Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming by Richard Littlemore James Hoggan Read Free Book Online Page A

apparently spontaneous outpouring of support or opposition on any public issue.
    The political theorist Jeffrey Berry documented this in his 2000 book, The New Liberalism: The Rising Power of Citizen Groups. Berry showed that in the realms of politics and media, grassroots organizations were outperforming industry-sponsored interest groups by a wide margin. For example, Berry found that a small number of citizens’ groups making representations in Congress were overrepresented in media citations by a factor of 10 to 1 when compared to their industry counterparts.
    The National Smokers Alliance, however, was not a spontaneous outpouring of public support. It was an Astroturf group, a fake grassroots organization animated by a clever public relations campaign and a huge budget. As John Stauber wrote in a 1994 edition of the online journal PR Watch:
    Burson-Marsteller’s state-of-the-art campaign utilizes full-page newspaper ads, direct telemarketing, paid canvassers, free 800 numbers, newsletters and letters to send to federal agencies. B-M is targeting the fifty million Americans who smoke. Its goal is to rile-up and mobilize a committed cadre of hundreds of thousands, better yet millions, to be foot soldiers in a grassroots army directed by Philip Morris’s political operatives at Burson-Marsteller. 3
    Such are the profits available to the tobacco industry that around the same time, Philip Morris had also engaged the public relations giant APCO Worldwide to craft a parallel attack on the scientific validity of links between cancer and secondhand smoke. In 1993 APCO proposed the foundation of The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC). The original documentation of this proposal is available on the Internet at TobaccoDocuments.org, a Web site established after the tobacco industry lost a series of 1990s lawsuits over the falsification of evidence and the attempt to cover up the health effects of smoking.
    The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition’s stated objectives were these:
    • Establish TASSC as a credible source for reporters when questioning the validity of scientific studies.
    • Encourage the public to question—from the grassroots up—the validity of scientific studies.
    • Mobilize support for TASSC through alliances with other organizations and third-party allies.
    • Develop materials, including new article reprints, that can be “merchandized” to TASSC audiences.
    • Increase membership in and funding of TASSC.
    • Publicize and refine TASSC messages on an ongoing basis. 4
    The eagerness to increase TASSC’s membership and funding is important in the climate change conversation because, well, guess who APCO contacted when it came time to increase membership in its new Astroturf group? Realizing how obvious it would look if Philip Morris was TASSC’s only financial supporter, APCO sent out recruitment letters to twenty thousand businesses inviting them to join the fight for “sound science.” Below is a list of the kinds of companies that APCO considered appropriate partners for such a venture. The list comes from another memo, written in 1994 when APCO was planning to expand TASSC operations into Europe. 5 One of the first goals, the memo said, was to try to “link the tobacco industry with other more ‘politically correct’ products.”
    “As a starting point,” the memo begins, “we can identify key issues requiring sound scientific research and scientists that may have an interest in them.” This seems to suggest that no one was currently conducting research in any of the areas about to be discussed, or that the research being done was somehow unsound. Certainly, that research in most cases seemed to be inspiring legitimate interest groups to demand more government intervention and regulation of the sort that was costing industry money.
    The TASSC memo continued:
    Some issues our European colleagues suggest include:
    • Global warming
    • Nuclear waste disposal
    •