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When Professor Christian Downey appeared before a Senate inquiry into climate and energy misinformation, he warned that Australia is facing coordinator campaigns that aim not to debate solutions, but to store them.
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There is a network of organisations that exist to influence the public, influence the media, influence political arenas like our parliament to stop or reverse effective climate action.
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Professor Downey has spent years tracing the billions spent on messaging and, and outlining what he calls the climate Obstruction Playbook.
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Short answer is, I think we're scratching the surface. There's much more to research, but there's an overwhelming body of empirical evidence now about these actors, about the financial flows.
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That inquiry has now reported back with 21 recommendations, including more scrutiny of greenwashing, more transparency around who funds campaigns and more support for communities affected by by renewable energy projects. But the government still hasn't formally responded. I'm Daniel James and you're listening to 7:00am today. We're bringing you our episode with professor at ANU's School of Regulation and Global Governance, Christian Downie on how the obstruction Playbook has been so successful in stopping action on climate Change. It's Sunday, June 14th. This episode was first published in October 2020. 25.
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C
So, Kristian, you've spent a lot of time investigating the lobbyists and the tactics that they use behind a lot of the misinformation that we see around climate change. So where did that start for you?
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B
Well, I guess for more than a decade I've been thinking about the politics of climate change. I've been working in think tanks and government and universities. I think the one thing that stood out, as I thought more about this issue, is, you know, because of the path breaking work of climate scientists, we have a good understanding of why the world is heating up, what the impacts are. Because of the work of engineers and entrepreneurs. We have almost all the technologies we need to cut pollution and stabilize our climate. And because of the work of economists and public policy experts, we know most of the policy solutions and yet we continue to fail to implement ambitious climate policy. So it was that kind of puzzling question about why are we failing? Why aren't we reducing emissions like scientists are asking? A major factor that's become clearer over the years is because of the efforts by groups and individuals in society to obstruct action on climate change, that is to block and oppose policies and our failure to understand that and then of course, to overcome it.
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C
Well, let's talk a bit more about those people and groups and what you've come to learn about them. I know that you went to Washington to meet some of these people. So when you were there in the room with them, tell me what you learned about who they are, how these campaigns are built. Yeah. How they come about.
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B
Yeah. So I've spent a number of stints over in the US trying to study how climate and energy policy was shaped, interviewing senior executives, lobbyists from all the major fossil fuel industries probably spent countless hours now, you know, waiting in the foyers of big office buildings, going through security up into the corporate boardrooms, and sitting in the offices of major coal corporations, executives from oil and gas corporations down in Houston. They're lobbyists in Washington, D.C. but I've also spent time with lobbyists in the solar, wind, hydro sector. And, you know, what you really find out is that a lot of these groups are engaged and this is part of how policy works in that town. They are engaged in sophisticated political campaigns to try and shape policy outcomes, to block policy outcomes, often particularly around climate change.
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C
And so being in those rooms and seeing how this works behind the scenes, was there anything that you witnessed that really, I suppose, crystallised the playbook that's being created and used here?
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B
Yeah, the thing that really, I guess, crystallized it for me was probably over a couple of conversations that when the lobbyists I'd come to meet described in quite a lot of detail how they were plotting their strategies. Often that involved developing sophisticated public relations campaigns, but they were often designed to kill off the next piece of climate legislation. Maybe it was attempts to limit emissions from coal. Of course, this isn't new. You know, we know fossil fuel companies around the world have funded multi billion dollar campaigns since at least the 1980s to deny the existence of climate change. They funded television campaigns, online campaigns, front groups, consultancy reports, and many others. And it's worked. And I think, you know, through these conversations, it really became apparent to me. And that's what me and many other researchers have been working on for some time now.
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C
I'm so curious. Tell me more about these campaigns, what the strategy is.
