How The Media Drives Climate Obstruction

over the world on trying to understand this issue. Today we are digging into a subject that is near and dear to my heart, the role of pr and media in climate obstruction. And to do that, I'm joined by two people who have been guests on this show before, Melissa Aronchek at Rutgers University and Max Boykoff from the

University of Colorado at Boulder. We had a great conversation about the role that media plays both in helping to shape the public's understanding of climate and therefore the role it can play in obstruction, especially if it is targeted by bad faith actors, which it often is. It is a super interesting conversation. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. That's coming up right after this quick break.

as a tool. So I want to kind of start by having you explain how, particularly the weaponization of this journalistic norm balanced reporting has contributed to the disparity between scientific consensus and the public's understanding of climate change.

answer that question. And I think if we look back through time we can track in our group, the Media Climate Change Observatory has done this where we've tracked media coverage of climate change over time, and it really came into public consciousness and into the news starting the late nineteen eighties, and when that was happening, it was a new story to tell, and there a lot of different journalists and actors trying to make sense of what was

going on and how to tell these stories. And as time went on, though, there was you know, in the late nineteen eighties was the establishment of the IPCC, the and a governmental pedaloid climate change. There was increasing understanding within the scientific community that humans contribute to climate change. And so from that period of time, journalism, as we've tracked it through various studies, had tried to make sense

of that. And as they did that, and as they started to drawn expert voices and others to give them a sense of where science was on human contributions to climate change, journalists leaned back into their journalistic norms, including the journalistic normal balanced reporting, which one perspective to get another and help reader or the viewer the listener makes

sense of what's going on. And so some early research that I had done with my brother, Jules Boykoff, who's at Pacific University and Political Science, we had just taken a look at how had US media been covering it from that time in the late nineteen eighties through at that point in two thousand and two when we finished up the study, and while there had been that conversion agreement in the scientific community and that had been communicated

clearly through Dinner Governmental Panel and climate change assessments, that we had found that the journalistic community had continued to tell this quote unquote balance story and in so doing had perpetrated an informational bias and actually skewed the conversations in the public arena. And you know, part of the reason that we make those claims, and then others have also been looking at this Ober time, is that you know, quite frankly, people don't pick up peer review literature of

the IPCC assessment reports. They rely on news coverage to help make sense of what's going on around them, and so news become this important bridge and this powerful driver of public conversation station. There has been a learning going on, a maturation or just sort of an integration of new understanding within the journalistic community. So we had put out

that study, it actually gained traction. It ended up in al Gore's and Inconvenient Truth just briefly mentioned, so it got a lot more attention and journalists some were very eager to think carefully and recalibrate how they're telling these stories through their own reporting. Others, you know, weren't quite

as receptive to that messaging and critique. But nonetheless, you know, we did some follow up work years later and found that that coverage had improved it, you know, when we looked it's with another collection of researchers here, led by Lucy mckelister. When we looked at it again in twenty twenty one, we found that there had been tremendous improvements in US press along with UK, Australian, Canadian and New Zealand newspapers. But there it still isn't one hundred percent.

And so you know, the way in which we went about it to look at the unit of analysis being each newspaper article. We can still see there's this room for improvement. But if somebody's picking up the paper and reading a very influential piece that isn't accurate, that is still falling, whether unwittingly or wittingly, to this sort of quote unquote balanced reporting that they themselves then start to get a skewed views. Still to this very day.

wasn't that long ago. This was probably like twenty fifteen ish, and and he said, you know, are you from California. I said yes, And he said, well, you probably remember when you were growing up that you would like go to bout at night and the fire would be twenty percent contained, and you'd wake up in the morning and it would be like sixty percent contained or at least fifty. And I said, yeah, that was that was the norm,

you know. And he said, yeah, that's how it used to work because it would get cool and humidity would increase at night. And now that doesn't happen anymore. So these fires are burning like the same intensity twenty four to seven and that's why they're getting so big, and that's climate change. And I was like, wow, what a great,

like simple way to understand that. And I put it on this story and my editor, who at the time was the national editor of the Washington Post, suggested taking out the part where he said that's climate change because and his comment was, this is a wildfire story, not a politics story. I said, like, I had been a climate reporter for a long time, so I knew enough to kind of push back on that and say, well,

you know, that's an industry talking point. There's nothing political about what he's saying, you do, and he like, O, listen to me and let me keep it in. But the average person that's just like getting sent off to you know, cover a flutter of fire, is not necessarily going to feel confident, you know, saying oh, you're wrong, it's not political. But like, you know, I don't think that that guy was being hounded by exon every day.

