On this day in 2022 the the CEO of the ad agency (well, behemoth) IPG announced it was revising its policy on fossil fuels.
In what the company said is a first for the industry, Interpublic Group and its agencies are now proactively reviewing the climate impacts of prospective clients that operate in the oil, energy and utility sectors before accepting new work.
IPG said it was working with climate change consultant Planet + Purpose Solutions to develop a set of questions that the company expects prospective clients to affirm before agreeing to partner with them.
The questions include:
Have these potential clients set specific emission reduction goals that are aligned with 1.5°C ambition to achieve net-zero GHG emissions by 2050 or sooner with no greater than 10% off-setting?
Are these companies publishing clear climate reporting, including scope, baseline, timeline, and the tracking of Scopes 1, 2 and 3 emissions?
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 418ppm. As of 2025, when this post was published, it is 430ppm. This matters because the more carbon dioxide in the air, the more heat gets trapped. The more heat, the more extreme weather events. You can make it more complicated than that if you want, but really, it’s not. Fwiw, I have a tattoo of the Keeling Curve on my left forearm.
The broader context was that white colour people with educations and eyes were beginning to see the webs of complicity, and not liking it so much. And were trying to change the system from within (as per Leonard Cohen).
The specific context was that “creatives” etc within the agency were pressuring for a pledge.
What I think we can learn from this. You can – with effort and luck – get some promises of action from our Lords and Masters.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.
Thirty one years ago, on this day, September 22nd, 1994,
The Federal Government’s response to the greenhouse gas problem will inevitably cut billions of dollars from Australia’s economic growth but a carbon tax would devastate the economy, according to a major new report.
The study, by the Melbourne-based National Institute of Economic and Industry Research, says that current government ambitions for reducing greenhouse gas emissions are “unrealistic” and cannot be achieved without major economic costs.
It confirms there are no easy choices facing the Government in dealing with the greenhouse problem, particularly in the short term.
Commissioned by the Electricity Supply Association of Australia, the two-year, $400,000 research project, suggests that a longer-term greenhouse response would mitigate the impact on the national economy. The new analysis will be publicly released today. … coal industry closed down by 2000.
Gill, P. 1994. Carbon tax to ruin economy says new study. The Australian Financial Review, 22 September, p.6.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 359ppm. As of 2025, when this post was published, it is 430ppm. This matters because the more carbon dioxide in the air, the more heat gets trapped. The more heat, the more extreme weather events. You can make it more complicated than that if you want, but really, it’s not. Fwiw, I have a tattoo of the Keeling Curve on my left forearm.
The broader context was that business had been running scare campaigns against any government action on any given issue for ages – that’s what they do. Starting in 1989 or so, they did the same for “the Greenhouse Effect.”
The specific context was that the Federal Environment Minister, John Faulkner, had spent the last few months trying to get people on board for a carbon tax. This was part of the pushback.
What I think we can learn from this is that they always do “sky will fall” economic reports. Why change a winning game?
What happened next: The carbon tax was defeated in early February 1995.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.
Twenty nine years ago, on this day, September 10th, 1997 another pro-apocalypse propaganda outfit was launched, ahead of the UNFCCC negotiations to take place in Kyoto (COP-3).
“Global Climate Information Project” launched”
Launched on September 9, 1997, by some of the nation’s most powerful trade associations, the Global Climate Information Project (GCIP) has rolled out an ambitious campaign for combating possible emission regulations courtesy of the Kyoto conference.
Through an advertising campaign that, according to GCIP figures, has already spent more than $3 million in newspaper and television spots and could spend as much as $13 million, the GCIP aims to cast doubt upon the need for emissions controls by questioning the politics and the science behind a United Nations agreement.
