Fossil Fuel Foolishness Persists but the Resistance is Rising
By Jacqui Patterson
The global economy operates on a foundational injustice: treating Black communities, and other frontline communities and Global South nations, as sacrifice zones. Our communities have disproportionately dealt with decades of disenfranchisement, disinvestment, and displacement. We continue to feel the worst effects of climate change and increased toxins in the environment.
Fossil Fueled Foolery 3.0 (FFF 3.0) exposes the tricks and traps set by polluting industries, including the false choices they routinely present to Black communities. It’s April Fool’s Day, but the situation is no joke!
FFF 3.0 also shares examples of local leaders in the U.S. and across the globe who see through the corporate playbook, resist the falsehoods, and clear the way for true justice and a regenerative economy.
This new report exposes the fossil fuel industry’s top ten manipulation tactics:
1) Investing in efforts that undermine democracy
2) Financing political campaigns and pressuring politicians
3) Funding biased scientific research
4) Claiming regulations hurt low-income communities
5) Denying or understating health harms
6) Deflecting responsibility
7) Co-opting community leaders and organizations
8) Exaggerating job creation
9) Praising false solutions
10) “Embracing” renewables to control the market
Exposing this foolery is our baseline. Ending the extractive economy is our mandate. Just Transition is the vision! Black Liberation is a prerequisite for achieving Just Transition, and Just Transition is a fundamental pillar of Black Liberation.
Resistance is rising in the U.S. and across the globe. In Guyana, grassroots citizens, including Wintress Morris and Joy Marcus, environmentalists such as Sherlina Nageer of the Greenheart Movement, and Indigenous leaders from the Association of Amerindian Peoples are fighting back. In March 2025, Morris and Marcus won a historic High Court case against Guyana’s Environmental Protection Agency to force ExxonMobil to include Scope 3 emissions (the total downstream carbon dioxide pollution created when the extracted oil is burned) in the Environmental Impact Assessments for its massive offshore Hammerhead project. This shatters the industry tactic of hiding the true climate impact of extraction projects and empowers citizens to hold state regulatory agencies accountable for corporate favoritism. And in February 2026, a U.S. federal district court ruled that groups representing residents of Louisiana’s Cancer Alley can proceed with their landmark lawsuit seeking a pause on new toxic industrial plants in two majority‑Black districts.
As the movement adage goes: Transition is inevitable, but justice is not guaranteed.
Petrochemical companies dominate public discourse along the Gulf Coast. They help fund schools and shape what information reaches residents. There is more work ahead.
While I was serving as Senior Director of the NAACP Environmental and Climate Justice Program, we issued the first FFF report in 2019, and FFF 2.0 in 2021, to ensure that NAACP branches, chapters, and state conferences are fully aware of the practices employed by the fossil fuel industry to entice Black communities to act against their own interests. The original reports shed light on the deceptive tactics used by fossil fuel conglomerates and their supporters at the expense of communities most affected by their pollution. Over the past five years, more revolts have halted corporate greed in its tracks — many of which are described in FFF 3.0.
We at The Chisholm Legacy Project (TCLP) release this fresh report against the backdrop of a coordinated authoritarian takeover, where the machinery of climate deception is deeply entwined with escalating, systematized assaults on trans rights, women’s rights, and racial justice. While authoritarian regimes declare war to defend their respective grips on power, communities across the globe pay the price of increasingly volatile oil and gas markets. Households across the U.S. are facing a worsening affordability crisis. The Philippines recently declared a state of emergency, with everyone from farmers to Jeepney drivers impacted by the energy crises; while other countries enact emergency policies in response to the Iran War.
Part and parcel of the extractive economy is the war machine being deployed and taking the lives of innocent people, exacerbating energy affordability issues, and diverting billions of dollars in much-needed domestic resources. These are not parallel crises; they are symptoms of the exact same pathology.
In the U.S., the very same neighborhoods that bear the brunt of the pollution driving climate change are bracing for another horrible hurricane season (forecasted by what’s left of national climate science infrastructure). American communities continue to feel record-breaking and devastating heat, destructive wildfires, supercharged storms and historic flooding — compounding health disparities and economic insecurity — while the fossil fuel industry deploys a far more insidious playbook designed to delay action, fracture frontline power, and actively subvert Just Transition.
Besides exposing the sophisticated, modernized machinery of deception deployed by the U.S. and global fossil fuel industry to maintain its grip on power and obscene wealth, we must fully equip the ongoing frontline resistance.
This April, in the port city of Santa Marta, Colombia, the First International Conference on the Transition Away from Fossil Fuels will be hosted by the Governments of Colombia and the Netherlands. In a statement from the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative (led by South African human rights and climate justice activist, Kumi Naidoo), this conference will “serve as a strategic space for dialogue among a broad range of stakeholders — including government representatives, experts, rural and Indigenous Peoples, Afro-descendant communities, civil society, climate advocates, industry leaders, and academia — to explore viable, fair, and equitable pathways for transitioning to sustainable, diversified, and accessible energy.”
Climate justice demands the complete dismantling of the extractive economy that has historically exploited our labor, our communities, and Mother Earth on which we all depend for our existence. We are building a regenerative economy rooted in self-determination, which means that Black communities, and all frontline communities, hold ownership, power, and democratic control over our systems. The era of fossil fueled foolery ends with us!
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Jacqui Patterson is the Executive Director of The Chisholm Legacy Project.
