Politics and propaganda have never been strangers to one another, but what’s happening to political discourse around the world right now is cause for concern.

While much attention is paid to Donald Trump’s obvious attempts to mislead the public, a more insidious form of propaganda is playing out right here in British Columbia.

Case in point: B.C. Premier Christy Clark’s recent letter on the Site C dam, addressed to NDP Leader John Horgan and Green Leader Andrew Weaver.

The letter follows on the heels of Horgan’s request for BC Hydro to hold off on evictions and signing new contracts until after the B.C. Utilities Commission can review the costs and demand for the most expensive project in B.C.’s history. 

Horgan’s letter wasn’t addressed to Clark, but she found it in herself to reply anyway. 

Her letter includes the unsubstantiated claim that delaying the eviction of two families in the Peace Valley may come at a risk of a “$600 million cost increase to Site C” — a figure that Harry Swain, the man who chaired the review of Site C for the federal and provincial governments, has called “preposterous.”

The Prophet River First Nation and West Moberly First Nation also thoroughly debunked Clark’s claims in a letter sent to Clark and BC Hydro on Wednesday.

Clark has been mysteriously unavailable to respond to any of these criticisms since issuing the letter, which demands an answer within four days on whether Horgan and Weaver would like the government to issue a “tools down” request to BC Hydro and argues that the project will progress past the “point of no return” before the conclusion of a review by the B.C. Utilities Commission.

What Clark is doing here is creating a zero-sum game — saying that if the province pauses to review the project, it’ll result in lost jobs and increased costs.

While that may intuitively make sense to some people that isn’t necessarily the case.

A team of experts from UBC recently found that by stopping Site C by June 30th, the province could actually save nearly $2 billion. And Swain has been saying essentially the same thing for years. One need only look at the economic devastation the Muskrat Falls dam is wreaking on Newfoundland to get an idea of what can happen when a government falls in love with a mega project there’s no demand for.

“If you represent things as a zero sum game, it’s easy to create conflict because then you’re all fighting over the same pie,” Jason Stanley, professor at Yale University and author of How Propaganda Works, told DeSmog Canada.

“It’s standard in propagandistic politics to limit the future, to fix things in the now, and then set up false dichotomies.”

Christy Clark’s Dangerous Site C Propaganda War #SiteC #bcpoli #bcelxn17 https://t.co/RCaIW447Bk pic.twitter.com/K13mknNYll

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) June 8, 2017

Much of the punditry around Site C right now is about the prospect of 2,200 workers being handed pink slips if the project is cancelled. This messaging again plays into the zero-sum game framework. While it may be effective at scoring political points, it obscures the true debate. 

Imagine a scenario where a government creates a make-work project to build a road to nowhere. More than two thousand workers are industriously building that road to nowhere (being paid with your tax dollars) when an election is held. Would it be fiscally responsible for a new government to continue paying those workers to build a road to nowhere? Or would it be more responsible for the new government to assess whether that road may ever be useful and, if not, stop building it so it can spend that money on things like schools and hospitals?

This is essentially what’s happening right now with the NDP-Green promise to send the Site C dam for an expedited review by the B.C. Utilities Commission.

If that review deems the $ 9 billion Site C dam unnecessary and the project is abandoned, it could free up public funds to create jobs in other ways, like say:

• Building new transit lines
• Building schools and hospitals
• Investing in energy conservation and efficiency
• Investing in 21st century renewables like wind and geothermal

Rarely are complex public policy decisions zero sum games.

"Please let me express my disappointment in how your government is choosing to proceed with this project," Weaver wrote in a response to Clark. "Your government is turning a significant capital project that potentially poses massive economic risks to British Columbians into a political debate rather than one informed by evidence and supported by independent analysis."

Indeed, what we seem to have here is Clark taking her last strangled breaths as her ship goes down.

In the process, she’s lowering the level of public discourse for all of us.

Photo: Premier Christy Clark, Province of British Columbia

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Political propaganda employs the ideals of liberal democracy to undermine those very ideals, the dangers of which, not even its architects fully understand.

In the early years of DeSmog’s research into anti science propaganda, I thought of energy industry PR campaigns such as “junk science,” “clean coal,” and “ethical oil” as misinformation strategies designed to dupe the public.

Although that’s obviously true, I now understand that propaganda is far more complex and problematic than merely lying about the evidence. Certainly propaganda is designed to deceive, but not in a way you might think. What’s more, the consequences are far worse than most people who produce and consume it realize.

My deeper understanding evolved after I interviewed Jason Stanley and read his important book How Propaganda Works. The American philosopher and Yale University professor will speak about the history and dangers of demagogic propaganda at UBC’s Point Grey Campus in Vancouver on April 27 (7 p.m. Buchanan A210, 1866 Main Mall).

