Hi, it's Greg Dalton. I'd like to hear your comments on the show, topics we should cover and guess suggestions. You can reach me at Greg at climatewe dot org. This is Climate One. I'm Greg Dalton. Spreading climate misinformation is a favorite tool of fossil fuel companies looking to protect their bottom line.
Whether they're arguing climate change isn't real, therefore we should mact, or climate change isn't caused by humans, therefore we should mact. Well solutions weren't work, therefore we should mact.
Companies use advertising and mass media to spread these messages, and in some cases want to defend their actions as protected free speech.
This idea that you know, if it's something that connects to policy I want to see, then it doesn't have to play by the same rules.
But we can counter these false arguments through critical thinking and education.
If we want a public who are resilient against misinformation, we need to build up their ability to spot these types of fallacies.
Fossil fuel corporations have spent decades casting doubt and public about climate facts that their own scientists validated in company research. These tactics have included a concerted effort to recast political speech banned and regulated in some contexts as protected free speech, giving corporations more leeway and broadcasting their messages. This week's episode is a special collaboration with Amy Westervelt, an award
winning journalist and creator of the podcast Drilled. She brings us the backstory of the free speech argument fossil fuel companies are now using to support their efforts to spread climate misinformation.
Most people think the debate over corporate free speech in America started with the Citizens United case in twenty ten.
Mister Olson, are you taking the position that there is no difference in the First Amendment rights of an individual? A corporation, after all, is not endowed by its creator with inalienable rights. So is there any distinction that Congress could draw between corporations and natural human beings for purposes of campaign finance?
What the Court has said in the First Amendment context New York Times versus Sullivan, Gross Chain versus Associated Press, and over and over again, is that corporations are persons entitled to protection under the First Amendment.
That was the lead Justice Ruth Peter Ginsberg questioning Attorney Ted Olsen with the firm Gibson Dunn who argued and won that case. Just a quick recap here. The case was about a film that had been made criticizing Hillary Clinton the first time she tried to run for president. It was funded by a cohort of right wing organizations and corporations, including coke industries, so the Federal Election Commission had said that the movie couldn't screen without identifying itself
as campaign material and noting its funders. The filmmakers and their attorneys argue that this violated their free speech rights, and they won, opening the door to unlimited corporate funding of political propaganda what's generally referred to as simply dark money. But Citizens United was not the first battle in the war over corporate free speech, nor was it the last. The story actually begins back in the late nineteen sixties
with Mobile Oil and its issue advertising program. It was a multifaceted strategy that included to finding a personality for Mobile, aligning the company with cultural institutions and advertising ideas rather than just gas. The strategy came from Mobile's VP of Public Affairs, Herb Schmertz, as a way to counter widespread criticism of oil companies in the press, and it was championed by the company's CEO, Rawley Warner. Here's Schmertz later in life describing Mobil's personality, Well.
It was multifast. It was a personality where we believe very strongly about the importance of public policies. Secondly, we believe fervently that as a sort of a custodian of a large corporation and the custodians of vast resources and employment and everything else, that we were not doing our job if we did not participate in the marketplace of ideas. Third part of our personality was we believed in that a democracy is to host of a group of free institutions.
We believe in free markets, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, academic freedom, freedom to organize and participate in union activities.
In addition to sponsoring Masterpiece Theater, starting in nineteen seventy, Mobile worked with The New York Times to create the advertorial. Every week, Mobile ran a piece in the Times op ed section espousing some idea or another. Here's Schmertz describing them on the show Open Mind.
Heb, thanks for joining me today.
Great pleasure to be here, Dick.
I want to turn as quickly as possible to a new fairy tale, the mobile ad or op ed piece or editorial call, or what you will that. We call them pamphlets pamphlets, but they appear in newspapers.
Yes, pamphlets, but they appear in newspapers. In the early nineteen seventies, Schmertz and Warner figured they were having such great luck with the newspap for advertorials and their various PBS specials that it was time to get mobile content onto commercial TV. They reached out to CBS, ABC and
NBC to buy time, but got a surprise. This time, CBS and ABC gave them an emphatic no. They described what mobil was trying to do with their ads as propaganda and claimed it violated various ethics policies and maybe even some FCC laws. Schmertz went one by one to independence stations to place his TV advertorials instead. Here's a taste of one of them from a mobile information center.
Good evening, I'm Dick Calliman.
Most Americans have an exaggerated idea about oil company profits.
Warner and Schmertz went on the offensive in general too. They wrote letters to the network heads. They placed multiple New York Times advertorials about how the big TV networks were trying to silence them, and they gave speeches at various business groups about how this was a huge threat to corporate rights. It was the first time any company had talked about such a thing as corporate free speech the seventies.
There was a lot of public opinion that they would have been concerned about.
