Amy Westervelt’s new book Brought To You By: How Corporations Warped the Truth, Conned the Public, and Broke Democracy is a must-read for anyone tracking the machinery of climate denial and delay.

The book offers a forensic account of how corporate America built a vast apparatus of public relations firms, think tanks, lobbyists, sponsored university research centers and obliging news networks — precisely the architecture of deception that we’re dedicated to exposing here at DeSmog. Brought To You By shows that this octopuslike entity doesn’t merely distort the truth — it undermines democracy by carefully curating popular perceptions of what’s politically possible.

Ahead of the book’s launch at New York Climate Week, which opened on Sunday, DeSmog caught up with Amy to hear more about what inspired her to write the book and explore some of the proposals she lays out for remediating our polluted information ecosystem in the final chapter.

The founder and executive producer of the Critical Frequency network, which includes the award-winning podcasts Unfinished: Short Creek, This Land, and Drilled, Amy’s work has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Economist, the Intercept, and others. Amy is a recipient of a “Women Greening Journalism” special recognition from the National Audubon Society; the Edward R. Murrow Award for investigative reporting; and a Peabody Award nomination, and various awards from Covering Climate Now.

You can find out more about Amy and her team’s work by visiting Drilled Media. And here is a joint Drilled-DeSmog report from December, 2023 exposing the scale of fossil fuel industry partnerships with legacy media.   

This interview was conducted via video call and has been edited for length and clarity.

DeSmog: Why did you think it was important to pull back the curtain to reveal the corporate-sponsored machinery that shapes the context in which so much public discourse takes place?

Amy Westervelt: Especially now, people talk about disinformation and misinformation and polarization almost as if they are products of technology or social media.

There’s really not that much discussion of the concerted efforts that have been made to really warp the information ecosystem that we’re all living in, and the impact that has had.

We just ran a miniseries in Drilled that was reported and hosted by Alleen Brown, who’s a reporter and senior editor at Drilled.

It’s a very deep dive into the propaganda effort that Energy Transfer undertook to deal with the Standing Rock movement. And it particularly centers on these two guys. One is hired to infiltrate the protest camps.  

My favorite detail about this is that he has a cute dog that he purposely brings to endear himself to the activists. And then there’s the guy who’s kind of in charge of propaganda, and they’re each feeding each other information.

And the whole gist of it is that they take some things that were maybe minor tensions in the community and they inflame them. That’s how good propaganda works: It finds a crack and exploits it.

I’m not saying it’s the only thing that made it possible for that pipeline to be built, but it was helpful, and it certainly then helped Energy Transfer with their lawsuit accusing Greenpeace of manufacturing the Standing Rock movement, which led to a $300-million settlement that may well end up resulting in the end entirely of Greenpeace U.S., which is a pretty big deal.

You take this one story alone and there’s all these little pieces of it where the pipeline company is really just trying to complete a pipeline project. They don’t necessarily want to create the conditions for protest rights to be eroded in the US. They don’t necessarily want to deepen divides within this South Dakota community. That’s just a byproduct. But this happens thousands of times a year where these companies are doing these kinds of things, and it has this enormous effect on society at large, on local communities, and on how we all process information.

One of the things I love about the book is how you trace the deep historical roots of organizations, for example, the American Petroleum Institute, America’s most powerful oil and gas lobby, which I believe dates back to after World War I?

Yes, just after. They really start to organize as part of World War I because it’s the first fossil fueled war and they have to organize to make sure that enough fuel is getting to the front. Standard Oil of New Jersey’s PR guy sees it for the opportunity that it is and suggests creating a trade group where they can do the same kind of organizing in peacetime.

They’re one of the first trade associations in the U.S. that starts to really lobby on behalf of a whole industry, which is very handy. No one company wants to be the bad guy lobbying against a tax or environmental regulation or things like that so it’s very handy to have those associations to do it for you.

Your book also documents how the API and other groups evolve beyond simply representing the industry’s interests but embark on this much bigger project to shape public discourse around the role of the free markets and what we should expect from government.

This is another thing that I just don’t think is super visible to people. These guys spend maybe even less than half their time specifically promoting oil and gas or defending a particular [fossil fuel] project. A lot of the effort and money goes into shaping people’s general ideas of the economy and how it should work, or our relationship to the natural world. They’ll create these pieces of propaganda that on the face of it don’t have anything to do with oil at all.

They’ll get involved in university research because it helps to shape the whole framework in which we’re talking about these ideas. So are they trying to skew the science? Yes, they’re doing that, but they’re also very involved in tending the soil in which certain ideas grow, which goes so much deeper than people think.

My favorite example of this with the API in particular is that they had a project running during the early 2000s with the help of the Atlas Network, this global network of free market think tanks, to funnel money through the API to this Catholic priest whose project was to encourage other Catholic priests to embrace capitalism and to increasingly see environmentalism as the devil’s work. They were really trying to get out in front of what they saw as Marxist tendencies among specifically Catholic priests.

It’s at so many different levels: There really is the intention of, yes, helping one company do a particular thing, but also to create the context in which all companies can operate with less and less regulation, less and less scrutiny.

Really, it’s an end run around democracy. You have these wealthy industrialists, you have all these great Enlightenment ideals, but when the rubber hits the road, they’re like: “Oh, we don’t really actually love it when people who don’t share our interests have a vote.”

When you pull on this thread, public relations is just the front end of this enormous project to essentially undermine and even arguably end democracy?

And you see it right up to today: It’s so interesting to me to see the reaction to what the tech industry is doing now, and the extent to which people act like it’s this radical new thing. But they’re doing what literally every other industry that needs to convince or force the public to go along with something that’s actually bad for them in order to make profits has ever done.

