How the PR Industry Has Helped Big Oil Transform the Way We Think About the Environment

Powered by fossil fuel funding, PR agents have used astroturfing, โ€œmanufactured consent,โ€ and other techniques to furtively shape public perceptions in favor of their polluting clients.
Opinion
Analysis
Stella Levantesi
Stella Levantesi
on
Series: Gaslit

Editorโ€™s Note: This is the first article in a new column, Gaslit, which will navigate society’s dysfunctional relationship with fossil fuel disinformation. Have a tip or idea? Get in touch.

Since 2008, the American Petroleum Institute (API), which is the U.S.โ€™s largest oil and gas trade group, has paid the worldโ€™s largest PR firm, Edelman, $439.7 million. API isnโ€™t the only group in the oil and gas sector to have paid a PR firm for its services. And Edelman isnโ€™t the only PR firm to have received money from the oil and gas sector. 

For decades, fossil fuel companies have been using PR firms to polish, reinvent, and fabricate their image; protect their reputation; and greenwash their activities, in ways that we are still trying to fully understand.

Itโ€™s not just that they need to, itโ€™s also that they have the power and money to do so.

โ€œWhen you make a fortune producing fossil fuels and you don’t wanna give it up, you will spend a lot of money to be able to do that. Youโ€™ve got ample funding, so you can afford the best PR firms and huge campaigns,โ€ Oklahoma State University emeritus professor and sociologist Riley Dunlap said. โ€œSo, thatโ€™s why they do it. To protect their interests and because they can easily afford it.โ€

And because oil and gas companies and their trade groups know that PR agents will carry out their work in the shadows. PR firms have developed what authors Melissa Aronczyk and Maria I. Espinoza refer to in their book Strategic Nature as โ€œstrategies of silenceโ€: the role of PR agents has been to create and execute strategies for their clients while remaining completely invisible.

In fact, they have done this so well that, to this day, there is very little literature on the role of PR firms in shaping climate policy and discourse.

As DeSmog has reported, a recent study, co-authored by Brown University researchers Robert Brulle and Carter Werthman, has begun โ€œlifting the veil of secrecy that envelops PR firms and their work.โ€ Their study challenges the notion that PR agents are neutral mediators merely working to carry out their clientsโ€™ wishes. To the contrary, PR agents are actors involved in the processes of shaping environmental culture, policy, and public discourse, as well as creating corporate-image and marketing strategies.

โ€œThe PR agencies themselves are the active developers of these techniques,โ€ Brulle said. โ€œWeโ€™re not giving the whole picture if we donโ€™t include them.โ€

According to the study, the origins of PR in the political context can be found, among others, in the work of Edward Bernays, often referred to as โ€œthe father of public relationsโ€ (although Ivy Ledbetter Lee, who started his PR firm 25 years before Bernays, might be better suited to hold this title). Developing his ideas in the 1920s, Bernaysโ€™ thought built on existing theories about the role of the public and its relationship to PR within the democratic political context.

He was the first to imagine the public as a โ€œstrategic resource,โ€ Aronczyk and Espinoza write in Strategic Nature. The public, in other words, was not an end in itself but โ€œa means for other ends.โ€

Using the public as a โ€œstrategic resourceโ€ would become a popular strategy for corporate propaganda. PR firms developed a tactic which engaged โ€œthird-party mobilizationโ€ such as grassroots involvement in order to create the perception of widespread support for an issue, position, campaign, or policy. According to the study by Brulle and Werthman, third-party mobilization is the second-most common PR tactic.

