Trust Us, We're Experts PA

by Sheldon Rampton

  “It will be interesting to see how the science approach sells,” commented an internal memo by the Edison Electric Institute’s William Brier. The campaign collapsed, however, after Brier’s comments and other internal memoranda were leaked to the press. An embarrassed Michaels hastily disassociated himself from ICE, citing what he called its “blatant dishonesty.”

  Qualms notwithstanding, Michaels continues to benefit from his association with the fossil fuels industry. During an administrative hearing in Minnesota in May 1995, he testified that he had received $165,000 in funding during the previous five years from fuel companies, including $49,000 from the German Coal Association and funding from the Western Fuels company for a non-peer-reviewed journal that he edits called World Climate Report. Michaels has served as a paid expert witness for utilities in lawsuits involving the issue of global warming. He has written letters to the editor and op-ed pieces, appeared on television and radio, and testified before government bodies. He sits on the advisory boards of several industry-funded propaganda campaigns and is a “senior fellow” at the Cato Institute.

  Other scientists who vocally defend the industry position have similar entanglements. Robert Balling is a geologist by training whose work prior to 1990 focused on desertification and soil-related issues. Beginning with his work for the ICE campaign, he has received nearly $300,000 in research funding from coal and oil interests, some of it in collaborations with Sherwood Idso. According to Peter Montague of the Environmental Research Foundation, S. Fred Singer “is now an ‘independent’ consultant” for companies including ARCO, Exxon Corporation, Shell Oil Company, Sun Oil Company, and Unocal Corporation. Rather than conducting research, Singer “spends his time writing letters to the editor and testifying before Congress.”11 Singer’s Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP) was originally set up by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, a frequent patron of conservative political causes. Although SEPP is no longer affiliated with Moon’s cult, Singer’s editorials frequently appear in the pages of the Unification Church-owned Washington Times newspaper.12

  With all of these side deals and front groups in place, the collapse of ICE didn’t even slow industry’s propaganda effort. The scientists who participated in the ICE campaign—Michaels, Balling, Idso, and Singer—have simply been recycled into new organizations with new names. As Gelbspan observes, this “tiny group of dissenting scientists have been given prominent public visibility and congressional influence out of all proportion to their standing in the scientific community on the issue of global warming. They have used this platform to pound widely amplified drum-beats of doubt about climate change. These doubts are repeated in virtually every climate-related story in every newspaper and every TV and radio news outlet in the country. By keeping the discussion focused on whether there really is a problem, these dozen or so dissidents—contradicting the consensus view held by the world’s top climate scientists—have until now prevented discussion about how to address the problem.”13

  Smoke and Mirrors

  In addition to the Global Climate Coalition, a host of other industry-funded front groups have entered the fray. Although the GCC leads the campaign against climate change reform, it collaborates extensively with a network that includes industry trade associations, “property rights” groups affiliated with the anti-environmental Wise Use movement, and fringe groups such as Sovereignty International, which believes that global warming is a plot to enslave the world under a United Nations-led “world government.”

  Groups participating in industry’s global warming campaign have included the American Energy Alliance (consisting of the National Association of Manufacturers, the American Petroleum Institute, and Edison Electric Institute), the Climate Council (run by Don Pearlman, a fixture at climate negotiations around the world and a member of the oil-client-heavy lobby firm of Patton Boggs), the International Climate Change Partnership (whose members include BP, Elf, and DuPont), the International Chamber of Commerce and Citizens for a Sound Economy (a Washington-based lobby group whose funders include BMW, Boeing, BP, Chevron, GM, Mobil, Toyota, and Unilever). In 1997, international global warming treaty negotiations were held in Kyoto, Japan, prompting a bevy of industry groups to mobilize. Some of the participating groups were the following: • The Global Climate Information Project (GCIP), launched on September 9, 1997, by some of the nation’s most powerful trade associations, spent more than $13 million in newspaper and television advertising. The ads were produced by Goddard*Claussen/First Tuesday, a California-based PR firm whose clients include the Chlorine Chemistry Council, the Chemical Manufacturers Association, DuPont Merck Pharmaceuticals, and the Vinyl Siding Institute. Goddard*Claussen is notorious for its “Harry and Louise” advertisement that helped derail President Clinton’s 1993 health reform proposal. Its global warming ads used a similar fearmongering strategy by claiming that a Kyoto treaty would raise gasoline prices by 50 cents per gallon, leading to higher prices on everything from “heat to food to clothing.” The GCIP was represented by Richard Pollock, former director of Ralph Nader’s group, Critical Mass, who has switched sides and now works as a senior vice president for Shandwick Public Affairs, the second-largest PR firm in the United States. Recent Shandwick clients include Browning-Ferris Industries, Central Maine Power, Georgia-Pacific Corp., Monsanto Chemical Co., New York State Electric and Gas Co., Ciba-Geigy, Ford Motor Company, Hydro-Quebec, Pfizer, and Procter & Gamble.

