In the United States the mere threat of impending climate change has impelled the oil and coal industries to engineer a policy of denial. While this campaign may seem at this point no more sinister than any other public relations program, it possesses a subtle antidemocratic, even totalitarian potential insofar as it curbs the free flow of information, dominates the deliberations of Congress, and obstructs all meaningful international attempts to address the gathering crisis.

With the exception of nuclear war, it is hard to imagine a higher-stakes issue than global warming. The idea that industrial emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases might lead to climate change has been seriously discussed among scientists since 1957. It first became a topic of public debate during the brutally hot summer of 1988, when Dr. James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies warned a congressional panel that human industrial activities were already exerting a measurable and mounting impact on the earth’s climate. Hansen’s testimony prompted Time magazine to editorialize that global warming’s “possible consequences are so scary that it is only prudent for governments to slow the buildup of carbon dioxide through preventive measures.”² As subsequent years saw a succession of record global temperatures, climatologists became increasingly concerned by what their computer models were telling them. The most authoritative statement of these concerns is a November 1995 report issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a group of some 2,500 climatologists from throughout the world that advises the United Nations. It predicted “widespread economic, social and environmental dislocation over the next century” if action is not taken soon to restrict greenhouse gas emissions. To avert catastrophe, the IPCC has called for policy measures to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases by 20 percent below 1990 levels initially and ultimately reduce those emissions by 70 percent.

Automobile exhausts, coal-burning power plants, factory smoke-stacks, and other vented wastes of the industrial age now pump six billion tons of carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse gases” into the earth’s atmosphere each year. They are called greenhouse gases because they trap radiant energy from the sun that would otherwise be reflected back into space. The fact that a natural greenhouse effect occurs is well-known and is not debated. Without it, in fact, temperatures would drop so low that oceans would freeze and life as we know it would be impossible. What climatologists are concerned about, however, is that increased levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are causing more heat to be trapped. Concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are currently at their highest level in 420,000 years.³

“The basic science of global warming has not changed since the topic was raised earlier in this century,” notes a December 1999 open letter by the directors of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the British Meteorological Office. “Furthermore, the consensus of opinion has been growing, within both the scientific and the business communities. Our new data and understanding now point to the critical situation we face: to slow future change, we must start taking action soon. At the same time, because of our past and ongoing activities, we must start to learn to live with the likely consequences—more extreme weather, rising sea levels, changing precipitation patterns, ecological and agricultural dislocations, and the increased spread of human disease. . . . Ignoring climate change will surely be the most costly of all possible choices, for us and our children.”⁴

“There is no debate among statured scientists of what is happening,” says James McCarthy, who chairs the Advisory Committee on the Environment of the International Committee of Scientific Unions. “The only debate is the rate at which it’s happening.” Between 1987 and 1993, McCarthy oversaw the work of the leading climate scientists from 60 nations as they developed the IPCC’s landmark 1995 report.

There are, of course, areas of considerable outstanding dispute and genuine scientific uncertainty. No one knows how rapid or drastic global warming will turn out to be, or how severely it will affect food production, ocean levels, or the spread of disease. There is also debate over the extent to which global warming has already contributed to droughts, intense hurricanes, and environmental degradation such as coral bleaching. Given these uncertainties, it is difficult to talk of a “worst-case scenario,” but the scenarios that are plausible include many that are dire enough. A number of these possibilities are discussed in Ross Gelbspan’s book The Heat Is On. Gelbspan quotes the late Dr. Henry Kendall, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, who worried that climate change could disrupt farming at a time when earth’s growing population is already creating unprecedented demands on agriculture. “The world’s food supply,” Kendall said in 1995, “must double within the next thirty years to feed the population, which will double within the next sixty years. Otherwise, before the middle of the next century—as many countries in the developing world run out of enough water to irrigate their crops—population will outrun its food supply, and you will see chaos. All we need is another hit from climate change—a series of droughts or crop-destroying rains—and we’re looking down the mouth of a cannon.”⁵

Gelbspan worries that a global disaster of this magnitude would not only mean mass starvation but would threaten the survival of democratic institutions, particularly in developing nations. “In many of these countries, where democratic traditions are as fragile as the ecosystem, a reversion to dictatorship will require only a few ecological states of emergency,” he warns. “Their governments will quickly find democracy to be too cumbersome for responding to disruptions in food supplies, water sources, and human health—as well as to a floodtide of environmental refugees from homelands that have become incapable of feeding and supporting them.”⁶ This vision of the future—a starving world under martial law—is by no means inevitable, but the groups pushing for strong measures to curb global warming believe that the nightmare scenarios are plausible enough to justify invoking the precautionary principle.

For the oil, coal, auto, and manufacturing industries, warnings of this sort involve another kind of high stakes. Any measures to control emissions of greenhouse gases threaten their long-standing habits of doing business. They view scientists’ conclusions about global warming with the same interest-driven hostility that the tobacco industry shows toward scientists who study lung cancer. Like the tobacco industry, they have pumped millions of dollars into efforts to debunk the science they hate. They have found little support, however, among the “statured scientists” to whom McCarthy refers—the people who are actually involved in relevant research and whose work has been published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. The global warming consensus among these scientists is so strong that the oil and auto industries have been forced far afield in their search for voices willing to join in their denial. What is remarkable, given this fact, is the extent to which industry PR has been successful in creating the illusion that global warming is some kind of controversial, hotly disputed theory.

