Trump’s UN speech and Big Oil’s lies undermine our democracy
When Donald Trump stood before the United Nations and called climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated,” he echoed a script the fossil fuel industry has rehearsed for decades. Lies and gaslighting have become more powerful tools than the world had anticipated. They erode trust in science, paralyse democratic debate, and protect profits while the planet burns.
From Exxon’s suppression of its own clean energy research to the psychological double binds that trap liberal societies, the cost of this fossil con is measured in melting glaciers, deadly heatwaves, rising seas – and the corrosion of democracy itself.
The ‘Great Fossil Con’ took off in 1989 when Exxon, BP, Shell and others formed the Global Climate Coalition to cast doubt on climate science and lobby against efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. 36 years on, naming it, exposing it, and resisting it is the first step towards breaking its hold.
Below are some recent and relevant reflections on the topic.
Gaslighting democracy – a psychological perspective on the theatre of lies
By Steffi Bednarek
When Donald Trump stood before the United Nations and declared that climate change was “the biggest lie ever invented,” he was not only engaging in political theatre, but was also deploying a psychological strategy that reaches far deeper than policy or science. His lies are effective, even when the majority of people recognise them as false, because liberal democratic cultures are particularly vulnerable to the psychological dynamics that are employed by populist leaders.
Liberal societies hold a deep faith in human rationality and progress. Public life is built around a respect for evidence and the assumption that debate is a good-faith exchange of rational arguments in which reason will eventually prevail. Gaslighting does not play by those rules. When reason fails, a culture built on reason alone is left with few tools to respond.
If liberal societies are to resist manipulation, they must recognise that the response requires more than fact-checking.
This is not a problem to be solved but a stuckness in multiple double binds:
– If liberal societies allow lies to circulate unchecked, truth erodes. Gaslighting requires confrontation and boundary-setting, but the restrictions needed would undermine the very principles and values that democratic societies are built on.
– If we allow leaders who lie access to the usual platforms, we allow them to undermine our core values. If we withdraw access, we are left without the shared frameworks that make social life possible and thereby undermine our own values.
– Trump’s lies about climate change being a hoax respond to people’s need to feel safe and secure in ways that make us all unsafe. If we successfully expose his lies and argue that climate impact is real, everyone is left feeling unsafe and insecure
In his theory of double binds, Bateson argued that resolution of these unsolvable situations does not come from rationally weighing up one side or the other or from working within the parameters of the double bind but from shifting to a higher order of understanding.
A double bind cannot be worked out, it can only be transcended by recognising the paradox itself and stepping into a wider frame.
Instead of trying to “win” the bind, we first need to acknowledge it with full awareness. The key is recognising that double binds are not problems to be fixed but invitations to a shift in perspective. They reveal the limits of the logical mind and call for a wider, more systemic awareness. In other words, weird situations need the capacity to come up with weird and unfamiliar responses.
This is an extract from a longer article by Steffi Bednarek from Centre for Climate Psychology called ‘Gaslighting Democracy and the Double Bind of Truths’
Unpacking Trump’s UN speech
| From Reuters Sustainable Switch newsletter on 25 September 2025 By Sharon Kimathi, Energy and ESG Editor, Reuters Digital Lock me up and throw away the key as it looks like I’ve been writing about “the greatest con job” for years. At least that’s what United States President Donald Trump said during his address to the United Nations General Assembly, doubling down on his skepticism of global environmental initiatives and multilateral institutions. “It’s the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion,” Trump told the General Assembly. “All of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons, were wrong.” He added: “They were made by stupid people that have cost their country’s fortunes and given those same countries no chance for success.” Here at Reuters, we delve into the facts. Let’s dissect those statements. ‘Greatest con job’ Scientists say climate change is real, mostly caused by humans, and getting worse. They point to rising temperatures, stronger storms, and melting ice as clear signs. Groups like the U.N. have warned that waiting too long to act could cause serious damage to the planet and people.In fact, just this week alone, countries across Asia have been battling against a Super Typhoon Ragasa from the Philippines to Taiwan and Hong Kong. There was also the finding that Switzerland’s 5.4 km-long Gries Glacier, a focal point for research, is retreating at an alarming pace as climate change accelerates an unprecedented ice melt across the country, the Swiss glacier monitoring service said. And according to research published in Nature Medicine this