When Professor Christian Downey appeared before a Senate inquiry into climate and energy misinformation, he warned that Australia is facing coordinated campaigns that aim not to debate solutions, but distall them.
There is a network of organizations that exist to influence the public, influence the media, influence political arenas like our Parliament, to stop or reverse effective climate action.
Professor Downey has spent years inside boardrooms and the lobbying world studying how these campaigns are built, tracing the billions spent on messaging, and outlining what he calls the climate Obstruction Playbook, a playbook developed in Washington but now echoed here in Australia.
Short answer is, I think we're scratching the surface as much more to research, but there's an overwhelming body of empirical evidence now about these actors, about the financial flows.
I'm Ruby Jones, and you're listening to seven am today. Professor at a and u's School of Regular and Global Governance and director of the Governing Energy Transition Lab, Christian Downey on how the Obstruction Playbook has been so successful in stopping action on climate change. It's Thursday, October twenty three, so Christian. You've spent a lot of time investigating the lobbyists and the tactics that they use behind a lot of the misinformation that we see.
Around climate change. So where did that start for you?
Well, I guess for more than a decade, I've been thinking about the politics of climate change. I've been working in think chains and government and universities. I think the one thing that stood out as I thought more about this issue is, you know, because of the path breaking work of climate scientists, we have a good understanding of why the world is heating up, what the impacts are.
Because of the work.
Of engineers and entrepreneurs, we have all those all the technologies we need to cut pollution and stabilize our climate. And because of the world of economists and public policy experts, we know most of the policy solutions, and yet we continue to fail to implement ambitious climate policy.
So is that kind of puzzling question about why are we failing? Why aren't we.
Reducing emissions like scientists are asking. A major fact that's become clearer over the years is because of the efforts by groups and individuals in society to obstruct actual and climate change, that is, to block and to pose policies and our failure to understand that and then of course to overcome it.
Well, let's talk a bit more about those people and groups and what you've come to learn about them. I know that you went to Washington to meet some of these people, So when you were there in the room with them, tell me what you've learned about who they are, how these campaigns are built, how they come about.
Yeah.
So I've spent a number of stints over in the US trying to study our climate and energy policy was shaped, interviewing senior executives, lobbyists from all the major fossil fuel industries countless ours now, you know, waiting in the foyers of big office buildings, going through security up into the corporate boardrooms, and sitting in the offices of.
Major coal corporations, executives.
From oil and gas corporations down in Houston, their lobbyists in Washington, d C.
But I've also spent time with lobbyists in.
The soul a wind Hydrosector and you know, what you really find out is that a lot of these groups are engaged.
So this is part of how policy works in that town.
There are engaged in sophisticated political campaigns to try and shape policy outcomes, to block policy outcomes, often particularly around climate change.
And so being in those rooms and seeing how this works behind the scenes, was there anything that you witness that really suppose crystallized the playbook that's been created and used here?
You know.
The thing that really I guess crystallized it for me was probably over a couple of conversations that when the lobbyists I had come to meet described, you know, we got a lot of detail how they were plotting strategies. Often that involved developing sophisticated public relations campaigns, but they're often designed to kill off the next piece of climate legislation. Maybe it was attempts to limit emissions from coal. Of course,
this isn't new, you know. We know fossil fuel companies around the world have funded multi billion dollar campaigns since at least the nineteen eighties to deny the existence of climate change. They find a television campaigns, online campaigns, front groups, consultancy reports, and many others, and it's worked. And I think, you know, through these conversations, it really became apparent to me, and that's what me and many other researchers have been working on for some time.
Now, I'm so curious. Tell me more about these campaigns, what the strategy is.