This is Robert Kerr, a media law professor and researcher at Oklahoma State University. He's written two books about the evolution of corporate free speech and mobile's role in it. He's talking here about the situation that oil companies found themselves in during the early seventies. There had been the big, high profile oils bill in California in nineteen sixty nine, and then in nineteen seventy three, the oil embargo hit in response to the US support of Israel during the
Arab Israeli War. Arab members of OPEK put a ban on exporting oil to the US. The effect was immediate.
You know, I lived through that, and I remember it
was people were scared all of a sudden. You know, this something that there were used to going to the pump and gas pump and getting for almost nothing was not only going way up in price, but you know, you might not even be able to buy again, And often you couldn't In the same the gas stations would run out of or you'd have a really long line, you'd wait for hours or and then then maybe you still couldn't buy any So, yeah, the public was really alarmed.
And uh, particularly the Carter administration in the late seventies seemed to be a lot less favorable toward the old companies in general. You know, Jimmy Carter and his administrations seemed willing to hold their feet to the fire.
Anger and bewilderment are growing. Is more and more Americans cope with gasoline lines and empty pumps. Good evening for millions of Americans, this may be the worst weekend they've ever faced for finding gasoline to give them the autumnabile freedom they take as they're due. Gasoline shortages are spreading across the country. Odd even service gasoline lines and closed gas stations are becoming increasingly common, and the news from overseas tonight gives no promise of quick relief.
People were scared and angry, and a lot of those emotions were being directed at oil companies. For mobile access to the press and the ability to get out its version of the story was critical to the company's ability to weather this storm, and that refusal from the commercial stations to run its ads that was a huge potential threat to that strategy. Mobile toyed with the idea of filing a case themselves that would formally establish the corporate
right to free speech, but it worried that that could backfire. Instead, the company started filing a meekis in other cases, and Mobile.
Was one of the leading corporations to fight for that legal right.
This is doctor Robert Brule, an environmental sociologist at Brown University.
There was a pretty big effort to get a Supreme Court ruling that basically supported corporate speech and the right of corporations to do advertising of their not just product advertising, but of their positions.
That Supreme Court case he's talking about was First National Bank of Boston versus Ballati. First National, along with two other banks and three corporations, had wanted to spend money to publicize their opposition to a ballot initiative that would permit Massachusetts to implement a graduated income tax. The Attorney General of Massachusetts said that violated a state law against funding campaigns that would influence the outcome of a vote. The bank sued, and the case went to the Supreme
Court in nineteen seventy seven. The ruling came out in nineteen seventy eight. Here's Supreme Court Justice Lewis A. Powell giving that ruling.
The First Amendment's primary concern, and therefore the courts concern always has been the preservation of free and uninhibited dissemination of information and ideas. If the restrictive view of corporate speech taken by the Massachusetts Court were accepted, government would have the power to deprive society of the views of corporations.
Paula is also credited with crafting the Powell Memorandum, which outlined the pro corporate strategy that would guide the Republican Party from the early nineteen eighties to today. BLODI is generally considered the precursor to Citizens United and Mobile was hugely influential in securing that ruling. Here's Robert kerr Agan.
You know, it actually was very close when it first got to the Supreme Court. The justices could have gone the other way. Justice Pale kind of really finessed it and got that first President setting case Blodi into the case law, and then later when it got to Citizens United, Justice Kennedy kind of ignores the overall body of case law and he goes back to Ballotti twenty four times. It's really unusual to cite one case twenty four times.
So why does this matter today? Well, in addition to changing public discourse forever, these cases also lead the groundwork for the argument that oil companies are using today to
defend climate disinformation. In some two dozen climate liability cases and some additional fraud cases, the oil companies are being accused with misleading the public on climate The lawyer appointed to speak for all of the companies in these cases is Ted Boutros, who's not only a well known First Amendment attorney, but also a partner at Gibson Dunn, the firm that's cured that when in Citizens United back in twenty ten. Here's Boutro speaking on the Climate One podcast in twenty twenty.
I do want to take head on the notion that the plaintiff's lawyers in a lot of the climate change cases have been advocating is that the oil and gas companies were they had secret knowledge and they were then putting out misinformation, and they tried to analogize it to tobacco and other areas. It just it doesn't make any sense because it was well known. The federal government knew the problems of climate change, the potential causes, and knew that there was an issue here.
Other attorneys are making this argument on behalf of the oil majors as well. When it exhausted all options to dismiss the fraud case against it in Massachusetts, Exon Mobile filed an anti slapsuit against the Attorney General's office there, claiming that the fraud case against it amounted to an effort to quash the company's First Amendment rights. SLAP stands
for strategic litigation against public participation. Anti SLAP statutes like the one in Massachusetts, we're meant to protect the press and civil society groups from corporations that wanted to silence critics. But these days it's become equally common for corporations to use these statutes to swat away legal complaints. Here's attorney Justin Anderson, a partner with Paul Weiss, that's Exon Mobil's law firm, at a March twenty twenty two hearing.
