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[ four ] THE AGE OF ASTROTURFING In which industry steals credibility from the people

It was a conspiracy!

There’s 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, Philip Morris financed the creation of the National Smokers Alliance, a purported grassroots association that mustered smokers together to fight for their “rights.”

From a tactical standpoint this was a brilliant strategy. True grassroots organizations are one of the great expressions of democracy. In them, theoretically at least, you have a group of independent citizens bound together in common interest rising up and demanding to be heard. Reporters have grown appropriately cynical of corporate manipulation, and they are generally suspicious of established interest groups, from environmentalists to consumer advocates, who have made what appears to be common cause with government regulators. They find it refreshing to see an apparently spontaneous outpouring of support or opposition on any public issue.

The political theorist Jeffrey Berry documented this in his 2000 book, The New Liberalism: The Rising Power of Citizen Groups. Berry showed that in the realms of politics and media, grassroots organizations were outperforming industry-sponsored interest groups by a wide margin. For example, Berry found that a small number of citizens’ groups making representations in Congress were overrepresented in media citations by a factor of 10 to 1 when compared to their industry counterparts.

The National Smokers Alliance, however, was not a spontaneous outpouring of public support. It was an Astroturf group, a fake grassroots organization animated by a clever public relations campaign and a huge budget. As John Stauber wrote in a 1994 edition of the online journal PR Watch:

Burson-Marsteller’s state-of-the-art campaign utilizes full-page newspaper ads, direct telemarketing, paid canvassers, free 800 numbers, newsletters and letters to send to federal agencies. B-M is targeting the fifty million Americans who smoke. Its goal is to rile-up and mobilize a committed cadre of hundreds of thousands, better yet millions, to be foot soldiers in a grassroots army directed by Philip Morris’s political operatives at Burson-Marsteller.³

Such are the profits available to the tobacco industry that around the same time, Philip Morris had also engaged the public relations giant APCO Worldwide to craft a parallel attack on the scientific validity of links between cancer and secondhand smoke. In 1993 APCO proposed the foundation of The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC). The original documentation of this proposal is available on the Internet at TobaccoDocuments.org, a Web site established after the tobacco industry lost a series of 1990s lawsuits over the falsification of evidence and the attempt to cover up the health effects of smoking.

The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition’s stated objectives were these:

• Establish TASSC as a credible source for reporters when questioning the validity of scientific studies.

• Encourage the public to question—from the grassroots up—the validity of scientific studies.

• Mobilize support for TASSC through alliances with other organizations and third-party allies.

• Develop materials, including new article reprints, that can be “merchandized” to TASSC audiences.

• Increase membership in and funding of TASSC.

• Publicize and refine TASSC messages on an ongoing basis.⁴

The eagerness to increase TASSC’s membership and funding is important in the climate change conversation because, well, guess who APCO contacted when it came time to increase membership in its new Astroturf group? Realizing how obvious it would look if Philip Morris was TASSC’s only financial supporter, APCO sent out recruitment letters to twenty thousand businesses inviting them to join the fight for “sound science.” Below is a list of the kinds of companies that APCO considered appropriate partners for such a venture. The list comes from another memo, written in 1994 when APCO was planning to expand TASSC operations into Europe.⁵ One of the first goals, the memo said, was to try to “link the tobacco industry with other more ‘politically correct’ products.”

“As a starting point,” the memo begins, “we can identify key issues requiring sound scientific research and scientists that may have an interest in them.” This seems to suggest that no one was currently conducting research in any of the areas about to be discussed, or that the research being done was somehow unsound. Certainly, that research in most cases seemed to be inspiring legitimate interest groups to demand more government intervention and regulation of the sort that was costing industry money.

The TASSC memo continued:

Some issues our European colleagues suggest include:

• Global warming

• Nuclear waste disposal

• Diseases and pests in agricultural products for transborder trade

• Biotechnology

• Eco-labeling for EC products

• Food processing and packaging

It’s worth looking at these tactics because they suggest a high degree of sophistication and a willingness to underwrite an ambitious and expensive “grassroots” campaign. First, APCO suggested that TASSC target secondary markets, because this would “avoid cynical reporters from major cities [and involved] less reviewing/challenging of TASSC messages.” It’s a judgment call whether big-city reporters are by definition cynical. But it’s pretty clear that they are, as a group, better educated, better informed, and more likely to be briefed on specific areas of science. Small-town papers and broadcast outlets tend to have fewer journalists in total and fewer specialists. They also pay less, so there is an incentive for the best reporters to get their early experience in smaller markets and then move up to the high-paying big-city jobs. The public relations professionals at APCO know this, so you have to read more critically when the plan they wrote for TASSC recommends targeting small towns. The 1993 memo “The Revised Plan for the Public Launching of TASSC” suggests that a secondary-market focus “ . . . increases [the] likelihood of pick-up by media” and “limit[s] potential for counterattack. The likely opponents of TASSC tend to concentrate their efforts in the top markets while skipping the secondary markets.” It seems fair to conclude that this is APCO’s way of saying that TASSC should try to stay under the radar.

APCO also recommended that TASSC establish a public information bureau that would brief “pertinent associations” in Washington, D.C., and coordinate with “organizations that have tangential goals to TASSC, such as . . . The Science and Environmental Policy Project.” (The latter is another Astroturf group established by a tobacco-sponsored scientist named Dr. S. Fred Singer—more about him later.) The name “public information bureau” sounds benign, like an informational clearinghouse that perhaps would send out the odd news release or be at the ready to answer questions. Certainly APCO anticipated sending out information, but the specific list of proposed activities and tactics suggested something much more proactive—and much more political. The list included:

• Publishing and distributing a monthly update report for all TASSC members, which will quantify media impressions made the prior month and discuss new examples of unsound science.

