Who are the real fossil fools?
Some lesser-known figures behind the climate crisis
There are some figures we hear about often as having a large hand in the crisis we’re facing–the Koch brothers, for example, or Rupert Murdoch. But there are so many figures behind the scenes who are not household names, but should be. Their actions have actively moved us away from progress on climate change, and their commitment to fuelling misinformation continues to pollute the conversation–and the planet.
There’s some pushback to the narrative that individuals can be seen as having responsibility for things like climate change denial, inaction, or disinformation. And of course, no one CEO is responsible for the actions of the entire corporation they represent. It’s part of a larger system. But people also hold positions of power wherein their decisions materially affect the lives of many people. Their influence can’t be obscured behind the larger institutions they belong to. They made decisions, and those decisions have consequences. They knew what they were doing. We’re going to look at some of these people today; the lesser-known climate villains.
It’s important because we often see climate change as a kind of inevitability, the necessary outcome or something we could have controlled–something fundamentally outside of us. But that’s not the case. The situation we’re in is the culmination of many decisions by people like the ones in this list, who used their positions of power to prioritize profits for the few over the health and prosperity of people and the planet. And none of their efforts would be public knowledge, without the pioneering work of investigative journalists from organizations like DeSmog, Inside Climate News, Drilled Media, The Narwhal, and elsewhere.
7. Steve Milloy
Steve Milloy is a major figure in the history of climate denial, playing a large role in the efforts to import disinformation techniques from the tobacco lobby to the fossil fuel industry. As the executive director of The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC), a front group set up by Philip Morris and the public relations firm APCO & Associates, he helped to undermine public confidence in the negative health impacts of tobacco smoke. (The books Merchants of Doubt and Climate Cover-Up serve as excellent introductions to this topic).
Milloy is a former executive of Murray Energy Corporation, which is the largest privately-owned coal producer in the U.S. He has been on the board of the Heartland Institute, which is a major funder of climate change denial and has strong ties to fossil fuel interests. He also founded the website JunkScience.com, where he claims to be fighting against “faulty scientific data used to advance special, and often hidden, agendas.”
6. Steve McIntyre
Steven McIntyre is a Canadian mining industry executive with a penchant for claiming to find “statistical errors” in climate science literature, despite having no credentials or experience in applied science. He started ClimateAudit.org to share these “findings,” including his attempted debunking of the influential “hockey stick graph” showing that the warming of the planet over the last 1,000 years is unprecedented and caused by human activity. He managed to get on the front page of the Wall Street Journal with this claim, igniting much debate about climate change’s validity, despite study after study supporting the original conclusion.
He was also one of the ring-leaders of the “ClimateGate” scandal in 2009, where hackers released emails from climate scientists that were meant to show that scientists were “manipulating data and creating panic about climate change out of nothing.” They did this just ahead of the UN Climate Summit. Although no evidence of malpractice was found on behalf of the scientists, it succeeded in heavily shaking public confidence in climate science.
He’s been a spokesperson for the George C. Marshall institute, an oil-funded organization, as well as a speaker at the Heartland Institute’s International Conference on Climate Change, where he again attempted to debunk the idea that the temperature is rising abnormally. He’s done a lot throughout his career to harass climate scientists, stoke confusion about the legitimacy of climate science, and generally delay the imperative of action.
5. Myron Ebell
Myron Ebell is a tireless fossil fuel lobbyist who has been a major figure in climate denial since at least the 1990s. He served prominently on an influential taskforce set up by the American Petroleum Institute, known as the “Global Climate Science Communications Team,” which aimed to carry out a plan to “convince the public that climate change was uncertain.”
Environmentalists around the world raised alarm when he was eventually appointed as the head of the Environmental Protection Agency by Donald Trump in 2016, despite having no background in environmental science. In this capacity, Ebell gained attention for his climate denial and his efforts to undermine efforts to regulate carbon emissions.
4. Lee Raymond
Lee Raymond was the CEO of ExxonMobil until 2005, when he retired with a USD$400 million severance package. Under Raymond's leadership, ExxonMobil was found to be funding climate change denial campaigns and sowing doubt about the scientific consensus on climate change. As chairman of the American Petroleum Institute, Raymond also played a role in the “Global Climate Science Communications Team” plan to promote “uncertainty” about climate change science and its links to fossil fuels.
