Hello, and welcome back to Drilled. I'm Amy Westervelt. This week I'm at Climate Week in New York. It strangely the first time I've ever been to Climate Week. Will have been covering climate for twenty plus years now. It's been an interesting mix so far. But last night we did a live event version of our mad Men season. And there's been a lot of talk this week at Climate Week about the mad Men of Big Oil because UN Secretary General Antonio Guterrez has been calling for these
mad men to be held to account. So I figured it was a good time to reprise our season on this subject. This season initially debuted in twenty and it came about because we had done this initial season on the history of climate denial. And the more I looked into it, the more I realized that there had to be something else going on, that this could not have worked as well as it did and as quickly as
it did if there wasn't something else there. The strategy of climate denial is not that brilliant, and as I started looking for answers, I talked to a lot of scholars like doctor Robert Brule at Brown, Melissa Aronchick at Rutgers, lots of folks, and the more I learned about the way that pro fossil fuel propaganda had been shaped, the
more it all made sense. That season focused on key figures in the pr industry, but the fossil fuel industry has worked to shape information in general from all sides. You heard our episode last week on university research. That's one way. You heard us talk to Maddie Stone earlier in the year about management consultancies. That's another way. There all these ways that the industry really warps the information that we're getting, and even the structure of the information ecosystem.
That's why I often talk about information pollution instead of disinformation, because we're dealing with something more than just a couple of misleading statements. If you've never listened to this season, it's a good time to listen to it now. If you did listen to it when it came out, it's a good time to re listen to it now. Here is episode one as a refresher, and I hope you'll listen to the rest. We'll be back with a new episode next week. Thanks for listening.
Some farms grow food. This one gross fuel.
Natural gas and oil companies are successfully meeting the demand for greater energy.
Cutting greenhouse gas emissions to their lowest levels and a generation.
And should there weather change yet again, on.
That sor gas can step in to keep the power flowing and the light shining, no matter.
The forecast, innovating to meet the energy demands of today and tomorrow.
If you watch TV, or listen to the radio or podcasts, or use social media, or read newsletters or get your news online.
In other words, if you are.
A human in America today consuming media in any form, you've probably heard or seen some variation of these ads. They are everywhere, which makes sense. The oil industry is embroiled in lawsuits over its role in delaying action on climate change.
Teenagers all over.
The world are striking for climate policy, and every Democrat running for president has both a climate plan and a position on the Green New Deal. So companies like Exon Mobile, Chevron BP, they're worried about their image. They want consumers to think of them as green companies, not polluters. And the American Petroleum Institute their trade organization. They want everyone to remember that natural gas is a clean energy. But
oil propaganda is nothing new. In fact, it's been a part of the industry almost since it began, The American Petroleum Institute. You know the guys you hear in all the news podcasts like The New York Times, The Daily are Voxes, the Weeds.
Today, the US is leading the world and producing natural gas and oil while reducing emissions at the same time.
They've been around for more than one hundred years, and their strategy hasn't actually changed all that much in those years. According to environmental sociologist Bob Brule, who you might remember from season one.
The American Way of Life and everything good about America. You know, apple Pie Mom, the flag fossil fuels, and so by implication, what they do is basically say, any attack on fossil fuels is an attack on our way of life.
Part of what has enabled the fossil fuel industry to operate the way it does is exactly this sort of propaganda. It has given the industry social license. It's created the conditions for science denial to thrive, and it works in really subtle ways too. It's the reason you'll hear even those who want to act on climate say things about
protecting oil companies while you do it. So that's the story we're going to tell this season, the creation of big Oil's big propaganda machine and why it's still so effective today. I'm Ami Westervelt, and this is Drilled, Season three, The mad Men of Climate Denial.
The important thing that we thought we had discovered in our research, the thing we taught people need to understand, was that actually the roots of the story are not found in the fossil fuel industry.
They're found in the tobacco industry.
That's Naomi Eurescu's Harvard science historian and Merchant Doubt author. Since Orescas first uncovered the link between big tobacco and climate denial, it's been sort of accepted wisdom that big oil copied big tobacco, and that's that. But that's not quite the whole story. Big oil definitely copied science denial from the tobacco industry's playbook. Aurescus has proven that thoroughly.
