The Many Forms of Fossil Fuel Propaganda

I posted something on LinkedIn recently (I know, look what Elon has driven us all to), about the roots of the PR industry. Specifically I said something about Edward Bernays, one of the forefathers of modern PR, and in fact the guy who named the industry back in the 1940s. It was a rebrand, to be more precise. What we now know of as PR had previously been referred to as propaganda. Bernays came up with "counsel on public relations" because, as he put it, the Germans had given propaganda a bad name.

Some guy who works for a PR trade association was quick to comment: "PR has come a long way since Bernays, just like journalism has." Nice try dude, I'm perfectly comfortable saying they've both gotten much worse. Back in Bernays' day, Ida fucking Tarbell was around! So was Ida B. Wells, Upton Sinclair, legend after journalistic legend giving industrialists and politicians hell. In fact, it's partly because the journalism back then was so good that PR had to become increasingly diabolical. And in a lot of ways, the rise of PR has materially contributed to the demise of good journalism.

What I don't think most people realize, and what that PR industry spokesperson would probably prefer they didn't, is that PR is still very much propaganda, except now it also has the sort of distribution mechanism Bernays only dreamed of, compliments of social media. To even hope to combat it, we first have to understand what exactly we're dealing with here. At its most basic, PR is the management of a company or industry's relationship with various "publics." Those publics consist of a company's customers, broader cultural influencers, politicians, journalists, teachers, thought leaders, other industries, competitors, potential hires, employees, investors, shareholders, the list goes on and on. With each of these publics, the company or industry is trying to elicit a particular behavior—they want you to buy their thing, or vote for a particular policy or, if you're a politician, maybe they want you to advocate for or against regulatory changes of some kind.

PR firms help companies do all of that. They set up photo opps for their clients to be seen amongst particular crowds of people, arrange speaking engagements at the right conferences, set up meetings with diplomats and tech leaders, and advise on philanthropic strategies. So when, for example, Charles Koch began investing millions in MIT to fund research that would later underpin policies locking in support for natural gas and then carbon capture in the U.S., it's entirely possible that his foundation's PR firm, Edelman, was advising on that strategy. We've covered before how PR firms carefully crafted the persona of Al Jaber, and helped to successfully position the UAE to win its COP28 hosting bid. This is work that goes way beyond sending out press releases or occasionally meeting with journalists, these are information warfare tactics. And for good reason. The founders of most of today's top PR firms got their training in military intelligence and psychological warfare (for real!) then put that knowledge to work on behalf of corporations looking for an end-run around democracy.

In their relationship with the media, too, the PR industry is far from blameless. The relentless onslaught of corporate PR over the past century or more has fundamentally warped our information ecosystem. Now everyone has to deploy PR tactics to get information out; NGOs use the same techniques (and sometimes the same firms) that oil majors do. So do government agencies. And journalists who have or take the time to do their own research, find their own stories, develop their own sources, are few and far between.

"I don't think most people realize how close the media is to strategic comms," Melissa Aronczyk, media studies professor at Rutgers University told me a long time ago. "Most of the time when we see climate change in the news it's because an organization has tried to push that story. That type of source relationship between PR and media is really under-recognized when we talk about the influence of these firms. Most people have never heard of Edelman or whoever, but they're the intermediaries between what is known scientifically and what we find out about."

By and large, PR firms are the people responsible for how information on everything from climate science to wellness trends is presented to the public.

"It's one thing to look at Exxon's dumb ads, where it's so obvious that they're speaking out both sides of their mouth, and go okay that's disinformation, that's bad," Aronczyk said. "It's much more nefarious to say the government of California has a new private relationship with a company to develop solutions to climate change, and then all the information we get about that comes through a PR firm. How climate is seen as a problem and what solutions are possible, that's all framed by PR. It's often framed as like these bad guys spread falsehoods and once that goes away we'll act. But PR is now baked into the media ecosystem we live in."

When I look at climate coverage, I mostly know which stories have been placed by a PR person, either at a company or at an NGO or government agency, and most weeks I'd say only about 10 percent haven't passed through the PR machine before they get to you, the reader.

And yet, the industry has faced very little criticism. A former Edelman staffer I spoke to recently told me he's shocked at how little scrutiny or criticism PR gets for its role in climate delay. "I don't know why it's only the Exxons of the world getting criticized for greenwashing when really we're the ones who invented it," he said.

"PR underlies the entire information ecosystem," Aronczyk said. "And they're part of the climate disinformation problem – they're creating information too, it's not just Exxon."

