The problem with corporate PR campaigns is that they're often about something that effects -- or even ends -- peoples lives. They've been used to turn links between smoking and cancer into controversial links between smoking and cancer and to cast links between asbestos and cancer as controversial links between asbestos and cancer. The purpose of a PR attack on the truth is to spread doubt. As long as there's doubt over whether or not a product causes harm, potentially expensive problems can continue to be swept under the rug and the eventual lawsuits filed by the sick, the dying, and the families of the dead can be put off for one more quarter. Everything from airbags to pharmaceuticals to water pollution has been spun this way. As long as there is doubt, it's still an open market.
That's what's happening with global warming. The Union of Concerned Scientists reports that -- surprise, surprise -- ExxonMobil's been on a PR campaign to cast doubt over the human impact on global climate change since 1998.
WASHINGTON, DC, Jan. 3–A new report from the Union of Concerned Scientists offers the most comprehensive documentation to date of how ExxonMobil has adopted the tobacco industry's disinformation tactics, as well as some of the same organizations and personnel, to cloud the scientific understanding of climate change and delay action on the issue. According to the report, ExxonMobil has funneled nearly $16 million between 1998 and 2005 to a network of 43 advocacy organizations that seek to confuse the public on global warming science.
"ExxonMobil has manufactured uncertainty about the human causes of global warming just as tobacco companies denied their product caused lung cancer," said Alden Meyer, the Union of Concerned Scientists' Director of Strategy & Policy. "A modest but effective investment has allowed the oil giant to fuel doubt about global warming to delay government action just as Big Tobacco did for over 40 years."
Not only are they doing the same sort of thing big tobacco did before them, they're using many of the same 'scientists'. The idea is to take a minority opinion of skeptics and make it seem as if there's a split in the scientific community -- think of 'intelligent design' v. evolution.
Let's take a look at how this works...
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Tags: news | politics | science | business | global warming | environment | propaganda | ExxonMobil | public relations