Just like tobacco funded studies about all the other causes of lung cancer to create doubt about its product really being so bad, the oil guys funded research on all the other potential causes of global warming, long after they knew the primary culprit was fossil fuels. But there's more to Big Oil's strategy than science denial, a lot more. Big oil started trying to influence the public a long
time before it got into the scientific spin game. In fact, the oil industry wrote the playbook on American propaganda in general, a lot of the techniques that we still see today, fake news, disinformation campaigns, even changing the vocabulary we used to talk about, things like how we went from the greenhouse effect to global warming to climate change. All of that and more was created for the benefit of the
oil industry. Science denial is one front in Big Oil's idea war, and it's an important one, but it's not the only one.
Here's Bob Brule again.
Well, why and share of the effort that these guys are spending money on. It's not on science denial. Yes, they spend this much on science denial, and I'm not saying that that isn't important and doesn't count. But they're spending probably five or ten times more on all this corporate promotion advertising.
When oil companies and trade groups like the American Petroleum Institute pay public relations firms, it's not just for advertising or even for dealing with the media. It's also for less obvious tactics that aim to create a generally positive view of the industry. If that sounds like some sort of psychological warfare, it is. There's a long history of military intelligence experts getting into the pr business, many of
them on behalf of Big Oil. Over the past century, multiple generations of these guys have built an extensive, you could say, well oiled publicity machine. That machine has shaped American opinions on the environmental impacts of oil and the importance of the fossil fuel industry. It's that apparatus that the courts are starting to call into question today and that the public is finally starting to see too. And it all started more than one hundred years ago with the first oil tycoon, John D.
Rockefeller.
No, on this my birthday, I desire to reaffirm my belief in the fundamental principles upon which this country was founded, their birthday, unselfish emotions of the common good, and believe in God.
There he is, on his ninety third birthday with his brown little glasses, sounding like a true American patriotism.
Morality, the common good. Now, John D.
Rockefeller was a very religious guy, but this image here is really the result of decades worth of grooming and management from the world's first pr guy.
The foundations of modern pr in general, and the fossil fuel propaganda machine in particular, were built around rehabilitating the Rockefeller family's image back in the early nineteen hundreds, and specifically to counter the work of one woman, an investigative journalist, one of the first muckrakers, a woman named Ida Tarbell.
This is supreme wrongdoing cloaked by religion. There is but one name for it, hypocrisy.
So Ida Tarbell starts digging into Standard Oil at the dawn of the century. She was a pretty established journalist and a biographer at this point. So she said about writing what she thought was going to be a biography of John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil. And she was really determined and dogged in her pursuit of information. She would track down these archives of documents and then go to pick up a box and find that all the
documents had been destroyed. But she kept out at and she found people inside the company that would talk to her, and she did find some documentary evidence eventually too.
And what she ends up.
Pulling together with all of that is a nineteen part series on Standard Oil and basically how John D. Rockefeller had scammed his way into a monopoly. At the time, he controlled everything about oil, from drilling to refining, pipelines to railroads.
Rockefeller and his associates did not build the Standard Oil Company in the boardrooms of Wall Street banks. They fought their way to control by rebates and drawback, bribe and blackmailt espionage, and price cutting.
Rockefeller had put hundreds of hard working independent producers out of business. He'd been given an unfair competitive advantage, and the public was outraged.
So was President Theodore Roosevelt.
By nineteen oh six, the Department of just As filed an anti trust claim against Rockefeller. Five years later, the US Supreme Court ruled that Standard Oil had in fact violated anti trust laws and needed to be broken up.
And just a few.
Years after that, Rockefeller's son was in the news, also getting bad press, this time at the company's mine in Colorado.
Mineers out of doors, out from the houses that the company own.
May have heard that very famous Wooden Gustrie song.
