core values and priorities explored in the previous article in this series.
So what did all this ‘achieve’?
The oil and gas lobby have probably quietly (but not likely publicly) congratulated themselves on the success of their stalling tactics to date and it is in truth quite impressive.
In the initial phases when the attack on climate action sought to directly undermine the science, the concerted attacks stopped the United States in its tracks from ratifying the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. The Protocol was the first landmark, global attempt to limit carbon emissions and facilitated clean development mechanisms with the objective of reducing global emissions by 5% by 2012 compared to 1990 levels. That modest first global step to controlling emissions was signed by President Clinton but was blocked by a Senate resolution opposing the treaty. The result was that although the Protocol came into force internationally in 2005 it was fatally weakened from the outset by the US’s absence.
The second major obstructionist success related to the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (generally referred to as the Waxman Markey bill), introduced during President Obama’s first term with fixed targets to reduce carbon emissions gradually by 83% by 2050 and a renewable energy minimum requirement standard. The bill was in fact the culmination of several attempts going back to 2003 to pass carbon limiting legislation. It passed through the House of Representatives but again was blocked in the US Senate, meaning that it never became law.
The API rallied the fossil industry, the Energy Citizens and other ‘astroturf’ campaigns went into overdrive, fronted as a popular movement but funded by petro dollars, to kill the bill; spending over $370 million dollars, as reported by Dembicki, on the familiar but relentless messaging on the threats posed. When the Waxman Markey bill failed, with it went the largest direct attempt in the United States history to directly tackle carbon emissions. Incidentally its failure is estimated to have social cost impacts in the US of $60 billion, figures rarely reported. Had the Waxman Markey bill succeeded, it would have accelerated the drive to clean energy and changed the whole carbon trajectory in the United States and by example possibly the whole world. Such was the criticality of its passage or failure and the pivotal role played by coordinated fossil lobby opposition.
Part of the successful lobbying lies in the receptivity of people to reassuring messages about the ‘uncertainty’ of climate change or the ‘exaggeration’ of the urgency of the risks. Partly that success is due to the successful framing, irrespective of truth, of climate action costs and so called infringement by Government regulation on individual liberties.
The result of the lobbying on public opinion was also stark. Dembicki indicates that by the late 1980s , almost two thirds of American people reported being worried about climate change but by the late 1990s that figure had fallen to only half, even when the climate science was itself becoming more certain in attribution of climate change to human carbon emissions and the potentially disastrous effects that would have on a heating planet.
‘We are doing our bit‘
We have now of course progressed from those years in terms of our climate understanding and the general recognition of the climate threat as well as its principal cause from carbon dioxide and methane gas emissions to the atmosphere.
But as climate science developed and the evidence for climate change threats became clearer, the fossil fuel industry strategy shifted from efforts to undermine the scientific consensus towards a softer, more subtle approach but with the same ultimate objective to extend fossil fuel extraction and burning for as long as possible.
In this approach, the industry presents itself as a key part of the solution to climate change but instead of supporting a transition from fossil burning, they support and argue for costly, unproven and controversial technological ‘solutions’; the leading one being carbon capture and storage (CCS). CCS is a whole additional add-on in terms of energy drain (‘the energy penalty’) and additional substantial infrastructure costs to power and industrial plants to capture CO2 from the waste flue gases, transport the gas and store in deep geological cavities underground.
CCS is attractive because it allows the illusion of clean fossil fuels stripped of its carbon pollution, but CCS increases energy costs by between 50% to 100% which would never be commercially viable without major incentives and significantly increasing already high consumer energy costs. The reality is that after more than 20 years of funding, research and investment, CCS has very limited success rates and has not been able to scale. It has remained at demonstration stages, unsurprisingly so as an add-on technology and cost whilst solar and wind as stand-alone energy sources have soared in the same period.
The other strategy is one of distraction – this is where as Dembicki points out, the oil and gas companies focus their climate efforts on reductions in carbon emissions involved in the extraction and processing of oil and gas (‘scope 1’ emissions in UN terminology) and make claims and projections for the progress. But crucially all the while ignoring the fact that 80% to 95% of total emissions comes from the actual end use of the fuels (‘scope 3 emissions’). That, as their argument goes, is not the responsibility of the companies but of the individual consumers choosing to buy petrol powered motor cars and install gas boilers etc without admitting that their supply drives demand.
A third alternative framing is to focus on the huge growth of the ‘transition fuel’ of methane or natural gas power in the United States from the 2010s onwards when fracking technology to extract the gas really got going and catapulted the US in the largest exporter of energy in the world. Now gas has approximately half the carbon emissions for the same amount of energy produced and is therefore presented as a clean ‘bridging fuel’ in the energy transition and a positive solution. This is the argument that the EU accepted when permitting investment in gas fired power plants to be labelled as ‘sustainable’. This of course conveniently ignores the fact that burning methane gas emits substantial amount of carbon and when methane leaks (x70 carbon dioxide) is taken into consideration and can be as dirty as coal in terms of total carbon emissions as this Climate Junction Context article on gas illustrates.
