climate change, corporations and PR

December 11th, 2005

Why did it take so long for people to realise climate change was already happening? What can we do about it?

Indymedia activists put the blame squarely on the mainstream media and their devious global corporate buddies.

Consensus is nearly unanimous amongst the world’s scientists that climate change is happening as a result of our use of oil, coal and petroleum. Yet only recently have politicians come to the party. George Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard have finally conceded the fact.

Yet, under the guise of ‘unbiased reporting’ the mainstream media have too often given voice to the climate critics. Many of them financed by big oil, these so-called climate scientists have created a skewed debate on climate that put sufficient doubt in the minds of readers to allow governments to continue to do nothing to mitigate climate change.

The connections of climate sceptics with mining corporations and big oil is so dazzling, one wonders that they even got a serious hearing in the media. One notable Australian example is Hugh Morgan. Morgan was CEO of Western Mining Corporation from 1986 to 2003, and director of Alcoa from 1977 to 2001. He launched his own ‘think tank’ (the Lavoisier Group) in 1999 to legitimise his claims that climate change is the product of green extremists and ‘nazi propaganda’, and that they Kyoto protocol is a challenge to Australia’s sovereignty. The Lavoisier Group continues to publish and promote the interests of his CO2 emitting mining business. Alcoa’s aluminium smelter is the single biggest emitter of GHG in Queensland. His corporate buddies include Rupert Murdoch and John Winston Howard. Morgan is now President of the Business Council of Australia, through which he continues to criticise attempts to get industry to reduce emissions. Morgan is but one of a handful of vocal and well-financed climate critics who have gotten more than their fair share of publicity. Morgan’s former company Alcoa still proclaims on their website that the science of climate change is ‘incomplete’.

Another Australian organisation notable for it’s climate scepticism is the Institute for Public Affairs, a right-wing think tank with an avowed goal to prevent the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol. The IPA often get published in the Murdoch rags in Australia, boasting former members like publisher and journalist Michael Duffy and commentator Ron Brunton. Their members include and some former Liberal party and industry heads like Tim Duncan formerly of Rio Tinto. One of the IPAs other main goals is to “defund the left” by undermining their charity status and removing government funding of environment groups, the latter the Howard government has already done in 2004. In 2005 the IPA launched a front group, The Australian Environment Foundation, to protect the interests of the timber industry. It includes former TV presenter Don Burke, who says, “The greatest threat to the world’s environment is the conservation movement.”

With such powerful and influential friends like Murdoch and mining money on their side, one wonders also why the US oil industry needed to spend millions of dollars on the services of PR giants. In the late 80s corporations including Amoco, the American Forest & Paper Association, American Petroleum Institute, Shell Oil, Texaco, Chevron, Chrysler, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Exxon, General Motors, Ford Motor Company and more than 40 other corporations formed the Global Climate Coalition (GCC). The GCC’s objective was to create positive publicity for big oil and create doubts about climate change to prevent reform.

Bob Burton and Sheldon Rampton at PR Watch note that,

“The GCC recognized early on that Australia would play a key role in its campaign against global warming reform. Rapid economic growth in the Australasian region has seen Australia emerge as an important regional staging post for the PR industry. Most major US firms–Edelman’s, Burson-Marsteller, Hill & Knowlton, Ketchum, Shandwick and others–have established a presence there to work on local issues and the regional implementation of international issues….

Australia also accounts for more than 30 percent of world trade in coal, and has major metal smelting industries which also belch out greenhouse gases. As a result, it has Asia’s highest per capita emission of greenhouse gases, even though its population comprises only one percent of the region’s 2.5 billion people.

In 1988, when Australia held a Greenhouse ‘88 conference, there was great public interest in the issue. At the time, Australia had one of the “greenest” governments in the world. Since then, however, corporations and their front groups have systematically manipulated public opinion through frequent pronouncements in the media by (Patrick) Michaels and other industry-funded scientists.” PR Watch 1997.

In 2002 the GCC disbanded. All that money spent, so little success.
Governments are now talking action on climate change. In 2005 British PM Tony Blair said that climate change was the biggest challenge facing humankind and that action was necessary. Even George Bush has admitted they must act, despite his loyalties lying with his oil funded family. However, he never went so far as to say he’d do anything about it: “A government report to the UN says that global warming exists, that it is man-made, and that it will transform the environment - all points that the current US government, while never actually denying, has been reluctant to accept. However, the report suggests that the country will have to accept the changes, rather than take any action to try to avert them” reports the Guardian.

