The same ideology sometimes places Whelan at loggerheads with the opinions and strategies of the rest of the anti-tobacco movement. In May 1998, for example, ACSH and the pro-tobacco Competitive Enterprise Institute joined forces in a bizarre appeal for Congress to prove its “sincerity” by offering a tax rebate to adult smokers. Legislation then pending would have raised tobacco taxes (and thereby prices) in order to deter underage smoking. “If these taxes are truly aimed at reducing underage smoking, then Congress should give rebates of the tax to adult smokers,” argued Whelan and CEI General Counsel Sam Kazman in a joint news release. “By rebating the revenues collected from adult smokers,” they reasoned, “Congress could unequivocally demonstrate the purity of its motives—or it could drop the matter entirely.”
Left unanswered was the question of how vendors were supposed to rebate the tax to adults without also rebating it to minors—who, after all, cannot legally buy their cigarettes directly, since sale of tobacco products to minors is already prohibited.
Defining Terms
One of the striking things about the concept of “junk science” has been the refusal of its theorists to offer a meaningful definition of the term. Huber defines junk science as “a hodgepodge of biased data, spurious inference and logical legerdemain, patched together by researchers whose enthusiasm for discovery and diagnosis far outstrips their skill.” Milloy’s website defines junk science as “bad science used by lawsuit-happy trial lawyers, the ‘food police,’ environmental Chicken Littles, power-drunk regulators, and unethical-to-dishonest scientists to fuel specious lawsuits, wacky social and political agendas, and the quest for personal fame and fortune.” Neither of these definitions offers any way of distinguishing good from bad science. Instead, they consist of ad hominem attacks on the motives, morals, or competence of anyone who differs from the worldview of their authors.
The absence of real standards for distinguishing between junk science and sound science allows corporate apologists to use the term with confidence, while simultaneously managing to amicably disagree about an issue as fundamental and important as tobacco. The concept of junk science serves as a convenient way of reconciling their pro-corporate bias with pretensions of scientific superiority, while simultaneously glossing over ethical conflicts of interest.
Equally disturbing is the sheer amount of rhetorical venom and bile that the junkyard dogs of science have injected into public policy discussions, polarizing debates and lowering rather than elevating the tone of public scientific discourse. Some of the most respected voices in public life have been targeted for attack. Since its founding in 1936, Consumers Union and its monthly publication, Consumer Reports, have been icons of integrity, offering impartial scientific testing of consumer products and also serving as advocates for real consumer protection. None of this matters to “Junkman” Steven Milloy. In 1999 he launched a second website, called “Consumer Distorts” (www.consumerdistorts.com), which accuses Consumer Reports of socialism, sensationalism, and “scaring consumers away from products.” ACSH has also gone to war repeatedly with Consumers Union, accusing it of “irresponsible fear-mongering” for its reports on health threats represented by pesticides and other chemicals found in foods and common household items.
The failure of the self-proclaimed “sound science” movement to provide a sound methodology is doubly disappointing because, in the end, the critics of junk science have a certain amount of truth on their side. There is indeed a great deal of bad science in the news media and in courtrooms, and not all of it comes from corporations. Over the years, both business marketers and advocacy groups have become highly skilled at inventing and exaggerating fears, dealing in dubious statistics and using emotional appeals to sell products or mobilize public support for causes. The time constraints and visual nature of television make simple messages stand out more easily than complex ones, and marketers have learned to exploit this reality of the modern mass media. In addition to the political goals that underlie these appeals, sometimes there are commercial motives as well. Great profits can be made by selling overhyped “natural” food supplements like shark cartilage and melatonin. ACSH has rightly criticized some of these marketing ploys as the scams that they are.
The problem is that neither Elizabeth Whelan nor Steven Milloy—nor, for that matter, any of the other attack dogs in the junk science war—seem capable of distinguishing between scam artists and reputable voices in today’s debates over environmental safety and public health. The concept of junk science, as they have defined it, has proven itself unable to separate the wheat from the chaff. A movement that cannot tell whether tobacco science is junk science has little right to pose as society’s scientific arbiter.
10
Global Warming Is Good for You
In the United States the mere threat of impending climate change has impelled the oil and coal industries to engineer a policy of denial. While this campaign may seem at this point no more sinister than any other public relations program, it possesses a subtle antidemocratic, even totalitarian potential insofar as it curbs the free flow of information, dominates the deliberations of Congress, and obstructs all meaningful international attempts to address the gathering crisis.
—Ross Gelbspan, The Heat is On1
With the exception of nuclear war, it is hard to imagine a higher-stakes issue than global warming. The idea that industrial emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases might lead to climate change has been seriously discussed among scientists since 1957. It first became a topic of public debate during the brutally hot summer of 1988, when Dr. James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies warned a congressional panel that human industrial activities were already exerting a measurable and mounting impact on the earth’s climate. Hansen’s testimony prompted Time magazine to editorialize that global warming’s “possible consequences are so scary that it is only prudent for governments to slow the buildup of carbon dioxide through preventive measures.”2 As subsequent years saw a succession of record global temperatures, climatologists became increasingly concerned by what their computer models were telling them. The most authoritative statement of these concerns is a November 1995 report issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a group of some 2,500 climatologists from throughout the world that advises the United Nations. It predicted “widespread economic, social and environmental dislocation over the next century” if action is not taken soon to restrict greenhouse gas emissions. To avert catastrophe, the IPCC has called for policy measures to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases by 20 percent below 1990 levels initially and ultimately reduce those emissions by 70 percent.
