Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome back to Drilled. I'm Amy Westervelt. This
Speaker 1: week I'm at Climate Week in New York. It strangely
Speaker 1: the first time I've ever been to Climate Week. Will
Speaker 1: have been covering climate for twenty plus years now. It's
Speaker 1: been an interesting mix so far. But last night we
Speaker 1: did a live event version of our mad Men season.
Speaker 1: And there's been a lot of talk this week at
Speaker 1: Climate Week about the mad Men of Big Oil because
Speaker 1: UN Secretary General Antonio Guterrez has been calling for these
Speaker 1: mad men to be held to account. So I figured
Speaker 1: it was a good time to reprise our season on
Speaker 1: this subject. This season initially debuted in twenty and it
Speaker 1: came about because we had done this initial season on
Speaker 1: the history of climate denial. And the more I looked
Speaker 1: into it, the more I realized that there had to
Speaker 1: be something else going on, that this could not have
Speaker 1: worked as well as it did and as quickly as
Speaker 1: it did if there wasn't something else there. The strategy
Speaker 1: of climate denial is not that brilliant, and as I
Speaker 1: started looking for answers, I talked to a lot of
Speaker 1: scholars like doctor Robert Brule at Brown, Melissa Aronchick at Rutgers,
Speaker 1: lots of folks, and the more I learned about the
Speaker 1: way that pro fossil fuel propaganda had been shaped, the
Speaker 1: more it all made sense. That season focused on key
Speaker 1: figures in the pr industry, but the fossil fuel industry
Speaker 1: has worked to shape information in general from all sides.
Speaker 1: You heard our episode last week on university research. That's
Speaker 1: one way. You heard us talk to Maddie Stone earlier
Speaker 1: in the year about management consultancies. That's another way. There
Speaker 1: all these ways that the industry really warps the information
Speaker 1: that we're getting, and even the structure of the information ecosystem.
Speaker 1: That's why I often talk about information pollution instead of disinformation,
Speaker 1: because we're dealing with something more than just a couple
Speaker 1: of misleading statements. If you've never listened to this season,
Speaker 1: it's a good time to listen to it now. If
Speaker 1: you did listen to it when it came out, it's
Speaker 1: a good time to re listen to it now. Here
Speaker 1: is episode one as a refresher, and I hope you'll
Speaker 1: listen to the rest. We'll be back with a new
Speaker 1: episode next week. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 2: Some farms grow food. This one gross fuel.
Speaker 3: Natural gas and oil companies are successfully meeting the demand
Speaker 3: for greater energy.
Speaker 1: Cutting greenhouse gas emissions to their lowest levels and a generation.
Speaker 2: And should there weather change yet again, on.
Speaker 4: That sor gas can step in to keep the power
Speaker 4: flowing and the light shining, no matter.
Speaker 3: The forecast, innovating to meet the energy demands of today
Speaker 3: and tomorrow.
Speaker 1: If you watch TV, or listen to the radio or podcasts,
Speaker 1: or use social media, or read newsletters or get your
Speaker 1: news online.
Speaker 2: In other words, if you are.
Speaker 1: A human in America today consuming media in any form,
Speaker 1: you've probably heard or seen some variation of these ads.
Speaker 1: They are everywhere, which makes sense. The oil industry is
Speaker 1: embroiled in lawsuits over its role in delaying action on
Speaker 1: climate change.
Speaker 2: Teenagers all over.
Speaker 1: The world are striking for climate policy, and every Democrat
Speaker 1: running for president has both a climate plan and a
Speaker 1: position on the Green New Deal. So companies like Exon Mobile,
Speaker 1: Chevron BP, they're worried about their image. They want consumers
Speaker 1: to think of them as green companies, not polluters. And
Speaker 1: the American Petroleum Institute their trade organization. They want everyone
Speaker 1: to remember that natural gas is a clean energy. But
Speaker 1: oil propaganda is nothing new. In fact, it's been a
Speaker 1: part of the industry almost since it began, The American
Speaker 1: Petroleum Institute. You know the guys you hear in all
Speaker 1: the news podcasts like The New York Times, The Daily
Speaker 1: are Voxes, the Weeds.
Speaker 3: Today, the US is leading the world and producing natural
Speaker 3: gas and oil while reducing emissions at the same time.
Speaker 1: They've been around for more than one hundred years, and
Speaker 1: their strategy hasn't actually changed all that much in those years.
Speaker 1: According to environmental sociologist Bob Brule, who you might remember
Speaker 1: from season one.
