webodec3ARCHIVEPreview
Open in TheBrain

advertorial

see native ad brand studio (WP and NYT)

politico newsweek they sell ads?! sponsored article

1 24 heated gmail

lte124

no lnx pix grf?

Here’s how much Democrats get paid to shill for fossil fuels

Two former Democratic lawmakers made six-figure salaries for falsely promoting methane gas as a climate solution, tax documents seen by HEATED show.

ARIELLE SAMUELSON

JAN 18

In January 2022, only a few years after leaving the elected seat she held for six years, former Democratic Senator Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota got a new job: convincing climate-concerned liberals to love the fossil fuel industry.

“It’s clear we have an existential threat to the planet,” said Heitkamp, in a December 2022 commercial for the methane gas lobbying group Natural Allies For a Clean Energy Future. “We should be doing everything that we can to help other countries do what we did, which is dramatically reduce our CO2 emissions by using natural gas.”

The ad—titled “Real Talk with Heidi Heitkamp”—was one of a handful of public relations jobs Heitkamp did that year for Natural Allies, some of which she did alongside former Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana. Together, the notoriously moderate Democrats wrote a sponsored article in Politico claiming that “natural gas is accelerating our clean-energy future,” and an op-ed in Newsweek declaring that methane gas can “actually achieve our shared global climate goals faster.” Landrieu also did her own “Real Talk” commercial in March 2022.

For these ads and op-eds, Heitkamp was paid $185,266 and Landrieu was paid $210,690 in 2022, according to IRS 990 tax documents obtained by the Energy and Policy Institute and seen by HEATED. The documents show payments made to Heidi Heitkamp Inc. and to Landrieu’s consulting firm VNF Solutions.

A screenshot of Natural Allies’ 990 tax form from FY2022, showing payments to Landrieu’s consulting firm and Heitkamp. They also show $1 million in payments to Mad Global, a public relations firm that specializes in politics and government, and more than $3.5 million to Omnicom Public Relations Group, a global public relations company.

It’s unclear if these positions represented full-time jobs; both Heitkamp and Landrieu were hired as members of Natural Allies’ “Leadership Council” in early 2022. According to a press release about the hires, the Leadership Council seeks “to bring greater awareness to the foundational role natural gas must play in transitioning to a clean energy future.” Neither Heitkamp nor Landrieu responded to HEATED’s request for comment.

Whatever the case, the numbers are a rare glimpse into the lucrative business of greenwashing the fossil fuel industry. Natural Allies is run and funded entirely by fossil fuel companies, including Williams, TC Energy, Kinder Morgan, National Fuel Gas, Southern Company Gas, and Cheniere Energy.

“It's not every day we get to see the price tag of a former U.S. senator’s advocacy,” said Charlie Spatz, a senior researcher at the Energy and Policy Institute.

Spatz said the numbers also highlight one of the reasons it may be so hard to pass truly effective climate policy in Congress.

“It's sending a message to current Senators that maybe you shouldn't be so harsh on the fossil fuel industry, if they're going to take care of you after you finish,” he said.

A six-figure salary to spread climate misinformation

With each passing year, the science on methane gas pollution and climate change becomes more damning. A recently revised analysis from Robert Warren Howarth, a professor of ecology and environmental biology at Cornell, found that greenhouse gas emissions from liquified methane gas “are larger than those from domestically produced coal, ranging from 18% to 185% greater for the average cruise distance of an [liquified methane gas] tanker.”

At the same time, with each passing year, more and more former Democratic lawmakers are lining up to tout methane gas as “climate-friendly” in exchange for a paycheck from Natural Allies, which is currently running a seven-figure campaign to target young, liberal, and Black and Latino voters “as effectively as we have messaged to the right.”

In addition to Heitkamp and Landrieu, former Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, former Ohio Congressman Tim Ryan, and former Florida Congressman Kendrick Meek all accepted positions with Natural Allies in 2023.

Those former lawmakers’ salaries were not disclosed on Natural Allies’s 2022 tax forms, as they were not yet hired by the organization. And it’s unclear if they will be disclosed on future forms, as the IRS only requires that non-profits disclose the five contractors with the highest salaries over $100,000.

However much they are making, they are spreading messages about methane gas that climate scientists have roundly decried as misleading.

“Their claims are all either extremely vague or disproved with middle-school-level science,” said Kate Marvel, a climate scientist at Project Drawdown, who previously worked at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

“Using natural gas warms the climate. Period, full stop,” said Andrew Dessler, professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University. “There is no world in which natural gas is a long-term ‘solution’ to the climate problem.”

Natural Allies cites multiple “independent studies” to support its claim that methane gas is the best way to solve the climate crisis. But, as we reported last year, all of those studies were funded at least in part by fossil fuel interests, and none were published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Actual peer-reviewed science with no industry backing has shown the opposite of what Natural Allies claims. According to a 2021 systematic review of the scientific literature on methane gas, increasing investments in the fossil fuel carries a long-term risk of delaying the clean energy transition and worsening the climate crisis. That’s because investing in further natural gas development “could lock-out emerging renewable technologies for extended periods.”