The alleged misrepresentations are the statements that Exon Mobile has made about its views on climate policy on energy policy. The anti slap Statute provides a mechanism to have a case that is brought against someone for petitioning activity dismissed at the outset, before burdensome discovery is imposed on the party, before we have our executives come in to give testimony and depositions, before we're dragged into a courtroom where we have to defend ourselves.
That phrase petitioning activity is really key here because what it means in Plean English is political speech. And the argument ex On Mobile is making here and that Boutros has been making as well, is that because the oil company's campaigns on climate are political speech, not commercial speech, they are protected by the First Amendment. It's the sort of argument Herbschmertz would have been proud of. Here. He is defending corporate pr In the eighties.
Government intrusion into the marketplace of ideas would limit our freedom of speech and distort the selection of our leaders. People feel frustrated when the press doesn't deliver a complete story or an accurate story, so they bring in people who have the ability to add to the spectrum of facts, opinions, views, philosophies so that the public can get a more balanced view today.
The groundwork that Schmirtz and Warner laid with Bloody, various other cases, with issue advertising, and with their general advocacy for corporate free speech over the decades is the foundation for Big Oil's argument about climate denial. It couldn't be fraud. It was political speech protected by the free speech rights they've spent the past fifty years securing.
You're listening to a Climate one conversation about tactics for spreading climate misinformation coming up. One way to break down misleading reasoning.
You can just take a flawed argument and transplant that logic into a parallel situation, usually the most absurd and extreme situation you can think of, and then use the same logic, and that makes it very clear and engaging in concrete when you're trying to explain the flawed logic to people.
That's up next, when Climate one continues. This is Climate one. I'm Greg Dalton, and today we're talking about climate misinformation and how to challenge it. John Cook is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Climate Change Communication Research Hub at Nash University in Australia. He focuses on using critical thinking to build resilience against misinformation. He says the most common climate misinformation in the US centers on climate policy being harmful, expensive, or ineffective.
Ultimately, its goal is to delay climate action and maintain the status quo. And you will find that no matter what the argument is, the conclusion is always the same, whether they're arguing climate change isn't real, therefore we shouldn act, or climate change isn't caused by humans, therefore we should act, or solutions won't work, therefore we should act. It's always that end thing. And so it's about delaying action by reducing public support for climate action, and there are various
pathways to do that. Wine is confusing people about the science. A famous two thousand and two memo written by a political strategist, Frank Lumps, where he basically argued for politicians who were trying to win the public debate about climate policy. He said, if you want to win the debate about climate policy and basically stop climate action, cast out on
the scientific consensus that humans are causing global warming. If the public get confused about the consensus, the attitudes about the policy change accordingly, right.
Which hearkens that confusion and doubt. Good course goes back to the tobacco company saying doubt is our product. There's been a decade's long effort by old companies and others to cast doubt on climate science to allow them to continue to profit. The strategy has taken many forms and evolved over time. Can you walk us through that evolution from deny, dismiss, delay, deflect.
Yeah, there has been a gradual shift. We've done analysis over the last twenty years of climate misinformation, and the biggest shift we're seeing is a gradual transition from science misinformation to solutions misinformation. As the scientific evidence has gotten stronger and stronger and harder to deny, it becomes untenable to keep using these same zombie arguments that we've been reading on blogs and on social media for many years.
And so now they're arguing against climate solutions, arguing that climate policy might be harmful, arguing that renewables won't work, and just more subtle arguments than the usual. Climate change is a hoax type misinformation.
Right, that's no longer tenable in a world where there's floods and fires that are rampant.
I think what's most potent right now is cultural war type misinformation arguments that other people who care about climate change, who are trying to get climate action, painting them as different to us, and they're trying to take away our lifestyle or impinge on our freedom, and generally just trying to make the climate issue more tribal. The more tribal and polarizer becomes, the harder it is to get progress.
And some of the techniques employed by misinformation you cite are magnified minority, cherry picking, false dichotomy. How are those employed? And give some examples of each one.
If you could so. Attacking the scientific consensus on climate change has been a common strategy over the last few decades, and one way to do that is the use of magnified minority. In other words, take a small group and make them look much bigger than they actually are and much more significant than they really are. And the most popular version of this technique is the Global Warming Petition Project.
This is a website that features thirty one thousand science graduates in the US who've signed a statement saying that humans aren't disrupting climate and the point of this website is to say, hey, look, thirty one thousand people dissent against the consensus. That proves that there isn't a scientific consensus. But when you look at the total number of science graduates in the US, it's millions and millions, and thirty one thousand, while seeming like a big number, is actually
a tiny fraction of a percent. It's magnifying a minority to make them look bigger than they really are.
So policy is harmful? What's that attack?
Usually arguing that climate policy is harmful takes a form of arguing that it's either going to ruin the economy or raise prices for people, and it really depends on the specific policy. But tiply what this does is cherry pigs or oversimplifies the policy. For example, this is a very Australian centric one, but it's the one that immediately
comes to mind. We brought in a carbon price in order to send a signal to the market to transition from fossil fuels to renewables, and this carbon price generated revenue for the government. But all that money was then given back and it was mainly given back to lower income families, and so it was a revenue neutral carbon price, the public shouldn't have any change in their household budget.
