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October 26, 2016

Was Hillary’s Secret Plan to Attack Climate Skeptics Exposed by Wikileaks?

Was Hillary’s Secret Plan to Attack Climate Skeptics Exposed by Wikileaks?

By Ron Arnold (1937 – 2022)

Published October 26, 2016

On Tuesday, October 25, 2016, Wikileaks released a series of emails sent between Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta, and the infamous “social change” media activist, David Fenton. The emails revealed a $3 million plan to attack the Wall Street Journal and Fox News Channel to put them ‘on the defensive’ about their realistic climate stand. The goal was to scare conservative politicians into supporting new government global warming rules and bans.

The series of emails WikiLeaks hacked from Podesta’s account shows that David Fenton thanked Podesta for a meeting on February 19, 2015. Fenton and sent him two emails documenting their conversation.

The first email said: “Here is the [Fenton Communications] plan to go after [the Wall Street Journal] and Fox [News Channel] on climate. I have 500,000 [dollars] of this pledged if I can raise another million.”

The plan, attached to the email, used “guerilla tactics,” budgeting $350,000 for groups including Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace for civil disobedience and social media campaigns, and $600,000 for advertisements in the Wall Street Journal and on the Fox News Channel. It would involve the creation of websites that disseminated true-believer views about climate change, and directly challenged the reporting in Rupert Murdoch’s Fox media.

Fenton’s email said:

“Fox News is the biggest single factor keeping almost 40% of Americans from believing humans are changing the climate, while only 10% know that 97% of climate scientists agree we are warming the earth at our peril. In some ways, the effect of the Wall Street Journal is even worse, as it sows regular confusion among its 3 million daily subscribers – business leaders and investors among the most influential people in the country.” [Murdoch’s companies also own the Wall Street Journal and he heads 21st Century Fox.]

Fenton continued his increasingly desperate email plea: “Unless and until the Journal and Murdoch are put on the defensive on climate change, opening political space for conservatives to come forward, it is unlikely that bipartisan efforts on climate change will be achieved in time.”

Part of Fenton’s plan involved “public shaming” of Murdoch so that his six children, who have more fanatic views on climate change, would have “leverage with their father”.

Clinton’s campaign has neither confirmed nor denied the authenticity of the Wikileaks emails, but has attacked what it said were Russian state actors involved in obtaining them. A Clinton campaign source dubbed the Wikileaks website a “propaganda arm of the Russian government” seeking to help elect the Republican nominee, Donald Trump, a conspiracy theory that serves as its own public shaming.

Fenton’s proposal to Podesta and its prime goal to “make Murdoch’s climate denial a major issue,” and “bring the scientific facts on climate change to his audiences,” was ironically released a day after an unwelcome story ran in London’s *Daily Mail* with the headline “Exposed: How top university helped secure £9million of YOUR money by passing off rivals’ research as its own… to bankroll climate change agenda.” So much for the integrity of “scientific facts on climate change.”

The Daily Caller covered the story for Americans:

“The UK government gave $11 million dollars to the Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy (CCCEP) in exchange for research that the organization reportedly never actually did. Many papers CCCEP claimed to have published to get government money weren’t about global warming, were written before the organization was even founded, or were written by researchers unaffiliated with CCCEP. The government never checked CCCEP’s supposed publication lists, saying they were “taken on trust.”

According to The Daily Mail, “Academics whose work was misrepresented reacted with fury. Professor Richard Tol, a climate change economics expert from Sussex University, said: ‘It is serious misconduct to claim credit for a paper you haven’t supported, and it’s fraud to use that in a bid to renew a grant. I’ve never come across anything like it before. It stinks.’ “

How could such a scandal begin? The chairman of the CCCEP since 2008 has been Lord Nicholas Stern, a militant global advocate for drastic action to combat climate change. He is also the president of the British Academy, an invitation-only society reserved for the academic elite. It disburses grants worth millions to researchers – and to Lord Stern’s own organization. Do we see the seeds of corrupt power here? Is this the beginning of another ClimateGate for the U.K.?

Meanwhile, the WikiLeaks emails between David Fenton and John Podesta show us only a proposal for a multi-million dollar attack against people with opposing but honestly held opinions, who are not given the right to those opinions – a signature mindset increasingly visible among intolerant progressives.

Fenton concluded his WikiLeaks email:

“We have let Rupert Murdoch get away with this atrocious behavior for too long. It’s time to make his endangerment of national and economic security a prominent, inescapable issue.”

Fenton is no scientist. His climate opinions are second hand, “taken on trust” from government science. Government science has been seen as the same type of oxymoron as military intelligence.

