SCHOLARS AGW
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1/22</font><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><b style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 102, 0);">Supran,</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> who works with Harvard climate politics expert Naomi Oreskes, says they have a collection of information that could help Democrats determine which questions to ask and which documents to demand.</span></font></b></div><div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">=</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><a href="https://www.desmog.com/2022/02/03/pr-big-oil-attitudes-aronczyk-bernays/"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.desmog.com/2022/02/03/pr-big-oil-attitudes-aronczyk-bernays/</font></a></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx ix</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>How the PR Industry Has Helped Big Oil Transform the Way We Think About the Environment</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Powered by fossil fuel funding, PR agents have used astroturfing, “manufactured consent,” and other techniques to furtively shape public perceptions in favor of their polluting clients.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">OPINION</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ANALYSIS</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Stella Levantesi</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Feb 3, 2022 </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Series: GASLIT</font></div><div>
</div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Editor’s Note: This is the first article in a new column, Gaslit, which will navigate society’s dysfunctional relationship with fossil fuel disinformation. Have a tip or idea? Get in touch.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Since 2008, the American Petroleum Institute (API), which is the U.S.’s largest oil and gas trade group, has paid the world’s largest PR firm, Edelman, $439.7 million. API isn’t the only group in the oil and gas sector to have paid a PR firm for its services. And Edelman isn’t the only PR firm to have received money from the oil and gas sector. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For decades, fossil fuel companies have been using PR firms to polish, reinvent, and fabricate their image; protect their reputation; and greenwash their activities, in ways that we are still trying to fully understand.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It’s not just that they need to, it’s also that they have the power and money to do so.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“When you make a fortune producing fossil fuels and you don’t wanna give it up, you will spend a lot of money to be able to do that. You’ve got ample funding, so you can afford the best PR firms and huge campaigns,” Oklahoma State University emeritus professor and sociologist Riley Dunlap said. “So, that’s why they do it. To protect their interests and because they can easily afford it.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And because oil and gas companies and their trade groups know that PR agents will carry out their work in the shadows. PR firms have developed what authors Melissa Aronczyk and Maria I. Espinoza refer to in their book<b> Strategic Nature as “strategies of silence”: the role of PR agents has been to create and execute strategies for their clients while remaining completely invisible.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In fact, they have done this so well that, to this day, there is very little literature on the role of PR firms in shaping climate policy and discourse.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As DeSmog has reported, a recent study, co-authored by<b> Brown University researchers Robert Brulle and Carter Werthman,</b> has begun “lifting the veil of secrecy that envelops PR firms and their work.” Their study challenges the notion that PR agents are neutral mediators merely working to carry out their clients’ wishes. To the contrary, PR agents are actors involved in the processes of shaping environmental culture, policy, and public discourse, as well as creating corporate-image and marketing strategies.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“The PR agencies themselves are the active developers of these techniques,” Brulle said. “We’re not giving the whole picture if we don’t include them.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">According to the study, the origins of PR in the political context can be found, among others, in the work of Edward Bernays, often referred to as “the father of public relations” <b>(although Ivy Ledbetter Lee, who started his PR firm 25 years before Bernays, might be better suited to hold this title).</b> Developing his ideas in the 1920s, Bernays’ thought built on existing theories about the role of the public and its relationship to PR within the democratic political context.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>He was the first to imagine the public as a “strategic resource,</b>” Aronczyk and Espinoza write in Strategic Nature. The public, in other words, was not an end in itself but “a means for other ends.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Using the public as a “strategic resource” would become a popular strategy for corporate propaganda. PR firms developed a tactic which engaged “third-party mobilization” such as grassroots involvement in order to create the perception of widespread support for an issue, position, campaign, or policy. According to the study by Brulle and Werthman, third-party mobilization is the second-most common PR tactic.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“The idea of a third party spokesperson is that you get somebody else that’s credible to say what you want them to say,” Brulle said. “It creates this idea that there’s grassroot support for [something], when in reality, it’s all a fabrication of the PR agency or the corporation.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Bernays also transformed the phrase “manufacturing consent,” which writer Walter Lippmann originally intended as a critique of political propaganda. One of Bernays’ publicity ideas was so effective that it became a way of life.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">black and white illustration of a woman in 1900 smoking and riding a bicycle</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Working on behalf of the tobacco industry in 1929, he hired women to march in the Easter Sunday Parade in New York City while smoking their “torches of freedom,” a symbolic phrase used to push women to smoke in public despite social taboos at the time. The “Torches of freedom” campaign was created to target women consumers and exploit their desires for freedom, when freedom was, in fact, considered transgression. Campaigns like this one led to higher rates of smoking among women.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Not only did Bernays make “manufacturing consent” possible, he made it “desirable,” Aronczyk and Espinoza argue. The public was PR’s best resource. Even Bruce Harrison, a pioneer of “corporate environmentalism” — when companies consider environmental themes in their decision-making process — thought that grassroots involvement was crucial for building public support for the oil and gas industry and that without it, the industry would suffer.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But to succeed, fossil fuel companies also needed to be seen as “trustworthy” and “socially responsible,” Brulle said. In other words, they needed legitimacy. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>At its core, PR is about legitimacy, and about using “the concepts of truth or facts to persuade others that your view is the best one” as a way to garner support</b>, according to Strategic Nature. Ideas and information, in this context, aren’t absolute categories; they need to be constructed and shaped in order to appeal to different “publics” — or audiences — in different contexts.</font></div><div>