But what the misinformation targeting the policy did was say this is putting a price on carbon that's going to raise prices for families, while ignoring that money was going back to families. So usually at tax on climate policy will focus on one part of it, but ignore the the entire policy and the aspects of it that make it work better.
And what are some other non policy attacks on solutions?
The most basic arguments attacking renewables are the sun doesn't shine at night or the wind doesn't always blow, and therefore renewables aren't a reliable source of energy, which ignores again its cherry picking the information because it ignores the
fact that we have battery storage. And also when you have combinations of wind and solar, particularly across a region, wind might not be blowing in one place, but it is at a different place, and when you have a network of renewables, then you get a more reliable source of energy.
And then false dichotomy.
What's an example of that false dichotomy is when you're given two choices and you have to choose one of them when both might be true, or maybe there's a third choice. And the most common example of this in climate change. And this is a little bit technical and complicated, but it's looking at the ice core record. When we look at ice cores going back hundreds of thousands of years in Antarctic ice cores, we see that when temperature goes up, CO two goes up afterwards by several hundred
years roughly. And what that tells us is temperature went up before the CO two and climate denies look at this and say, wow, either temperature drives CO two or CO two drives temperature. You have to choose one or the other. But that's actually a false dichotomy because it's not a choice between one or the other. Both are actually true. Temperature does drive CO two. When it gets warmer, the ocean gives up CO two in the atmosphere, and then when you have more CO two in the atmosphere,
that causes warming because it's a greenhouse gas. Put those two together and you get a reinforcing feedback. And it's actually that reinforcing feedback that pulled the Earth out of ice ages in our past over the last eight hundred thousand years.
John, you've also written about how people often substitute judgment about complex topics such as climate science, with more simple judgments, for example, the character or tribal identity of a person talking about climate science. How does that reliance on shortcuts fuel climate and misinformation.
Yeah, it's important to recognize that all of us are hardwired to make decisions based on snap mental shortcuts or heuristics, and generally it serves us well, that's how we're able to escape a saber toothed tiger jumping out of the bushes or just immediate threats. The problem is, in this modern world, sometimes those mental shortcuts can lead us astray, and it can also make us vulnerable to that arguments or misinformation. And it's an unfortunate reality that the solution
to this problem is critical thinking. We need to be able to get better at spotting misinformation and the spotting attempts to mislead us. What are those different fallacies? Is this argument a false dichotomy or does it use magnified minority or cherry picking or other misleading techniques. If we want a public who are resilient against misinformation, we need to build up their ability to spot these types of fallacies.
Right and sort of complexity can Yeah, we want things, especially these days, we want things that are fast, simple, understandable, and social media often distorts and doing that and distilling things. And I was watching some of your videos online of you kind of dissecting the premise and does the conclusion logically follow the premise, and it all seems very reasonable.
I thought, Yeah, but this is like bringing a knife to a gunfight with and so I'm just curious about your sort of very reasoned approach logic based in an information age where things are viral and fake and spreading so quickly regardless of their veracity.
Yeah, it's really hard. I've struggled with those thoughts and for many years. When we develop this critical thinking approach where you deconstruct arguments into premises and conclusion. I did that work with two critical thinking philosophers. They introduced me to the idea of parallel argumentation. You can explain logical flaws by not You don't have to go into the whole premise, premise, conclusion, logical like is it logically about?
All that kind of analysis. You can just take a flawed argument and transplant that logic into a parallel situation. Usually the most absurd and extreme situation you can think of and then use the same logic, and that makes it very clear and engaging in concrete when you're trying to explain the flawed logic to people. And when they introduced this technique to me, I realized that this was
what late night comedians used every night. They'll say this person said this statement, and well, that's just like being in this situation and then using the same logic. Everyone laughs. They can immediately see that it's wrong and they're entertained. But most importantly, like is the comedian has actually introduced a bit of critical thinking because it's shown a logical
fallacy in a very concrete, engaging way. The beauty of this approach is you can use non polarizing examples to explain how misinformation is misleading or to explain a fallacy.
So let's practice this. If I see the climate's change before, it's changing now it's always been changing. Yeah, climate changes, that's what it does. How would you respond.
That argument is the same logic as saying, well, people have died of natural causes before cigarettes were invented, therefore cigarettes can't cause harmful effects, or people have died of cancer long before cigarettes were invented. Therefore, smoking doesn't cause cancer. It's the same logic, and it commits single cause fallacy, in other words, saying that whatever's whatever caused something in the past must also be causing it now when you can have multiple causes.
Let's try another one. If I say that models are unreliable, oh, climate models, no, they're not accurate.