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B
Well, when you're thinking about, for example, the campaigns run by corporations, often they have very long time horizons. They're thinking, what do they want to achieve over the next decade? And maybe over a decade it is simply to, you know, stall climate action as long as possible because they want to keep selling oil or gas or coal. They're simply just motivated by commercial interests. How those campaigns play out? Well, there's a lot to it. There's lobbying, there's public relations, there's often litigation. There's campaigns to cast Doubt on the role of science and scientists. I'll give you one example, perhaps on public relations, which is really, I think, a key part of, you know, what you might call the climate obstruction playbook. So public relations and advertising firms have long been paid to craft political campaigns for oil and gas companies, among others. Now, these campaigns, they involve more than simply running a few television ads for a corporate client. Often a firm will do polling, they'll do focus groups, they'll do media and social media campaigns. Sometimes they'll even undertake astroturfing. And by astroturfing, what I'm referring to is creating fake community groups to give the impression of widespread support or widespread opposition for an issue.
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C
Hmm. Okay, so PR companies are being paid to come up with these campaigns, but how much is being spent on this? And what does the money trail look like?
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B
Yeah, I think this is one of the fascinating questions, right? Like, if you follow the money, what's actually happening? So what we did to try and answer that question and follow the money trail was, look, I can't say it was the most exciting task all the time, but we were looking at their tax records.
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C
Sounds exciting to me.
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B
It's a good way to kill a dinner party conversation when you start talking about tax records. But what we tried to do was look at not 90 trade associations. These are kind of industry lobby groups. And see, over a decade, how much were they spending on politics? So the first thing we did was just figure out how much money they got. And these are huge sums of money, even in the US context. So 90 trade associations working on climate issues over a decade had 25.6 billion US just in revenues.
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C
Wow.
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B
Lots of money. And then the next question is, well, you know, are they spending all of that on politics? How much? Not all of it. In fact, it was only 13%. But 13% of that is 3.4 billion much of it. In fact, 2.2 billion of that was going to public relations advertising campaigns. Another 730 million was going to lobbying. Now, this is big in the US but it's not peculiar to the US of course, similar things happen here, too.
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C
Yeah. So if those are the sorts of sums that we know are being spent in the U.S. do we know how that compares to what might be happening here in Australia?
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B
Well, part of the problem is we just don't have as good transparency or disclosure practices here in Australia. So we know that groups like, say, the Minerals Council of Australia, which has probably done a lot to block climate policy, or at least advocate against climate policy here in Australia does spend significant sums of money on political campaigns. They run television and other campaigns. These things cost a lot of money. But we aren't able to follow the money trail in the same way that we are in the us. And that's one of the issues I think here is just the lack of transparency.
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C
Coming up, how Australia could fix its transparency problem.
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B
Look, as a social scientist, it's notoriously difficult to try and, you know, reach very robust conclusions on the effectiveness of one particular strategy. But I think we can safely assume that one of the main reasons that we're failing to implement perhaps climate policies that are consistent with what climate scientists have been calling for is because of the activities of some of these organisations. It's not the only one.
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C
Kristen, you just recently gave evidence to a Senate inquiry into climate and energy misinformation. Can you tell me about that inquiry and why you decided to speak?
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B
Yeah, so in the last couple of months, there's a cross party inquiry set up. It's called the Senate Select Committee on Information Integrity and Climate Change and Energy. But basically what they're interested in is looking at how is misinformation around climate change affecting Australian politics, affecting public debate? So it's a tried and true playbook
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C
which has been tested overseas, particularly in the us.
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B
And is there any reason to believe
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C
that this isn't now being tested here in Australia, or do you think that
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B
the learnings have already come across? No, I believe those, those types of campaigns are being run here currently. You did have senators from across all parties, you know, concerned about this issue, wanting to know more about it and really gathering information about the extent of these campaigns, how they're playing out in Australia. So we'll expect the committee to report in February and hopefully they produce some strong recommendations that the government decides to act on. Hmm.
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C
And when we talk about misinformation in climate change and the climate wars and, you know, the media's role in this, this has been going on for a long time. So has something changed recently? Is what we're seeing different now?
