Slip-up Reveals Chevron Ties to Architect of Climate Attack

by Corbin Hiar (E&E News) It was an audacious messaging campaign: White environmentalists are hurting black communities by pushing radical climate policies that would strip them of fossil fuel jobs.

The email to journalists, sent by a public affairs firm at the height of national protests over systemic racism earlier this month, accidentally contained the name of a high-profile client.

The Virginia-based communications firm, named CRC Advisors, urged journalists to look at how green groups were "claiming solidarity" with black protesters while "backing policies which would hurt minority communities."

"Despite this claimed solidarity, environmental organizations, composed of predominantly white members, are backing radical policies like the Green New Deal which would bring particular harm to minority communities," wrote John Gage of CRC in an email sent to media outlets including E&E News.

Chevron denied involvement in the messaging campaign, but the email's accidental nod to the oil giant is renewing suspicions among activists and academics that Chevron's public statements about climate change fail to match its lobbying activities. While Chevron has promised to do more to slow rising temperatures, observers view the email as a shadowy continuation of the fossil fuel industry's past efforts to undercut legislation aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

But the CRC effort is remarkable, she (Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard University history professor and the co-author of "Merchants of Doubt," a 2010 book about how scientists with ties to Big Oil worked to obscure the truth about global warming) said, for trying to leverage national unrest about systemic racism and police violence to promote an expansion of oil and gas drilling.

"There's no socially acceptable language to describe how despicable this is," she said. "It's hard for me to contain my fury."

The Green New Deal is a conceptual resolution that calls for a sweeping public jobs program and asserts that the government should "achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions through a fair and just transition for all communities and workers" in a decade's time.

That would require overhauling the nation's oil-dependent transportation system "to remove pollution and greenhouse gas emissions" and invest in "zero-emission vehicle infrastructure and manufacturing; clean, affordable, and accessible public transit; and high-speed rail," the proposal says.

"Radical policies like the green new deal that raise the cost of driving to work and heating our homes would target the African-American community and ... would make us even more vulnerable and marginalized than we already are," Blackwell said in the email sent by CRC. He is currently an adviser to Trump's reelection campaign and senior fellow at the Family Research Council, an anti-abortion group.

"With black communities ablaze, the same nearly uniformly white environmental extremists assure us of their solidarity while at the same time trying to kill high-paying oil and gas jobs that have been the cornerstones of progress in lifting up working-class minority communities," Hollie was quoted as saying in the CRC email to journalists. "Any program such as their Green New Deal that makes energy more expensive or jeopardizes jobs is counter-productive, reckless, and wrong."

To be sure, the environmental movement has struggled with its own racial disparities. The largest green groups are overwhelmingly white, and they have historically overlooked communities of color when trying to reduce pollution. Some have racist pasts (Greenwire, June 5).

But people of color are also underrepresented in much of the oil and gas industry. For example, a 2016 report by the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, found the oil and gas business to be "among the worst in terms of employment and earning equity for women, African American and Hispanic populations."

Experts on corporate influence campaigns suggest that CRC is engaged in a shadowy campaign to shape federal policy on climate change.

The firm may be "attempting to influence public policy surreptitiously using industry money," said Marcus Owens, a partner at the law firm Loeb & Loeb LLP. "I've been doing this for nearly 50 years now, so I think I have a fairly well-developed sense of who's not being candid."

What CRC did is a textbook example of the "most unethical type of PR," according to Pallavi Kumar, a communications professor at American University.

"It's just a way where they put together a coalition and therefore you think it's something, but it's done by a corporation," said Kumar, who worked in corporate public relations for two decades before becoming an academic. "To me, they really screwed up by showing it's coming from Chevron."

"If Chevron is hiring public relations companies that are putting out a message that is contrary to what the company is publicly espousing, that is a concern," said Danielle Fugere, the president of As You Sow. "Just hiring these individuals or these groups for public communications purposes raises red flags."

Kumar, of American University, described CRC's work this way: "Stealth lobbying, AstroTurf lobbying, front groups."

While those tactics aren't new, the focus of the campaign surprised her. The firm is trying to take advantage of the Black Lives Matter movement, she said.

David Pellow, the African-American director of the University of California, Santa Barbara's global environmental justice project, argued that Chevron's involvement with CRC shows the oil company is more focused on countering support for the Green New Deal than helping communities of color.

With the U.S. in recession and tens of millions of Americans out of work, "the Green New Deal is now looking much more reasonable as a proposal," he said. "And that's got to have big polluters worried." READ MORE