Well, when you're thinking about, for example, the campaigns run by corporations, often they have very long time horizons. They're thinking what do they want to achieve over the next decade and maybe over a decade, it is simply to you know, store climate action as long as possible, because they want to keep selling oil or gas or coal. They're simply just motivated by commercial interests. How those campaigns play out, Well, there's a lot to it. There's lobbying,
there's public relations. There's often litigation. There's campaigns to cast doubt on the role of science and scientists. I'll give you one example, perhaps on public relations, which is really i think a key part of you know, what you might call the climate obstruction playbook. So, public relations and advertising firms have long been paid to craft political campaigns for oil and gas companies, among others. Now these campaigns, they involve more than simply running a few television ads
for a corporate client. Often affirm will do polling, they'll do focus groups, they'll do media and social media campaigns. Sometimes they'll even undertake astroturfing, and by astroturfing, what I'm referring to is creating fake community groups to give the impression of widespread support or widespread opposition for an issue.
Okay, so pr companies are being paid to come up with these campaigns, But how much is being spent on this and what does the money trail look like?
Yeah?
I think this is one of the fascinating questions, right, like if you follow the money of what's actually happening. So what we did to try and answer that question and follow the money trail was I can't say it was the most exciting task all the time, but we were looking at their tax records.
Sounds exciting to me.
That's a good way to kill a dinner party conversation and you start talking about tax records. But what we tried to do was look at ninety trade associations. These are kind of industry lobby groups, and see go over a decade, how much were they spending on politics. So the first thing we did was just figure out how much money they got. And these are huge sums of money, even in the US context. So ninety trade associations working on climate issues over a decade had twenty five point
six billion US just in revenues. Wow, lots of money. And then the next question is, you know, are they spending all of that on politics?
How much? Not all of it?
In fact it's only thirteen percent, but thirteen percent of that is three point four billion much of it. In fact, two point two billion of that was going to public relations advertising campaigns. Another seven hundred and thirty million was going to lobbing. Now, this is big in the US, but it's not peculiar to the US. Of course, similar things happen here too.
Yeah. So if those are the sorts of sums that we know are being spent in the US, do we know how that compares to what might be happening here in Australia.
Well, part of the problem is we just don't have as good transparency or disclosure practices here in Australia. So we know that groups like say the Minerals Council of Australia, which has probably done a lot to what climate policy or at least advocate against client policy here in Australia, does spend significant sums of money on political campaigns. They
run television and other campaigns. These things cost a lot of money, but we aren't able to follow the money trailer the same way that we are in the US, and that's.
One of the issues I think here is just the lack of transparency.
Coming up. How Australia could fix its transparency problem.
Look, as a social scientist, it's notoriously difficult to try and reach very robust conclusions on the effectiveness of one particular strategy.
But I think we can.
Safely assume that one of the main reasons that we're failing to implement perhaps climate policies that are consistent with what climate science has been calling for is because of the activities of some of these organizations' is not beyond.
Because you just recently gave evidence to a Senate inquiry into climate and energy misinformation. Can you tell me about that inquiry and why you decided to speak now?
Yeah, So in the last couple of months there's a cross party inquiries set up. It's called the Senate Select Committee on Information, Integrity and Climate Change Energy. But basically what they're interested in is looking at how is misinformation around climate change effecting Australian politics, affecting public debate.
So it's a tried and true playbook which has been tested overseas, particularly in the US. And is there any reason to believe that this isn't now being tested here in Australia or do you think that the learnings have already come across.
No.
I believe those types of campaigns are being run here currently. It did have senators from across all parties concerned about this issue. You're wanting to know more about it and really gathering information about the extent of these campaigns.
How they're playing out in Australia.
So we'll expect the committee to report in February and hopefully they produce some strong recommendations that the Government decides to act on.
And when we talk about misinformation in climate change and the climate wars, and you know the media's role in this, this has been going on for a long time.
So has something changed recently? Is what we're seeing different now?
Well, I don't think anything significantly change. It kind of happens with peaks and troughs. Often if there's a big climate policy put forward, such as say a carbon price, we saw a lot of lobbying in that period. But one thing that we have had in the last few months is a debate around what Australia's greenhouse gas target is. You know, how much should Australia reduce its emissions by.