It was just so ingrained in him that like, I don't know, I think of it every time I think about this, because it's it was such a simple way that that stuff like creeps in.

kind of amazing. At least since the nineteen seventies, we have started to see connections among not just media platforms and people who set the agenda in the media, but think tanks, research centers, private donors, lobbyists, and lawyers PR firms. We're starting to get better and better evidence of this network, and both journalists and researchers are uncovered just how far

back these relationships of denial go. But I do think it's also important to remember that we're you know, all of those groups I just mentioned operate in society and that society in general, and really, you know, if we just again zoom out from fossil fuels per se and just look at our entire consumer society, the way our lifestyles are set up right now, the status quo is one in which fossil fuels play a very big role, and it's very hard for people to imagine alternatives, especially

when we don't see a lot of presentation of those alternatives in public communication. So it's a very vast and really has been for a long time, very intractable problem that we've been trying to work through.

can at times be seen as greenwashing. But then on top of that, you know, at the very core, we're primed to fall into this because we've got a lot of other things that we want to focus in on. We don't have to worry about it. And so when this sort of apparatus, when it flows through courses, through the veins of our lives, we take it. We're ready for it. Would just say all right, let's focus in on other things. And so this apparatus gives us that opportunity to not have to face it.

chart which summarizes the argument, so it's very useful. So the first argument for climate delay is to suggest that someone else should take actions first, so in other words, redirecting responsibility for the problem away from themselves, which in this case would often be a fossil fuel company onto somebody else. So the classic one is suggesting that consumers themselves, individuals themselves should take actions to address climate change, you know,

recycle for instance. The second argument has to do with saying that we can't mitigate climate change. It's simply not possible. You have to just kind of give in to the fact that it's never going to happen. And you've seen a lot of arguments like that, especially by climate deni as saying, you know, change is just impossible. We can't change our current way of life, we can't do that, or saying it's basically a catastrophe and you know, doom

and bloom apocalypse, there's nothing to be done. There's a third argument, which is actually a little more insidious, where fossil fuel companies will push non transformative solutions. That's how Lamb and his collaborators put it. And you know, this one's insidious because it seems like solutions are just around the corner, but in fact these solutions are very problematic

and often really backwards. One would be to say future technologies are going to solve the problem, so you know, we don't have to worry now because in the future we'll have AI solving climate change. These kind of very vague, very always future focused ideas for how the problem will be solved. Another one is to say you can't restrict or regulate companies because then they won't be able to come up with solutions for climate change, so you have to kind of give them time to figure it out.

Yet again, this future facing solutionism. Again, these are problematic because they seem like, back to what Max was saying a moment ago, they seem to make us feel better, and they make us feel like we don't have to do anything that you know, companies have. It's kind of the opposite from the redirect responsibility frame anyway. And then the last one is about emphasizing all of the problems

with the solutions that are being proposed that are viable. So, for instance, you've got a solution in mind which involves social justice, but you know that means that vulnerable members of our society might have to bear the brunt of the solutions, So we can't do that. We need solutions that work for everyone. Otherwise we shouldn't have solutions at all.

So these discourse types to be fancy shows this tendency among actors of disinformation to actually move away from overt denial, like moving away from saying climate change isn't happening, it's not real, and having more subtle tactics to just undo or delegitimate climate solutions just by saying that they're not going to work for a variety of reasons.