โ€œThe idea of a third party spokesperson is that you get somebody else thatโ€™s credible to say what you want them to say,โ€ Brulle said. โ€œIt creates this idea that thereโ€™s grassroot support for [something], when in reality, itโ€™s all a fabrication of the PR agency or the corporation.โ€

Bernays also transformed the phrase โ€œmanufacturing consent,โ€ which writer Walter Lippmann originally intended as a critique of political propaganda. One of Bernaysโ€™ publicity ideas was so effective that it became a way of life.

black and white illustration of a woman in 1900 smoking and riding a bicycle
A tobacco industry ad targeting women in 1900. Credit: Ogden & Phillip’s, public domain

Working on behalf of the tobacco industry in 1929, he hired women to march in the Easter Sunday Parade in New York City while smoking their โ€œtorches of freedom,โ€ a symbolic phrase used to push women to smoke in public despite social taboos at the time. The โ€œTorches of freedomโ€ campaign was created to target women consumers and exploit their desires for freedom, when freedom was, in fact, considered transgression. Campaigns like this one led to higher rates of smoking among women.

Not only did Bernays make โ€œmanufacturing consentโ€ possible, he made it โ€œdesirable,โ€ Aronczyk and Espinoza argue. The public was PRโ€™s best resource. Even Bruce Harrison, a pioneer of โ€œcorporate environmentalismโ€ โ€”  when companies consider environmental themes in their decision-making process โ€” thought that grassroots involvement was crucial for building public support for the oil and gas industry and that without it, the industry would suffer.

But to succeed, fossil fuel companies also needed to be seen as โ€œtrustworthyโ€ and โ€œsocially responsible,โ€ Brulle said. In other words, they needed legitimacy. 

At its core, PR is about legitimacy, and about using โ€œthe concepts of truth or facts to persuade others that your view is the best oneโ€ as a way to garner support, according to Strategic Nature. Ideas and information, in this context, arenโ€™t absolute categories; they need to be constructed and shaped in order to appeal to different โ€œpublicsโ€ โ€” or audiences โ€” in different contexts.

Green footprints with 'reduce your carbon footprint - walk this way'
Carbon footprint. Credit: Didier Vidal, CC BY-SA 2.0

This is why PR isnโ€™t only invested in communication. It also creates dimensions where certain ideas and information, such as โ€œclean coalโ€ or โ€œcarbon footprints,โ€ can be chosen over others and made to seem legitimate โ€” what Aronczyk and Espinoza call the creation of โ€œcontexts of communication.โ€

Third-party mobilization was especially popular after Barack Obama was elected U.S. President in 2008, when fossil fuel companies funded โ€” and PR firms designed โ€” so-called astroturf campaigns to create the perception of existing grassroots efforts to oppose climate change policies. Astroturfing hit a peak around 2009, when Congress was about to pass climate legislation, which is generally when they โ€œcrank up their PR machines,โ€ Brulle said. 

But recently, such PR frenzies around legislative efforts have become less common. According to Dunlap, this is because obstruction efforts have become so effective that astroturf campaigns just arenโ€™t as necessary these days.

โ€œI think one of the reasons weโ€™ve seen some decline in the importance of astroturf groups is that the oil corporations and big conservative philanthropists like the Koch brothers have been so successful in getting the Republican party to buy into their agenda and do their bidding that perhaps thereโ€™s no need for these other activities,โ€ Dunlap said.

Dozens of upright white drilling rigs are stacked in a storage yard at night
Dozens of drilling rigs are stacked at the H&P yard in Midland, Texas, after the oil price went negative on April 20, 2020. May 28, 2020. Credit: Justin Hamel

One of the reasons Big Oilโ€™s disinformation campaign has been, in fact, so effective is that it has succeeded in turning a physical problem โ€” the planet warming โ€” into political propaganda by means of โ€œsocial technology,โ€ as Brulle calls it. According to Strategic Nature, the environmental problem became โ€œthe wrong kind of problemโ€ when PR firms turned it into a problem of politics, of โ€œindividual attention,โ€ of information โ€” of anything other than what it actually was: โ€œa problem of existence.โ€

However, before the environment could become any kind of problem, the notion of โ€œthe environmentโ€ had to be created in the first place. This wording implies that there is something โ€œthe environmentโ€ is, in fact, external to, that it is separated from human beings. And not only that the environment is separate, but that it can be legitimately used, exploited, owned. 