ExxonMobil's approach to climate change has been characterized by a strategy of casting doubt on the seriousness of the issue and resisting regulatory measures aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Raymond himself has been outspoken in downplaying the significance of human-caused climate change and advocating against policies that would limit fossil fuel consumption.
3. John Brewer
John Brewer is the chief superintendent of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and the commander of the Community-Industry Response Group (C-IRG), the arm of the RCMP that raided the traditional territory of the Wetʼsuwetʼen people in 2021 in an attempt to quell protests against the Coastal GasLink (CGL) pipeline. In this capacity, Brewer adopted the counterinsurgency playbook of the former CIA director David Patraeus, whom Brewer served in 2010 as NATO’s senior police advisor in Afghanistan. This was after David Petraeus became employed as a partner at KKR, the private equity firm that owns the CGL pipeline, where he directs its internal intelligence service.
In this role, Brewer used tactics employed in Afghanistan to “wear an insurgent down”. These tactics include constant surveillance, traffic stops, walk-throughs at all hours, physical searches, and much more. These actions have aimed to harass and intimidate land defenders, treating them as enemies of the state.
2. Robert Mercer
Robert Mercer, a secretive billionaire hedge fund manager and conservative political donor, has been prominently associated with funding organizations and causes that promote climate change denial. His financial contributions to various political campaigns, think tanks, and advocacy groups have been scrutinized for their influence on public discourse and policy regarding climate change. Mercer and his daughter spent “at least USD$3,824,000 between 2003 and 2010 directly funding groups opposing climate change action.”
Mercer is also one of the largest investors in Cambridge Analytica, the controversial data science firm that worked on targeting potential voters using psychological profiling on platforms like Facebook to help get Donald Trump elected. Mercer was also one of the most prominent donors to Trump’s 2016 campaign. He has used his vast wealth to delay progress on climate change, and erode democracy.
1. Antony Fisher
Perhaps the most influential person on this list is Antony Fisher. In some ways the godfather of neoliberalism, Fisher is a man who unwittingly laid the groundwork for modern climate denial. After WWII, Fisher made it his life’s mission to advance the ideology of free market fundamentalism by founding right-wing think tanks all over the world, primarily in the Anglosphere. He founded countless organizations, such as the Institute for Economic Affairs, the Manhattan Institute, the Fraser Institute, the Pacific Research Institute, and others which had as their primary mission to roll back state capacity through a program of privatization, deregulation, austerity, and tax cuts. In many ways, he has done more than anyone to create the regime of shareholder primacy which continues to obstruct coordinated government action on climate change. Fisher was also the founder of the Atlas Network, an influential think tank which is currently working hard to criminalize climate protestors and Indigenous land defenders all over the world.
Much of the fight ahead of us is not one of science–it’s one of ideas. It can be difficult to understand why all of these people, so well-educated, continue to refute the very clear scientific consensus about climate change and its risks. It’s not based in a rational place, however. It’s based on core unquestioned beliefs about the world that guide action, such as the idea that all forms of state control are bad, and that climate change regulation will necessarily lead to government overreach.
But it’s also crucial to remember that the forces that have led us here are not outside of us. They weren’t inevitable. They had their roots in various ideas that took hold, especially in the 20th century, and people like those above promoted them throughout society, upholding them, strengthening them. There are people to hold responsible. There are people who have delayed action.
If there’s anything to take away from this, it’s that money and position do garner power, but ideas are far more powerful. The doubt sown through media, PR efforts, and public opinion have delayed us more than perhaps anything else. These are the battlegrounds for future action–we have to figure out how to win there.
Three books we recommend to dive deeper into these topics:
Merchants of Doubt, by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, exposes how a handful of scientists obscured facts to sow doubt on issues like climate change, challenging the integrity of scientific discourse
Climate Cover-Up, by James Hoggan, delves into the orchestrated efforts by vested interests to conceal the truth about climate change, revealing the strategies employed to manipulate public perception
Our Biggest Experiment, by Alice Bell, scrutinizes humanity's inadvertent global experiment with the climate, exploring its consequences and the urgent need for action