Lobbying for Lethargy

In 1989, not long after James Hansen’s highly publicized testimony before Congress and shortly after the first meeting of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the Burson-Marsteller PR firm created the Global Climate Coalition (GCC). Chaired by William O’Keefe, an executive for the American Petroleum Institute, the GCC operated until 1997 out of the offices of the National Association of Manufacturers. Its members have included the American Automobile Manufacturers Association, Amoco, the American Forest & Paper Association, American Petroleum Institute, Chevron, Chrysler, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Dow Chemical, Exxon, Ford, General Motors, Mobil, Shell, Texaco, Union Carbide, and more than 40 other corporations and trade associations. The GCC has also used “Junkman” Steven Milloy’s former employer, the EOP Group, as well as the E. Bruce Harrison Company, a subsidiary of the giant Ruder Finn PR firm. Within the public relations industry, Harrison is an almost legendary figure who is ironically considered “the founder of green PR” because of his work for the pesticide industry in the 1960s, when he helped lead the attack on author Rachel Carson and her environmental classic Silent Spring.

GCC has been the most outspoken and confrontational industry group in the United States battling reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Its activities have included publication of glossy reports, aggressive lobbying at international climate negotiation meetings, and raising concern about unemployment that it claims would result from emissions regulations. Since 1994 GCC alone has spent more than $63 million to combat any progress toward addressing the climate crisis. Its efforts are coordinated with separate campaigns by many of its members, such as the National Coal Association, which spent more than $700,000 on the global climate issue in 1992 and 1993, and the American Petroleum Institute, which paid the Burson-Marsteller PR firm $1.8 million in 1993 for a successful computer-driven “grassroots” letter and phone-in campaign to stop a proposed tax on fossil fuels.

These numbers may not seem huge compared to the billions that corporations spend on advertising. The Coca-Cola company alone, for example, spends nearly $300 million per year on soft drink advertisements. But the Global Climate Coalition is not advertising a product. Its propaganda budget serves solely to influence the news media and government policymakers on a single issue and comes on top of the marketing, lobbying, and campaign contributions that industry already spends in the regular course of doing business. In 1998, the oil and gas industries alone spent $58 million lobbying the U.S. Congress. For comparison’s sake, environmental groups spent a relatively puny total of $4.7 million—on all issues combined, not just global warming.⁷

Industry’s PR strategy with regard to the global warming issue is also eminently practical, with limited, realistic goals. Opinion polls for the past decade have consistently shown that the public would like to see something done about the global warming problem, along with many other environmental issues. Industry’s PR strategy is not aimed at reversing the tide of public opinion, which may in any case be impossible. Its goal is simply to stop people from mobilizing to do anything about the problem, to create sufficient doubt in their minds about the seriousness of global warming that they will remain locked in debate and indecision. Friends of the Earth International describes this strategy as “lobbying for lethargy.”

“People generally do not favor action on a non-alarming situation when arguments seem to be balanced on both sides and there is a clear doubt,” explains Phil Lesly, author of Lesly’s Handbook of Public Relations and Communications, a leading PR textbook. In order for the status quo to prevail, therefore, corporations have a simple task: “The weight of impressions on the public must be balanced so people will have doubts and lack motivation to take action. Accordingly, means are needed to get balancing information into the stream from sources that the public will find credible. There is no need for a clear-cut ‘victory.’ . . . Nurturing public doubts by demonstrating that this is not a clear-cut situation in support of the opponents usually is all that is necessary.”⁸

In the Beginning There Was ICE

As political theorist Göran Therborn has observed, there are three basic ways to keep people apathetic about a problem: (1) argue that it doesn’t exist; (2) argue that it’s actually a good thing rather than a problem; or (3) argue that even if it is a problem, there’s nothing they can do about it anyway. Industry’s first propaganda responses to the problem of global warming focused on the first line of defense by attempting to deny that it was happening at all. In 1991, a corporate coalition composed of the National Coal Association, the Western Fuels Association, and Edison Electrical Institute created a PR front group called the “Information Council for the Environment” (ICE) and launched a $500,000 advertising and public relations campaign to, in ICE’s own words, “reposition global warming as theory (not fact).”

To boost its credibility, ICE created a Scientific Advisory Panel that featured Patrick Michaels from the Department of Environmental Services at the University of Virginia; Robert Balling of Arizona State University; and Sherwood Idso of the U.S. Water Conservation Laboratory. ICE’s plan called for placing these three scientists, along with fellow greenhouse skeptic S. Fred Singer, professor emeritus of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, in broadcast appearances, op-ed pages, and newspaper interviews. Bracy Williams & Co., a Washington-based PR firm, did the advance publicity work for the interviews. Another company was contracted to conduct opinion polls, which identified “older, less-educated males from larger households who are not typically active information-seekers” and “younger, lower-income women” as “good targets for radio advertisements” that would “directly attack the proponents of global warming . . . through comparison of global warming to historical or mythical instances of gloom and doom.”⁹ One print advertisement prepared for the ICE campaign showed a sailing ship about to drop off the edge of a flat world into the jaws of a waiting dragon. The headline read: “Some say the earth is warming. Some also said the earth was flat.” Another featured a cowering chicken under the headline “Who Told You the Earth Was Warming . . . Chicken Little?” Another ad was targeted at Minneapolis readers and asked, “If the earth is getting warmer, why is Minneapolis getting colder?”¹⁰

“It will be interesting to see how the science approach sells,” commented an internal memo by the Edison Electric Institute’s William Brier. The campaign collapsed, however, after Brier’s comments and other internal memoranda were leaked to the press. An embarrassed Michaels hastily disassociated himself from ICE, citing what he called its “blatant dishonesty.”

