Remember the old television commercials where doctors in white coats assured parents that one brand of cigarettes was smoother, safer, and even soothing for a nervous child’s cough? They seem absurd now, like scenes from a stranger, more naive era, but for decades those ads worked. Americans lit up in record numbers, and millions eventually died from lung cancer, heart disease, and emphysema. What is harder to dismiss is that the same industries that sold those deadly images later developed an almost identical strategy for selling another product: the fossil fuels that heat our homes, power our cars, and increasingly threaten our shared climate. This is the uncomfortable truth at the heart of the counterpoint published in The Derrick. The message is simple and chilling: the fossil fuel industry has taken the tobacco industry’s worn, disinformation-laden playbook and is running with it. The commercials are smarter, the science is more urgent, and the stakes are far higher, but the game is the same. Sow doubt. Confuse the public. Discredit the experts. Delay meaningful action. Protect shareholder dividends. And in the meantime, keep the product moving, no matter what smoke starts to collect in the lungs of the planet.
The origin story of this strategy goes back further than most people realize. In the 1970s and 1980s, major oil companies like Exxon knew about climate change from their own scientists. Their internal research projected that burning fossil fuels would raise global temperatures and alter the climate in dangerous ways. But instead of informing the public or investing seriously in clean energy, they chose the route of calculated ignorance. That is where the ghost of big tobacco enters the room. When cigarette companies learned that nicotine was an addictive and carcinogenic substance, they did not confess. They hired lobbyists, funded seemingly independent research, and coined the phrase “sound science” to mean study after study that muddied the waters and delayed policy changes. An internal tobacco industry memo in the 1960s even laid out the strategy bluntly: doubt is our product, because doubt keeps the debate alive, and a live debate means no lawsuits and no regulations. The fossil fuel industry adopted this exact phrase and this exact mentality. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the science of climate change was becoming impossible to ignore in public life, oil companies created front groups and industry councils designed to confuse journalists, teachers, and voters. They did not have to win every argument. They only had to keep the argument going long enough for the drilling to continue and the profits to flow.
Once you see the playbook, you see it everywhere. The fossil fuel industry runs television ads showing children hugging puppies and green trees while claiming that natural gas is actually a bridge to a clean future. They sponsor museums and science centers, rebrand their products as “climate solutions,” and celebrate their own investments in solar panel subsidiaries while quietly expanding their core fossil production. But beyond the glossy marketing, the deeper layer of the playbook is the politics of manufacture. Just as tobacco paid doctors and professors to question the link between smoking and cancer, oil and gas companies have funded think tanks and academics to attack climate science, attack the famous hockey stick graph, and attack the legitimacy of climate activists. They helped create a world in which scientists are seen as just another interest group with an opinion, rather than a community of researchers following millions of data points. They launched campaigns that framed climate policy as an attack on ordinary working families, on freedom, on the American way of life. They even went after individual scientists such as James Hansen and Michael Mann, subjecting them to politics, harassment, and organized campaigns to destroy their reputations. The goal, like the goal of the tobacco executives, was never to convince everyone that climate change is false. It was to persuade enough people that the science was unsettled, that the debate was still open, and that “both sides” deserved equal airtime. As one tobacco executive famously said years ago, “Doubt is our product.” The fossil fuel industry learned that lesson so well that it became their most profitable export.
The human consequence of this disinformation campaign is not abstract. It is a family in a coastal town watching the floodwaters rise, a firefighter exhausted and overwhelmed by wildfires that burn longer and hotter than they once did, a farmer watching the rain disappear after years of the family farm’s existence. It is the child in an industrial corridor breathing polluted air on the morning walk to school, and the mothers and fathers in fracking country quietly wondering whether the neighbors’ strange illnesses are connected to the water and the earth and the constant hum of compressors. When companies spend millions of dollars on P.R. campaigns while privately knowing exactly what their product can do, this is not an honest business debate about energy policy. It is a betrayal of human beings for the sake of quarterly earnings. The Derrick’s counterpoint makes this clear: the long arc of tobacco history shows that eventually the lies catch up with the liars. The tobacco industry was forced to pay billions of dollars in legal settlements, to remove its cartoons and billboards, and to admit in court that its product was addictive and deadly. The same reckoning is now slowly arriving at the doors of the fossil fuel industry. Cities, states, and families are filing lawsuits against oil companies for the damage caused by rising seas and devastating hurricanes. Young people are marching through the streets and asking their governments why the people who knew the truth sixty years ago continued to wave it away. None of this is vindictive. It is accountability. It is the natural consequence of a public that has finally learned to recognize the old script when it appears in a new costume.
There is a dangerous temptation to believe that things are changing fast enough. The energy industry now talks about carbon capture, hydrogen, and net zero by 2050. But words are cheap, and the same companies that release grand climate pledges continue to expand drilling projects and pipelines. This is exactly the kind of bait-and-switch that has always defined disinformation. The tobacco companies never stopped selling cigarettes entirely; they just started selling nicotine patches and gum at the same time, and they fought their ground in markets where they could still thrive. Similarly, the fossil fuel industry wants to position itself as a leader in the green transition while maintaining its core product, the product that generates all the money and all the power. It would be a lie of a different kind to pretend that renewables are simply not viable. Solar electricity is now cheaper than coal in many parts of the world. Electric vehicles are no longer science fiction. Storage technology is expanding. But the transition requires political will, and political will is exactly what disinformation has worked so hard to evaporate. The tobacco analogy tells us that the truth does eventually win, but only after decades of preventable death and suffering. The lesson, if we truly learn it, is that we do not have to relive that whole timeline. We can choose to shorten it. We can choose to see the playbook for what it is.
For all of us who read the news, share a social media post, or ask a question at a town hall, the single most human response is to refuse to let them get away with the old trick again. We can call out the PR language for what it is. We can ask difficult questions about whether a company’s “clean energy” partnership is a genuine shift or simply advertisement. We can support journalists and scientists who study the long history of disinformation and hold it to the light. We can vote for leaders who do not treat denial as a virtue and sustainability as a weak afterthought. We can also find the courage to talk about the uncomfortable truth in our own communities, even in places like western Pennsylvania, where oil and gas once built the towns and helped fund the schools. This humanization is not about shaming individuals who work in the industry; they too are part of a larger system that has often been sold false promises about their place in the future. But it is about recognizing that every person deserves an honest conversation about the world they are inheriting. The tobacco companies were eventually forced to appear in front of Congress and admit, in language that was no longer careful and polished, that they had lied. A similar day of reckoning is coming for those who played the same disinformation card with our atmosphere. The only question is what happens before that day arrives. If we understand the playbook, we can decline to keep playing by its terms. We can replace doubt with clarity, delay with action, and silence with the voices of a generation that refuses to be airbrushed by corporate marketing. That is the human way to honor the uncomfortable truth of the past and the still unwritten possibility of the future.