This article in BBC is about propaganda used by the fossil fuel industry in the 1990s to convince the public to doubt the emerging consensus among climate scientists. Basically, the technique was to find the tiny minority of legitimate scientists with dissenting views, and then heavily publicize those views. Reporters like dissenting views because they are interesting, and when they are being bombarded from all sides by an extremely well-funded campaign, they will tend to present those views as having equal weight to the overwhelming majority view. So the public is not exactly hearing pure lies (although there are certainly some of those, such as statements that there was “no evidence” of human contributions to global warming), but 50% of what they are hearing represents the consensus of 99% of scientists and 50% represents the views of the dissenting 1%.

This is difficult to counter, because scientists are trained to communicate the uncertainty of their work. Corporations behave amorally to maximize their profits, which is interesting because they are comprised of people who generally have some moral scruples. People will behave to maximize their own interests to some extent, but I don’t believe that is the only factor. They will also rationalize their behavior, or they will often lack information about the contribution of their individual role to the bigger picture, which may be an amoral or immoral result.

There are a couple good quotes from Al Gore in the article, including saying climate science propaganda is a crime on the level of World War II war crimes. I would agree with this – the companies that did (and are certainly doing) things like this chose to put the lives and livelihoods of billions of future humans at risk for the sake of maximizing their own wealth in the short term.