Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming (4 page)

The American political establishment joined the discussion in 1988, led by presidential candidate George H.W. Bush. Running against Democratic contender Michael Dukakis, then-vice president Bush said, “Those who think we are powerless to do anything about the greenhouse effect forget about the ‘White House effect’; as president, I intend to do something about it.” Bush promised, if elected, to convene an international conference on the environment: “We will talk about global warming and we will act.”
¹

The newly elected president was, at first, as good as his word. Later the same year, after the world community gathered to create the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Bush signed into law the National Energy Policy Act “to establish a national energy policy that will quickly reduce the generation of carbon dioxide and trace gases as quickly as is feasible in order to slow the pace and degree of atmospheric warming . . . to protect the global environment.”

I offer all of the foregoing for context. I am neither a scientist nor a historian, and I have no intention in this book of jumping into the actual science “debate.” For an in-depth overview, you can go online and read the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC, a scientific collaboration of unprecedented breadth, depth, and reputation. You can google Elizabeth Kolbert’s brilliant
New Yorker
series,
The Climate of Man.
Or you can pick up one of the great populist science books on the subject: Canadian scientist Andrew Weaver’s
Keeping Our Cool;
Australian scientist Tim Flannery’s
The Weathermakers;
Kolbert’s later book
Field Notes from a Catastrophe;
or Al Gore’s book version of
An
Inconvenient Truth.
Any one of these will give you a solid enough grasp of the science to leave you nervous about the state of our world.

My point, however, is that no one seemed to be confused about climate change in 1988. The great scientific bodies of the world were concerned, and the foremost political leaders were engaged. So what happened between then and now?

Well, here’s what happened in science: with each new experiment, with each new report of the IPCC, with each new article published in legitimate peer-reviewed scientific journals, the science community became more certain that they were on the right track. Naomi Oreskes, a professor of history and science studies at the University of California, San Diego, tested that question in a paper she published in the journal
Science
in 2005. Oreskes searched the exhaustive ISI Web of Knowledge for refereed scientific journal articles on global climate change that were published between 1993 and 2003, and she analyzed them on the basis of whether they supported, contradicted, or took no position on the consensus that the human release of greenhouse gases was causing climate change. She found 928 articles—and not a single one took exception with the consensus position.

Clear enough. But what was happening in the mainstream media during the same period? The best answer to that question comes from the brothers Jules and Max Boykoff, who published an article in the peer-reviewed
Journal of Environmental Change
in 2003 titled “Balance as Bias: Global Warming and the U.S. Prestige Press.” The brothers had searched the libraries of four “prestige” dailies in the United States—the
New York Times,
the
Wall Street Journal,
the
Washington Post,
and the
Los Angeles Times
— and had analyzed their coverage of climate change between 1998 and 2002. They found that while the scientific press was coming down 928 to zero in accepting or, at the very least, not denying climate change, in 53 percent of their stories these four newspapers quoted a scientist on “one side” of the issue and a spokesperson on the other. I say spokesperson rather than scientist for two reasons. First, the deniers were very often not scientists, but rather political ideologues or self-appointed “experts” from think tanks. Second, even when the experts had scientific credentials, in most cases those credentials were not relevant to the topic at hand. The experts were geologists or economists commenting outside their field of expertise, not climate scientists reporting on up-to-date peer-reviewed science.

Boykoff and Boykoff telegraphed their point about the mainstream media in the title of their paper “Balance as Bias.” Journalists in the modern age find it all but impossible to stay up to speed on every issue, especially every issue of science. To protect themselves, they very frequently fall back on the notion of balance: they interview one person on one side of an issue and one person on the other. There is even a fairly common conceit in North American newsrooms that if both sides wind up angry about the coverage, the reporter in question probably got the story about right.

This has a degree of legitimacy when the subject matter is political, economic, or even moral. There are legitimate differences of opinion on the correct way to handle many political issues, and few economists agree on the right response to a specific economic event. And on a highly emotional issue such as abortion—one in which people are just as likely to be bringing forth points that are based in religion as they are to be talking about science—it is completely appropriate to canvas a range of opinions.

But science is a discipline in which there are legitimate subject experts, people whose knowledge is weighed and measured by their scientific peers. This is the process people use to decide, for example, on a new surgical method or on the structural strength of a new metal alloy. If a doctor recommended that you undergo an innovative new surgical procedure, you might seek a second opinion, but you’d probably ask another surgeon. You wouldn’t check with your local carpenter, and you certainly wouldn’t ask a representative of the drug company whose product would be rendered irrelevant if you had the operation. If you were building an apartment block or a bridge and someone offered a “state-of-the-art” new girder that was lighter and cheaper than the conventional alternative, you wouldn’t accept the recommendation on the basis of the salesman’s promises or even on the latest feature in
Reader’s Digest.
You would insist on a testimonial from scientific sources.

That’s not what’s been happening in the public conversation about global warming. For most of the last two decades, while scientists were growing more convinced about the proof and more concerned about the risks of climate change, members of the general public were drifting into confusion, led there by conflicting stories that minimized the state of the problem and exaggerated the cost of solutions. Somehow, we have been spun.

[
three
]
FROM BERNAYS TO TODAY
A brief history of private prophets and public lies

SPIN DOCTOR
: (noun) A person employed to gloss over a poor public
image or present it in a better light in business and politics, especially
after unfavorable results have been achieved. A lobbyist; a
PR
person.
WIKTIONARY, FEBRUARY
16, 2009

I
have never liked the term “spin doctor,” and I hate this definition— at least I hate that someone would propose “PR person” as a reasonable synonym. Public relations is not by definition “spin.” Public relations is the art of building good relationships. You do that most effectively by earning trust and goodwill among those who are important to you and your business. And in more than thirty years of public relations practice, I have learned that the best way to achieve those goals is to act with integrity and honesty and to make sure everybody knows you are doing so.