So actually we're doing an experiment on that now. And so our approach has been to say models are a simplification of reality. They don't capture all of reality, and we use models to get astronauts to the moon. They're simplified versions are reality. Mutant's laws of motion and Newton's laws of gravity simplifications. Models don't need to be perfect in order to give us useful results, and climate models
they're not perfect. They don't capture absolutely everything, but they capture enough to tell us that humans are causing climate change and that climate change has serious impacts.
Many fossil fuel companies now are engaging in what some call greenwashing or climate washing, where they're making net zero commitments and stating that they're working toward climate solutions you mentioned earlier. They are attacking solutions there's other approach, which is there kind of co opting solutions, saying we share the solutions, we're part of the solution.
Yes. Greenwashing is another form of climate misinformation, particularly from industry, and it's a hard one. Often you need a lot of background information in order to fact check whether what they're doing is actually helping the environment or whether it's just token behavior in order to portray themselves as being environmental when actually they're actually being quite distractive. But they're
generally speaking. The strategy to counter green washing is the same as the strategy to count other forms of climate misinformation. Learn the techniques and become familiar with them so that when you see them in some corporate advertising, that's a
red flag. The techniques of green washing, just a few of them that come immediately to mind is vague terms or kind of meaningless terms, so they would say it's environmentally friendly, or they'll they'll just use either colors or imagery or environmental sounding words, but it's all very loosey goosey. The other red flag is when they're a company that their main bread and of their business is environmentally destructive, and then they talk about something that they're doing that's
environmentally positive. Usually in those cases, what they're spending on this environmental activity is a tiny, tiny fraction of their overall budget.
Yeah, that's the magnified minority. We're spending millions on renewables, but they're spending tens of billions on fossil fuels. Amy Westervelt reported elsewhere in the show that freedom of speech is often viewed as sakra sanct We all know that, and has been used by fossil fuel companies as cover further misinformation campaigns. What are the bigger implications of that in terms of free speech.
It really depends on the specific situation. But generally speaking, my policy or my approach is the antidote to bad speech is more speech or good speech, and that is kind of the principle that informs building public resilience misinformation, so helping people to see through these false arguments from fussil fuel companies or other sources of misinformation.
Right, and we've seen lots of attacks on science, and there seems to be you know, it's related to the distrust of institutions, and that's certainly been rampant during COVID nineteen pandemic and has led to real harm and even the death of some vocal anti vaxxers. If you did research on whether personal experience does that affect people's receptivity to these myths if they know someone who's been affected by climate or know someone who's been affected by COVID.
There's some interesting research done by my colleagues at George Mason University threes of myas at MAYBAC. They looked at how personal experience can influence people's perceptions about climate change and the way to think about these imagine there's three segments of society. Is the alarmed and concern people who are who are on board about climate change. There's the dismissives at the other end, and then there's the mushy middle.
There's the undecideds in the middle. What they found was personal experience about climate change doesn't affect the two groups at the ends. The people who are alarmed stay alarmed. The people who are dismissive stay dismissive. It's the people who are undercided in the middle. When they have personal experience with climate related events like increasing extreme weather, those are the ones whose perceptions about climate change shift.
You work with Facebook to help them combat misinformation, what does that work look like, particularly in the climate realm.
So Facebook launched the Climate Science Center, and initially the Climate Science Center was just about providing authoritative, reliable, accurate facts about climate change, and this was done in response to a lot of criticism they received about letting this information spread on their platform, and a lot of people
were critical that this was not enough, including myself. I didn't have any association with them at the time, so I was quite blunt in saying producing facts while letting misinformation spread was like poisoning someone and then giving them a pamphlet about vegetables. But to their credit, they always recognized that just producing the Climate Science Center was a first step, and their intent was to gradually ratchet up
their ambition and proactiveness in taking on climate misinformation. So their next step was to work with myself and two other climate communication researchers, Tony Lyisowitz and Sander Vandalinden, and we went through the process of looking at the most common myths about climate change, and then we advise them on how to write debunkings about them. It's important when
you're debunking misinformation not just to explain the facts. Although that's crucially important, but also to explain the technique used to distort the facts, so fact myth fallacy. Fact is a general structure that we recommend for debunking misinformation, and they use that. So we produced those with them debunking the most common myths about climate change. Since then, it's been an ongoing collaboration and they're still looking at other
ways to use their platform to count of misinformation. It's been slow, slower than I would have liked, but there has been incremental progress. Misinformation is a really complicated problem. It involves psychology, culture, technology, science, a whole range of different factors, and we need to be throwing a lot of different tools out it.
John Kirk, thanks for sharing your insights on how to identify misinformation and how to respond to the misinformation.
Thanks Greg, it was great to talk to.
You coming up the implications of podcasts not being regulated the same way as other types of media.
Every person who's putting out a podcast, it's up to them entirely what their process is for fact checking or any kind of backstop there on truthfulness, and we've really seen in the last few years what that can lead to.
