Fossil fuels are bad. So are gender discrimination and racism. Set them up in Culture War opposition, and Big Oil profits. How to spot these insidious distractions and re-frame them as stories that mitigate climate disaster? 

From Olympic Boxing to African infrastructure, climate science is being hitched to various culture war bandwagons. This article digs beneath the headlines in search of a way to dodge the collateral damage that benefits social media giants – and Big Oil.

Boxing’s Latest Gender Fight

For culture warriors, women’s boxing has been one of Paris 2024 Olympics’ most rewarding events.

Public furore about the gender identities of Algeria’s Imane Khelif, Welterweight gold medallist, and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-Ting, Featherweight champion, far outstripped coverage of the ring action that won them their titles.

Gender identity is guaranteed to provoke such public ‘debate’ – if by ‘debate’ you mean performative declarations of allegiance, rather than reasoned discourse. 

Like boxing itself – and all culture wars – the Paris Olympics’ ‘boxing gender row’ has been shoehorned into a binary outcome.

In the Red Corner, the Transphobes/Traditionalists (the label depends on where you stand). For them, Khelif and Lin are transparent ‘cheats’, men posing as women to win a medal. At the very least, the boxing rumpus provides a great chance to land some jabs on the ‘wokerati’.

In the Blue Corner, the Wokerati/large subsection of the LGBTQ+ community. For them, Khelif and Lin are women competing in the division nature assigned them. They are victims of prejudice who deserve defending against bullying reactionaries upset by their non-normative ‘feminine’ appearance.

Such online culture war ‘debate’ leaves little room for neutrality, nuance or science. Each side’s keyboard culture warriors are more than happy to knock lumps out of each other in the online battleground.

They do what culture warriors do, affirm their own tribal affiliation, and denounce that of their opponents.

How to spot a Culture War spat

One of the signs of a Culture War ‘debate’ is that it rapidly jumps the tracks of the instigating issue. The narratives quickly settle into well-worn ruts, even if they take you in quite different directions from the original story.

Both sides hitch their entrenched positions to the current bandwagon, their deep sense of outrage trumping any efforts to re-frame the story differently.  Culture warriors are suspicious of , or confused by, nudges that steer the narrative away from their outraged comfort zone. If you’re too obvious about it, you risk being accused of being an enemy, saboteur, traitor or agitator.

The Khelif/Lin ‘debate’ didn’t take long to spiral beyond the confines of the boxing ring, and tick these Culture War boxes.. 

As the athletes progressed through the rounds, some of their vanquished opponents obligingly fanned the flames, blaming their defeats on gender issues in more or less subtle ways. Each progression to the next round raised the stakes. Any national pride felt in Algeria and Taiwan became increasingly compromised, as simple sports narratives become sucked deeper into the culture war vortex.

Before long, what started as a technical quibble involving testosterone levels, chromosomes and normative bracketing of outlier results, catapulted the Khelif/Lin story from back-page minor sports obscurity to front-page headlines.

Two boxers who’d overcome economic disadvantage and tough upbringings suddenly had their rags-to-riches narrative stripped away.

They had become unwilling pawns in a rage-to-bitches narrative, over which they had no control.

Debate vs Punch-Up

Essential to this escalation was the ‘online public debate’. 

These ‘debates’ are more like public pummelings. These pile-ons leave all participants feeling vindicated, and rarely give either side cause for nuanced reflection, let alone change their mind. 

They do, however, create social media ‘engagement’. Each click, like or comment further enriches our Silicon Valley Overlords. Social media shareholders profit from every Culture War skirmish fought on their battlegrounds. 

Their business models thrive on online fisticuffs. Facebook, X, Reddit, Instagram et al are indifferent to whether Two Wrongs Make a Right. They profit when Two Wronged Make a Fight. 

Like promoters exploiting their boxers, the social media giants lurk in the shadows, avoiding the spotlights. As we all point and shout at the brightly-lit ring, they quietly count their cash.

But look deeper into the shadows of the Paris Olympic boxing arena. Who really profited most from this latest skirmish in the gender war? Who else lurks deeper in the shadows?

We’ll leave that question hanging while we introduce our second case study. 

West African energy infrastructure may appear to be entirely unrelated to Olympic boxing.