Qualms notwithstanding, Michaels continues to benefit from his association with the fossil fuels industry. During an administrative hearing in Minnesota in May 1995, he testified that he had received $165,000 in funding during the previous five years from fuel companies, including $49,000 from the German Coal Association and funding from the Western Fuels company for a non-peer-reviewed journal that he edits called World Climate Report. Michaels has served as a paid expert witness for utilities in lawsuits involving the issue of global warming. He has written letters to the editor and op-ed pieces, appeared on television and radio, and testified before government bodies. He sits on the advisory boards of several industry-funded propaganda campaigns and is a “senior fellow” at the Cato Institute.

Other scientists who vocally defend the industry position have similar entanglements. Robert Balling is a geologist by training whose work prior to 1990 focused on desertification and soil-related issues. Beginning with his work for the ICE campaign, he has received nearly $300,000 in research funding from coal and oil interests, some of it in collaborations with Sherwood Idso. According to Peter Montague of the Environmental Research Foundation, S. Fred Singer “is now an ‘independent’ consultant” for companies including ARCO, Exxon Corporation, Shell Oil Company, Sun Oil Company, and Unocal Corporation. Rather than conducting research, Singer “spends his time writing letters to the editor and testifying before Congress.”¹¹ Singer’s Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP) was originally set up by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, a frequent patron of conservative political causes. Although SEPP is no longer affiliated with Moon’s cult, Singer’s editorials frequently appear in the pages of the Unification Church-owned Washington Times newspaper.¹²

With all of these side deals and front groups in place, the collapse of ICE didn’t even slow industry’s propaganda effort. The scientists who participated in the ICE campaign—Michaels, Balling, Idso, and Singer—have simply been recycled into new organizations with new names. As Gelbspan observes, this “tiny group of dissenting scientists have been given prominent public visibility and congressional influence out of all proportion to their standing in the scientific community on the issue of global warming. They have used this platform to pound widely amplified drum-beats of doubt about climate change. These doubts are repeated in virtually every climate-related story in every newspaper and every TV and radio news outlet in the country. By keeping the discussion focused on whether there really is a problem, these dozen or so dissidents—contradicting the consensus view held by the world’s top climate scientists—have until now prevented discussion about how to address the problem.”¹³

Smoke and Mirrors

In addition to the Global Climate Coalition, a host of other industry-funded front groups have entered the fray. Although the GCC leads the campaign against climate change reform, it collaborates extensively with a network that includes industry trade associations, “property rights” groups affiliated with the anti-environmental Wise Use movement, and fringe groups such as Sovereignty International, which believes that global warming is a plot to enslave the world under a United Nations-led “world government.”

Groups participating in industry’s global warming campaign have included the American Energy Alliance (consisting of the National Association of Manufacturers, the American Petroleum Institute, and Edison Electric Institute), the Climate Council (run by Don Pearlman, a fixture at climate negotiations around the world and a member of the oil-client-heavy lobby firm of Patton Boggs), the International Climate Change Partnership (whose members include BP, Elf, and DuPont), the International Chamber of Commerce and Citizens for a Sound Economy (a Washington-based lobby group whose funders include BMW, Boeing, BP, Chevron, GM, Mobil, Toyota, and Unilever). In 1997, international global warming treaty negotiations were held in Kyoto, Japan, prompting a bevy of industry groups to mobilize. Some of the participating groups were the following:

• The Global Climate Information Project (GCIP), launched on September 9, 1997, by some of the nation’s most powerful trade associations, spent more than $13 million in newspaper and television advertising. The ads were produced by Goddard*Claussen/First Tuesday, a California-based PR firm whose clients include the Chlorine Chemistry Council, the Chemical Manufacturers Association, DuPont Merck Pharmaceuticals, and the Vinyl Siding Institute. Goddard*Claussen is notorious for its “Harry and Louise” advertisement that helped derail President Clinton’s 1993 health reform proposal. Its global warming ads used a similar fearmongering strategy by claiming that a Kyoto treaty would raise gasoline prices by 50 cents per gallon, leading to higher prices on everything from “heat to food to clothing.” The GCIP was represented by Richard Pollock, former director of Ralph Nader’s group, Critical Mass, who has switched sides and now works as a senior vice president for Shandwick Public Affairs, the second-largest PR firm in the United States. Recent Shandwick clients include Browning-Ferris Industries, Central Maine Power, Georgia-Pacific Corp., Monsanto Chemical Co., New York State Electric and Gas Co., Ciba-Geigy, Ford Motor Company, Hydro-Quebec, Pfizer, and Procter & Gamble.