Building new gas pipelines, LNG terminals, and gas-fired power plants “pose a particularly great risk for carbon lock-ins,” scientists wrote this year in the journal Nature Energy.

What Natural Allies is doing is called “solutions denial,” a common form of climate misinformation, as we previously reported:

“It's an absolute tried-and-tested argument within the disinformation playbook to constantly create more interim milestones before we achieve what a real necessary transition looks like,” said [Jennie] King, who works at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. “So taxpayer money [goes] into creating new dependencies on [fossil fuels], which ultimately in the long term, make it much harder for us to achieve an actual clean energy transition.”

But former Democratic lawmakers and mainstream media are still more than willing to spread the misinformation coming from Natural Allies, so long as Natural Allies is willing to pay for it. Since 2020, Natural Allies has spent $10 million on a national PR campaign targeting Democratic voters, including more than $4 million to place ads in E&E News and Politico newsletters, Axios, Newsweek, Vox, the Wall Street Journal, and across cable news stations, according to reporting from the Guardian and Floodlight.

These campaigns are effective, in part, because it is very difficult to tell who is behind them. Readers of these news outlets may not recognize, as we uncovered last year, that Natural Allies’ ads are a form of fossil fuel industry climate disinformation. And that is the real price of Heitkamp and Landrieu’s sell out: a deception not measured in dollars, but in the degrees threatening our livable climate.

Further reading

Politico and Axios defend running misleading natural gas ads. HEATED, February 2023.

Key quote: “It is not up to us to decide what is factually accurate or what is not factually accurate,” Politico executive vice president Cally Stolbach Baute told HEATED. “We frankly respect our readers enough to be fully transparent with them on our advertising and encourage them to evaluate our journalism on its merit and its accuracy.”

How the gas industry aims to rebrand as ‘clean’ energy to appeal to Black and Latino voters. Floodlight and The Guardian, June 2022.

Key quote: “Success for the natural gas industry will be rooted in whether we can message to the left and the Democratic base of Black and Latino and age 18-34 voters as effectively as we have messaged to the right,” read one early strategy document.

The methane gas industry is trying to codify misinformation into law. HEATED, May 2023.

Key quote: “The phenomenon started in Europe [in 2022], when the European Parliament voted to label certain uses of natural gas as “green.” That meant billions of dollars that were intended to fund climate-friendly projects could legally be used for methane power plants and terminals. Now, industry climate misinformation has also started making its way into U.S. state law—albeit in slightly different ways.”

===

exxonknewS 12 23 // cop 28

...“Oil and gas companies are under pressure, desperately trying to preserve their social license through recycled pledges,” said David Tong, Global Industry Campaign Manager at Oil Change International, which last year published a report finding that Exxon’s climate commitments are “grossly insufficient” to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement.

Woods and his fellow oil company representatives are also using COP to push for unproven technologies that will prolong the lifespan of climate-wrecking fossil fuels. In an interview with Bloomberg at COP, Woods said the energy transition would require an assortment of “solutions” — including hydrogen and carbon capture — and “we need big companies to help with that.”

Woods rejected the IEA’s recent assessment of carbon capture as an “illusion,” telling Reuters that “you could say that about electric vehicles, about wind, about solar.” But according to the IEA, “The key actions required to bend the emissions curve sharply downwards by 2030 are well understood, most often cost effective and are taking place at an accelerating rate. The scaling up of clean energy is the main factor behind a decline of fossil fuel demand of over 25% this decade.”

Yet unlike the billions it invests in carbon capture, Exxon is spending almost nothing on renewable sources of energy, while lobbying against the transition away from its core products.

“It’s no surprise that Exxon is pushing for the continued use of fossil fuels,” said Jessica Green, Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto. “Exxon is in a fight for its life. Real progress on climate change isn’t about more carbon markets or net zero pledges, it’s about putting the oil and gas industry out of business.”

A larger strategy

Woods’ deflections at COP are part of a larger strategy of “corporate issues management,” said Supran, which “the fossil fuel industry has been pioneering for decades.”

“It means having your fingers in all the pies, anticipating future threats to your business and neutralizing them through decades of 360-degree public affairs strategies,” he said.

Exxon has been working to shift the narrative outside of COP, too. “On November 30, the first day of COP 28, The New York Times included a full-page greenwashing ad from ExxonMobil,” Brad Johnson documented in Hill Heat on Monday. “Reuters coverage of Al Gore’s criticism of ExxonMobil’s presence at COP 28 was smothered by greenwashing ads from ExxonMobil. The Punchbowl News political newsletter today is Presented by ExxonMobil.” Yesterday’s Power Switch newsletter from Politico was Presented by ExxonMobil, too.