But is it? 

Africa’s First Refinery

Beyond Nigeria, the Dangote Refinery ding-dong has not generated as much heat and light as the Olympic boxing gender wars, but features just as much smoke-and-mirrors complexity.

Its relevance to climate action is more immediately obvious, as it concerns an oil refinery.

For African energy infrastructure novices, here are some basic Dangote Refinery facts:

• Who: Named after Nigeria’s richest resident, and world’s richest black man, Aliko Dangote.
• What: World’s biggest single-train refinery, 7th biggest refinery overall.
• Where: Lekki, near Lagos.
• When: Conceived in 2013, first significant output in 2023, full capacity due in 2024.
• Why: When completed, can supply 100% of Nigeria’s domestic fuel demand, plus exports.
• How Much: cost to date – approximately US$19Bn. 

Before you pick sides based on this information, it’s only fair to point out the project’s geopolitical significance.

For many, this aspect transcends any financial, operational, political or even climate considerations. It is easily lassoed into a culture war.

Black Gold & Black Power

Dangote is Africa’s first major league refinery.  

Measured by total GDP, Nigeria is Africa’s richest country. It is also the continent’s most populous nation, with nearly twice the population of the next biggest, Ethiopia.

After decades of exporting low-margin crude oil, the value of which is dictated by OPEC member countries and major Western producers, Nigeria is finally joining the global elite of oil-refining countries. This top table is where value is added, power resides, and real money is made.

Dangote Refinery means Nigeria is no longer condemned to remaining a supplier of raw materials. This single infrastructure project, in one multi-billion dollar leap, elevates an African country to a status only enjoyed by rich countries, i.e. controlling the entire value chain created by its natural resources. 

Thanks to the Dangote Refinery, Nigeria can now join the genuine global power-brokers. Its production muscle power means Africa’s voice is now heard, alongside those of the incumbent Western and Middle East powers.

For a continent still recovering from centuries of colonial exploitation and oppression, it’s easy to understand why Dangote has become a focus of Pan-African pride. 

From slave to master

Beyond the billions, Africa’s first major league refinery represents a powerful symbol of a continent degraded by centuries of slavery finally asserting itself on the world stage as a master.

David Hundeyin is a Nigerian investigative journalist . Despite currently living in Ghana as an asylum refugee, he’s an ardent supporter of this project, and an articulate voice explaining exactly why.

As Hundeyin left Nigeria following death threats for his activism, this support of a government-afiliated and supported megaproject may appear surprising.

To explain this, it’s worth quoting extensively from Hundeyin post on X supporting the Dangote Refinery as a symbol of African power, despite certain reservations.

Hundeyin says he went public after receiving a US$500 offer from 

‘an international NGO called Dialogue Earth (formerly known as China Dialogue Trust) to write an article essentially saying that Dangote Refinery is terrible for the environment because something something “Environmental Concerns,” something something “Climate Change,” something something “Energy Transition Policy,” something something “COP 28.”

In his public statement, Hundeyin rejects this offer comprehensively, because: 

‘a message needs to be sent to a group of external interests working in tandem with the internal interests…to counteract the interests of half a billion West Africans. A message that at whatever level we exist, we take our destiny seriously and we are not to be trifled with.’

The (unstated but clearly implied) thrust of the brief was for a prominent local voice to put their name on an article that is an argument or a premise for the Nigerian government to kill the refinery based on its “energy transition commitments” and “environmental policy.” 

Hundeyin is not afraid to name names, blow whistles, and speak truth to power.

This London-based NGO is headed by Sam Geall, an Oxford professor and is funded by several American intelligence fronts such as Ford Foundation and ClimateWorks (which is blacklisted in India for funding organisations working against India’s national interest). For whatever reason, it is now quietly mobilising a resistance campaign against what it describes as “Nigeria’s first refinery.” Apparently, the status quo of Africa’s largest oil producer having no functioning oil refinery to beneficiate its own oil was not a problem for Dialogue Earth and the American CIA fronts who fund it.

Hundeyin addresses the environmental aspects head-on.

The human poverty caused by exporting this raw material and importing refined fuel was not bad for the environment. But Nigeria having a refinery that will wean West Africa off import dependency on those European refiners (and allow West Africa control the sulphur content of its own fuels) is where Dialogue Earth and its funders draw the line. That one is bad for the environment, and David Hundeyin should write an article calling for the refinery to be shut down or limited.

