Disinformation Campaign on Climate Change

Disinformation Campaign on Climate Change

By Dr Arvind Kumar

For almost three decades some corporations have supported a disinformation campaign about climate change science that has been spreading untruths and distortions about climate science. Several recent books, including a book by Oreskes and Conway, Merchants of Doubt (Oreskes and Conway, 2010), document how this disinformation campaign began in the1980s. On 21 October 2010, a report in the New York Times reported, that "the fossil fuel industries have for decades waged a concerted campaign to raise doubts about the science of global warming and to undermine policies devised to address it. It is further revealed that the fossil fuel industry has "created and lavishly financed institutes to produce anti-global-warming studies, paid for rallies and Web sites to question the science, and generated scores of economic analyses that purport to show that policies to reduce emissions of climate-altering gases will have a devastating effect on jobs and the overall economy."

These corporations are clearly doing this because they see climate change greenhouse gas emissions reduction strategies as adversely affecting their financial interests. According to this report, some US corporate-sponsored activities are helping elect politicians that have been influenced by the most irresponsible climate change scientific skeptical arguments. The oil, coal and utility industries have collectively spent $500 million just since the beginning of 2009 to lobby against legislation to address climate change and to defeat candidates who support actions to reduce the threat of climate change. If this can happen in the United States, other countries, including India, India can be expected to be more vulnerable to such and other types of corporate-sponsored disinformation campaigns.