Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming (26 page)

We captured the quote, which seems crafted to make people nod their heads in agreement rather than to actually think seriously about an issue of global importance, in a screen shot from the now-defunct Center for Energy and Economic Development. CEED was a coal-industry front group that arose in 1992 and spent the next fifteen years or more lobbying against new coal-industry regulations and especially against any policy that would rein in greenhouse gas emissions. The CEED Web site also offered this battered bit of denial: “Some scientists believe that the one degree of warming that has taken place over the past 100 years is evidence that potential catastrophic climate change is an imminent threat. However, other
equally-qualified
experts
are not so sure. They point to the fact that most of the warming that occurred in the 20th century happened prior to the 1920’s—when manmade emissions began a rapid increase” (my emphasis).

In addition to its public and private lobbying activities, CEED carried and promoted the Oregon Petition (which it referred to as the Seitz Petition), urging anyone who could argue their credentials as a “scientist” to sign and support the effort to undermine public faith in climate change science. CEED’s leader was president and CEO Stephen L. Miller. In a 2004 memo to Peabody Coal CEO Irl F. Engelhardt outlining CEED’s strategy of distraction and delay, Miller wrote:

In the climate change arena, CEED focuses on three areas:

• opposing government-mandated controls of greenhouse gases (GHG),

• opposing “regulation by litigation,” and

• supporting sequestration and technology as the proper vehicles for addressing any reasonable concerns about greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere.

In the memo, now posted at ArizonaEnergy.org, Miller went on to explain that CEED supported sequestration and technology for tactical purposes, saying, “Our belief is that, on climate change like other issues, you must be for something rather than against everything. The combination of carbon sequestration and technology is what we preach and we are looking for more members in the choir.” But Miller also makes it clear that preaching about sequestration is different than committing to it: “The other element is to pose voluntary sequestration and technology as the correct policy, rather than mandatory controls.” But the industry’s track record stands as evidence that a voluntary sequestration policy will result in exactly no sequestration projects. It’s hard to believe in that light that Miller is sincere.

The above-referenced screen shots from the CEED Web site featured many pages with these kinds of policy promotions. The site contained numerous descriptions of potential lines of attack on emission regulations and a careful strategy to “sow discord” among states that looked like they might force industry’s hand by setting up a regional greenhouse gas initiative.

In its defense, there was never any doubt that CEED was an industry organization. It acknowledged its membership clearly on its Web pages: “Eight Fortune 500 companies are among CEED’s nearly 200 member companies and organizations. Over 70 of those companies participate in CEED at the Board Member level. In addition to coal producers, utilities, and railroads, CEED’s members also include barge shippers, equipment manufacturers and suppliers, labor unions, and others who know first-hand the economic and social benefits derived from coal-based electricity generation.” This clearly is a coalition that can muster significant resources and influence.

Its successor group seems to have been just as well-connected, without being quite so quick to acknowledge its industry connections. Americans for Balanced Energy Choices (ABEC) emerged in 2000, sporting a Web site that, according to SourceWatch.org, was registered to CEED. It’s interesting that ABEC’s mailing address and fax number were also being used by the Greening Earth Society, the Astroturf group that the Western Fuels Association set up in the early 1990s to argue that climate change would be good for us. Without ever acknowledging its funding partners, the well-financed ABEC set about building “grassroots support” for coal as an appropriate fuel for the provision of electrical energy and to lobby against environmental regulation. In 2002 ABEC launched its first major clean-coal advertising campaign. The resulting television ads, broadcast more than eight hundred times in the pricey D.C. market, proclaimed that “advancements in clean coal technologies are effectively making our environment cleaner” and that “electricity from coal is an increasingly clean source of energy.” But Steve Miller and his second in command, Joe Lucas, who were the officers at ABEC, were hardly standing at arm’s length from industry. Between 2001 and 2008 the two men reported income in the amount of US$6.4 million for lobbying against stricter emission regulations.

