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In the news over the weekend was a story about the audacious PR plot that seeded doubt about climate change.

It all started apparently with a man named E Bruce Harrison, the “father of environmental PR”, on an autumn day in 1992. A few months earlier, the international community had adopted the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC. The Global Climate Coalition, a body which actually represented fossil fuel companies, auto manufacturers, and steel and rail industries, wanted to counter the threat that the UNFCCC posed to its membership.

On that day in 1992, Harrison – a PR man with a proven track record of helping car makers, the tobacco industry and pesticide manufacturers to disown any harm they caused – delivered a presentation to the GCC in which he outlined a campaign to find and promote sceptical voices, initially within the industry and subsequently amongst the external scientific community. These sceptics were to be paid to give speeches and interviews, and to write articles, that would suggest human-induced climate change was not a serious problem.

In the years that followed, the campaign begun by Harrison was remarkably successful in persuading politicians in the United States to delay taking action that might dent the profits of GCC members.

A personal reflection

Reading this story reminded me of my own early employment. In 1991, a year before the UNFCCC was established, I was working in operational research at British Coal. I was in the ‘environment’ team, which was increasingly interested in the greenhouse effect. Our role was to analyse data and bring management up to speed. There was no discussion that I can recall about the possible implications for coal production, which was in steady decline in any case.

Later that year, I left British Coal and went travelling on a 6-month round-the-world air ticket. Did we think it was a bad idea environmentally because of the flying? No, it didn’t occur to us, any more than it had yet occurred to its management team that British Coal had significantly contributed to global warming.

And that recollection evokes mixed feelings about this weekend’s big story on big oil. Because on the one hand, it’s a disgusting tale of deceit. Vested interests hid behind supposedly independent and authoritative umbrella organisations with names like Global Climate Coalition. A number of respected scientists and economists were bribed to give at best one-sided and at worst fictitious accounts of the harmlessness of their paymasters’ activities.

Fossil fuel companies then and now acted and continue to act irresponsibly. Even those which did not pay for the services of climate deniers were complicit, happy to benefit from the deceit. And all the time, while the earth has got hotter and future generations are increasingly threatened, these companies have taken the line that they have no other option than to produce as much as they can sell, a myth that is perpetuated to this day in the name of shareholder interest.

So credit to the BBC for this important if depressing investigative journalism.

The other side

But there’s another side to the story, with various aspects that are troubling for different reasons.

Firstly – we need energy, though not nearly as much as some of us use. Fossil fuels are currently essential to people’s lives around the world. It sometimes feels like western environmentalists have forgotten that basic fact. We can’t just give up on oil and gas without replacement and renewable energy still only meets a small percentage of the global requirement.

Secondly – we need scepticism. It was, and still is, entirely right to ask questions and challenge orthodoxy; the problem was not the challenge per se but the dishonesty and corruption that accompanied it.

And the claims made by Greenpeace and others that oil companies knew all about global warming back in the early 1990s are far-fetched. It’s much more credible that even within the highly resourced research teams of the oil majors there was a combination of worrying evidence and genuine uncertainty. Which doesn’t excuse their underhand tactics or the procrastination of politicians.

The richest billion

Lastly – we desperately need a sense of collective responsibility. History, it is alleged, is written by the victorious; but it often seems to be written by those looking for someone else to blame.

Most of us are reluctant to act on inconvenient evidence. How many companies change their activity in a way that reduces their profits in response to partial and contestable evidence that such activity may be harmful? Under such circumstances, it is alas more common to carry on with business as usual, until the case is proven or alternative business opportunities arise.

Which means therefore that regulatory action is required. If politicians and the body politic are all-too-easily (even allowing for the lies) persuaded by corporate campaigning not to take action, the fault does not rest entirely with the corporates or their campaigners.

How many of us decide not to fly, or halve consumption of red meat and dairy, even when we are presented with plenty of evidence that these activities are harmful? We are more likely to embrace arguments for continuing to have those foreign holidays, and those delicious steaks: (i) the plane is going anyway; (ii) clever people are inventing green planes; (iii) local organic, pasture-fed beef is climate-friendly; (iv) individuals on their own don’t make any difference.

In surrendering to these and other excuses for carrying on with certain harmful things we enjoy, we exhibit behaviour that differs markedly in degree, but perhaps not in kind, from that of the oil executive who commissions reports to demonstrate that oil extraction and consumption are harmless.

We all have responsibility to do what we can. It is genuinely tragic when we conflate little influence with none. If the world’s richest billion people did the things we could – like altering our diet, reducing our personal travel, buying much less stuff – the climate would probably not be in crisis.

We frequently read, in both news reports and expert publications, that energy accounts for around 75% of human-induced greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and food – or, to be more accurate, forestry, land use and agriculture (FLAG) – accounts for the remaining 25%. This seriously understates the importance of FLAG, with serious consequences.

There are two main problems with the claim. The first is that it’s based on a subjective convention: the particular time horizon over which warming effects are measured. As different GHG break down in the atmosphere at different rates – methane within a dozen years, carbon dioxide over centuries – different time horizons yield different outcomes for their relative importance. For no especially compelling reason, the most commonly used timeframe is 100 years. If a shorter timeframe is used, the relative importance of methane increases: for instance, if 20 years is used, the importance of methane roughly triples. Methane is released by both the energy industry and by FLAG in roughly equal measure – so in the extreme that we integrate over a 1-year time horizon, the GHG contributions from energy and FLAG are about the same (prior to consideration of the second issue below).

Of course, if a longer time horizon were to be used, methane and hence agriculture would have a lower measured importance. I don’t know about you, but given the state of the world I’m personally disinclined to have as a working assumption that we’ll make it to 2100, let alone any later.

The second major issue is not subjective at all. Currently about half of the Earth’s entire habitable land surface is devoted to agriculture, predominantly livestock through pasture and grassland, a large proportion of which has been deforested in recent decades. If this process were to be reversed, we could eradicate a large proportion of the net emissions of GHG into the atmosphere. However, the standard calculations of annual emissions ignore this opportunity cost of using the land for livestock: they usually account for net deforestation within the year itself, but do not consider the potential value of the land as a carbon sink. It’s a bit like a royal accountant announcing that the monarch is impecunious, ignoring the capital tied up in his or her palaces, castles and estates.

But what about population – surely there are too many people? It’s not people who take up the land surface per se, it’s our livestock. If, on a global basis, we were to halve our per capita consumption of meat and dairy, and simultaneously the human population were to rise to 10 billion, the total land use by human beings and our animals would still fall, probably by as much as 20-30%.

Perhaps it’s hard for the British in particular to accept that farming is unsustainable, given our centuries-old agricultural practices. How can that be right when we’ve managed perfectly well for hundreds of years? The key consideration is this: if only Britain chooses to use half of its land for animals, the planet can cope, given how tiny Britain is in the global context. When the rest of the world copies the British example – as has happened largely within the last half-century, especially in Asia – the world’s climate is put under strain.

It matters if we are told food “only” accounts for a quarter of our GHG emissions. Not only is the proportion arguably a lot higher, what we eat is within our control. Whilst energy is very important too, it is difficult for us to influence as individuals (with some points of exception, such as home insulation and how much we drive and fly). By contrast, most of us have some choice over what we eat. Meat is not a staple: it is a luxury, increasingly these days both from a financial and environmental standpoint. It doesn’t need to be eradicated, but it does need to be substantially reduced. But while that may be true, we are and will continue to be fed with an alternative narrative, given the power of the farming industry, and our collective reluctance to change.