Read Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming for Free Online Page A

one side of an issue and one on the other, a danger exists that public relations people will begin to think of themselves not as communicators with a responsibility to their audience but only as advocates. In court (and before you conclude that I am lawyer-bashing, I learned all this in law school myself), there is a convention that every accused person deserves the best possible defense, and it is the lawyer’s duty to mount that defense to the best of his or her ability. We have even grown to accept the idea that it’s acceptable to construct a case that is entirely—almost deceptively—one-sided, knowing that the lawyer on the other side will bring equal vigor to the case. This approach appears to have carried over to public relations and to the court of public opinion. Some public relations people act as though it is their duty to mount the most compelling— or most devastating—case possible on behalf of their client, leaving it to the opposition to mount a counter argument, and allowing the public to sort it out.
    The problem is this: in court, there are rules of evidence (you have to tell the truth) and a judge who has the expertise and is given the resources to make an intelligent decision about what is being presented. But there are no such rules in the public conversation. There are only tactics, strategies, and spin.
    Although it is not always successful in doing so, the court also endeavors to level the playing field when one party is rich and powerful and another is pressed for resources. In the court of public opinion, however, there is no such corrective. Rich individuals, large corporations, and industry associations can afford to muster a devastating campaign, against which environmentalists or conscientious scientists must always strain to respond.
    At the end of the day, it comes back to the rules of ethical practice. As Edward Bernays might have said, it’s okay to put lipstick on a vice president (or a vice-presidential candidate), but you should always call a pit bull a pit bull. That’s not what’s been happening in the climate change conversation. A public policy dialogue that should have been driven by science has instead been disrupted by public relations—and if you look closely, it seems to be the kind of public relations that Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays practiced on their worst days, not the kind they recommended on their best.

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THE AGE OF ASTROTURFING
In which industry steals credibility from the people
    I t was a conspiracy!
    There’s something histrionic about that charge. The very idea of a cabal of rich and powerful people conspiring to fool the public about a fundamental point of science strains credulity and is offensive in its own right. Yet if you read on, you will see that there are conspiracies aplenty, documented and undeniable.
    The first was organized by the Western Fuels Association, which as of April 2009 defined itself on www.westernfuels.org as “a not-for-profit cooperative that supplies coal and transportation services to consumer-owned electric utilities throughout the Great Plains, Rocky Mountain and Southwest regions.” The magic word in that description is “coal,” the most plentiful conventional energy source in the world and the number-one fuel for electric utilities in the United States, which has the second-largest known deposit of coal in the world, only slightly behind Australia. The problem is that coal is also the worst fossil fuel when it comes to generating carbon dioxide, and those coal-fired electrical generators are already the largest carbon dioxide point source in the country.
    In 1991 Western Fuels joined with the National Coal Association and the Edison Electric Institute to create the Information Council on the Environment (ICE). This was a not-very-arm’s-length organization that would use its original US$500,000 budget “to reposition global warming as a theory (not fact)” and “supply alternative facts to support the