Climate Cover-Up. James Hoggan
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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
• Those promoting the Kyoto treaty on the basis of extant science appear to be out of touch with reality.
The statement seems to make clear that the goal was not to promote an understanding of science, but to spread uncertainty. The goal was not to put the best case before a deserving public, but to ensure at all times that the public was treated to “balance”—and in this case, the API strategists meant that every time a top scientist offered the public new insights into the risks of climate change, the institute would be there with a contradictory view. Victory would be achieved when the public accepted this balance—this confusion—as “conventional wisdom.” It was also a priority that industry leaders learn not about science but about uncertainty, with a specific goal of attacking the Kyoto agreement, making its supporters appear “out of touch with reality.” There is, however, no contention here that Kyoto supporters really were out of touch, only that the API would like to cast them as such.
The plan went on to describe how the API might achieve these goals, beginning with a campaign to search out and recruit “new (scientific) faces who will add their voices to those recognized scientists who already are vocal.” The document goes on to expand on the list of specific tactics (with my emphasis added in italics):
• Develop a global climate science information kit for media including peer-reviewed papers that undercut the “conventional wisdom” on climate science. This kit also will include understandable communications, including simple fact sheets that present scientific uncertainties in language that the media and public can understand.*
• Conduct briefings by media-trained scientists for science writers in the top 20 media markets, using the information kits. Distribute the information kits to daily newspapers nationwide with offer of scientists to brief reporters at each paper. Develop, disseminate radio news releases featuring scientists nationwide, and offer scientists to appear on radio talk shows across the country.
• Produce, distribute a steady stream of climate science information via facsimile and e-mail to science writers around the country.
• Produce, distribute via syndicate and directly to newspapers nationwide a steady stream of op-ed columns and letters to the editor authored by scientists.
• Convince one of the major news national TV journalists (e.g., John Stossel) to produce a report examining the scientific underpinnings of the Kyoto treaty.
• Organize, promote and conduct through grassroots organizations a series of campus/community workshops/ debates on climate science in 10 most important states during the period mid-August through October, 1998.
• Consider advertising the scientific uncertainties in select markets to support national, regional and local (e.g., workshops / debates), as appropriate.
Like the Western Fuels Association campaign in the early 1990s and the TASSC campaign that followed, this document once again set out a major work plan that involved burying science writers in “a steady stream of climate science information” concentrating not on quality but on doubt. It can hardly be a coincidence that even as the science itself was becoming ever more certain—and ever more alarming—the “conventional wisdom” in the late 1990s and into the early part of this century turned more and more to confusion and doubt.
If you look at the bottom of the “Situation Analysis” within this plan, you get a list of the authors. The list includes but is not limited to Candace Crandall, Science and Environmental Policy Project; Jeffrey Salmon, George C. Marshall Institute and later the Bush Administration’s associate under secretary for science at the U.S. Department of Energy; Myron Ebell, Frontiers of Freedom; Randy Randol, Exxon; Sharon Kneiss, Chevron; Steven Milloy, TASSC; and Joseph Walker, American Petroleum Institute. The more you read in this area, and the farther you read into this book, the more you begin to recognize the names of people and organizations. You also find that many of the most prominent “scientists” and spokespeople are not currently working in science, and often never were working in climate science. Many others, like Steven Milloy, enjoy generous financial connections to self-interested industries, connections that they generally fail to report when they are casting themselves as impartial experts.
Returning to the question of Astroturf groups, you also realize that the term “grassroots” as we might normally recognize it means something completely different to the people who are writing these reports. When we think of a grassroots group, we might think of something like the Montgomery Improvement Association, the citizens’ group that emerged to support Rosa Parks when she stood up in 1955 for the rights of African Americans. But like any number of modern public relations firms that boast of having grassroots expertise, the API was talking about something much less spontaneous. The API’s grassroots groups were not going to sprout up independently. They were to be planted, tended, nurtured, and financed by the fossil fuel companies that would benefit as the actual weight of science gave way to a manufactured “conventional wisdom.”
There are four specific references to “grassroots” in the API document. First, the API proposed establishing a “global climate science data center,” staffed not by scientists but by “professionals on loan from various companies and associations with a major interest in the climate issue.” One of the important prerequisites for these “professionals” was that they have “expertise in grassroots organization.” This “science data center” could then start a “national direct outreach and education” project, one element of which would be a plan to “distribute educational materials directly to schools and through grassroots organizations of climate science partners (companies, organizations that participate in this effort).” And again, from the earlier list of tactics, the API would “organize, promote and conduct through grassroots organizations a series of campus/community workshops/ debates on climate science in 10 most important states during the period mid-August through October, 1998.” In each of these strategy planks, the proposed “grassroots” groups do not currently exist but can be organized by people with the appropriate expertise. The result is not being pitched as a spontaneous expression of democratic choice, but as a fixed goal that can be achieved by patching together something that looks like a public organization built from the ground up, rather than an industry-driven lobby.
The other thing you’ll notice if you sit down and read one of these documents is that the doubt about climate science begins to sound legitimate. You begin to forget that most of the “scientists” who act as spokespeople for the API or its partner organizations do no research in climatology or any other related field. You stop noticing that the goals of these “science” reports never include financing actual scientific research—or even an impartial review of the best of current science. The Global Climate Coalition asked its own in-house scientists for an impartial review in 1995, and then stuck the results in a drawer, far away from the curious eyes of the public.
No, promoting scientific research or advancing the public understanding of the true state of science appears not to be the priority. The API strategists, working on behalf of clients in the chemical and fossil fuel industries, are working instead to change the conventional wisdom, irrespective of the science. They are crafting a plan to create grassroots organizations that serve industry goals, regardless of whether the public might share those