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B
I don't think anything's significantly changed. It kind of happens with peaks and troughs. Often if there's a big climate policy put forward, such as, say, a carbon price, we saw a lot of lobbying in that period. But one thing that we have had in the last few months is a debate around what Australia's greenhouse gas target is, you know, how much should Australia reduce its emissions by? So over the last few months, we've seen a lot of political media attacks on renewable energy and climate action here. And I think these are straight out of the climate obstruction playbook. There is a pathway for Australia to be really ambitious in terms of the target that it sets, but it is expensive and it's difficult and we need to make sure that we're very clear eyed in terms of the approach that we take. So we saw the Business Council of Australia, one of the biggest business groups in the country, release modelling process. We want Australia to be ambitious, but we need to make sure that we're inherently practical. Along the way, it was the Business Council's chief executive, Bran Black, who also says inaction on climate change is no longer an option. You know, warning the government that, you know, if you take a particular target, this might cost a lot of money. Analysts say if the climate target is to reduce emissions by more than 60%, it will require more than $400 billion in new capital investment. We saw Australian scientists who'd actually prepared the nation's first national climate risk assessment showing the devastating consequences that we're going to see from climate change and are already seeing. If you've experienced the bushfires or the flooding of recent years, the report warns
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natural disasters will cost the economy 40 billion dol annually by 2050.
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We saw them being, you know, a lot of scaremongering about them on the front pages of Australian newspapers.
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By the2060s, climate change will allegedly rob us of 2.7 million work days a year. But here's the thing, governments can't even project next year's budget deficit.
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So a lot of these kind of examples are very much consistent with the empirical evidence that we've gathered from around the world about how these groups obstruct climate action.
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C
And when you read those sorts of reports and the media reporting on them, you hear these lines like the one from the Business Council of Australia that, you know, we support ambitious but quote achievable targets. So what should we be taking from that kind of messaging?
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B
I think the first thing is people should always be wary of information that's spread by organisations such as an industry group that have a commercial interest in the issue. So, you know, if you've got a gas company out there saying, oh look, renewable energy is more expensive than gas, well, you've got to remember that the gas company is going to make more money if people believe that. So it's the same for industry groups like the Business Council. I think the next time you see an industry group such as them or the Minerals Council out there complaining about government regulation or claiming we need achievable emissions targets. We've just got to remember it's not us they represent, it's the interests of their members. Industry associations have a legitimate role to advocate on behalf of corporations, but we should never confuse this with what's in the interests of the public.
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C
And you mentioned this issue around transparency in Australia. Tell me, I suppose, how you think that issue can be looked at and changed.
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B
Well, research suggests that, I guess if you're going to combat climate change information, there's a whole range of things you could do. In our testimony before the Senate, we suggested a few things. Not an exhaustive list by any means, but one is just to enhance individual immunity. Often people talk about public inoculation much like a vaccine. Right. The idea is that you can weaken the impact of misinformation if you just make people aware about it, draw their attention to who's doing it, what's their financial support. Another thing of course you can do, which we've spoken about, is making sure that the government thinks about putting in place regulations that forces some of these actors, like a trade association, to, to disclose, you know, where they're getting their money from, what are they spending it on, so we can shine a light on some of these political practices. We're also going to, of course, need, you know, more systemic changes and that often might involve regulators like the ACCC or ASIC or others holding organisations to account that engage in greenwashing. So there's a whole range of things we can do and of course the individual level, you know, we also, we all lead busy lives, but to the extent we can, checking, you know, verifying the source of something, particularly before we go and shut down, share it on social media.
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C
Well, Christian, thank you so much for talking with me.
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B
A pleasure, thanks for having me.
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7am will be back tomorrow with an interview with Peter Garrett. The former labor minister and midnight oil frontman is leading a public inquiry into the most expensive defence project in Australia's history, Aukus. We ask why he believes Australians deserve answers and whether it's too late to walk away.
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And when I do a back of the envelope on the cost of Aukus, I'm up around $500 billion. It's a hell of a lot of money. For that amount of money you could arguably, according to defence experts, have a small, a bigger fleet of diesel submarines. You could have enhanced land based defence forces and you'd have quite a lot of spare change left over for schools and hospitals.
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I'm Daniel James. See you then.