Hannah Morris and Chris Russell also contributed to this. So it was a great opportunity for us to pull together this kind of research from William Lamb and colleagues and others to help provide a bit more of a cogent picture.

kind of the current picture. But it has been quite a while now that oil and gas producers and their collaborators have actively worked with both legacy news and social media platforms, as well as PR firms and advertising agencies to promote disinformation that obstricts climate policy. Max talked about the news balance, but we've also seen how oil and gas companies do source building with journalists to promote their

industry point of view and news coverage. But then, of course we also have social media where there's less of an intermediary or date keeping function, so oil and gas companies can pretty much post whatever they want. Not to mention blogs, instant messaging, and because our mainstream media is under corporate control, and because their business model needs advertising revenue to stay afloat, it has also become harder and

harder for news to remain separate from promotional content. Yes, I don't you know, there's even more we could say. We talk about this in the chapter for the book. We have these newer kinds of threats with emerging digital technologies and social media. Because now disinformation campaigns can operate at a massive scale and scope, they can target certain groups much more precisely. You have technology companies and their platforms that let powerful actors shape information in ways that

lack accountability. And on top of everything else, we have the explosion of artificial intelligence, which is changing at day and is incredibly difficult to detect and predict. Not to mention the environmental costs of AI use, the energy consumption generated by AI, the waste generated by AI systems, especially data centers, which contribute to greenhouse gas emissions and environmental pollution.

So we've got like a I was going to say a triple threat, but I think this is like an octuple threat.

bigger and bigger all the time. And as we look around, we can see that our local independent news are strained. Just some of the recent decisions from the Trump administration have put even further strain on these news sources. And so we've across this country, across the world, we've got many news deserts. So people are increasingly reliant on these corporate media sources to make sense of what's going on

in the world, and that's through legacy media. As Melissa's pointed out, once you get into social media, gets even more confusing with algorithms and the blending. Even some of your work amy has found its way into our chapter where you've pointed out this confusion that can take place between straight news reporting and some advertising that's going on from these carb based industry players. And so while there are definitely a lot of dynamics at play, it's discouraging and challenging.

read anymore. I just see this huge shift in like the credibility that people are ascribing to influencers for what appears to be no rhyme or reason, and it's not like these people are like, hey, listen to me, I'm very credible for these reasons. It's just like some random guy anyway.

mean where you saw it. I mean the original source. And they really didn't know what I was talking about. And that's when it hit me that the way our media platforms are organized, the way we access information online is really not the way we people of my generation used to access or understand. So the source is not nearly as relevant to younger people as the content itself and the way it's presented. So that you know, if we're talking about a space where influencers come to have

a lot more credibility. That really does have to do with what's getting put in front of people, and that in itself has to do with how algorithms work, and how prior usage patterns work, and how the location of

the individual works. We know about all of these data points that inform what kind of information is put in front of people, and so an influencer who might froughten your attention at some other time for some other completely different topic suddenly seems like somebody much more reliable and

trust worth than a source you don't know. And that proximity in time and space to you is really problematic when it comes to information about complex, scientific and highly polarized issues like climate chain.

TikTok influencers court young people. Yeah, they are the pathways forward, and so the savvy pr firms, advertising firms, carbon based industry actors themselves are getting into this. So you're what we're sensing together is definitely something that's deliberate and that it is going on.

climate pulsy action, greater engagement. And when you refer to that emyre, the cool Dude's piece just refers to maybe colloquially older white guys who are very influential in these spaces. And some of them, you know, are microblogging on Twitter x even Blue Sky and others massed on for a little bit there. They're you know, sometimes maybe just sitting in their basements and they're comfortable suburban homes. And these folks demographically may not be at the forefront of climate

impacts like many others. And so there's been research that's followed on theirs. I've done some myself where I've gone to the Heartland Institute meetings about a decade apart and sought to make sense of who they are, what are their motivations. So that finds its way into our chapter.

