The origin story of climate denial
The life and legacy of Antony Fisher
Much of this work is built on the fantastic series written by Brendan Montague for Desmog. If you like this piece, we recommend checking the full series out here.
One of the biggest obstacles to climate action today is the idea that corporations should be able to self-regulate and write their own rules; that nothing can be done in the public interest if it interferes with making profits. Even fifty years ago, this idea was far from accepted. How did we get to a place where it’s so widely accepted as truth?
You may not have heard of a man named Antony Fisher, but he’s one of the figures whose life has shaped the world as we know it in profound ways, despite not being a household name. Throughout his lifetime, he worked tirelessly to entrench market fundamentalist ideas throughout the western world, sowing the seeds for modern-day climate denial. The network of think-tanks he founded–and the corporate propaganda they espouse–continue to be some of the greatest obstacles for activists today seeking progressive change.
His life and experiences offer a unique perspective into the systems that continue to prop up the corporations who fuel climate denial. Today, we want to explore how his ideas came to be, and what we can do about it going forward. To start, we need to start with his own unique origin story and the forces that shaped his beliefs.
Fisher was born in 1915. When he was just two years old, his father was killed in World War I. After growing up Fisher found himself on the battlefield during World War II. This would prove to be the great tragedy in his life. First, his cousin was killed in battle. Just a few days later, his closest friend died in another. And then just months later, he saw his brother, Basil, plummet to the ground after his plane was shot and his parachute caught fire as he tried to escape.
Fisher left traumatized, with an intimate understanding of the horrors of war. He wanted more than anything else to prevent humanity from descending again into violence and conflict. He became obsessed with researching the forces–political, economic, social–that had led to the war in order to understand how to prevent it from happening again. He genuinely wanted to make the world a freer place, where young men did not have to sacrifice themselves by the millions for the geopolitical whims of nation-states.
He came to believe that state control was what led humanity down the path of tyranny and violence. As Britain began to make moves towards nationalizing their industries and increasing state-level economic planning, Fisher grew alarmed. He read Friedrich von Hayek’s (at the time, quite fringe) book The Road to Serfdom, which greatly influenced his thinking. Hayek wrote that central planning was the first step towards totalitarianism and the state being empowered over the individual. Both believed that socialism was the ideology that sowed the seeds for the Nazis to come to power in the leadup to World War II, and thus believed that a free market, with little to no intervention from governments, was the key to long-lasting peace and freedom.
Fisher and Hayek began a kind of alliance. Fisher originally wanted to go into politics to spread his free market ideas, but Hayek convinced him that think tanks were where the true power lay. Both men became adamant that the way to shape the world was through the marketplace of ideas. It wasn’t the politicians who truly had the power; it was the professors, journalists, and intellectuals who shaped what was seen as acceptable and desirable for society. Throughout his life, Fisher often spoke of the “war of ideas” that he was out to win.
Although Hayek and Fisher’s ideas are commonplace now, they weren’t always treated as such. At the time they were first published, Hayek’s ideas were ridiculed, many publishing houses rejected his book, and he wasn’t taken seriously as an economist. However, as time passed and a small group of powerful people–including Fisher–rallied behind his ideas, they began to sow the seeds for free market ideology (what we now call neoliberalism) to spread across Britain and the rest of the world. Neoliberalism, as we know it today, is the ideology that states that “unless we submit to the ‘invisible hand’ of the free market we shall cause totalitarianism and want on a global scale.”
The Rise of the Think Tank
With the money that Fisher made by bringing factory chicken farming to Britain (another story entirely), he set out to realize his think tank vision and spread his free market ideology further. In 1955, he started the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) in the U.K., the first think tank of its kind. At first it didn’t have great success until Fisher recruited their very first corporate sponsor: Royal Dutch Shell. Then came BP. And with these powerful actors behind it, the IEA began to take off. It became extremely influential, relentlessly promoting Hayek’s neoliberal ideas throughout the country and paving the way for politicians like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan to come to power.
