Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet (35 page)

To oppose these trends, business adopted a multiplicity of tactics in its second wave of opposition to environmental values. Many elements are familiar from the foregoing history; some of these were intensified at this time, while new strategies also emerged. Apart from the role of the think tanks, which is explored in detail in chapter 12, the major initiatives were the PR-based creation of fake grassroots organizations and of a legal infrastructure to intimidate environmental protestors by taking them to court.

Greenwashing and Front Groups

Public relations companies conducted numerous campaigns on behalf of corporations, the most novel being the “greenwash” exercise, whereby the public was to be convinced that polluting companies were “going green.” When British Petroleum set out to rebrand itself “Beyond Petroleum,” the advertising campaign cost as much as or more than BP’s actual investment in solar technology.
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Nonetheless, an impression of green credentials was successfully created. Sponsorships and “green partnerships” were established, such as one between the clear-cut logging and paper mill company Georgia-Pacific and an organization for injured animals, and another between Chevron and National Geographic. Public relations firms continued their well-established function of damage control but were also paid to create specialized front groups, such as the Global Climate Coalition (GCC), dedicated to minimizing concern about climate change. The GCC represented NAM and automotive, coal, and oil corporations, and shared personnel with industry associations and think tanks, including the American Petroleum Institute and the George C. Marshall Institute.
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Seeking to replicate the authenticity of citizen participation, business began to finance putative grassroots campaigns, forming organizations with innocuous (or totally misleading) names such as the Environmental Conservation Organisation, Citizens for Effective Environmental Action Now, established by the chemical industry, and the National Wildlife Institute. These organizations, funded by corporate interests and often set up by PR firms, mobilized discontented citizens (often unwittingly against their own beliefs and interests) in campaigns designed to ensure corporate access to resources such as forests and minerals. It was industry insiders who first dubbed them “astroturf” organizations, after the synthetic grass known as AstroTurf. Although citizens were enlisted in these entities, they did not arise as grass roots groups but were instigated from above by corporate interests for propaganda purposes. The “wise use” umbrella organization, founded in the United States in 1988, was one of the most successful of innumerable such groups and had links to many corporate bodies, including the Heritage Foundation, logging companies, resource trade organizations, and off-road vehicle manufacturers; the CEI sponsored their first conference.
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Ron Arnold, who helped to organize the gathering, acknowledged the underlying agenda: “We don’t even care what version of Wise Use people believe in, as long as it protects private property, free markets, and limits government.”
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Thus, although aggrieved or politically conservative citizens were attracted to aspects of its program, its intention was to advance corporate goals: to free private property from all regulation and open public lands to unrestricted commercial exploitation. Influential US legislators are also linked to an array of bodies like the National Wildlife Institute, founded by timber interests, and the Environmental Conservation Organisation, funded by the trade associations of earthmoving contractors and farmers.
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Astroturf methods facilitated the camouflage of corporate values and priorities and advanced a corporate version of facts without business actually seeming to be involved. Corporations could enroll private citizens and masquerade as “the ordinary person,” just as the US tea party movement, though attacking the big banks in its rhetoric, has been funded and facilitated by the billionaire Koch brothers through their own astroturf organization called Americans for Prosperity. The same Kochs funded the launch of the Cato Institute in 1977 and have spent hundreds of millions over the years on such conservative think tanks as the Economic Education Trust, the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, and the Heritage Foundation.
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Funding Antienvironmental Research

