S.T.

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April 19, 2022



Here’s a fun fact! According to our records of more than 1,000 editorials, op-eds and columns, the Wall Street Journal’s opinion page published more climate disinformation in March than it has in any month in more than 10 years: Twenty-six pieces covered for the fossil fuel industry’s massive profits resulting from the pandemic and Putin’s fossil fueled war on Ukraine, and otherwise advanced pro-industry propaganda. 

The last time climate got so much play in the WSJ opinion pages, it was in 2009 when the Journal pushed “climategate” disinformation. That December during the Copenhagen climate COP negotiations, the Journal ran 28 op-eds, columns and editorials, 24 of which were a who's-who of climate disinfo, featuring Pat Michaels and Bjorn Lomborg, false attacks on climate science, and cheering political obstruction of climate policy and negotiations. The month kicked off with a column by Bret Stephens advancing the climategate lie and an op-ed by Richard Lindzen headlined “The Climate Science Isn’t Settled.” 

In the years since, the Journal has churned out plenty of climate hit pieces, like Steve Koonin’s 2014 WSJ op-ed with the Lindzen-like headline “Climate Science Is Not Settled” (Couldn’t it at least come up with something new?), which Koonin then used for the title of his 2021 “Unsettled” book (Guess not…). 

Most of the time, the quantity of content ranges from a handful to around a dozen pieces a month, with November and December, COP season, generally being the busiest. Climate disinfo during the Trump years was a bit less frequent than when there was policy to oppose under the Biden and Obama administrations.   

The Journal more or less kept up that cadence until October of 2021, when in just three weeks, it ran 21 pieces on the UN COP negotiations and high gas prices, and every one pushed industrial disinformation. 

In November 2021, it published a dozen pieces, just one of which, by U.S. Climate Envoy John Kerry, wasn’t full of fossil fuel disinformation. There were nine in December (all dumb), fifteen in January (uniformly uninforming), and 16 in February, as the Russian invasion began.   

This set up the disinfo boom in March, when the opinion page ran 26 pieces of fossil fueled disinformation. 

On March 1st, a WSJ editorial blamed Europeans for buying Russian oil. The Journal then ran two pieces on the 4th promoting fossil fuels and attacking Biden, and rounded out the week with an anti-ESG op-ed (denierland’s new hobby horse). 

On March 8th, the Editorial Board ran editorials criticizing renewables and Biden’s climate and energy agenda. On the 11th they ran another one headlined “Democrats for Higher Gas Prices” and an op-ed by birdbrained Robert Bryce blaming California for high gas prices, “not Moscow.” 

Apparently the Journal is playing to an audience eager to attack Democrats for trying to save the planet from fossil fuels instead of a petro-dictator committing war crimes. 

On the 13th the Journal ran an op-ed claiming “Biden’s War on Oil Hits Consumers” by oil tycoon Harold Hamm, who has made so much money off of consumers he’s got to dodge taxes to pass it to his children and whose fracking company is returning billions to shareholders based on profits made by high prices.   

Then on March 14th came a full Opinion page press, with editorial writer Gerard Baker running a column attacking Biden for blaming Putin for recent inflation; an editorial echoing the one it ran days earlier, but this time more specific because recycling ideas is easy: Whitmer Wants Higher Gas Prices. Another editorial praised Joe Manchin for opposing Sarah Bloom Raskin’s appointment to the Fed because praising fossil fuel millionaires is important content; and a final editorial calling on Biden to deregulate the fossil fuel industry, just in case anyone wasn’t sure where the paper stood in relation the industry (under its boots, tongue out). 

The next day the Journal ran a piece blaming climate policy for oil and gas prices, and another dancing on Raskin’s Fed appointment grave. (The sole exception to the onslaught of climate lies on the WSJ opinion page the entire month was an op-ed on March 2nd rebutting the industry’s false attacks against Raskin, whose mere nomination is still cited as a reason for high fuel prices.)