Another kind of layer of this is that we've we've documented in this chapter a lot of good research that's been done that's been tracking how it is much more evident and influential within certain countries with ties to fossil fuel industry. And reliance on fossil fuels. Matthew Hornsey and colleagues have done some really good work that compares and

contrasts these discourses across countries. So there's places like the United States where the belly of the beast in a certain way, the UK, Australia, certain elements of Brazil around food consumption and fossil fuels, they have much more vocal and I guess legible audible climate contrarian groups collections which can be you know, cacaphanous at times, but the overall goals of distracting, delaying, denying the facts and the evidence around this, there are through lines there.

the media becomes really salient here. But another issue that affects the way we think about how the UK and the US stand out as giving a platform for skepticism is simply that there's a lot more research out there about the UK and the US than about other parts of the world. So it's not just that American and British media platforms enables skepticism, which they do, but that we know much more about it there than we do

about what's going on in other places. And I really want to underline that as a very big challenge when you're writing, as we did for as a contribution to

this book, a Global Assessment of Climate Obstruction. It just I think one takeaway that we had from working on this chapter was that we really need better and more sustained research all over the world to recognize how some of the climate skeptic frames and platforms and styles are being exported to other parts of the world, or how we are getting imported from other parts of the world. Various kinds of climate skepticism but we just don't know as much as we need to in some parts of the world.

other land use practices. So I think that's just something else to keep in mind when we're talking about climate skepticism. It might sometimes certain stories might fall outside of the purview of research on climate skepticism, but it is climate skepticism. It just might look different in the news piece.

play out in various times and spaces and that. But it is stunning, you know, given the amount of funding and capacity that there is within these pr agencies, within advertising, within news reporting that shapes the stories that we get on a daily basis, that we don't have a larger, more coordinated effort to understand all these dynamics from a social sciences perspective, from humanities and how that relates to the natural physical sciences.

but human behavior perspectives. And there have been social scientists that have come on board and been a part of some of the previous IPCC reports, but this really was a big step forward with some of us that were invited along. So I was a contributing author to that

most recent IPCC report. And so when you ask that question, I mean, I think the kind of simple answer is because there were folks like me and me included to bring the very thoroughly researched work that we're talking about in this chapter and this larger book into the pages

of the IPCC. But I think a bigger part of that is just that more folks from different disciplines, seeing this as an integrative, interdisciplinary set of challenges, are being invited in to help provide those insights through the thoroughly researched work that's going on out there, and so it is a step forward. You know, they're selecting authors for

the next one. We could possibly debate for a full hour about the wisdom of another big assessment report years and off, while we need to do a lot interim. But having said that, they're selecting authors for the next one, I hope that continues to flow into these pages. And the work that we talk about in the chapter that we capture that's in the larger reports themselves actually didn't make it into the summary for policy makers, and that too,

we could talk about for quite a while. But there's still a lot of work to do to make this much more legible and to make this a larger conversation through the IPCC.

Maybe the difference between them, because I feel like they get conflated a lot. Maybe there's not that much difference between them anymore. I don't know, anyway, over to you.

relevant and necessary. So we now have a lot more information about what Exxon does, or what Shell does, or what VP does. But lately journalists and researchers have started paying a lot more attention to the consultants and strategists who come up with the positioning for these fossil fueld companies and who play key roles in managing these companies

media image and their marketing and strategic plan. I do want to mention that there is a very important pioneer of this kind of research who's name as John Stauber

of the Center for Media and Democracy in Wisconsin. He founded that center back in nineteen ninety three, and in nineteen ninety five he wrote this book which I think has the best name that any book like this could have, which is called Toxic Sludge Is Good for You, which was an expose of the PR firms involved in environmental disinformation. And I mentioned that because that really was a very important guide that came out at a time when most of us were looking the other way. It really has

helped later researchers and journalists think about this. So a second major finding that we have about the role of PR firms and AD agencies in climate disinformation is that these firms are embedded in a very wide ecosystem of influence.

We mentioned this well earlier in our conversation, but just important to remember PR firms and ad agencies are doing work for not only fossil fuel companies, but also their trade associations, industry councils and science advisory councils, for think tanks and research institutes, ENGOs, foundations, Chambers of commerce, organizational boards. I mean, the list goes on, and the important thing that really came to me is that these firms play

several roles in keeping this network together. This is the glue part. One of the things that these PR firms and other consultants do is intelligence gathering across different industries as well as inside the environmental community. So you'll have PR firms hiring people who used to work at government agencies working on environmental issues or from other organizations that influence public policy on environment or climate and energy issues.

