THE CARBON WAR

Chapter 13
Winning dirty in an endless war
London, 30 th October 2014
Twenty solar industry executives gather for wine and dinner in a conference
room above an office on a crowded West End Street. The price of their supper
is a pitch from me. The Solar Trade Association has kindly convened this early-evening
gathering so that I can try to organise some solar-industry lobbying
beyond the kind that they themselves do.
My idea is simple. I want ten companies to contribute £10,000 each to
fund a basic effort to counter the oil and gas industry’s efforts to sabotage
the solar industry’s interests. In particular, I want us to develop a voice in the
fracking debate. Why should we not, when the wonders of shale are so often
espoused by incumbency cheerleaders as a reason for putting solar on a back
burner or worse?
The latest evidence of what we are up against has appeared this very day
in the New York Times. Someone in a roomful of oil and gas industry executives
has developed a conscience and leaked a tape of a presentation by a top
incumbency lobbyist. In it, Richard Berman, a veteran fossil fuel defender, tells
his audience that they should regard themselves as being in a state of “endless
war” with environmentalists and others who oppose fracking and advocate
clean-energy deployment. The oil and gas industry cannot “win pretty”, he says.
They will have to “win dirty”. By this he means the use of tactics such as digging
up embarrassing information about environmentalists and liberal celebrities,
and exploiting emotions like fear, greed and anger, and turning them against
the opponents of fossil fuels.
The executive who did the leaking told the paper that he did so because
the black-arts approach Berman suggested left a bad taste in his mouth.
This is one of the reasons why I think of the battle of ideas on climate
and energy as a “war”. A civil war: fossilistas versus cleantechistas, incumbents