The Climate-COVID Tracker

Leaked Document: Industry Pushing Liability Waiver Under Cover of COVID-19

Amy Westervelt

For a long time, the story went that the tobacco industry cooked up disinformation and then spread it to the fossil fuel guys, the chemical industry, pharma, you name it. But one thing that became incredibly clear when we began digging into PR firms and specific publicists was that this version of history is not quite right; if disinformation strategies were cooked up by any particular industry it was the public relations industry, which put these strategies to work on behalf of fossil fuels, tobacco, chemical manufacturers and more, often all at the same time. The 

, Ivy Ledbetter Lee, worked on behalf of both Standard Oil and, shortly after, American Tobacco, for example. 

Daniel Edelman developed astroturf campaigns

 for both RJ Reynolds tobacco company and the American Petroleum Institute, as did John Hill, who went so far as to  have tobacco folks join the API. He also worked with Monsanto, juggling all three clients at the same time. E. Bruce Harrison worked for the chemical guys first, then 

managed front groups for tobacco and fossil fuels

These industries all surely learned from each other at various points in time, but that was mostly because they were working with the same publicists. The history is less that tobacco or oil embraced disinformation first and then passed it on and more that a handful of PR firms and consultants created the disinformation industry, and then put it to work on behalf of whatever industry needed it at any given time.

Today, those same strategies are at work on behalf of those who worry that the response to COVID-19 will undermine capitalism, which is why climate folks keep noting how familiar the whole anti-science component of the rightwing response to the pandemic feels. It’s familiar because the exact same strategies are being deployed, in some cases by the same people. Here are a few key examples:

Disinformation Strategy #1: He who controls the language controls the narrative. 

Ivy Lee’s big thing, way back 100+ years ago when he was working with the Rockefellers... oh, and advising Hitler and Goebbels too… was to take control of language. If the government wanted to impose safety regulations on your industry, you described them as “extra” or “additional” or “surplus”. In climate, we’ve seen language shift from “the greenhouse effect” to global warming to climate change. When media finally seized the power to make its own language choices, opting for “climate crisis” or “climate emergency", it was deemed radical, even by other journalists. In the COVID-19 context, we’ve seen this too. It’s gone from a “flu” to “a really bad flu” to “a pandemic” in a relatively condensed amount of time. But you’ll see those trading in disinformation continue to refer to it as “just a bad flu” or point out how many people the flu kills every year.

Disinformation Strategy #2: Leverage science illiteracy to create doubt:

 This has been a hugely effective tactic for multiple industries because the vast majority of public don’t spend a lot of time reading scientific studies, nor do they understand that scientific research has its own language. That makes it very easy to point to something like the uncertainty inherent in any scientific research and say “see, they don’t really know.” The best recent example of this is the re-emergence of Michael Fumento, as 

. Fumento questioned health models for the tobacco guys, climate models for the oil guys, and has 

 to question public health models used to predict the spread and likely death toll of COVID-19. Fumento was also famously fired when Businessweek outed him for accepting $60,000 from Monsanto one year to write GMO-friendly pieces in his column, which was syndicated to dozens of papers across the country. Of course models, like science in general, have a bit of uncertainty baked in; they represent both the most extreme outcomes and the most likely scenarios, they encapsulate multiple variables. And if you know enough about them, it’s quite easy to cherry pick data and flaws and argue, as Fumento does, that modeling in general is bunk that ought to be thrown out.

Disinformation strategy #3: Astroturfing 

This weekend, social media was awash in the news that those anti-lockdown rallies in Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin and Colorado were all fomented by rightwing donors. 

 figured out all the “re-open the economy” websites were made by one guy in Florida. This is astroturfing 101, and it’s a strategy that’s been a key tool in the disinformation toolbox for at least 100 years. When coalminers and steelworkers were striking regularly back in the late 1800s and early 1900s, publicists like Ivy Lee, Edward Bernays and John Hill helped create fake protest groups that supposedly represented all the coal miners who just wanted these strikes to be over so they could get back to work. In more recent years, fossil fuel companies have backed fake advocacy groups like the California Drivers Alliance or the Washington Consumers for Sound Fuel Policy to fight against everything from emissions regulations to a carbon tax. Astroturfing is fake activism meant to give the illusion of grassroots opposition to policy. My favorite example is the Save the Plastic Bag Coalition, a petrochemical and plastic manufacturers-backed group that protests bag bans and bag taxes. It’s somewhat rare, however, to get a sitting U.S. President supporting and promoting your astroturf campaign, as Trump has done with the fake “re-open the economy” movement.

