Perhaps the most compelling testimony in Episode 2 of the BBC’s documentary Big Oil vs The World comes from Bill Heins, a geoscientist who worked with ExxonMobil from 2001 to 2019:

I’m disappointed, I’m angry, I’m disenchanted at the duplicity exhibited by ExxonMobil to say one thing internally and to say a different thing with a much different consequence in the political arena.

The implication is that the same people within ExxonMobil were saying one thing internally and another publicly. But the story Heins tells suggests that it was different people who were saying different things:

Shortly after I joined ExxonMobil, there was a presentation by Art Green, who was the chief geoscientist of ExxonMobil Exploration. All the scientific staff were there. Art got up and gave his presentation about how ice core records were unreliable and here were temperature excursions in the past when there couldn’t possibly be any human influence.

Episode 1 of BBC’s Big Oil vs The World is a polished, emotional, lawyer-like brief for one side of a multi-sided, complex issue. But in the final analysis, the BBC case is long on agenda and feelings and short on facts, balance, and proper context. The documentary is slick propaganda that accuses oil companies of producing slick propaganda.

With its documentary Big Oil vs The World, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has added its voice to the chorus accusing the petroleum industry in general, and ExxonMobil in particular, of misleading the public and slowing the global response to climate change. The three-part documentary (Denial, Doubt, and Delay) was produced in cooperation with PBS, which ran its version on Frontline under the title The Power of Big Oil in April and May of this year.…

“Equatorial Guyana and Suriname have combined oil reserves estimated to be 17 billion barrels of oil equivalent. The biggest hurdle to the extraction of these reserves could come from lack of capital … if the international climate-industrial complex takes a strong stand against their extraction plans and their own governments acquiesce.”

The poverty-stricken Caribbean countries of Guyana and Suriname have hit the jackpot with the discovery of huge offshore oil reserves that are on track to produce revenue for decades.

Opposition from the United Nations and other anti-hydrocarbon entities might hamper the pace of production but won’t stop it. The global need for more crude is too great, and the economic situation of the two South American nations is too dire.

Suriname has been experiencing double-digit inflation for a while now (35 percent in 2020).…

I have been actively engaged on social media for the last year, challenging climate alarmism and forced energy transformation. My opponents begin with a particular argument on climate science to which I respond with a different view. (For example, here at MasterResource, I promote the benefits of CO2 fertilization from the peer-review literature summarized by Craig Idso.)

As we go back and forth, inevitably the ‘argument from authority’ is resorted to. For example:

But the IPCC reports are compiled from the work of hundreds of independent scientist’s peer reviewed works. The views your organisation are expressing are not. In effect you/your organisation is the one playing politics and spreading misinformation that doesn’t stand up to peer review.

Then, when I rebut the shortcomings of the peer review process and how our side has opted out (‘Atlas Shrugged’), my critics then go ad hominem.…