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Over the years, there have been repeated assertions that "Big Oil propaganda" is responsible for why the climate change debate is foundering. For example, here

[bzipitidoo:] Then there's all the ruckus over Global Warming. An awful lot of people would rather suck up Big Oil propaganda than listen to climate scientists. Why? For most of them, there's no gain in adhering to climate change denial, but they stick to it anyway, and have no scruples against using 3rd degree methods to suppress and silence climate science, stuff such as cutting funding and threatening their jobs and even their freedom.

here

[PartTimeZombie:] The problem is that "your team" is wrong about climate change, and are being manipulated by people who directly gain from fossil fuels, but at least your team get to win right?

Stupid way to run a country if you ask me.

here

[khallow:]“And yet the environmental guys are way outspending the other side. Somethings not quite right with the narrative.”

[AC:] Addressing this separately. To me this makes sense.

The companies get to hide behind “nothing is wrong” and that is cheap compared to the independent attempts to show that there is something going wrong in the environment.

here

[AC:]You do realize that if it is true that big oil hid the negative effects of their and related industries concerning global warming that it is a huge savings?

A contrary viewpoint:

[AthanasiusKircher:] Other industries manage to employ paid scientists to "shill" for them all the time. Big pharma, food additives and nutritional research -- we all know that where ambiguous data CAN be exploited, industry can and has often hired researchers or financed research to help support its position. (And to be fair, I think many research scientists in these industry positions actually believe in the work they do.)

With the pockets of Big Oil and dozens of other related industries that would suffer from increased pro-environmental regulation to combat climate change, where is this army of paid scientists? And don't argue that it has something to do with tenure requirements or whatever, because Big Pharma, the big chemical companies, and the Food Industry has no problem finding scientists with graduate degrees whom they can EMPLOY and finance directly to publish research. If the data is really that open to interpretation, it should be easy to employ a bunch of debunking scientists. (And they probably wouldn't even lost a lot of money doing so, since they could probably charge huge speaking fees on the conservative circuit for these people.)

That's always the most confusing aspect of those who claim a massive conspiracy -- every other industry manages to find a significant number of scientists to shill for them when needed, despite the fact that such scientists are often bucking the research funded by non-industry groups and the government. Yet for some weird reason, it's claimed here on this issue that exactly the opposite happens: industry with big pockets is powerless to recruit an army of shills, and instead all the scientists are jockeying for the much smaller pockets of NSF money. If this is so easy for the government to do, how come it's so hard for them to achieve similar levels of consensus around problematic drugs or chemicals or food additives or whatever?

To all those people who think there's a massive, well-funded (that is, well-funded for an industry that has trillions of dollars in revenue!) Big Oil/fossil fuel campaign to sabotage humanity's efforts to combat climate change, I have this simple challenge. There's plenty of analysis of the few groups that allegedly support climate denialism and such.

Now, do the same for the pro-mitigation side. Include the big non profits like Greenpeace and World Wildlife Fund, government/intergovernment agencies like the UK's MET, NASA's GISS, and the IPCC, and the many businesses that support pro-mitigation. Use the same metric for each side. Who spends more on propaganda?

Protip: if you get that climate denialists are spending within an order of magnitude of the other side, then you're missing something big.