Two-decade-long campaign by industry and Canada and the United States, that the energy industry basically designed to confuse the public about climate change and give people the sense that there’s a debate about the science of climate change.
The first thing was to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on everything from focus groups to very sophisticated messaging to setting up groups of pseudoscientists to confuse the public about—to create the impression that there was actually a debate, where there was none.
Two decades ago, there was a group called the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition that was put together by Philip Morris. They were having problems, with public credibility, so they decided to invite some friends to join this fight, what became a fight against scientists. And one of the first companies they invited was Exxon Mobil. And this was kind of the beginning of these front groups in this war on science that has evolved and continues today with front groups all over the United States.
Basically overworked and undereducated on science and easy to manipulate. And when you have a lot of money, like these people do, a lot more money than climate scientists have, they are out there all the time writing news releases, doing press conferences, creating, phony studies and all these vehicles to basically manipulate people’s thinking on climate science.
They basically started to create this impression that there was a scientific debate. There was an enormous amount of research done in this area. They do these focus groups, and they find out that your average person thinks that there’s always a debate in science. So, rather than kind of fighting and saying climate change isn’t happening, let’s just say we don’t know if it’s happening. There’s a debate.
Now, that debate actually wasn’t taking place in the scientific community; it was actually taking place in the news media, in the mainstream news media. And just by repeating it, having enough money to repeat these kinds of messages over and over again, people start to become susceptible to this. The root of all this campaign, is the fact that corporations have less and less credibility as the years roll along, particularly over the past couple of decades.
More and more money and more and more interests to protect, but less and less credibility. So what they do is they actually hire fake groups of scientists, put together these, what we call “astroturf” groups to go out there and act and say things that these corporations couldn’t say themselves.
About a year ago a paper in Canada, that the premier of Alberta, where the tar sands are, decided that they were going to spend $25 million on a public relations campaign on the tar sands. This is the political year of the wealthiest province in Canada thinking that the tar sands was a public relations problem, not an environmental problem. That’s where the problems start, but they get worse because of the massive amount of money. Twenty-five million dollars is an enormous amount of money. It just overwhelms the system. So you’re able to hire the best researchers. You’re able to come up with the best messages. You’re able to hire the best PR firms. You can send out the most news releases. You can hire the best scientists for hire. And it’s just impossible for legitimate climate scientists to have a voice in these kinds of situations.
“The more we know about these kinds of groups and these kinds of efforts, the less they work. And I would just encourage journalists to ask these people whether or not they’re actually practicing climate science, whether they are climate scientists, and who they’re taking money from. Start to ask these questions and shed light on these people, they’ll be far less effective”.
James Hoggan talking.
James Hoggan, author of Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming. He is president of the award-winning PR firm Hoggan & Associates. He is chair of the David Suzuki Foundation and the Canadian chapter of Al Gore’s The Climate Project. He also runs DeSmogBlog.com
– from democracynow.org