According to Stanley, the danger for a democracy “raided by propaganda” is the possibility that the vocabulary of liberal democracy is being used to mask an undemocratic reality.

In a democracy where propaganda is common, citizens believe they live in a liberal democracy; they have free speech. But this belief masks an illiberal, undemocratic reality. In his rich and thoughtful book Stanley defines political propaganda as “the employment of a political ideal against itself.” DeSmog stories about groups concealing ideologies and financial interests behind cloaks of alternative science, and offering “facts” designed to undermine real science, are paradigm examples of this type of propaganda.

“Propaganda that is presented as embodying an ideal governing political speech, but in fact runs counter to it, is antidemocratic …  because it wears down the possibility of democratic deliberation,” Stanley writes.

He dismisses the idea that deception is what makes propaganda effective. Instead, Stanley argues what makes propaganda effective is the way it, “exploits and strengthens flawed ideology.”

This sometimes involves outright lies, but Stanley points to a bigger problem, “that sincere, well-meaning people under the grip of flawed ideology unknowingly produce and consume propaganda.”

In his introduction to a recent reprinted edition of Edward Bernays’ classic book, Propaganda, Crispin Miller agrees. The professor of media studies at New York University says behind-the-scenes wirepullers are often prone to losing touch with reality themselves because in their universe “the truth is ultimately what the client wants the world to think is true.”

It’s an occupational hazard facing all full-time propagandists, he warns, but the greater risk is to the public since a slick propaganda campaign can squelch any inconvenient investigation or journalistic enterprise, so that early warnings fail to resonate and escalating ills receive no mass attention.

With this in mind, my worry is that when we cannot spot propaganda or don’t understand how it works, democracy is damaged to a point where we cannot tell truth from fiction or make evidence-based collective decisions.

Jason Stanley. Photo: Carol Linnitt/DeSmog Canada

Authoritarian Propaganda Undermines Democracy

We saw the emergence of dangerous propaganda in the United States recently, during the presidential campaign when Trump branded Latino immigrants as criminals and rapists. His efforts to whip up fear and anger about race and religion were highly successful and he is now in the White House — despite the fact many people in his own party see him as unstable, untrustworthy and unpredictable.

Trump’s warlike attack on the EPA, the FBI, the CIA and even the Pope is classic authoritarian propaganda. It is an attempt to concoct an alternative reality through the creation of enemies. In Russia they call it theater craft and Putin has been fine-tuning this choreographic approach to authoritarian propaganda for decades.

Donald Trump’s dispute with science and facts is less about old-fashioned misinformation propaganda and more about authoritarian theater. Part of his strategy is to undermine confidence in the public square and in the institutions that democracies rely upon to mediate competing versions of the truth: courts, universities, science, news media, etc. The authoritarian must decide what is true; there can be no competition.

One of his prime tools is Twitter. With a deluge of lies, fake news accusations and outrageous claims his provocative tweets create a chaotic, alternative reality. He sabotages democracy by creating his own swamp where we can’t tell truth from fiction, where rational debate evaporates as he diverts, distracts and deflects accountability.

Trump repeatedly described climate change as a Chinese hoax intended to make U.S manufacturing less competitive, but now denies ever having said it. This is not the ranting of a madman but the voice of a demagogue turning science into a partisan sport.

Powered by propaganda, Trump is now rolling back President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which called for substantial reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. The new president appointed a trio of infamous anti climate science propagandists to oversee the dismantling of the Environmental Protection Agency.

They include Myron Ebell, the non-scientist chair of the Cooler Heads Coalition formed in 1997 to dispel the “myths of global warming” and a director in the anti-regulation think tank, the Competitive Enterprise Institute; Steve J. Milloy, who runs the website JunkScience.com which aims to debunk climate change, and a man who has continually affirmed that smoking does not cause cancer; and Scott Pruitt, a self-described “leading advocate against the EPA’s activist agenda.”

According to NASA data, the Earth’s surface temperatures in 2016 were the hottest since records began in 1880 and that made last year the third in a row to set a new heat record. This data was corroborated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which confirmed 16 of the 17 warmest years on record have occurred since 2001.

Trump appointed Ebell to his EPA team despite the fact that Gavin Schmidt, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a top Earth scientist at NASA, has explained that Ebell’s technique is to point out some little fact and then use it to deduce a larger unconnected and scientifically incorrect point.

As many of you know, the gusher of oil money in recent years has led to PR campaigns and propaganda on a grand scale, similar to that fuelled by the tobacco industry years ago. While facing an environmental crisis, we are also facing a group of industries and a new president who don’t want us to know anything about it.

