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suggestion that global warming will be good.” 1
    ICE went into small U.S. markets that were heavily dependent on coal-fired electricity and, with advance planning from the D.C. public relations firm Bracy Williams and Company, tested a series of messages, including:
    • “Some say the Earth is warming. Some also said the Earth was flat.”
    • “Who told you the Earth was warming . . . Chicken Little?”
    • “How much are you willing to pay to solve a problem that may not exist?”
    It actually wasn’t getting warmer in Minneapolis, and presumably the messaging went down well, especially on cold winter days, because ICE rolled out a campaign that included newspaper and radio advertising. ICE also learned that audiences didn’t take coal or electrical company officials very seriously when it came to arguing environmental issues, but that they were inclined to listen to “technical experts.” So ICE mobilized a group of scientists who in many instances were not climate change experts, but who would nevertheless make themselves available for newspaper and broadcast interviews and sign opinion page articles that could be distributed to local papers.
    Parallel to the ICE operation, the Western Fuels Association also launched another “educational” entity called the Greening Earth Society, which produced a video called The Greening of Planet Earth, a thirty-minute love note to carbon dioxide that is still available for viewing on YouTube. This became the first public appearance of a group of scientific experts made up of people like Sherwood Idso—people who have since become famous for their willingness to argue climate science on behalf of the fossil fuel lobby. In the video they argue that Earth’s plants are starving for carbon dioxide and that an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide will result in a more fertile world. Ignoring the implications of climate change, especially the threat of lasting droughts that could turn much of the equatorial zone into a desert, The Greening of Planet Earth showed a time-lapse animation in which carbon dioxide-driven vegetation colonizes virtually every part of the Earth’s surface—even closing in happily over the Sahara. The message was clear: climate change—if it’s happening—is a good thing.
    The Western Fuels Association offered the video online in return for a small, tax-deductible donation to the Greening Earth Society, but it delivered hundreds of copies for free to public and university libraries across the country. As Naomi Oreskes reports in her fabulous podcast at smartenergyshow .com, “You CAN Argue with the Facts,” the overworked librarians at the University of Oregon took this gift at face value, filing it with the description that the Western Fuels Association had provided: “An enlightening documentary that examines one of the most misunderstood environmental phenomena of the 1980s.” Imagine the potential confusion to be suffered by a first-year student who has been reading legitimate science about global warming and checks this video out of his university library, in all probability becoming the first person at the institution to actually watch it. On one hand, the student would have learned in class that climate change was a gathering threat. On the other, the university was inadvertently endorsing a contrary argument that global warming would be a boon to humanity.
    The Western Fuels Association put ICE on ice after one of its strategy documents was leaked to the newspapers, sparking a raft of embarrassing stories in the Energy Daily, the National Journal, the Arizona Republic, and the New York Times. But a pattern was beginning to take hold. Corporations and industry associations were using their considerable financial resources to influence the public conversation. They were using advertising slogans and messages that they had tested for effectiveness but not for accuracy. They were hiring scientists who were prepared to say in public