Greenpeace’s John Sauven looks at the tactics employed to silence those who campaign and report on climate change

Public debate and the open flow of information are essential cogs in the operation of any democracy. But as those of us who have fought the climate information wars know well, when science and public policy occupy the same space, the national dialogue can be corrupted. The debate is too often polluted by vested interests with a determination to buy their own facts, and their objective is not so much to win the debate as to prolong it.

The tobacco industry provides a powerful example of how business interests can stifle discussion in the pursuit of a particular business model. In 1996, the vice-president of Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation, Jeffrey Wigand, appeared on national television to expose the underhand practices utilised by the industry for which he worked. Wigand became one of America’s most celebrated corporate whistleblowers after he witnessed seven CEOs from the biggest and most powerful tobacco companies in the US claim, in front of the House of Representatives, that nicotine was not addictive and that there was no proven causal link between smoking and cancer. Following a decades-long debate over the effects of smoking, characterised by misinformation on an industrial scale, Wigand bravely turned the tables on Brown & Williamson, proving they had deliberately made their cigarettes more addictive. Among the tens of thousands of documents he spirited out of the company was an internal memo that included this now infamous phrase:

Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy. Fossil fuel companies employ tactics largely the same as those used in the tobacco wars

The scale of the war over tobacco research becomes apparent when one compares the respective resources available. In 1981 the American Cancer Society and the American Lung Association spent a combined US$300,000 on researching the health impacts of smoking. Meanwhile, tobacco companies spent $6.3m on studies downplaying the adverse health impacts of their products. The recipients of Big Tobacco’s largesse are still spreading doubt and disinformation – but for the last decade or so their paymasters have been the fossil fuel companies, most famously Exxon and Koch Industries.

Research by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M Conway (as well as Greenpeace, among others) has exposed how those with the most to lose from curbing emissions – fossil fuel companies – have been funding smear campaigns through right-wing ‘think tanks’. Many of the key players, such as the George C Marshall Institute, the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, have spent significant time and money trying to cast doubt over climate science. Some of the characters involved have previously worked to deny the reality of the hole in the ozone layer, acid rain and the link between tobacco and lung cancer. And the tactics they are applying are largely the same as those they used in the tobacco wars. Doubt is still their product.

While the White House was occupied by George W Bush, the campaign to suppress the scientific consensus on climate change was amplified by the federal government itself. A 2007 report published by the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Government Accountability Project (‘Investigation Reveals Widespread Suppression of Federal Climate Research’), found that almost half of 279 US federal climate scientists had been pressured to delete references to ‘global warming’ or ‘climate change’ from scientific papers or reports. Many said their work had been altered. The most famous example was that of Rick Piltz, who resigned from his post as coordinator of climate science for the federal government in 2005, claiming that his work had been distorted by political interference. Philip A Cooney, a White House lawyer with no scientific training, removed entire paragraphs from government reports on climate change and inserted words exaggerating uncertainties to reduce the apparent urgency of the threat. The government asked for Piltz’s resignation on the grounds that he had briefed the New York Times on Cooney’s editing practices despite employees of his agency not being allowed to speak to the press without clearance from political minders. Cooney was also forced to resign, though the blow was softened by an immediate offer of employment from Exxon. (for more on Piltz’s case, see ‘The denial machine’, Index, 4/2008).

Seniority or expertise seemingly offers little protection in repelling the tentacles of political or corporate interference from reaching into scientific research. James E Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, found that officials had put his planned lectures and papers under review and restricted his access to journalists after he publicly called for greater restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions. ‘Communicating with the public seems to be essential because public concern is probably the only thing capable of overcoming the special interests that have obfuscated the topic,’ he said in a 2006 New York Times article.

This all took place under Bush, a pantomime villain for environmental protection groups. But while many would like to believe that the 43rd president was a one-off, a glance north to Canada shows that his administration was possibly more of a trailblazer than an anomaly. Because while the Obama administration has relaxed the restrictions on its scientists, the United States’ northern neighbour has recently discovered that it has – in the form of Alberta’s tar sands – much larger fossil fuel reserves than previously thought. And this realisation appears to have caused the government in Ottawa to question how much the free dissemination of information continues to be in the interests of the Canadian people. Since 2007, Canadian government scientists have been barred from communicating with journalists, even in a personal capacity, unless they are ‘assisted’ by a government media relations officer. This frequently leads to Canadian scientists being unable to speak to journalists until well after a news story is no longer news, and to some journalists abandoning their attempts to approach government scientists. It seems, therefore, that the so-called ‘resource curse’ – where discoveries of large deposits of fossil fuels or minerals leads to a reversal of rights – is a phenomenon not restricted to developing countries.

In the UK, government surveillance of peaceful environmental organisations has raised fundamental questions over the power of the executive and its attitude to dissent. Two years ago the Guardian exposed how UK police forces had spent millions on undercover officers thoroughly infiltrating peaceful environmental groups. Some of these police officers spent years in the movement and had relationships and even children with genuine activists, who were unaware that they were just ‘cover’. If a police force wants to tap the phone of an activist it must still seek the authority of the Home Secretary, but if it wants to send an agent to live with a protester, to marry her, to have children with her, all that is required is the agreement of a senior officer. Meanwhile, freedom of information requests have revealed evidence of UK police forces colluding with fossil fuel corporations to stifle protest. This collaboration has gone well beyond logistical cooperation in policing disruptive protests, and includes coordinated media strategies. In 2007, the British Airports Authority sought a high court injunction on climate activists, barring them from Heathrow, perhaps constituting the high-water mark of corporate efforts to suppress public discourse. The defeated injunction cast its net so widely that it would have barred several million people from West London.

The underhanded acts of government are not limited to the UK or the US. India is confronting an ever-increasing demand for energy – a dynamic for which the only solution, according to the government, is to build more and more coal-fired power stations. To feed this expansion, the Indian government has been allocating huge swathes of forest for coal-mining companies to exploit. In 2012 it emerged that the allocation of these mining areas was mired in corruption – ministers and regional politicians had been handing over some of India’s most precious forest areas, where some of its oldest indigenous groups live, to coal-mining companies for substantial sums of money. The Indian police were called in to investigate corruption in the allocation of licences. As in the UK, the police in India send their investigations to a state prosecutor. However, in this highly political case, the police sent the draft of their criminal investigation to the government, including the individuals implicated, before they sent it to the prosecution.

When the Supreme Court of India uncovered the cosy relationship between the police and politicians, their honourable justices said that the ‘massive breach of trust’ had ‘shaken democracy to its foundation’, asserting that the central investigating agency must be ‘liberated’ from its ‘political masters’. The resource curse had struck again.

It is impossible to predict how the climate debate will change as the world’s most populous countries assert their power on the international stage – not least within UN climate negotiations. But it is clear that it will be in these expanding economies that the battle over the Earth’s future will be won or lost. And as in the tobacco wars, the fight over clean energy is likely to be a dirty one.