• The Coalition for Vehicle Choice (CVC), a front group for automobile manufacturers, launched its own advertising campaign, including a three-page ad in the Washington Post that blasted the Kyoto climate talks as an assault on the U.S. economy. Sponsors for the ad included hundreds of oil and gas companies, auto dealers and parts stores, along with a number of far-right organizations such as the American Land Rights Association and Sovereignty International. CVC was originally founded in 1991 and has successfully prevented higher fuel-efficiency standards in U.S. autos and trucks. From the beginning, it has been represented by Ron DeFore, a former vice president of E. Bruce Harrison’s PR firm. Its budget in 1993 was $2.2 million, all of which came from the big three automakers—Ford, GM, and Chrysler.

• The National Center for Public Policy Research, an industry-funded think tank, established a “Kyoto Earth Summit Information Center,” issued an “Earth Summit Fact Sheet,” and fed anti-treaty quotes to the media through a “free interview locator service” that offered “assistance to journalists seeking interviews with leading scientists, economists, and public policy experts on global warming.”

• The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC), headed by “Junkman” Steven Milloy, attempted to stimulate anti-treaty e-mail to President Clinton by promising to enter writers’ names in a $1,000 sweepstakes drawing. Milloy’s website also heaps vitriol on the science of global warming, including attacks on the American Geophysical Union, the American Meteorological Society, and Nature magazine.

• The American Policy Center (APC) worked to mobilize a “Strike for Liberty,” calling on truckers to pull over to the side of the road for an hour and for farmers to drive tractors into key cities to “shut down the nation” as a protest against any Kyoto treaty. Signing the treaty, APC warned, would mean that “with a single stroke of the pen, our nation as we built it, as we have known it and as we have loved it will begin to disappear.” APC also appealed to anti-abortion activists with the claim that “Al Gore has said abortion should be used to reduce global warming.”

Autograph Collections

Waving petitions from scientists seems to be a favorite PR strategy of greenhouse skeptics. The website of S. Fred Singer’s Science and Environmental Policy Project lists no fewer than four petitions, including the 1992 “Statement by Atmospheric Scientists on Greenhouse Warming,” the “Heidelberg Appeal” (also from 1992), Singer’s own “Leipzig Declaration on Global Climate Change” (1997), and the “Oregon Petition,” which was circulated in 1998 by physicist Frederick Seitz. Thanks to the echo chamber of numerous industry-funded think tanks, these petitions are widely cited by conservative voices in the “junk science” movement and given prominent play by reporters.

The Heidelberg Appeal was first circulated at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and has subsequently been endorsed by some 4,000 scientists, including 72 Nobel Prize winners. It has also been enthusiastically embraced by proponents of “sound science” such as Steven Milloy and Elizabeth Whelan and is frequently cited as proof that scientists reject not only the theory of global warming but also a host of other environmental health risks associated with everything from pesticides in food to antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The Heidelberg Appeal warns of the “emergence of an irrational ideology which is opposed to scientific and industrial progress and impedes economic and social development” and advises “the authorities in charge of our planet’s destiny against decisions which are supported by pseudo-scientific arguments or false and non-relevant data. . . . The greatest evils which stalk our Earth are ignorance and oppression, and not Science, Technology and Industry.”

The only problem is that the Heidelberg Appeal makes no mention whatsoever of global warming, or for that matter of pesticides or antibiotic-resistant bacteria. It is simply a brief statement supporting rationality and science. Based on the text alone, it is the sort of document that virtually any scientist in the world might feel comfortable signing.¹⁴ Parts of the Heidelberg Appeal in fact appear to endorse environmental concerns, such as a sentence that states, “We fully subscribe to the objectives of a scientific ecology for a universe whose resources must be taken stock of, monitored and preserved.” Its 72 Nobel laureates include 49 who also signed the “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity,” which was circulated that same year by the liberal Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and attracted the majority of the world’s living Nobel laureates in science along with some 1,700 other leading scientists.¹⁵ In contrast with the vagueness of the Heidelberg Appeal, the “World Scientists’ Warning” is a very explicit environmental manifesto, stating that “human beings and the natural world are on a collision course” and citing ozone depletion, global climate change, air pollution, groundwater depletion, deforestation, overfishing, and species extinction among the trends that threaten to “so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know.” More recently, 110 Nobel Prize-winning scientists signed another UCS petition, the 1997 “Call to Action,” which called specifically on world leaders to sign an effective global warming treaty at Kyoto.¹⁶

Like the Heidelberg Appeal, the Leipzig Declaration is named after a German city, giving it a patina of gray eminence. Signed by 110 people, including many of the signers of the earlier “Statement by Atmospheric Scientists,” it is widely cited by conservative voices in the “sound science” movement and is regarded in some circles as the gold standard of scientific expertise on the issue. It has been cited by Singer himself in editorial columns appearing in hundreds of conservative websites and major publications, including the Wall Street Journal, Miami Herald, Detroit News, Chicago Tribune, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Memphis Commercial-Appeal, Seattle Times, and Orange County Register. Jeff Jacoby, a columnist with the Boston Globe, describes the signers of the Leipzig Declaration as “prominent scholars.” The Heritage Foundation calls them “noted scientists,” as do conservative think tanks such as Citizens for a Sound Economy, the Heartland Institute, and Australia’s Institute for Public Affairs. Both the Leipzig Declaration and Seitz’s Oregon Petition have been quoted as authoritative sources during deliberations in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.