That "information" ranges from "research" like Edelman's Trust Barometer, which coincidentally lends credibility to the authoritarian governments the firm represents every year, to opinion pieces written by agency copywriters for various thought leaders, to surveys that generate misleading results to astroturfing and completely staged protests. If a company doesn't already have the information or the story they want a PR firm to take to the media, the firm will create that story. The most famous example is Bernays staging a "women's lib" march in New York with women he had hired to march up and down the street demanding the right to smoke, because his tobacco company client wanted to break down the taboo on women smoking so they could sell more cigarettes.

Industry funding of particular academics is effectively PR too, or strategic communications. It not only helps companies shape the way future politicians and business leaders view the economy, the environment, and the relationship between the two, but also locks in particular "solutions" before anyone who doesn't work for an oil company has been able to figure out which technologies might be best positioned to address the climate crisis. Industry-funded research is often the first step toward lobbying, providing a credible foundation for politicians arguments that, for example, carbon capture is a great thing for the U.S. government to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in. Despite the great work of groups like Campus Climate Network and multiple whistleblower accounts, that influence remains relatively obscure.

Sometimes it's the more innocuous examples that make the penny drop for folks about just how insidious and dangerous PR can be. Lately I've been talking about the viral TikTok "butter board" trend. The "recipe" was created by a popular food influencer, Justine Doiron. It's essentially a charcuterie board, but instead of meat, the board is smeared with butter, then topped with salt, herbs, spices, whatever you like, and served with warm, crusty bread. It was a massive hit, with millions of views, which then generated a whole media cycle. The New York Times covered it, the Today Show ran a segment on it. Every food blog posted tutorials on how to do it. None of them knew that the whole trend was entirely manufactured by Dairy Management Inc, the marketing arm of the U.S. dairy industry, and their PR firm, Edelman. Doiron was part of the "Dream Team" of influencers that Edelman, DMI's long-standing PR agency, helped pull together. In their end-of-the-year report, DMI noted that the "Dairy Dream Team of chefs, recipe developers, foodies, gamers and lifestyle influencers delivered nearly 80 million impressions and jump-started the “butter board” craze that became a viral sensation, generating coverage from major news and entertainment outlets."

Big Dairy is deploying tactics like this in large part because they are losing market share to plant-based alternatives, and because they're scared about animal ag being the next big target for climate action. Lucky for them, the PR industry has already honed its craft on behalf of the fossil fuel industry.

Hey there! We are hitting the ground running in 2024, investigating PR firms, politicians, management consultancies, and all the other folks working to obstruct climate action. Drilled is a four-women team now that includes Amy Westervelt, Mary Annaise Heglar, Alleen Brown and Molly Taft. If you would like to support our work, you can sign up for a paid subscription using the button below. A subscription also gets you access to ad-free podcast episodes and (soon!) some very cool subscriber-only databases. We'll also start releasing stories early to our paid subscribers beginning next month. Thanks for the support!

This Week's Climate Must-Reads

• How Wealthy Corporations Use Investment Agreements to Extract Millions From Developing Countries (Nicholas Kusnetz and Katie Surma for Inside Climate News) - A terrific story on the horror that is the investor-state dispute system. We've covered the issues with ISDS a lot (if you want an explainer, here's one); here, Kusnetz and Surma show how devastating it is for people living in countries on the losing end of this system.
• How Fossil Fuels Found Their Influencers (Adam Lowenstein for Lever News) - Lever is consistently doing great climate reporting and here they did justice to a story I myself had a hard time figuring out how to approach: what the heck the Edelman Trust Barometer is and why it's gained such influence in the world (the latest one was just released, as it is every year, at the World Economic Forum in Davos).
• Here's How Much Democrats Get Paid to Shill for Fossil Fuels (Arielle Samuelson for Heated) - Our pals Emily and Arielle at Heated tearing it up as usual. Here, Arielle got the receipts on two former Democratic lawmakers—Senators Heidi Heitkamp (North Dakota) and Mary Landrieu (Louisiana)—who made six-figure salaries promoting methane gas as a climate solution.
• ‘Control the narrative’: how an Alabama utility wields influence by financing news (Miranda Green for Floodlight/The Guardian) - This Floodlight investigation found that Alabama Power runs a news service and its foundation bought a Black newspaper. Neither reports on high electric bills or utility-related pollution.
• Davos Puts Climate on the Backburner (David Gelles for The New York Times) - This story almost made me throw up in my mouth but that's kinda the point. We need to understand how absolutely unserious the wealthy are about doing anything at all about the climate crisis.