• Monitoring the trade press (e.g., public interest group newsletters and activities) and informing TASSC members of any upcoming studies and relevant news.

• Arranging media tours.

• Issuing news releases on a regular basis to news wire services, members, allies and targeted reporters.

• Acting as a clearinghouse for speaking requests of TASSC scientists or other members and maintaining a Speakers Bureau to provide speakers for allies and interested groups.

• Drafting “boilerplate” speeches, press releases and op-eds [opinion page articles] to be used by TASSC field representatives.

• Placing articles/op-eds in trade publications to serve as a member recruitment tool in targeted industries, such as the agriculture, chemical, food additive and biotechnology fields.

• Monitoring the field and serving as a management central command for any crises that occur.

• Developing visual elements that help explain some of the issues behind unsound science.⁶

Here again, APCO was advising that TASSC look for every opportunity to attack inconvenient (“unsound”) science. It wanted TASSC to identify “targeted reporters” who would be most likely to give the kind of coverage that served TASSC’s purposes. It suggested the drafting of “boilerplate” speeches and press releases of the kind that could be used again and again to promote its messages. And the op-eds could come in especially handy, again, in the secondary markets. As any big public relations firm (or would-be thought leader) knows, it’s hard as can be to get the New York Times to publish your opinion piece. But if you are satisfied to send lots of copies to lots of smaller papers, many of which find it much harder to source a steady supply of good material, you have a reasonable chance of reaching just as many readers.

TASSC’s early membership list included “sound science” supporters like Amoco, Exxon, Occidental Petroleum, Santa Fe Pacific Gold Corporation, Procter & Gamble, the Louisiana Chemical Association, the National Pest Control Association, General Motors, 3M, Chevron, and Dow Chemical. For “science advisors,” they had people such as Frederick Seitz.

In the 1960s and ‘70s, Seitz was a widely admired scientist, a former president of both the National Academy of Sciences and Rockefeller University. In 1978 he took that reputation to work for the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. According to “While Washington Slept,” a May 2006 Vanity Fair article by investigative journalist Mark Hertsgaard, over a ten-year period Seitz was responsible for handing out US$45 million in tobacco money to people who were pursuing research that overwhelmingly failed to link tobacco to anything the least bit negative. Seitz later admitted to accepting almost US$900,000 of that money himself.

But by the late 1980s he seemed to have lost a step. In a Philip Morris interoffice memo dated 1989, an executive named Alexander Holtzman reported that he was told that “Dr. Seitz is quite elderly and not sufficiently rational as to offer advice.”⁷ Yet Seitz continued to stand as a TASSC regular, in particular lending his name and leveraging his old National Academy of Sciences affiliation to the global warming denial movement for nineteen more years, dying in 2008 at the age of ninety-six.

It’s probably time to introduce Steven Milloy, a.k.a. “The Junkman,” to our cast of characters. While TASSC was originally run by executive director Garrey Carruthers, an economist and former New Mexico governor, Steven Milloy took over in 1997. Milloy’s academic background is also considerable: he has an undergraduate degree in science from Johns Hopkins, a masters in health sciences and biostatistics (also from Johns Hopkins), and a masters in law from Georgetown. But there is no record of his directly pursuing science or law as a career.

Instead, Milloy emerged in the 1990s working for a series of public relations and lobby firms, including the EOP Group, which the Web site PR Watch.org describes as “a well-connected, Washington-based lobby firm whose clients have included the American Crop Protection Association (the chief trade association of the pesticide industry), the American Petroleum Institute, AT&T, the Business Roundtable, the Chlorine Chemistry Council, Dow Chemical Company, Edison Electric Institute (nuclear power), Fort Howard Corp. (a paper manufacturer), International Food Additives Council, Monsanto Co., National Mining Association, and the Nuclear Energy Institute.” ⁸

Milloy, who is currently an “adjunct scholar” at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and formerly held that position at the Cato Institute, is also the creator and proprietor of the Web site JunkScience.com, which works to “debunk” everything from the dangers of secondhand smoke to the risks of genetically modified foods. Milloy was a founding member of a team assembled by the American Petroleum Institute (API) to create a 1998 “Global Climate Science Communication Action Plan” (the precise contents of which Greenpeace later discovered and made available for public viewing).⁹ The API made no bones about its intent in creating its plan for the public. The document plainly states that its purpose is to convince the public, through the media, that climate science is awash in uncertainty. Notwithstanding that the industry’s own scientists were saying as early as 1995 that the science of climate change was undeniable (as in the New York Times report discussed in Chapter 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 goals or might spontaneously have risen to fight for those priorities. These industry-funded planners set out to ridicule the Kyoto agreement and to frustrate government efforts to constrain greenhouse gas emissions. They made a plan to overwhelm the media with a steady stream of information that served industry’s purposes and injected “balance” into coverage, whether or not that balance reflected the true state of science.

In March of 2009 Gallup updated its annual poll asking whether Americans thought the risks of climate change were being reported reasonably or whether they were being exaggerated. A total of 41 percent of respondents said they thought the seriousness of the global warming threat is, even at the beginning of 2009, still being exaggerated. That means that two years after the release of a report in which a Nobel Prize-winning group of scientists declared with a more than 90 percent certainty level that climate change is real, pressing, and apt to change forever the face of the Earth, four in ten Americans still don’t believe it. For them, uncertainty is embedded as conventional wisdom. For the writers of the API strategy— though not for the defenders of accuracy in media—that must be considered a victory.

* For the record, and per the discussion in Chapter 2 about Naomi Oreskes’s survey of the reputable scientific literature of the day, neither the API nor any other organization that wants to deny the science has yet come up with any “peer-reviewed papers that undercut the ‘conventional wisdom’ on climate science.”