When journalist David Olinger of the St. Petersburg Times investigated the Leipzig Declaration, however, he discovered that most of its signers have not dealt with climate issues at all and none of them is an acknowledged leading expert. Twenty-five of the signers were TV weather-men—a profession that requires no in-depth knowledge of climate research. Some did not even have a college degree, such as Dick Groeber of Dick’s Weather Service in Springfield, Ohio. Did Groeber regard himself as a scientist? “I sort of consider myself so,” he said when asked. “I had two or three years of college training in the scientific area, and 30 or 40 years of self-study.”¹⁷ Other signers included a dentist, a medical laboratory researcher, a civil engineer, and an amateur meteorologist. Some were not even found to reside at the addresses they had given.¹⁸ A journalist with the Danish Broadcasting Company attempted to contact the declaration’s 33 European signers and found that four of them could not be located, 12 denied ever having signed, and some had not even heard of the Leipzig Declaration. Those who did admit signing included a medical doctor, a nuclear scientist, and an expert on flying insects.¹⁹ After discounting the signers whose credentials were inflated, irrelevant, false, or unverifiable, it turned out that only 20 of the names on the list had any scientific connection with the study of climate change, and some of those names were known to have obtained grants from the oil and fuel industry, including the German coal industry and the government of Kuwait (a major oil exporter).

Some Like It Hot

The Oregon Petition, sponsored by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine (OISM), was circulated in April 1998 in a bulk mailing to tens of thousands of U.S. scientists. In addition to the petition, the mailing included what appeared to be a reprint of a scientific paper. Authored by Arthur B. Robinson and three other people, the paper was titled “Environmental Effects of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide” and was printed in the same typeface and format as the official Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). A cover note from Frederick Seitz, who had served as president of the NAS in the 1960s, added to the impression that Robinson’s paper was an official publication of the academy’s peer-reviewed journal.

Robinson’s paper claimed to show that pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is actually a good thing. “As atmospheric CO₂ increases,” it stated, “plant growth rates increase. Also, leaves lose less water as CO₂ increases, so that plants are able to grow under drier conditions. Animal life, which depends upon plant life for food, increases proportionally.” As a result, Robinson concluded, industrial activities can be counted on to encourage greater species biodiversity and a greener planet. “As coal, oil, and natural gas are used to feed and lift from poverty vast numbers of people across the globe, more CO₂ will be released into the atmosphere,” the paper stated. “This will help to maintain and improve the health, longevity, prosperity, and productivity of all people. Human activities are believed to be responsible for the rise in CO₂ level of the atmosphere. Mankind is moving the carbon in coal, oil, and natural gas from below ground to the atmosphere and surface, where it is available for conversion into living things. We are living in an increasingly lush environment of plants and animals as a result of the CO₂ increase. Our children will enjoy an Earth with far more plant and animal life than that with which we now are blessed. This is a wonderful and unexpected gift from the Industrial Revolution.”²⁰

In reality, neither Robinson’s paper nor OISM’s petition drive had anything to do with the National Academy of Sciences, which first heard about the petition when its members began calling to ask if the NAS had taken a stand against the Kyoto treaty. The paper’s author, Arthur Robinson, was not even a climate scientist. He was a biochemist with no published research in the field of climatology, and his paper had never been subjected to peer review by anyone with training in the field. In fact, the paper had never been accepted for publication anywhere, let alone in the NAS Proceedings. It was self-published by Robinson, who did the typesetting himself on his own computer under the auspices of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, of which Robinson himself was the founder.

So what is the OISM, exactly? The bulk mailing that went out to scientists gave no further information, other than the address of a post office box. The OISM does have a website, however, where it describes itself as “a small research institute” in Cave Junction, Oregon, with a faculty of six people engaged in studying “biochemistry, diagnostic medicine, nutrition, preventive medicine and the molecular biology of aging.”²¹ The OISM also sells a book titled Nuclear War Survival Skills (foreword by H-bomb inventor Edward Teller), which argues that “the dangers from nuclear weapons have been distorted and exaggerated” into “demoralizing myths.”²² Like the Institute itself, Cave Junction (population 1,126) is a pretty obscure place. It is the sort of out-of-the-way location you might seek out if you were hoping to survive a nuclear war, but it is not known as a center for scientific and medical research.

“Robinson is hardly a reliable source,” observes journalist Ross Gelbspan. “As late as 1994 he declared that ozone depletion is a ‘hoax’—a position akin to defending the flat-earth theory. In his newsletter, he told readers it was safe to drink water irradiated by the Chernobyl nuclear plant, and he marketed a home-schooling kit for ‘parents concerned about socialism in the public schools.’ ”²³

None of the coauthors of “Environmental Effects of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide” had any more standing than Robinson himself as a climate change researcher. They included Robinson’s 22-year-old son, Zachary (home-schooled by his dad), along with astrophysicists Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon. Both Baliunas and Soon worked with Frederick Seitz at the George C. Marshall Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank where Seitz served as executive director.²⁴ Funded by a number of right-wing foundations, including Scaife and Bradley, the George C. Marshall Institute does not conduct any original research. It is a conservative think tank that was initially founded during the years of the Reagan administration to advocate funding for Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative—the “Star Wars” weapons program.²⁵ Today, the Marshall Institute is still a big fan of high-tech weapons. In 1999, its website gave prominent placement to an essay by Col. Simon P. Worden titled “Why We Need the Air-Borne Laser,” along with an essay titled “Missile Defense for Populations—What Does It Take? Why Are We Not Doing It?” Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, the Marshall Institute has adapted to the times by devoting much of its firepower to the war against environmentalism, and in particular against the “scaremongers” who raise warnings about global warming.