It’s the chemical industry, the tobacco industry, the automotive industry, Big Oil. How many different stories do we need about this industry borrowing that industry’s playbook? They’re all using the same playbook.

The other thing I really enjoyed was your description of your ‘murder wall’ with the truth as the victim in the middle.

I don’t even necessarily know if these industries set out to undermine truth. But that’s kind of the point too. This is what I thought was really interesting about William Nordhaus [an economist widely regarded as having underestimated the economic implications of the climate crisis], who I wrote about in the book too. I don’t think that he’s compromised or a bad person or doing the oil company’s bidding or anything like that. There are so many people that you come across who are really just unwitting participants in this whole machine.

But it’s like the oil companies saw economics as a handy thing to use to push back against emissions reductions, and they found the economists that were making arguments that helped them push that idea and amplified them.

I talked to a guy who ran the center at Stanford that Exxon funded for a long time. Really nice guy. He was a petroleum engineer for a long time and then got into earth sciences and carbon capture. And he said: “Well, I get really frustrated when my students complain about me working with scientists at fossil fuel companies because I’m just trying to solve a differential equation, and so are they, and there’s nothing political about it.”

And I said: “Yes, but you understand that it can be political whether you’re actively participating in that side of it or not?” And he said, “What do you mean?” I said, “Well, what did Exxon do with the solution to that differential equation? And how did they present that work to the public? Was it used in any lobbying that they did?”

There are any number of ways that you can very innocently be doing science, and it can be politicized because of this whole machine that exists.

It’s not even necessarily that the fossil fuel companies put their fingers on the scale of the results. It’s more that they’re directing the focus. So if they are going to put everything into carbon capture as a climate solution, then the research dollars will follow.

We’re working on a project right now with ProPublica that has been going on for a couple of years now. We’re really trying to dig into the opportunity cost question and the overall impact of the funding, beyond just saying that “hey, maybe Stanford shouldn’t be taking hundreds of millions of dollars from oil companies.”

Well, what impact did that money have? How did it shape policy? One of the things that’s been really kind of shocking to me is the extent to which it’s shaped the models that really form the basis of everything the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] tells us every four years.

You pull the camera back and demonstrate that the stage that we’re operating on has been built by the industry to shape what we imagine to be possible. Journalists need to read this regardless of whether they’re directly covering climate, because it applies across the board.

I really was trying to make clear that these are tactics and strategies that are used by any industry trying to avoid regulation, or any high net worth individual trying to shape society in a way that they would like.

I think it’s fascinating to look at some of the stuff that [free market economist] Friedrich Hayek and [Atlas Network founder] Antony Fisher were saying in the ‘50s, and [billionaire industrialist] Charles Koch in the ’70s. Now we’re seeing a whole other round of it again: conservative and pro-free market thinkers being absolutely terrified by the idea that young people might be radicalized and turned into leftists on college campuses.

There’s also the desire to get the free market approach into universities because they see it as a pathway to policy. A lot of times the people that run these research centers at universities end up getting hired to run the Department of Energy or run the Department of Education or things like that. There’s a real revolving door there.

I think it’s really important for people to see that this infrastructure exists and that industries and particular people continue to avail themselves of it. And I think the tough part, too, is that the people you like are using it, too.

People are constantly trying to shape and influence information. It’s really important as journalists to know that. Why is this person telling me this? What do they want me to do with this information? What are they hoping I’ll do with it? Who are they hoping I’ll pass it on to? And why?

I love the imagery you use of information pollution. I think it’s so helpful because it allows us to visualize how it’s kind of seeped into the aquifers. In your last chapter, you set out some really concrete proposals for how we can address this.

First of all, people do need to be able to spot it and see it and be aware of it. We’ve actually had a lot of the guardrails in place in the past that have been removed. And when you talk about this stuff now, that maybe there needs to be some fact-checking, or maybe there needs to be content moderation or things like that, people are like, “Oh, that’s censorship.” That is not what censorship is.

I feel like actually just unifying around some basic definitions of what is free speech, what is censorship, would be incredibly helpful, as well as media literacy in general. I don’t understand how this isn’t part of basic civics class in every curriculum, because that’s the world that we’re living in.

In my kids’ schools over the past few years, the biggest conversation is, “to what level are we going to allow them to use AI in school?” It’s not “what kinds of conversations are we having with them about the information ecosystem that AI is entering into?”

I also think that we should be able to have a conversation about what the consequence should be of knowingly misleading people and infecting the public square with lies. The idea that is a victimless crime and that it should never be punished, I don’t think that that’s a very functional idea right now.

I write this in the book: Free-speech absolutists that say any type of speech — a lie, hate speech, violent speech, whatever — should all be allowed forget the other side of the coin, which is the right to discourse, the right to information, the right to be informed.

I’m very interested in hearing from people that disagree with me and change my mind all the time. Someone who is sharing something that they truly believe is very different from someone who’s being paid by a person or a company to spread a certain kind of narrative. And I don’t think that we should treat those two forms of speech the same way.

This is why one of the main arguments I make throughout the book is that we have to reinstate the difference between individual free speech and corporate speech. That’s a very toxic product created in the U.S. and now disseminated globally: The idea that corporations should have equal speech rights to individuals is completely out of touch with reality. They have 100 times the budget to craft their message, get it out, amplify it — and they should be held to a higher standard of truth as well because of that. 

There’s absolutely no reason that we can’t say, “Companies shouldn’t knowingly spread misleading information.” I don’t understand why that’s even remotely controversial. Ironically, it’s often the same people that accuse everybody else of censorship that censor any kind of conversation around this stuff.

Preorder your copy of Brought To You By here.