</div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This is why PR isn’t only invested in communication. It also creates dimensions where certain ideas and information, such as “clean coal” or “carbon footprints,” can be chosen over others and made to seem legitimate — what Aronczyk and Espinoza call the creation of “contexts of communication.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 102);">Third-party mobilization </span>was especially popular after Barack Obama was elected U.S. President in 2008, when fossil fuel companies funded — and PR firms designed — so-called<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);"> astroturf </span>campaigns </b>to create the perception of existing grassroots efforts to oppose climate change policies.<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> Astroturfing hit a peak around 2009, when Congress was about to pass climate legislation, which is generally when they “crank up their PR machines,” Brulle said. </span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>But recently, such PR frenzies around legislative efforts have become less common. According to <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Dunlap,</span> this is because obstruction efforts have become so effective that astroturf campaigns just aren’t as necessary these days.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>“I think one of the reasons we’ve seen some decline in the importance of astroturf groups is that the oil corporations and big conservative philanthropists like the Koch brothers have been so successful in getting the Republican party to buy into their agenda and do their bidding that perhaps there’s no need for these other activities,”</b> Dunlap said.</font></div><div>
</div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>One of the reasons Big Oil’s disinformation campaign has been<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">, in fact, so effective is that it has succeeded in turning a physical problem — the planet warming — into political propaganda by means of “social technology,</span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">” as Brulle calls it. According to Strategic Nature, the environmental problem became “the wrong kind of problem” when PR firms turned it into a problem of politics, of “individual attention,” of information — of anything other than what it actually was: “a problem of existence.”</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">However, before the environment could become any kind of problem, the notion of “the environment” had to be created in the first place. This wording implies that there is something “the environment” is, in fact, external to, that it is separated from human beings. And not only that the environment is separate, but that it can be legitimately used, exploited, owned. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Separation from “the environment,” encouraged by what is historically defined in Western thought as dualism — basically, nature on one side, humankind on the other — has promoted the illusion that there is an “outside.” (This idea sits in contrast to many Indigenous perceptions of human-nature relationships). British philosopher Timothy Morton says that if you begin to think of the biosphere as a dreaming mind, you will find that everything in that biosphere is a symptom and expression of the biosphere itself. There is no outside. The environment is only perceived as external.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This framing was convenient for PR firms who needed to put space between “the environment” and its degradation and those responsible for it — especially, corporations. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Some PR agents in the early 1970s understood that managing environmental problems wasn’t enough. If they wanted to control the social perception of companies’ responsibility for the environment, and consequent political action for it, they had to anticipate problems, and construct them. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Aronczyk and Espinoza write that W. Howard Chase, founding member of the Public Relations Society of America, was one of the proponents of this idea of “issue management.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Chase’s idea for the 1970s Crying Indian ad campaign can be considered a key moment in constructing one of the most flawed cultural narratives around the climate crisis: that just like individuals are singularly responsible for emissions and pollution, it’s individuals — not corporations — who are singularly responsible for solving these problems. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the ad, a caricature of an American Indian man (played by an Italian-American actor) paddles a canoe into an industrial waterway. Coming upon a littered shoreline, he sheds a single tear when a person tosses trash out of a passing vehicle and it lands at his feet. A narrator proclaims, “People start pollution. People can stop it.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The oil, gas, and plastics industry was more than happy to deviate attention from production (its sphere) to consumption (the general public’s). And we know today that the myth of individual responsibility, which PR agents developed — by using the public as a resource, nonetheless — has been one of the most successful communications strategies of all time.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">PR has played a key — and undeniable — role in both the way we perceive the fossil fuel industry and the way we understand environmentalism and environmental issues today. And it’s done so to the extent that, as Strategic Nature argues, it’s impossible to comprehend the role of the environment in our everyday lives “without understanding how something called ‘the environment’ has been invented and communicated to us throughout our lives” in the first place.