One of the IEA’s key strategies was not disclosing its corporate donors, so the corporations could use this ostensibly unbiased institution to say the things that people would not trust if it were coming from them directly. They would write papers, pay for their work to be available in universities, and find ways for their ideas to penetrate all levels of public thought.
In 1977, Fisher went global. He linked up with the Koch brothers in the U.S. and founded several more think tanks including the Manhattan Institute and International Institute for Economic Research, which became the Atlas Network and the International Policy Network a couple of decades later. He also founded the Fraser Institute in Canada, and helped start countless other free-market think tanks, giving them funds and operational support. The Atlas Network was the one that finally became the largest and most influential; today, it works with nearly 500 other think tanks in over 90 countries.
Today, the Atlas Network engages in campaigns to criminalize and delegitimize environmental movements. They label them as terrorists, and actually help draft anti-protest legislation for governments, making it illegal to interfere with “critical infrastructure.” This network of think tanks is unimaginably powerful and has arms in countries around the world, and it was all set in motion by Fisher and those around him.
Understanding this rise of free-market fundamentalism is crucial to understanding modern climate change denial and the PR machine the think tanks have set up to spread it. Fisher’s think tanks have been some of the most fervent opponents to climate action. Given all of this context, however, it’s not hard to see why.
Environmental regulations almost necessarily distort the “free market” and increase government control by doing things like regulating pollution or even imposing moratoria on certain destructive activities. As such, they represent for the neoliberals the first step on the road to tyranny, violence, and unfreedom. ‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions,’ as the saying goes. Although climate change regulations might seem harmless or well-meaning on the surface, for the neoliberals they represent a Trojan Horse that is destined to lead to totalitarianism.
To counter this perceived threat, those funding the think tanks have invested countless resources in fuelling doubt, attacking climate science, and spreading disinformation. They are able to do this because they hide behind the veneer of the “research” carried out by the think tank’s “experts.” They’ve been extremely successful at halting progress on climate change regulation–and to no-one’s surprise, the fossil fuel industry has been more than happy to help out.
This piece of history is important for several reasons. The first thing that’s striking about it is the very human story of Fisher’s global influence campaign. Although he’s often presented as a villain–the ‘father of climate denial’–it’s not hard to trace the origin of his beliefs to a few traumatic events in his early life. The horrors of war he experienced in his youth made him determined to awaken humanity from its slumber, undertaking a sincere effort to create the conditions which ensured peace and prosperity. At least at first, this seemed like a truly good-faith effort, however misguided.
It’s important to remember that most beliefs are shaped by direct experiences. Our understanding of the world is based on what we see, feel, and learn to be true in our lifetimes. Often, we focus on our incredulity at beliefs that we don’t agree with–“How could they think that way?” “How could they deny climate change?” “Don’t they have children?” Although asked rhetorically, it’s worth asking the question seriously: how were the beliefs of those opposing climate action genuinely shaped? What historical, political, and social forces were at play? It’s hard to find human beings who are truly evil or uncaring–it’s too easy to write others off with these labels and assign them as the opponent without looking more deeply at why they might hold those views in good faith.
Often, we assume that the only thing behind these ideas is raw self-interest on the part of fossil fuel companies who are pursuing their own profits at the expense of all else. That’s part of it, but underneath it, there is an ideology that genuinely seeks to bring about the kind of world its proponents believe to be desirable, prosperous, and free. The complicated thing now is that they are interwoven with one another almost inextricably; many people working at these think tanks may very well believe in the ideology that free markets will bring prosperity for all. But they’re funded by fossil fuel companies who shape these think tanks’ activities in their interests, and whose intentions are often more insidious.
We also have to understand these think tanks are a massive cog in the machine that fuels corporate fossil fuel propaganda. Fisher and Hayek were correct that ideas are extremely powerful, sometimes more powerful than politics itself. Figures like Thatcher recognized this too; she referred to Fisher and the IEA in her famous quote “It started with ideas, with beliefs. That’s it. You must start with beliefs.” In the years following, as free-market fundamentalism took off, her assertion turned out to be remarkably true.