Today’s public discourse on the environment is overflowing with fabrications and distortions, and I doubt the general public has the faintest idea just how much energy, intelligence and money is poured into these deceptive techniques.

‘Toxic Rhetoric & Spin Silence Critics. Let’s Get Savvier About How #Propaganda Works’ https://t.co/Wq6wrinCX7 #cdnpoli #bcpoli #bcelxn17 pic.twitter.com/2cZtmYWScP

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) April 26, 2017

Liberal Democracy Requires Rational Debate

This style of rhetoric is not as much an attempt to persuade, as it is an act of cultural tribalism: the creation of a team divided against other teams in a manner that shuts down open-minded thinking.

Stanley writes that a democratic society is one that values liberty and political equality. It is a society suffused with a tolerance for difference. It rests on the view that collective reasoning is superior, “that genuine liberty is having one’s interests decided by the result of deliberation with peers about the common good.”

These examples of propaganda pose a challenge for liberal democracy because they sabotage joint deliberations. They are touted as free speech but in fact undermine public reason by excluding certain groups.

Trump’s ad hominem name-calling undermines our ability to question our own views, or respectfully consider the perspectives of others, Stanley says. It undermines the inclusive, rational debate at the core of liberal democracy.

“…flawed ideologies rob groups of knowledge of their own mental states by systematically concealing their interests from them,” he says.

Understanding what makes propaganda effective is at the heart of understanding political inaction on issues that scream out for action. Stanley is most worried about demagogic speech, saying it “both exploits and spreads flawed ideologies,” creating barriers to democratic deliberation. “It attempts to unify opinion without attempting to appeal to our rational will at all,” he says.

Stanley describes propaganda as a method of bypassing the rational will of others. The consequences are widespread and can be long-lasting. Accumulated over time, propaganda becomes a turn-off that discourages citizens from participating in democratic responsibilities, such as voting, the participation level of which is already embarrassingly low in free societies like Canada and the U.S.

Toxic Rhetoric and Spin Silences Critics

The impact of propaganda reaches far beyond immigration. When people deny climate change or label Canadian oil as “ethical” or coal from West Virginia as “clean,” to justify aggressive expansion and government subsidies, the entire planet is harmed.

According to Stanley, it’s difficult to have a real discussion about the pros and cons of an issue when they are shrouded by spin. He believes assertions like these, where words are misappropriated and meanings twisted, are often less about making substantive claims than about silencing critics.

In his words, they are “linguistic strategies for stealing the voices of others.” Groups are silenced by attempts to paint them as grossly insincere, which in turn undermine the public’s trust in them. Consider the former Harper government’s labelling of environmentalists who opposed their aggressive oilsands expansion policies as “foreign funded radicals” trying to block trade and undermine Canada’s economy.

When I first met Stanley in Harlem, he used the example of Fox News, which he says is silencing when it describes itself as ‘fair and balanced’ to an audience that is perfectly aware that it is neither. “The effect is to suggest there is no such thing as fair and balanced. There is no possibility of balanced news only propaganda,” Stanley says.

This style of propaganda pollutes the public square with a toxic form of rhetoric that insinuates there are no facts, there is no objectivity and everyone is trying to manipulate you for their own interests.

Let’s Get Savvier About How Propaganda Works

When facts are spun, people mislabelled and it appears that you can’t trust what anyone says, why bother paying attention at all?

American linguist Deborah Tannen puts the problem this way: “When you hear a ruckus outside your house you open the window to see what’s going on. But if you hear a ruckus every night you close the shutters and ignore it.”

Propaganda makes it difficult for citizens to weigh facts honestly and think things through collectively. What’s more, it’s convinced many of us to disengage.

That is the opposite of what we should be doing. We need to ensure that conditions exist for reasonable conversations about serious problems that impact society.

Stanley cites a tradition in political philosophy dating back to Aristotle, called “defending rhetoric.” He argues there is a kind of propaganda that is necessary to help overcome obstacles to realize democratic ideals. That speech involves empathy and appeals to emotion as it brings reasonableness back into public discourse. In other words, fighting propaganda with propaganda that elicits empathy can help to reinforce the liberal democratic ideals of autonomy, equality and reason.

“The demand of reasonableness requires those deliberating about policy to take into account the perspective of anyone who may be subjected to those laws,” Stanley writes.

The antidote to demagogic propaganda is what Stanley calls civic rhetoric. It’s an attempt to share the perspectives of a group whose members have been silenced, such as scientists or Latinos, or what he describes as “the tool required in the service of repairing the rupture.“

One of the most striking lessons in his book, How Propaganda Works, is a piece of advice on what we can do personally about the dark art of propaganda.

