The oil and gas industry has been lying about global warming for decades — accountability is long overdue
theconversation.com
A major report in the U.S. finds damning evidence of decades of deceit by American oil and gas companies. The situation in Canada is likely not much different.

The science is clear: the planet is warming at an alarming rate and we need to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions.

For decades, effective actions have lagged behind the needs of the moment. The 2022 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report suggested that at least part of the reason for this inaction has been “due to misinformation about climate science that has sowed uncertainty.”

The full scale of this misinformation was revealed in May 2024, when the United States House Committee on Oversight and Accountability completed its three year investigation into how U.S. oil companies sought to avoid accountability for climate change.

The report — tellingly titled Denial, Disinformation and DoubleSpeak: Big Oil’s Evolving Efforts to Avoid Accountability for Climate Change — explores Big Oil’s decades-long campaign of deception and denial finding that:

"Documents demonstrate for the first time that fossil fuel companies internally do not dispute that they have understood since at least the 1960s that burning fossil fuels causes climate change and [that they] then worked for decades to undermine public understanding of this fact and to deny the underlying science”.