So now corporations are concentrating on getting their lobbyists into government positions to weaken decisions, adulterate policy and influence personnel postings. PR Watch report that the Bush administration, Exxon-Mobil and other energy companies successfully connived in 2002 see climatologist Robert Watson rejected as leader of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In 2003 Paul Harris reported “government documents obtained by The Observer show that officials have sought to edit or remove research warning that the problem is serious. They have enlisted the help of conservative lobby groups funded by the oil industry to attack US government scientists if they produce work seen as accepting too readily that pollution is an issue.” In June 2005 the New York Times reported that “U.S. government climate research reports had been edited by a White House official, Philip A. Cooney, to emphasize doubts about climate change. According to the memo Cooney, a former “climate team leader” and lobbyist with the American Petroleum Institute, changed one 2002 document to “create an enhanced sense of scientific uncertainty about climate change and its implications.” (PR Watch 2005). There are so many more examples of the covert manipulation of data, and the democratic process as to boggle the mind with the lengths big oil will go to, to protect their profits even at the price of the world through climate change.

While lobbyists and science critics continue to try to undermine the science of climate change, some corporations are embracing it. The Nuclear industry thinks it’s renaissance lies in promoting itself as a solution to climate change. Power provision from coal-fired power stations creates 15% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. But the nuclear industry are not letting facts stand in their way. And they’ve sold themselves to Australia in particular, because of the big uranium deposits here. And it seems it was an easy sell. Dollar signs light up in the eyes of PM John ‘It’s all about the Economy’ Howard, and his pro-nuclear cronies including Foreign Minister Alexander ‘We Know Our Uranium Isn’t Being Used for Bombs’ Downer, Defence Minister Robert ‘Jabiluka Uranium Mine’ Hill and Science Minister Brendan ‘Australia is Open for Business on Uranium Mining’ Nelson.

Australian Activists and citizens have a big task a head of us. With so much bias in government and media on the side of corporations, we need to be the voice of reason and solutions to climate change. If we leave it up to the media to deliver the facts, skewed by PR companies, oil and nuclear lobbyists and profiteers, we won’t survive.
It’s already happening. No climate meeting anywhere goes without grass roots protests and alternative conferences often accompany the biased and selfish money-making decisions of government convened events. The D3 International Day of Action is one of these, timed to provide an alternative to the COP meetings of late November, the common people have had enough of the lies, the bias, and the inaction of governments colluding with rich bastards with vested interests. The vested interests of all of us lie in the survival of the planet and it’s people.

Indymedia have been providing an alternative news forum for activists since the 1999 Seattle protests. This November an international group of media activists have come together to create a forum for sane solutions and critique of the behaviours and policy of governments and corporations on the subject of climate change. Climate Indymedia hope to provide that forum. Climate Indymedia will be launched in support of the D3IDA. If you’re interested in the issue, have been involved in constructive grass roots action or just want to tell your story, visit us at www.climate.indymedia.org

Further Reading:
www.exxonsecrets.org
www.prwatch.org
www.corpwatch.org

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climate justice means ending oil exploitation

November 10th, 2004

Daily, the mainstream news reports on one of the effects of the West’s dependence on oil — war. However, even when outright war has not broken out, life in communities where oil is being extracted is often violent, unhealthy and exploitative.

Nnimmo Bassey works with OilWatch and Environmental Rights Action to uncover the destructive activities of the many oil companies operating in Niger Delta, including Shell, ExxonMobil (Esso) and ChevronTexaco. He works to expose human rights abuses, which are often government sanctioned.

Bassey is trying to raise awareness about how the initial stages of the climate change cycle — the extraction of fossil fuels to meet the excessive demand of energy consumptive states in the North — cause chaos and human rights violations in his homeland.

In Australia, we are highly dependant on coal for our electricity production. Yet we still consume the equivalent of 872,000 barrels of oil per day, and rate ninth in the world for per capita consumption. We are also the biggest greenhouse gas emitters in the world. These facts highlight the extent to which we need to take responsibility for the human rights and environmental effects of our energy consumption.