Evidently, Podesta did not take Fenton’s razzle-dazzle on trust. There is no evidence that Fenton’s $3 million campaign ever went ahead. To the contrary, climate change seems to be the poor stepchild of the 2016 election’s leading issue awards. If, somehow, the Fenton fantasy was actually put into action, it left the Wall Street Journal and Fox unscathed in their climate realism. Certainly, Rupert Murdoch doesn’t seem to be taking climate policy advice from his six offspring. So, perhaps David Fenton’s Wikileaks email plans are what the Roman Empire once referred to as brutum fulmen – harmless thunderbolt.

But do not underestimate the man. Fenton is remembered as the one who engineered the phony 1989 Alar “poison apples” scam with the Natural Resources Defense Council to wrongfully disparage hundreds of blameless orchardists into bankruptcy.

He gloated about it.

First published at [LeftExposed.org.]

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 Biden has put climate at the front and center of foreign and domestic policy. He’s appointed climate leaders at Treasury, State, Transportation, Interior, Energy and throughout the government. His proposed 50 percent emissions cut by 2030 is consistent with the Paris Agreement. For the first time, the U.S is taking action at the scale needed if we’re to have any hope of tackling the climate crisis in time.

To emphasize the benefit of these actions to the American people, the president says, “when I think of climate, I think of jobs.” That’s true — many jobs can be created decarbonizing our industrial, energy, housing and transportation infrastructure, investing in smart agriculture and nature-based solutions, preparing to weather the impacts of climate change we can no longer avoid, and by accelerating the transition to clean energy. Jobs are an important solutions message.

But this is only half the equation. To want to solve a problem, you first have to know there is one. And the data is clear: most Americans don’t know how much of a crisis we truly face, nor how little time we have left to solve it. They still view climate change as a distant issue, one that matters only to future generations, to people in low-income countries, to ecosystems — but not to them.

The Yale Project on Climate Change Communication finds that only 26 percent of Americans are “alarmed” about climate change. Even more disturbingly, the Yale researchers consistently find that people don’t talk or hear much about climate change. Among those surveyed, 64 percent say they “rarely” or “never” discuss global warming with family and friends. Only 35 percent talk about it even occasionally, and only 22 percent say they hear people they know talk about global warming at least once a month.

Here’s the connection: if we don’t clearly communicate the risks climate change poses to us, here and now and in concrete ways that matter to our lives, why wouldpeople care? And if they don’t care, why would they want to do anything about it?

Biden does refer to climate change as an “existential threat.” But that’s a term most people won’t understand, when so many are already so confused. The research finds that 40 percent of Americans still believe climate is changing due to the ozone hole; only 21 percent know there’s a strong scientific consensus on the issue; and the majority don’t think it matters to them.

Addressing these misconceptions helps people understand that climate change is real, and serious; and explains why solutions are needed.

For example, extensive testing has shown the effectiveness of simple and clear explanations like the following:

President Franklin Roosevelt’s “fireside chats” used radio to help the public fight the Great Depression and win World War II. Today, as Bill Gates argues, to solve climate change we need the equivalent of a mobilization for war. But you can’t mobilize for war if people don’t know they are under attack. And Americans largely don’t.

Biden could change this quickly, by talking about the risks from climate change. The president “literally has the ability to change what people know, think and talk about,” according to UC Berkeley linguist George Lakoff.

Embracing the power of what Teddy Roosevelt called the “bully pulpit,” Biden can clearly communicate that we are in a war, a race to save our livable planet. And when opponents challenge climate action, it’s not about justifying the job numbers — as Lakoff would say, change the frame. Ask what theirplan is to protect America’s health, security and prosperity from the dangers of climate change.

In the United States, Paul Revere has not yet made his climate ride. Most people do not know what is coming. Biden can fix this. Depending on who the next president is, that opportunity may not come again for many years. The science is clear: later will be too late.

Katharine Hayhoe, Ph.D., is chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy and an atmospheric scientist and professor of political science at Texas Tech University. She is the founder of Science Moms. Her new book, “Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World” will be released in Sept 2021.

David Fenton founded the social change communications firm Fenton in 1982. 

