A Turtle on a Fencepost: How Fossil Fuel Messaging Delayed Climate Action

“There’s an old saying in Tennessee that if you see a turtle on top of a fence post, you can be pretty sure it didn’t get there by itself.” – Ex-U.S. vice-president Al Gore

When we ask how we got here—to this place where our social fabric is being pulled apart by polarization and distrust, where the secure world order feels upended, and where we know, down to the molecular level, what we’re doing to the planet and ourselves, but we’re not racing to stop it—it’s impossible to overlook the role of the fossil fuel industry. Humans may be notoriously irrational, but so irrational that we would knowingly destroy our own life source?

We didn’t get here by ourselves.

The fingerprints of fossil fuel lobby groups can be found, quite literally, in every aspect of climate change. Attribution science, which enables us to pinpoint the direct source of planet heating emissions, is often called ‘fingerprinting’, because it shows, with precision, how (and which) greenhouse gases contribute to fossil pollution and climate-fuelled disasters.

Thanks to attribution science, we know that just 122 companies have been responsible for 94% of all industrial carbon dioxide emissions since 1959. We know that more than half of the increase in ocean acidification since 1880 is tied to just 88 fossil fuel and cement producers, led by Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP, and Shell. These same producers are responsible for 37% of the total area destroyed by wildfires in the western United States and Canada between 1986 and 2021.

A Brief History of Denial, Delay, and Disinformation

Documentation reveals that by the late 1950s, these companies knew a good deal about threats posed by climate change, thanks to their own internal research. By the 1970s and early 1980s, they had “a deep and sophisticated understanding of climate change that far exceeded that of the general public and policymakers.” James Black, a scientist employed by Exxon, warned the board in 1978 that “present thinking holds that man has a time window of five to 10 years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical.”

Around this time, coincidentally of course, climate research funding was cut, and the industry instead began to develop strategies for denying climate science.

A memo from this era between a coalition of fossil fuel corporations, relating to the development of a shared communication strategy, noted, “Victory will be achieved when the average person is uncertain about climate science.”

For the last four decades, in a coordinated global effort, the fossil fuel industry has united to capture and control public discourse and policy direction on climate. This is not a naive effort to find a cartoonish villain and ignore the complexities of climate change. There is a cartoonish villain, and climate change is actually pretty simple.

Throwing Rocks at a Giant

Oil and gas interests outspend climate advocates nearly 30 to one on public lobbying alone. If you’re wondering what that actually looks like, in Canada, that sort of money buys you around 1,000 meetings a year with policymakers. Three a day, every day, not including the off-book lunches and private events. But that expenditure is peanuts compared to what goes on behind the curtain.

From the establishment and funding of ‘independent’ think tanks that funnel warped information to policymakers and social media echo chambers, to astroturfing, to funding pop culture hits on your TV, to fuelling social breakdown through the support of divisive political movements like the Tea Party and far-right influencers like Charlie Kirk and Jordan Peterson, there is a vast and coordinated system of invisible, arm’s-length activities that shape what we see, hear, and ultimately believe.

If you’d like a non-exhaustive summary of the tactics used by the industry, check out this list, or follow the outstanding journalism of the team at Drilled Media.

It’s easy to look at the overwhelming money and effort invested by the fossil fuel lobby and feel that countering it is an impossibly Sisyphean task. But it’s important to remember that as recently as 2011, most people were unsure about climate change if they knew much about it at all. Today, 89% of people around the world are concerned and want more to be done. We’ve had huge success in raising awareness, despite the odds being stacked against us.

The next step is to use our growing understanding of effective climate communication practices to shift people from awareness to action—and shift them faster, because now we know what works.

The Framing that Works

The path to success isn’t more communication. Shouting facts more loudly isn’t going to change behaviours. Today’s complex communications environment demands strategic, agile, and targeted messaging, grounded in evidence.

These approaches have been tested in real-world settings and shown to positively shift people’s likelihood to adopt pro-environmental attitudes and behaviours:

• Accountability

Much of the PR and philanthropic expenditure by oil and gas companies is aimed at buying social licence precisely so they can avoid scrutiny and accountability—for example, by sponsoring sports teams and art galleries. This has been relatively successful to date, positioning these corporations as good guys, and stifling opposition because of the golden gag that sponsorship dollars can impose on athletes, artists, and community organizations.

But this is changing. In the lead-up to the 2026 Winter Olympics, a global survey revealed the vast majority of sports fans want fossil fuel sponsors to be dropped. More broadly, studies have found that 81% of people globally support taxes on the oil, gas, and coal industry to pay for damages caused by fossil fuel-driven climate disasters like storms, floods, droughts, and wildfires. As these events become more frequent and severe, demand for accountability rises, making this a highly successful messaging frame for advocates.

• Fairness

Climate impacts disproportionately affect disadvantaged communities and populations, and those who consider themselves ‘ordinary citizens’ (which is most of us). As affordability becomes a more pressing global concern, an increasingly-informed public is beginning to ask questions. They want to know why some corporations are making windfall profits, (legally) avoiding taxes, and receiving government subsidies, while families struggle to make ends meet with insufficient support.

Most people place a high value on fairness, so helping the public to draw connections between the climate and cost of living crises, and pointing to the multi-billion-dollar corporations that are profiting while grocery bills rise can help shift public sentiment away from the oil and gas industry.

• Information Integrity

As major tech companies are being dragged through the courts, distrust in online information is at an all-time high. In Canada, eight in 10 people are concerned about climate disinformation, while nearly nine in 10 worry about the integrity of health information. Globally, there is high demand for greater regulation of what can be shared as ‘truth’ online.

Aligning with movements supporting information integrity, which are almost universally popular, is an effective way for climate organizations to demonstrate shared values and reinforce their reputations as trusted sources of climate change information.

This could be through the development of formal or informal partnerships, or through campaigns that educate audiences on how to spot disinformation, critical approaches to media, and inoculation campaigns ahead of key moments like elections and climate disasters when disinformation levels are highest.

• Building Community > Being Right

As the world feels more uncertain and alarming, and scholars debate whether we are in a time of collapse, people are turning to community as an antidote to the havoc of uncontrolled external forces. You need only look at the instant and intractable coming-together in Minnesota over the last month to recognize that people are actively seeking out the power of community.

The climate movement can play the role of community-builder as well, a proxy for the broadly felt need to create a world that’s kinder, fairer, and more human. This must be done through inclusion: using accessible language in messaging, ensuring calls to action are free of judgment and shaming, allowing for incremental progress, and welcoming those who are unsure or who have recently changed their minds or taken action for the first time.

The best communities feel like safe, pleasant, positive places to be. So climate messaging should balance urgency with hope, joy and possibility, embracing irreverence and pop culture, and making climate action fun. This isn’t trivialization—it’s making sure this is the party that everyone wants to come to.

All around the world, people are rejecting what the fossil fuel industry stands for—unchecked greed, lies, inequality, and division. Awareness is growing that it’s the same pillars of the community that are eating away at its foundations. A multi-million-dollar communications budget isn’t needed to mainstream this awareness—it’s already on its way. Effective, consistent nudges with evidence-based messaging and creating a community that is the opposite of joyless isolation is how we get the turtle off the fencepost.

Cover photo: From  Facebook