McCright & Dunlap
Jacques
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-political-science/article/abs/who-are-the-3-per-cent-the-connections-among-climate-change-contrarians/A4664E239F0774A37C20FE03689B34DD
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 December 2021
Laura D. Young
Open the ORCID record for Laura D. Young[Opens in a new window]
and
Erin B. Fitz
Despite 97 per cent of scientists agreeing on anthropogenic global warming, the remaining 3 per cent play a critical role in keeping the debate about climate consensus alive. Analysis of climate change contrarians from multi-signatory documents reveals 3 per cent of signees to be climate experts, while the remaining 97 per cent do not meet expert criteria and are also involved with organizations and industries who make up the climate change countermovement. The data also reveal most contrarians to be aged sixty-five or older. As a result, we explore other factors (for example, collective memories and ideological views) that may have also contributed to expert and non-expert views.
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Dunlap, RE and Jacques, PJ (2013) Climate change denial books and conservative think tanks: exploring the connection. American Behavioral Scientist 57, 699–731.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jacques, P et al. (2008) The organization of denial: conservative think tanks and environmental skepticism. Environmental Politics 17, 349–385.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McCright, AM (2007) Dealing with climate change contrarians. In Moser, SC (ed.), Creating a Climate for Change: Communicating Climate Change and Facilitating Social Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 200–212.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McCright, AM and Dunlap, RE (2011a) The politicization of climate change and polarization in the American public's views of global warming, 2001–2010. The Sociological Quarterly 52, 155–194.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McCright, AM and Dunlap, RE (2011b) Cool dudes: the denial of climate change among conservative white males in the United States. Global Environmental Change 21(4), 1163–1172.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McCright, AM et al. (2013) Perceived scientific agreement and support for government action on climate change in the USA. Climatic Change 119, 511–518.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McCright, AM et al. (2014) Political polarization on support for government spending on environmental protection in the USA, 1974–2012. Social Science Research 48, 251–260.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McCright, AM et al. (2016) Political ideology and views about climate change in the European Union. Environmental Politics 25, 338–358.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
https://www.desmog.com/2022/02/03/pr-big-oil-attitudes-aronczyk-bernays/
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How the PR Industry Has Helped Big Oil Transform the Way We Think About the Environment
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.
OPINION
ANALYSIS
Stella Levantesi
Feb 3, 2022
Series: GASLIT
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.
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.
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.
It’s not just that they need to, it’s also that they have the power and money to do so.
“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.”
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 bookStrategic Nature as “strategies of silence”: the role of PR agents has been to create and execute strategies for their clients while remaining completely invisible.
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.
As DeSmog has reported, a recent study, co-authored byBrown University researchers Robert Brulle and Carter Werthman, 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.
“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.”
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” (although Ivy Ledbetter Lee, who started his PR firm 25 years before Bernays, might be better suited to hold this title). 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.
He was the first to imagine the public as a “strategic resource,” Aronczyk and Espinoza write in Strategic Nature. The public, in other words, was not an end in itself but “a means for other ends.”
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.
“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.”
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.
black and white illustration of a woman in 1900 smoking and riding a bicycle
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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.
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.
But to succeed, fossil fuel companies also needed to be seen as “trustworthy” and “socially responsible,” Brulle said. In other words, they needed legitimacy.
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, 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.
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.”
Third-party mobilization was especially popular after Barack Obama was elected U.S. President in 2008, when fossil fuel companies funded — and PR firms designed — so-called astroturf campaignsto create the perception of existing grassroots efforts to oppose climate change policies. 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.
But recently, such PR frenzies around legislative efforts have become less common. According to Dunlap, this is because obstruction efforts have become so effective that astroturf campaigns just aren’t as necessary these days.
“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,” Dunlap said.
One of the reasons Big Oil’s disinformation campaign has been, 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,” 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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.”
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.
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.
ANALYSIS OPINION SCIENCE DENIAL
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Dunlap and McCright, 2008; Hamilton, 2008, 2011; Hamilton and Keim, 2009; Malka et al., 2009; McCright and Dunlap, 2011) and gender differences (e.g., Brody et al., 2008; Hamilton, 2008; McCright, 2010). We also extend the risk perception literature on the white male effect, by offering a sociopolitical explanation of the denial of climate ...
:{PDF:(style="margin:-0.2em 0px 0px;padding:1px 0.35em 0px;border:0px;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:600;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:middle;border-radius:var(--default-border-radius);display:inline-block;position:relative;user-select:none;top:-1px;background-color:#d0d0d0;"):}: The Politicization of Climate Change and Polarization in ...
Dunlap and McCright (2008a) provide preliminary evidence of partisan polarization on climate change from 2001 to 2008, but here we provide a more meth-odologically rigorous analysis of both partisan and ideological polarization and we include data from 2009 and 2010. The latter is critical given the recent sharp drop in
:{PDF:(style="margin:-0.2em 0px 0px;padding:1px 0.35em 0px;border:0px;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:600;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:middle;border-radius:var(--default-border-radius);display:inline-block;position:relative;user-select:none;top:-1px;background-color:#d0d0d0;"):}: Theory, Culture & Society
2008; McCright, 2007; McCright and Dunlap, 2000, 2003; Oreskes et al., 2008). Forces of Reflexivity and Anti-reflexivity Much has been published in recent years on the concept of 'reflexivity' and theories of 'reflexive modernization' (RM hereafter). Our task is not to offer
[PDF] :{Cool dudes: The denial of climate change among .:(style="background-color:#ff9900;"):}:..
