It was the first time so many scientists had come together to call out the role of PR and advertising in fueling the climate crisis.ĭuncan Meisel, campaign director at Clean Creatives, a U.S.-based group working to disentangle the PR industry from the fossil fuel sector, told CNBC via telephone that it's important to recognize that most fossil fuel advertisements are not trying to sell their product. Last month, more than 450 scientists called on PR firms and ad agencies to drop their fossil fuel clients and stop spreading climate disinformation. They are strategic leaders who not only influence how the public sees those companies but also what the company themselves do." How has the PR industry responded? They are information creators themselves to a large extent.
"We cannot just see them as these neutral channels of communication. These firms are instrumental in creating, shaping, managing and maintaining that conversation in the public sphere," she said. "The reason that they've been so invisible for so many years is by design, their strategic power has come from remaining behind the scenes and I think that's one reason we have mistakenly seen these firms as neutral."Īronczyk, co-author of a book that explores the history of environmental inaction in the United States and the rise of the PR industry, said it is all too easy to assume PR and ad agencies simply work to relay the messages of their fossil fuel clients. PR firms do not want bad PR," Melissa Aronczyk, associate professor of media studies at Rutgers University, told CNBC via video call. "It is such an irony that public relations firms are perhaps the most sensitive about bad PR but that is true. Campaigners say this step foreshadows a showdown between lawmakers and PR executives, with the latter expected to be called upon as witnesses to the fossil fuel industry's climate disinformation campaign.
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