Climate Criminals: E. Bruce Harrison

By now, it’s no big secret that fossil fuel corporations funded the billion dollar disinformation campaigns of the last 40 years, sowing the seeds of climate denial. But these sprawling disinformation campaigns had the support of so many organizations and companies, it becomes hard to pinpoint the person in the driver’s seat. But in many respects, public relations professional and author E. Bruce Harrison designed and steered the climate change denial campaigns that shaped the political and ecological landscape where we currently live. E. Bruce Harrison is considered the father of greenwashing. In fact, he wrote the book on it—2 books actually: Going Green: How to Communicate Your Company’s Environmental Commitment (1993) and Corporate Greening 2.0 (2008).

In the 1950s, Harrison was working in DC as the press secretary for Democratic Representative Kenneth Roberts. While there, Harrison made connections and learned more about the inner-workings of the American political machine. He then worked on the Kennedy presidential campaign in 1960 before becoming the director of public relations for the Manufacturing Chemists Association in 1961, (now called the American Chemistry Council). One year later, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring came out, a book that sparked an entire environmental movement while creating a huge PR problem for the petrochemical industry. Suddenly, corporations faced pushback from a public demanding answers, transparency, and regulations. Essentially, the petrochemical industry needed a strong PR campaign, and Harrison stepped in to provide exactly that for the next 50 years (Westervelt).

Harrison knew that he had the knowledge of business, government, lobbying, and PR to help the petrochemical industry navigate this new post-EPA world. Harrison’s revolutionary idea—an idea that would would change our political landscape entirely—was to “combine various industries, unions and government entities together into groups that could get more done and couldn’t be traced to any one company. He created the National Environmental Development Association (NEDA), a vaguely pro-environment-sounding name that was actually a coalition of chemical, mining, oil & gas, and ag[riculture] companies, along with industry-friendly politicians and unions, really anyone who had a bone to pick with the new environmental regulations” (Westervelt). 

It was a strength-in-vague-numbers kind of tactic that the Koch brothers ran with decades later.

Even before climate change became a part of the public consciousness, Harrison’s NEDA was a powerful lobbying force, putting business interests before environmental concerns. In the 1970s and 80s, Harrison spun the narrative that environmental regulations not only threatened America’s economy, but it would destroy the American way of life overall. On behalf of his clients’ bottom line, Harrison turned environmental regulations into a culture war. Many of these clients and NEDA members were some of the highest polluting corporations and organizations in the world: BP, Chevron, Coca-Cola, Du Pont, Exxon, Mobil (they hadn’t yet merged), Monsanto, the American Automobile Association, the American Petroleum Institute just to name a few.

Harrison, with the support of the richest and most powerful CEOs on the planet, had essentially taken over the branding of environmental regulations.

The 1980s were less of an uphill battle for Harrison’s PR firm and his NEDA members because they had a friend in the White House. Reagan ushered in sweeping environmental deregulations. But in 1988, climatologist James Hansen told the Senate that climate change was not just a future problem, that “the greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now.” This watershed testimony brought climate change into the foreground and put terms like greenhouse gas into public consciousness for the first time. 

The companies pumping the majority of these greenhouse gases into the atmosphere knew that much like Carson’s Silent Spring, Hansen’s startling testimony would spark a wave of regulations. They sought to protect their bottom line as quickly and aggressively as possible and get ahead of the narrative. Fortunately, many of these companies already had a working relationship with E. Bruce Harrison.

In response to the economic threat that climate change created for these businesses, Harrison formed a new special interest coalition to help frame the environmental narrative for industry giants. And just like the National Environmental Development Association, this group also had a purposefully vague and ironically green connotation (they don’t call him the godfather of greenwashing for nothing, folks): the Global Climate Coalition.

Plenty has been written about the Global Climate Coalition, but I think the GCC speaks best for itself.

In the GCC’s own words (from 1995), the coalition was “created to coordinate business participation in the domestic and international debates concerning global warming, science, and policy. With international policymakers, special interest groups, and the media pushing for strict controls on emissions of greenhouse gases linked to alleged global warming, businesses faced the real possibility of increased energy taxes–or other draconian actions that would burden industry, the U.S. economy, and ultimately, the consumer.” 

Yep.