“The mailing is clearly designed to be deceptive by giving people the impression that the article, which is full of half-truths, is a reprint and has passed peer review,” complained Raymond Pierrehumbert, an atmospheric chemist at the University of Chicago. NAS foreign secretary F. Sherwood Rowland, an atmospheric chemist, said researchers “are wondering if someone is trying to hoodwink them.” NAS council member Ralph J. Cicerone, dean of the School of Physical Sciences at the University of California at Irvine, was particularly offended that Seitz described himself in the cover letter as a “past president” of the NAS. Although Seitz had indeed held that title in the 1960s, Cicerone hoped that scientists who received the petition mailing would not be misled into believing that he “still has a role in governing the organization.”²⁶

The NAS issued an unusually blunt formal response to the petition drive. “The NAS Council would like to make it clear that this petition has nothing to do with the National Academy of Sciences and that the manuscript was not published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences or in any other peer-reviewed journal,” it stated in a news release. “The petition does not reflect the conclusions of expert reports of the Academy.” In fact, it pointed out, its own prior published study had shown that “even given the considerable uncertainties in our knowledge of the relevant phenomena, greenhouse warming poses a potential threat sufficient to merit prompt responses. Investment in mitigation measures acts as insurance protection against the great uncertainties and the possibility of dramatic surprises.”²⁷

Notwithstanding this rebuke, the Oregon Petition managed to garner 15,000 signatures within a month’s time. Fred Singer called the petition “the latest and largest effort by rank-and-file scientists to express their opposition to schemes that subvert science for the sake of a political agenda.”²⁸

Nebraska senator Chuck Hagel called it an “extraordinary response” and cited it as his basis for continuing to oppose a global warming treaty. “Nearly all of these 15,000 scientists have technical training suitable for evaluating climate research data,” Hagel said.²⁹ Columns citing the Seitz petition and the Robinson paper as credible sources of opinion on the global warming issue have appeared in publications ranging from Newsday, the Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post to the Austin-American Statesman, Denver Post, and Wyoming Tribune-Eagle.

In addition to the bulk mailing, OISM’s website enables people to add their names to the petition over the Internet, and by June 2000 it claimed to have recruited more than 19,000 scientists. The institute is so lax about screening names, however, that virtually anyone can sign, including for example Al Caruba, the pesticide-industry PR man and conservative ideologue whose “National Anxiety Center” we describe briefly in chapter nine. Caruba has editorialized on his own website against the science of global warming, calling it the “biggest hoax of the decade,” a “genocidal” campaign by environmentalists who believe that “humanity must be destroyed to ‘Save the Earth.’ . . . There is no global warming, but there is a global political agenda, comparable to the failed Soviet Union experiment with Communism, being orchestrated by the United Nations, supported by its many Green NGOs, to impose international treaties of every description that would turn the institution into a global government, superceding the sovereignty of every nation in the world.”

When questioned in 1998, OISM’s Arthur Robinson admitted that only 2,100 signers of the Oregon Petition had identified themselves as physicists, geophysicists, climatologists, or meteorologists, “and of those the greatest number are physicists.”³⁰ The names of the signers are available on the OISM’s website, but without listing any institutional affiliations or even city of residence, making it very difficult to determine their credentials or even whether they exist at all. When the Oregon Petition first circulated, in fact, environmental activists successfully added the names of several fictional characters and celebrities to the list, including John Grisham, Michael J. Fox, Drs. Frank Burns, B. J. Honeycutt, and Benjamin Pierce (from the TV show M*A*S*H), an individual by the name of “Dr. Red Wine,” and Geraldine Halliwell, formerly known as pop singer Ginger Spice of the Spice Girls. Ginger’s field of scientific specialization was listed as “biology.”³¹

Casting Call

In April 1998, at about the same time that the OISM’s petition first circulated, the New York Times reported on yet another propaganda scheme developed by the American Petroleum Institute. Joe Walker, a public relations representative of the API, had written an eight-page internal memorandum outlining the plan, which unfortunately for the plotters was leaked by a whistle-blower. Walker’s memorandum called for recruiting scientists “who do not have a long history of visibility and/or participation in the climate change debate.”Apparently, new faces were needed because the industry’s long-standing scientific front men—Michaels, Balling, Idso, and Singer—had used up their credibility with journalists.³²

Walker’s plan called for spending $5 million over two years to “maximize the impact of scientific views consistent with ours on Congress, the media and other key audiences.” To measure success, a media tracking service would be hired to tally the percentage of news articles that raise questions about climate science and the number of radio talk show appearances by scientists questioning the prevailing view. The budget included $600,000 to develop a cadre of 20 “respected climate scientists” and to “identify, recruit and train a team of five independent scientists to participate in media outreach.” (Unanswered, of course, was the question of how anyone who has been recruited and trained by the petroleum industry can be honestly described as “independent.”) Once trained, these scientific spokesmodels would be sent around to meet with science writers, newspaper editors, columnists, and television network correspondents, “thereby raising questions about and undercutting the ‘prevailing scientific wisdom.’ ”³³

“One of the creepiest revelations is that oil companies and their allies intend to recruit bona fide scientists to help muddy the waters about global warming,” commented the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, seemingly unaware that this “third party” strategy had been part of the industry campaign from day one.³⁴

Hot Talk, Slow Walk

During the 1990s, Clinton-bashing was a common theme in industry’s appeals to conservatives, using the argument that the global warming issue was a liberal attempt to replace private property with “socialism,” “bureaucracy,” and “big government.” Particularly strong criticisms were leveled at then-Vice President Al Gore, who has spoken with occasional eloquence about the greenhouse effect and wrote about it in his book Earth in the Balance. Ironically, industry’s attacks on Clinton and Gore helped conceal the Clinton administration’s own complicity in the effort to prevent any effective regulations on greenhouse emissions.