Writing on the media campaign unveiled by the GCIP, Bruce Clark of the Financial Times remarked that it “could become one of the most expensive lobbying efforts since the ‘Harry and Louise’ commercials that helped doom” the Clinton administration’s health-care reform proposal”
“A Clear View, Vol 4, No 16, Clearinghouse on Environmental Advocacy and Research”
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 364ppm. As of 2025, when this post was published, it is 430ppm. This matters because the more carbon dioxide in the air, the more heat gets trapped. The more heat, the more extreme weather events. You can make it more complicated than that if you want, but really, it’s not. Fwiw, I have a tattoo of the Keeling Curve on my left forearm.
The broader context was that business interests always mobilise and collaborate to face down challenges to their right to socialise the costs and privatise the profits. There’s lots of good research on this – Merchants of Doubt by Oreskes and Conway remains a good place to start.
The specific context was that Kyoto was coming and business had already done a great job in demonising it, in boxing in US Senators. But you can never be too sure, so thus the “Information” (sic) Project.
What I think we can learn from this. The war for the public mind goes on, and on.
What happened next – the war for the public mind went on.
New battalions were formed, new weapons tested. The strategic imperative remains unchanged – keep the peasants too busy to fight back. Buy off the smart one that you can, sideline or dephysicalise those you can’t.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.
So much of the world of these dudes is based on the idea that the "realistic", "pragmatic" and "rational" thing to do is to commit civilisational suicide by boiling ourselves alive.
The days when energy companies could flirt with outright climate denial are gone (outside of the US, but the US has always been an outliar). The evidence has piled up, the reputational and access-to-policymaker risks too high.Why run the risks when you can achieve the same results, enact the same predatory delay, by pushing the line of ‘realism’?
you paint yourself an adult, a sensible centrist and your critics as hysterical children. It’s a win-win.
On the question o practical/pragmatic, the best thing I ever read was this-
“… the word praktisch had been a two-syllable club he’d been beaten with by fellow students and teachers and businessmen and clergy all through the nightmare years. “Stop being such a god-damned idealist! Be practical!”“Practical means I know right from wrong but I’m too fucking scared to do what’s right so I commit crimes or permit crimes and I say I’m only being practical. Practical means coward. Practical frequently means stupid. Someone is too goddamn dumb to realize the consequences of what he’s doing and he hides under practical. It also means corrupt: I know what I ought to do but I’m being paid to do something different so I call it practical. Practical is an umbrella for everything lousy people do.”
(Quote from Brendan Phibbs amazing book The Other Side of Time: a Combat Surgeon in World War II Little Brown & Co, New York (1987)
Inspired by the brilliant “Letters from an American” podcast by Professor Heather Cox Richardson, I bashed out this below.
May 27, 2025, with atmospheric carbon dioxide at roughly 430.36ppm, up from 315ppm in 1958.
Speaking at the Australian gas industry’s annual conference in Brisbane the CEO of energy giant Woodside, Meg O’Neill, tried to stiffen the spines of her fellow fossil fuel activists by attacking young people who were taking what she called an ideological stand against fossil fuels. As Graham Readfearn of the Guardian Australia reports, she suggested the young are hypocrites for ordering cheap online consumer goods “without any sort of recognition of the energy and carbon impact of their actions”.
I want to give two bits of context – first historical about the gas industry’s response to climate, and secondly about the nature of these trade events.
It was not always like this. In the late 1980s, when the Greenhouse Effect” – which we now call climate change – was first a hot political issue, the Australian Gas industry had an initial interest in the greenhouse effect in supplanting coal. This continued in the late 1990s when the Australian Gas Association – the peak trade body at the time, was led by one Bill Nagle, who saw gas as “cleaner than coal.” He broke with the Australian Industry Greenhouse network. Coal interests were not impressed at the show of disunity. As described in the 2007 book High and Dry by Guy Pearse Nagle was warned by a senior Minerals Council figure
“You know, you pursue this hard line and you scratch the coal industry too much harder and they will come out and we will start talking about nitrous oxide emissions, methane, or pipe leakages…Don’t do it, because if you do it we’ll have a big brawl between the energy industries in this country in the public arena which won’t do anybody any good.”