  • The Coalition for Vehicle Choice (CVC), a front group for automobile manufacturers, launched its own advertising campaign, including a three-page ad in the Washington Post that blasted the Kyoto climate talks as an assault on the U.S. economy. Sponsors for the ad included hundreds of oil and gas companies, auto dealers and parts stores, along with a number of far-right organizations such as the American Land Rights Association and Sovereignty International. CVC was originally founded in 1991 and has successfully prevented higher fuel-efficiency standards in U.S. autos and trucks. From the beginning, it has been represented by Ron DeFore, a former vice president of E. Bruce Harrison’s PR firm. Its budget in 1993 was $2.2 million, all of which came from the big three automakers—Ford, GM, and Chrysler.

  • The National Center for Public Policy Research, an industry-funded think tank, established a “Kyoto Earth Summit Information Center,” issued an “Earth Summit Fact Sheet,” and fed anti-treaty quotes to the media through a “free interview locator service” that offered “assistance to journalists seeking interviews with leading scientists, economists, and public policy experts on global warming.”

  • The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC), headed by “Junkman” Steven Milloy, attempted to stimulate anti-treaty e-mail to President Clinton by promising to enter writers’ names in a $1,000 sweepstakes drawing. Milloy’s website also heaps vitriol on the science of global warming, including attacks on the American Geophysical Union, the American Meteorological Society, and Nature magazine.

  • The American Policy Center (APC) worked to mobilize a “Strike for Liberty,” calling on truckers to pull over to the side of the road for an hour and for farmers to drive tractors into key cities to “shut down the nation” as a protest against any Kyoto treaty. Signing the treaty, APC warned, would mean that “with a single stroke of the pen, our nation as we built it, as we have known it and as we have loved it will begin to disappear.” APC also appealed to anti-abortion activists with the claim that “Al Gore has said abortion should be used to reduce global warming.”

  Autograph Collections

  Waving petitions from scientists seems to be a favorite PR strategy of greenhouse skeptics. The website of S. Fred Singer’s Science and Environmental Policy Project lists no fewer than four petitions, including the 1992 “Statement by Atmospheric Scientists on Greenhouse Warming,” the “Heidelberg Appeal” (also from 1992), Singer’s own “Leipzig Declaration on Global Climate Change” (1997), and the “Oregon Petition,” which was circulated in 1998 by physicist Frederick Se
itz. Thanks to the echo chamber of numerous industry-funded think tanks, these petitions are widely cited by conservative voices in the “junk science” movement and given prominent play by reporters.

  The Heidelberg Appeal was first circulated at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and has subsequently been endorsed by some 4,000 scientists, including 72 Nobel Prize winners. It has also been enthusiastically embraced by proponents of “sound science” such as Steven Milloy and Elizabeth Whelan and is frequently cited as proof that scientists reject not only the theory of global warming but also a host of other environmental health risks associated with everything from pesticides in food to antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The Heidelberg Appeal warns of the “emergence of an irrational ideology which is opposed to scientific and industrial progress and impedes economic and social development” and advises “the authorities in charge of our planet’s destiny against decisions which are supported by pseudo-scientific arguments or false and non-relevant data. . . . The greatest evils which stalk our Earth are ignorance and oppression, and not Science, Technology and Industry.”

  The only problem is that the Heidelberg Appeal makes no mention whatsoever of global warming, or for that matter of pesticides or antibiotic-resistant bacteria. It is simply a brief statement supporting rationality and science. Based on the text alone, it is the sort of document that virtually any scientist in the world might feel comfortable signing.14 Parts of the Heidelberg Appeal in fact appear to endorse environmental concerns, such as a sentence that states, “We fully subscribe to the objectives of a scientific ecology for a universe whose resources must be taken stock of, monitored and preserved.” Its 72 Nobel laureates include 49 who also signed the “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity,” which was circulated that same year by the liberal Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and attracted the majority of the world’s living Nobel laureates in science along with some 1,700 other leading scientists.15 In contrast with the vagueness of the Heidelberg Appeal, the “World Scientists’ Warning” is a very explicit environmental manifesto, stating that “human beings and the natural world are on a collision course” and citing ozone depletion, global climate change, air pollution, groundwater depletion, deforestation, overfishing, and species extinction among the trends that threaten to “so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know.” More recently, 110 Nobel Prize-winning scientists signed another UCS petition, the 1997 “Call to Action,” which called specifically on world leaders to sign an effective global warming treaty at Kyoto.16

  Like the Heidelberg Appeal, the Leipzig Declaration is named after a German city, giving it a patina of gray eminence. Signed by 110 people, including many of the signers of the earlier “Statement by Atmospheric Scientists,” it is widely cited by conservative voices in the “sound science” movement and is regarded in some circles as the gold standard of scientific expertise on the issue. It has been cited by Singer himself in editorial columns appearing in hundreds of conservative websites and major publications, including the Wall Street Journal, Miami Herald, Detroit News, Chicago Tribune, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Memphis Commercial-Appeal, Seattle Times, and Orange County Register. Jeff Jacoby, a columnist with the Boston Globe, describes the signers of the Leipzig Declaration as “prominent scholars.” The Heritage Foundation calls them “noted scientists,” as do conservative think tanks such as Citizens for a Sound Economy, the Heartland Institute, and Australia’s Institute for Public Affairs. Both the Leipzig Declaration and Seitz’s Oregon Petition have been quoted as authoritative sources during deliberations in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.