I’m putting this out there publicly so that nobody will henceforth use the term “conspiracy theory” when it is pointed out for the umpteenth time, that there are American and European state and private interests that are heavily invested in keeping Africa exactly as poor as it is, and that they regularly push levers most of us do not even know exist, to make sure that this status quo is protected. These people believe that Africans should not exist or have nice things in this world. Apparently, the sole purpose of our existence is to enhance their experience of the planet and all that it has to offer.

The message needs to be passed that as poor as we are, you cannot convince us to campaign for the elongation of our own poverty by commissioning $500 hack jobs in the hope that we will be greedy enough to only see the money and ignore the bigger picture of what we can clearly see you trying to do.

I might not be a fan of Aliko Dangote or his monopolistic business practices – as is well known – but I’m also smart enough to know when rich white men in DC, Houston, Rotterdam and London are trying to use me as a marionette in their 400 year-old coloniser games. If you are reading this and you are one of the rich white men whose economic interests are threatened by Nigeria refining its own oil, you should come out and fight Aliko Dangote by yourself.

Or at least go find a much stupider African to do your dirty job – there’s plenty of those.

It will never be me.‘

Go on then, now pick a side. 

Are you for African economic independence? Or are you a colonial apologist?

Whose Side Are You On?

Did you spot the conjuring trick?

Are you getting the hang of this storytelling sleight-of-hand, the false framing ploy? 

Here’s the key part of Hundeyin’s post:

I will reiterate something I have said multiple times – I am not a believer in the religious faith called Climate Change/Saving The Environment. I care exactly as much about the environment as do the rich white men who destroyed it to begin with. I firmly believe that if what it takes for Africa to industrialise is for it to burn so much fossil fuel that snow stops falling in Wisconsin and it starts raining concentrated sulphuric acid in Doncaster, it is not too big a price for Europe and North America to pay – it is certainly not bigger than the price Africa had to pay for Europe and North America to develop.

It is and will continue to be 100% OUR prerogative to determine what to do with our hydrocarbons. It is not the rich white men hiding behind these “Climate Advocacy NGOs” who will tell us what to do with our energy reserves, and by what means we are allowed to escape the poverty that they engineered for us.

Very explicitly, Hundeyin is setting one Wrong (the Western colonisation of Africa) in conflict with another Wrong (greenhouse gas emissions). 

But Hundeyin goes even further. He’s denying the climate wrong by associating the message (keep fossil fuels in the ground) with the messenger (white-backed climate NGOs).

The point here is not that Hundeyin finds himself allying himself with the regime that forced him into exile, but that his emotional attachment to a culture war Wrong (racism) trumps any rational attachment to a atmospheric physics Wrong (greenhouse gas emissions).

Hundeyin is correct in observing that very few rich white men actively support the Dangote refinery, but he must also be aware there are many Nigerian climate activists who oppose any extension of Nigeria’s reliance on oil for a variety of reasons, including climate change. 

Presumably, his framing of the narrative would require him to denigrate African opponents of the refinery as Uncle Toms, dancing to the white man’s tune.

Here lies the nuance gap, and the similarity to the Olympic boxing gender war.

It’s all about the framing

Having cast himself as a whistleblower exposing the duplicity of ‘American intelligence fronts’, Hundeyin would probably be outraged by anyone pointing out that his actions could not have been more effective for Big Oil if they’d paid him a hundred times what the NGO had offered.

So let’s look at the cause of this distortion, rather than its outcome.

There are many different categories of objectors to the Dangote project, including, but not limited to:

• Rich white men who want to ‘keep Africa poor’
• Rich Middle-Eastern, South American and Asian men who want to maintain their dominance in value-added petroleum production
• Ordinary Nigerians who want to mitigate the worst impacts of human-induced climate change
• Ordinary white people (including some white men) who want to mitigate the worst impacts of human-induced climate change

Hundeyin has rejected these nuances to frame Dangote as a binary Rich White Men vs. Black Africa narrative. Race trumps all other considerations, including climate change.

The problem with Hundeyin’s narrative is that it casts the villain as ‘rich white men’ in general, not ‘rich oil men’ in particular.

