Introduction to climate change disinformation strategies

Introduction to Climate Change Disinformation

Michael Mann became famous for what is known as the Hockey Stick: a graph that showed how human intervention was crucial in affecting the climate - back then there were a lot of climate deniers. He used a very easy metaphor: the hockey stick is horizontal and then suddenly has the peak. The graph is so called for the similar shape of the results. Michael Mann was persecuted and attacked by oil companies and those who had interests in the field: he's been vilified on conservative media outlets, his words have been taken out of context and broadcasted widely to embarrass and discredit him, he and his family have been subject of multiple death threats - "All because of the inconvenience my scientific findings posed to powerful and influential special interests."

The Serengeti Strategy

The Serengeti strategy - metaphor with the savanna where the lions isolate and attack the zebra. As Mann argues: "The term describes how industry special interests and their facilitators single out individual researchers to attack, in much the same way lions of the Serengeti single out an individual zebra from the herd. In numbers there is strength; individuals are far more vulnerable." The strategy has 2 purposes:

1. Kill the messenger - Character assassination: to undermine the credibility and the reputation of the science community, thus impairing scientists as messengers and communicators - "you're not qualified";
2. Scare-tactics (much more common): to discourage other researchers from raising their heads above the parapet and engaging in public discourse over policy-relevant science (scare into submission).

Key Points and Book Structure

• It's not a matter of ignorance: ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel interests knew from the 70s about climate change and its devastating impact - actually the first to discover it. But instead of publicly discuss the dangers it posed or fixing problems, they denied and delayed: they waged a massive PR campaign contesting the scientific evidence, doing everything in their power to block policies aimed at curbing planet-warming carbon pollution;
• Their modus operandi was modelled after other successful PR campaigns and initiatives known under the umbrella of Denial & Delay - deny until the info is so much that you cannot even distinguish the reality and when you get caught, you delay (promising goals to be reached in X years). This campaigns, waged against the public interest, include:
  • The gun lobby, whose motto "Guns don't kill people, people kill people" dates back to the 1920s;
  • The tobacco industry, which sought to discredit the connection btw cigarettes and lung cancer, even as its own internal research -dating back to the 1950s- demonstrated without doubt the deadly and addictive nature of its product - "Doubt is our product". Tobacco industry introduced rules and tactics that eventually applied to the energy industry;
  • The attack on the environmental movements that rose in the 1960s-1970s. To stop any attempts at curbing the consumption of plastic, packaging companies, fossil fuel companies, and FMCG (Fast-Moving Consumer Goods) companies launched a PR campaign "emphasizing individual responsibility over collective action and governmental regulation" = Companies had to come up with new strategies: individual responsibilities.
• Starting in the late 1980s, fossil fuel companies "such as ExxonMobil funnelled billions of dollars into a disinformation campaign" and a series of PR initiatives funded by right wing "billionaire plutocrats like the Koch brothers, the Mercers, and the Scaifes" to deny any significant impact on the environment. The fossil fuel industry took all these strategies and created a super strong one that lasted until today.

Deny and delay playbook (1920s-1970s)-related to gun lobby, tobacco, chemical industries and plastic special interests groups- eventually became the Deception, Distraction and Delay playbook (1980s-today) -related to fossil fuel industry, very powerful = A PARADIGM SHIFT in PR strategies.

Counter Strategies to Disinformation

According to Mann, counter strategies to all of this are:

• Disregard the doomsayers: The misguided belief that "it's too late" to act has been co-opted by fossil fuel interests. It's just another way of legitimising business-as-usual and a continued reliance on fossil fuels.
• A child shall lead: The youngest generation is fighting to save their planet, and there is a moral authority and clarity in their message that none but the most jaded ears can fail to hear. They are the game-changers that climate advocates have been waiting for. We should model our actions after theirs and learn from their methods and their idealism.
• Educate: Most hard-core climate-change deniers are unmovable. They view climate change through the prism of right-wing ideology and are impervious to facts. Don't waste your time and effort trying to convince them. But there are many honest, confused folks out there who are "caught in the crossfire, victims of the climate-change disinformation campaign.
• Changing the system requires systemic change: The fossil fuel disinformation machine wants to make it about the car you choose to drive, the food you choose to eat, and the lifestyle you choose to live rather than about the larger system and incentives. We need policies that will incentivize the needed shift away from fossil fuel burning toward a clean, green global economy. So-called leaders who resist the call for action must be removed from office. The need to change lifestyle must be supported by policies that incentivises a shift from fossil fuels toward a clean, green global economy.