Stanley writes: “In the face of the complexities we’ve discussed, perhaps a reasonable way to adhere to ideal deliberative norms, for example, the norm of objectivity, may be to adopt systematic openness to the possibility that one has been unknowingly swayed by bias.”

To my mind, the best way to fight propaganda is to become savvier about how it works to undermine public trust. It strives to polarize and activate what social psychologists call “my side bias.” It’s not just that we don’t want to become victims of propaganda. We don’t want to inadvertently contribute to its darker purpose, which is to divide us into warring tribes. Authoritarian propaganda creates unyielding one-sidedness and it also creates enemies.

We can inadvertently reinforce this polarization by acting like the enemy the demagogue needs or defuse it with a more pluralistic reaction that shows concern for the problems Trump supporters struggle with.

As George Orwell wrote: “One defeats the fanatic precisely by not being a fanatic oneself.”

Photo: Alisdare Hickson via Flickr

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Political Propaganda employs the ideals of liberal democracy to undermine those very ideals, the dangers of which, not even its architects fully understand.

In the early years of DeSmog’s research into environmental propaganda, I thought of industry PR campaigns like “junk science,” “clean coal,” and “ethical oil” as misinformation strategies designed to dupe the public about the real issues.

Although there is obvious truth to that view, I now understand that propaganda is far more complex and problematic than lying about the facts. Certainly propaganda is designed to look like facts that are true and right, but not in a way we might think. What’s more, the consequences are far worse than most people consuming and even producing it realize.

Much of my new understanding comes from conversations with Jason Stanley, an American philosopher and professor at Yale University and author of an important new book How Propaganda Works. According to Jason Stanley, the danger for a democracy “raided by propaganda” is the possibility that the vocabulary of liberal democracy is being used to mask an undemocratic reality.

In a democracy where propaganda is common, you have a state that appears to be a liberal democracy, its citizens believe it is a liberal democracy (they have free speech) but the appearance of liberal democracy masks an illiberal, undemocratic reality.

In this rich and thoughtful book Stanley defines political propaganda as “the employment of a political ideal against itself.” DeSmog stories about groups presenting ideologies or financial interests as objective and scientific evidence are paradigm examples of this type of propaganda.

“Propaganda that is presented as embodying an ideal governing political speech, but in fact runs counter to it, is antidemocratic …  because it wears down the possibility of democratic deliberation,” Stanley writes.

He dismisses the idea that it’s deception that makes propaganda effective. Instead, Stanley argues what makes propaganda effective is that it “exploits and strengthens flawed ideology.”

It sometimes involves outright lies, but Stanley points to a bigger problem, which is that “sincere, well-meaning people under the grip of flawed ideology unknowingly produce and consume propaganda.”

My worry, alongside Stanley’s, is that when we can’t spot propaganda or don’t understand how it works, its detriment to democracy will grow to a point where it can’t be reversed.

Propaganda blazes a reckless path in politics 

The best example of this dangerous form of propaganda is currently playing out in the race for a leader of the Republican Party in the U.S., with its surprising frontrunner, real-estate tycoon and reality TV star Donald Trump.

In his campaign, Trump has described Latino immigrants as criminals and rapists and proposed to build a wall across the U.S. border to keep Mexicans out of the country. He’s also called for a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslims entering the U.S. as an attempt to crack down on terrorism and believes those already in his country should be registered on a special government database and required to carry special identification cards.

While it may sound like bluster to some, Trump’s efforts to build support by whipping up fear and anger about race and religion is unfortunately working, at least where popularity contests are concerned.

That’s even though people in his own party see him as reckless and dangerous for the country. Trump is now being regularly characterized as a demagogue in mainstream media, with parallels to Joe McCarthy, the Republican senator who is known for stoking anti-communist fears in the 1950s.

Canada isn’t immune to this propaganda-guided campaign strategy. Consider the Conservative-driven debate during last fall’s federal election around whether Muslim women should be allowed to wear the niqab during the citizenship oath. The former Harper government’s “Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act” also pandered to fears of immigrants, while claiming to address issues such as forced marriages and honour killings, which many pundits were quick to point out are already illegal under existing laws.

Understanding propaganda is key to stopping its spread 

Obviously these examples of propaganda feed into negative stereotypes, but blatant bigotry is only part of the problem.

This style of rhetoric is not as much an attempt to persuade, as it is an act of cultural tribalism: the creation of a team divided against other teams in a manner that shuts down open-minded thinking.

Stanley writes that a democratic society is one that values liberty and political equality. It is a society suffused with a tolerance of difference. It rests on the view that collective reasoning is superior, “that genuine liberty is having one’s interests decided by the result of deliberation with peers about the common good.”