Automobile exhausts, coal-burning power plants, factory smoke-stacks, and other vented wastes of the industrial age now pump six billion tons of carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse gases” into the earth’s atmosphere each year. They are called greenhouse gases because they trap radiant energy from the sun that would otherwise be reflected back into space. The fact that a natural greenhouse effect occurs is well-known and is not debated. Without it, in fact, temperatures would drop so low that oceans would freeze and life as we know it would be impossible. What climatologists are concerned about, however, is that increased levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are causing more heat to be trapped. Concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are currently at their highest level in 420,000 years.3
“The basic science of global warming has not changed since the topic was raised earlier in this century,” notes a December 1999 open letter by the directors of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the British Meteorological Office. “Furthermore, the consensus of opinion has been growing, within both the scientific and the business communities. Our new data and understanding now point to the critical situation we face: to slow future change, we must start taking action soon. At the same time, because of our past and ongoing activities, we must start to learn to live with the likely consequences—more ex
treme weather, rising sea levels, changing precipitation patterns, ecological and agricultural dislocations, and the increased spread of human disease. . . . Ignoring climate change will surely be the most costly of all possible choices, for us and our children.”4
“There is no debate among statured scientists of what is happening,” says James McCarthy, who chairs the Advisory Committee on the Environment of the International Committee of Scientific Unions. “The only debate is the rate at which it’s happening.” Between 1987 and 1993, McCarthy oversaw the work of the leading climate scientists from 60 nations as they developed the IPCC’s landmark 1995 report.
There are, of course, areas of considerable outstanding dispute and genuine scientific uncertainty. No one knows how rapid or drastic global warming will turn out to be, or how severely it will affect food production, ocean levels, or the spread of disease. There is also debate over the extent to which global warming has already contributed to droughts, intense hurricanes, and environmental degradation such as coral bleaching. Given these uncertainties, it is difficult to talk of a “worst-case scenario,” but the scenarios that are plausible include many that are dire enough. A number of these possibilities are discussed in Ross Gelbspan’s book The Heat Is On. Gelbspan quotes the late Dr. Henry Kendall, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, who worried that climate change could disrupt farming at a time when earth’s growing population is already creating unprecedented demands on agriculture. “The world’s food supply,” Kendall said in 1995, “must double within the next thirty years to feed the population, which will double within the next sixty years. Otherwise, before the middle of the next century—as many countries in the developing world run out of enough water to irrigate their crops—population will outrun its food supply, and you will see chaos. All we need is another hit from climate change—a series of droughts or crop-destroying rains—and we’re looking down the mouth of a cannon.”5
Gelbspan worries that a global disaster of this magnitude would not only mean mass starvation but would threaten the survival of democratic institutions, particularly in developing nations. “In many of these countries, where democratic traditions are as fragile as the ecosystem, a reversion to dictatorship will require only a few ecological states of emergency,” he warns. “Their governments will quickly find democracy to be too cumbersome for responding to disruptions in food supplies, water sources, and human health—as well as to a floodtide of environmental refugees from homelands that have become incapable of feeding and supporting them.”6 This vision of the future—a starving world under martial law—is by no means inevitable, but the groups pushing for strong measures to curb global warming believe that the nightmare scenarios are plausible enough to justify invoking the precautionary principle.
For the oil, coal, auto, and manufacturing industries, warnings of this sort involve another kind of high stakes. Any measures to control emissions of greenhouse gases threaten their long-standing habits of doing business. They view scientists’ conclusions about global warming with the same interest-driven hostility that the tobacco industry shows toward scientists who study lung cancer. Like the tobacco industry, they have pumped millions of dollars into efforts to debunk the science they hate. They have found little support, however, among the “statured scientists” to whom McCarthy refers—the people who are actually involved in relevant research and whose work has been published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. The global warming consensus among these scientists is so strong that the oil and auto industries have been forced far afield in their search for voices willing to join in their denial. What is remarkable, given this fact, is the extent to which industry PR has been successful in creating the illusion that global warming is some kind of controversial, hotly disputed theory.