On March 17th, the WSJ opinion page featured yet another combo of Biden/climate attacks and oil/gas defense. And on the 20th, it gave space to some Republicans to complain about the SEC’s overdue decision to require companies to disclose climate risks, which it followed up with an editorial on the 21st making the same points, because propaganda and disinformation is only effective when repeated. That’s why we’ll breeze past the last bunch, as they’re largely repeats, like an energy lawyer shamelessly using Ukraine to attack FERC, and the closing act, stalwart climate disinfo pro Bjorn Lomborg. 

Halfway through April, and the Journal appears back on pace for more like 18 disinfo opinion pieces this month, suggesting we’re past the peak for the Wall Street Journal’s Putin-excusing and petro-praising propaganda push. 
 

We’ll call it a Special Disinformation Operation. And unlike Putin’s so-called Special Military Operation, this one might be succeeding.
https://newsletter.climatenexus.org/ripples-from-russias-war-will-set-off-a-climate-damaging-wave

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May 25, 2022




MONEY QUOTE:

"As InfluenceMap's analysis reveals," Clean Creatives founder Christine Arena said, "the kind of climate disinformation proliferating since the invasion of Ukraine is more misleading, widespread, and dangerous" than traditional climate denial, and this version is happening "with direct participation from 🦖😈💰industry CEOs and a nearer-term impact on public policy.”

Read more:
NOAA forecasts busy, dangerous hurricane season

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September 22, 2022

Manchin Fossil 🦖 Fuel 💰 Streamlining Bill Panned By Dems 🤔, GOP 🤔: Coal millionaire and West Virginia senator Joe Manchin III released his long-awaited bill on Wednesday to streamline the construction of fossil fuel projects including methane gas pipelines.
House Natural Resources Committee Chair Raul Grijalva: The bill resembled a draft that had been leaked months ago. 📢 The very fact that this fossil fuel brainchild is being force-fed into must-pass government funding speaks to its unpopularity. I don’t want this.
The bill was promised to Manchin by Sen. Majority Leader 🐍 Chuck Schumer during the negotiation of the Inflation Reduction Act. Manchin has insisted the legislation be attached to a government funding bill, setting up the prospect of a government shutdown. The bill would require the approval of the beleaguered Mountain Valley Pipeline, a provision on which Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine was not consulted and to which he would not support because his constituents "have felt ignored" by the opaque process, the Virginia Mercury reported. “[The Mountain Valley pipeline section] is completely unacceptable,” he told reporters Wednesday night per E&E News. “I will do everything I can to 🦅 oppose it.”

Multiple Democratic senators have stated Manchin's fossil fuel streamlining bill should not be attached to a government funding package and Kaine joins Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in opposing it even if it is. Manchin has said he is seeking support from at least 20 🐘 GOP senators for the legislation which he says 🦖 Republicans have wanted for years and told reporters Tuesday “There’s no reason Republicans shouldn’t support it.”

Republicans have responded cooly to the bill, however, instead Manchin's fellow West Virginian senator, Republican Shelley Moore Capito, has released a far more aggressive bill to slash regulations on fossil fuel extraction and transportation. The 🦕 White House said Wednesday it supports Manchin's legislation . (Manchin bill & reception: E&E News, Washington Post $, E&E News, CNN, Politico, The Hill, Roll Call, New York Times $, The Hill, Houston Chronicle, Reuters, The Hill, National Journal, E&E News; MVP & Kaine opposition: Virginia Mercury, WFXR; Capito: Politico Pro $; Substantive details: E&E $)

Amnesty Accuses Egypt Of 'Shiny Cover-Up' Of Human Rights Violations: A second major international human rights group in less than two weeks accused Egypt of trying to conceal a decade's worth of “unrelenting violations of human rights” ahead of COP27 in November. Amnesty International, in a report released Wednesday, outlined crackdowns on dissent and individual freedoms, including the imprisonment of political opponents and journalists over the last ten years. It also detailed a "shiny cover-up" on the part of the el-Sissi administration intended to accrue goodwill from foreign governments and financial institutions ahead of the UN climate conference. (AP)




In the summer of 2022, a heat wave broke records across Europe, bringing unprecedented temperatures and drought worse than any in at least 500 years. Thousands died, wildfires burned out of control, and the companies complicit or causing the climate crisis were busy posting through it. 