Bassey describes the Niger Delta landscape as “criss-crossed” with petroleum pipes that leak and spill oil into the streets and on agricultural land and are “never adequately handled”.

There is constant gas flaring and explosions, accompanied by “unbridled repression of the local people by occupation forces”. These forces include Nigeria’s own military, which continues to act at the behest of a corrupt government in league with transnational oil corporations.

The industry has such a pervasive grip on Nigeria that Bassey says “oil-related activities have led to the destruction of whole communities, the killing (including extra-judicial murders) of thousands as well as [the production of] thousands of external and internal refugees” with hardly a murmur from the international community.

The extraction of oil is synonymous with pollution. Indeed, Bassey maintains, “it can be said without fear of any contradiction that no oil spill has been adequately cleaned up in the Niger Delta”. The environment has been severely degraded in many places. Bassey believes the oil industry is intrinsically hostile to the environment and the people who live on it.

Waste products from oil extraction include gas, drilling mud and drilling cuts. The constant gas flaring, where gas is burnt off as an unprofitable byproduct of oil extraction causes “continual noise, acid rain and retarded crop yield, corroded roofs and lung diseases”. Bassey says that gas flaring has resulted in the Niger Delta being described as “the biggest single industrial complex in the world contributing to global warming today”.

Human health has suffered so much so that the Niger Delta is now a place “where life is short and unpredictable; where so much wealth is extracted and where so much wretchedness is evident”.

In addition to the lung diseases related to gas flaring, the pumping of mud waste into marine environments may be responsible for food-borne poisoning and illnesses. Explosives have been used in many places to the extent that aftershocks “have been known to impact on the auditory systems of sea birds and mammals finally affecting their ability to community and procreate. Other side effects are noted in diminished food supplies, increased cases of hypertension and endocrine imbalance. The ultimate impact is on the fish supply on which the economy of the local people hangs.”

Bassey links oil extraction to climate change in the area: “Climate change was once a remote possibility. Today it is a reality and an immediate threat to the very existence of island and coastal communities.”

Attempts to clean up oil spills have been either poorly attempted or non-existent. Legislation has been enacted to absolve transnational oil corporations of responsibility if they allege sabotage. Bassey claims, “[corporations] often set whole forests on fire in a bid to wipe out the evidence of the spills.”

Many human deaths have resulted from explosions or toxic cleaning chemicals in oil spills. Pipelines can also explode, a recent incident caused the deaths of 1000 people at the Jesse petrol pipeline in the Niger Delta. As in other occasions with other corporations, the state-run oil company NNCP attempted to place responsibility on the victims, accusing them of being saboteurs and vandals.

In 1999, the government blamed anti-Shell “rebels” for the deaths of four police officers, and razed an entire town, Odi, in retaliation. According to Human Rights Watch workers who visited the town two weeks after the attack, the stench of decomposing bodies was noticeable a kilometre from the town, and there were only three buildings left standing.

Ultimately, the promises made by government and industry of higher standards of living, new roads, school and hospitals do not materialise or fail to remain once the companies have made their profits. In addition, oil companies make no pretence to public consultation in Nigeria, unlike in Western countries. These double standards amount to environmental racism.

Bassey says: “The oil industry believes that the people have no right to know what is happening in their environment. Dialogue, they believe, ends in social tokens such as classroom blocks and ill-equipped health centres.”

The connections between oil extraction, climate change and human rights could not be more obvious than they are in Nigeria. For the predominantly poor rural Nigerians, the effects of climate change heap injury upon injury: deforestation (which Bassey describes as “a truly vicious circle”, because as climate change increases, so does deforestation through tree death, which further increases climate change), heat waves, tropical diseases, salinisation of crop lands, rising sea level and the dislocation of potentially millions of people.

Bassey’s trip to Australia is one of hope. The solidarity of the Australian people is essential for the reformation of his country, indeed the unjust system that makes the Niger Delta as it is today.

In Bassey’s words: “It is time for all of us to realise that environmental actions have environmental costs. Laws must be enacted to ensure that the environment is protected against both public and private actions that fail to take account of costs and harms inflicted on the eco-system. Our environment, indeed, is our life.”

originally published in Green Left Weekly

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