Is there a PR campaign against climate science in the UK?
It seems like there’s a small one, at least. The Guardian covered Al Gore’s presentation at the Scottish low-carbon investment conference:
Outside the conference venue, two women employed by the Kreate promotions agency in London handed out anonymously produced leaflets to delegates reproducing media reports of a high court judgment that heavily criticised the accuracy of Gore’s 2007 climate documentary An Inconvenient Truth.
Barry Duncan, the manager of Kreate, said their staff had been hired by a client who wanted to remain anonymous, on behalf of another anonymous client, to hand out “leaflets on renewable energy”. Duncan said: “This is a bit strange, I totally agree.”
Why strange? There were undoubtedly lots of people handing out leaflets at the conference, of all political hues. But you’d probably be able to find out where most of them were coming from and infer who was paying for their activities.
If Kreate were commissioned to do the work by an intermediary on behalf of another anonymous client, it does look like whoever is behind the leafleting has taken some significant steps to make sure they’re not linked to it.
The worry about such anonymised PR is that it approaches the kind of ‘ astroturfing‘ activities which have run alongside the US climate debate. In one example, the American Petroleum Institute – lobbyists for the US fossil fuels industry, talked about running ‘Energy Citizens’ rallies, upswellings of grassroots concern about energy policy which involved ‘ contracting with a highly experienced events management company that has produced successful rallies for presidential campaigns, corporations and interest groups‘ and then bussing in oil company employees to fill up the events.
On the phone, Kreate were quick to claim as little knowledge as possible. They were paid to supply a couple of people to ‘help a client’ the ‘account manager’ told me. But she wouldn’t say who the account holder was, and while he had apparently given Kreate a ‘rough idea’ what the leaflets were about, that was as much involvement as they were admitting to.
None of this reluctance to spill the beans is surprising. PR agencies are notoriously protective of their client’s identities – most don’t put full lists of who they work for on their websites. This is presumably the case for Kreate – it’s hard to imagine that any of the companies listed on their website are that interested in Al Gore. (Although maybe Greggs is a particularly carbon-intensive business, I don’t know.)
I asked them (over twitter) whether their staff had been branded as Kreate employees, or whether they’d been effectively posing as members of the public. There was no response, although the people concerned were obviously prepared to say who they were when the Guardian asked them.
So all we know is that someone has paid a PR firm to attack Al Gore while he’s in the UK. And whatever you think of him, in the US at least, attacking Al Gore has pretty much become a proxy for attacking climate science.
We haven’t got hold of a copy of the leaflet yet (Kreate apparently didn’t have any), but if the leaflets covered the High court verdict on Al Gore’s film as the Guardian suggest, it’s worth noting that according to the Guardian that was supported by a ‘powerful network of business interests with close links to the fuel and mining lobbies‘. (It’s worth noting as an aside that although the judge did identify some problems with the presentation of climate science in the film, in his ruling he noted that it was ‘broadly accurate’.)
Someone else at Kreate told us that there had been a lot of phone calls about the story, and asked me to explain what was going on. So if nothing else, they’ll probably ask a few more questions the next time their mystery client commissions them.