Lobbying for Lethargy
In 1989, not long after James Hansen’s highly publicized testimony before Congress and shortly after the first meeting of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the Burson-Marsteller PR firm created the Global Climate Coalition (GCC). Chaired by William O’Keefe, an executive for the American Petroleum Institute, the GCC operated until 1997 out of the offices of the National Association of Manufacturers. Its members have included the American Automobile Manufacturers Association, Amoco, the American Forest & Paper Association, American Petroleum Institute, Chevron, Chrysler, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Dow Chemical, Exxon, Ford, General Motors, Mobil, Shell, Texaco, Union Carbide, and more than 40 other corporations and trade associations. The GCC has also used “Junkman” Steven Milloy’s former employer, the EOP Group, as well as the E. Bruce Harrison Company, a subsidiary of the giant Ruder Finn PR firm. Within the public relations industry, Harrison is an almost legendary figure who is ironically considered “the founder of green PR” because of his work for the pesticide industry in the 1960s, when he helped lead the attack on author Rachel Carson and her environmental classic Silent Spring.
GCC has been the most outspoken and confrontational industry group in the United States battling reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Its activities have included publication of glossy reports, aggressive lobbying at international climate negotiation meetings, and raising concern about unemployment that it claims would result from emissions regulations. Since 1994 GCC alone has spent more than $63 million to combat any progress toward addressing the climate crisis. Its efforts are coordinated with separate campaigns by many of its members, such as the National Coal Association, which spent more than $700,000 on the global climate issue in 1992 and 1993, and the American Petroleum Institute, which paid the Burson-Marsteller PR firm $1.8 million in 1993 for a successful computer-driven “grassroots” letter and phone-in campaign to stop a proposed tax on fossil fuels.
These numbers may not seem huge compared to the billions that corporations spend on advertising. The Coca-Cola company alone, for example, spends nearly $300 million per year on soft drink advertisements. But the Global Climate Coalition is not advertising a product. Its propaganda budget serves solely to influence the news media and government policymakers on a single issue and comes on top of the marketing, lobbying, and campaign contributions that industry already spends in the regular course of doing business. In 1998, the oil and gas industries alone spent $58 million lobbying the U.S. Congress. For comparison’s sake, environmental groups spent a relatively puny total of $4.7 million—on all issues combined, not just global warming.7
Industry’s PR strategy with regard to the global warming issue is also eminently practical, with limited, realistic goals. Opinion polls for the past decade have consistently shown that the public would like to see something done about the global warming problem, along with many other environmental issues. Industry’s PR strategy is not aimed at reversing the tide of public opinion, which may in any case be impossible. Its goal is simply to stop people from mobilizing to do anything about the problem, to create sufficient doubt in their minds about the seriousness of global warming that they will remain locked in debate and indecision. Friends of the Earth International describes this strategy as “lobbying for lethargy.”
“People generally do not favor action on a non-alarming situation when arguments seem to be balanced on both sides and there is a clear doubt,” explains Phil Lesly, author of Lesly’s Handbook of Public Relations and Communications, a leading PR textbook. In order for the status quo to prevail, therefore, corporations have a simple task: “The weight of impressions on the public must be balanced so people will have doubts and lack motivation to take action. Accordingly, means are needed to get balancing information into the stream from sources that the public will find credible. There is no need for a clear-cut ‘victory.’ . . . Nurturing public doubts by demonstrating that this is not a clear-cut situation in support of the opponents usually is all that is necessary.”8
In the Beginning There Was ICE
As political theorist Göran Therborn has observed, there are three basic ways to keep people apathetic about a problem: (1) argue that it doesn’t exist; (2)
argue that it’s actually a good thing rather than a problem; or (3) argue that even if it is a problem, there’s nothing they can do about it anyway. Industry’s first propaganda responses to the problem of global warming focused on the first line of defense by attempting to deny that it was happening at all. In 1991, a corporate coalition composed of the National Coal Association, the Western Fuels Association, and Edison Electrical Institute created a PR front group called the “Information Council for the Environment” (ICE) and launched a $500,000 advertising and public relations campaign to, in ICE’s own words, “reposition global warming as theory (not fact).”
To boost its credibility, ICE created a Scientific Advisory Panel that featured Patrick Michaels from the Department of Environmental Services at the University of Virginia; Robert Balling of Arizona State University; and Sherwood Idso of the U.S. Water Conservation Laboratory. ICE’s plan called for placing these three scientists, along with fellow greenhouse skeptic S. Fred Singer, professor emeritus of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, in broadcast appearances, op-ed pages, and newspaper interviews. Bracy Williams & Co., a Washington-based PR firm, did the advance publicity work for the interviews. Another company was contracted to conduct opinion polls, which identified “older, less-educated males from larger households who are not typically active information-seekers” and “younger, lower-income women” as “good targets for radio advertisements” that would “directly attack the proponents of global warming . . . through comparison of global warming to historical or mythical instances of gloom and doom.”9 One print advertisement prepared for the ICE campaign showed a sailing ship about to drop off the edge of a flat world into the jaws of a waiting dragon. The headline read: “Some say the earth is warming. Some also said the earth was flat.” Another featured a cowering chicken under the headline “Who Told You the Earth Was Warming . . . Chicken Little?” Another ad was targeted at Minneapolis readers and asked, “If the earth is getting warmer, why is Minneapolis getting colder?”10
Trust Us, We're Experts PA Page 34
