Left as an Exercise

(Click the cover to go to the book’s official page and read the synopsis and blurbs. Pay attention to who’s giving it the best praise.)

Short review: If you’ve listened to me discuss denialism and PR at all in the last two years, consider that a Coles-notes-version of a course on the subject. This would be the required textbook to such a course.

I’ve been waiting for this book for years before I knew it was coming out. Climate Cover-up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming is easy to read (my father, who isn’t as steeped in the material as I am and thus isn’t likely to enter the “skim the familiar bits” mode, finished it in two and a half hours, including time for lunch) and covers an incredible amount of territory - from the foundations of public relations itself to the brutal specifics of the modern-day inactivist noise machine. It’s also, in a refreshing change, not entirely American-centric: the authors, based out of BC, spend  a good chunk of time observing Canadian inactivism and the impact it’s had on our leadership. (I’ve certainly cited them before: they’re the main people behind the DeSmog Blog. Oh, and by the way, Ian, the federal Liberals get hit almost as heavily as Stephen Harper here. It seems the accusations of partisanship may only apply to Kevin Grandia.)

For someone like me, obsessed with this very subject (and science communication as a whole), many of the details aren’t new, although seeing them all in one place puts them in a different perspective. However, for people less familiar with the scope of the Denial Machine, this book may be one loud wake-up call after the other. James Hoggan pulls no punches and isn’t afraid to name names - some professional denialists, most notably S. Fred Singer, are mentioned so often that the reader learns to recognize their names, which should prove useful in spotting denialist op-eds.

Content-wise, the book follows a logical organization: After a brief introduction to public relations as a whole (including an often-ignored ‘oath’ of sorts to serve the public interest), it progresses through the inner workings of the Denial Machine not in chronological order (which would only make sense to those familiar with PR in the first place), but rather in chapters based on specific PR techniques. One chapter highlights astroturfing (fake grassroots movements), for instance, while another talks about petitions, another on “follow the money”, another on think tanks, another on SLAPPs (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation - in essence “you can’t afford a legal defense so stop criticizing big business”), and so on. Later chapters focus not only on specific techniques, but also specific lobbies, notably Exxon (a recurring theme in the book) and the coal industry. As I’m fond of saying, a good PR company is invisible (its goal is to promote its client, not itself), so many of the techniques here simply aren’t known about by the general public, and the book does an excellent job in both discussing them and providing illustrations from the Denial Machine.

In brief, this is a must-read book. I’ve read a lot of climate/energy books over the past couple of years (trying to glean how to get the message across to the public); this is one of the two best books on the subject you will find, even if you aren’t involved in the issue at all. (The other, of course, is What’s The Worst That Could Happen? by Greg Craven; sample reviews at Only In It For The Gold and ClimateSight.) Another decent review of the book is from energy policy guru Joe Romm; it takes a monumentally impressive work to get him to refer to something as a “must-read”. As long as I am listing reviews, I should mention John Mashey’s review, which is where I heard of the book in the first place; Mashey is a diligent observer of inactivist strategies as they develop (and his work is cited in the book), and his review goes into more detail than my rather more casual piece.

Consider it required reading for anyone remotely interested in a livable climate, or defending public interest from industry. Although, fair warning: You will probably be angry (or angrier) at the status quo after reading this. It certainly makes me want to take a stronger stand than before… maybe I can find a way to link studies of PR and denialism into my grad studies…