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ANALYSIS OPINION SCIENCE DENIAL</font></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">=</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09644016.2020.1863703" style="text-decoration-line: none; outline: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000" style="">https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09644016.2020.1863703</font></a></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">early oil industry disinformation on global warming</font></b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Benjamin Franta</b> ORCID </font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Pages 663-668 | Published online: 05<b> Jan 2021</b></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Download citation https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2020.1863703 </font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> Full Article Figures & data References Citations Metrics Licensing Reprints & Permissions PDF EPUB</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ABSTRACT</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Determining the onset of organized disinformation about global warming is critical for understanding its political history and evaluating the responsibilities of fossil fuel producers and other relevant parties today.</span><b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 102);">A newly discovered archival document shows the American Petroleum Institute was promulgating false and misleading information about climate change in 1980, nearly a decade earlier than previously known</span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">, in order to promote public policies favorable to the fossil fuel industry. This finding demonstrates early use of public-facing disinformation about global warming by the petroleum industry and suggests commercial fossil fuel interests played a more obstructive role in climate change discourse and policy throughout the 1980s than previously understood.</span></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">KEYWORDS: Climate change global warming American Petroleum Institute fossil fuel industry disinformation denial</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the historiography of climate change politics, organized disinformation (false or misleading information promulgated by an organization) about global warming is <b>often understood to commence in 1989 with publications from the George C. Marshall Institute</b> (Brulle 2020a) and the founding of the Global Climate Coalition (Brulle 2020b). Some writers (Rich 2018), as well as fossil fuel industry representatives (Walrath 2018), have argued that this apparent lack of organized disinformation prior to 1989 proves that commercial interests bear no or little responsibility for the lack of proactive climate policy throughout the 1980s.<b> A document not yet noticed by historians, however, shows that the American Petroleum Institute (API) was publicly downplaying the threat of climate change as early as 1980.</b></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 0);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">In August 1980, the API published Two Energy Futures: A National Choice for the 80s (American Petroleum Institute 1980). The policy booklet acknowledged that carbon dioxide was a ‘pollutant’ and that fossil fuels could cause global warming, stating (American Petroleum Institute 1980, p. 80):</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When coal (or any other fossil fuel) is burned, carbon dioxide emissions occur. In itself, carbon dioxide is harmless – nature itself is a major source. However, some scientists believe that large concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can, in time, cause climatic changes – specifically, higher temperatures worldwide (the ‘greenhouse’ effect).</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">After this acknowledgment, however, the API proceeded to cast doubt upon the danger of global warming, invoking the popular astronomer Carl Sagan:</font></b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Other scientists are more sanguine about the presence of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Some scientists, including Dr. Carl Sagan, Cornell University astronomer, see a cooling phenomenon as counteracting the greenhouse effect.</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">To support this message of reassurance, the API cited an article in the magazine The Wilson Quarterly (Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars 1980), which itself was a summary of an article by Sagan, physicist Owen Toon, and astrophysicist James Pollack in the journal Science (Sagan et al. 1979). </font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 0);">But the article by <b>Sagan</b> and colleagues did not state that global warming from fossil fuels was not a threat, as suggested by the API. Rather, the scientists proposed that human societies had over thousands of years<b> caused desertification and deforestation of large areas of Earth, gradually increasing the planet’s albedo and lowering globally averaged temperatures by about 1 degree Celsius</b></span>. Continued desertification and deforestation might reduce the planet’s temperature by another 1 degree Celsius by the end of the twenty-first century, the scientists estimated. </font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>But such cooling, they noted, would require that nearly all of Earth’s surface be deforested, transformed into desert, and/or salinized into salt flats, and even then, global warming from fossil fuels would be only partly counteracte</b>d. ‘The surface albedo of the earth will reach an asymptotic limit long before the carbon dioxide abundance will,’ the scientists observed, warning, ‘Global temperature changes of this magnitude [1–2 degrees Celsius] have profound consequences for human populations.’ The API’s public reassurance that Sagan was ‘sanguine’ (i.e. optimistic) about the buildup of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels was false.</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Sagan also discussed global warming in his widely read 1980 book Cosmos, where he issued a stark admonition</b> (Sagan 1980):</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">The surface environment of Venus is a warning: something disastrous can happen to a planet rather like our own. … the carbon dioxide content of the Earth’s atmosphere is increasing dramatically. The possibility of a runaway greenhouse effect suggests that we have to be careful: <b>Even a one- or two-degree rise in the global temperature can have catastrophic consequences.</b></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Again, Sagan’s words were far from the posture of reassurance falsely attributed to him by the API.</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Having created the false impression that scientists did not view global warming from fossil fuels as a significant threat, the API suggested that expanded fossil fuel use – specifically expanded coal and synthetic fuel production – would be safe (American Petroleum Institute 1980, p. 80):</font></div></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">===
</font><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">these are academics on denial</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div>
</div></div>