While the oil giant’s greenwashing may have ramped up around COP, it’s also a years-long affair — aided in large part by many of the same media outlets interviewing Woods at the conference. A major analysis of Big Oil’s advertising between October 2020 and October 2023 found that “many of the world’s most trusted English-language news publications help fossil fuel companies mislead readers about topics like the promise of carbon capture, the potential of ‘renewable biogas,’ and how much the industry contributes to the energy transition,” according to Amy Westervelt and Matthew Green.

The analysis, published by Drilled and DeSmog this week, found that Bloomberg Media Studios last year created a video for Exxon promoting carbon capture and hydrogen; Politico organized 37 e-mail campaigns for Exxon; and Exxon sponsored more than 100 editions of Washington Post newsletters in 2022 alone, as just a few examples.:}:

Ultimately, it’s up to the media, policymakers, and other major institutions to determine whether the oil companies still responsible for fueling climate catastrophe are allowed to have a platform to stand on — or whether, like Big Tobacco, their time to influence the debate about their products’ harm is finally up.

Exxon algae ads

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/14/climate/oil-industry-documents-disinformation.html

https://www.criticalfrequency.org/drilled

==

see Brulle

November 20, 2019

The AEA purchased a full-page advertisement inThe Wall Street Journalcalling on the Republican-led Senate to “protect consumers and taxpayers by eliminating the electric vehicle tax credit once and for all.” [78]

The ad described the EV tax credit as a subsidy for “wealthy coastal elites,” 50% of whom reside in California. [78]

AEA President Thomas Pyle justified the ad with a statement on AEA’s website: [78]

“House Democrats have made expanding the electric vehicle subsidy a top priority before Congress wraps up for the year. This move would essentially enrich two auto companies,GM and Tesla, along withwealthy coastal elites, mainly fromCalifornia and New York.It’s now up to the Republicans in the U.S. Senate to stop the madness. No deals, no extensions. Majority Leader McConnell and his Senate GOP colleagues must protect consumers and taxpayers by eliminating the electric vehicle tax credit once and for all. At the very least, they must block the proposed expansion of this welfare program for the wealthy.” [78]

no lnx (see below) 2x?

<< BACK TO CLIMATEWIRE

Why Exxon hates the Rockefellers, its founding family

By Maxine Joselow | 05/04/2021

Exxon Mobil Corp. has a strategy for firing back at supporters of climate change litigation against the oil giant: Blame the Rockefellers.

In recent court filings and public statements, Exxon has accused people who support climate liability lawsuits of engaging in a conspiracy bankrolled by members of the elite Rockefeller family.

The allegations, which pit one of the world’s largest oil and gas companies against one of America’s wealthiest dynasties, are more than a little ironic.

For one thing, Exxon is the largest descendant of Standard Oil Co., the business that John D. Rockefeller founded in 1870. The family’s wealth today largely stems from the 19th-century oil tycoon.

For another, the climate liability lawsuits accuse Exxon itself of engaging in a far-reaching conspiracy to obscure the scientific consensus on climate change and block global efforts to rein in planet-warming emissions.

To climate activists, the oil giant is trying to flip the script on the allegations it’s battling in court.

"If there’s ever been a conspiracy, it’s abundantly clear what it is. It’s been a conspiracy over many decades of Exxon and its ilk covering up the greatest threat that human civilization has ever faced," author and activist Bill McKibben said in an interview with E&E News.

"The results," McKibben said, "will be obvious in the geological record of planet Earth for millions of years to come."

To Exxon and its allies, however, a paper trail from the Rockefellers’ charities paints the picture of a tangled conspiracy stretching from journalists to activists to lawyers.

The paper trail starts in 2015, when the Rockefeller Brothers Fund — a New York City-based philanthropic foundation created and run by members of the Rockefeller family — donated $200,000 to InsideClimate News.

That same year, the RockefellerFamily Fund — a separate charitable entity — gave $200,000 to Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Both donations funded bombshell investigations published in InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles Times that revealed Exxon privately knew about climate change in the 1970s but that the company publicly denied the scientific consensus for decades. The investigations spawned the hashtag #ExxonKnew and fueled a wave of climate litigation against the oil giant.

Today, five states and more than a dozen municipalities have filed lawsuits alleging that Exxon and other oil companies misled the public about the climate risks of burning fossil fuels. The complaints ask the industry to help cover the costs of addressing floods, wildfires and other disasters fueled by rising global temperatures.

From 2015 to 2019, the latest year for which data is available, the Rockefellers’ charities donated more than$3 million to organizations that have supported the climate liability lawsuits through advocacy, research or litigation, according to data compiled for E&E News by Anna Massoglia, an investigative researcher at the Center for Responsive Politics.

That includes more than $1 million to 350.org, the environmental group co-founded by McKibben, and $175,000 to EarthRights International, a nonprofit organization involved in a climate liability lawsuit in Colorado.

"The #ExxonKnew campaign is extremely well-funded and includes paid media coverage, legal support, activist groups and academic research," Exxon wrote in a February post on its website. "Foundations providing financial support for the campaign include: Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Rockefeller Family Fund, Rockefeller Philanthropy."

Lee Wasserman, the director of the Rockefeller Family Fund, said the philanthropic efforts have struck a nerve at the oil supermajor.