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ucsc woman

Milloy was a leader in the already defunct NoMoreScares.com, a web site launched in August 2000 primarily to defend biotech food and malign Fenton Communications,one of the only PR firms in Washington DC willing to work with non-profit public interest groups and their relatively small PR budgets. Other coalition members included Elizabeth Whelan of the American Council on Science and Health, Alex Avery and Michael Fumento of the Hudson Institute, National Center for Public Policy Research, Bonner Cohen of the Lexington Institute, and Michael Gough of the Cato Institute. No More Scares disappeared almost as hastily as it was brought into existence, perhaps made redundant by the**Guest Choice Network**, which is now called "The Center for Consumer Freedom". Who can keep track of who is doing what? (Which is exactly the goal of ever-changing corporate front groups)

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Lisa Witter, Stevenson College, 1995

Lisa Witter is an experienced executive, social entrepreneur, communications strategist, writer, and commentator. Lisa is the co-author of The She Spot: Why Women are the Market for Changing the World and How to Reach Them and is partner and Chief Change Officer of Fenton Communications, the largest public interest communications firm in the country. She focuses on behavior change, innovation, women’s issues, and global affairs for clients including Desmond Tutu’s The Elders and The Ford Foundation. She was named by the World Economic Forum as a Young Global Leader in 2010. Lisa and her husband, technology consultant Christopher Brem, have two young sons.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Fenton_Communications

Fenton Communications is a public relations firm which specialises in PR for not-for-profit organizations, liberal advocacy groups and companies with a claim for social responsibility. They are probably best known for their represenation of MoveOn. It was founded by David Fenton in 1982 and now has offices in New York, Washington D.C. and San Francisco.

In April 2004 O'Dwyer's PR Daily reported that Fenton ran the following ad on Air America Radio, which it launched with Dan Klores Communications:

"Public relations. Monty Python called it a modern useless profession. Too bad they were wrong. PR has become the way crafty corporations and even the leader of the free world convince people that pollution is harmless, war is peace and greed is good. No wonder we at Fenton Communications don't like to be asked at parties what we do for a living."

Lisa Witter, an executive VP, told O'Dwyer's that FC does not like to be called a PR firm. "We're generally described as a public interest communications firm," she said. [1]

Contents [hide]

Criticism from the right

Fenton Communications' history of working for environment and other non-profits has drawn criticism the conservative Hudson Institute affiliated project, the Center for Global Food Issues. The CFGI champions genetically engineered crops and disputed concerns about mad cow disease. In February 2002 CFGI produced a report The Fear Profiteers edited by Bonner Cohen, John Carlisle, Michael Fumento, Michael Gough, Henry Miller, Steven J. Milloy, Kenneth Smith, Elizabeth Whelan.

They wrote of Fenton Communications that "it is a founding member of the so-called Business for Social Responsibility. Yet Fenton has played a key role in a growing number of health scare campaigns involving both his non-profit and for-profit clients." [2]

"Their practices combine junk science with a hidden agenda to scare consumers away from safe products, supposedly all in the name of protecting public health and the environment." ... including scares about Alar and apples, swordfish, leaky breast implants, Health Care Without Harm ("danger of phthalates, chemicals used to make plastic flexible for products such as IV bags, teethers, nipples, and toys"), the book "Our Stolen Future" ("alleged that synthetic chemicals were causing developmental and reproductive problems in humans, such as low sperm counts, impotence and even homosexuality"), Bovine Growth Hormone," Cohen wrote.

"If you have been scared about food or pesticides in the last 10 years, chances are Fenton Communications played a key role in provoking that fear. The scares just don't ever stop. But they all have one thing in common -- a lack of evidence and abundance of deceit. The claims involved in the scares have all been refuted in public. By the time the scares have been debunked, however, the campaigns have taken such a strong hold that the truth usually is irrelevant," he wrote.

The report stated that it was published "through the efforts of the National Center for Public Policy and Junkscience.com".

Clients

Fention lists their current and former clients on their site as including: [3]

It manages the Iraq Policy Information Project.

Personnel

Management team

Other staff

SourceWatch resources

Contact information

182 Second Street

Fourth Floor

San Francisco, CA

94105 U.S.A.

Ph: 415.901.0111

Fx: 415.901.0110

260 Fifth Avenue

Ninth Floor

New York, NY

10001 U.S.A.

Ph: 212.584.5000

Fx: 212.584.5045

1320 18th Street N.W.

Fifth Floor

Washington, DC

20036 U.S.A.

Ph: 202.822.5200

Fx: 202.822.4787

Web: http://www.fenton.com

External links

References

  1. ↑ Press release, "Fenton Communications Launches Green-Tech Division: Josh Baran to Head New Effort," Fenton Communications via PR Newswire, May 27, 2008.
  2. ↑ "Fenton Adds 'Deep Thinker'," O'Dwyer's PR Daily (sub req'd), April 16, 2008.

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