But how does this global network of corporate propaganda work in our world today? And what role does Fisher’s labyrinth of think tanks play in propping it up?
Grassroots and Treetops Propaganda
To understand this idea, we can turn to Alex Carey’s book Taking the Risk out of Democracy, which talks about the role of corporate propaganda in eroding democracy in the Australian context. Carey makes a brilliant distinction between the different forms of propaganda that these corporations employ to target different sectors of society. He calls them ‘grassroots' and ‘treetop’ propaganda.
‘Grassroots propaganda’ targets vast numbers of mostly working-class people to shift the public sentiment to be favourable to business interests. Through mainstream media like TV, radio, mainstream news, they propagate ideas like discrediting unions, linking free-market ideas to patriotism, and instilling the idea that hard work, not systemic factors, are what lead to success.
‘Treetop propaganda,’ on the other hand, is aimed at the elites, the leaders of society. Its purpose is to set the terms of the public conversation–what’s within the realm of debate, what’s on the political or academic agenda–and make sure that, too, is aligned with business interests. Think tanks are the major disseminators of treetop propaganda through means like policy research, political pressure, and shaping research agendas through funding.
The corporations need to target both, because the elites–politicians and the like–can generally only act in ways that could conceivably match public opinion (at least in so-called democracies). So, they must first shape the public opinion. Then, they can do more targeted messaging to accomplish what they really want at the policy level. However, it can’t come directly from them, because then the corporate influence would be too stark. So they employ the think tanks to be their mouthpieces under the guise of independent expertise that both politicians and the public can trust.
As Carey aptly wrote in his book, “The twentieth century has been characterized by three developments of great importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.” Nothing could more accurately capture the moment that we find ourselves in.
The global network of think tanks is something that we don’t often think about–and that’s also by design. They often prefer to work more behind the scenes, not advertising their ties to industry, and presenting themselves as neutral gatherers and disseminators of data, research, and information about issues relevant to society at large. But they have massive power to shape our systems to be favourable to the exact corporations that many of us are fighting against.
That’s one of the important takeaways from this story: we can’t afford to only focus on the fossil fuel companies. We have to zero in on the networks of support that exist around them. These companies continue to be successful in large part because the environment they exist in–regulatory, political, even social–remains hospitable to them. What we need to do is not only to oppose them ideologically, to paint them as the villain (although, in many ways, they are). We need to make the environment they exist in inhospitable to their propaganda–through changing public opinion, pushing for regulatory change, and exposing their actions for what they are.
The other important takeaway from this story is the sheer power of beliefs, stories, and ideologies in shaping our world. The think tank strategy worked. These once-fringe ideas are now more like the water we live in, and much of that is thanks to the conversation-shaping they engaged in over the last decades. We should all take note of that and ask ourselves: have we, on the other “side,” so to speak, capitalized on the power of ideas to their fullest potential? And if we haven’t, how do we start?
Of course, one important contextual factor is that these think tanks had the vast wealth of fossil fuel companies and other business interests behind them. Money goes a long way to accomplishing these goals in our current world–something that is often harder to come by in progressive spaces. But the point still remains; ideas, beliefs, and words are an incredibly important arena for change, and we need to capitalize on it for our own goals. We need to begin shaping the conversation towards the alternative visions for what the world could be like if they don’t win. The stakes couldn’t be higher–we need everyone’s voices to bring this future forth.
The third season of the Drilled podcast tells a similar story to some of what we’ve explored today. If you’re a podcast fan and want a more in-depth exploration of these ideas, it’s one to add to your list.
This article from Desmog titled “Meet the Shadowy Network Vilifying Climate Protestors” explores the Atlas Network in more detail. You can also find their series on Antony Fisher referenced at the top here.
This article from Ricochet titled “Playbook for RCMP’s Wet’suwet’en raids provided by former U.S. commander in Iraq and Afghanistan,” which explores C-IRG, the controversial arm of the RCMP in Canada that used brutal tactics to crush Indigenous resistance against a pipeline project. It offers insight into the deep network of powerful people organizing to break down activist resistance to industry projects.
