Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming (6 page)

This was a highly effective mixed-message strategy. The smoky executives knew they were never going to win the health argument, so they muddied the scientific waters and tried to reposition the debate to be about free choice. According to a document obtained by the organization TobaccoFreedom .org,
²
the executives even co-opted the American Civil Liberties Union, providing big donations to the ACLU in return for its support in recasting smoking as a matter of freedom and individual choice.

Still, by the late 1980s the public had grown tired of tobacco industry “geniuses” telling them smoking was harmless, and skeptical of tobacco company employees or institute “experts” fighting against increasingly popular smoking restrictions. So Philip Morris opened up two new fronts. First, working with the public relations giant Burson-Marsteller, Philip Morris financed the creation of the National Smokers Alliance, a purported grassroots association that mustered smokers together to fight for their “rights.”

From a tactical standpoint this was a brilliant strategy. True grassroots organizations are one of the great expressions of democracy. In them, theoretically at least, you have a group of independent citizens bound together in common interest rising up and demanding to be heard. Reporters have grown appropriately cynical of corporate manipulation, and they are generally suspicious of established interest groups, from environmentalists to consumer advocates, who have made what appears to be common cause with government regulators. They find it refreshing to see an apparently spontaneous outpouring of support or opposition on any public issue.

The political theorist Jeffrey Berry documented this in his 2000 book,
The New Liberalism: The Rising Power of Citizen Groups.
Berry showed that in the realms of politics and media, grassroots organizations were outperforming industry-sponsored interest groups by a wide margin. For example, Berry found that a small number of citizens’ groups making representations in Congress were overrepresented in media citations by a factor of 10 to 1 when compared to their industry counterparts.

The National Smokers Alliance, however, was not a spontaneous outpouring of public support. It was an Astroturf group, a fake grassroots organization animated by a clever public relations campaign and a huge budget. As John Stauber wrote in a 1994 edition of the online journal
PR
Watch:

Burson-Marsteller’s state-of-the-art campaign utilizes full-page newspaper ads, direct telemarketing, paid canvassers, free 800 numbers, newsletters and letters to send to federal agencies. B-M is targeting the fifty million Americans who smoke. Its goal is to rile-up and mobilize a committed cadre of hundreds of thousands, better yet millions, to be foot soldiers in a grassroots army directed by Philip Morris’s political operatives at Burson-Marsteller.
³

Such are the profits available to the tobacco industry that around the same time, Philip Morris had also engaged the public relations giant APCO Worldwide to craft a parallel attack on the scientific validity of links between cancer and secondhand smoke. In 1993 APCO proposed the foundation of The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC). The original documentation of this proposal is available on the Internet at TobaccoDocuments.org, a Web site established after the tobacco industry lost a series of 1990s lawsuits over the falsification of evidence and the attempt to cover up the health effects of smoking.

The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition’s stated objectives were these:

• Establish TASSC as a credible source for reporters when questioning the validity of scientific studies.

• Encourage the public to question—from the grassroots up—the validity of scientific studies.

• Mobilize support for TASSC through alliances with other organizations and third-party allies.

• Develop materials, including new article reprints, that can be “merchandized” to TASSC audiences.

• Increase membership in and funding of TASSC.

• Publicize and refine TASSC messages on an ongoing basis.
⁴

The eagerness to increase TASSC’s membership and funding is important in the climate change conversation because, well, guess who APCO contacted when it came time to increase membership in its new Astroturf group? Realizing how obvious it would look if Philip Morris was TASSC’s only financial supporter, APCO sent out recruitment letters to twenty thousand businesses inviting them to join the fight for “sound science.” Below is a list of the kinds of companies that APCO considered appropriate partners for such a venture. The list comes from another memo, written in 1994 when APCO was planning to expand TASSC operations into Europe.
⁵
One of the first goals, the memo said, was to try to “link the tobacco industry with other more ‘politically correct’ products.”

“As a starting point,” the memo begins, “we can identify key issues requiring sound scientific research and scientists that may have an interest in them.” This seems to suggest that no one was currently conducting research in any of the areas about to be discussed, or that the research being done was somehow unsound. Certainly, that research in most cases seemed to be inspiring legitimate interest groups to demand more government intervention and regulation of the sort that was costing industry money.

The TASSC memo continued:

Some issues our European colleagues suggest include:

• Global warming

• Nuclear waste disposal

• Diseases and pests in agricultural products for transborder trade

• Biotechnology

• Eco-labeling for EC products

• Food processing and packaging

It’s worth looking at these tactics because they suggest a high degree of sophistication and a willingness to underwrite an ambitious and expensive “grassroots” campaign. First, APCO suggested that TASSC target secondary markets, because this would “avoid cynical reporters from major cities [and involved] less reviewing/challenging of TASSC messages.” It’s a judgment call whether big-city reporters are by definition cynical. But it’s pretty clear that they are, as a group, better educated, better informed, and more likely to be briefed on specific areas of science. Small-town papers and broadcast outlets tend to have fewer journalists in total and fewer specialists. They also pay less, so there is an incentive for the best reporters to get their early experience in smaller markets and then move up to the high-paying big-city jobs. The public relations professionals at APCO know this, so you have to read more critically when the plan they wrote for TASSC recommends targeting small towns. The 1993 memo “The Revised Plan for the Public Launching of TASSC” suggests that a secondary-market focus “ . . . increases [the] likelihood of pick-up by media” and “limit[s] potential for counterattack. The likely opponents of TASSC tend to concentrate their efforts in the top markets while skipping the secondary markets.” It seems fair to conclude that this is APCO’s way of saying that TASSC should try to stay under the radar.