Actions speak louder than words
The truth of the big fossil fuel companies’ real focus and commitments is made clear by the direction of the industry’s development plans. In 2021, the International Energy Agency (IEA) produced the generally recognised definitive analysis report on the steps needed across the energy spectrum to achieve ‘Net Zero’ by 2050 (2023 updated version). The report makes clear that net zero by 2050 means having completed the effective elimination of all carbon emissions by that date in order to keep the 1.5 heating threshold in sight (allowing for the balancing of removals with residual emissions hence the ‘net’ with the ‘zero’).
In 2022, the Guardian reviewed the oil and gas development plans of the oil majors; labelling each development plan which would result in 1 billion more tonnes of CO2 being emitted as a ‘carbon bomb’.
The article counted 646 such carbon bombs in the pipeline (for comparison last year the global emissions were 31 billion tonnes CO2) – enough at today’s levels of emissions to grow emissions for another 20 years, not counting existing capacity. The new capacity would be enough of itself to completely exhaust the remaining carbon budget in order to remain below 1.5 degrees of warming.
The reality is that the fossil fuel industry ambitions have never changed. The industry has not had some type of pauline conversion to clean energy, only at best the semblance of one and then only when it suited. Of course, with Trump back in power, delivered on a ‘drill baby drill’ manifesto and funded by the oil and gas majors; the pretence has been dropped. That victory itself, at least in part secured by the relentless anti climate action messaging over the decades as documented in this article.
Where possibly from here for climate engagement
So it seems we have reached the lowest point in terms of climate action commitment and engagement and outcome. A US President sounding louder than the most extreme oil and gas lobbyist ever dared, a fossil fuel industry seemingly vindicated in its decades of misinformation and large swathes of the electorate buying into false reassurances that climate change is all a con-job and hoax to rob them in taxes and impose ‘eco-fascism’ on the ‘free world’.
Much as we may like to think, it has not been a case of carry on regardless for climate activist groups and organisations. Climate action groups; pilloried in the majority right leaning media, fatigued by relentless climate misinformation, seeming public indifference or even hostility, beaten down by repressive laws and enforcement by a political system seeking to maintain the status quo and satisfy their large fossil fuel funders have reached a critical junction.
Roger Hallam, the Just Stop Oil leader imprisoned for 5 years for a climate protest (obstructing a motorway), is quoted in a Guardian article reflecting on the disbanding of the organisation and climate action at the cross roads more generally is quoted as saying:
While our impact may seem marginal and the crisis worsens, this is not due to the lack of effort – thousands have been arrested, hundreds imprisoned, facing the most repressive laws in modern UK history.
But the arrest tolls also reflect the belief, the commitment, the tenacity and ultimately the love for our planet of climate activists.
And that tenacity and dedication has not all been in vain, far from it. Keeping climate change in the minds of the public as a critical threat to all life has kept the issue alive when many as we have seen may prefer if it was conveniently packed away as some technological issue for ‘experts’ to handle.
And as the Guardian article reports, the activist Just Stop Oil disbanded after their key demand for a moratorium on new oil and gas licences in the UK ‘was now government policy’ following the Labour government election in 2024.
It also may have what is called a ‘radical flank effect’ where according to a 2024 Nature paper that unpopular activist groups such as Just Stop Oil can have a positive ripple effect on people’s actions even if they would not subscribe to the more disruptive tactics of those groups.
Learning Sun Tzu’s lessons
Nevertheless it is fair to say that that having learnt from the experience of disruptive, direct action; that the time is ready for the climate movement across the spectrum of action, to regroup and consider where it goes from here. As the hoped for snowball effect of climate engagement and commitment has not materialised and as emissions continue to climb; it seems that a new approach is now needed.
In the final article in this series, I will look at what solutions there may be to the engagement conundrum – to convert that large but apparently dormant support into a real force for change that people sense it can be. That rationally it needs to be when we are faced with the extremes of climate collapse that scientists consistently tell us we are moving rapidly towards.
Having considered the internal barriers in the last article and external barriers erected by the fossil fuel industry in this article, we are in a better position to understand the challenges we face and the lengths the ‘enemy’ is prepared to go to preserve its position of economic power and political privilege.
Sun Tzu’s advice was clear: know yourself and know your enemy. After three articles in this series, we are in a stronger position to do both. We have examined the internal landscape — the values, the biases, the psychological barriers that make climate action so difficult to sustain. And we have now mapped the external terrain: the deliberate, well-funded and decades-long campaign by the fossil fuel industry to exploit precisely those vulnerabilities, to sow doubt, to reframe sacrifice as tyranny, and to buy time. This knowledge is not a cause for despair — it is rather the precondition for effective action. In the final article, we will look at how the climate movement might fight the next hundred battles rather than merely the next one — and this time, win.