"Exxon has accused us and other advocates of conspiracy, which is obviously a very loaded term," Wasserman, who is not a Rockefeller, said in an interview with E&E News.

"In America, of course, it’s considered noble when citizen organizations band together to address major societal concerns, not a conspiracy," he continued. "But I guess if you’re Exxon, the world looks a little different to you."

In a phone call with E&E News, Exxon spokesperson Casey Norton questioned why this story was newsworthy. Norton didn’t respond to follow-up requests for comment.

‘Morally reprehensible’

Standard Oil controlled more than 90% of petroleum production in America within a few decades of its founding. By the time John D. Rockefeller died in 1937, he was the richest man in the world, leaving behind a fossil fuel fortune for his descendants.

Today, there are more than 70 heirs of the oil tycoon with a combined net worth of $8.4 billion, according to Forbes. Many of them have become increasingly concerned about climate change — and increasingly uneasy about the source of their wealth.

One of those heirs, Neva Rockefeller Goodwin, the great-granddaughter of John D. Rockefeller, co-sponsored a resolution at Exxon’s annual shareholder meeting in 2008 demanding that the company study the risks it faces from climate change.

:{

}:

The resolution failed. But the battle was just beginning.

In 2016, after unsuccessfully trying to persuade Exxon’s top brass to take climate change more seriously, Goodwin went public with her discontent. She penned an opinion piece in the LA Times announcing that she was selling her shares in the company and donating the $400,000 in proceeds to the Rockefeller Family Fund’s environmental program.

"I was really disgusted with the lying that the company had been doing. And I just didn’t feel good about maintaining a relationship with this company, which had been started, of course, by my great-grandfather," Goodwin, an economist at Boston University, said in an interview with E&E News.

"I don’t say he was doing the wrong thing to start that company. In his day, that was the progressive thing to do," she added. "But looking back, we know that human extraction and use of fossil fuels has done enormous damage to the planet and to our species’ future."

Around the same time, the Rockefeller Family Fund announced that it would divest its portfolio from fossil fuels in a scathing statement that singled out Exxon.

"We would be remiss," the leaders of the fund wrote, "if we failed to focus on what we believe to be the morally reprehensible conduct on the part of ExxonMobil."

Consultants and lawyers

The Exxon-Rockefeller feud is not a new phenomenon. The New York Times detailed the controversy in a 2016 piece titled "Exxon Mobil Accuses the Rockefellers of a Climate Conspiracy."

But in the five years since then, the mud-slinging has intensified, as Exxon has funneled its attacks on the Rockefellers through a network of high-powered consultants and lawyers.

FTI Consulting Inc., a global firm whose fossil fuel industry clients include Exxon, has written a flurry of posts blasting the Rockefellers on Energy in Depth, a news and media site run by the Independent Petroleum Association of America.

In a 2019 post titled "How the Rockefellers Manufactured the Climate Liability Campaign,"FTI’s Spencer Walrathwrote that backers of the climate liability lawsuits "have all been bankrolled by the Rockefellers, a wealthy family that owes its riches to the very company it is now seeking to destroy."

Asked for comment, William Allison, a spokesman for Energy in Depth and a senior director at FTI, said in an emailed statement: "For nearly a decade, members of the Rockefeller family have openly spent tens of millions of dollars to support plaintiffs’ attorneys, activist groups, academics and journalists who advocate for lawsuits that they fully admit will do absolutely nothing to address climate change."

Allison added, "Governments, energy companies, investors and labor unions are focused on solutions, while the Rockefellers are increasingly on an island — wasting time, money and resources on a campaign that everyone else knows is a failure."

In addition to FTI, Exxon has hired Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, a New York City-based law firm that represents the oil company in several climate liability cases.

In a recent presentation in the climate liability case brought by Massachusetts officials, Paul Weiss partner Justin Anderson pointed out that climate activists held a 2016 meeting at the Rockefeller Family Fund.

The participants in the meeting "referred openly to an Exxon campaign, the goals of which were to create scandal, force officials to disassociate themselves from the company and delegitimize Exxon Mobil as a political actor," Anderson told Massachusetts Superior Court Justice Karen Green at a March hearing in the case.

Paul Weiss lawyers also dismissed the 2015 investigations into Exxon by InsideClimate News and the LA Times as "so-called investigative journalism" in a 2018 court filing in the climate liability lawsuit brought by former New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman (D).

"ExxonMobil has unambiguously alleged that the Attorneys General relied on this so-called journalism to provide a convenient pretext for their unlawful exercise of state power to discriminate based on viewpoint," the lawyers wrote.

Asked for comment, David Sassoon, founder and publisher of InsideClimate News, said in an email to E&E News: "We published a nine part series based on Exxon’s own internal documents, and our work, which has proven itself to be bulletproof, speaks for itself. To claim it’s the result of conspiracy is silly and baseless."

Sassoon added that Exxon has never asked the news outlet to issue a correction.

