Fossil fuels are choking cities with smog, turning the water toxic, and heating the atmosphere to a point of no return. So how do you make them sound like a good thing? Ask the public relations firms that have spent decades finding the right words.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A report published this week in the journal Climatic Change<\/a> summarizes how these marketing whizzes have helped polluting industries improve their image and block climate policy over the last 30 years. Researchers from Brown University analyzed more than 600 PR firms, including major players like Edelman and Ogilvy, to see how they\u2019d shaped the public discourse around climate change while working for coal, oil and gas, steel, and utility companies. Some of the PR firms also worked for environmental groups, at times contradicting their own messages<\/a>, the analysis found. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The study documents how PR agencies popularized terms like \u201ccarbon footprint\u201d and \u201cclean coal,\u201d<\/a> emphasizing personal responsibility for climate change and diverting blame from fossil fuels. These ideas have become taken for granted, the study says, and have shaped the public debate about what to do about climate change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Take the now-ubiquitous \u201ccarbon footprint.\u201d British Petroleum, the company that popularized it, is responsible for more than 34 billion metric tons<\/a> of carbon emissions since 1965, putting BP near the top of the list of the highest-emitting companies in the world. The PR agency Ogilvy took the footprint idea<\/a> developed by an ecology professor in the 1990s and capitalized on it. In a $200 million campaign to rebrand BP as the climate-friendly \u201cBeyond Petroleum\u201d in the early 2000s, the oil company unveiled a carbon footprint calculator eventually used by nearly 300,000 people<\/a> to calculate how their burgers, plane travel, and old lightbulbs were burning up the planet. Meanwhile, BP continued to expand oil production<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The notion of an individual carbon footprint suggests that emissions are a personal failing, the new report explains, diverting attention away from how BP was busy drilling for more oil. It\u2019s an old PR trick to deflect blame: Before oil companies like BP and ExxonMobil<\/a> adopted this framing, car companies blamed crashes on pedestrians \u201cjaywalking,\u201d tobacco companies criticized people for \u201cchoosing\u201d to smoke<\/a> their addictive product, and companies that wrapped their products in disposable packaging derided people for all the litter that appeared on the ground<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n PR companies also popularized phrases like \u201cclean coal\u201d and promoted \u201cclean burning\u201d natural gas, according to the study. In 2014, a subsidiary of the PR giant Burson Cohn & Wolfe launched a campaign for the coal company Peabody Energy, promoting the misnomer \u201cclean coal.\u201d It coincided with the proposal of the Obama-era Clean Power Plan, a policy to limit pollution from coal plants. The problem is, technology to make coal truly \u201cclean\u201d simply doesn\u2019t exist<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the months after the campaign, Peabody found that that discussions of \u201cclean coal\u201d had increased 40 percent online. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Beginning in 2011, a $29 million campaign from FleishmanHillard for the American Petroleum Institute, the oil and gas industry\u2019s biggest lobbying group, sold fracking as \u201csafe\u201d and frequently referred to methane as \u201cclean burning natural gas.\u201d One advertisement from the campaign\u2019s \u201cEnergy for Shale\u201d Twitter account declared: \u201cTurns out wind & solar have a secret friend: Natural gas.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The symbiotic relationship between PR whizzes and oil stretches all the way back<\/a> to John D. Rockefeller, an oil tycoon from the Gilded Age. Over the last century, marketers have developed strange but effective strategies for improving their clients\u2019 images: hiring actors to fake grassroots support for their cause, bullying journalists into reporting their side of the story, and pouring oil money into philanthropy and the arts<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n PR companies haven\u2019t attracted the same attention as climate-denying think tanks or oil companies themselves \u2014 advertisers are more often viewed as passive participants in obstructing climate action. However, there\u2019s growing pressure on these companies to drop fossil fuel clients. An advocacy group called Clean Creatives<\/a> is currently targeting the globe\u2019s biggest PR firm, Edelman<\/a>, which works with ExxonMobil. Edelman recently committed to hold itself \u201caccountable\u201d on climate change but hasn\u2019t dropped its oil clients.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “We work with oil majors. I’m proud of our work,\u201d CEO Richard Edelman told Axios<\/a> last month. \u201cI think that bigger question over time is, how we can help them express their transitions.\u201d<\/p>\n This story was originally published by Grist<\/a> with the headline Shilling for Big Oil: Study analyzes PR’s hidden role in climate crisis<\/a> on Dec 2, 2021.<\/p>\n