Climate Cover-Up. James Hoggan
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action on climate change
eleven SLAPP SCIENCE Using courts and cash to silence critics of climate confusion
twelve MANIPULATED MEDIA An industry overwhelmed in the age of information
thirteen MONEY TALKS Calculating the heavy weight of political capital
fourteen WHITEWASHING COAL In coal country, cleanliness is relative, but profit is absolute
fifteen LITTLE COAL Salvaging a future that’s stuck in the tar sands
sixteen NOBODY WANTS TO BE A CHUMP How the debate cripples public policy and paralyzes private action
seventeen SAVING THE WORLD Tactics for turning back the clock on global disaster
Notes
It is a rare privilege to have a friend like John Lefebvre, without whose courage, insight, and generosity this book could never have come to pass. We are all deeply indebted to John for his guidance, his constant encouragement, and his ongoing support for the operations of DeSmogBlog.com.
I am also grateful to everyone involved in the DeSmogBlog, especially Richard Littlemore and Kevin Grandia, for their efforts and their research. Many of the details in this book were reported originally on the blog.
The whole community owes a vote of thanks to the scientists and advocates who have worked so hard to catch our attention and build our understanding on the topic of climate change. The Nobel Committee has already offered appropriate praise for former U.S. vice president Al Gore and the scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But some of those scientists have taken a particularly public position and have endured unconscionable abuse as a result. Brave and outspoken scientists such as NASA’s James Hansen, Penn State’s Michael Mann, UC San Diego’s Naomi Oreskes, Stanford’s Stephen Schneider, and the University of Victoria’s Andrew Weaver are among those we know best and respect the most.
There are also scientists and journalists who deserve credit and acknowledgment. Ross Gelbspan, formerly of the Boston Globe, was among the first reporters in North America to uncover the extent of the climate cover-up. ABC’s Bill Blake-more and the New York Times’s Andrew Revkin reported the climate change story accurately when many others were getting it wrong.
In the online world, John Stauber’s SourceWatch.org is an encyclopedic font of information, as is Kert Davies’s Exxon Secrets.org. Joe Romm has done great work at ClimateProgress .org, and the DeSmogBlog team has long been a fan of Australian online journalist and scientist Tim Lambert, whose Deltoid blog has been a solid source of scoops and thoughtful reporting on the science and politics of climate change.
In the process of assembling the material in this book, the DeSmogBlog received solid support from a host of online sources that also do a great job covering this issue. I’d like to thank and acknowledge Richard Graves of ItsGettingHotIn Here.org; Jesse Jenkins of WattHead.blogspot.com; Pete Altman of Switchboard.nrdc.org; Alex Stefan of WorldChanging.com; Brad Johnson, Faiz Shakir, and Amanda Terkel at ThinkProgress .org; Page van der Linden at DailyKos.com; Drew Curtis at Fark .com; and Andrew Sullivan at AndrewSullivan.TheAtlantic.com.
Given the rigors and distractions that are inevitable in putting together this kind of book, I want to extend a special thanks to some of the people who had to pick up the slack during the long process of research and writing. The whole Hoggan staff has been endlessly supportive, but the greatest thanks must be offered in return for the patience shown by my wife, Enid Marion, and by Richard Littlemore’s whole family, including his wife, Elizabeth, and his three boys, Ted, Avery, and Llewellyn.
Finally, I would like to offer a more specific thanks to Richard Littlemore. I have said before that Richard has a knack for writing down the things I say in the way I wish I had said them. But his contribution to this book went much further. He brought passion, energy, and extensive knowledge of climate change, politics, and journalism. In the earliest days he was the lone pen on the DeSmogBlog, and throughout he has been a tireless researcher and a conscientious reporter. Collaborations of this scope are likely to either ruin friendships or cement them forever. In this case I am delighted to say that I have found and forged a good and lasting friendship.
Jim Hoggan
This is a story of betrayal, a story of selfishness, greed, and irresponsibility on an epic scale. In its darkest chapters, it’s a story of deceit, of poisoning public judgment—of an antidemocratic attack on our political structures and a strategic undermining of the journalistic watchdogs who keep our social institutions honest. It is ultimately a story that drove me and those closest to me to outrage and to activism. And although it is not my purpose to make you angry, I hope that you may, through the coming pages, come to understand the sense of indignation and injustice that brought me to write this book.
I didn’t go looking for this trouble. I don’t think of myself as an activist, and I don’t fit the stereotypical description of an environmentalist. I have a decent wardrobe that doesn’t include a single hair shirt. I spend too much money on art, fine wine, skis, and high-end bicycle parts, and I am in recovery from my habit of buying luxury cars.
Nor do I bear any grudges against “the establishment”—and particularly not the public relations industry. As the owner of a successful Vancouver public relations firm, I think that PR is a good thing. It connects people and builds understanding, and I generally have a high regard for my professional colleagues. It’s true that there have always been bad actors in my business—the tobacco apologists and the partisan political spin doctors—but I have always regarded them as obvious exceptions. In my career, examples of spin-doctoring seemed episodic, not epidemic.
Or that’s what I thought before I started looking closely at the climate file. That too began in relative innocence, and only three or four years ago. I was thinking about adding a community service element to the Hoggan & Associates Web site, and somebody suggested a public information section on climate change. I liked the idea immediately. I knew the topic was controversial, and I knew that in a controversy people sometimes oversell their position. I thought it would be useful to introduce an objective viewpoint.
I started doing a lot of reading and was surprised by what I discovered. Where I expected a blistering controversy, I found an overwhelming scientific consensus. Mainstream media had been reporting that doubt lurked in every report, that for every scientist warning of global warming there was another saying it was all bunk. But when I started reading reports from the world’s leading science academies, I found that everyone seemed to be speaking with one voice. Every science academy in every major developed country in the world had stated clearly that the world’s climate is changing dangerously and humans are to blame. Why, I wondered, were people so confused? Who had started this public debate?
The great U.S. journalist Ross Gelbspan had the answer. In two early books, The Heat Is On (1997) and Boiling Point (2004), Ross had uncovered the first hard evidence of an organized campaign, largely financed by the coal and oil industries, to make us think that climate science was somehow still controversial, climate change still unproven. I had always known about the potential for public manipulation, but I had never conceived of a campaign so huge, well-funded, and well-organized. Ross is anything but a conventional environmentalist. He’s a reporter, skeptical to the bone. And when I flew to Boston to meet him, he told me that when he had started looking into climate change, he actually thought the “science skeptics” had it right. He thought the science was truly stuck