something histrionic about that charge. The very idea of a cabal of rich and powerful people conspiring to fool the public about a fundamental point of science strains credulity and is offensive in its own right. Yet if you read on, you will see that there are conspiracies aplenty, documented and undeniable.
The first was organized by the Western Fuels Association, which as of April 2009 defined itself on www.westernfuels.org as “a not-for-profit cooperative that supplies coal and transportation services to consumer-owned electric utilities throughout the Great Plains, Rocky Mountain and Southwest regions.” The magic word in that description is “coal,” the most plentiful conventional energy source in the world and the number-one fuel for electric utilities in the United States, which has the second-largest known deposit of coal in the world, only slightly behind Australia. The problem is that coal is also the worst fossil fuel when it comes to generating carbon dioxide, and those coal-fired electrical generators are already the largest carbon dioxide point source in the country.
In 1991 Western Fuels joined with the National Coal Association and the Edison Electric Institute to create the Information Council on the Environment (ICE). This was a not-very-arm’s-length organization that would use its original US$500,000 budget “to reposition global warming as a theory (not fact)” and “supply alternative facts to support the suggestion that global warming will be good.” 1
ICE went into small U.S. markets that were heavily dependent on coal-fired electricity and, with advance planning from the D.C. public relations firm Bracy Williams and Company, tested a series of messages, including:
• “Some say the Earth is warming. Some also said the Earth was flat.”
• “Who told you the Earth was warming . . . Chicken Little?”
• “How much are you willing to pay to solve a problem that may not exist?”
It actually wasn’t getting warmer in Minneapolis, and presumably the messaging went down well, especially on cold winter days, because ICE rolled out a campaign that included newspaper and radio advertising. ICE also learned that audiences didn’t take coal or electrical company officials very seriously when it came to arguing environmental issues, but that they were inclined to listen to “technical experts.” So ICE mobilized a group of scientists who in many instances were not climate change experts, but who would nevertheless make themselves available for newspaper and broadcast interviews and sign opinion page articles that could be distributed to local papers.
Parallel to the ICE operation, the Western Fuels Association also launched another “educational” entity called the Greening Earth Society, which produced a video called The Greening of Planet Earth, a thirty-minute love note to carbon dioxide that is still available for viewing on YouTube. This became the first public appearance of a group of scientific experts made up of people like Sherwood Idso—people who have since become famous for their willingness to argue climate science on behalf of the fossil fuel lobby. In the video they argue that Earth’s plants are starving for carbon dioxide and that an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide will result in a more fertile world. Ignoring the implications of climate change, especially the threat of lasting droughts that could turn much of the equatorial zone into a desert, The Greening of Planet Earth showed a time-lapse animation in which carbon dioxide-driven vegetation colonizes virtually every part of the Earth’s surface—even closing in happily over the Sahara. The message was clear: climate change—if it’s happening—is a good thing.
The Western Fuels Association offered the video online in return for a small, tax-deductible donation to the Greening Earth Society, but it delivered hundreds of copies for free to public and university libraries across the country. As Naomi Oreskes reports in her fabulous podcast at smartenergyshow .com, “You CAN Argue with the Facts,” the overworked librarians at the University of Oregon took this gift at face value, filing it with the description that the Western Fuels Association had provided: “An enlightening documentary that examines one of the most misunderstood environmental phenomena of the 1980s.” Imagine the potential confusion to be suffered by a first-year student who has been reading legitimate science about global warming and checks this video out of his university library, in all probability becoming the first person at the institution to actually watch it. On one hand, the student would have learned in class that climate change was a gathering threat. On the other, the university was inadvertently endorsing a contrary argument that global warming would be a boon to humanity.
The Western Fuels Association put ICE on ice after one of its strategy documents was leaked to the newspapers, sparking a raft of embarrassing stories in the Energy Daily, the National Journal, the Arizona Republic, and the New York Times. But a pattern was beginning to take hold. Corporations and industry associations were using their considerable financial resources to influence the public conversation. They were using advertising slogans and messages that they had tested for effectiveness but not for accuracy. They were hiring scientists who were prepared to say in public things that they could not get printed in the peer-reviewed scientific press. And they were taking advantage of mainstream journalists’ willingness—even eagerness—to feature contrarian and controversial science stories, regardless of whether the controversy was actually occurring in reputable scientific publications.
The next example of a transparent effort to manipulate public opinion on a range of issues, including climate change, started out as a project of the tobacco giant Philip Morris. Big Tobacco had been playing this game since the days of Bernays, at first trying to surround cigarettes with a patina of glamor and then wrapping the death sticks in a cocoon of doubt. It began with the founding of the Tobacco Institute in the 1950s and specifically with the creation of the Tobacco Industry Research Committee, later the Council for Tobacco Research. The Tobacco Institute and the Council for Tobacco Research were both tireless in funding and promoting any research that would cast doubt on the health effects of smoking. There is a great scene in the 2005 movie Thank You for Smoking in which the main character, Nick Naylor (played by Aaron Eckhart), talks admiringly about a cigarette industry scientist who had done research on tobacco for thirty years without finding a link to cancer. About which Naylor says, sardonically, “The man’s a genius.”
From the emergence of the tobacco lobby in the 1950s until the tobacco companies started losing huge health-related lawsuits in the 1990s, the tobacco industry’s message was admirable for its consistency: the link to cancer (and, later, the cancer link to secondhand smoke) was not “proven.” Tobacco defenders said the alleged link was based on epidemiological studies that established a correlation but couldn’t prove cause and effect beyond a reasonable doubt. They also made arguments that seemed calculated to distract people from the actual issue. They said that lots of things caused cancer, so it was unreasonable to try to pin all lung cancer deaths on tobacco or to pick on cigarettes and not deal with all the other causes at the same time. And they criticized as zealots anyone who tried to educate or legislate against tobacco use, saying that the health advocates, government bureaucrats, or responsible politicians were creating a nanny state that would interfere with people’s rights.
This was a highly effective mixed-message strategy. The smoky executives knew they were never going to win the health argument, so they muddied the scientific waters and tried to reposition the debate to be about free choice. According to a document obtained by the organization TobaccoFreedom .org,2 the executives even co-opted the American Civil Liberties Union, providing big donations to the ACLU in return for its support in recasting smoking as a matter of freedom and individual choice.
Still, by the late 1980s the public had grown tired of tobacco industry “geniuses” telling them smoking was harmless, and skeptical of tobacco company employees or institute “experts” fighting against increasingly popular smoking restrictions. So Philip Morris opened up two new fronts. First, working with the public relations giant Burson-Marsteller,