A. McCright, R. Dunlap; Published 1 October 2011; Sociology; Global Environmental Change-human and Policy Dimensions; A B S T R A C T We examine whether conservative white males are more likely than are other adults in the U.S. general public to endorse climate change denial. We draw theoretical and analytical guidance from the ...
Anti-reflexivity - Aaron M. McCright, Riley E. Dunlap, 2010
Article first published online: May 24, 2010; Issue published: March 1, 2010. Aaron M. McCright. Lyman Briggs College and the Department of Sociology at Michigan State University, mccright@msu.edu. Riley E. Dunlap. Department of Sociology at Oklahoma State University, rdunlap@okstate.edu.
Perceived scientific agreement and support for government ...
McCright AM, Dunlap RE (2003) Defeating Kyoto: the conservative movement's impact on U.S. climate change policy. Soc Probl 50(3):348-373. Article Google Scholar McCright AM, Dunlap RE (2010) Anti-reflexivity: the American conservative movement's success in undermining climate science and policy.
Riley E. Dunlap - Brown Climate Social Science Network
Aaron M. McCright & Riley E. Dunlap. 2011. " The Politicization of Climate Change: Political Polarization in the American Public's Views of Global Warming ," Sociological Quarterly (March 2011). Aaron M. McCright & Riley E. Dunlap. 2010.
(PDF) Challenging Global Warming as a Social Problem: An ...
For instance, US media coverage creates controversy about the science of climate change itself McCright and Dunlap, 2000), emphasizing the journalistic 'norm of balance' to bestow equal time and ...
Climate change denial: sources, actors and strategies ...
Conservative think-tanks in particular have facilitated and promoted the efforts of a small number of 'contrarian' scientists in an effort to provide the forces of denial with the guise of scientifi c credibility, magnifying the visibility and impact of the contrarians' views (McCright and Dunlap 2000, 2003).
:{PDF:(style="margin:-0.2em 0px 0px;padding:1px 0.35em 0px;border:0px;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:600;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:middle;border-radius:var(--default-border-radius);display:inline-block;position:relative;user-select:none;top:-1px;background-color:#d0d0d0;"):}: The Climate Change Denial Campaign
Read more in Riley E. Dunlap and Aaron M. McCright, "Organized Climate Change Denial," in The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society, edited by John S. Dryzek, Richard B. Norgaard, and David Schlosberg (Oxford University Press, 2011), 144-160, and Riley E. Dunlap and Aaron M. McCright, "Climate
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HQS Inspection Services - McCright & Associates
McCright is the acknowledged industry expert in HQS, and all McCright inspections comply with Housing Quality Standards (Title 24 CFR 982), lead-based paint regulations (Title 24 CFR 35), and any additional requirements. McCright is a full-service HQS inspections firm, performing all the inspection responsibilities within the Housing Choice ...
:{PDF:(style="margin:-0.2em 0px 0px;padding:1px 0.35em 0px;border:0px;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:600;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:middle;border-radius:var(--default-border-radius);display:inline-block;position:relative;user-select:none;top:-1px;background-color:#d0d0d0;"):}: THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF POLITICS: Climate Change ...
As McCright and Dunlap note, the partisan split over global warming is entwined with a broader polarization that intensified since the late 1990s. We address facets of American political culture that feed this polarization and support McCright and Dun-lap's critique of "reflexive modernity"theories.
:{PDF:(style="margin:-0.2em 0px 0px;padding:1px 0.35em 0px;border:0px;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:600;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:middle;border-radius:var(--default-border-radius);display:inline-block;position:relative;user-select:none;top:-1px;background-color:#d0d0d0;"):}: Defeating Kyoto: The Conservative Movement's Impact on U.S ...
350 McCRIGHT/DUNLAP (McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald 1996a; Tarrow 1998)4— as well as recent ideas on " Ideologically Structured Action" (e.g., Zald 2000a, 2000b) to solve the puzzle of the delegitimation of global warming as a major problem within the policy arena. Third, we extend the arguments made in our previous work in two crucial ways.
The Politicization of Climate Change and Polarization in ...
Aaron M. McCright, Lyman Briggs College, Michigan State University, E-185 Holmes Hall, East Lansing, MI 48825-1107; e-mail: mccright@msu.edu Search for more papers by this author Riley E. Dunlap , Oklahoma State University
:{PDF:(style="margin:-0.2em 0px 0px;padding:1px 0.35em 0px;border:0px;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:600;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:middle;border-radius:var(--default-border-radius);display:inline-block;position:relative;user-select:none;top:-1px;background-color:#d0d0d0;"):}: Challenging Global Warming as a Social Problem: An ...