In keeping with the general trend in the fossil fuel community of shifting from denial to delay, Miller and Lucas started to ease away from the harder-edged reputation of both CEED and ABEC and early in 2008 merged the organizations into a new group called the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE). By then word had emerged that ABEC had been given a US$35 million war chest for use in fighting climate change regulation. That money was shuffled from ABEC to ACCCE and topped up with another US$5 million, and it helped fund the clean-coal ads that seemed to dominate every CNN commercial break throughout coverage of the November election.

But ACCCE was doing a great deal more than buying airtime. Using the Hawthorn Group, a Virginia-based outlet that describes itself as being “among the top 15 independently owned public relations firms in the U.S.,” ACCCE began a public and political full-court press, making sure that no prominent political candidate or political reporter could avoid the message that in America, coal is clean—regardless of whether this version of the word accords with the dictionary definition.

The ACCCE tactics were recorded in full in a memo posted online to “Hawthorn Friends and Family.” In an attempt to raise clean-coal brand visibility on the ground as well as in paid television slots, the Hawthorn memo said:

• We placed teams in early primary/caucus states, and key battleground states during the fall general election

• We used branding for “clean coal” and “America’s Power” consistent with our national advertising campaign

• The team drove a branded, flex-fuel mini-van to events for added visibility

• At each event, we handed out tee shirts and hats with “clean coal” and our logo and Web URL; as well as literature on our issue, to as many event attendees as possible as they stood in line waiting to enter the event

• In the colder months, we also gave out cups of coffee bearing our logo • Took hundreds of photos and shot video of our activities and posted on our Web site, blog, Facebook page, Flickr account and YouTube channel

• We constantly mobilized our existing grassroots citizen army to mail and email the candidates and ask for support of clean coal technology

• As we attended rallies, campuses, diners and worked town squares, we distributed sign-up cards inviting voters to join our grassroots network

• We routinely emailed our grassroots network our schedule, as well as links to the photos and videos online

• We created and passed out business cards with our Web site, blog, Facebook page, Flickr account and YouTube channel to campaign event attendees.

If you remember seeing a picture of Joe Biden standing with a teenager in a blue clean-coal sweatshirt or Joe the Plumber wearing a white clean-coal baseball cap, it was no accident. Hawthorn and ACCCE made sure those images were transmitted and retransmitted around the country in every form of new media available. And consider for a moment the excitement that must have prevailed in the Hawthorn offices on April 2, 2008, the day that candidate Obama was quoted in the
Scranton Times
Tribune
saying, “And I saw somebody with a clean coal technology hat. We have abundant coal.”

The memo’s author was Hawthorn’s executive vice president and chief communications officer Suzanne Hammelman, and she was exultant in reporting the results of Hawthorn’s activities. “We nearly turned candidate events into clean coal rallies,” she said, adding that these activities had exactly the desired effect on the electorate: “In September 2007, on the key measurement question—Do you support/oppose the use of coal to generate electricity?—we found 46 percent support and 50 percent oppose. In a 2008 year-end survey that result had shifted to 72 percent support and 22 percent oppose. Not only did we see significantly increased support, opposition was cut by more than half.” That, better even than the results of the election itself, tells you who won in the presidential campaign of 2008.

The Hawthorn mission statement is drawn from what the company describes on its HawthornGroup.com home page as Aristotle’s definition of “the art of advocacy . . . the ability to find, in any given situation, all the available means of persuasion.” But at no point in its efforts to persuade Americans about the cleanliness of coal does Hawthorn report using any actual factual information. There were no safety briefings, no scientific reports, no epidemiological studies of cancer deaths in the lee of giant coal burners. There were bright blue hoodies and sparkling white hats framing the shiny faces of teens and young adults who had been coached to cheer enthusiastically for “their candidate”—which is to say, whatever candidate was in the room. These kids were urged to rush over and stand near politicians and reporters, take one another’s photos, and then distribute those pictures online. You got extra points if you could actually get a media photographer or TV camera operator to capture your image instead.

