Page 36 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

18 G. MURDOCK AND B. BREVINI

Section Three: Corporate Captures: PR Strategies
and Promotional Gambits

This section examines the strategies corporations employ in their attempts
to influence public debate and policy on climate change.
In Chap. 8, Kim Sheehan, a past president of the American Academy of
Advertising who has consulted for numerous consumer product compa-
nies, including People magazine and Laura Ashley, and now at the
University of Oregon, explains her work with the Greenwashing Index,
monitoring corporate public relations strategies designed to present a
green image.
In Chap. 9, David McKnight and Mitchell Hobbs detail the public
relations strategies used by the mining and energy lobby in Australia to
defeat climate change policy initiatives which they see as running counter
to their corporate interests. They present three case studies where these
strategies were implemented to maximum effect: the Labour government’s
attempt to implement a carbon emissions trading scheme, the ‘charm
offensive’ mounted by the mining and energy sector to cultivate strategic
alliances and allies to prevent future legislative challenges, and the Labor
government’s second attempt to introduce a carbon tax and the mining
industry’s powerful backlash. These case studies demonstrate very clearly
the ways the mining and energy sector employ varying combinations of
‘reward and punishment’ that can make it difficult for governments to
enact legislation to reduce carbon emissions.
In Chap. 10, Patrick McCurdy explores the struggles around the con-
tentious exploitation of Alberta’s bitumen sands focussing on the possi-
bilities and problems presented by the mobilisation of celebrity
endorsement of protests. Taking four prominent celebrities–actress Neve
Campbell, singer Neil Young, film director James Cameron and actor
Leonardo DiCaprio–who have lent support to the tar sands protests by
travelling to the disputed sites of extraction and physically ‘bearing wit-
ness’, he demonstrates how easily an inadvertent slip can undermine the
credibility of the cause. Of the four celebrities Leonardo DiCaprio had the
strongest track record of concern and activism on environmental issues,
having established a foundation in 1998 promoting projects to protect
endangered habitats and ecologies. But a simple error, mistaking a recur-
ring local weather condition for a more general signal of climate instability,
was immediately seized on by media hostile to the protests and used to
discredit him and the protest.