The Western Fuels Association and the ICE Campaign

The campaign to promote the Greening Earth theory was launched in 1991 by the Western Fuels Association and largely driven by one man, Fred Palmer, Western Fuels’ general manager and chief executive officer. A law-yer by training and businessman by profession, Palmer served on numer-ous organizations promoting business interests and free-market solutions, including the Global Climate Coalition (a coalition of fossil fuel corpora-tions), the Center for Energy (promoters of coal use), the Alliance for Rail Competition, the National Mining Association, and the Center for the New West (a Denver-based think tank promoting free-market solutions to social

9 This video is briefly discussed in Gelbspan 1997, pp. 36–7. The role of visual media in getting facts to travel is also discussed in this volume by Merz, in the scientific context, and by Schneider, in the artistic context.

problems).¹⁰ A profile in Range – a magazine dedicated to the “cowboy spirit on America’s outback” – described him as a man who was “deter-mined to defend the coal-fired power plants from an assault launched by professional environmentalists, the United Nations, our own government, and our nation’s economic competitors.” Above all, Palmer was determined to ensure that the U.S. federal government did not impair the competitive-ness of the coal industry.

Acting on behalf of the Western Fuels Association, Palmer retained the services of Bracy, Williams, and Co., a government-relations firm based in Washington, D.C.¹¹ Their mission was articulated in a series of strategy documents, one of which enumerated ten specific goals and the means to achieve them. Number one was to “reposition global warming as theory (not fact).”¹² They would do this through targeted print and radio media campaigns, which would “start small” and then “build national involve-ment” as soon as the test market results were in hand in the summer of 1991. The tactics included ensuring that the entire electric utility spoke with a unified voice and had scientists to speak on their behalf.¹³

Western Fuels provided $510,000 for the test market project to run in February–August 1991. Bracy, Williams would run advertising messages in selected radio and print media environments, and would use a polling firm, Cambridge Reports, to test the potential for “attitude change” in listeners and viewers. Four cities were chosen: Chattanooga, Tennessee; Champaign, Illinois; Flagstaff, Arizona; and Fargo, North Dakota. (Later, Bowling Green, Kentucky, was added, while Chattanooga and Champaign were dropped.)

10 Leonard 2000; Greening Earth Society Press Release, “About Frederick D. Palmer,” AMS Archives.

11 On PR firms challenging scientific evidence, see Rampton and Stauber 2001. My discus-sion here should not be read to imply that scientists never take their cause “straight to the public.” Consider, for example, Bruno Latour’s discussion of Louis Pasteur (Latour 1988) or James Hansen’s direct communications with public and press: http://www.columbia.

edu/~jeh1/. However, often these efforts are viewed with dismay by colleagues who con-sider it inappropriate to stray outside the institutional mechanisms of vetting and certifica-tion, or for those without proper credentials to speak to scientific concerns (Shapin, 1994;

see also Mooney and Kirshenbaum, 2009; Schneider, 2009).

12 ICE, Mission Statement 1991, copy in the archives of the American Meteorological Society (AMS). Most of the materials on the Greening Earth Society were found in the archives of the AMS headquarters in Washington, D.C. (see endnote “A Note on Sources”). The adver-tising campaign attracted some negative press attention, see: O’Driscoll 1991a and 1991b;

Wald 1991; and The Arizona Daily Sun 1991. Greenwire, an environmentally oriented news service, suggested that information had been leaked by industry executives who did take the threat of global warming seriously, such as the president of Arizona Public Utilities, who felt that the issue was too complex to be dealt with in “a slick ad campaign” (Greenwire 1991).

13 ICE, Mission Statement – Strategies: Reposition Global Warming as Theory (Not Fact).

AMS Archives.

The cities were chosen using three criteria: (1) that the market derived a majority of its electricity from coal, (2) that it was home to a member of the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce or Ways and Means Committee, and (3) that it had low media costs.¹⁴ According to a report in the trade magazine, The Energy Daily, four of the top fifteen U.S. coal-producing groups contributed funds for the campaign, including ARCO Coal, Peabody Holding Company, Island Creek Coal Company, and Amax Coal Industries. Their requested contributions were based on per-ton coal production: Companies producing more than fifty million tons per year were asked to contribute a minimum of $15,000 each.¹⁵

The test market proposal summarized the three objectives for the media campaign¹⁶:

(1) to demonstrate that a “consumer-based awareness program can positively change the opinions of a selected population regarding the validity of global warming”;

(2) to “begin to develop a message and strategy for shaping public opinion on a national scale”; and

(3) to “lay the groundwork for a unified national electric industry voice on global warming.”

If successful, the results would demonstrate that you could market views about global warming, more or less in the same manner as you could mar-ket toothpaste. You could change people’s minds about the “validity” of a scientific conclusion in the same way you could get them to switch their laundry detergent.