APCO also recommended that TASSC establish a public information bureau that would brief “pertinent associations” in Washington, D.C., and coordinate with “organizations that have tangential goals to TASSC, such as . . . The Science and Environmental Policy Project.” (The latter is another Astroturf group established by a tobacco-sponsored scientist named Dr. S. Fred Singer—more about him later.) The name “public information bureau” sounds benign, like an informational clearinghouse that perhaps would send out the odd news release or be at the ready to answer questions. Certainly APCO anticipated sending out information, but the specific list of proposed activities and tactics suggested something much more proactive—and much more political. The list included:

• Publishing and distributing a monthly update report for all TASSC members, which will quantify media impressions made the prior month and discuss new examples of unsound science.

• Monitoring the trade press (e.g., public interest group newsletters and activities) and informing TASSC members of any upcoming studies and relevant news.

• Arranging media tours.

• Issuing news releases on a regular basis to news wire services, members, allies and targeted reporters.

• Acting as a clearinghouse for speaking requests of TASSC scientists or other members and maintaining a Speakers Bureau to provide speakers for allies and interested groups.

• Drafting “boilerplate” speeches, press releases and op-eds [opinion page articles] to be used by TASSC field representatives.

• Placing articles/op-eds in trade publications to serve as a member recruitment tool in targeted industries, such as the agriculture, chemical, food additive and biotechnology fields.

• Monitoring the field and serving as a management central command for any crises that occur.

• Developing visual elements that help explain some of the issues behind unsound science.
⁶

Here again, APCO was advising that TASSC look for every opportunity to attack inconvenient (“unsound”) science. It wanted TASSC to identify “targeted reporters” who would be most likely to give the kind of coverage that served TASSC’s purposes. It suggested the drafting of “boilerplate” speeches and press releases of the kind that could be used again and again to promote its messages. And the op-eds could come in especially handy, again, in the secondary markets. As any big public relations firm (or would-be thought leader) knows, it’s hard as can be to get the
New York Times
to publish your opinion piece. But if you are satisfied to send lots of copies to lots of smaller papers, many of which find it much harder to source a steady supply of good material, you have a reasonable chance of reaching just as many readers.

TASSC’s early membership list included “sound science” supporters like Amoco, Exxon, Occidental Petroleum, Santa Fe Pacific Gold Corporation, Procter & Gamble, the Louisiana Chemical Association, the National Pest Control Association, General Motors, 3M, Chevron, and Dow Chemical. For “science advisors,” they had people such as Frederick Seitz.

In the 1960s and ‘70s, Seitz was a widely admired scientist, a former president of both the National Academy of Sciences and Rockefeller University. In 1978 he took that reputation to work for the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. According to “While Washington Slept,” a May 2006
Vanity Fair
article by investigative journalist Mark Hertsgaard, over a ten-year period Seitz was responsible for handing out US$45 million in tobacco money to people who were pursuing research that overwhelmingly failed to link tobacco to anything the least bit negative. Seitz later admitted to accepting almost US$900,000 of that money himself.

But by the late 1980s he seemed to have lost a step. In a Philip Morris interoffice memo dated 1989, an executive named Alexander Holtzman reported that he was told that “Dr. Seitz is quite elderly and not sufficiently rational as to offer advice.”
⁷
Yet Seitz continued to stand as a TASSC regular, in particular lending his name and leveraging his old National Academy of Sciences affiliation to the global warming denial movement for nineteen more years, dying in 2008 at the age of ninety-six.

It’s probably time to introduce Steven Milloy, a.k.a. “The Junkman,” to our cast of characters. While TASSC was originally run by executive director Garrey Carruthers, an economist and former New Mexico governor, Steven Milloy took over in 1997. Milloy’s academic background is also considerable: he has an undergraduate degree in science from Johns Hopkins, a masters in health sciences and biostatistics (also from Johns Hopkins), and a masters in law from Georgetown. But there is no record of his directly pursuing science or law as a career.

Instead, Milloy emerged in the 1990s working for a series of public relations and lobby firms, including the EOP Group, which the Web site PR Watch.org describes as “a well-connected, Washington-based lobby firm whose clients have included the American Crop Protection Association (the chief trade association of the pesticide industry), the American Petroleum Institute, AT&T, the Business Roundtable, the Chlorine Chemistry Council, Dow Chemical Company, Edison Electric Institute (nuclear power), Fort Howard Corp. (a paper manufacturer), International Food Additives Council, Monsanto Co., National Mining Association, and the Nuclear Energy Institute.”
⁸

Milloy, who is currently an “adjunct scholar” at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and formerly held that position at the Cato Institute, is also the creator and proprietor of the Web site JunkScience.com, which works to “debunk” everything from the dangers of secondhand smoke to the risks of genetically modified foods. Milloy was a founding member of a team assembled by the American Petroleum Institute (API) to create a 1998 “Global Climate Science Communication Action Plan” (the precise contents of which Greenpeace later discovered and made available for public viewing).
⁹
The API made no bones about its intent in creating its plan for the public. The document plainly states that its purpose is to convince the public, through the media, that climate science is awash in uncertainty. Notwithstanding that the industry’s own scientists were saying as early as 1995 that the science of climate change was undeniable (as in the
New York Times
report discussed in Chapter 1), the API set out an entire strategy bent on making doubt, in the words of the memo below, “conventional wisdom.” The API document begins with a kind of mission statement (the parenthetical additions appear as in the original):

Victory Will Be Achieved When

• Average citizens “understand” (recognize) uncertainties in climate science; recognition of uncertainties becomes part of the “conventional wisdom”

• Media “understands” (recognizes) uncertainties in climate science

• Media coverage reflects balance on climate science and recognition of the validity of viewpoints that challenge the current “conventional wisdom”

• Industry senior leadership understands uncertainties in climate science, making them stronger ambassadors to those who shape climate policy