Nagle’s efforts to reorient the Australian Gas Association failed.
On these sort of conferences – they act as a watering hole for lobbyists to rub shoulders with ministers, for trial balloons to be flown, and carefully honed publicity slogans to begin their journey to “common sense” – repeated by journalists, politicians and other “thought leaders.”.
The Australian Coal Association, now defunct, used to run bi-annual conferences. In 1990, much of the talk was given over to the greenhouse effect – including speakers saying it wasn’t real – and what might be done to blameshift or even take actual technical steps. Conferences like these also allow inadequate and/or hasbeen journalists the chance to feel important by their proximity to power and wealth, and provides cheap (pre-written) copy. So it’s a win win all around, except for the – checks notes – planet.
By the way, for more details about the gas industry, you can check out Royce Kermelovs’ recent book Slick and various reports of The Australia Institute on how much – or little – tax the gas giants pay, and who benefits.
What is the incumbent strategy on display
What O’Neill said is a very well established rhetorical technique. This process of infantilizing critics, ignoring the strongest or most socially powerful critics and instead aiming fire at children, is clever, devious and cynical.
By framing climate change as an issue that young people with their silly views and silly consumer habits are concerned with, rather than something scientists have been studying and warning about for 35 years, tat the Secretary-General of the United Nations, the late Pope Francis and countless others have screamed themselves hoarse over. O’Neill is setting up a straw man and knocking it down.
O’Neil is ducking and weaving away from the substantive issues that actual adults would need to confront, because she has nothing else if Woodside is to continue making profits, it will have to keep extracting selling fossil fuels that will be burnt and the carbon dioxide From those long molecules of gas will be released into the atmosphere, trapping heat. She knows this, and she also knows that carbon capture and storage and carbon dioxide removal is frankly, “solution” even if it were to work, which it has not so far.
Ultimately, O’Neill is deploying a version of what I call the “hypocrite/zealot” trap. If a critic benefits from fossil fuels they can be dismissed as a hypocrite. If they are vegan who never flies or drives, they can be dismissed as a zealot.
What are the earliest/clearest examples of this incumbent strategy being deployed, either on climate or in another context?
This trivialization of opponents and this willful ignorance is not new. Indeed, it pre-dates the battles over climate and environment, as laid out in Oreskes and Conway’s magisterial 2010 work “Merchants of Doubt,“
If you want to look at how incumbent trade associations and supporters of what are now regarded as horrific practices – slavery, child labour etc defend themselves – I would strongly recommend ES Turner s 1950 book Roads to Ruin: A Shocking History of Social Progress.
How has this incumbent strategy been challenged/delayed/defeated in the past?
So, how to respond? How does one challenge these techniques? Well, simply naming them is a start. By explaining, in clear, vivid and non-technical terms what O’Neill and others are doing, it makes it riskier for her and her colleagues to repeat the same trick again. But that can’t come from the young, because it will look like special pleading. This push back has to come from adults, and preferably ones with scientific and business credentials.
What power/forces would be needed to combat/move this incumbent strategy to the “too costly” or “not effective” space?
There is a new-ish expression doing the rounds – “every accusation is a confession.” While I don’t think that is always true, I do think it holds in this case. On some level, presumably, O’Neill knows what she is doing. She is the child here, refusing to accept realities that would force her to stop doing what she wants. Those she accuses of being children, they are the adults.
What is required is a properly grown-up conversation about where we find ourselves – at 430ppm and rising fast, Why we are here, why almost 40 years of scientific and political concern about climate change has in no meaningful way worked. That would require independent media, brave professionals and brave professional bodies, social movements and political parties that were not made up of -mostly- meatpuppets for extraction.
What makes the creation/maintenance/extension of that power/that adaptation more difficult.
Look, itt seems unlikely, given the last 40 years, that we are going to start being grown up now, when the social inducements to fantasies of technosalvation and explicit and implicit denial become stronger and stronger.
