“As scientists who study and communicate the realities of climate change, we are consistently faced with a major and needless challenge: overcoming advertising and PR efforts by fossil fuel companies that seek to obfuscate or downplay our data and the risks posed by the climate crisis.”
From an open letter, signed by over 450 scientists, to the public relations industry
Not entirely different from the public relations efforts of Big Tobacco years ago and social media giants today, the fossil fuel industry continues to spend tens of millions of dollars every year to discredit scientific evidence of their global acceleration of climate change and its concomitant natural disasters. They continue to shift blame to others, even to consumers as individuals not doing enough to counter the issue, sometimes attacking the scientists who are performing the necessary research and publishing the results… with dire results.
For example, as Adele Peters, writing for the January 19th edition of FastCompany.com reports: “‘I have been at the receiving end of attacks for decades funded by fossil fuel interests and facilitated by fossil-fuel-funded PR firms like Edelman [a public relations consultancy with 65 offices worldwide and 275 active professionals],’ says Michael Mann, a climatologist at Pennsylvania State University, who has written several books, including 2021’s The New Climate War, which examines the decades-long campaigns waged by fossil fuel companies… ‘I have been publicly vilified, experienced death threats, faced demands that I be fired from my job,’ Mann says, noting that those actions are the result of ‘PR firm-orchestrated character attacks.’ He adds, ‘Until these PR firms refuse to work for fossil fuel companies, they are part of the problem, no matter what greenwash campaigns they may engage in.’…
“The billions of dollars that fossil fuel companies have poured into advertising and PR campaigns over the past few decades have helped play a major role in slowing down climate action, convincing the public that their actions and product weren’t as harmful as the companies knew them to be. Now, hundreds of climate scientists are asking ad and PR agencies to drop polluters as clients… [As the above scientist-authors also wrote in that open letter above:] ‘In fact, these misinformation campaigns represent one of the biggest barriers to the government action science shows is necessary to mitigate the ongoing climate emergency.’…
“Edelman, one of the largest public relations firms in the world, recently told employees that it would ‘put science and facts first’ when working with clients. In an internal review, the company looked closely at 20 ‘emissions-intensive’ clients, though it hasn’t said that it would drop those clients. (Edelman declined to comment.)
“A recent study detailed some of the ways that PR firms have helped slow down support for climate policy. The PR agency Ogilvy, for example, created a campaign for BP [British Petroleum] in the year 2000 that popularized the idea of individual ‘carbon footprints,’ offering an online calculator that people could use. The approach ‘sought to divert attention from the fossil fuel industry by reframing climate change as an issue of individual responsibility,’ the study authors wrote. Among other campaigns, PR agencies also helped promote the term clean coal, and branded natural gas as ‘clean burning,’ though gas is a major source of emissions.” Clean coal is nothing more than pumping the polluting and greenhouse-contributing effluents underground for future generations to deal with.
Spinning is a big part of the problem. ExxonMobil, for example, is running a campaign as if it were a concerned corporation, making huge concessions to environmental realities. But if you just scrape the surface, you get… “Six months after the activist hedge fund Engine No. 1 helped get three new members voted onto ExxonMobil’s board—with the goal to help the company focus on the existential risks of fossil fuels—the oil company has announced an ‘ambition’ to reach net zero emissions by 2050. But if you just saw the headline, you would miss the fine print. The commitment is to reach net zero ‘in its operations.’ But almost all of the emissions that the company is responsible for come from burning its products. Those emissions aren’t included.” FastCompany.com, January 21st. Delay. Delay. Spin!
The lack of accountability for the damage that fossil fuel companies have caused, directly, is the product of massive PR efforts, fortunes in campaign contributions to political candidates on both sides of the aisle and playing the “millions of jobs at stake” card, pretending that alternative energy is a job killer… as opposed to the job creator that sector truly is. If they can continue to avoid that financial liability and delay the necessary corrective efforts, these polluters can continue without facing that accountability. But the writing is on the wall.
“The [energy sector’s] campaign approaches have changed over time, [Jamie Henn, director of Fossil Free Media] says, in the same way that the tobacco industry’s messaging changed. ‘The fossil fuel industry has moved from outright denial to predatory delay,’ he says. ‘So the whole strategy is to convince the public, and by extension their representatives, that the fossil fuel industry is already working to solve the climate crisis, and that fossil fuels can be part of the solution. They want to delay the adoption of renewables by just another year or two so that they can continue to profit off of oil and gas.’” Peters. Or a few more years beyond that.
I’m Peter Dekom, and what are just a few more devastating wildfires, storm surges, searingly hot temperatures, droughts and horrific tornados or hurricanes anyway?
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