On the eve of Earth Day in April 1993, Clinton announced his intention to sign a treaty on global warming, only to spend the rest of his two terms in office waffling and backpedaling. His “Climate Change Action Plan” of October 1993 turned out to be a “voluntary effort,” depending entirely on the goodwill of industry for implementation. By early 1996, he was forced to admit that the plan was off track and would not even come close to meeting its goal for greenhouse gas reductions by the year 2000.

In June 1997, Clinton addressed the United Nations Earth Summit and pledged a sustained U.S. commitment to stop global warming. Painting a near-apocalyptic picture of encroaching seas and killer heat, he acknowledged that America’s record over the past five years was “not sufficient. . . . We must do better and we will.” Four months later, however, he announced that realistic targets and timetables for cutting greenhouse gas emissions should be put off for 20 years, prompting Australian environmental writer Sharon Beder to comment that “champagne corks are popping in the boardrooms of BP, Shell, Esso, Mobil, Ford, General Motors, and the coal, steel and aluminum corporations of the US, Australia and Europe. . . . The new limits are so weak, compared with even the most pessimistic predictions of what the US would offer in the current negotiations, that two years of hard work by 150 countries towards reaching an agreement in December are now irrelevant.”³⁵

During negotiations in Kyoto, the United States lobbied heavily and successfully to weaken the treaty’s actual provisions for limiting greenhouse gases. The resulting treaty proposed a reduction of only 7 percent in global greenhouse emissions by the year 2012, far below the 20 percent cut proposed by the IPCC and European nations or the 30 percent reduction demanded by low-lying island nations that fear massive flooding as melting polar ice leads to rising sea levels. The United States also successfully won a provision that will allow countries to exceed their emission targets by buying right-to-pollute credits from nations that achieve better-than-targeted reductions.

Greenpeace called the resulting Kyoto treaty “a tragedy and a farce.” It was condemned as “too extreme” by U.S. industry, declared dead on arrival by Senate Republicans, and praised by some environmental groups; and it provided all the political wiggle room that the Clinton administration needed to have its cake and eat it too. Clinton embraced the agreement but simultaneously said he would not submit it to the Senate until impoverished Third World nations agreed to their own cutbacks in greenhouse gas emissions.

There is a method to this madness that is well understood in Washington lobbying circles, although it is rarely discussed in public. By talking tough about the environment while sitting on the Kyoto treaty, Clinton and Gore were able to preserve their “green credentials” for political purposes while blaming the treaty’s demise on anti-environmental Republicans and an apathetic public. For Democrats, it was a “win-win situation.” They could stay on the campaign-funding gravy train by doing what their corporate donors wanted, while giving lip service to solving the problem. The December 12, 1997 New York Times reported that Clinton was “in the risk-free position of being able to make a strong pro-environmental political pitch while not having to face a damaging vote in the Senate. . . . One senior White House official . . . said it was possible that the treaty would not be ready for submission . . . during the remainder of Mr. Clinton’s term in office.” And indeed, this prediction proved correct. Industry’s “lobbyists for lethargy” had succeeded.

Stormy Weather

While Nero fiddles, the burning of Rome is proceeding and even appears to be occurring faster than some climatologists expected. The twelve warmest years in recorded history have all occurred since 1983. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the World Meteorological Association concurred that 1997 was the hottest year ever, only to be surpassed by 1998, which was in turn surpassed by 1999. In January 2000, the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences—Fred Seitz’s former stomping grounds—issued a major report concluding that global warming is an “undoubtedly real” problem and is in fact occurring 30 percent faster than the rate estimated just five years earlier by the IPCC.³⁶

A series of extreme weather events also seemed to corroborate the IPCC’s predictions. In 1998, a January ice storm caused widespread power outages in eastern Canada and the northeastern United States. In February, Florida was hit by the deadliest tornado outbreak in its history. April through June was the driest period in 104 years of record in Florida, Texas, Louisiana, and New Mexico, and May through June was the warmest period on record. Heat and dry weather caused devastating fires in central and eastern Russia, Indonesia, Brazil, Central America, and Florida. Massive floods hit Argentina, Peru, Bangladesh, India, and China, where the flooding of the Yangtze River killed more than 3,000 people and caused $30 billion in losses. Droughts plagued Guyana, Papua New Guinea, Pakistan, the Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and southern Russia. On October 4, 1998, Oklahoma was hit by 20 tornadoes, setting a national record for the most twisters ever during a single day. Three hurricanes and four tropical storms caused billions of dollars of damage to the United States. In late September, Hurricane Georges devastated the northern Caribbean, causing $4 billion in damages. A month later, Central America was devastated by Hurricane Mitch, Central America’s worst natural disaster in 218 years, which killed more than 11,000 people and displaced another 2.4 million. In the Pacific, October’s Supertyphoon Zeb inundated the northern Philippines, Taiwan, and Japan. Only eight days later, Supertyphoon Babs struck the Philippines, submerging parts of Manila.³⁷