‘A conspiracy to end world hunger’

From 2015 to 2019, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund donated $700,000 to the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development, according to the data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. The Rockefeller Family Fund gave an additional $75,000.

Until last month, the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development housed the Center for Climate Integrity (CCI), a Washington-based group that seeks to raise public awareness of the climate liability lawsuits through a "Pay Up Climate Polluters" campaign.

FTI has accused CCI Executive Director Richard Wiles of supporting a "larger coordinated scheme to attack energy companies and force the industry to pay for global warming."

Wiles responded sarcastically when asked about these allegations.

"I suppose if there is a conspiracy, it’s like a conspiracy to end world hunger," he said. "Yes, we’re guilty of talking to each other about the oil industry’s role in causing and then lying about climate change. I’m guilty of talking to my colleagues. It’s true."

Wiles argued that Exxon has sought to deprive climate activists of theirFirst Amendment rights to criticize the oil giant — while at the same time seeking to preserve its own First Amendment rights to communicate about climate change to the public.

"They think that the First Amendment allows them to lie about their role in causing climate change, but it does not allow advocates to talk to each other about how to deal with that," Wiles said. "So it’s an interesting interpretation of the Constitution."

Rockefeller funding has supported the Center for Climate Integrity’s work "across all program areas," he added, including staff salaries, legal assessments and the ExxonKnews newsletter.

From 2015 to 2019, the Rockefeller Family Fund provided $175,000 toEarthRights International, a nonprofit organization that says it combines "the power of law and the power of people in defense of human rights and the environment."

:{

}:

EarthRights helped three Colorado communities — the city of Boulder, Boulder County and San Miguel County — bring climate liability lawsuits against Exxon and SuncorEnergy Inc. in 2018.

FTI has described Earthrights as a "shadowy group" that has "connections to all the major anti-fossil fuel players backed by wealthy environmentalist foundations."

Marco Simons, general counsel at EarthRights International who is on the legal team representing the three Colorado governments, said the Rockefellers don’t exert control over his work.

"We never allow funders to interfere with our attorney-client relationships or call the shots in terms of litigation strategy. That would be a serious ethical violation," Simons said.

"On a more general level, I’m not sure why it’s surprising that people who care about climate change are funding work on climate change," he added. "So if that’s a conspiracy, I don’t know what to say."

Saying adieu to ads

Many of the climate liability lawsuits against Exxon have been tied up in procedural wrangling over whether they belong in state or federal court.

The Supreme Court is expected to soon decide BP PLC v. Mayor and City Council of Baltimore, a narrow technical dispute stemming from Baltimore’s climate liability lawsuit that could help settle the venue question (Climatewire, Feb. 23).

In the meantime, Goodwin, the great-granddaughter of John D. Rockefeller, counts a small victory outside the courtroom.

Goodwin said that although her early meetings with Exxon were largely unproductive, she was able to convince the company to stop running advertorials in The New York Times touting its commitment to fighting global warming.

"We had been having some dialogue, and we discovered that the company was not talking with us in good faith at all. Basically what we realized was we were meeting with their [public relations] people and it wasn’t going anywhere," Goodwin said.

"But I told them, ‘That ad is making you look really silly,’" she added. "And the ad disappeared and never appeared again. That’s the one success that those conversations had.’"

Many of the climate liability lawsuits cite Exxon’s advertorials in the Times as an example of deceptive messaging to consumers, including the complaints brought by Delaware and Minnesota.

Exxon’s advertorials, which appeared in the Times every Thursday from 1989 to 2004, effectively "misled the public" about the scientific consensus on global warming, Harvard University researchers Naomi Oreskes and Geoffrey Supranconcluded in a 2017 paper.

The Harvard researchers, too, have faced pushback from Exxon. Vijay Swarup, the company’s vice president of research and development, has accused the researchers of using "cherry-picked" data, while FTI has called out the paper’s partial funding from the Rockefeller Family Fund.

"My broad reaction is that as the saying goes, first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win," Supran said in an interview with E&E News.

"I see this stage right now as the fighting," he added. "In other words, the evidence that the fossil fuel industry endangered the public by misleading it about climate science has become so overwhelming that Exxon is coming out swinging with everything they’ve got."

Rockefeller funding

Grantor Recipient 2019 amount 2018 amount 2017 amount 2016 amount 2015 amount Total 2015-2019

Rockefeller Brothers Fund 350.org $200,000 $0 $200,000 $200,000 $250,000 $850,000

Rockefeller Brothers Fund Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development $75,000 $75,000 $150,000 $73,877 $326,123 $700,000

Rockefeller Brothers Fund Lost Light Projects Inc. for InsideClimate News $0 $0 $0 $0 $200,000 $200,000

Rockefeller Brothers Fund Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors for Climate Nexus $195,159 $0 $0 $0 $0 $195,159

Rockefeller Brothers Fund Climate Accountability Institute $0 $30,000 $30,000 $30,000 $37,000 $127,000

Rockefeller Brothers Fund Better Future Project Inc. for Divest Harvard $100,000 $0 $0 $0 $0 $100,000