In other words these naïve participants were coached to game the system—to make fools of anyone who thinks that the practice of politics is still about sincere and committed people standing up for what they believe.

HAVING TURNED THE last dozen pages, you might find it remarkable that your hands haven’t turned black. There are undoubtedly scientists and engineers in the coal industry who deserve praise and thanks for their efforts to reduce the pollution that their product creates; there is no question that the technology has improved over time. Neither, however, is there much question about whether industry was at any point eager to implement these improvements.

Arguing that they were just trying to keep rates cheap for consumers, coal-fired utilities have fought regulatory improvements at every turn, and still they advocate for “voluntary” sequestration measures over mandatory controls. This would be so much more convincing if a single company had shown any willingness to volunteer—even to try to create one very small pilot or demonstration project. If they had given US$40 million to university engineering faculty for research instead of spending it on an election advertising campaign—well, we’ll never know what the results might have been.

But the Hawthorn memo makes it clear that manipulating American election coverage is both fun and profitable. Forty million dollars might seem like a lot of money, but the coal kings behind ACCCE apparently think it’s a small price to pay to influence a new generation of politicians whose in-boxes have been filled with clean-coal emails, and who have grown used to seeing themselves with their arms wrapped around the clean-coal team.

In the land of Washington and Jefferson the maintenance of a healthy democracy is an article of faith. Indeed, much of the world looks to America as an example of democracy in action. Former president George W. Bush even invoked the spreading of democracy as one of the reasons for starting a war with Iraq. But the Hawthorn campaign, the ACCCE advertising surge, the CEED strategy to disrupt regional climate negotiations among states trying to create a greenhouse gas regulatory system— none of these things scan as truly democratic. They all look like manipulations aimed at taking advantage of a lenient system to privilege the interests of an already wealthy and powerful industry at the expense of the interest of the public. An election campaign is the purest expression of grassroots democracy. This is the occasion on which citizens can make themselves heard, the occasion on which politicians have to present themselves to the people—to listen and to account for their own actions. In 2008 the coal industry stepped into that process in a way that was, by Hawthorn’s own description, intentionally disruptive. They played the politicians and the people for fools, and they got the media to go along for the ride. The CEED/ABEC/ ACCCE/Hawthorn participants might want to point out that they didn’t do anything illegal, but I want to ask if at any point they wondered whether what they were doing was right.

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fifteen
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LITTLE COAL
Salvaging a future that’s stuck in the tar sands

C
anada has had a long history as the United States’ principal provider of goods and services. In addition to the longest undefended border in the world, the two countries shared the world’s largest trading relationship for decades, and although China bumped Canada as the United States’ largest trading partner in 2008, Canada is still the United States’ number-one source for raw materials, most notably oil. If you include U.S. imports of both crude oil and refined petroleum, the U.S. Energy Information Administration reports, Canada sends the United States twice as many barrels per day (4 .4 million) as Saudi Arabia does (2.2 million).

Of course, Canada sends all manner of high-value human products south of the border as well, including entertainers (from Donald Sutherland and William Shatner to Keanu Reeves and Jim Carrey) and Nobel laureates (such as Rudolph Marcus and Richard Taylor). A slightly less famous Canadian treasure (at least, less famous in the United States) is the environmentalist Dr. David Suzuki, Canada’s answer to Sierra Club founder John Muir. An academic with an environmental conscience and a gift for simplifying science, Suzuki has hosted Canada’s most popular TV show on science and the environment,
The Nature of
Things,
for three decades, and in 1990 Suzuki and his wife, Tara Cullis, founded the David Suzuki Foundation, Canada’s most influential environmental organization. It has been a pleasure to volunteer my services to that foundation almost since its inception, and I am honored today to sit as chair of the David Suzuki Foundation Board of Directors.