In 1999, farmers in the northeastern and mid-Atlantic regions of the United States suffered through a record drought. A prolonged heat wave killed 271 people in the Midwest and Northeast. Hurricane Floyd battered North Carolina, inflicting more than a billion dollars in damages, while Boston marked a record 304 consecutive days without snow. In India, a supercyclone killed some 10,000 people. Torrential rains and mudslides killed 15,000 in Venezuela. Hurricane-force windstorms destroyed trees, buildings, and monuments in France, leaving more than $4 billion in damages. The South Pacific islands of Tebua Tarawa and Abunuea in the nation of Vanuato disappeared beneath the ocean, the first victims of the global rise in sea levels. The wave of catastrophes continued in 2000, with a prolonged drought in Kenya while wet, warm weather spawned billions of crop-threatening locusts in Australia and drought-driven fires devastated Los Alamos. The melting and fissuring of Antarctica’s ice shelf, which first became dramatically evident in 1995, led in May 2000 to the calving of three enormous icebergs with a combined surface area slightly smaller than the state of Connecticut.

It is impossible, of course, to prove that any of these individual events was caused by global warming, but cumulatively the evidence is becoming harder to deny. As the evidence continues to mount, even some members of the oil industry have begun to defect. In 1999, the oil companies BP Amoco and Royal Dutch/Shell, along with Dow Chemicals, left the Global Climate Coalition and stated publicly that they now consider global warming a real, immediate problem. The following year saw similar moves from Ford, DaimlerChrysler, the Southern Company, Texaco, and General Motors.³⁸ The DuPont corporation claims it will voluntarily cut emissions of greenhouse gases to 35 percent of their 1990 level by the year 2010.

“You can’t stop climate change given what we’re doing right now,” said Michael MacCracken in February 2000. MacCracken is director of the National Assessment Coordination Office of the U.S. Global Climate Change Research Program, which was launched by President Bush in 1989. It is already too late to stop global warming, he said, due to the accumulated carbon-dioxide emissions that have already entered the atmosphere. The best that can be hoped for is to minimize the problem and adapt to the changes. In the United States, necessary measures will include changing the way water supplies are managed in the western United States, beefing up public health programs, building higher bridges, and rethinking massive environmental restoration projects.³⁹

For years, the PR apparatus of big coal and big oil persuaded many key decision-makers that global warming was a phantom—that it was not even happening. As the scientific data proving otherwise has accumulated, the contrarian line of argument has also shifted. Industry voices have begun to admit that the industrial greenhouse effect is real, and some are attempting to argue, like Arthur Robinson of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, that it is actually a good thing—that it will enhance plant growth or that it will be of no consequence because the anticipated temperature changes will be relatively slight. Other voices are stepping forward with industry’s standard lament, claiming that even if global warming is a bad thing, fixing the problem is impossible because it will cost trillions of dollars, ruin the economy, and eliminate jobs.

The Western Fuels Association (WFA), which provides coal to electrical utility companies, has been a major sponsor of efforts to respin the global warming debate. In the early 1990s, WFA backed the ICE campaign, which attempted to claim that the planet was actually cooling. Its more recent creations include the Greening Earth Society, which promotes that idea that increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is “good for earth” because it will encourage greater plant growth. The Greening Earth Society has produced a video, titled “The Greening of the Planet Earth Continues,” publishes a newsletter called the World Climate Report, and works closely with a group called the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change. Each of these groups has its own separate website.⁴⁰

Another web venture is a “grassroots mobilization effort” created for WFA by Bonner & Associates, a Washington, D.C., lobby firm that specializes in “grassroots public relations”—a PR subspecialty that uses telemarketing and computer databases to create the appearance of grassroots public support for a client’s cause. The “Global Warming Cost” website⁴¹ focuses on generating e-mail to elected officials. Between September 1997 and July 1998, WFA claims the site generated 20,000 e-mail messages to Congress opposing the Kyoto treaty. The way it works is simple. Visitors to the home page of the website are invited to click on an icon indicating whether they represent “business,” “seniors,” “farmers,” “families,” or “workers.” This takes them to another Web page that requests their address and asks a handful of questions about the amount they spend on home heating, transportation, and other fuel costs. Based on this information, the website automatically generates a “customized” e-mail, directed to each senator and member of Congress in the visitor’s voting area, asking them to “reject any effort to stiffen the United Nations Global Climate Change Treaty.” It’s all computerized, and the website makes no effort to verify that the resulting letter is accurate or even plausible.

Using the assumed name “George Jetson,” for example, we plugged in an estimate that he currently spends $24,166,666 per year on gasoline, electricity, heating oil, and natural gas. (After all, it takes a lot of energy to propel those flying cars.)

The computer promptly generated messages to our elected officials. “I am proud to be a worker which you represent,” Mr. Jetson stated. “Estimates suggest I will personally see my cost for electricity, for natural gas, and for gasoline go up by $24,239,987.52 a year!”

It’s nice to know that the democratic system works. Thanks to the miracles of modern computer technology and sophisticated PR, even cartoon characters can do their part to save America from the eco-wackos and their newfangled scientific theories.