Inspired by the brilliant “Letters from an American” podcast by Professor Heather Cox Richardson, I bashed out this below.
May 27, 2025, with atmospheric carbon dioxide at roughly 430.36ppm, up from 315ppm in 1958.
Speaking at the Australian gas industry’s annual conference in Brisbane the CEO of energy giant Woodside, Meg O’Neill, tried to stiffen the spines of her fellow fossil fuel activists by attacking young people who were taking what she called an ideological stand against fossil fuels. As Graham Readfearn of the Guardian Australia reports, she suggested the young are hypocrites for ordering cheap online consumer goods “without any sort of recognition of the energy and carbon impact of their actions”.
I want to give two bits of context – first historical about the gas industry’s response to climate, and secondly about the nature of these trade events.
It was not always like this. In the late 1980s, when the Greenhouse Effect” – which we now call climate change – was first a hot political issue, the Australian Gas industry had an initial interest in the greenhouse effect in supplanting coal. This continued in the late 1990s when the Australian Gas Association – the peak trade body at the time, was led by one Bill Nagle, who saw gas as “cleaner than coal.” He broke with the Australian Industry Greenhouse network. Coal interests were not impressed at the show of disunity. As described in the 2007 book High and Dry by Guy Pearse Nagle was warned by a senior Minerals Council figure
“You know, you pursue this hard line and you scratch the coal industry too much harder and they will come out and we will start talking about nitrous oxide emissions, methane, or pipe leakages…Don’t do it, because if you do it we’ll have a big brawl between the energy industries in this country in the public arena which won’t do anybody any good.”
Nagle’s efforts to reorient the Australian Gas Association failed.
On these sort of conferences – they act as a watering hole for lobbyists to rub shoulders with ministers, for trial balloons to be flown, and carefully honed publicity slogans to begin their journey to “common sense” – repeated by journalists, politicians and other “thought leaders.”.
The Australian Coal Association, now defunct, used to run bi-annual conferences. In 1990, much of the talk was given over to the greenhouse effect – including speakers saying it wasn’t real – and what might be done to blameshift or even take actual technical steps. Conferences like these also allow inadequate and/or hasbeen journalists the chance to feel important by their proximity to power and wealth, and provides cheap (pre-written) copy. So it’s a win win all around, except for the – checks notes – planet.
By the way, for more details about the gas industry, you can check out Royce Kermelovs’ recent book Slick and various reports of The Australia Institute on how much – or little – tax the gas giants pay, and who benefits.
What is the incumbent strategy on display
What O’Neill said is a very well established rhetorical technique. This process of infantilizing critics, ignoring the strongest or most socially powerful critics and instead aiming fire at children, is clever, devious and cynical.
By framing climate change as an issue that young people with their silly views and silly consumer habits are concerned with, rather than something scientists have been studying and warning about for 35 years, tat the Secretary-General of the United Nations, the late Pope Francis and countless others have screamed themselves hoarse over. O’Neill is setting up a straw man and knocking it down.
O’Neil is ducking and weaving away from the substantive issues that actual adults would need to confront, because she has nothing else if Woodside is to continue making profits, it will have to keep extracting selling fossil fuels that will be burnt and the carbon dioxide From those long molecules of gas will be released into the atmosphere, trapping heat. She knows this, and she also knows that carbon capture and storage and carbon dioxide removal is frankly, “solution” even if it were to work, which it has not so far.
Ultimately, O’Neill is deploying a version of what I call the “hypocrite/zealot” trap. If a critic benefits from fossil fuels they can be dismissed as a hypocrite. If they are vegan who never flies or drives, they can be dismissed as a zealot.
What are the earliest/clearest examples of this incumbent strategy being deployed, either on climate or in another context?
This trivialization of opponents and this willful ignorance is not new. Indeed, it pre-dates the battles over climate and environment, as laid out in Oreskes and Conway’s magisterial 2010 work “Merchants of Doubt,“
If you want to look at how incumbent trade associations and supporters of what are now regarded as horrific practices – slavery, child labour etc defend themselves – I would strongly recommend ES Turner s 1950 book Roads to Ruin: A Shocking History of Social Progress.
How has this incumbent strategy been challenged/delayed/defeated in the past?
So, how to respond? How does one challenge these techniques? Well, simply naming them is a start. By explaining, in clear, vivid and non-technical terms what O’Neill and others are doing, it makes it riskier for her and her colleagues to repeat the same trick again. But that can’t come from the young, because it will look like special pleading. This push back has to come from adults, and preferably ones with scientific and business credentials.
What power/forces would be needed to combat/move this incumbent strategy to the “too costly” or “not effective” space?
There is a new-ish expression doing the rounds – “every accusation is a confession.” While I don’t think that is always true, I do think it holds in this case. On some level, presumably, O’Neill knows what she is doing. She is the child here, refusing to accept realities that would force her to stop doing what she wants. Those she accuses of being children, they are the adults.
What is required is a properly grown-up conversation about where we find ourselves – at 430ppm and rising fast, Why we are here, why almost 40 years of scientific and political concern about climate change has in no meaningful way worked. That would require independent media, brave professionals and brave professional bodies, social movements and political parties that were not made up of -mostly- meatpuppets for extraction.
What makes the creation/maintenance/extension of that power/that adaptation more difficult.
Look, itt seems unlikely, given the last 40 years, that we are going to start being grown up now, when the social inducements to fantasies of technosalvation and explicit and implicit denial become stronger and stronger.
But who knows, I could be wrong.