Think tanks play a similarly covert role on behalf of business. Instead of corporations putting research forward transparently as their own, think tanks, with the studied appearance of independence, purport to be supplying research comparable to peer-reviewed work from the academic world. Vested interests can be concealed in this way and media organizations encouraged to air think tank scholars as if they were in fact independent.
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Indeed, in the United States, research by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) showed mainstream media outlets (major newspapers, radio and TV stations) had quoted, hosted, or published Heritage Foundation staff 2,268 times in the study year (1995), AEI staff 1,297 times, and Cato Institute staff 1,163 times.
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In 1998, as corporations faced the prospect of the Clinton administration signing on to the Kyoto Protocol, adopted on December 11, 1997, John Cushman of the
New York Times
revealed that “an informal group of people working for big oil companies, trade associations and conservative policy research organizations … have been meeting recently at the Washington office of the American Petroleum Institute.” Their plans encompassed a media program, with $600,000 in funding, to recruit, train, and finance a team of credible scientists who would question and undercut the “prevailing scientific wisdom” on radio talk shows and in opinion pieces in newspapers. They also planned a Global Climate Science Data Center with a budget of $5 million over two years, which would again recruit credible scientists and act as a “one-stop resource” for members of Congress, the media, and industry.
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The document Cushman obtained stated that “victory will be achieved when … recognition of uncertainties becomes part of ‘conventional wisdom.’”
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Industry sources claimed that the
Times
publicity had forced them to abandon that particular plan, but people involved in the meeting have been prominent in climate change denial work ever since—including ExxonMobil lobbyist Randy Randol, “junk science” proponent Steve Milloy, Myron Ebell from Frontiers of Freedom, now with the CEI, and representatives from the American Petroleum Institute, Chevron, the Marshall Institute, the Science and Environmental Policy Project, and the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow.
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As negotiations for a treaty beyond Kyoto drew closer, the AEI offered $10,000 to any scientist who would write articles emphasizing shortcomings in the IPCC’s 2007 draft assessment report.
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In these documented cases, vested interests planned to pay individual scientists to present an industry-friendly opinion in the public sphere as if they were unconnected to industry. Though it is often difficult to link specific individuals to precise corporate donations, some evidence does exist: in the early 1990s the coal conglomerate Western Fuels revealed in an annual report that it was enlisting prominent scientists Patrick Michaels, Robert Balling, and Fred Singer as spokesmen. The coal industry paid these and a handful of other self-styled skeptics $1 million over a three-year period;
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Michaels admitted at a 1995 hearing in Minnesota that he had received more than $165,000.
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Evidence that the Heartland Institute has spent over $20 million since 2007 funding scientists and “skeptical” bloggers was leaked in early 2012.
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Among the recipients were the Australian geologist Bob Carter and the US weatherman Anthony Watts. Even where proof of direct funding is lacking, there is ample evidence of corporate donations to think tanks and corporate involvement in their boards, while think tank relationships with self-styled contrarians are openly disclosed. Think tanks constitute a go-between that sanitizes industry propaganda and turns it into “independent research.”

Mother Jones
journalist Chris Mooney has documented connections between ExxonMobil and various think tanks and front groups. He found forty organizations with close ties to climate change denialists that were funded by the petroleum giant, which spent more than $8 million on them between 2000 and 2003. The AEI received nearly $1 million while ExxonMobil chairman Lee Raymond served as vice president of its board of trustees. The CEI got $1.38 million, Frontiers of Freedom $612,000, and the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow $252,000. Smaller sums were disbursed to many other entities, including the Cato Institute, the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, where Ron Arnold is based (discussed in chapter 12), and the Advancement of Sound Science Center, registered at Steve Milloy’s address.
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Mother Jones
has compiled a table of think tank funding by ExxonMobil,
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and the Greenpeace investigative website exxonsecrets.org provides extensive information on the connections between dozens of think tanks and their funding sources.
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In their open letter to ExxonMobil in 2006, Republican senator Olympia Snowe and Democrat senator Jay Rockefeller pointed out that “since the late 1990s, ExxonMobil [alone] has spent more than $19 million on a strategy of ‘information laundering,’ enabling a small number of professional skeptics, working through so-called scientific organizations, to funnel their viewpoints through non-peer-reviewed websites.”
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Intimidating Citizens with Lawsuits

