Change of climate

Change of climate

Let's look at some specific examples of corporate PR at work, and what we can learn from them. In 1995, the year Saro-Wiwa was murdered, Shell received a prestigious award from the then British Chancellor, Ken Clarke, for its range of corporate videos, one of which was on climate change. Being the largest global oil company in the world, Shell should be worried about climate change.

It is now an established fact that we are changing the world's climate. The burning of fossil fuels is largely to blame. For the last forty years, Shell and the other fossil fuel companies have adopted a dinosaur mentality towards climate change. Instead of joining the debate constructively, they set out to destroy it. Essentially the oil industry responded with what we call the 3-D PR Strategy:

Deny, delay, dominate:

Deny there is a problem with your product.

Delay effective action.

Dominate the international agenda and the marketplace in the search for alternatives.

The industry has treated climate change as a PR problem - it has funded so-called independent scientists and formed green-sounding front groups, such as the Global Climate Coalition. The GCC, which was set up in the late eighties, was formed to scupper the UN Climate negotiations. In the run up to the Kyoto meeting last December, the GCC spent $60 million dollars trying to persuade the public that they were not to blame and justify a business as usual future - even though that future jeopardises the long-term viability of life on earth.

The use of climate front groups is just one of the many PR techniques companies are using to counter the environmental movement. The techniques are very simple: On the one hand to co-opt the environmental debate and on the other to demonise and marginalise the environmental movement. Co-option can take many forms. Companies have spent billions adopting the language of the environmental movement, or greenwashing their products: motor vehicles, the fastest growing source of pollution on the planet, have become 'environmentally-friendly'. Aerosols are 'ozone friendly', washing powders are phosphate free, even when most had no phosphate in them anyway, aluminium cans and paper bags are not recycled but recyclable. 'Sustainable development' has become one of the most co-opted and corrupted corporate terms used today.