Tag: Drilled

Categories
Norway Predatory delay Propaganda

New words! “Petroganda” and “oilsplaining”

I just listened to a Drilled podcast – The Black Thread Pt 2: Petroganda, and you should to.

It’s a nice investigation of the way Statoil (since rebranded as Equinor) has a virtual death grip on Norwegian culture and “common sense.” Nobody says “Gramsci” or “hegemony”, but maybe they should. Nice interview with the Statoil Veep of Communications too.

Here’s a definition

The term “petroganda” was coined by journalist and Drilled founder Amy Westervelt to describe the fossil fuel industry’s approach to the information ecosystem, an approach that goes far beyond simply “disinformation,” which Westervelt describes as just the most visible symptom of this problem. In this context “petroganda” is defined as: The intentional warping of information ecosystems by corporate interests, such that everything from the basic building blocks of information—university research, surveys, white papers—to public-facing campaigns crafted by PR and advertising experts are driven by a profit or power motive as opposed to the desire to understand and communicate.

“Petroganda” is perhaps a little clumsy, and is hardly new (but then, they don’t claim it is). It’s simply the way that the oil companies (and in Australia it was/is the coal companies) go for full spectrum dominance – making sure they are in people’s minds and hearts from a very young age. The usual stuff – museums, sponsoring sports and cultural stuff, games for the kiddies etc etc. And it creates what one interviewee calls “oilsplaining” – whenever she raises Statoil’s carbon emissions she gets all the oily talking points, from people who don’t think they’ve been indoctrinated at all…

I quite like Emily Atkin’s

of oilsplaining, drawing on (of course) Rebecca Solnit’s “mansplaining.”

Oilsplaining,” our word for when some random dude who doesn’t fully understand climate change explains the benefits of fossil fuels to you .

See also

The Fossil Fuel Industry Hasn’t Come Up With a New Story in 100 Years, Why Do Climate Folks Find It So Hard to Keep Up?

2023 academic article “The language of late fossil capital.”

And my piece about Shell and its corporate propaganda, from late 2015. On existentialism, guilt, Godard and … Shell’s corporate framing strategy

A Statoil guy talking about climate change in 1980.

March 21, 1980 – chair of Statoil board acknowledges the “social cost” of the “CO2 problem”

Categories
Academia Propaganda

“Books, books, and more books”: a key climate delayer technique

The battle for the public mind is never-ending. And one of the key weapons remains… wait for it… books.

This below is inspired by reading Royce Kurmelovs’ review of a new tiresome pronuclear abundance tome that makes utterly baseless allegations about the funding behind “Friends of the Earth.” (Full disclosure, Royce is a friend, we’ve collaborated in the past and I had a very minor role in the research of this review).

A book is a “hook” – the author(s) get, er, booked, to appear on radio shows, tv programmes. The book is excerpted in newspapers, which are then quoted by columnists in papers and by politicians in parliament. The book can be the excuse for a tour of cities. The book gets you on podcasts. The book can get turned into instagram posts and tiktok videos.

None of this is new, but it is worth remembering.

Two particular (albeit American) examples should be part of any intelligent media-observer’s toolkit.

The first is the statement by Julian Simon about what the “conservative” movement needed. This from Jane Meyer tells you what you need to know.

His father evidently lost his mother’s fortune, motivating Simon to make his own. On Wall Street, he became a hugely successful partner at Salomon Brothers, where he was an early leader in the lucrative new craze for leveraged buyouts. But what neither Olin nor Simon had was influence over the next generation. “We are careening with frightening speed towards collectivism,” Simon warned.
Only an ideological battle could save the country, in Simon’s view. “What we need is a counter-intelligentsia. … [It] can be organized to challenge our ruling ‘new class’ — opinion makers,” Simon wrote. “Ideas are weapons — indeed the only weapons with which other ideas can be fought.” He argued, “Capitalism has no duty to subsidize its enemies.” Private and corporate foundations, he said, must cease “the mindless subsidizing of colleges and universities whose departments of politics, economics and history are hostile to capitalism.” Instead, they “must take pains to funnel desperately needed funds to scholars, social scientists and writers who understand the relationship between political and economic liberty,” as he put it. “They must be given grants, grants, and more grants in exchange for books, books, and more books.”
Under Simon’s guidance, the Olin foundation tried to fund the new “counterintelligentsia.” At first, it tried supporting little-known colleges where conservative ideas — and money — were welcome. But Simon and his associates soon realized that this was a losing strategy. If the Olin foundation wanted impact, it needed to infiltrate prestigious universities, especially the Ivy League.

Mayer 2016 (emphasis added).

    The second is the Joan Peters debacle. Somebody wrote a book, published under her name in 1984, about how there weren’t any Palestinians in the 19th century – “a land without people for a people without a land” stuff, and the US academics lapped it up. Then along came Norman Finkelstein and Noam Chomsky… I URGE you to read Chomsky’s account, here.

    The beauty of the book technique is that – if it comes from a ‘reputable’ publisher – it gives any old bullshit argument a heft, a solidity, it doesn’t deserve. It sells copies (publisher happy) and the author gets exposure, and bandwidth gets taken up, nonsense talking points get repeated and regurgitated, no matter how many times the book is “demolished” (see Chomsky above)

    See also

    “Why are they lying to our children?” – what a 40 year old propaganda campaign can tell us about today (and tomorrow’s) cultural battles. #Climate #CorporatePropaganda