The PR Plot to Overheat the Earth
by Bob Burton and Sheldon Rampton

The world's scientists are nearly unanimous that the world's climate is suffering damage from burning oil, coal and gasoline. This sentiment is echoed by the US National Academy of Sciences as well as the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - a working group of 2,500 climate experts sponsored by the United Nations.

In 1995, the IPCC bluntly warned that Earth has entered a period of climatic instability likely to cause "widespread economic, social and environmental dislocation over the next century." To avert a catastrophe, IPCC called for policy measures to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases to 20 percent below 1990 levels.

Such changes, of course, would seriously alter the lucrative status quo enjoyed by industry, including fuel companies, automobile makers and other large-scale polluters.

Pouring ICE on the Debate

In 1991, a US corporate coalition including the National Coal Association, the Western Fuels Association and Edison Electrical Institute created a public relations front called the "Information Council for the Environment" (ICE). ICE launched a $500,000 advertising and PR blitz to, in ICE's own words, "reposition global warming as theory (not fact)."

ICE was run by Bracy Williams & Co., a Washington-based PR firm. Using opinion polling, Bracy Williams identified "older, less-educated males from larger households who are not typically active information-seekers" and "younger, lower-income women" as "good targets for radio advertisements" that would "directly attack the proponents of global warming."

To boost its credibility, ICE created a Scientific Advisory Panel that featured Patrick Michaels from the Department of Environmental Services at the University of Virginia. Michaels has been the leading scientific naysayer on global warming.

Just Another Voice

The industry's propaganda campaign also created a bevy of other front groups. The group currently leading the charge is the Global Climate Coalition (GCC), a creation of the Burson-Marsteller PR firm. From its founding in 1989 until the summer of 1997, GCC operated out of the offices of the National Association of Manufacturers. Its members include Amoco, the American Forest & Paper Association, American Petroleum Institute, Shell Oil, Texaco, Chevron, Chrysler, the US Chamber of Commerce, Exxon, General Motors, Ford Motor, and more than 40 other corporations and trade associations.

GCC is also represented by the E. Bruce Harrison Company, a subsidiary of PR giant Ruder Finn. Harrison is ironically considered "the founder of green PR" because of his work for the pesticide industry in the 1960s, when he helped lead the attack on author Rachel Carson and her environmental classic, Silent Spring.

Since 1994, GCC has spent more than $1 million a year to downplay the threat of climate change. The National Coal Association spent more than $700,000 on the global climate issue in 1992 and 1993. In 1993, the American Petroleum Institute paid Burson-Marsteller $1.8 million for a successful computer-driven "grassroots" letter and phone-in campaign to stop a proposed tax on fossil fuels. The Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club, the Union of Concerned Scientists and the World Wildlife Fund can't spend that much on all their climate campaigns combined

The Australian Connection

The GCC recognized early on that Australia would play a key role in its campaign against global warming reform. Most major US PR firms - Edelman's, Burson-Marsteller, Hill & Knowlton, Ketchum, Shandwick and others - have established a presence Down Under.

Australia accounts for more than 30 percent of world trade in coal and has major metal smelting industries that belch greenhouse gases. As a result, it has Asia's highest per capita emission of greenhouse gases even though its population is only one percent of the region's 2.5 billion people.

In 1988, when Australia held a Greenhouse '88 conference, Australia had one of the "greenest" governments in the world. Since then, however, corporations and their front groups have systematically manipulated public opinion through frequent media pronouncements by industry-funded scientists.

Part of the campaign has been managed by Noel Bushnell of the PR firm Hannagan and Bushnell, which serves as a consultant to the Australian Industry Greenhouse Network, a coalition of industry groups. Hannagan was formerly the public affairs manager for the Aluminum Corporation of America (ALCOA). ALCOA is 40 percent owned by the Western Mining Corporation, which also owns chemical plants and smelters in Australia, Guinea, Suriname, Jamaica, Brazil, Germany, India, Holland, Japan and the US.

