Fossil fuels are major contributors to climate change problems
From an Article by Corbin Hiar, E&E News, June 18, 2020
The public relations firm CRC Advisors criticized environmental groups for promoting climate policies that it said would hurt communities of color in an email that accidentally included the name of a client: Chevron Corp.
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.
It was Chevron Corp. It was Chevron Corp. It was Chevron Corp.
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.
The story pitch included an offer to connect journalists with black conservatives who oppose the Green New Deal, a sweeping government jobs program advanced by progressive lawmakers who champion environmental justice issues for communities of color.
The email ended with a revealing tagline: “If you would rather not receive future communications from Chevron, let us know by clicking here.”
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.
“Chevron’s fingerprints appear to be on this,” said 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.
Oreskes described previous instances of oil and gas companies working with communications firms to advance industry talking points. But the CRC effort is remarkable, she 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.”
Chevron, a longtime CRC client whose shareholders recently called on the oil major to detail its lobbying on climate change, says it had nothing to do with the message.
“Thanks for the opportunity to clarify the situation,” Chevron spokesman Sean Comey said in an email.
‘A clerical error’ — (Are you kidding me? ADMIN)
The email received by an E&E News journalist on June 3 included quotes from two black conservatives who oppose the Green New Deal.
They were Ken Blackwell, a Republican who served as Ohio’s secretary of state in the late 1990s and has gone on to stump for a wide variety of conservative causes, and Derrick Hollie, a former advertising executive.
The email portrayed CRC as playing a helpful role in distributing Blackwell’s and Hollie’s concerns with the climate plan and its effect on black communities.
Instead, the firm appears to have organized the campaign. Hollie, who said he doesn’t personally know Blackwell, revealed that CRC approached him with the idea.
“This was like, ‘Derrick, would you mind being a part of something that we’re working on?’ I said, ‘Absolutely.’ And they asked me to put together a quote,” Hollie said in a phone interview.
“I didn’t know what they were going to do with it,” he added. “I figured they were going to put it in an op-ed or something like that.”
Gage, the account executive at CRC, said in an email to E&E News that he had contacted journalists “on behalf of Mr. Blackwell and Mr. Hollie regarding this issue and inadvertently attached a disclaimer from another client’s media list onto that email.”
“This was, in effect, a clerical error,” Gage said.
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.
Chevron hasn’t directly lobbied on the Green New Deal, but it has pressed members of Congress and the Trump administration about “Energy Transitions, technology, and climate change,” lobbying disclosures show.
Energy prices — another major focus of the CRC pitch — are also an issue Chevron has lobbied on.
“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.
Blackwell’s quote was partially featured in the headline of a June 4 story on the website of the conservative Daily Wire.
This story is to be continued tomorrow!
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See also: Chevron’s ‘Black Lives Matter’ Tweet Prompts a Debate About Big Oil and Environmental Justice, Ilana Cohen, InsideClimate News, June 20 2020
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