Money is a finite resource that’s inequitably distributed around the world. Greenhouse gases are another finite resource that is soon equitably distributed in Earth’s atmosphere, but with a disproportionately severe impact on poor countries. 

For all its oil billions, Nigeria is only the 21st richest country per-capita in the world’s poorest continent. It is already suffering from climate-related disaster.

So how can someone with a history of being on the side of the oppressed place themselves so decisively on the side of an industry that is sure to accelerate their oppression?

And what does any of this have to do with Olympic boxing?

Truth, Lies & Storytelling

In both cases, science has been sidelined by scandal. Empirical facts have been eclipsed by raw emotion. 

It’s a diversionary deception well understood by conjurers. Hitch an event to marginally related, emotional trigger-issues, and people all look in the direction you’re pointing.

In both cases, the distraction of tangential issues – race and gender – happens to benefit Business as Usual for Big Oil.  

Re-framing climate issues as binary gender or racist debates works just fine for the status quo. Even better if you can divide your enemies, or they even divide themselves without your intervention.

While we all bicker and snap about second-order issues, the focus is shifted from the problem that might destroy our civilisation.

The 3-Headed Beasts of Government, Business and Media need only blow on the embers of our prejudices, sensitivities and grievances. They can then step back, observe the conflagrations from afar, and count the cash while they drill, baby, drill.

We’re easily stoked into outrage. Smart boxers know how to get inside their opponents head. So do the PR experts hired by Big Oil. They need only exploit an incident to tap our emotional triggers, and the red mist reliably descends, obscuring our vision for the big picture.

Culture Wars are actually Culture Battles. The ultimate victory can only end with them drilling the last drop of oil from the ground, and damn the consequences. That’s a War where we all lose eventually.

The climate war is an existential threat to all human civilisation, a consequence of our relatively recent addiction to fossil fuels. If we keep on falling for these culture war provocations, we just keep enabling those profiting from fossil fuels to keep on profiting.

They know that when Emotion and Facts climb into the ring, there’s usually only one winner.

This is the key lesson for effective climate activists. Framing.

Emotions vs Facts

Bill the fight as a battle between Reason and Emotion, Truth vs. Lies, or Head vs Heart, and you hand victory to Big Oil. No contest. TKO. 

Yet many climate activists persist in using the same tactics. They may be cheered on by their supporters, but they usually end up dazed on the floor, while their opponent showboats to their baying crowd, and the promoters count the cash in the shadows.

Big Oil is a formidable opponent, with huge muscles, doped to the eyeballs by US$7Trillion a year of state subsidy. It has a track record, stamina and can pay for top coaches. They’ve seen off many flailing, jabbing, roundhousing climate activists who get suckered into their framing of narratives. 

To have a chance of success, you need to adopt similar tactics. If possible, leave the ring altogether to fight on less familiar territory.

In case this Dangote Refinery story hasn’t made its climate connection to the Olympic boxing hoo-haa clear enough, let’s climb back in the ring.

Back in the Ring

Time to return to the Paris Olympics highest-profile culture war and the online culture war it engendered (if that’s an appropriate word to use).

The vast majority of the mainstream coverage, and an even higher proportion of the social media responses, have not gone far beyond the framing of a binary battle of:

I reckon she’s a woman 

vs 

I reckon he’s a man.

Some of the more thoughtful journalists and commentators have asked a few more questions, unravelling a longer thread. As we’ll see, this thread ends where so many human threads end: power, money, oil.

These inquisitive journalists have done what good investigative reporters do. They’ve asked one more question. Dug deeper. Followed the money. Asked ‘who benefits?’ They’ve interrogated the science, focused on the message as well as the messenger, and shone unwelcome torches into dim shadows. 

Such reporters exist around the world. Here are three from the UK, with their takes on the ‘Boxing’s Gender Wars’.

• Sofia Bettiza, the BBC World Service’s Gender and Identity correspondent, What does science tell us about boxing’s gender row?
• Barney Ronay’s Guardian piece The men of international boxing use the Olympics to spoil for another kind of fight 
• Daniel Boffey’s Observer article ‘Boxing Gender wars and Gazprom vol-au-vents: how boxing ended up in a mess

Each of these articles challenges the knee-jerk certainties of the online pile-on in a different way.  