Architects of Misinformation and Misdirection

Historical review of the puppet master of misinformation and misdirection. "The origins of the ongoing climate wars lie in disinformation campaigns waged decades ago, when the findings of science began to collide with the agendas of powerful vested interests":

• Tobacco industry (1950s-)
• Environmental campaigns (1960s-)
  1. 1960s: DDT side-effects;
  2. 1970s: Lead pollution;
  3. 1970s-1980s: Acid rain, ozone layer depletion.
• Military-industrial complex (1980s-)

This chapter begins with the story of "Thomas Stockmann, an amateur scientist in a small Norwegian town. The local economy was dependent on tourism tied to the town's medicinal hot springs. After discovering that the town's water supply was being polluted by chemicals from a local tannery, Stockmann was thwarted in his efforts to alert the townspeople of the threat, first when the local paper refused to publish an article he had written about his findings, then when he was shouted down as he attempted to announce his findings at a town meeting. He and his family were treated as outcasts. His daughter was expelled from school, and the townspeople stoned his home, breaking all the windows and terrifying his family. They considered leaving town but decided to stay, hoping-in vain-that the townspeople would ultimately come around to accepting, and indeed appreciating, his dire warnings." This story is actually a book written by Henrik Ibsen: "Enemy of the people" (1882). He used this metaphor because this book represents:

1. The canonical cautionary tale of the clash btw science and industrial or corporate interests;
2. An apt metaphor for the climate wars that would take place in the 20th and 21st centuries.

• "enemy of the people" even became a term used by Donald Trump in his tweets!

Cases that help us understand the situation we are living in now:

The Tobacco Industry: "Doubt is Our Product"

The own scientists of the tobacco companies established the health threats of smoking as early as the 1950s. Nevertheless, the companies chose to engage in an elaborate campaign to hide those threats from the public. It took 50 years to understand the correlation btw the habits and the health. Strategy was twofold, used to:

1. Disseminate doubt in their effort to hide evidence of the addictive and deadly nature of their product: "Doubt is our product wrote a Brown and Williamson executive in 1969. They wanted to convince people in doubting in science;
2. Systematically and ruthlessly discredit real scientists studying the effects of smoking on human health.

Who was behind this? Frederisck Seitz, physicist hired by tobacco industry, who was also the former head of the US National Academy of Sciences and a recipient of the prestigious Presidential Medal of Science. Tobacco giant R.J. "Reynolds paid him half a million dollars to use his scientific standing and stature to attack any and all science (and scientists) linking tobacco to human health problems. Seitz was the original science-denier-for-hired.

The Rise of the Environmental Movement (1960s-1970s)

Among the many things happening in those years (e.g. sexual revolution, phreaks, hippie movements etc.), the idea that everything technology did was good was wide-spread.

1. The book Silent spring by Rachel Carson (1962) was about DDT destroying the environment: she described how DDT was decimating populations of bald eagles and other birds. The pesticide was creating a dire threat to wildlife -and humans. Eventually, the US banned DDT, but not until 1972 (after 10 years) -although the data provided were undiscussed.

Carson was awarded for her efforts with a full-on character assassination campaign by industry groups who denounced her as "radical," "communist," and "hysterical" with all its misogynist connotations (misogyny and racism have become inextricably linked to climate-change denialism). The president of Monsanto, the largest producer of DDT, denounced her as "a fanatic defender of the cult of the balance of nature". Her critics even labeled her a mass murderer. Even today "the industry front group known as the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) continues to defame the long-deceased scientist".

