For a brief while, Big Oil seemed to fear that the game was up. It assumed that there would be a popular and political backlash as the data leaked out.

In 1989, Shell plotted two future scenarios. In one, which it termed “Sustainable World”, carbon burning would peak in 2000 and then drop off, leading to a manageable 1C rise in temperatures. The other, what it called continued “Global Mercantilism” - or business as usual - would lead to disastrous outcomes.

“There would be more violent weather - more storms, more droughts, more deluges. The mean sea level would rise at least 30cm. Agricultural patterns would be most dramatically changed,” Shell’s 1989 report concluded.

A worldwide refugee problem would be unleashed too, as people fled hotspots where famine and drought hit first. “Conflicts would abound. Civilisation could prove a fragile thing.”

In response, public relations campaigns were organised to show how seriously the oil industry was taking the problem. In 1991, for example, Shell funded a half-hour video on the dangers of climate change for screening in schools and colleges.

Irrational faith in eternal growth

Averting a crisis for all mankind that the industry knew was coming may have been a moral duty, but it was not a legal one.

In fact, as explained before by Middle East Eye, the exact reverse happened. Throughout the 1990s, Big Oil successfully sabotaged meaningful climate action by pressuring western states to sign an energy treaty tying their hands on cuts to fossil-fuel use.

That was for a good reason. Under the capitalist system, the primary duty of oil corporations - like other corporations - is to maintain profitability and guarantee value for investors and stockholders. Ethics never got a look-in.

So the fossil fuel industry spent part of its vast profits pursuing a twin-track: first, muddying the waters about the climate science, then channelling attention towards largely meaningless, small-scale fixes that fell to the public to implement.

For the critical years when urgent, state-backed action was needed on a massive scale, climate denial, funded by dark money from Big Business, was given regular airtime on influential media channels like the BBC. Ordinary people were left, as they were supposed to be, confused and unsure.

Meanwhile, the burden of doing something was intentionally shifted away from governments to western publics. Small, private actions, we were told, would have big impacts.

Ordinary people were encouraged, for example, to convert, very gradually, from using wasteful, short-life lightbulbs to more efficient, long-lasting versions - lightbulbs that had been around for decades but kept out of production because they were far less profitable.

Now the cost-benefit analysis had changed for Big Business: the humble lightbulb was a weapon in the fight to placate a public and policymakers keen to do something about climate change.

Similarly, responsible citizens were advised to commute to work on a bike, even as governments exclusively prioritised road infrastructure improvements for motorists, not cyclists, and a wider culture was fostered vilifying bike riders, one that persists to this day.

It did not end there. The fossil-fuel lobby intensified its capture of the public space.

Corporate money in politics meant the political class was in no mood to take on the oil industry, whatever the scientists were saying. In any case, politicians, desperate for re-election, were not about to start questioning the precepts of capitalism in a two-party system in which both parties were expected to worship the model of endless economic growth.

The establishment media was embedded in the same network of interconnected corporations that profited from an oil-based economy. Their own short-termist goals depended on shoring up an irrational faith among the public in eternal economic growth on a finite planet.

Giant psyop

The bottom line was that no one with a public platform had any interest in warning the public that advanced societies were structured in a way that was hurtling us towards extinction. The profit-driven, over-consumption model of capitalism was never in question.

Instead, the fossil-fuel companies set themselves a deadline of the 2010s - the point at which, as their scientists had warned, climate disruptions would be hard to conceal from the public. By that time, the oil industry would need to have ready a new script that the oil industry was integral to saving the planet.

Which is exactly what it did. Recent reports show that ethical and green investment funds have poured money into fossil-fuel companies after those firms rebranded themselves. The oil giants’ profits have again hit record levels.

Under the so-called Green New Deals, nothing fundamentally changes. We still drive our own cars in pretty, individualised colours. We still holiday abroad. We still shop in large supermarkets with everything - including year-round exotic fruit flown in from abroad - wrapped and protected in oil-based plastics.

We are still encouraged through advertising to consume as much as possible and throw away items of new technology - from personal computers to phones - every few years through planned obsolescence.

But this individualised, competitive, wasteful way of life is being given a makeover. Cars are now hybrids or electric. Holidays are “carbon offset” somehow. Plastic on our food is described as recyclable. Advertising now explains to us how all the stuff we buy is saving the planet.

Living ever more of our lives online supposedly helps too, because it reduces our carbon footprint. It is a green revolution in which everything stays pretty much the same - including the ability of giant corporations to make massive profits.

Armed with warnings - decades in advance - from their own scientists, the oil industry had enough of a head-start to invent a self-serving narrative. It's one in which ordinary people are encouraged to consume as much as before, while being persuaded either that they are making a difference or that the damage they are causing will be reversed by imminent technologies.

The new watchword is “net zero”. But in truth, it is a giant psychological operation (psyop), as climate scientists have gradually started to appreciate.

In 2021 a group of three leading academics admitted that for years they had been duped into championing the promises of the Green New Deal.

Technological fixes, such as carbon capture, offsetting and geoengineering, were “no more than fairy tales”, they warned. Net zero policies “were and still are driven by a need to protect business as usual, not the climate”.