These examples of propaganda pose a challenge for liberal democracy because they sabotage joint deliberations of this sort. They are touted as free speech but in fact undermine public reason by excluding certain groups.

Such ad hominem name-calling undermines our ability to question our perspectives, or respectfully consider the perspectives of others, Stanley says. It undermines the inclusive, rational debate at the core of liberal democracy.

“…flawed ideologies rob groups of knowledge of their own mental states by systematically concealing their interests from them,” he says.

Understanding what makes propaganda effective is at the heart of understanding political inaction on issues that scream out for action. Stanley is most worried about demagogic speech, saying it “both exploits and spreads flawed ideologies,” creating barriers to democratic deliberation. “It attempts to unify opinion without attempting to appeal to our rational will at all,” he says.

Stanley describes propaganda as a method to bypass the rational will of others. The consequences are widespread and can be long-lasting. Accumulated over time, propaganda becomes a turn off that discourages citizens from participating in democratic responsibilities, such as voting, the participation level of which is already embarrassingly low in free societies like Canada and the U.S.

Propaganda’s attempt to silence critics 

The propaganda problem goes way beyond terrorism, impacting the entire world around us. Consider the harm being done to the planet by those who deny climate change is a reality or label Canadian oil as “ethical” and coal from West Virginia as “clean” to justify its aggressive expansion and government subsidies.

According to Stanley, it’s difficult to have a real discussion about the pros and cons of an issue when they’re slapped with these types of spin. He believes assertions like these, where words are misappropriated and meanings twisted, are often less about making substantive claims and more about silencing critics.

In his words, they are “linguistic strategies for stealing the voices of others.” Groups are silenced by attempts to paint them as grossly insincere, which in turn undermine the public’s trust in them. Consider the former Harper government’s labeling of environmentalists who opposed their aggressive oil sands expansion policies as “radical groups” funded by foreign interests trying to block trade and undermine Canada’s economy.

When I first met Stanley in Harlem, he used the example of Fox News, which he says is silencing when it describes itself as ‘fair and balanced’ to an audience that is perfectly aware that it is neither. “The effect is to suggest there is no such thing as fair and balanced. There is no possibility of balanced news only propaganda,” Stanley says.

This style of propaganda pollutes the public square with a toxic form of rhetoric that insinuates there are no facts, there is no objectivity and that everyone is trying to manipulate you for their own interests.

Can the battle against propaganda be won?

So when facts are being spun and people mislabeled and it appears that you can’t trust what anyone says, why bother paying attention at all? American linguist Deborah Tannen puts the problem this way, “when you hear a ruckus outside your house you open the window to see what’s going on. But if you hear a ruckus every night you close the shutters and ignore it.”

Propaganda makes it difficult for citizens to weigh facts honestly and think things through collectively. What’s more, it’s convinced many of us to disengage.

That, is the exact opposite reaction we should have at this time. Instead, we need to ensure the conditions for reasonable conversations about serious problems that impact society are made possible.

Stanley cites a tradition in political philosophy, dating back to Aristotle, called “defending rhetoric.” He argues there is a kind of propaganda that is necessary to help overcome obstacles to realize democratic ideals. That is speech that brings empathy and appeals to emotion, to bring reasonableness back into public discourse.  In other words, fighting propaganda with propaganda that elicits empathy can help to reinforce the liberal democratic ideals of autonomy, equality and reason.

“The demand of reasonableness requires those deliberating about policy to take into account the perspective of anyone who may be subjected to those laws,” Stanley writes.

The antidote to demagogic propaganda is what Stanley calls civic rhetoric. It’s an attempt to share the perspectives of a group who have been silenced, or what he describes as “the tool required in the service of repairing the rupture.“

One of the most striking lessons in his book, How Propaganda Works, is a piece of advice on what we can do personally, about the dark art of propaganda.

Stanley writes: “In the face of the complexities we’ve discussed, perhaps a reasonable way to adhere to ideal deliberative norms, for example, the norm of objectivity, may be to adopt systematic openness to the possibility that one has been unknowingly swayed by bias.”

To me, the best way to fight propaganda is to become savvier about how it manipulates, how it actually works, as Stanley does in his work. It’s not just because we don’t want to become a victim of propaganda, we also don’t want to inadvertently contribute to its dark purpose.

As George Orwell wrote: “One defeats the fanatic precisely by not being a fanatic oneself.”

Blog image credit: Ads targeting clean coal propaganda, via Flickr CC. 

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

“Speak the truth, but not to punish.”

These are the words the famous Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh told DeSmogBlog and DeSmog Canada founder, president and contributor James Hoggan one afternoon in a conversation about environmental advocacy and the collapse of productive public discourse.

