A December 2013 academic article has documented how billionaires made suckers of millions of people like jerm and pihole, causing them to believe that global warming is a mere hoax, and to think that the oil companies' line on this matter is honest.
This research, by Robert J. Brulle, was published in a leading climatological journal,
Climate Change, and it reports that a small number of aristocrats have collectively spent, on average, a billion dollars a year, in order to fool the American public into thinking that climate change isn't happening, and that, even if it is, it's not caused by burning fossil fuels. These aristocrats control fossil fuels corporations, such as Koch Industries, and ExxonMobil, but their money for this mass-deception campaign is laundered through far-right-wing foundations they control, to think-tanks they control, which buy professors to provide "authority" for these distortions and outright lies. That is why the reality (a graphical presentation of which can be seen at places such as
this), though acknowledged by virtually all climatologists, is rejected, just disbelieved, by much of the public.
Listed in order, with the largest listed first, the nine foundations that account for half of this total billion-dollar-a-year expenditure, are: Donors Trust, Scaife, Bradley, Koch, Howard, Pope, Searle, Dunn's, and Richardson. Their money is then further laundered, through the following eleven think-tanks, listed here also largest-first, which collectively account for a full two-thirds of this total billion-dollar-a-year propaganda campaign: American Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation, Hoover Institution, Manhattan Institute, Cato Institute, Hudson Institute, Atlas Economic Research, Americans for Prosperity, John Locke Foundation, Heartland Institute, and Reason Foundation.
They, in turn, pay professors and journalists to write, both for the "news media," and for professional journals, to debunk or (in the scholarly publications) to raise questions about, global warming or its cause -- questions that are no longer even questions among actual climate scientists.