The Australian Institute of Public Affairs, which gets almost one-third of its budget from mining and manufacturing companies, has produced a series of statements challenging the greenhouse consensus.

These efforts, combined with intensive mining industry lobbying aimed at Australian Prime Minister John Howard, have successfully transformed the Australian government from a green role-model to a green pariah. Rather than agreeing to a call for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, Australia has announced plans to increase its emissions 18 percent by the year 2010.

Countdown to Kyoto

One of the key people building the trans-Pacific campaign was R. J. Smith, Senior Environmental Scholar with the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) - an industry-funded right-wing think-tank based in Washington, DC.

In a strategy meeting held in November 1996 at CEI headquarters, Ray Evans from Australia's Western Mining Corporation, along with a senior world vice-president for Ford Motors, American Petroleum Institute executive director Bill O'Keefe and Dick Lawson, the executive director of the US National Mining Association, decided to plan "a series of conferences before Kyoto."

The first one on July 15, 1997 in Washington, DC was called "The Costs of Kyoto." It offered blanket dismissals of scientific evidence for climate change and predicted staggering economic costs for any policies aimed at restricting emissions. Speakers included Fran Smith from Consumer Alert, an industry-funded front group; Patrick Michaels of ICE; Australian Embassy Chief of Mission Paul O'Sullivan and Brian Fisher from the Australian Bureau of Agriculture and Resource Economics (ABARE), a government-funded economic forecasting agency that has predicted huge costs in jobs and income if emission reduction targets are met.

For a contribution of $50,000, corporations can buy a seat on ABARE's steering committee. "By becoming a member of the consortium, you will have an influence on the direction of the model development," ABARE states in promotional material to potential sponsors. Contributors to ABARE's work include Rio Tinto, the world's largest mining company; Texaco; Mobil Oil; Exxon; the Australian Coal Association; the Australian Aluminum Council; and Statoil, the Norwegian oil company. All told, ABARE receives $500,000 a year from the fossil fuel industry.

Rather than setting a goal for all nations to lower their greenhouse emissions by equal proportions, ABARE's Brian Fisher advocates "differentiated" goals tailored to the economic characteristics of each country - an approach that abandons the agreement reached at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. According to environmentalists, differentiation would scuttle any hope of effectively capping worldwide emissions.

At an August 1997 CEI-sponsored conference in Canberra, former US Senator Malcolm Wallop declared: "This conference is the first shot across the bow of those who expect to champion the Kyoto Treaty." Wallop chairs the Frontiers of Freedom Institute, another corporate-funded US think-tank. Joining Wallop at the conference were US Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE), US Congressman John Dingell (D-MI), and Richard Lawson, president of the US National Mining Association.

US Smoke and Mirrors

In the US, the countdown to Kyoto saw a dizzying array of activity from industry front-groups:

The Global Climate Information Project (GCIP), launched last September by some of the nation's most powerful trade associations, spent more than $3 million in newspaper and television advertising. The ads were produced by Goddard*Claussen/First Tuesday, a California-based PR firm whose clients include the Chlorine Chemistry Council, the Chemical Manufacturers Association, Dupont Merck Pharmaceuticals and the Vinyl Siding Institute.

The GCIP is represented by Richard Pollock, former director of the Naderite group Critical Mass, who now works as a senior vice president for Shandwick Public Affairs, the second largest PR firm in the United States. Shandwick's clients include Browning-Ferris Industries, Central Maine Power, Georgia-Pacific, Monsanto, New York State Electric and Gas Co., Ciba-Geigy, Ford Motor Company, Hydro-Quebec, Pfizer and Proctor & Gamble.

The Coalition for Vehicle Choice (CVC), a front for automobile manufacturers, launched its own advertising campaign, including a three-page ad in the Washington Post blasting the climate agreement as an assault on the US economy. Sponsors of the ad included hundreds of oil and gas companies, auto dealers and parts stores, as well as a number of far-right anti-environmental organizations such as the American Land Rights Association and Sovereignty International (which claims that international environmental treaties are part of a United Nations conspiracy to establish a "new world order" that will abolish private property and personal freedoms).

