The turf is always greener on the other side

The American Petroleum Institute is the kind of friendly industry body that lobbies for 'big oil', and has no trouble inspiring grassroots action. The trouble is, from their point of view, it's the wrong kind.

For the oil companies, it must be incredibly tedious to have masses of engaged citizens fired up about the way you're trashing the planet - camping out on your lawn, organising rallies, chaining themselves to your office, asking pointed questions to politicians. How irritating that there are people who think you're so wrong they'll actually get out onto the streets and protest about it! It sucks to be on the wrong side of history.

Trouble is, it's quite hard to get people that excited about protesting in favour of big oil companies. People aren't stupid. More and more of the general public know that continued fossil fuel use is bad news for the planet. Furthermore, they know that corporations are huge and wealthy, and that they lobby and spend cash on public relations. They know that if BP wants to influence people, they don't host a badly organised rally attended by people in sandals with shoddily painted signs, they just blow a million dollars on buying some advertising.

And yet there obviously remains something quite attractive about having ordinary people cheerleading for you, because the API has been doing a little, er, 'grassroots organising' of its own. Welcome to the world of 'astroturfing'. Why 'astroturfing'? Because it's the fake grassroots.

As a way of getting around the inherent unattractiveness of campaigning in favour of oil company profits, astroturfing was invented in the 1990s by the PR business, in response to, for example, US biodiversity legislation. The so-called 'wise use' movement was a manufactured version of the environmental movement, created by PR companies and paid for by the fossil fuels industry.

"Look on the bright side - they've got the money, but all the money in the world apparently can't buy genuine people power. It just buys you some of your own employees."

Lobbyists and PR people set up small think tanks or fake local community groups, and used them to call for the responsible use of the natural environment. In practice, their definition of 'responsible' turned out to mean weakening environmental regulations, and cheerfully blowing up entire mountains to extract coal. Not really very wise, and not really a movement.

In this modern example, when faced with the threat of the climate bill being passed, the API sent a memo to its members - like Shell and BP, telling them to round up their employees and get them to cheerlead for big oil, in a cheap pastiche of grassroots activity. Of course, nobody was supposed to mention that they worked for oil companies, because then it might look a bit, er, fake. Instead they gave themselves the friendly name of 'energy citizens'. And then they got found out, because someone leaked the memo to us, and everyone looks very embarrassed, and it becomes a big media story. Oops.

What does this tell us?

First, the good news: Big oil companies are worried. They look around and they see a clean-tech revolution poised to happen, they see a climate bill in the US which, if passed, would make life difficult for them, they see China and the US talking constructively about reducing emissions. They see the public calling for action, and that scares them, because they've spent billions or maybe trillions of dollars to try and ensure that this doesn't happen, and it's clear that they have failed catastrophically.

So that's the good news: The possibility of a US climate bill has put the frighteners on big oil. They'd like to maintain the status quo which serves their profits quite nicely. Many of them are also looking to invest in damaging oil developments like tar sands, and they worry that the climate bill and future climate legislation might pose a long-term risk to those investments. (More on this at a later date.)

But now the bad news: When oil company employees are effectively being paid to protest against climate legislation, lobbying is clearly out of control. And while the oily hand of petrochemical progress continues to firmly grasp the heart of the global economy, lobbying by the oil companies could still destroy our chances of cutting emissions fast enough.

Tip of the iceberg

Sure, astroturfing is a particularly obvious example of dirty PR tactics, but to be honest this API story is just the particularly stupid tip of the iceberg. Some of the other things the lobbyists get up to make astroturfing seem relatively honest. So, for example, earlier this month it was revealed that letters to the US congress, purporting to come from groups of local citizens unhappy with the idea of a climate bill, had actually been written by a Washington-based lobbying firm working on behalf of the coal industry.

Or a few years ago, when Greenpeace US was highlighting the damaging role played by Exxon in making progress on climate change, it got audited by the tax office checking up on whether we were misusing supporters money, it was after a 'tip-off' from 'Public Interest Watch' a small organisation dedicated to uncovering the misuse of charitable funds, run by an ex-Republican lobbyist, which happened to be funded by, er, ExxonMobil. (We passed with flying colours, by the way.)

And so it goes - an ex-lobbyist from the API rewrites science in government climate reports to downplay certainty about climate change happening. He gets exposed in the press. He gets fired. Two days later he gets hired by Exxon.

Lobbying at Copenhagen 

Just because Obama has taken over from Bush doesn't mean the problem has gone away. In the run up to Copenhagen there's never been more lobbying on environmental issues - and the people with the money to pay these lobbyists are overwhelmingly vested interests in the oil, gas and coal industries.

In Copenhagen in December we're going to see a massive gathering on politicians, civil servants, environmentalists, and the entire place is going to be crawling with corporate lobbyists of every hue. We should be asking our government to come clean over who they're listening to - lobbying doesn't just happen in the US. Over here we have similar problems: matey emails between big power companies and government departments, people from BAE seconded to the MOD and Foreign Office, and what has been described as a 'revolving door' relationship between BAA and the DfT.

But look on the bright side - they've got the money, but all the money in the world apparently can't buy genuine people power. It just buys you some of your own employees.