What made us doubt climate change?
Fossil fuel executives have been asked to testify before the US Congress about the role the industry has played in misleading the public about climate change. What’s the evidence?
Recent research has shown that oil companies knew about the threat of climate change decades ago. Yet over forty years, it has been revealed that they contributed millions of dollars to think tanks and campaigns to spread doubt and misinformation about climate change – its existence, the extent of the problem, and its cause.
Across the US, these revelations have sparked a wave of lawsuits against the fossil fuel industry, demanding accountability for climate change – and now a US congressional committee has started to investigate. Executives from the world’s biggest oil companies and trade groups have been called to testify before US lawmakers in October this year, in an inquiry modelled on the tobacco hearings of the 1990s, which paved the way for far tougher nicotine regulations.
This week, The Climate Question looks over the evidence behind these allegations – and asks whether Big Oil might finally be facing a reckoning for its role in the climate crisis.
Presenters: Neal Razzell and Phoebe Keane
Producer: Zoe Gelber
Series Editor: Ros Jones
Editor: Emma Rippon
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- Mon 4 Oct 2021 01:32GMTΒι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ World Service
- Mon 4 Oct 2021 08:06GMTΒι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ World Service
- Mon 4 Oct 2021 12:32GMTΒι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ World Service East and Southern Africa, South Asia, West and Central Africa & East Asia only
- Mon 4 Oct 2021 19:06GMTΒι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ World Service except East and Southern Africa & West and Central Africa
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The Climate Question
Why we find it so hard to save our own planet, and how we might change that.