Speaker 3: The American Way of Life and everything good about America.
Speaker 3: You know, apple Pie Mom, the flag fossil fuels, and
Speaker 3: so by implication, what they do is basically say, any
Speaker 3: attack on fossil fuels is an attack on our way
Speaker 3: of life.
Speaker 1: Part of what has enabled the fossil fuel industry to
Speaker 1: operate the way it does is exactly this sort of propaganda.
Speaker 1: It has given the industry social license. It's created the
Speaker 1: conditions for science denial to thrive, and it works in
Speaker 1: really subtle ways too. It's the reason you'll hear even
Speaker 1: those who want to act on climate say things about
Speaker 1: protecting oil companies while you do it. So that's the
Speaker 1: story we're going to tell this season, the creation of
Speaker 1: big Oil's big propaganda machine and why it's still so
Speaker 1: effective today. I'm Ami Westervelt, and this is Drilled, Season three,
Speaker 1: The mad Men of Climate Denial.
Speaker 3: The important thing that we thought we had discovered in
Speaker 3: our research, the thing we taught people need to understand,
Speaker 3: was that actually the roots of the story are not
Speaker 3: found in the fossil fuel industry.
Speaker 2: They're found in the tobacco industry.
Speaker 1: That's Naomi Eurescu's Harvard science historian and Merchant Doubt author.
Speaker 1: Since Orescas first uncovered the link between big tobacco and
Speaker 1: climate denial, it's been sort of accepted wisdom that big
Speaker 1: oil copied big tobacco, and that's that. But that's not
Speaker 1: quite the whole story. Big oil definitely copied science denial
Speaker 1: from the tobacco industry's playbook. Aurescus has proven that thoroughly.
Speaker 1: Just like tobacco funded studies about all the other causes
Speaker 1: of lung cancer to create doubt about its product really
Speaker 1: being so bad, the oil guys funded research on all
Speaker 1: the other potential causes of global warming, long after they
Speaker 1: knew the primary culprit was fossil fuels. But there's more
Speaker 1: to Big Oil's strategy than science denial, a lot more.
Speaker 1: Big oil started trying to influence the public a long
Speaker 1: time before it got into the scientific spin game. In fact,
Speaker 1: the oil industry wrote the playbook on American propaganda in general,
Speaker 1: a lot of the techniques that we still see today,
Speaker 1: fake news, disinformation campaigns, even changing the vocabulary we used
Speaker 1: to talk about, things like how we went from the
Speaker 1: greenhouse effect to global warming to climate change. All of
Speaker 1: that and more was created for the benefit of the
Speaker 1: oil industry. Science denial is one front in Big Oil's
Speaker 1: idea war, and it's an important one, but it's not
Speaker 1: the only one.
Speaker 2: Here's Bob Brule again.
Speaker 3: Well, why and share of the effort that these guys
Speaker 3: are spending money on. It's not on science denial. Yes,
Speaker 3: they spend this much on science denial, and I'm not
Speaker 3: saying that that isn't important and doesn't count. But they're
Speaker 3: spending probably five or ten times more on all this
Speaker 3: corporate promotion advertising.
Speaker 1: When oil companies and trade groups like the American Petroleum
Speaker 1: Institute pay public relations firms, it's not just for advertising
Speaker 1: or even for dealing with the media. It's also for
Speaker 1: less obvious tactics that aim to create a generally positive
Speaker 1: view of the industry. If that sounds like some sort
Speaker 1: of psychological warfare, it is. There's a long history of
Speaker 1: military intelligence experts getting into the pr business, many of
Speaker 1: them on behalf of Big Oil. Over the past century,
Speaker 1: multiple generations of these guys have built an extensive, you
Speaker 1: could say, well oiled publicity machine. That machine has shaped
Speaker 1: American opinions on the environmental impacts of oil and the
Speaker 1: importance of the fossil fuel industry. It's that apparatus that
Speaker 1: the courts are starting to call into question today and
Speaker 1: that the public is finally starting to see too. And
Speaker 1: it all started more than one hundred years ago with
Speaker 1: the first oil tycoon, John D.
Speaker 2: Rockefeller.
Speaker 5: No, on this my birthday, I desire to reaffirm my
Speaker 5: belief in the fundamental principles upon which this country was founded,
Speaker 5: their birthday, unselfish emotions of the common good, and believe
Speaker 5: in God.