Boffey’s article (among others) explores the area of most interest to climate activists. 

As usual, it’s not all that complicated, and it involves oil.

Follow the money

Boffey unveils the complex, murkier, less headline-friendly power struggle that the Tweets, Facebook posts and culture war-driven comments omit or skate over. 

Some mainstream articles on the Olympic boxing ‘gender wars’ briefly mention its origins. The most that most people understand about how this controversy came about is that one boxing organisation (the International Boxing Association, or IBA) reckoned the boxers were men, and another (the International Olympic Committee, or IOC) reckoned they were women.

For the clickbait-chasing media, details of the beef between the IOC and IBA are either too complicated to understand, or too convoluted to explain in 280 characters. 

Either way, this truth doesn’t conform to the I Reckon She’s A Woman/He’s A Man templates culture warriors are so keen to squeeze any story into. Too much detail is too ‘political’, too ‘boring’, or ‘not the story’ they think the public wants to hear.

Even alluding to deeper motivations, let alone spending more than a sentence on them, risks alienating public demand for a binary battle between Good and Evil. 

Such battles are comfortingly familiar. They signal to us which side to plant our flags. 

Whichever side that happens to be, everyone is the hero of their own story. Progressives and Traditionalists alike cast themselves as righteous warriors. Each brands their Transphobe/Wokerati opponents as villains.

Dials and Switches

Whether gender or race culture wars, framing the debate in a more nuanced way is a high-risk strategy.

Many people won’t even notice, and will keep sounding their team’s klaxon regardless of what you say or do.

But others may be nudgeable. Re-framing issues as a dial with a spectrum of settings rather than an on/off switch, is a turn-off for both sides, but also a good starting point. 

Be prepared for resistance. Raise an objection, or suggest a third option, and at best you risk accusations of ‘muddying the waters’ or ‘being duped’, at worst of ‘betrayal’, or ‘collusion’.

Such accusations can come from both sides, and come at the risk of losing their attention altogether.

Simply dialling down your outrage will also diminish your social media engagement and audience retention metrics. They favour binary bun-fights. Boxers, it turns out, aren’t the only people concerned about losing eyeballs…

The trick is to make the Dial Story more interesting than the Switch Story.

Returning to the boxing ring, what’s the more complex, dial-based, story being told by these investigative reporters?

It’s the way you tell ‘em

Here’s an alternative re-framing of the same story.

1. Two evil giants are locked into a fight to the death. The IBA and the IOC are both engorged by money and power, with an insatiable desire for more. Both strive for public legitimacy at the cost of the other. Both have long track records of corruption. Both fight dirty, Only one can prevail. (Not a bad start to a story).
2. One evil giant spots a weakness and attacks! The IOC is hobbled by its rules for dividing its troops into two gender divisions. The IBA mercilessly jabs at this vulnerability, forcing the IOC into a public relations disaster. (Fatal flaws are the basis for many classic Greek tragedies). 
3. Look – two innocents are caught up in the conflict!  Khalif and Lin, find themselves being wrestled back and forth between these two tottering, corrupt giants. Neither the IOC nor the IBA cares for them, both care only for money and power. (Introducing helpless innocent victims is not a bad next chapter).
4. Disaster looms – all seems lost!  The IOC sacrifices anything to advertisers, broadcasters and sponsors. The IBA is a Putin regime puppet body deployed to discredit the IOC following its Olympic ban due to repeated doping violations.The Putin regime depends on fossil fuels for its power and legitimacy. (No one wants either evil giant to win, we just want to find a way to save the poor innocent victims of their power struggle)

This story ends, as most stories do, with the power that comes with Big Oil’s money. 

It’s begging for a 5th Act when evil is vanquished, the innocents are rescued, and everyone lives happily ever after – What Happens Next?

This is the tricky bit.

Stories, stories everywhere

Once you’ve understood one of these stories, others start to reveal themselves. 

Decode the Olympic boxing contest, and the Dangote Refinery tale starts to make sense. 

Concealed links between government, business and media form the foundation of nutty conspiracy theories that end up blaming extraterrestrial lizards.

But part of the allure of these irrational conspiracy theories is that – up till the space lizard bit – they’re largely true. 