week, more than 62,700 people died in Europe from heat-related causes in 2024, with women and the elderly representing the largest part of the death toll. The summer of 2024 was the hottest on record in Europe, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. How about the predictions? It is unclear what U.N. predictions Trump was referring to, but in any case, the last global scientific consensus on climate change was released in 2021 through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Scientists say evidence shows global warming and its impacts have since been unfolding faster than expected. Earlier this year, scientists found that the world may already have hit 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7F) of warming above the average pre-industrial temperature – a critical threshold beyond which it is at risk of irreversible and extreme climate change, scientists say. It is also unclear who the ‘stupid people’ are that Trump was referring to. If it is the scientists at the IPCC, then it is worth noting that the institution is currently being led by British scientist Jim Skea, a professor of Sustainable Energy at Imperial College in London – a university that is often ranked in the top 10 worldwide and in the top two in the United Kingdom. Why does it matter? Trump’s rhetoric against science, knowledge, environmental, social and governance (ESG) policies pose a larger threat. He has withdrawn the U.S. from the U.N. climate pact whilst ramping up fossil fuel use and rolling back renewable energy initiatives. It has also created a culture of fear – or “greenhushing” – within the corporate space. That’s according to a study of 75 firms across the world conducted by Harvard University researchers Kelly Cooper and Neil Hawkins. Click here to read their full study on the Harvard Business Review. Kelly and Hawkins’ study found “a significant trend of greenhushing, a public posture of silence that further threatens the momentum of coalition collapse, and ultimately, the power of collective action,” they added. This is what happened to the mass exit of many firms from initiatives such as the Net Zero Banking Alliance and the Net Zero Insurance Alliance earlier this year. But some world leaders are pushing back. China led several countries in announcing new climate plans and offered a veiled rebuke of the U.S. president’s anti-climate speech while Brazil committed to reducing emissions by 59%-67% by 2035 and to stepping up efforts to combat deforestation. And U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres assured delegates that the world was making progress in the energy transition, even if it was slow. |
→ Many more historical facts and details about the history of ‘the greatest con job ever perpetrated’ on www.climatesafety.info/history
→ Sydney Morning Herald – 27 September 2025:
Dark visions of a diving democracy
Letters. “It seems the US is heading for autocracy with a corrupt democratic facade.”
Fossil fuel industry tactics explained
From two very nimble legal minds, Aaron Regunberg and Zephyr Teachout, comes an interesting antitrust argument that could be employed against the fossil fuel industry:
“Antitrust laws protect open thriving markets and prevent collusive incumbent-protection schemes that slow down innovation and freeze technologies in place—the very crux of what oil corporations sought to do by working together to block renewable competitors from challenging their control of the energy market.
Internally, fossil fuel companies were explicit about the goal of suppressing competition. Consider a 1988 memo by a senior public affairs manager at Exxon. It acknowledged that greenhouse gases “cause disproportionate warming of the atmosphere,” that “the principal greenhouse gases are by-products of fossil fuel combustion,” and that “climate models predict a 1.5°C to 4.5°C global temperature increase, depending on the projected growth of fossil fuels.”
The memo then suggested that the industry act to cloud the public’s understanding of this scientific reality by “emphasiz[ing] the uncertainty in scientific conclusions” in order to undermine the “noneconomic development of nonfossil fuel resources.”
The industry also used capture-and-kill tactics to shut down the development of alternative energy technologies before they could challenge fossil fuels. Scientists at Exxon invented the lithium battery in the 1970s. The company began developing electric motors, too. But in the 1980s, Exxon shut down the lithium battery program and other related projects, shelving countless promising patents.
Ed Garvey, a geochemist at Exxon during the 1980s, concluded that the company’s goal was suppression of clean energy development. And it wasn’t just Exxon.
Stanford Ovshinsky, one of the principal inventors of solar energy and the founder of Energy Conversion Devices—which was once the largest producer of flexible solar panels in the world—said of his company’s interactions with Texaco Inc (now operated by Chevron Corp) that the industry wanted to “put you out of business, rather than building the business”.”
~ excerpt from Bill McKibben’s newsletter
What the fossil CEOs really think
It’s time to shift from dialogue to action
→ ABC News – 19 September 2025:
The climate conversation is stuck in a loop, but out in the world things are changing
“‘How to keep the lights on’ conversation totally ignores where we are already at. We can no longer pretend we can avoid paying for climate change by doing nothing.”