 gets into these strategies and more in great detail, and you’re bound to see in this history the roots of today’s pandemic disinformation machine.

 are focused on solutions to climate change, a conversation that COVID-19 has certainly changed. Which got me thinking: often people act like climate accountability is 

a solution, like all we do is point out problems or play the blame game. Sorry for 

about carbon capture occasionally, but for the team at 

part of addressing climate change. How can you move forward functionally if you don’t know where things went wrong in the past? How can any technological solution possibly work if it’s plugged into the same old system (carbon capture is an excellent example of this, come to think of it)?

Our hope, of course, is that when people learn to recognize these strategies and know what’s behind them, they might become less effective. Disempowering the disinformation industry is a necessary part of any climate solution.

E. Bruce Harrison Documents

John Hill Documents

Newsom Documents

Edelman Documents

S2, Ep24 | What Covid and Climate Have in Common: Science Denial, with ProPublica’s Caroline Chen

Petroganda

Mad Men

The Reason Covid-19 and Climate Seem So Similar: Disinformation

Mary Annaïse Heglar

Pro Publica healthcare reporter Caroline Chen joins us to talk about her experience navigating that minefiled, where public health and climate intersect, what happened when all the climate journalists got reassigned to Covid, how to better integrate the ways we talk about health and climate, and a whole lot more.

We talk about the very bad month Big Oil had in May, how much the climate story has changed in the past couple years, and what lies ahead as wildfire and hurricane season pick up, and pipeline protests rage on.

Hot Take S2

S2, Ep25 | Big Oil Had a Bad Month (Which Means We Had a Good One)

Hot Take is a holistic, irreverent, honest look at the climate crisis and all the ways media and society are talking—and not talking—about it. Hosted by real-life friends Mary Annaïse Heglar and Amy Westervelt—an essayist and a journalist— Hot Take offers a unique perspective on the issue of climate change. With a breath of fresh humanity and humor, conversation moves swiftly from cackling about the bad week an oil company had, to speaking seriously and passionately about the unequal distribution of climate impacts and our own experiences of climate grief. And then washing it down with a round of dad jokes! Every week, we’ll connect you with the latest climate news and with the journalists and storytellers trying to make sense of this complex issue to help you see the world through climate-colored glasses. We ended production on Hot Take at the end of 2022, but you can still access episodes here, or 

A holistic, irreverent, honest look at the climate crisis and all the ways media and society are talking—and not talking—about it.

Hot Take

Transcription

Hot Take S3

S3, Ep1 | The Real F&#ckBois of Fossil Fuel

S3, Ep2 | Free Britney and Lock Up Exxon

Mea Culpas Are Great, But Climate Leaders Need to Model Real Accountability

S3, Ep3 | The Kids Are All Angry!

S3, Ep4 | A Total Moral Disaster

S3, Ep5 |  Down Uterus! Down Girl! with Rebecca Solnit

S3, Ep6 | Of Meat and Men, with Alicia Kennedy

S3, Ep7 | Death of Democracy with Adam Serwer

S3, Ep8 | A Republican Climate Plan?

Fossil Fuel Workers Are Dying Inhaling Gases — Despite U.S. Warnings to Big Oil

S3, Ep9 | How Many Oil Jobs Are There Really?

S3, Ep10 | Trans Rights Are Climate Justice

S2, Ep24 | What Covid and Climate Have in Common: Science Denial, with ProPublica’s Caroline Chen

About This Episode

Transcript

Next Up

S2, Ep25 | Big Oil Had a Bad Month (Which Means We Had a Good One)

Related Articles

The Reason Covid-19 and Climate Seem So Similar: Disinformation