Speaker 1: There he is, on his ninety third birthday with his
Speaker 1: brown little glasses, sounding like a true American patriotism.
Speaker 2: Morality, the common good. Now, John D.
Speaker 1: Rockefeller was a very religious guy, but this image here
Speaker 1: is really the result of decades worth of grooming and
Speaker 1: management from the world's first pr guy.
Speaker 2: The foundations of modern pr in general, and the fossil
Speaker 2: fuel propaganda machine in particular, were built around rehabilitating the
Speaker 2: Rockefeller family's image back in the early nineteen hundreds, and
Speaker 2: specifically to counter the work of one woman, an investigative journalist,
Speaker 2: one of the first muckrakers, a woman named Ida Tarbell.
Speaker 4: This is supreme wrongdoing cloaked by religion. There is but
Speaker 4: one name for it, hypocrisy.
Speaker 1: So Ida Tarbell starts digging into Standard Oil at the
Speaker 1: dawn of the century. She was a pretty established journalist
Speaker 1: and a biographer at this point. So she said about
Speaker 1: writing what she thought was going to be a biography
Speaker 1: of John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil. And she was
Speaker 1: really determined and dogged in her pursuit of information. She
Speaker 1: would track down these archives of documents and then go
Speaker 1: to pick up a box and find that all the
Speaker 1: documents had been destroyed. But she kept out at and
Speaker 1: she found people inside the company that would talk to her,
Speaker 1: and she did find some documentary evidence eventually too.
Speaker 2: And what she ends up.
Speaker 1: Pulling together with all of that is a nineteen part
Speaker 1: series on Standard Oil and basically how John D. Rockefeller
Speaker 1: had scammed his way into a monopoly. At the time,
Speaker 1: he controlled everything about oil, from drilling to refining, pipelines
Speaker 1: to railroads.
Speaker 4: Rockefeller and his associates did not build the Standard Oil
Speaker 4: Company in the boardrooms of Wall Street banks. They fought
Speaker 4: their way to control by rebates and drawback, bribe and
Speaker 4: blackmailt espionage, and price cutting.
Speaker 1: Rockefeller had put hundreds of hard working independent producers out
Speaker 1: of business. He'd been given an unfair competitive advantage, and
Speaker 1: the public was outraged.
Speaker 2: So was President Theodore Roosevelt.
Speaker 1: By nineteen oh six, the Department of just As filed
Speaker 1: an anti trust claim against Rockefeller. Five years later, the
Speaker 1: US Supreme Court ruled that Standard Oil had in fact
Speaker 1: violated anti trust laws and needed to be broken up.
Speaker 2: And just a few.
Speaker 1: Years after that, Rockefeller's son was in the news, also
Speaker 1: getting bad press, this time at the company's mine in Colorado.
Speaker 3: Mineers out of doors, out from the houses that the
Speaker 3: company own.
Speaker 2: May have heard that very famous Wooden Gustrie song.
Speaker 1: It was written about a massive strike at Rockefeller's coal
Speaker 1: mine in Ludlow, Colorado, in the summer of nineteen thirteen,
Speaker 1: United Mine workers began to organize the eleven thousand coal
Speaker 1: miners employed by the Rockefeller owned Colorado Fuel and Iron Company. Initially,
Speaker 1: workers asked to meet with management to air their grievances
Speaker 1: low pay, long and unregulated hours, and the fact that
Speaker 1: they were only allowed to live and trade in the
Speaker 1: company town. That meant everything they bought was just paying
Speaker 1: money back to the company they were worked for, and
Speaker 1: it gave the company an enormous amount of control over
Speaker 1: their lives, even though those rights had already been legally.
Speaker 2: Granted to workers.
Speaker 1: Management wasn't having it, so a month later, eight thousand
Speaker 1: Colorado mine workers went on strike. Of course, first Rockefeller
Speaker 1: evicted them from their company owned homes, which was the
Speaker 1: entire point of why company towns aren't great for workers
Speaker 1: on strike and homeless. The miners and their families set
Speaker 1: up a tent setting near the mine. By nineteen fourteen,
Speaker 1: about twelve hundred people were living in that camp. It
Speaker 1: was a huge protest, but that wasn't necessarily new at
Speaker 1: this point in history. What made the Ludlow strike infamous
Speaker 1: was what Rockefeller did to bust it. Private security guards
Speaker 1: and the National Guard showed up at the protest camp
Speaker 1: with machine guns. They lit tents on fire and sprayed
Speaker 1: the camp with bullets, killing twenty two protesters, including women
Speaker 1: and children. A riot broke out, including more guns on
Speaker 1: both sides, and by the end of it, more than
Speaker 1: sixty people had died. Wasn't long before every paper was
Speaker 1: painting Rockefeller as the villain.
