When I was in my early twenties, in the late 1980s, it was common to hear climate change being dismissed as a “theory” or a hoax, one supposedly cooked up by a mix of socialists hoping to bring down capitalism and a group of rapidly emerging new specialists – climate scientists – eager for funding and prestige. We now know that the strongest evidence for climate change was actually proposed not by socialists, or even by the new breed of climate scientist, but by research conducted by the fossil fuel industries themselves through the 1970s and 1980s. Industry executives accepted the evidence presented to them as scientifically sound decades ago, and they then worked night and day to keep the public ignorant of their findings. The Global Climate Coalition was formed in 1989 – secretly backed by Exxon, Texaco, and BP – and served as a powerful “independent” lobby group. When its own technical advisers concluded in 1995 that the science of global warming could not be denied, the coalition aggressively suppressed the report. Another group, Informed Citizens for the Environment, set up by coal and utility companies, used advertising blitzes targeted at economically precarious groups to persuade them climate action would be harmful to their household finances. A leaked 1998 internal memo from the American Petroleum Institute mapped out another multi-million dollar strategy, funding independent-seeming scientists to inject skepticism into mainstream debate in the media. The goal of promoting these scientists would be to make “average citizens” and the media “understand (recognise) uncertainties in climate science”. “Victory” would be achieved, according to the memo, when climate doubt became “the conventional wisdom”. These fake think tanks helped organise letter-writing campaigns, inundating politicians, to make it appear that there was a groundswell of opposition to any action on the climate crisis. Remember, the oil industry launched these campaigns to deceive the public and journalists even though its own scientists had demonstrated many years earlier that continued fossil fuel burning would have catastrophic consequences. This is an extract from my latest article Thatcher warned in 1989 of a climate crisis. She did nothing. Nor will her successors. Find a link to the full article in the reply post below ⬇️