One, James Dyke, an expert in global systems at Exeter University, observed: “It’s astonishing how the continual absence of any credible carbon removal technology seems to never affect net zero policies. Whatever is thrown at it, net zero carries on without a dent in the fender… I've now realised that we have all been subject to a form of gaslighting.”

Unhealthy cynicism

This has turned out - whether intentionally or not - as a win-win-win for Big Business.

Much of the public is wrongly persuaded that the climate crisis is still some way off, and that the action necessary to avert it is in hand through technological advances like carbon capture. As a consequence, they have little truck with an increasingly noisy climate protest movement.

Significant sections of the protest movement itself have been hoodwinked into believing the Green New Deal offers good-faith solutions - despite the fact that it has been hijacked to disguise business as normal.

As a result, the elephant in the room - the inherent, self-destructive tendencies of capitalism - is pushed by protesters to the sidelines or out of sight completely. Protests are invariably restricted to policy failures or government U-turns.

Even the protest movement’s figurehead, Greta Thunberg, who last year finally came out against capitalism with the publication of The Climate Book, has found it hard not to drift back into supporting business as normal.

In recent months she has become an increasingly high-profile partisan in the Ukraine war, effectively greenwashing the West’s cynical proxy fight against Russia on behalf of its war and energy industries.

The Ukraine war, provoked all too predictably by Nato expansion to Russia’s borders, has offered enormous profiteering opportunities for the West’s military, weapons and oil industries.

That has served not just as a welcome distraction from the urgent need to tackle the climate crisis. The war’s collateral damage - from the Nord Stream pipeline explosions to the Kakhovka dam rupture - is wreaking an enormous ecological toll. The war itself, and the refusal to consider peace talks, is fuelling the very forces most responsible for environmental destruction.

Trapped in the middle is a third camp. It has grown terminally cynical. Some deny any kind of climate emergency. Others write off the green agenda, arguing that the deadline to save the planet has been missed and any action is now futile.

Western publics are confused, embittered and divided - the ideal conditions in which inertia reigns and Big Oil can carry on as normal.

Growth paradigm

With no one in the mainstream grappling with the reality of what lies ahead, leading financial institutions have been free to pretend that capitalism’s relentless growth paradigm can be squared with sustainability.

A 2017 report, for example, by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a world trade body comprising the world’s 38 most developed states, is titled simply: “Investing in Climate, Investing in Growth”.

The World Bank champions continuing growth - for western corporations - under the deceptive rubric of “development” for the Global South.

The market cheerleaders of the British government trumpet their green credentials. “Our transition to a green and sustainable future will provide new opportunities to grow and level up the UK economy,” a 2023 policy paper says. Such claims are being made, as noted earlier, even as the government and opposition scramble to reverse policies that are the prerequisite for a sustainable future.

The European Commission, meanwhile, calls its Green Deal “Europe's new growth strategy”, even as it fails to fund it.

The exclusive focus on climate change has served too as a kind of sinkhole, into which much wider problems of ecological degradation through human activity can be disappeared. While Big Business is busy promising fairytale tech fixes like carbon capture, attention is diverted from the things for which no fixes are being offered. They include a massive, global loss of biodiversity, shortages of fresh water, soil degradation, deforestation, air and water pollution, microplastics, ocean acidification, the over mining of rare minerals. The list goes on.

Ecologist William Rees, professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia, has referred to modern techno-industrial culture as “fundamentally dysfunctional”. It “is systematically - even enthusiastically - consuming the biophysical basis of its own existence.” He describes humanity’s relationship to the planet as analogous to a “malignant parasite”.

Heads in the sand

Behind the scenes, politicians and officials appear less sanguine than their public, simple-minded declarations.

Though they refuse to face up to the inherent contradictions between ecological and economic demands, they are recognising the heavy costs certain to be inflicted on each nation’s finances by more extreme weather events and rising oceans.

In late 2021, a US Treasury panel concluded that the climate crisis was an “emerging threat” to the country’s financial stability, with the potential to wipe out trillions of dollars of assets. 

Nonetheless, when faced with a choice between addressing the climate emergency or pursuing growth, the economic imperative triumphs every time.

In January, at a meeting of central bank chiefs in Stockholm, the head of the US Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, urged his western colleagues to prioritise short-term goals like fighting inflation rather than address the long-term need to fight climate change. “We are not, and will not be, a climate policymaker,” he said.

The climate emergency, and the wider ecological crisis, will put this kind of neoliberal orthodoxy under ever greater strain. Without a meaningful response, something will have to give. Already, the twin pillars of the West’s liberal democratic order are starting to crumble: the commitment to free speech and the right to protest.

Ahead lie ever more unaffordable energy bills, empty supermarket shelves, floods and heatwaves, wasted expenditure on resource wars, and the more general symptoms of ecological collapse.

Burying our heads in the sand a little longer won't make the coming battle go away. It will just make survival even less likely.

Jonathan Cook is the author of three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His website and blog can be found at www.jonathan-cook.net