That's up next when climate One continues, we're talking about climate misinformation. This week's show is a special collaboration with Amy Westervelt, an award winning print and audio journalist. She's founder of the Critical Frequency podcast network, which includes her own show Drilled, a true crime style podcast about climate change. I asked her to join me to reflect on what we've heard so far in this show about ways fossil
fuel comey spread misinformation. Amy, Welcome to Climate One. I'm excited to be talking with you.
I'm super excited to be here. Thanks for having me.
Well.
Reflecting on your piece that opened this episode, it was real interesting, and I've been thinking about the distinction between commercial speech and political speech. Fossil fuels have amazing energy density and they enable us to live our lives every day, and fossil fuels are killing the natural systems that we rely on every day. Both are true. Where do you see the line between commercial speech and political speech that you talked about in that opening segment.
Yeah, I mean I find that really interesting too. Just from a legal strategy standpoint, this idea that you know, if it's something that connects to policy, I want to see then it doesn't have to play by the same rules as you know something that's about a product that I'm selling. So to me, I actually it reminds me of the conversation that sprung up when The Guardian stopped
taking fossil fuel ads a couple of years ago. So a lot of people kind of questioned that and said, well, where do you draw the line, What about airplanes and air travel and cars and if it has to do with climate change and or a product's impact on the environment or the world at large, you could theoretically just
get rid of of any kind of advertiser. And they had this very succinct response to that, which was, well, all of those other categories are selling a product, and the fossil fuel industry is very much selling ideas and policy positions. They don't advertise gas anymore. Nobody really chooses
their gasoline based on brand, right, It's a commodity. So to me, there's a very very clear difference between the way that the fossil fuel industry advertises for the last ten fifteen years and the way most other industries advertise. That is a pretty good illustration of the difference between commercial and political speech.
Right, and then that advertising often gets into its branding and you know, another part of your segment that was real interesting is Mobile VP of Public Affairs formerly Herb Schmertz, remarking on the company's personality and its participation in the marketplace of ideas. Of course, these days, corporations are often
invited into public discourse bipartisans and advocates. Disney just called for rescinding Floridas Don't Say Gay law, which I said, yay, Yeah, So oil companies are not the only ones shaping their image and in the public policy sphere. So you know, why is it bad for oil companies to do what Disney is and others are doing.
I personally believe it's not great for any of them to do it. Actually, whether we agree with them or not is sort of irrelevant. I think the invitation to corporations into the public square has been a real problem America since the seventies. And I think that you see this right in this history of Mobile kind of involving itself with this that it was very much like we need to maintain this position in society to be able to effectively lobby both the public and politicians for these
kinds of policies that we want to control. The narrative about what's happening, you know, with our industry. It's actually a really interesting time to be talking about this because very similar things were happening then that are happening now, where you know, the gas phrases were high, and the oil companies were saying, it's not our fault, it's the government's fault, and there was this kind of you know, jockeying for control of the story.
When I heard that piece that you did, I thought of, you know, the status of corporations as individuals, as legal individuals, which is kind of another extension of what you pointed out. They have First Amendment rights and they are an individual which made me think immediately of Stephen Colbert's line a while back where he said, I'll believe that corporations are individuals when Texas executes one.
Yes, yeah, exactly, And I mean Herb Schwartz whole personality thing really played into that too, This idea of like, oh, if we imbue corporations with a personality and an opinion and a soul, like a morality too, right, then that makes it easier for us to convince the public that, you know, we're good faith actors, we care about more than just our bottom line. But the reality is that they don't have to play by the same rules as
any other member of the community. You know, nobody else gets as many benefits as corporations do in the realm where they're not humans.
And I'm curious, you know. You also, we had John Cook talking about deconstructing climate myths, how to identify and respond misinformation. What struck you about his piece?
I find him so interesting every time I read anything of his or listen to him talk about this stuff. So the thing that struck me this time was this notion. And I don't it wasn't necessarily new to me, but just the way he phrased it. As you know, we had like twenty years of science denial and then twenty years of solutions denial. It's a very straightforward way to
understand it. And you really have seen that over over the years of you know, Okay, now we believe the science, Like, let's focus on these other things that will help us delay policy and regulation and you know, allow us to kind of get as much out of these assets as we can before we have to retire the you know, which is the name of the game. And like to be honest, I don't necessarily blame oil companies for doing that. They're doing what corporations are encouraged and incentivized and enabled
to do. Right, So I am kind of a the opinion of, well, if we wanted to change, then we have to change the rules so that you know, they can't do these things that are beneficial to them and kind of impose a lot of liabilities and risks on the rest of us.
The idea of kind of solutions that also for me was really clarifying and crystallizing when John said, we've moved from climate misinformation to solutions misinformation. And maybe think of how many times I've heard people question what happens to
EV batteries after the useful life of the car? And I've heard that so many times that I'm suspicious of where that's being seated and how that's being seated, Like did those people all come up with that organically, or you know, is there some you know, Facebook posts somewhere that campaign to like so doubt about EV batteries at the end of life and we know that that is
a solvable problem. And now there's a new company that's going to harve by a founder of Tesla that's going to try to harvest those batteries, et cetera.