  When journalist David Olinger of the St. Petersburg Times investigated the Leipzig Declaration, however, he discovered that most of its signers have not dealt with climate issues at all and none of them is an acknowledged leading expert. Twenty-five of the signers were TV weather-men—a profession that requires no in-depth knowledge of climate research. Some did not even have a college degree, such as Dick Groeber of Dick’s Weather Service in Springfield, Ohio. Did Groeber regard himself as a scientist? “I sort of consider myself so,” he said when asked. “I had two or three years of college training in the scientific area, and 30 or 40 years of self-study.”17 Other signers included a dentist, a medical laboratory researcher, a civil engineer, and an amateur meteorologist. Some were not even found to reside at the addresses they had given.18 A journalist with the Danish Broadcasting Company attempted to contact the declaration’s 33 European signers and found that four of them could not be located, 12 denied ever having signed, and some had not even heard of the Leipzig Declaration. Those who did admit signing included a medical doctor, a nuclear scientist, and an expert on flying insects.19 After discounting the signers whose credentials were inflated, irrelevant, false, or unverifiable, it turned out that only 20 of the names on the list had any scientific connection with the study of climate change, and some of those names were known to have obtained grants from the oil and fuel industry, including the German coal industry and the government of Kuwait (a major oil exporter).

  Some Like It Hot

  The Oregon Petition, sponsored by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine (OISM), was circulated in April 1998 in a bulk mailing to tens of thousands of U.S. scientists. In addition to the petition, the mailing included what appeared to be a reprint of a scientific paper. Authored by Arthur B. Robinson and three other people, the paper was titled “Environmental Effects of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide” and was printed in the same typeface and format as the official Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). A cover note from Frederick Seitz, who had served as president of the NAS in the 1960s, added to the impression that Robinson’s paper was an official publication of the academy’s peer-reviewed journal.

  Robinson’s paper claimed to show that pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is actually a good thing. “As atmospheric CO2 increases,” it stated, “plant growth rates increase. Also, leaves lose less water as CO2 increases, so that plants are able to grow under drier conditions. Animal life, which depends upon plant life for food, increases proportionally.” As a result, Robinson concluded, industrial activities can be counted on to encourage greater species biodiversity and a greener planet. “As coal, oil, and natural gas are used to feed and lift from poverty vast numbers of people across the globe, more CO2 will be released into the atmosphere,” the paper stated. “This will help to maintain and improve the health, longevity, prosperity, and productivity of all people. Human activities are believed to be responsible for the rise in CO2 level of the atmosphere. Mankind is moving the carbon in coal, oil, and natural gas from below ground to the atmosphere and surface, where it is available for conversion into living things. We are living in an increasingly lush environment of plants and animals as a result of the CO2 increase. Our children will enjoy an Earth with far more plant and animal life than that with which we now are blessed. This is a wonderful and unexpected gift from the Industrial Revolution.”20

  In reality, neither Robinson’s paper nor OISM’s petition drive had anything to do with the National Academy of Sciences, which first heard about the petition when its members began calling to ask if the NAS had taken a stand against the Kyoto treaty. The paper’s author, Arthur Robinson, was not even a climate scientist. He was a biochemist with no published research in the field of climatology, and his paper had never been subjected to peer review by anyone with training in the field. In fact, the paper had never been accepted for publication anywhere, let alone in the NAS Proceedings. It was self-published by Robinson, who did the typesetting himself on his own computer under the auspices of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, of which Robinson himself was the founder.

  So what is the OISM, exactly? The bulk mailing that went out to scientists gave no further information, other than the address of a post office box. The OISM does have a website, however, where it describes itself as “a small research institute” in Cave Junction, Oregon, wi
th a faculty of six people engaged in studying “biochemistry, diagnostic medicine, nutrition, preventive medicine and the molecular biology of aging.”21 The OISM also sells a book titled Nuclear War Survival Skills (foreword by H-bomb inventor Edward Teller), which argues that “the dangers from nuclear weapons have been distorted and exaggerated” into “demoralizing myths.”22 Like the Institute itself, Cave Junction (population 1,126) is a pretty obscure place. It is the sort of out-of-the-way location you might seek out if you were hoping to survive a nuclear war, but it is not known as a center for scientific and medical research.

  “Robinson is hardly a reliable source,” observes journalist Ross Gelbspan. “As late as 1994 he declared that ozone depletion is a ‘hoax’—a position akin to defending the flat-earth theory. In his newsletter, he told readers it was safe to drink water irradiated by the Chernobyl nuclear plant, and he marketed a home-schooling kit for ‘parents concerned about socialism in the public schools.’ ”23