THE CARBON WAR

Chapter 17
Give us moving pictures
London, 1 st March 2015
A day about communication in the battle of ideas on climate energy. I am
launching my serialised book at a public lecture in the London School of Economics.
It will be videoed, as so many presentations are these days, and posted
for endless posterity on both the university’s website and my own. The audience
is mostly students, and I will have a responsibility to offer them both hope and
as much entertainment as I can.
I elect to use a PowerPoint but make it image-heavy and chart-light. And
I do something I have never done in a talk before: I include a short video clip.
The point I want to emphasise, at the end of the talk, is that young people
today have an advantage, when it comes to communicating in the battle of
ideas, over the aging men who for the most part run the PR for the oil and gas
industry. The youngsters understand the zeitgeist far better.
The stakes are high here. The world’s biggest PR agency has just parted
ways with the American Petroleum Institute, in the face of withering criticism
on social media. After more than $300m in billings from Big Oil, Edelman ends
a relationship that is now giving it a PR problem, especially with the young
thinkers that it sees as vital to its future.
Fossil fuel companies have been hitting back at the divestment movement
with crude videos and websites bearing names like “Big Green Radicals”,
pushing an extreme defence of the status quo rooted in simple messages and
smears. One attack website, funded by the oil-billionaire Koch brothers, is
focused solely on solar. Its rationale: “Shining a light on the dark side of solar
power. Billions blown on solar offer little bang for the bucks.”
Another, run by the lobbyist exposed by the New York Times for his
exhortation of oil-and-gas executives to wage “endless war” on advocates of
transition, Richard Berman, offers a particularly inane video defence of fossil