Over the course of three years James (Jim) Hoggan has engaged the minds of communications specialists, philosophers, leading public intellectuals and spiritual leaders while writing a book designed to address the bewildering question: “why, when we know so much about the global environmental crisis, are we doing so little?”

Hoggan recently recounted some of the insights he has gained into this question when he spoke at the Walrus Talks “The Art of Conversation.”

He begins with the basic axiom shared by cognitive scientist Dan Kahan, “just as you can pollute the natural environment, you can pollute public conversations.” From that the logic follows – if we’re serious about resolving our environmental problems, we are going to have to attend equally to the state of our public discourse.

In Canada, says Hoggan, we face particular challenges when it comes to polluted pubic conversations, especially with the heightened tenor of rhetoric regarding environmentalism and energy issues surrounding the oilsands and proposed pipelines.

"The ethical oil, foreign funded radicals campaign," he says, "has made Canadians less able to weigh facts honestly, disagree constructively, and think things through collectively."

You can watch a short video of Hoggan’s talk on The Walrus, or read the transcript below:

Good evening, I’m Jim Hoggan. I wanted to start by saying I’m not speaking here as the chair of the David Suzuki Foundation, but as the author of a book that I’m writing called The Polluted Public Square.

In this book I’m on a personal journey to learn from public intellectuals. I travel from Oxford, to Harvard, to Yale to MIT; I had tea with the expert on public trust in the House of Lords dining room; I spent a week with the Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh; I traveled to the Himalayas to interview the Dalai Lama. So I’ve spent three years on this journey. Originally I thought I was writing a book for other people, but I realized as I was going through this that I was actually writing a book for myself.

The book is about this question of public conversations and the state of public discourse. And the specific question I asked all of these people, was “why is it, in spite of all this scientific evidence, from experts in atmospheric, marine and life sciences, are we doing so little to fix these big environmental problems that we’re creating? And why isn’t public discourse on the environment more data driven? Why are we listening to each other shout rather than listening to what the evidence is trying to tell us?"

One of the first interviews I did was with a Yale Law School cognitive scientist named Dr. Dan Kahan. He had part of the answer for me. He said, “just as you can pollute the natural environment, you can pollute public conversations.”

He said that healthy public discourse is a public good that is every bit as important as the natural environment; that we should be willing to protect, consciously protect, the state and the health of public discourse; and that we were in Canada and the United States suffering from he called a ‘social pathology.’

And this kind of healthy public discourse, or healthy attitude to public discourse, is certainly something that we’re not paying much attention to in Canada these days.

In 2012 – let me take you back to something the Conservative government would probably rather we all forgot about – in early 2012 some folks in the oil and gas industry launched a PR campaign with this message: ethical oil is like fair trade coffee. It’s like conflict-free diamonds. It’s morally superior.

In 2012 the oil and gas industry worked closely with the Conservative government to convince Canadians that British Columbians who opposed tankers on the coast of B.C. were extremists working for American business interests.

Now, environmental activists have been polluting the public square for a long time: they’ve called the oilsands heroin, they’ve called it blood oil, they’ve called oil companies environmental criminals engaged in crimes against humanity.

Now who would have thought that this level of rhetoric could be raised any higher? But it was.

Senator Mike Duffy called B.C. charities “un-Canadian.” The minister of environment accused them of money laundering. The PMO called them “foreign funded radicals.” Senator Don Plett said, where would environmentalists draw the line on who they receive money from? Would they take money from Al-Qaeda? The Taliban? Hamas?

So in 2012, as Terry Glavin put it, suddenly we had sleeper cells of Ducks Unlimited popping up across Canada.

Now I’m not suggesting equivalency here. These environmentalists have the evidence of climate change on their side. They’re arguing against the inaction from an industry that’s in a lot of trouble as the world realizes that their product is changing the climate. And they haven’t done a very good job of handing that trouble.

I met a guy in Harlem at a coffee shop. His name is Jason Stanley and he writes for the New York Times and teaches philosophy of language and a class in democracy and propaganda at Yale. And he said that when oil from Fort McMurray is called ‘ethical oil,’ or coal from West Virginia is called ‘clean coal,’ it’s difficult to have a real discussion about the pros and cons. He explained that these kinds of improbable assertions, where words are misappropriated and their meanings twisted, are not so much about making substantial claims, but they’re about silencing.

He called them linguistic strategies for stealing the voices of others.

He said Fox News engages in silencing when it describes itself ‘fair and balanced’ to an audience that is perfectly aware that it is neither. The effect is to suggest that there’s not such thing as fair and balanced. That there’s no possibility of balanced news, only propaganda.