Unsurprisingly, they weren't owning up to the impacts of their profits. Instead, as a new report from Geoffrey Supran and the Algorithmic Transparency Institute documents, they were distracting the public with posts about sports, using images of nature and diverse communities to improve their public image. 

The analysts looked at the social media output of 22 European companies across three sectors: fossil fuel companies like Shell and Total, airline industry players like Air France and Lufthansa, and car companies like BMW and Mercedes-Benz. The research examined 2,416 posts from 375 social media accounts run by these companies across five platforms- Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter and TikTok. 

They found that during the climate-driven extreme weather of the summer, "the 22 companies remained silent about climate change in the examined posts, with only a negligible handful (0.3%) making explicit reference to 'climate change' or 'global warming'." 

But they weren't being quiet. Instead, they found "that two-thirds (67%) of the 22 companies’ posts communicate a narrative of ‘Green Innovation’" which "avoids directly addressing climate change while nonetheless presenting companies as environmentally-conscious, engaged in or committed to low- carbon technologies and/or technological innovation." 

Another one in five of the posts "offer a narrative of ‘Misdirection’" which "uses messaging about sports, fashion, and social causes to direct attention away from firms’ core business roles and responsibilities."

Additionally, they "also show that a number of companies variously leverage imagery of nature, female- presenting people, non-binary-presenting people, non-Caucasian-presenting people, young people, experts, sportspeople, and celebrities to strengthen their messages of greenwashing and misdirection." 

The consequences of climate change, which Europeans were experiencing over the summer, "were never communicated (0%) by any industry." That said, they also avoided the explicit denial of claiming climate change isn't real or human-caused, and didn't attack the science, scientists or activists calling for climate action, but that's not surprising given that such toxic denial is why they covertly fund front groups to spread it, instead of tainting their brand with it.

What they DID post, though, was content that the report describes as its titular "Three shades of greenwashing": the idea that "green innovation" will save us, that other problems are more important, and that business-as-usual with its "visuals and language fetishizing luxury and performance, with no consideration of sustainability." 

And as much as the text, the imagery plays an important role, something these companies know and exploit by something known as "nature-rinsing", or more formally as "executional greenwashing." The report explains that "these findings demonstrate a systematic use of Nature/Environment visuals in fossil fuel interests’ social media posts to strengthen their ‘green’ messaging." 

Similarly,"fossil fuel interests variously leverage visuals of select demographics - sportspeople, celebrities, young people, and racial minorities - to misdirect audience’s attention with discourses about sports, social causes, and fashion and design." 

For example "car manufacturers and airlines additionally show more racially diverse casts to misdirect with posts about social goods such as LGBTQIA+ issues and Women’s rights" but "when car companies post about sports, particularly motor racing, the trend is reversed, with more people - including sportspeople - being all- Caucasian." 

"All told," lead researcher Geoffrey Supran tweeted, "our data show that 😈 fossil fuel interests are engaged in strategic brand positioning to establish themselves as 😇 green, 😇 innovative, & 😇charitable.  These subtle, 😈 systematic trends have been hiding in plain sight for too long."

 
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November 8, 2022


SNIPPETS:

While we usually write these columns with little more at our disposal than our wits and a web browser, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue has developed an incredible dashboard that pulls data from some 3,000 social media accounts, millions of posts, and 250 media outlets, and we're working with them to produce regular bulletins about 🦖😈🐍 climate disinformation. ... ...

There's also a section on the Russia-Ukraine narrative, some tracking of over a million dollars in climate disinformation ads on Facebook, primarily from API's Energy Citizens 😇 front 🦖 group and their "American Oil First" framing, "a thinly-veiled dog whistle to former President Trump's anti-immigrant "America First" policy" and a section on how Elon Musk's Twitter takeover showed how right-wing 😈 "comedians" strategically use humor to spread disinformation.