That description alone makes me too angry to speak. (The “alleged” global warming and the “draconian” energy taxes.) But then I paid more attention to the context of the document I was reading. It’s a PDF of a 1994-1995 internal GCC report, a summary of E. Bruce Harrison’s PR campaign and how that campaign would respond to the 1995 Conference for the Parties or COP (the first UN climate change conference that was held in Berlin, March 1995).  Harrison and the GCC knew the global pushback on industry after the COP would be huge, so once again, they had a plan to frame the environmental narrative in their favor.

On the next slide is a screenshot of some of the GCC’s post-COP communication goals.  The whole plan is shocking, but I put arrows by the sections that hurt my soul the most.

Also in the communications report, listed under “Major Accomplishments October 1994-May 1995” the GCC included two of the pamphlets they’d produced that year: “Climate Change: Your Passport to the Facts” and “Changing Weather: Facts and Fallacies about Severe Weather and Climate Change.” 

And most upsetting of all is the section about the communication campaign’s program elements where GCC outlines how they will target specific demographics and spread disinformation: 

“We will…seek to involve leaders of local businesses (including insurance and tourism) whose operations might be affected by climate change mandates…We will work to identify one or more highly credible economists or policy analysts who are knowledgeable about climate change economics and willing to sign op-eds and letters to the editor, when appropriate.”

Within this short report, only 3 people are mentioned by name. One is Rush Limbaugh in regards to a GCC radio appearance. One is a reference to John Shlaes’ (president of the GCC) letters to the editor for USA Today and The Journal of Commerce. And the third name is Harrison’s. 

The report explains that “Harrison will continue to provide counsel, logistical assistance, program oversight, and other support activities,” and “this program plan and budget…represents a distillation of that process as further refined by the Communications Committee and the group of donors who fund the communications program, working closely with representatives of the E. Bruce Harrison Company.” 

(The communications program donors mentioned above are also outlined in the report: American Automobile Manufacturers Association, American Petroleum Institute, Association of American Railroads, Edison Electric Institute, Global Climate Coalition, National Mining Association, Southern Company.)

In 2001, the GCC disbanded. It was growing more difficult to deny the more conclusive climate science that they’d spent the better part of 20 years saying either wasn’t real or wasn’t nearly as scary as the economic fallout that would certainly follow greenhouse gas restrictions. Plus, in many ways, the GCC had accomplished what they set out to do. In 1998, they put enough pressure on the Senate to keep it from ratifying the Kyoto Protocol–an international agreement to lower greenhouse gas emissions.

After the GCC, Harrison continued to work as a private consultant, helping corporations “green” their messaging. He published a few books about environmental PR. He taught public relations at Georgetown. When he did in January of 2021, he was widely eulogized as a “pioneer in environmental communications.”

To have been such a prominent force, Harrison seems remarkably good at staying behind the scenes. I could only find 2 filmed interviews with him. In one interview from not long before his death, Harrison looks small and frail as he tells the story about writing a pro-integration editorial for the University of Alabama newspaper, an editorial that drew the ire of the entire Alabama football team. It felt like one of those interviews where all parties involved knew it was a form of memorial.

In the other interview, Harrison looks a little younger, more put together in a suit. He’s doing an interview for Penn State’s Arthur W. Page Public Communication’s Center, answering question after question about ethics in public relations. It gets especially interesting when the off-screen interviewer asks about the ethics of environmental public relations within the corporate world. Harrison responds that “greening has a very strong social impact, but it’s done something else. This idea of greening, of environmental development, has made communicators more aware of the economic impact of environmental responsibility.”

Every answer Harrison gave was like that. It always circled back to economics. He seemed unable to think outside of costs and bottom lines. I couldn’t get over how with every answer it became obvious that this mild-mannered man had a moral center completely submerged in capitalism.

Like me, Harrison views climate change as an existential threat, but we have very different views about what is at risk. 

Within a capitalist system, economic threats become existential. And that fact allows people like Harrison to do all kinds of awful things like lie, cheat, steal, murder. Yet he’s still able to maintain his supposed civility. He’s able to sit behind a desk in a suit and say in a soft, southern accent that “morality is a state of mind.” Because within a capitalist system, lying, cheating, stealing, murdering are the visceral necessities of survival, but they are also the cold, dispassionate demands of good business practices.

Sources:

Westervelt, Amy. “E. Bruce Harrison: The Godfather of Greenwashing” Drilled.

The Global Climate Coalitions 1994-1995 Communication’s Report

James Hansen’s June 23, 1988 Testimony before the Committee on Governmental Affairs