In the news over the weekend was a story about the audacious PR plot that seeded doubt about climate change.
It all started apparently with a man named E Bruce Harrison, the “father of environmental PR”, on an autumn day in 1992. A few months earlier, the international community had adopted the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC. The Global Climate Coalition, a body which actually represented fossil fuel companies, auto manufacturers, and steel and rail industries, wanted to counter the threat that the UNFCCC posed to its membership.
On that day in 1992, Harrison – a PR man with a proven track record of helping car makers, the tobacco industry and pesticide manufacturers to disown any harm they caused – delivered a presentation to the GCC in which he outlined a campaign to find and promote sceptical voices, initially within the industry and subsequently amongst the external scientific community. These sceptics were to be paid to give speeches and interviews, and to write articles, that would suggest human-induced climate change was not a serious problem.
In the years that followed, the campaign begun by Harrison was remarkably successful in persuading politicians in the United States to delay taking action that might dent the profits of GCC members.
A personal reflection
Reading this story reminded me of my own early employment. In 1991, a year before the UNFCCC was established, I was working in operational research at British Coal. I was in the ‘environment’ team, which was increasingly interested in the greenhouse effect. Our role was to analyse data and bring management up to speed. There was no discussion that I can recall about the possible implications for coal production, which was in steady decline in any case.
Later that year, I left British Coal and went travelling on a 6-month round-the-world air ticket. Did we think it was a bad idea environmentally because of the flying? No, it didn’t occur to us, any more than it had yet occurred to its management team that British Coal had significantly contributed to global warming.
And that recollection evokes mixed feelings about this weekend’s big story on big oil. Because on the one hand, it’s a disgusting tale of deceit. Vested interests hid behind supposedly independent and authoritative umbrella organisations with names like Global Climate Coalition. A number of respected scientists and economists were bribed to give at best one-sided and at worst fictitious accounts of the harmlessness of their paymasters’ activities.
Fossil fuel companies then and now acted and continue to act irresponsibly. Even those which did not pay for the services of climate deniers were complicit, happy to benefit from the deceit. And all the time, while the earth has got hotter and future generations are increasingly threatened, these companies have taken the line that they have no other option than to produce as much as they can sell, a myth that is perpetuated to this day in the name of shareholder interest.
So credit to the BBC for this important if depressing investigative journalism.
The other side
But there’s another side to the story, with various aspects that are troubling for different reasons.
Firstly – we need energy, though not nearly as much as some of us use. Fossil fuels are currently essential to people’s lives around the world. It sometimes feels like western environmentalists have forgotten that basic fact. We can’t just give up on oil and gas without replacement and renewable energy still only meets a small percentage of the global requirement.
Secondly – we need scepticism. It was, and still is, entirely right to ask questions and challenge orthodoxy; the problem was not the challenge per se but the dishonesty and corruption that accompanied it.
And the claims made by Greenpeace and others that oil companies knew all about global warming back in the early 1990s are far-fetched. It’s much more credible that even within the highly resourced research teams of the oil majors there was a combination of worrying evidence and genuine uncertainty. Which doesn’t excuse their underhand tactics or the procrastination of politicians.
The richest billion
Lastly – we desperately need a sense of collective responsibility. History, it is alleged, is written by the victorious; but it often seems to be written by those looking for someone else to blame.
Most of us are reluctant to act on inconvenient evidence. How many companies change their activity in a way that reduces their profits in response to partial and contestable evidence that such activity may be harmful? Under such circumstances, it is alas more common to carry on with business as usual, until the case is proven or alternative business opportunities arise.
Which means therefore that regulatory action is required. If politicians and the body politic are all-too-easily (even allowing for the lies) persuaded by corporate campaigning not to take action, the fault does not rest entirely with the corporates or their campaigners.
How many of us decide not to fly, or halve consumption of red meat and dairy, even when we are presented with plenty of evidence that these activities are harmful? We are more likely to embrace arguments for continuing to have those foreign holidays, and those delicious steaks: (i) the plane is going anyway; (ii) clever people are inventing green planes; (iii) local organic, pasture-fed beef is climate-friendly; (iv) individuals on their own don’t make any difference.
In surrendering to these and other excuses for carrying on with certain harmful things we enjoy, we exhibit behaviour that differs markedly in degree, but perhaps not in kind, from that of the oil executive who commissions reports to demonstrate that oil extraction and consumption are harmless.
We all have responsibility to do what we can. It is genuinely tragic when we conflate little influence with none. If the world’s richest billion people did the things we could – like altering our diet, reducing our personal travel, buying much less stuff – the climate would probably not be in crisis.