Rockefeller Family Fund Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism $50,000 $0 $155,000 $0 $200,000 $405,000

Rockefeller Family Fund EarthRights International $105,000 $0 $70,000 $0 $0 $175,000

Rockefeller Family Fund Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development $75,000 $0 $0 $0 $0 $75,000

Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors 350.org $300,500 $0 $0 $0 $0 $300,500

Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors Union of Concerned Scientists $19,000 $15,000 $0 $0 $0 $34,000

Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors Center for International Environmental Law $0 $0 $25,000 $0 $0 $25,000

          TOTAL: $3,186,659

Anna Massoglia/Center for Responsive Politics

https://www.dropbox.com/s/t98nfoexa2fglji/SchmertzAMBspeech.jpeg?dl=0

speech meh

mobil op ed orig 1970, mgmt thot oil wd be in short supply, so boost mass transit?!  nyt widely read (and repected?] has op eds from editors an guests; run of paper" ad cheaper than specifc spot and corner of op ed page is among highest; p 24  1st try controv w/ other oil co b/c mass transit, but proved worked; by q972 every wk;  ow in wapo, LAT wsj boston globe...obsrvations kinda watered down op ed in 400 sunday supplements; other msg taylor to aud eg biz

https://www.drillednews.com/post/the-mobil-oil-flack-who-brought-us-false-equivalence-advertorials-and-corporate-free-speech

ep 4 and 5

In episodes four and five of Drilled, we tell the story of Herb Schmertz, former VP of Public Affairs for Mobil Oil. Schmertz brought many new PR tactics to the oil industry; he invented the advertorial, bullied journalists into false equivalence (what he called "creative confrontation"), and pushed for the first big corporate personhood case—long before Citizens United—back in the 1970s. He also coined the term "affinity of purpose" marketing to describe Mobil's longtime funding of Masterpiece Theatre and various other PBS programming, which helped to establish Mobil as "the thinking man's oil company."

Collected below are examples of the advertorials Schmertz distributed (in numerous interviews he refers to them as "pamphlets" and to The New York Timesas an excellent distribution system for the company's pamphlets), as well as some of the documents we referred to in the episode (speeches Schmertz gave, transcripts of interviews with him, and a Mobil doc explaining its advertorial strategy and the success of it). You can also listen to the episodes wherever you get your podcasts, or via the embedded players below.

Documents:

Advertorials

sum

Fossil fuel companies have been lying to the public for decades; it's well-documented that almost as soon as climate change became a scientific reality, they actively downplayed the crisis. But to keep Americans unaware of the growing urgency of our environmental problem, those same companies needed a way to paint themselves as heroes. Advertising allowed fossil fuel companies to sell themselves, not their products, as the good guys. The depictions of billion-dollar companies were often folksy, innovative, innocent, and brazenly, stereotypically American. The strategy was genius. It’s also now the subject of congressional scrutiny. This week, the House Oversight Committee officially launched an investigation into the fossil fuel industry's disinformation efforts and their impact on the climate crisis. Journalist and podcast host Amy Westervelt wanted to go back to the beginning — to find out how advertising, the media, and the fossil fuel industry became so intertwined. Her podcast Drilled profiled several of the men who invented the public relations business we know today — starting with a man named Herb Schmertz.

This is a segment from our September 17th, 2021 program, :{:{Fire and Brimstone:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}::(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}:.

no lnx

The Birth of Climate Disinformation

Photograph of Herb Schmertz in his office, circa mid 1980s.

TRANSCRIPT

SACHA PFEIFFER We heard Hertsgaard say that fossil fuel companies have been lying to the public for decades. In fact, it's well documented that almost as soon as climate change became a scientific reality, they actively downplayed the crisis. But to keep Americans unaware of the growing urgency of our environmental problem, those same companies needed a way to paint themselves as heroes. Advertising allowed fossil fuel companies to sell themselves, not their products, as the good guys. The depictions of billion dollar companies were often folksy, innovative, innocent and brazenly, stereotypically American. The strategy was genius. It's also now the subject of congressional scrutiny. This week, the House Oversight Committee officially launched an investigation into the fossil fuel industry's disinformation efforts and their impact on the climate crisis. Journalist and podcast host Amy Westervelt wanted to go back to the beginning to find out how advertising the media and the fossil fuel industry became so intertwined. Her podcast Drilled, profiled several of the men who invented the public relations business we know today. The following is an excerpt from one of those episodes.

[CLIP]

HERB SCHMERTZIf you're going to do the job properly, you have to find unconventional ways to communicate to the public. And it's not a question of convincing the press of anything. It's a question of convincing the public [END CLIP]

AMY WESTERVELT That’s Mobil Oil's legendary PR guy, Herb Schmertz. Schmertz was VP of public affairs for Mobil for decades. Slick and handsome, always with an expensive suit, he was the smartest guy in the room and mostly thought that both journalists and other PR guys were idiots. He ran PR for Mobil Oil from 1969 to 1988 and became a master of media manipulation. Schmertz didn't just focus on placing particular stories he set about fundamentally changing the relationship between corporations and the media. To Schmertz, the press was more of an obstacle between him and the public or Mobil and policy makers.