Read more:
https://newsletter.climatenexus.org/20221108-cop27d02-deforestation-and-drought-world-cup-math-draft-nca

"On closer inspection, countless ambitious-sounding pledges ring hollow. Many commitments are little more than vague declarations of intent. Others hide huge chunks of a company’s CO2 pollution, or rely on dubious promises to compensate continued emissions, while lacking efforts to reduce fossil fuel use."



Dossiers   

CLEW focus: 'Climate neutral' products and companies - Greenwashing or sign of serious action?


Factsheets 🧐

How to unpick a company net zero target in 7 steps

 
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January 19, 2023


If you bought something and it didn't work, you probably wouldn't buy it again the next year, or the year after, or every year for the foreseeable future. The 🦖 fossil fuel industry is no different—if it wasn't seeing a return on its annual investment in disinformation, it wouldn't keep spending billions of dollars on climate disinformation 🐍 campaigns. 

The explosion of support for gas stoves in Republican circles is the latest example of how the fossil fuel industry's near-century of public relations expenditures has created a surround-sound media machine to manufacture backlash against even the barest hint of a pending regulation. 

In a disinfo-free world, Republicans eager to show their support for rural and working-class communities wouldn't be so quick to lend their support to gas stoves because they're primarily used in urban areas, where Democratic voters are concentrated. Furthermore, gas stoves are often promoted by home renovation shows as a luxury good for the fanciest of kitchens. So, since new gas stoves are either a prized feature of lavish, elite kitchens or a common fixture in the poor Black and Hispanic communities that the GOP spends more time attacking than defending, the Republican gaslighting on gas stoves seems to make little sense. 

The fervent worship of gas stoves seems especially nonsensical since Consumer Reports finds that the innovative alternatives to gas stoves are so much better in every conceivable way: “Induction ranges and cooktops in particular often heat the fastest, simmer steadily, and provide quicker temperature changes when you adjust a burner.” (They also won't melt plastic measuring cups when you turn on the wrong burner…)

But this pro-gas hullabaloo begins to make sense when you consider the fact that the fossil fuel industry has been lying about 🦕 methane gas for nearly a hundred years, as Rebecca Leber explained in Mother Jones. In the 1930s, "the 🦕😈 industry embraced the term 'natural 😇 gas', which gave the impression that its product was cleaner than any other fossil fuel" and promoted the now-ubiquitous catchphrase "cooking with gas". 

The 🦕 methane gas industry has been at it ever since. As recent reporting at the New York Times exposed, the industry is sponsoring TV shows to promote gas stoves, part of the hundreds of millions the industry has spent on disinfo organizations and the billions that it has spent on trade associations and public relations.

So when a federal regulator suggested looking into gas stove regulations, especially given the latest study showing that gas stoves cause as much asthma in children as second-hand smoke, the fossil-funded Republicans snapped into action, and the industry barely even needed to misrepresent past studies and activate its faux-media outlets and propagandists — though it still did. 

The Wall Street Journal's opinion page, the crown jewel of climate disinformation media, was true to form with its "Biden is Coming for Your Gas Stove" editorial, falsely ginning up fears that jackbooted Big Government agents were on their way to your kitchen. Professional PR people like Alex Epstein also sent talking points, but that was little more than an opening of the other barn door after the horses had already run all around the farm. The Daily Caller discovered a so-called 'conflict of interest' and did a story attempting to make the fact that the study was funded by an advocacy group into a controversy, which is an interesting frame for an organization funded to be a conservative advocacy group posing as a media outlet. 

Overall, the Right generated plenty of noise but not much heat, and that's sort of the point. Make enough noise so that regulators, who have been aware of gas stoves' health risks for decades, will be too scared to protect the public from that particular source of pollution. 

Because it's certainly not about the quality of 🦕 gas stoves. 

Literally the only thing Consumer Reports found that gas stoves did better than electric stoves is that they have a scary flame: "The visual feedback provided by a flame growing and shrinking as you adjust a burner is valuable when gauging heat." (A problem that was literally solved in 2015.)

So if you're so 🐵 dumb you need to see a 🔥 flame to know the stove is on, then 🐘🦖😈 Republicans have your back, and your stove. Hopefully it's worth the asthma and the climate-killing emissions.
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