How Fossil Fuels Found Their Influencers
Edelman used its trust survey to help oil and gas clients obstruct climate action.
Last Friday, The Lever published my latest investigation into the public relations firm Edelman: “How Fossil Fuels Found Their Influencers.”
The story, which is based on a briefing produced by the advocacy group Clean Creatives, reveals how the world’s largest PR agency used proprietary insights from the “trust barometer,” its flagship survey about trust, to serve the interests of its oil and gas clients. (Edelman launched the latest version of the trust barometer at the World Economic Forum earlier this week.)
The PR juggernaut Edelman has employed its purportedly definitive “trust barometer”… to help fossil fuel companies more effectively manufacture public trust. With Edelman’s help, these corporations turned oil and gas workers into a positive public face for fossil fuels, obscuring the role of the profit-hungry executives who actually pull the strings.
The trust barometer has “always been positioned as this quasi-academic contribution of Edelman: ‘We’re just looking at how things are shaped in the world,’ as if they’re doing it in some magnanimous gesture or service to the world,” Kert Davies, director of special investigations at the nonprofit Center for Climate Integrity, told The Lever. “This [Clean Creatives] report shows that the trust barometer is built to generate business.”
Clean Creatives’s findings, which are being published for the first time by The Lever, include the revelation that “Energy Citizens,” an ultimately successful astroturf campaign launched by the American Petroleum Institute while Edelman was the organization’s single largest contractor, hewed closely to Edelman’s proprietary insights about trust. The effectiveness of Energy Citizens, which involved making oil and gas workers the “human face” of the fossil fuel industry to create the impression of widespread grassroots support, contributed to the defeat of U.S. climate legislation in 2010.
You can read the full story here: “How Fossil Fuels Found Their Influencers.”
Thanks to Lucy Dean Stockton, Joel Warner, and the team at The Lever, as well as the tireless investigators who produced the Clean Creatives briefing.