Yeah, it's it's it's I don't know. It's so tough because I think there are important and nuanced conversations to be had about, you know, some of the the unintended consequences of the solutions to climate change too, right, Like, I know there's a whole a lot going on around lithium mining right now and huge. Yeah, you know, those
are our very important conversations to be having. We don't want to go into you know, the next energy generation with the same exact mindset except for like the source of energy or else we're going to repeat, you know, the same mistakes and end up with a new problem.
Right and unfortunately, it's like you almost can't have those conversations without it being weaponized by you know, people who who don't want to see climate policy or who don't want to see energy transition to say, oh, let's see there. You know, there's problems with this too. There's problems with
all of it. The other thing I thought was interesting in your interview with John where he talks about how there's a real focus on kind of weaponizing the human tendency towards tribal identity and sticking with our group and digging into our opinions and those kinds of things, because you really see that in the fracturing of the climate movement too, not just like climate people versus people who don't think we should act on climate, or centrist versus
progressives or whatever, like even in these things like should we or should we not mind lithium for electrification, it's like people can't even have, you know, a remotely nuanced conversation about it.
And you know a lot of this is playing out in the pod casting place. And there was a big dust up recently with you know, Joe Rogan. He's been peddling in both climate and COVID misinformation for a long time, but it's COVID that got him in trouble. And then you tweeted recently that he interviewed Michael Shellenberger, who I've interviewed numerous times, who's running for the governor of California. So how does he embody kind of the evolution from
science misinformation to solution information? And what did you think about when you saw Rogan and Schellenberger together that photo?
It was so interesting because I had just I was just listening to your conversation with John and then I saw that that you know, interview had happened, and I was like, oh, this is like a perfect example of this of this evolution, because Joe Rogan has you know, interviewed lots of kind of garden variety climate deniers, you know, will say, actually Car two is good for us in
the atmosphere and things of that nature. And now he's graduated to Schellenberger, who you know is a like likes to kind of burnish his environmental credentials and say I was an environmental activist and and now I'm apologizing to the world for all the alarmism that we created about climate change. And yes it's a problem, but we don't need to actually make any drastic changes. And very very much a big user of one of the strategies that
John Cook talked about, which is cherry picking datas. I went through his book when it came out and found I think three thousand examples of cherry picked data that was like making a very flawed argument.
So how much of this is you know, you and I both came out of you know, traditional news backgrounds. You know, when I worked at the AP, there was a saying that if you think your mother loves you, you better call and confirm that it's still true, you know. And so the But in Podland and the realm of podcasts, which are you know, those traditional rules rules don't apply.
They're regulated differently. So how you know, talk about you know, how much of this is a real function of, you know, the surge of podcasting and how can podland avoid becoming the cesspool that is social media.
Yeah, I'm actually very concerned about this because it is governed by the exact same rules as Twitter and Facebook. Podcasts are. But I think the public thinks of podcasts as being media right and therefore governed by media rules like websites or newspapers or whatever, and it's not. Actually so every person who's putting out a podcast is it's up to them entirely what their process is for fact checking.
Or you know.
I mean, there are some basic consumer protection laws, but in terms of any kind of backstop there on truthfulness, no, it's kind of up to each organization. And we've really seen in the last few years what that can lead to. Joe Rogan is a perfect example of you know, he kind of takes this approach that well, I'm just I'm just sharing my opinion. And the problem there is that when you're sharing your opinion and it sounds like expertise, then it can be very misleading to people.
You know, So maybe I learned from maybe he took a page from me.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I think that, you know, I'm not a fan of censorship, and I think also like the horse is kind of out of the barn, like you're not gonna, you know, go back in time and set up rules that the podcast industry can you know, can live by necessarily. But I do think that there's an argument to be made to bring podcasts under FCC regulations instead of the Federal Trade Commission FTC, which it's
under now. Not that the SEC is perfect, obviously, we see tons of misinformation on cable news for example, as well, but there's at least some amount of more proactive action to try to curb that there. And the other thing is, I do think that you're seeing the industry itself start
to sort of take some somewhat of a turn. You're always going to have these kind of rogue actors, but the podcast platforms are thinking about, you know, what can we do to sort of let the more high quality reported stuff rise to the top and highlight that stuff versus some guy in his mom's garage, you know, And companies are starting to hire fact checkers more and more too. This has like become just in the last couple of years.
I've seen a major major shift where I had to really convince people before that that was worth spending money on. But because of the FTC thing. The other problem with podcasts is that the ads don't go by the same rules.
So we've we've struggled with that. How you've like fact checked the ads that come on your platform. That Daily got called out for some things on natural gas. I think it was that that was not quite meet the standards of the New York Times.