It was written about a massive strike at Rockefeller's coal mine in Ludlow, Colorado, in the summer of nineteen thirteen, United Mine workers began to organize the eleven thousand coal miners employed by the Rockefeller owned Colorado Fuel and Iron Company. Initially, workers asked to meet with management to air their grievances low pay, long and unregulated hours, and the fact that they were only allowed to live and trade in the
company town. That meant everything they bought was just paying money back to the company they were worked for, and it gave the company an enormous amount of control over their lives, even though those rights had already been legally.
Granted to workers.
Management wasn't having it, so a month later, eight thousand Colorado mine workers went on strike. Of course, first Rockefeller evicted them from their company owned homes, which was the entire point of why company towns aren't great for workers on strike and homeless. The miners and their families set up a tent setting near the mine. By nineteen fourteen, about twelve hundred people were living in that camp. It was a huge protest, but that wasn't necessarily new at
this point in history. What made the Ludlow strike infamous was what Rockefeller did to bust it. Private security guards and the National Guard showed up at the protest camp with machine guns. They lit tents on fire and sprayed the camp with bullets, killing twenty two protesters, including women and children. A riot broke out, including more guns on both sides, and by the end of it, more than sixty people had died. Wasn't long before every paper was painting Rockefeller as the villain.
First the Trust thing.
And now this he was everything Americans were coming to hate about their bosses. In desperate need of some good pr Rockefeller hired this guy.
Rockefeller listen to me patiently, pleasantly and calmly until I'd finished mile Upon presentation.
IV Ledbetter Lead is widely considered the father of public relations. Rockefeller initially hired him to help handle the fallout from what journalists including Ida Tarbell, had started calling the Ludlow massacre, and Leaded such a good job they wound up working together for the rest of his life and his handling of Ludlow. The first thing Lee did was create an entirely fake story. He claimed the strikers weren't even really workers,
they were plants from the labor unions. In Lee's story, labor organizer Mother Jones had orchestrated the whole thing, and for some reason he threw in that Jones was running a nearby brothel. She was eighty two at the time, so not likely. When he was asked about this story decades later, Lee said, quote, what are facts anyway, but
my interpretation of what happened. Lee's approach worked. He coached Rockefeller on how to talk, how to behave in public, to make himself likable, how to seem like one of the people, even which charitable projects to take on. The press never knew what hit him, and when Rockefeller died, he was remembered as a kindly philanthropist, a hard working industrialist, and a true blue American. Standard Oil's progeny, of course, became today's oil giants Exon now Exon Mobil, Conico, Phillips,
and Chevron. And just like you can draw a straight line from Standard Oil to Chevron and Exon Mobile, today you can see Ivy Ledbetter Lee's fingerprints all over the oil industry's disinformation campaigns.
It's the same.
Tactic Lee used to rehabilitate Rockefeller's image way back then. Fake news crisis actors corporate philanthropy as a PR move, all to shift the public's focus away from a company's bad behavior, the company that's working to bring affordable, scalable carbon capture to industries around the world. So who exactly was Ivy led Better Lee, What did he end up doing for Rockefeller and Standard Oil in the years following the Ludlow massacre, Why did he love Russia so much?
And what exactly made him so good at propaganda that a certain German dictator came calling just a few years later.
We'll get into all of that and more next time.
The oil companies, especially Standard Oil and then later on through API, were really the beginners and probably the greatest institutionalized effort at developing corporate propaganda to support their industry.
Drilled is part of the Critical Frequency podcast Network. The show is reported, written, and produced by me Amy Westervelt. Julia Richie is our editor. Our managing producer is Katie Ross. She also created this season's incredible artwork, sound design, scoring and mixing by b Emon. Riga Murphy is our editorial advisor.
Meamula Schaance is our fact checker. Special thanks to Richard Wiles and to our First Amendment Attorney, James Wheaton and the First Amendment Project, Drilled is made possible in part by a generous grant from the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development.
We appreciate their support. You can find Drilled on.
Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Don't forget to leave us a rating, a review. It really helps the show. And you can follow us on Twitter now at we are Drilled, and visit our new website drillednews dot com for climate accountability, reporting, newsletters, and behind the scenes stories from this season. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.