Canada’s public square is polluted with a toxic form of rhetoric that insinuates that there are no facts, there is no objectivity, and that everyone is trying to manipulate you for their own interests. Our belief in sincerity and objectivity itself is under attack. So when everything is mislabeled and you can’t trust anything that anyone says, why bother with the public square?

The American linguist Deborah Tannen puts it this way: when you hear a ruckus outside your house at night, you open the window to see what’s going on. But if there’s a ruckus every night, you close the shutters and ignore it.

The ethical oil, foreign funded radicals campaign has made Canadians less able to weigh facts honestly, disagree constructively, and think things through collectively.

Now how you clean up the public square – my book is 120,000 words – that’s a big question for a seven-minute speech.

But let me say this: “I’m right, your wrong. Let me tell you what you should think” is not a great communications strategy.

Moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt told me that, and also said it doesn’t work because we all think we’re right. Haidt argues that people are divided by politics and religion, not because some people are good and others are evil, but because our minds were designed for ‘groupish righteousness.’ Morality binds and blinds us. Our righteousness minds were developed by evolution to unite us into teams, divide us against other teams, and blind us to the truth. Haidt suggests we step outside the self-righteousness of what he calls our moral matrix, and look to the Dalai Lama to see the power of moral humility and that we take the time to understand the values and worldviews of people we strongly disagree with.

I also interviewed Ted-prize winner Karen Armstrong who developed the charter for compassion. She put it this way: we must speak out against injustice, but not in a way that causes more hatred. She told me, remember what St. Paul said: charity takes no delight in the wrongdoing of others.

So my time’s up, but I just want to say one more thing. Since the 60s I’ve been reading Eastern philosophy and following particularly Zen Buddhism. So a little while ago David Suzuki and I were lucky enough to spend an afternoon with the famous Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. And he kept saying to David, people don’t need to know more about destroying the planet. They already know they’re destroying the planet. You need to deal with the despair. So I kept listening to him and it sounded to me like he was saying we should go meditated.

So I said to him, “in Canada, Canadians expect the David Suzuki Foundation to speak up on behalf of the environment. You’re not saying we shouldn’t be activists?”

It’s hard, I’ve been trying to think of how I could describe the way he looked at me. But it was with this kind of silence and deepness that I can’t remember having anyone look at me like that before. So he looked at me and he said, “speak the truth but not to punish.”

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What is ethical public relations? Where do you draw the line and what should your boundaries be when influencing public perceptions and opinions? As president of a Canadian public relations firm my colleagues and I face this question all the time. Some days the answer is more obvious than others, so I asked Rutgers University philosopher Jason Stanley how to maintain a principled position.

It’s a question that floats to the surface like a greasy slick these days because during the last 12 to 18 months, Canadians have been subjected to one of the most expensive and extensive PR campaigns in history, in an attempt to nudge public attention away from the environmental impacts of tankers, pipelines and oil sands mining, and redirect it towards economic benefits.

Whether it has been Enbridge ads regarding the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline — “A path to prosperity … a path to thriving communities” — or Canada’s own federal government talking about creating “more than a million jobs from coast to coast to coast,” the tactic has been relentless.

Harper’s federal government spent more than $55 million on advertising last year and conducted hundreds of polls, to not just reflect public opinion but also shape it. The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) featured greenwashing, pro oil-sands ads that showed scientists and workers standing in pristine wilderness expounding their concern for the environment.

I asked Stanley what the communication ground rules are: Should the touchstone be whether you are increasing people’s understanding, or decreasing it? Or is that too naïve a distinction?

That’s an excellent distinction, he told me, except it’s unworkable. That's an intuitive guideline that people use, but facts are difficult things to nail down. It isn't that someone wants to make obviously false statements but people are constantly negotiating with the “boundary" of truth.[view:in_this_series=block_1]

Stanley, who specializes in the philosophy of language and epistemology, believes such boundaries are disappearing because scientific objectivity is either being eroded, or left completely out of conversations in the public square.

People today express opinions, not facts.

“Everyone is under the grip of an ideology, so what we’re doing is comparing ideological frameworks now.” He adds the right-wing media adds to the turmoil by saying whenever anyone asserts something you cannot believe them because they’re just trying to manipulate you for their own interests.

“Fox News is saying you can’t believe anything you hear because everyone is just trying to get you to accept their own ideology.”

For instance, the National Academy of Science and the Royal Society, which comprise many of the world’s most distinguished scientists, agree climate change is a serious problem. The American Petroleum Institute and the Fraser Institute, however, are two non-scientific organizations that do not.

How do you participate in debates about climate change and science when you’re not a scientist? How does the public benefit from this lop-sided debate, or draw any usable and meaningful conclusions?

