From Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

It’s not that nobody cares, its just people worried about the imminent end of the world are too shy to speak up.

COVERING CLIMATE NOW / MARCH 19, 2026

The Silencing Power of Big Oil’s Climate Lies

A new report suggests that the majority of people think new economic rules are required to curb climate change. The issue is that those majorities think they are a minority.

MARK HERTSGAARD

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Over the years, companies like BP and ExxonMobil have employed various strategies to deflect public anger and the changes in policy it might encourage. For decades, the strategy was simply to lie. By the 1970s, their own scientists were telling senior management that burning fossil fuels would threaten the survival of civilization. But the industry chose to hide the truth anyway, spending millions of dollars on advertising, phony research, and other forms of propaganda to convince the public, government officials, and the press there was no cause for alarm.

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One reason Big Oil has worked so assiduously to manage public opinion is simple enough: Most people understandably don’t want to see global warming ruin the planet. As CCNow’s 89% Project has reported, 80 to 89 percent of the world’s people want their governments to take stronger climate action. However, these same people think that they’re the minority, so they mostly stay silent. It’s a perverse tribute to the industry’s propaganda, which has many people convinced that climate change is too divisive to even talk about, much less to tackle.

A report by Climate Majority Project, a nonprofit based in the UK, argues that climate change is not the only issue where most people favor radically different approaches than what the status quo is delivering. The report finds that the majority of people around the world feel threatened by climate chaos, fear societal breakdown, and want less consumerism. But these majorities also mistakenly think that they are a minority, so they tend to say, and do, nothing. For example, a “climate concerned business majority” believes that new economic rules are needed to avoid catastrophe, but they don’t lobby for such rules. The result is a “spiral of silence” that blunts the action that most people want, according to the report.

…Read more: https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/the-silencing-power-of-big-oils-climate-lies/

I guess it was inevitable that greens would lay claim to supporters who are too shy to speak up. I mean, anyone who claims we are in the midst of a climate emergency nobody can see has the capacity to imagine supporters who nobody can hear.