Title: Challenging Global Warming as a Social Problem: An Analysis of the Conservative Movement's Counter-Claims. Created Date: 2/20/2001 3:24:23 PM
:{PDF:(style="margin:-0.2em 0px 0px;padding:1px 0.35em 0px;border:0px;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:600;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:middle;border-radius:var(--default-border-radius);display:inline-block;position:relative;user-select:none;top:-1px;background-color:#d0d0d0;"):}: Public'S Views of Global Warming,
Dunlap and McCright (2008a) provide preliminary evidence of partisan polarization on climate change from 2001 to 2008, but here we provide a more meth odologically rigorous analysis of both partisan and ideological polarization and we include data from 2009 and 2010. The latter is critical given the recent sharp drop in
Challenging Global Warming as a Social Problem: An ...
Riley E. Dunlap Washington State University. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic. ... Aaron M. Mccright, Riley E. Dunlap, Challenging Global Warming as a Social Problem: An Analysis of the Conservative Movement's Counter-claims, Social Problems, Volume 47, ...
Organized Climate Change Denial - Oxford Handbooks
Riley E. Dunlap is Regents Professor of Sociology, Oklahoma State University. Aaron M. McCright Aaron M. McCright is Associate Professor of Sociology, Lyman Briggs College, Department of Sociology, and Environmental Science and Policy Program, Michigan State University.
:{PDF:(style="margin:-0.2em 0px 0px;padding:1px 0.35em 0px;border:0px;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:600;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:middle;border-radius:var(--default-border-radius);display:inline-block;position:relative;user-select:none;top:-1px;background-color:#d0d0d0;"):}: Polarization Widens in the U.S. The Political Divide on ...
by Riley E. Dunlap, Aaron M. McCright, and Jerrod H. Yarosh T he November 2008 election of Barack Obama as 44th President of the United States created great optimism among support- ers of many progressive causes, includ- ing environmental protection and ac- tion on climate change.
Cool dudes: The denial of climate change among ...
This is consistent with the findings of existing climate change public opinion studies that self-identified liberals (Hamilton, 2008, McCright, 2010, McCright and Dunlap, 2011, Wood and Vedlitz, 2007) and females (Brody et al., 2008, Hamilton, 2008, Leiserowitz, 2006, Malka et al., 2009, McCright, 2010, McCright and Dunlap, 2011, O'Connor et ...
(PDF) The Political Divide on Climate Change: Partisan ...
To cite this article: Rile y E. Dunlap, Aaron M. McCright & Jerrod H. Yarosh (2016) The Political Divide on Climate Change: Partisan Polarization Widens in the U.S., Environment: Science and ...
Relationships Between Climate Change News Coverage, Policy ...
Further, The National Post was more likely to rely on think tanks as sources, thus perhaps echoing findings in the United States (Dunlap & McCright, 2015) that conservative think tanks play a role in promoting climate change denial. To what extent does corporate ownership influence the news?
Routledge Handbook of Climate Change and Society
The result is that the leading counter-claims used by denialists that we found in the 1990s (McCright and Dunlap 2000) as well as the complementary set discerned by Rahmstorf remain widely used, but have been regularly supplemented by new ones. These include the unfairness and futility of the US taking action to reduce carbon emissions if China ...
Dr. Riley Dunlap | OK EPSCoR
McCright, Aaron M. and Riley E. Dunlap. 2000. "Challenging Global Warming as a Social Problem: An Analysis of the Conservative Movement's Counter-Claims." Social Problems 47:499-522. Link; McCright, Aaron M. and Riley E. Dunlap. 2003. "Defeating Kyoto: The Conservative Movement's Impact on U.S. Climate Change Policy." Social ...
Cool dudes: The denial of climate change among ...
Highlights Conservative white males are more likely than other Americans to report climate change denial. Conservative white males who self-report understanding global warming very well are even more likely. Climate change denial is an example of identity-protective cognition. System-justifying tendencies lead to climate change denial. Climate change denial increased from 2001 to 2010.
Climate Change Denial Books and Conservative Think Tanks ...
The conservative movement and especially its think tanks play a critical role in denying the reality and significance of anthropogenic global warming (AGW), especially by manufacturing uncertainty ...
A Widening Gap: Republican and Democratic Views on Climate ...
Riley E. Dunlap Oklahoma State University Araon M. McCright Department of Sociology and the Environmental Science and Policy Program, Michigan State University Pages 26-35
:{PDF:(style="margin:-0.2em 0px 0px;padding:1px 0.35em 0px;border:0px;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:600;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:middle;border-radius:var(--default-border-radius);display:inline-block;position:relative;user-select:none;top:-1px;background-color:#d0d0d0;"):}: Development Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable
26-35 Dunlap-McCright.indd 26 8/11/08 10:17:56 AM Downloaded by [ ] at 13:14 30 December 2011 . A Widen ing Gap Republican and Democratic Views on Climate Change by Riley E. Dunlap and Aaron M. McCright The divide has been most noticeable among political elites, such as members of Congress,