Another thing these PR firms will do is conduct industry friendly research that help clients promote their viewpoints in the media. So there's a massive production of scientific material, legal material, and technical material to circulate in the media. So, like you said, Amy, I could really go on for several more hours about this, but I just really want to

communicate that these firms are not just about spin. There's so much more going on and they deserve all of the attention that we've been trying to give to them over the last few years.

ads from fossil fuel companies. We have one report we talk about in the chapter that estimates that Google alone received twenty three point seven million dollars between twenty twenty and twenty twenty two from the five largest oil companies in the world to promote their advertising. We can also really level our sites at meta slash Facebook, which has overridden its own independent fact checkers for climate science. It has also allowed fossil fuel companies to purchase misleading ads.

And another real problem that is posed by companies like Facebook is that they have a data sharing tool called crowd Tangle, which is traditionally relied upon by journalists and academics to analyze engagement with content on the platform, and they keep tweaking the data sharing tools so that it's

less transparent and less useful for journalists and academics. So it's very hard to get a long term view of how engagement is changing over time, and it's very difficult to understand all the demographics and other data points that researchers need. So it's so it's yeah, it's really it

really feels like the wild West. There's a group called Climate Action Against Disinformation CAD, which has done a lot of really interesting research in this area, and they've talked about how really the four big platforms of TikTok, Meta, YouTube, and X have become complicit in the spread of climate denial.

And they put X out of those four last among platforms because of their absolute total absence of policies on climate disinformation, failing to effectively enforce whatever policies they do have, and total lack of public transparency.

policy and just starting some community board community notes. I should say that just the misinformation that proliferates because of the influence of these and the lack of intentional fact checking, amongst them is really troubling.

policy actions or advocating for certain outcomes. But in the absence of that, we've allowed ourselves to devolve into this place where fact checking can be seen as, like you say, some kind of censorship, some kind of intervention, that that is unwanted and that curtails free speech. I mean, it's

where things can turn on their head. But I think I find myself somewhat culpable and those within our communities for not advocating more strenuously for facts and evidence and for not helping others better understand these these uh, you know, the landscape of how this matters, how facts matter.

directions online. And if you contrast that with the academic research and publication cycle, I mean, there's just no contest. It's our research and publication cycle is incredibly slow. We work in cycles of years, not cycles of minutes. So what some researchers are calling for is a monitoring and rapid response service to provide facts, to provide accurate information to the public while they're thinking about the issue, not

a year or two later. And so some have suggested that maybe academic researchers can take a page from nonprofit projects or even projects like Max's observatory groups like Max's Observatory, by working either more closely with those groups or working with other research centers to track and analyze digital media and social media disinformation as it happens and provide a researcher's lens on the response.

ambition to do something about climate change. And so here there's a variety of climate obstruction that I know really well because I've spent a lot of years studying how big brands and other business groups sidesteck their role in contributing to climate change, and because they generate narratives that are very influential, very seductive, but that really are problematic. And they do this by promoting that they're at the table with us, that they're collaborators, their consensus makers, or

that they're willing to compromise. And in fact, I would say that some of the most effective undermining of environmental science has come from business leaders who say that their company is working alongside scientists or alongside public policy makers to solve climate problems. So here we have to come back to PR specialists, because their entire resondet is to promote consensus among public audiences, that's the public in public relations, is to relate to the public. They influence people by

aligning their clients' messages with public values and beliefs. That's a classic branding strategy. And it's also about creating legitimacy for their client organizations like fossil fuel companies, and about creating trust in their message. So, for example, PR consultants will create public private partnerships or sponsorships for their clients

that make them look good. Shell for instance, the oil company sponsors youth programs, they sponsor healthcare initiatives, sponsor housing projects, and that's not It's hard to point to that and say that's bad. You shouldn't sponsor those projects. But at the same time, if you think about how that acts back on the company to make them look good, when in fact, alongside those sponsorships they are also expanding the infrastructure for oil production, it becomes really challenging to uphold

their good image. I could go on, but maybe I could leave it at that for now.

