Our climate solutions are failing - and Big Oil’s fingerprints are all over them
People who do not spend their days reading climate reports or scouring the archives of oil companies are often surprised to hear that the fossil-fuel industry has been part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) since its inception. And it’s not just the IPCC. Oil companies have been involved in the entire international effort on climate change since it began in the late 1980s – and here’s a pro tip: they’re there for a reason, and it’s not decarbonisation.
The second part of the IPCC’s most recent report was published last week, and it finally acknowledged the oil industry’s biggest contribution to the climate space thus far: misinformation. This was followed closely by another new-to-the-IPCC topic: maladaptation, which refers to measures ostensibly geared towards warding off climate change, but which “may lead to increased risk of adverse climate-related outcomes, including via increased greenhouse gas emissions, increased or shifted vulnerability to climate change, more inequitable outcomes, or diminished welfare”, according to the IPCC.
The report points to “green gentrification” – the introduction of green spaces to a neighbourhood, which can increase property value and push low-income residents out – as an example of a measure that “offers nature-based solutions to the few”. Whether an action is maladapted can depend on context, the report’s authors add, for instance, air conditioning can reduce risk for the individual but is maladaptive at a societal level.
The report’s authors did not draw a connection between misinformation and maladaptation, opting instead to assert that maladaptation is often unintended. Yet an increasing number of peer-reviewed studies point to the fossil-fuel industry’s
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