A crucial element of the campaign would be to create an “indepen-dent” organization to promote the alternative message – an organization whose name would suggest concern for the environment and no hint of links to the coal industry. The campaign strategists decided on an acro-nym before they decided what it stood for – ICE – and an early part of the program used focus groups to test potential names: “Information Council for the Environment,” “Informed Citizens for the Environment,”

“Intelligent Concern for the Environment,” and “Informed Choices for the Environment.” The focus groups indicated that American citizens trusted scientists more than politicians or political activists – and much less than industry spokesmen – so Western Fuels settled on Information Council for

14 ICE, Test Market Proposal, AMS Archives.

15 O’Driscoll 1991a.

16 ICE, Test Market Proposal, AMS Archives.

the Environment because it positioned ICE as a “technical” source rather than an industry group. When the advertising campaign was launched, it operated under this name, with a logo of an outstretched hand holding a large plant emerging from the globe.

During the spring and summer of 1991, print and radio advertisements bearing the ICE name and logo saturated the airwaves and local news-papers of the chosen American cities. Print and radio advertisements asked: If the Earth is getting warmer, why is Kentucky getting colder? If the Earth is getting warmer, why is the frost line moving south? If the earth is getting warmer, why is Minneapolis getting colder? Who told you the earth was warming…Chicken Little? And how much are you willing to pay to solve a problem that may not exist?¹⁷ These claims were at odds with mainstream scientific interpretations of the evidence. As American Metrological Society (AMS) officer Anthony Socci noted in a memo to the file, the frost line was not moving south, and temperature data showed that the Minneapolis area had warmed 1.0–1.5 degrees in the twentieth cen-tury.¹⁸ Other claims were, if not at odds with the scientific evidence, then certainly misleading: Global warming did not imply that every place on earth would get warmer, and there was no reason why Kentucky mightn’t have a few cool winters in a row. And the vast majority of climate scientists had concluded that the evidence showed that the problem did exist – as the IPCC would soon report.¹⁹

Several of the print advertisements included a small box, inviting the reader to submit his or her name and address to get more information;

radio ads included a toll-free telephone number to call for more informa-tion. According to one press report, the campaign produced nearly 2,000 requests to the toll-free number.²⁰ With this, Bracy, Williams built a mailing list of sympathetic citizens, while creating the impression of a grassroots citizens’ organization.²¹ They also arranged meetings with local editors and writers, and appearances by sympathetic scientists on local radio and television programs. In Bowling Green, the campaign paid tangible divi-dends, as the Bowling Green Daily News ran a front-page article under the headline: “Hot Debate: Bowling Green now battleground in heated global warming dispute.”²² Western Fuels, under the name of ICE, had persuaded

17 Press copies found in Greening Earth Society documents, AMS Archives.

18 Socci 2000.

19 Houghton et al. 1996.

20 Wald 1991.

21 For more on this strategy, see Fritsch 1996.

22 Baur, “Hot Debate,” AMS Archives.

local writers that global warming was not a demonstrated scientific fact, or even a reasonable explanation for certain observed phenomena, but a

“heated dispute.”

The results of the advertising campaign were assessed through focus groups with citizens in the target communities and showed that you could change people’s minds, particularly if you presented them with “credible facts” presented by “technical sources.” In particular, “older, less educated males” were susceptible to impugning the motives of people talking about global warming, as in the suggestion that “the threat was being exagger-ated by members of the media who wanted to increase their audience and influence.”²³ Younger, lower-income women were “receptive …to factual information,” and “likely to soften their support for federal legislation [to stop global warming] after hearing new information.” And many people were susceptible to the suggestion that the issue was more complex than they had been told. This meant that there was the opportunity to change their minds by presenting them with alternative scientific claims, in effect, with an alternative set of facts.

An important part of the campaign was the construction of the impres-sion that global warming was the subject of active scientific debate, so a crucial component was the use of scientists as spokesmen. Three scientists in particular lent their names to the campaign: Patrick Michaels, a long-time “skeptic” with links to the coal industry; Robert Balling, a professor of geography at Arizona State University; and Balling’s Arizona Colleague, Sherwood Idso.²⁴ On May 15, 1991, a letter was drafted over Michaels’s signature. With a side bar listing Michaels, Balling, and Idso as the ICE Scientific Advisory Panel, the letter was sent to the people who had written in to request more information. It thanked them for writing, asserting that climate science was still in its early stages and it was “wrong to predict that higher levels of carbon dioxide will bring a catastrophic global warming.”

ICE was created, Michaels explained, to “foster better public understanding of global warming and to ensure that any legislation passed by Congress is based on scientific evidence.”²⁵ Michaels, Balling, and Idso were also featured in the radio and television presentations. In each case, the speak-ers suggested that no one really knew if global warming was a real problem, preparing the ground for the alternative suggestion that global warming was actually good.

23 ICE, Mission Statement – Strategies: Reposition Global Warming as Theory (Not Fact).

24 For details on Michaels’s links to the coal industry, see Gelbspan 1997 pp. 40–4. On Balling, see pp. 44–6, and brief discussion in Gelbspan 2004 pp. 51–2.

25 Michaels 1991.