So for the last few months we've seen a lot of political media attacks on renewable energy and climate action here and I think these are straight out of the climate obstruction playable. There is a passway for Australia to be really ambitious in terms of the target that it sets, but it is expensive and it's difficult, and we need to make sure that we're very clear eyed in terms
of the approach that we take. So we saw the Business Council Australia, one of the biggest business groups in the country, released modeling We want Australia to be ambitious, but we need to make sure that we're inherently practical. Along the way, it was the Business Council a chief executive Brand Black, who also says in action on climate change is no longer you know warning the government that you know, if you take a particular target, this might
cost a lot of money. Analysts say if the climate target is to reduce emissions by more than sixty percent, it will require more than four hundred billion dollars in new capital investment. We saw Australian scientists who'd actually prepared the nation's first national climate risk assessment showing the devastating consequences that we're going to see from climate change and are already seeing if you, you.
Know, have experienced the bushfires or the flooding of recent years.
The report wardens natural disasters will cost the economy forty billion dollars annually by twenty fifty.
We saw them being you know, a lot of scare mongering about them on the front pages of Australian newspapers.
By the twenty sixties, climate change will allegedly rob us of two point seven million work days a year. But here's the thing. Governments can't even project next year's budget deficit.
They so a lot of these kind of examples are very much consistent with the empirical evidence that we've gathered from around the world about how these groups obstruct climate action.
And when you read those sorts of reports and the media reporting on them, you hear these lines, like the one from the Business Council of Australia that we support ambitious but quote achievable targets. So what should we be taking from that kind of messaging?
I think The.
First thing is people should always be wary of information that's spread by organizations such as an industry group that have a commercial interesting issue. So you know, if you've got a gas company out there saying, oh, renewable energy is more expensive than gas, well you've got to remember that the gas company is going to make more money if people believe that. So it's the same for industry
groups like the Business Council. I think the next time you see an industry groups such as them or the Minerals Council out there complaining about government regulation or claiming we need achievable and issues targets, we've just got to remember it's not us they represent, it's the interests of their members. Associations have a legitimate role to advocate on behalf of corporations, but we should never confuse this with what's in the interest of the public.
And you mentioned this issue around transparency in Australia, Tommy, I suppose how you think that issue can be looked at and changed.
Well, research suggests that I guess if you're going to combat climate change information, there's a whole range of things you could do. In its estimated before the Senate we suggested a few things, not an exhaustive list by any means, but one is just to enhance individual immunity. Often people talk about public inoculation much like a vaccine, right. The idea is that you can weaken the impact of misinformation if you just make people aware about it, draw their
attention to who's doing it, what's their financial support. Another thing, of course you can do, which we've spoken about, is making sure that the government thinks about putting in place regulations that forces some of these actors like a trade association to disclose, you know, where they're getting their money from, what are they spending it on, so we can shine a light on some.
Of these political practices.
We're also going to, of course, need more systemic changes and that often it might involve regulators like the Atriable CE or a SIK or others holding organizations to account that engage in green washing. So there's a whole range of things we can do, and of course at the individual level we also we all need busy lives, but to the extent we can checking verifying source of something, particularly before we go and share it on social media.
Well, Christian, thank you so much for talking with me.
A pleasure, thanks for having me.
Also in the news, the Prime Minister has confirmed the government's overhaul of Australia's environment laws will not include a climate trigger that could block coal and gas projects. The government says the laws will instead force major projects to report their carbon emissions, as well as provide plans for how they intend to reduce emissions to net zero by twenty fifty. The country's biggest polluters are already required to report and cut emissions under the safeguard mechanism.
The new laws would expand that to.
Include projects expected to emit more than one hundred thousand tons annually. And refugee advocates have intensified calls for support for Australian visa holders trapped in Gaza due to closed borders, and estimated six hundred to seven hundred people in Gaza hold Australian visas, according to the Home Affairs Minister, although the Home Affairs Department says it's unsure.
How many of those people are still alive.
Defat says the Australian government is doing all it can to support Australian's permanent residents and their immediate family members still in Gaza, who wish to depart, but says exiting Gaza remains difficult, and Ruby Jones this is seven AM.
Thanks for listening.