The world’s biggest public relations company has decided it will no longer work with coal producers and climate change deniers.

Edelman said it believes such clients pose a threat to the company’s legitimacy and its bottom line.



The exclusion of coal and climate denial, as well as fake front groups that oppose action on global warming, is outlined in internal communications obtained by the Guardian and confirmed by company executives. It signals an important shift in a company that reported earnings of $833m (£540m) and has played a critical role in shaping public opinion in the US and globally about climate change.

The new approach follows a two-year review of Edelman’s operations aimed at protecting what the company calls its “licence to lead”, following negative publicity about its work on behalf of the oil lobby and pipeline companies.

The conclusion was that coal producers and climate denial, as well as tactics such as greenwashing, were high-risk.



“On climate denial and coal those are where we just said this is absolutely a no-go area,” Michael Stewart, the president and chief executive for Europe, who led the review, told the Guardian.



The company was also taking a stand against spreading doubt about climate change, and the use of fake front groups to influence elected officials, Stewart said.

“When you are trying in some way to obfuscate the truth or use misinformation and half-truths that is what we would consider getting into the work of greenwashing, and that is something we would never propose or work we would support our client doing,” he went on. “Greenwashing, fake front groups, anything like that is completely inappropriate.”

The company made no promises on representing companies that have fought against regulations cutting carbon pollution. However, clients involved in Arctic drilling and the Alberta tar sands will not be excluded, and there was no discussion about dropping other oil and gas producers, Stewart said.

“To simply try and carve out carbon production from the overall energy mix in one fell swoop is just not part of the mainstream discourse, and not something we considered,” he said. “Right now the only categorical exclusion we have is on climate denial and coal.”



The company would not say how much of its work currently remained in the energy sector, after Edelman ended its work for a number of high-profile energy clients, or whether falling oil prices were a factor in the decision.

Edelman was one of the first big PR companies to adopt an internal carbon accounting system, and has worked on several high-profile global environmental campaigns.



But the company lost a number of big clients and key executives earlier this year, in part because of its position on climate change.



Edelman was caught flat-footed last year when other major PR firms took a stand against climate denial, and was also criticised for setting up front groups in support of a Canadian pipeline project. In Britain anti-fracking activists accused Edelman of using front groups to influence parliamentary debate.

Campaigners said Edelman’s stated policies on climate change were at odds with such campaign tactics and a client roster that included the powerful oil industry lobby, the American Petroleum Institute, as well as conservative groups such as the American Legislative Exchange Council that oppose Barack Obama’s environmental agenda and have disputed the existence of climate change.

Some of those same critics have now praised Edelman for dropping coal.



“It’s a very big deal for the biggest PR company in the world to be shunning coal. It shows that coal’s social licence has been degraded, and that it is affecting industries that do business with big coal,” said Kert Davies, the director of the Climate Investigations Centre, which last year put Edelman on the spot for its policies on climate change.

Robert Cox, professor emeritus of communications at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a former president of the Sierra Club, said the new strategy signalled a shift in public perceptions of fossil fuels.

“If Edelman is now declining to work for climate change denialists or fossil fuel, particularly coal, I think it is yet another signal that the fossil fuel industry is losing its credibility and that climate change denial its losing its appeal,” Cox said. “The refusal of companies like Edelman to work for coal companies is now putting them in the same category of delegitimisation as tobacco.”

Lisa Manley, one of the departing Edelman executives, said: “I think the world needs more companies to take positions around the changes that are going to be needed so that we can live within a 2C boundary [the amount of global warming governments have set out to hold temperature rises to], and one of the things that needs to be phased out with all due haste is our reliance on coal. So for a large multinational communications company to take a public stance is a positive thing.”

Henk Campher, who also left Edelman’s sustainability practice, said the company could still do more. “If you want the licence to lead then you have to use your services in a way that promotes a better world. It is not good enough to say: I won’t work on campaigns that deny climate change. That is not the problem. How are your services used to actually fight climate change? That’s leadership.”

The changes at Edelman follow an extensive review described by Stewart as “soul-searching” after the company itself had a run of bad PR for its business practices.



“Clearly in 2014 we were becoming part of the headlines and not in a helpful way,” Stewart said. “We are there to help our clients tell their story and not be a part of the story.”

He said the company no longer represented some of the clients that had attracted the negative publicity, and was no longer working for API, Alec, or the Keystone XL pipeline.

Edelman is also no longer working with the Alliance for Northwest Jobs and Exports, a coalition of coal, mining and rail interests that is lobbying for coal-expert terminals in the Pacific Northwest.

In a 30 July memo, Matthew Harrington, Edelman’s chief operating officer, told the company’s global management team that the firm had determined that climate deniers and coal producers were a threat to its reputation and potentially its business. “When it comes to determining our client assignments, the only issue that experts repeatedly advised Edelman to stay away from was climate change deniers/denial and related activities,” Harrington wrote.

Edelman was also reviewing other potentially high-risk clients, such as coal producers. “Certain types of energy/topics surfaced as potentially higher-risk areas – eg coal production – as well as certain tactics (eg greenwashing),” the memo went on.

Richard Edelman, the chief executive and the son of the company’s founder, personally intervened to see that the company dropped coal – the dirtiest of fossil fuels – because it is the biggest contributor to climate change.

“In the past few weeks, the decision has been made not to work with clients in the coal production industry,” the memo said. “Given that coal emits the most C02 of any fossil fuel per unit of energy obtained, Richard has made the category decision that we will not work for coal producers going forward.”

In those deliberations, Harrington said the company had come to some important conclusions about energy and climate change.

“Climate change is not a dichotomy between energy and climate interests. It is a multi-facted issue that touches nearly all sectors and will affect most industries and, more importantly, economies,” he wrote.

