BOOKBUSTER REVIEW: The Petroleum Papers
By Geoff Dembicki
Published by Greystone Books, £10.99
REVIEW BY TIM BARTON
The website for Left Foot Forward recently analysed data on far-right party funding, and reported that “climate disinformation database DeSmog” had found “that all of Reform Party’s funders in 2023 had oil and gas investments or ties to climate science denial, totalling £135,000”. They note that “the party holds a vocal anti-net zero stance, seemingly reflected in its funding […], [donors include] Panther Securities, […] First Corporate, who gave £100,000 in June 2023, a consultants firm owned by Terence Mordaunt, director of the UK’s leading climate science denial group, Global Warming Policy Foundation”.
Additionally, “Richard Tice, the current leader of Reform has previously denied there is a climate crisis, airing his anti-net zero views on GB News – who’s co-owner has invested billions in fossil fuels – where he is a regular presenter. In a scientifically debunked video, he called C02 ‘plant food’ in an attempt to challenge climate change facts”. They are far from alone, all major parties take bribes, sorry, ‘donations’ from fossil-fuel industry lobbyists.
This is not a new phenomenon, although the traction for such views has increased considerably during and since the lockdown year, as more people, trapped at home, absorbed huge amounts of dubious ‘news’ via the Trollosphere. Geoff Dembicki, a contributor to DeSmog, in his new book The Petroleum Papers traces the deep roots of what he describes as ‘the far-right conspiracy to cover-up climate change’.
GREENWASHING AND DENIALIST
The tragedy here is that the fossil-fuel extractive industries have been aware of their role in anthropogenic climate-change for many decades, but systematically not only suppressed internal reports, but frighteningly successfully propagandised against external agencies that have sought to blow the whistle on these issues. And now, decades later, and despite the environmental activists succeeding in pressuring industry to, in public, admit they are responsible, but whilst they less publicly fund a greenwashing and denialist propaganda machine to the tunes of millions of pounds, we have begun to reach limits many fear will lead to a synergy between various ecological drivers that will accelerate beyond any hope of successful human intervention.
The facts of ‘greenhouse gasses’ were first theorised and laboratory-tested in the nineteenth-century by scientists such as Fourier, Pouillet, Foote, Tyndall, and Arrhenius. The Royal Institution website notes that “Guy Callendar, […] showed in 1938 that human activity was responsible for increasing carbon dioxide levels, and hence of potential climate change”.
A RUNAWAY WARMING EVENT VERY SOON
Of course, CO2 is by no means the only greenhouse gas, a fact the disinformation crowd make much of, deliberately misrepresenting the situation. Methane is a major contributor, for example, which is one of a number of reasons many advocate a reduction in numbers of farm-bred cattle, who to put it bluntly fart too much. James Lovelock invented the electron capture detector and became the first to detect the presence of greenhouse gasses of the chlorofluorocarbon family in the atmosphere. Lovelock wrote many articles and books warning of the consequences of the ‘greenhouse effect’. The reality is that, whilst not the worst gas per volume in climate change, CO2 remains the most copious by a very large degree. As Lawrence Krauss noted in his book The Physics of Climate Change, over the last 150 years we have burnt through probably the majority of easily reached fossil fuels: oils, gasses and shales laid down over millions of years. He notes the difference between natural average annual CO2 emission and absorption, and contemporary emissions and absorption. And that our oceans are reaching their capacity to absorb heat & CO2, whilst our forests are fast disappearing, thus reducing the capacity of land-based mechanisms to absorb even ‘normal’ CO2 emissions. This augers a runaway warming event very soon.
Dembicki’s book traces the denial industry, it’s nefarious suppression of data, and it’s funding of those spreading disinformation. Unsurprisingly, giant corporations such as Shell, British Petroleum, Koch Industries, and Exxon have not only known of the problems their industrial pollution causes for many decades, but have and are actively suppressing, misrepresenting and frankly lying about it too. Their natural allies, of course, are in the agriculture industry, the construction industry, the transport industry, and the supermarkets. Productivist capitalism, and state-capitalist supposedly ‘left-wing’ nations, also seek to at best deliberately sideline attempts to curb emissions. Hence the rampant failures of our much-touted international conventions to agree limits.
IT WILL BE BITTER
Given the impacts of reining in the fossil-fuel industry, reducing livestock, reducing the use of artificial fertilisers, limiting private transport, trying to source materials and products more locally instead of shipping them from the Far East, moving away from out-of-town megastores and shopping centres, et cetera, it is no surprise to find the right-wing neoliberal globalists in bed with far-right populists who will blow any old dog whistle they can in order to suppress the effort to save us from a runaway climate emergency. It is no accident the Trollosphere has radicalised so many people against ULEZ, the climate justice movement, and those seeking a more decentralised and localist economy. The latter are allied with the movement to found ‘fifteen-minute cities’, a particular focus for over-weaning and irrational hatred from the populist right-wingers. The paranoia they spread will likely be the final straw.
It is ironic that Reform UK Party supporters are so cognitively dissonant, and unable to see through the dangerous spiv, Nigel Farage’s nonsense – on the one hand ‘we got our country back’, on the other he takes cash from those most inclined to push a globalist capitalist agenda and puts more fossil-fuel extraction right there in his Top 5 policies.
“If oil executives had actually taken seriously the climate warnings given by their own scientists” from at least the 1980s onwards, “we wouldn’t be experiencing the climate crisis.” And we are experiencing it, in its early but accelerating stages, right now, not in some far-off future. But of course, Essex Man wants his car, just as much as the oil barons want to keep the black gold flowing until the bitter end – and it will be bitter.
The Petroleum papers is available from Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road, Hastings TN34 1RE
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