Separation from โ€œthe environment,โ€ encouraged by what is historically defined in Western thought as dualism โ€” basically, nature on one side, humankind on the other โ€” has promoted the illusion that there is an โ€œoutside.โ€ (This idea sits in contrast to many Indigenous perceptions of human-nature relationships). British philosopher Timothy Morton says that if you begin to think of the biosphere as a dreaming mind, you will find that everything in that biosphere is a symptom and expression of the biosphere itself. There is no outside. The environment is only perceived as external.

This framing was convenient for PR firms who needed to put space between โ€œthe environmentโ€ and its degradation and those responsible for it โ€” especially, corporations. 

Some PR agents in the early 1970s understood that managing environmental problems wasnโ€™t enough. If they wanted to control the social perception of companiesโ€™ responsibility for the environment, and consequent political action for it, they had to anticipate problems, and construct them. 

Aronczyk and Espinoza write that W. Howard Chase, founding member of the Public Relations Society of America, was one of the proponents of this idea of โ€œissue management.โ€

Chaseโ€™s idea for the 1970s Crying Indian ad campaign can be considered a key moment in constructing one of the most flawed cultural narratives around the climate crisis: that just like individuals are singularly responsible for emissions and pollution, itโ€™s individuals โ€” not corporations โ€” who are singularly responsible for solving these problems. 

In the ad, a caricature of an American Indian man (played by an Italian-American actor) paddles a canoe into an industrial waterway. Coming upon a littered shoreline, he sheds a single tear when a person tosses trash out of a passing vehicle and it lands at his feet. A narrator proclaims, โ€œPeople start pollution. People can stop it.โ€

The oil, gas, and plastics industry was more than happy to deviate attention from production (its sphere) to consumption (the general publicโ€™s). And we know today that the myth of individual responsibility, which PR agents developed โ€” by using the public as a resource, nonetheless โ€” has been one of the most successful communications strategies of all time.

PR has played a key โ€” and undeniable โ€” role in both the way we perceive the fossil fuel industry and the way we understand environmentalism and environmental issues today. And itโ€™s done so to the extent that, as Strategic Nature argues, itโ€™s impossible to comprehend the role of the environment in our everyday lives โ€œwithout understanding how something called โ€˜the environmentโ€™ has been invented and communicated to us throughout our livesโ€ in the first place.

Stella Levantesi
Stella Levantesi is an Italian climate journalist, photographer, and author.ย She is the author of the Gaslit series on DeSmog. Her main areas of expertise are climate disinformation, climate litigation, and corporate responsibility on the climate crisis.ย Her book โ€œI bugiardi del climaโ€ (Climate Liars) was published in Italy with Laterza, and her work has featured in The New Republic and Nature Italy. You can follow her on Twitter @StellaLevantesi.

Related Posts

on

New documents show close coordination between the oil major and a coalition of free-market think tanks at a crucial moment in climate diplomacy.

New documents show close coordination between the oil major and a coalition of free-market think tanks at a crucial moment in climate diplomacy.
Analysis
on

Right wing YouTuber Tim Pool is the latest to own โ€˜climate peopleโ€™ with fake facts spouted by a grizzled TV oilman.

Right wing YouTuber Tim Pool is the latest to own โ€˜climate peopleโ€™ with fake facts spouted by a grizzled TV oilman.
on

Lord Moynihan of Chelsea, who holds shares in Shell and TotalEnergies, called the green transition a โ€œchildrenโ€™s crusadeโ€.

Lord Moynihan of Chelsea, who holds shares in Shell and TotalEnergies, called the green transition a โ€œchildrenโ€™s crusadeโ€.
Analysis
on

Oil patch advocate Lisa Baiton called for more extraction and less regulation at Vancouver address that didnโ€™t once mention climate change.

Oil patch advocate Lisa Baiton called for more extraction and less regulation at Vancouver address that didnโ€™t once mention climate change.