Yeah, right, exactly.
Yeah.
The fact that you saw this explosion in oil companies in particular advertising and podcasts a few years ago, it's for a reason. You know, they don't they don't spend money on stuff just to try things out. They're they're very smart and very strategic. So if you know, if they're investing a lot there and then social media ads, it's because they have more control over the story there.
Right, which all gets to the need for the educated, discerning public to sort of, you know, check ourselves and what's the difference between the editorial, the podcast, the advertisement. One of the themes running through this is the narrative of personal responsibility, both for climate action and for I guess, for the information we take in versus corporate responsibility, for corporate responsibility for climate, corporate responsibility or producer responsibility for
media and for energy. You know, BP popularized the idea of the personal carbon footprint twenty years ago, and I respect your work a lot, and you have really gone after you know, the villains, energy companies, energy suppliers as villains in the climate story. And I've also pursued the limitations and the truth of the personal responsibility. And I want to play a clip from brit Ray, who's a researcher at Stanford University who's had this to say.
It's a huge part of a lot of activist rhetoric that we shouldn't be focusing on our individual minuscule impact in relation to who's out there really spreading the damage, you know, the fossil fuel companies, the corrupt politicians, the lobbyist et cetera, that are fueling the damage as we speak and have and for decades. And I really think that.
That is, of course true on an intellectual level in many ways, but there's also perhaps a propulsion to turn away from looking within because it brings up shame, it brings up guilt, it brings up intolerable emotions that produce a bunch of defensive reactions.
That's Britt Ray, who has a PhD and climate science communication. So I'm going to ask you if someone can villainization sometimes be easy or than looking at ourselves and our own complicity.
I definitely thin get can be and I also agree with Britt And I also think that there's again going to sound like a broken record here, like a real need for nuance in the conversation around personal responsibility because the reality is that the top ten percent of consumers globally, which most Americans fall into, are responsible for a much larger proportion of global CO two emissions than everyone else
in the world. Right, So I absolutely think that we should look at that and take responsibility for, you know, the ways that we're you know, contributing to that. I also think, just as a human, it feels better to live according to your values than not, you know, on a on a real basic level. And I think also that there's something to be said for individual action beyond consumerism.
This is something that really bugs me that the personal responsibility stuff always gets well down to what we buy right or how we travel.
You know.
But like individual action can also be civic action. It can be political organizing, It can be finding ways to make your community more resilient. It can be mutual aid. There are lots and lots and lots of things that have nothing to do with buying different stuff that are individual actions that are very important and that are a critical part of of how we not only address this problem but actually survive it, you know.
Right, And yes, Bill mckibbon said years ago the most important thing an individual can do is not act as an individual. And I'm recently thinking about the best thing you can do is have relationships and make this part of your life and your relationships whoever those relationships are with, to make climate part of it.
Yeah, And I know Catherine Hahoe talks a lot about the power of talking to other people about this, not just in the vein of you know, persuading people to see your point of view or things like that, but just to create community to like actually to help with processing those feelings of shame and fear and anxiety and grief and all of those things that come up with
this too. Like you can't do that alone. You need to talk to people, you know, but you speaking to someone else about it can absolutely help them to feel more like they're able to kind of work through that stuff and get to a place where they can. To me,
it's actually not about finding villains at all. It's about figuring out what the what drove a problem like the climate crisis in the first place, Like, how do you have a society that allows a small group of people to make decisions that impact the whole world?
You know?
Like how does that happen? How does it get to this point where we're facing this catastrophe and everyone feels really powerless to do anything about it, you know, So that is interesting to me. I'm like, you know, how did this system get built? And who built it? And why did they have the power to build it? And how do we Because for me, I don't think you get to effective solutions if you don't understand that. How do you solve a problem when you don't even know
the roots of it or where it came from. We have to deal with the power structure, not just the power source.
Oh yeah right, it is ultimately about power. Yeah. Well, Amy Westerville, thank you so much for coming on climate and it's been a real pleasure.
And yeah, thanks for having me. Thank you so much.
On this Climate one, we've been breaking down climate misinformation, tactics, and ways to respond. Special thanks to Amy Westervelt for this collaboration. Check out her excellent podcast Drilled. Climate one's empowering conversations connect all aspects of the climate emergency. To hear more, subscribe to our podcast on Apple or wherever you get your pods. Talking about climate can be hard, difficult, depressing, awkward,
and it's critical to addressing the climate emergency. Please help us get people talking more about climate by giving us a rating or review or tell a friend. It really does help advance the climate conversation. Brad Marshland is our senior producer. Our producers and audio editors are Aaron Abrocious and Austin Cologne. Our team also includes Arnov Gupta, Steve Fox, and Tyler Reid. Our theme music was composed by George
Young and arranged by Matt Wilcox. Gloria Duffy is CEO of the Commonwealth Club of California, the non profit and non partisan forum or our program originates. I'm Greg Dalton.