The issues started to come into focus for me when I was doing a book tour soon after writing Climate Cover-Up in 2009. I was invited to speak at Yale Universities’ debate society, the Yale Political Union. After a nearly three-hour debate I decided to leave students with this thought:

When I was in first year law school a lot of us asked how you justify defending a rapist or serial killer. We were told the legal system was set up to be adversarial. It is based on the prosecution arguing a case, the defence arguing a case, and then a judge or jury deciding.

Everybody has a job and everyone puts faith in the process. When I got involved in the PR business I heard a similar argument about getting a client’s information into the court of public opinion. It wasn’t up to the PR firm to pass judgment.

But I see two big flaws in that thinking. First, there are no rules of evidence in the court of public opinion. When you talk about climate change especially, the public can be misled because there are no charges for perjury, no one is held accountable for tampering with evidence. And second, there is little distinction between an expert witness and a charlatan.

So how does the public judge?

Stanley says it makes sense that a scientific debate should take place in a “scientific way” through journals and conferences. When the public is involved, we can choose to believe and listen to those who are reliable, and tune out those who are not.

We may not all be experts in climate change but we can educate ourselves to understand what they're talking about to a certain degree. To continually listen to a debate among scientific illiterates adds little to the public discourse. 


When trying to judge where the truth lies, he warns there are two important tactics to be aware of:  One is the undermining of sincerity by special interest groups who know how to exploit a strategy that throws into question the credibility of public figures, and the second is to suggest that no one has special access to the facts about any domain.

People who claim the mantle of science are trying to say: “We’re the experts, you have to believe us because we are scientists.” In certain respects this latter point is right, says Stanley. But “We don't want Milton Friedman telling us economics is a science, and he's an expert, and we're not and we have to listen to him because there's competing models.”

There's a significant difference between economics and climate science. For one thing, economics is more akin to history and is an interpretive discipline rather than a predictive one. But the critical gulf between the two is: In economics there are many different views among experts whereas in climate science there are not.

When there are “wildly” different views, he says it’s inappropriate to feature only one expert’s view and hold them up as the single person to believe, “and let them boss you around.”

That's a clearly illegitimate use of a scientific expert. There are areas of science where there is genuine controversy, and where experts disagree. When such scientific disputes are present, then no expert should be allowed to claim their view is unchallenged.


But when it comes to climate science, this is clearly not the case.

There is overwhelming agreement and that’s what must be conveyed to the public.

Among climate scientists, the debate was settled years ago after an overwhelming consensus emerged in the literature. A review of the published research by James Lawrence Powell found that out of 13,950 peer-reviewed articles, published between 1991 and 2012, only 24 reject human-caused global warming. 

So, in fact, all that remains is a political debate about what to do to address it. Of course, scientists remain involved in the discussion, so they remain targets for attack and obfuscation.

What's happening in the climate debate is similar to what's happening in the case of evolution with the Discovery Institute, an American public policy think tank. “You have a whole industry of fake science being created, to create the illusion of controversy,” Stanley told me.

He said this is exacerbated when PR firms and news media create a “din” — where the facts are unclear, there is no uniformity to facts, no one is believable and everyone has a different agenda. That’s when people stop listening.

The engine driving this din is the turbine of powerful moneyed interests, whether oil and coal companies, or the people whose livelihoods depend on those industries, whether or not the industries are good for their country, their community, or for their children and grandchildren. 

The prison industrial complex is a staggering example of this. Massively important in the United States and becoming more so in Canada, Stanley explains the system does not make sense since imprisoning huge portions of a population is not an economically sound way to run a country.

“We in the U.S. imprison 25% of the world's prisoners, and have by far the largest prison population in the world … We shouldn't have a prison industry, but there are so many prison guards and so many lawyers, so many people whose livelihood depends on a steady influx. That's their job.” 

Such policies are promoted because of financial self-interest.

People are employed in industries that are clearly bad for the country and the world, yet people align their views with whatever is going to keep their paychecks coming every month.

We live in a complicated world with confusing debates and motivations churning on all sides.

We started DeSmog Canada because we wanted to clean up the PR pollution that swirls around issues of the environment, social justice and the economy. My interview with Stanley helped me understand how we accomplish that, by not only telling the truth and increasing people’s understanding, but also by encouraging people to look at issues in a different way and rely on trustworthy experts.

Without being an expert it’s very challenging to get to the bottom of things, but we have an obligation to try. There is no way we can all become authorities on climate science —— I don’t personally know anyone who’s taken an ice core sample from Greenland lately —— but part of being a good citizen is informing ourselves, figuring out who to trust, seeking those with proper credentials and keeping the discussion healthy.

We need to ask the right questions, and encourage the media to do the same, so we can detect the difference between fake and real debate.

Post image from Enbridge's Northern Gateway "Safety & Environment" web page.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.