Speaker 2: First the Trust thing.
Speaker 1: And now this he was everything Americans were coming to
Speaker 1: hate about their bosses. In desperate need of some good
Speaker 1: pr Rockefeller hired this guy.
Speaker 5: Rockefeller listen to me patiently, pleasantly and calmly until I'd
Speaker 5: finished mile Upon presentation.
Speaker 1: IV Ledbetter Lead is widely considered the father of public relations.
Speaker 1: Rockefeller initially hired him to help handle the fallout from
Speaker 1: what journalists including Ida Tarbell, had started calling the Ludlow massacre,
Speaker 1: and Leaded such a good job they wound up working
Speaker 1: together for the rest of his life and his handling
Speaker 1: of Ludlow. The first thing Lee did was create an
Speaker 1: entirely fake story. He claimed the strikers weren't even really workers,
Speaker 1: they were plants from the labor unions. In Lee's story,
Speaker 1: labor organizer Mother Jones had orchestrated the whole thing, and
Speaker 1: for some reason he threw in that Jones was running
Speaker 1: a nearby brothel. She was eighty two at the time,
Speaker 1: so not likely. When he was asked about this story
Speaker 1: decades later, Lee said, quote, what are facts anyway, but
Speaker 1: my interpretation of what happened. Lee's approach worked. He coached
Speaker 1: Rockefeller on how to talk, how to behave in public,
Speaker 1: to make himself likable, how to seem like one of
Speaker 1: the people, even which charitable projects to take on. The
Speaker 1: press never knew what hit him, and when Rockefeller died,
Speaker 1: he was remembered as a kindly philanthropist, a hard working industrialist,
Speaker 1: and a true blue American. Standard Oil's progeny, of course,
Speaker 1: became today's oil giants Exon now Exon Mobil, Conico, Phillips,
Speaker 1: and Chevron. And just like you can draw a straight
Speaker 1: line from Standard Oil to Chevron and Exon Mobile, today
Speaker 1: you can see Ivy Ledbetter Lee's fingerprints all over the
Speaker 1: oil industry's disinformation campaigns.
Speaker 2: It's the same.
Speaker 1: Tactic Lee used to rehabilitate Rockefeller's image way back then.
Speaker 1: Fake news crisis actors corporate philanthropy as a PR move,
Speaker 1: all to shift the public's focus away from a company's
Speaker 1: bad behavior, the company that's working to bring affordable, scalable
Speaker 1: carbon capture to industries around the world. So who exactly
Speaker 1: was Ivy led Better Lee, What did he end up
Speaker 1: doing for Rockefeller and Standard Oil in the years following
Speaker 1: the Ludlow massacre, Why did he love Russia so much?
Speaker 1: And what exactly made him so good at propaganda that
Speaker 1: a certain German dictator came calling just a few years later.
Speaker 2: We'll get into all of that and more next time.
Speaker 3: The oil companies, especially Standard Oil and then later on
Speaker 3: through API, were really the beginners and probably the greatest
Speaker 3: institutionalized effort at developing corporate propaganda to support their industry.
Speaker 1: Drilled is part of the Critical Frequency podcast Network. The
Speaker 1: show is reported, written, and produced by me Amy Westervelt.
Speaker 1: Julia Richie is our editor. Our managing producer is Katie Ross.
Speaker 1: She also created this season's incredible artwork, sound design, scoring
Speaker 1: and mixing by b Emon. Riga Murphy is our editorial advisor.
Speaker 1: Meamula Schaance is our fact checker. Special thanks to Richard
Speaker 1: Wiles and to our First Amendment Attorney, James Wheaton and
Speaker 1: the First Amendment Project, Drilled is made possible in part
Speaker 1: by a generous grant from the Institute for Governance and
Speaker 1: Sustainable Development.
Speaker 2: We appreciate their support. You can find Drilled on.
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1: Don't forget to leave us a rating, a review. It
Speaker 1: really helps the show. And you can follow us on
Speaker 1: Twitter now at we are Drilled, and visit our new
Speaker 1: website drillednews dot com for climate accountability, reporting, newsletters, and
Speaker 1: behind the scenes stories from this season. Thanks for listening
Speaker 1: and we'll see you next time.