CVC was originally founded in 1991 to fight higher fuel economy standards. Its 1993 budget was $2.2 million, all of which came from Ford, GM and Chrysler.

The National Center for Public Policy Research, another industry-funded think-tank established the Kyoto Earth Summit Information Center, issued an "Earth Summit Fact Sheet" and fed anti-treaty quotes to the media.

On the eve of the Kyoto Conference Steven Milloy, executive director of The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC), announced that more than 500 physicians and scientists had signed an open letter to world leaders opposing any climate change treaty. When asked to provide the signers' names and credentials, Milloy told the authors that he had not yet had time to "compile" the hard-copy list.

TASSC's funders include 3M, Amoco, Chevron, Dow Chemical, Exxon, General Motors, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Lorillard Tobacco, Louisiana Chemical Association, National Pest Control Association, Occidental Petroleum, Philip Morris Companies, Procter & Gamble, Santa Fe Pacific Gold and W.R. Grace.

The American Policy Center (APC), another far-right, industry-funded nonprofit organization based in Washington, DC, worked to mobilize a 'Strike for Liberty,' calling on truckers to pull over to the side of the road for an hour and for farmers to drive tractors into key cities to 'shut down the nation" as a protest against any Kyoto treaty. Signing the treaty, APC warned, would mean that "with a single stroke of the pen, our nation as we built it, as we have known it and as we have loved it will begin to disappear."

APC also appealed to anti-abortion activists with the claim that "Al Gore has said abortion should be used to reduce global warming." Clinton-bashing was a common theme in industry's grassroots appeals, using the usual argument that the global warming issue is another Clinton attempt to replace private property with "socialism," "bureaucracy" and "big government."

The Bottom Line

On the eve of Earth Day 1993, President Clinton announced his intention to sign a treaty on global warming. Ever since then, he has played the game of perpetually watering down the content of any such treaty. Clinton's October 1993 'Climate Change Action Plan" turned out to be a "voluntary effort" depending entirely on the goodwill of industry for implementation. By early 1996, he was forced to admit that the plan would not even come close to meeting its goal for greenhouse gas reductions by the year 2000.

In June, 1997, Clinton addressed the United Nations Earth Summit. Painting a near-apocalyptic picture of encroaching seas and killer heat, he acknowledged that America's record over the past five years was "not sufficient". We must do better and we will.

In October 1997, however, Clinton announced that realistic targets and timetables for cutting greenhouse gas emissions should be put off for 20 years, prompting the London Guardian to editorialize that "champagne corks are popping in the boardrooms of BP, Shell, Esso, Mobil, Ford, General Motors, and the coal, steel and aluminum corporations of the US, Australia and Europe. . . . In a stunning example of raw backroom power and political manipulation, the 'death-row' industries showed who rules the economic world by effectively killing any hope of combating global warming at the Kyoto climate conference. The new limits are so weak that two years of hard work by 150 countries towards reaching an agreement in December are now irrelevant."

The treaty that emerged from Kyoto proposed a reduction of only 7 percent in global greenhouse emissions by the year 2012, far below the 30 percent reduction demanded by low-lying island nations that fear massive flooding as melting polar ice leads to rising sea levels.

Tragically, as the New York Times noted December 12, 1997, even in the unlikely event that the treaty were adopted and strictly observed by all the participating nations, "many experts believe that it may already be too late to avoid serious climatic disruption."

-- Adapted from a special edition of PR Watch [Center for Media & Democracy, 3318 Gregory St., Madison, WI 53711, (608) 233-3346, fax: -2236, www.prwatch.org].

Sheldon Rampton is the associate editor of PR Watch and co-author of Mad Cow USA: Could the Nightmare Happen Here? Bob Burton is an investigative reporter based in Australia.