comes through the individualization of responsibility. And so some of the narratives that take place through the media and through everyday lives can come into the notion of carbon footprints, which themselves we're seen as creation by the foss fuel industry to redirect attention to the individual rather than larger corporate actors who are contributing significantly to these issues. And so that individualization can have several different kind of pushes

and pulls. It can distract from their responsibilities, but then they can also, you know, very importantly, it can have us feel like, oh my gosh, we get overwhelmed with the enormity of the challenges that we have before us, and so it can push us into these spaces of paralysis if we if we subscribe to this kind of atomized, individualized way of acting, and we also, on top of that can tend to you know, start to name and shame and blame one another instead of looking at some

of the clear fact around us. And so you know, there's there's been a lot of work over time among them was some important work by Richard he that points out that two thirds of industrial greenhouse gas emissions, fossil fuel use, methane leaks, and manufacturing have come from ninety companies around the world since the john of the Industrial Revolution.

And so this naming and shaming and individualization is both a redirection of responsibility and that it's also really is a very effective technique of delay and distraction.

And this was a large group, a coalition of political groups, nonprofits, and so that was trying to encourage political leaders around the world to acknowledge that there is a major threat posed by climate disinformation as an obstacle to climate action, and to adopt a definition that will allow regulation and other forms of rules to get put in place, to be able to say, you know, to point at something and say that is climate disinformation based on this definition

that all of us have agreed upon. I think that that would be very powerful. And then that third pillar is to hold platforms accountable. As you said, Amy, so just push social media companies ad tech publishers to prevent the spread of climate disinformation by agin acknowledging it and saying we're not going to allow this kind of garbage to be to be on our sites. I would say, if I had to, you know, leave with some Oh, but this is really not I don't intend this to

be about t toooting my own hord. This is just something I know more about than other areas. We'll talk about it. It's in relation to this idea of adopting a universal definition, but it's on the topic of greenwashing,

which is a subset of climate disinformation. This is something that some colleagues and I have been working pretty steadily on through the Climate Social Science Network we have a Greenwashing working group and we've just put out our second article that attempts to develop a very clear and coherent framework to identify greenwashing and to lay out a set of criteria that anyone can use. It's not just an academic thing. It's really about saying, here are the features.

that then will allow all these groups accountable. And we've had some real success with that framework. We've had a couple of groups, I know in Canadian cities, some lawmakers have used that framework to ask for public buses and other transit systems to take down their advertising that is greenwashing as a result of our study. So that's just one very small contribution to try t to just keep these different platforms and different outlets accountable.

and on and on. I guess I would say that, you know, while we have talked about how you know, there are strains on our media literacy nowadays, generally my experience has been that once you open up these conversations, especially with young college aged people that I'm working with a lot teaching, that there is a real appetite and there's an ability to learn very quickly, and especially young people who have been born into the world where we've

already had this on the public agenda. For those of us that are a little bit older, you know, we grew up in a world where this wasn't being discussed. But many young people now that are in college have been exposed to this, been talking about it, and they're well positioned to start to move forward with solutions. And I know at times we all may feel like this is really daunting. There are so many large forces and pressures that are working against this kind of progress. I

guess I am in a quoting kind of mood. I think about Wes Jackson something he said about if you're not working on something that you plan on finishing in your lifetime, you're not thinking big enough. And so when we start to work with folks across demographics, across generations, and there is this appetite to learn, there is this

appetite for positive change. I see it through the creative ways that students I'm working with are communicating about climate change with their peers and families and neighbors and roommates. That I find that as a source of encouragement. So while we have been focused in here on diagnosing some of the real daunting challenges, there are places where we can look to for encouragement and hope.

is Bird in the Hand by Foreknown. Our cover art is by Matthew Fleming. Our First Amendment attorney is James Wheaton with the First Amendment Project. The show was created, written, and reported by me Amy Westervelt. Thanks for listening and see you next time.