Spin is to public relations what manipulation is to interpersonal communications. It’s a diversion whose primary effect is ultimately to undermine the central goal of building trust and nurturing a good relationship.

Of course, lies are darned handy when the truth is something you dare not admit. Earning trust and goodwill is a nonstarter if you’re a cigarette company peddling a product (often to children) that everyone knows is offensive, addictive, and potentially deadly. An impartial observer might come to the same conclusion about the fossil fuel industry. ExxonMobil doesn’t really have to worry about its public image: because it has a stranglehold on a commodity that is also addictive (we need that energy to make our current economy function) and, in the current circumstances, ultimately life-threatening—especially for all those people who will not be able to adapt to dramatic changes in world climate. So when Exxon gives money to think tanks in support of programs that sow confusion about global warming, that isn’t public relations. It’s not an effort to build or maintain the quality of Exxon’s reputation. It is, rather, a direct interference in the public conversation in a way that serves Exxon’s interest at the expense of the public interest.

But here’s the part that bugs me the most: the people who are taking Exxon’s money are often
in
public relations. Or they are taking advantage of skills, tactics, and techniques that have been developed and refined in the shadier parts of the public relations industry. Just as there are unscrupulous lawyers who use their expertise to help break the law, or unprincipled accountants who help their clients evade taxes, it seems there have always been public relations people willing to meddle with the public discourse to promote the private interests of the people who are paying their bills.

The Public Relations Society of America has a professional code of ethics, which begins: “I pledge to conduct myself professionally, with truth, accuracy, fairness, and responsibility to the public.” I would urge you to keep that pledge in mind and to measure the stories that unfold in the following pages against that standard. I’m pretty sure you’ll be disappointed.

But I am equally convinced that it is important for you to hear these stories, to learn about how sometimes-questionable public relations tactics have evolved, and to arm yourself against the effect of those tactics in the future. It’s just as Aristotle said more than two thousand years ago: someone who is highly trained in rhetoric can argue any question from every angle—a skill that can be used for good or ill. But Aristotle didn’t teach rhetoric so shysters could play the public for fools. Rather, he was trying to make sure that people would recognize when someone was playing with the language rather than promoting the truth. He taught rhetoric to inoculate the public against that kind of abuse.

Looking back into the history of public relations can be inspiring, but, I have to admit, it can also be disillusioning. Consider the examples of Ivy Lee (1877-1934) and Edward Bernays (1891-1995), two men who, perhaps unfortunately, will forever compete for the title of “the father of public relations.”

If I could look only at what Ivy Lee said and disregard a lot of what he did, he’d be an appropriate hero. I say that because I see in Lee’s own writings some of the same advice that I am in the habit of giving myself. For example, when a client asks me the key to establishing, maintaining, or recovering a good reputation, I say three things:

1. Do the right thing;

2. Be seen to be doing the right thing; and

3. Don’t get #1 and #2 mixed up . . .
by which I mean, always make sure that you’re doing the right thing for its own sake and not for the reputational advantage you might gain.

Ivy Lee’s prescription sounds pretty similar. He said, “Set your house in order; then tell the public you have done so.” Do the right thing; be seen to be doing the right thing. So far, so good. Lee is also famously said to have told John D. Rockefeller Jr., “Tell the truth, because sooner or later the public will find out anyway. And if the public doesn’t like what you are doing, change your policies and bring them into line with what people want.”

This is all excellent advice, especially appropriate if you are trying to recover your reputation after an unfortunate accident. In fact when I first started thinking this way, it wasn’t because I was trying to force an ethical framework on the public relations business. It was because I had learned that this is what works. I had noticed that when my clients tried to cover up bad news or gloss over problems, those problems got worse. But when people stood up, told the truth, and did the right thing, they won public trust and earned higher regard.

It was obvious from early in his career that Lee also understood the importance of openness and integrity in building a good reputation. In 1906, for example, after a train crash on the Pennsylvania Railroad, he convinced management to forego the usual approach of bribing reporters to ignore the story in favor of throwing open the doors—actually bringing reporters to the scene at the railroad’s expense and offering all the assistance they might need once they got there. It worked like a charm. People understand that accidents happen, and are remarkably forgiving, especially if they see you making an effort to “set your house in order” and prevent an unnecessary recurrence.

Lee also distinguished himself during the First World War by organizing publicity for the fledgling Red Cross. He is credited with helping that organization grow in the United States from 486,000 to 20 million members by the time the war was over. And he helped to raise US$400 million—an unbelievable fortune given the strength of the dollar of the day.

Like so many who came after him, however, Lee found that the high road is a less attractive option when you’re managing a crisis that is not so easily forgiven. Working for the Rockefeller family in 1914, Lee was called in to manage media after the Colorado state militia and company guards had sprayed machine-gun fire into a colony of striking mine workers. The guards also set fire to the colony’s tents, resulting in the deaths of twenty-two people, including eleven children. Three guards were also killed. Lee responded by launching a series of bulletins titled “The Struggle in Colorado for Industrial Freedom,” demonizing the strikers and lionizing the supposed heroism of the Rockefeller guards. He did something similar in West Virginia, where seventy coal miners lost their lives in labor disputes. This time the bulletin was called “Coal Facts,” but the “facts” that Lee selected were particularly favorable to the Rockefellers.