[CLIP]

HERB SCHMERTZ And to do the job properly, you have to really go around the press or beyond the press or against the press to get a story out so that the public focuses on it, not the press. If you're just going to limit yourself to getting the press to focus on it, you're not doing the entire job. [END CLIP]

AMY WESTERVELT Schmertz is the guy who really turned media into another propaganda tool for the fossil fuel industry. He invented the advertorial for a start. He also invented issue advertising, which is now the only type of advertising the oil industry does. You'd think all they do is farm algae and research carbon capture and worry about climate change if you only paid attention to their ads.

[CLIP]

EXXON MOBIL ADVERT Energy is a complex challenge. People want power and power plants have more than a third of energy related carbon emissions. The challenge is to capture the emissions before they're released into the atmosphere. Exxon Mobil.... [END CLIP]

AMY WESTERVELT Schmertz, also bullied journalists into covering big oil’s side of the story, and he encouraged his peers to do the same. Which, sadly, worked really well, and he lobbied for corporate First Amendment rights and against any media regulations that would make it harder for him to use the press as a tool. Known during his heyday for dapper suits, cigars and generally being something of a dandy. For the first half of his life, Herb Schmertz seemed more destined to be secretary of labor than a famous PR guy. After graduating from Columbia Law School in 1955, Schmertz was drafted into the Army. The Vietnam War was just beginning, given his law background, Schmertz was sent straight to work in counterintelligence in Washington, D.C. After 2 years there, it was back to law for Schmerts. Labor law, following in the footsteps of his older brother. In 1960, Schmertz signed on to work for JFK's campaign.

[CLIP OF JFK AD PLAYS, CHORUS SINGS "KENNEDY" REPEATEDLY]

AMY WESTERVELT He was a Democrat, an idealist, and he helped the campaign with voter registration and reaching out to special groups. Including labor and various ethnic communities in New York. When he went to work for Mobil, commerce is actually still working in labor. He handled the company's labor relations for 5 years, but his background in law and political campaigning, combined with his relationships with various labor unions, made Schmertz an even greater, if unexpected, fit for the company's public affairs office. By this point, 1969, Mobil's CEO was a man named Rawleigh Warner. Warner wanted Mobil, which always seemed to be playing catch up to Exxon, to be more of a visible player in the industry. Schmertz had a lot of ideas on that front, starting with humanizing Mobil. Giving the company a personality, complete with ideas that needed to be shared. Here's Schmertz much later in life, describing that strategy.

[CLIP]

HERB SCHMERTZ As a personality where we believe very strongly about the importance of public policy. We believe fervently that as custodians of vast resources and one that we were not doing our job if we did not participate in the marketplace of ideas [END CLIP]

AMY WESTERVELT To get all the facets of the corporation's personality across to the public, Schmertz used the tools he's come to be known for. The issue ad and the advertorial. The latter was born in 1970, when the New York Times opened up its op-ed pages to advertising for the first time. Schmertz wanted Mobil's ad to be just as smart and provocative as any editorial that might appear in the section otherwise. He hired legit writers to write them and eventually ran them every week for decades. They ran the gamut from squawking about taxes, to complaining about the media,to unexpected takes in favor of public transit. Schmertz talked about one of his advertorials on the PBS show The Open Mind in 1980.

[CLIP]

DAVE Herb, thanks for joining me today.

HERB SCHMERTZ A great pleasure to be here Dave.

DAVE I want to turn as quickly as possible to a new fairy tale, the Mobil ad or op ed piece or editorial, call it what you will ...

HERB SCHMERTZ We call them, pamphlets,.

DAVE Pamphlets, but they appear in newspapers.

HERB SCHMERTZ Yes. [END CLIP]

AMY WESTERVELT A new kind of fairy tale was the title of Schmertz's latest advertorial, and it criticized PBS for running a film that stereotyped Saudi Arabians. It was, of course, in Mobil's interest to be seen as a friend and staunch defender of Saudi Arabia.At this point in time in particular, the company was increasing its profits mainly by expanding its development and production in Saudi Arabia.

[CLIP]

DAVE At the end, your conclusion in the ad, we hope that the management of the Public Broadcasting Service will review its decision to run this film. Meaning you hoped they wouldn't run it.

HERB SCHMERTZ Well not necessarily [OVERTALK]

DAVE ...and exercise responsible judgment in the light of what is in the best interest of the United States.

HERB SCHMERTZ Right

DAVE Do you think they did exercise responsible judgment?

HERB SCHMERTZ I think they did a better job after this ad period than they otherwise would have, but they could have done substantially more [END CLIP]

SACHA PFEIFFER Driven, at least in part by this advertorial, PBS aired a panel discussion following that film where Mobil's position was represented alongside other voices.