After Carson, more and more scientists realised that there were various problems concerning the environment and nature, awareness of other threats emerged in the 70s:

1. Herbert Needleman was a professor and researcher (University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine). His research identified a link btw environmental lead contamination from gasoline and paint and childhood brain development. He studied children and cribs, used teeths to analyse the lead levels in kids' bones (>200 children), finding that lead was causing long-term harm.

Lead industry should have moved away from petroleum products, instead, they tried to discredit him, engaging in a character assassination campaign to create perception that data was wrong. The campaign included unfounded accusations against him of scientific misconduct, labelling him as unethical. He was exonerated by his university-twice. -Herbert Needleman and Rachel Carson were scientists, they didn't want to spend time in the spotlights-

1. In the 1970s and 1980s, the emergence of truly global environmental threats, including acid rain and ozone depletion. Industry groups whose bottom line might be impacted by environmental regulations began to significantly step up their attacks on the science demonstrating these dangers, and of course on the scientists themselves.

In the mid-1980s, Frederick Seitz created the GEORGE C. MARSHALL INSTITUTE (GMI) and recruited as partners astrophysicist Robert Jastrow (founder of NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies) and oceanographer William Nierenberg (onetime director of the revered Scripps Institution for Oceanography in La Jolla, California).

Founded in 1984 in Arlington, Virgina, GMI was a nonprofit conservative think tank with a focus on science and public policy issues. The institute advocated for environmental skepticism, most notably climate change denial. The think tank received extensive financial support from the fossil fuel industry. Though the institute officially closed in 2015, the climate-denialist CO2 Coalition is viewed as its immediate successor. Frederick Seitz, Robert Jastrow, and William Nierenberg were "free-market fundamentalists" (the cult of Ayn Rand) who didn't have any training in "environmental science". What they had was an ideological distrust of efforts to limit what they saw as the freedom of individuals or corporations. As such, they played willfully into the agenda of regulation-averse special interests by discrediting scientists study such phenomena as acid rain and ozone depletion.

Acid Rain Research and Industry Response

1. Acid rain -> In the 1970s, "lakes, rivers, streams, and forests throughout eastern North America were being destroyed by increasingly acidic rainfall. The scientist Gene Likens and others discovered the origins of the problem: midwestern coal-fired power plants that were producing sulfur dioxide pollution.

How did the coal industry respond to Liken's discovery? By ruthlessly discrediting his research and his ethical status, accusing him of scientific misconduct and protocol violations. That included, among other things, "nasty letters and complaints to his bosses; hostile reception by conservative politicians; attacks from industry-funded hatchet men and politicians seeking to discredit his scientific findings"; the front group organization, aka Edison Electric Institute [ ... ] offered nearly half a million dollars to anybody willing to discredit him. GMI 1984 fought acid rain research until they could keep up the lies. Unethical practices performed to Deny, Doubt & Delay. The evidence presented proved too much to deny even for the deep-pocketed companies of the coal industry, although it took decades before legislation was introduced (in 1984, under Pres. Reagan inaction prevailed). In 1990, the Republican Pres. George H.W. Bush signed the Clean Air Act, which required coal-fired power plants to scrub sulphur emissions before they exited the smokestacks. He even introduced a vehicle known as "cap and trade" aka Emission Trading Scheme (ETS) a market-based mechanism that allows polluters to buy and sell a limited allotment of pollution permits = you can pollute as long as you pay money for your pollution, to fix your damages. Compromise!

Ozone Depletion and Character Assassination

1. Ozone depletion -> In the 1980s, scientists recognized that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), used in spray cans and refrigerators, were responsible for the growing hole in the ozone layer in the lower stratosphere that protects us from damaging, high-energy ultraviolet radiation from the Sun. The erosion of the ozone layer brought with it an increasing incidence of skin cancer and other adverse health impacts in the Southern Hemisphere. One of the lead scientists who discovered this phenomenon was William Brune, former head of the Department of Meteorology at Penn State.

How did the coal industry respond to Brune's research? Character assassination! By ruthlessly discrediting his studies and his ethical status as a scientist. Manufacturers, users, and their government representatives initiated PR campaigns designed to throw doubt on the hypothesis and the weight of scientific evidence, and to convince lawmakers and the public that the data were too uncertain to act upon.