In a 1971 speech to the US Chamber of Commerce, Lewis Powell, of Powell Memo fame, recommended that business set up its own law firms, call them “public interest” firms, and prepare to fight for the business agenda in the courtroom. The Chamber of Commerce established its own litigation center, one of many such corporate interest law firms.
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These provided a weapon later used widely to threaten individuals involved in protest or activism against polluters and developers; this sort of intimidating litigation was dubbed “strategic lawsuits against public participation” (or SLAPPs) by the University of Denver academics Penelope Canan and George Pring. Canan and Pring had observed an upsurge in civil damages suits mounted against citizens.
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In court, the pockets of corporations were too deep for ordinary citizens to oppose. In the United States, many activists were scared off and silenced. The Melbourne barrister Brian Walters has documented a number of cases in which Australian businesses—often developers—used the defamation or trade practices laws to sue citizens who expressed concerns about environmental and community issues, sometimes by merely writing to the paper.
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Many of these suits succeeded in silencing the dissent and, even when people chose to fight, the risk of losing everything was high and led others to fear the consequences of public participation.
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As well as discrediting, bankrupting, and scaring off private individuals, the neoliberal Right and its think tank infrastructure went on to accuse scientists of distortion and bias while fostering the denial of environmental problems with its own distortion and bias. The next chapter examines these developments and looks at the rhetorics that have undermined environmental science and prevented or delayed action on environmental issues.

12

The Free Market Assault on Environmental Science

The environmental policies of the most powerful and gluttonous nation on the planet are being written by the world’s most powerful oil company.

—Mark Morford, 2005

Climate change policy in Canberra has for years been determined by a small group of lobbyists who happily describe themselves as the “greenhouse mafia.”… This cabal consists of the executive directors of a handful of industry associations in the coal, oil, cement, aluminium, mining and electricity industries. Almost all of these industry lobbyists have been plucked from the senior ranks of the Australian Public Service.… The revolving door between the bureaucracy and industry lobby groups has given the fossil fuel industries unparalleled insights into the policy process and networks throughout government.

—Clive Hamilton, 2007

Science Loses Favor

In chapters 10 and 11, I traced the step-by-step creation of channels of propaganda and direct influence by corporate America, and their spread to other countries. I have also indicated the process whereby pro- corporate ideology was internalized in popular belief and became the commonsense way to see the world. Economic growth is intrinsic to the corporate system so that, even when growth itself is not the overt topic of the propaganda, it remains an underlying objective. This is particularly true of the battle to continue burning the fossil fuels on which the entire productive apparatus currently depends.

The core rhetorical task for nearly a century was to persuade ordinary Americans—and then others round the world—that their interests were identical to those of big business and best served by keeping the government out of economic decision making. By the late twentieth century, there were signs that corporate interests wished to subsume under their own control not only strictly economic decisions but much of the entire range of government policy as well. One manifestation of this broadening intent was the attack on the credibility of science itself.

Science had been regarded as an indispensable ally of capital throughout the successive technological transformations of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Though neutral in theory, scientific knowledge fuels technical innovation, an indispensable aspect of a regime of “creative destruction” and growth in GDP. However, as scientists began to document the ecological damage caused by the surge of economic growth after World War II, American business turned against them. During the 1960s, biological scientists in particular started studying the evidence of unintended, often noxious, consequences of production; in response, the status of science in the industrial system began to plummet. From this time on, pro-business interests perceived science in two categories: “productive science,” the natural support of industry for a century or more, and “impact science,” the unwanted study of industrial outcomes. This involved the rise to prominence of the ecological and health sciences; according to the sociologists Riley Dunlap and Aaron McCright, these biologically oriented sciences presented a “fundamental challenge to the dominant social paradigm” of endless growth and ever-mounting prosperity.
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This was a challenge that business was anxious to suppress since, as has been argued throughout, expansion is crucial to the profit system. The rise of the biological sciences also diverted part of science funding into the new disciplines, a trend that some of America’s elite physicists criticized forcefully.
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