In the  real world, the 3-Headed Beasts of Government, Business and Media don’t even need to conceal their connections. Why bother to arrange secret Illuminati conferences when you publish political donations, and media owners’ shareholdings?

For exasperated climate scientists, and activists like See Through News, the challenge is not to ‘prove’ the genuine conspiracy, but to find effective ways to re-frame carbon drawdown options to cast everybody as the hero of their own story.

The Real Conspiracy Theory

Strap on the See Through goggles, and nearly all news headlines reconfigure themselves into some version of ‘Big Oil Seeks Business As Usual At Expense of Human Civilisation Via Culture War Distraction’.

Race riots in the UK? 

Through the See Through Goggles, linking opportunistic thugs looking to kill brown people and loot shops with climate protestors sentenced for twice as long for attending video calls planning civil disobedience by disrupting traffic, becomes a transparent false equivalence. 

For the avoidance of confusion, the protestors even called themselves ‘Just Stop Oil’.

Immigration issues everywhere? 

This common narrative frames the foreigners as ‘economic migrants’, ‘scroungers’ and ‘criminals’, rather than as victims of climate-induced or climate-exacerbated disasters.

Instead, frame the story to vilify tens of thousands of refugees in small boats, rather than focus on numbers of climate refugees predicted by the IPCC, which could reach hundreds of millions, or billions, depending on when we stop burning fossil fuels.

It’s all about the framing

Framing a story in a certain way determines expectations of its outcome. Like a Knock Knock joke, or the rhyming scheme of a Limerick, it can create an appetite in the listener for a particular kind of resolution.

Here are three narrative models for climate stories…

The Culture War Model

Populist politicians everywhere have simple stories to tell, following similar simple narratives. 

1. Frame a simple problem (usually ‘foreigners’) 
2. Offer a simple solution (usually ‘get rid of the foreigners’)
3. Cast your audience as heroes (usually ‘you can get rid of the foreigners’)

The ‘Don’t Worry’ Model

Pusillanimous politicians everywhere follow the same simple structure when it comes to ‘climate policy’. Let’s call this format the Don’t Worry Model:

1. Simplify the climate problem (e.g. ‘flooding’, ‘food security’  or  ‘energy’
2. Offer a simple solution (usually a magic bullet like ‘stronger dikes’, ‘tax food imports’ or ‘nuclear power’)
3. Promise your audience this won’t require them to change their behaviour or lifestyles

This framing is effective because evolution – and Disney – has programmed us to accept this cartoon-like view of the world. To be fair, history tells us that this strategy works fine until it doesn’t.

The appeal of these stories is understandable. Frame the ‘problem’ as something smaller, closer, and more specific than human-induced climate change makes the solutions seem more possible, practical and containable.

Honestly state the magnitude and complexity of the problem, and your ‘simple’ solutions are exposed as inadequate. 

Tell voters they may have to change their behaviour, and you’ll have to give them very compelling reasons (Covid has taught us this is possible when the crisis is immediate in time and space).

The Carbon Drawdown Model

So what does a story that promotes Carbon Drawdown look like? 

It will have to take many different forms for many different audiences, but the basics will be the same:

1. Describe the climate problem honestly in all its complexity.
2. Explain why this complex problem requires many urgent diverse solutions.
3. Prove to your audience that many of the trade-offs required will improve their lives now, as well as those of their children.

Worth a try?

• Boost Us: the usual social media stuff – subscribe, Like, click, comment, share with your friends etc. If you have a social media reach and are interested in promoting this project, email info@seethroughnews.org for updated release schedules, with the opportunity to preview each new release.
• Join Us: email volunteer@seethroughnews.org to see how you can help this zero-budget project. We have plenty of roles requiring varying degrees of expertise and experience.
• Follow Us: Subscribe to See Through News Newsletter. It’s free, keeps your data private, and plops into your inbox every Sunday, updating you on new content and developments See Through’s innovative mission to measurably reduce carbon. Share any See Through content with your friends
• Critique Us: Use the comment features, on YouTube or here on the website, to give your thoughts on any aspect of any See Through project. Being innovative involves making mistakes, and we benefit as much from your criticism as your praise (though feel free to praise us too, if you want…)