AMY WESTERVELT In various documents and speeches, Schmertz referred to how they helped shape the discourse on key issues to the company and established mobile as the thinking man's oil company. In a long buried briefing that we found called the Corporations and the First Amendment that Schmertz wrote for the American Management Association in 1978, he explains why he chose The New York Times for these ads. He writes, quote, The Times was chosen because it is published in the nation's leading population communications and business center. Because it has a highly intelligent, vocal, sophisticated readership and because it reaches legislators and other government officials. In short, it was the paper most likely to reach the largest number of opinion leaders and decision makers. Schmertz also talks about the program as a great success, in this briefing. "Mobil found that the medium worked," he writes. "The messages stimulated discussion among influentials on both sides of the issue. Exactly what the company had set out to do." But it turns out that the result of placing all those ads was quite different from simply stimulating discussion, not just in terms of reaching a large audience of readers, but also in shaping the Times his own coverage of these issues.

KERT DAVIES They talk about having influence The New York Times editorial viewpoints.

SACHA PFEIFFER Kert Davies is the founder and director of the Climate Investigation Center, a nonprofit watchdog group that focuses on influence around energy and environmental policy. They uncovered an internal marketing report from 1982 in which Mobil's marketing and PR team was reporting to the company's leadership about how these advertorials had done.

KERT DAVIES The document says, quote, our analysis shows that the Times has altered or significantly softened its viewpoints on conservation, moving from a total reliance on conservation to advocating increased production incentives to solve the supply shortage on monopoly and divestiture. Moving from approving the breakup of the oil companies to opposing divestiture.Moving from advocating strict environmental safeguards to suggesting more relaxed controls on offshore drilling. Moving from valuing environmental concerns at the expense of exploration and development, to urging accelerated offshore drilling. So they are tallying how they have affected the viewpoints of The New York Times on conservation, monopoly and divestiture. Decontrol, natural gas, coal, offshore drilling, all things that they had written op eds on.

GEOFFREY SUPRAN And they've been open and forthright about this, even in some of the editorials themselves.

SACHA PFEIFFER Harvard science historian Geoffrey Supran has studied these advertorials at length.

GEOFFREY SUPRAN No doubt the fossil fuel industry has been very effective at embedding themselves into our culture and our society and our media in an increasingly insidious way that makes it hard to discern when you are being advertised to, versus simply being reprogrammed to see the world and society in a slightly different way.

AMY WESTERVELT Mobil was convinced enough that its advertorial strategy worked, to keep running them weekly in the Times for decades. It was even a program that Exxon kept going after it acquired Mobil.

GEOFFREY SUPRANThey've taken out about one in four of all the advertorials that have ever appeared on the op ed page of The New York Times.

AMY WESTERVELT He said one in four. So 25 percent of all advertorials that have ever run in the New York Times op ed pages were commissioned by Mobil or ExxonMobil.

GEOFFREY SUPRAN Political scientists studying these efforts have described this campaign as towering over all other competitors in its volume and expense.

AMY WESTERVELT ExxonMobil doesn't run its advertorials anymore, but it's moved on to the latest iteration. Campaigns made by The New York Times itself. It's not the newsroom, it's the brand studio that The New York Times created, but still, it's the same company that puts out The New York Times newspaper – making oil companies ads for them. See if you can spot a bit of the Schmertz magic here. In 1978, he said the goal of Mobil's advertorial campaigns was to, quote, stimulate discussion among influentials. In 2020, The New York Times brand studio website's tagline is, quote, stories that influenced the influential. Here's a campaign they did for ExxonMobil last year. Highlighting the company's algae biofuel program.

[CLIP]

ALGAE BIOFUEL ADVERT These vibrant green dots, microscopic living organisms are algae. Look closely, algae grows almost everywhere from murky ponds. [END CLIP]

AMY WESTERVELT Again, the brand studio is separate from the newsroom. There's a definite firewall between advertising and editorial. And every time I talk about these campaigns, New York Times reporters bristle at the idea that they are being accused of being manipulated or influenced by industry. Whether they are or aren't influenced is not really the point. It's not even the goal of these campaigns. The goal is to reach and influence certain types of readers and to wrap the industry's messages in the cloak of credibility provided by The New York Times or The Washington Post, which also does this. 

Last year, The Post ran a series of stories that its brand studio created for the American Petroleum Institute, all about how, quote, natural gas and oil are helping to deliver a sustainable fuel mix. These campaigns are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue for newspapers at a time when the business model for journalism has never been more strained. And when you ask for proposals on them, as I did, ad sales, people start offering all kinds of things. You could place content they write for you in the climate section. You can peg it two key words like climate change and make sure it's a suggested next read on any related news story. Influence doesn't look like an oil tycoon in a top hat showing up at your desk to twirl his mustache and tell you to spike a story. It looks like readers being fed a bunch of oil propaganda before, after and right next to your legit climate reporting. We have Herb Schmertz to thank for that.

SACHA PFEIFFER That was an excerpt from the Mad Men season of Drilled, an Investigated podcast about climate change hosted by Amy Westervelt.