The Problem With PR
How PR Agencies Are Greenwashing The Climate Crisis Through Disinformation Campaigns
If you’re a regular reader of IrishEVs, you may be aware that we have previously named the PR agencies who are working alongside Irish brands to help them with supposed sustainability campaigns, which are often nothing more than greenwashing.
Today we look at the ethics of this approach of naming and shaming PR agencies who reinforce greenwashing, and what this means for corporate accountability and transparency in the context of the climate crisis.
Takes One To Know One
Prior to the creation of IrishEVs, my background was in PR and communications, and I spent a number of years working in agencies creating campaigns to promote a wide range of brands and products – so I come from an informed position of how these organisations work.
While every agency is different, I know that they are – almost without exception – incredibly high-pressure environments where you are being pushed hard to bring in new clients and new income into the business, while also being told to be creative and original.
In this environment you end up as the middle-man between the brand and your agency’s owner, and while there are some incredibly talented people with strong ethics working in PR, the industry environment and the financial demands often mean that these are the lowest order of priority.
This is best highlighted in the area of “reactive comms” – where you have received an enquiry from the media or public – where the worker in an agency must act as though they were the distilled essence of the brand that they are representing, and respond in the brand’s best interests. Even if this means acting against the public’s best interests.
We have all seen the outcome of this, whether we know it or not. Almost every statement from a company experiencing a crisis is prepared by a PR agency or in-house team, with the sole focus of protecting the brand’s reputation – which is why those statements so rarely actually make sense or answer the question that has been put to them.
Graph showing the long-term increase of average temperatures in Ireland between 1901-2019. Credit: Prof Ed Hawkins
Transparency and Accountability
You may ask why this matters – particularly if it is so ubiquitous.
The issue is that you never actually get to speak to, or hear from, the brand themselves – and as such you are much less likely to actually get a straight answer to the question you’re putting to them.
More importantly, the brand is protected from ever facing proper public enquiries into the ethics of what it is doing. This hands a lot of power to the PR agency, and decreases the amount to which you or I can hold corporations accountable for the harm that they might be doing.
A great case in point is the ICCRA’s campaign of disinformation being run by Weber Shandwick in Dublin. Their E-Way 2040 initiative promotes a wide range of factually inaccurate myths in order to lobby the Irish government to delay emissions regulations by a decade, so that car dealerships in Ireland can increase their profit margins by selling higher polluting vehicles for a longer period of time – something that flies in the face of every climate crisis report.
Having reached out to ICCRA for comment, we were sent an email by Weber Shandwick with a pre-prepared statement that did not answer any of our questions.
Despite further enquiries and requests to speak directly with ICCRA, our emails and calls about the many untruths presented in the campaign went unanswered for weeks – including those where we requested comment from Weber Shandwick, including why they were promoting a disinformation campaign when their website boldly states “no fake news here, without truth there’s no trust.”
An example from ICCRA’s deliberately misleading campaign, run by Weber Shandwick Dublin - it is impossible under the laws of physics for an ICE vehicle to run without creating emissions.
At the time of writing, we have yet to hear back from Weber Shandwick.
“While they (internal combustion engine cars) do release emissions, new technological advances mean the levels are getting lower and lower and will disappear by 2030.”
This is a claim entirely unfounded in science and ruled impossible by the laws of physics – a combustion engine will always burn fuel, and will always produce emissions. The representative of ICCRA claimed that – despite employing a PR agency to promote this in the media and on social media with the intent of spreading disinformation amongst the Irish public – this was simply a spelling mistake.
Since our conversation, the statement on the ICCRA campaign website has now been changed to:
“While they do release emissions, new technological advances mean the levels are getting lower and lower and will could disappear altogether by 2030.”
This change (and the subsequent spelling error) was made by Weber Shandwick on behalf of ICCRA – an organisation that has no website, no publicly accessible email address, and which is therefore completely unaccountable and lacking transparency.
Yet they are regularly given coverage in leading Irish publications such as RTE, the Irish Times and CompleteCar.
Killing You And The Planet
While you might hope that people would see through the bare-faced lies of initiatives such as this, the media coverage that they garner repeats the misinformation and soon it becomes accepted fact.
These campaigns look real and feel real because they are created by intelligent people who know what they are doing – and know how to inspire a response from both the media and consumers.
Yet they do very real ecological and public health harm.
For example, take our recent articles on greenwashing by Irish fuel firms Applegreen and Maxol.
Both brands are running a PR exercise to appear superficially “green” to the public, while promoting the purchase of their most expensive fuel products in order to increase their profit margin – despite the fact that both campaigns will do nothing to deliver the promised offset in emissions for their customers.
Instead of having transparency and being able to hold these brands accountable for the harmful emissions that they produce – which worsen the impact of the climate crisis, while also contributing to public health issues and early deaths – they hide behind misinformation spun by PR agencies.
In the case of Applegreen, their PR agency – Cullen Communications – informed us that our questions “cover areas beyond the topic of the current campaign”, despite the fact that they related directly to the greenwashing of the campaign while also allowing Applegreen to highlight where they are investing in renewable energy, EV charging and other tangible sustainability initiatives.
You can find the questions we submitted to Applegreen here – we’ll leave it to your judgement as to whether they are relevant to their campaign.
Applegreen made profits of €3.1 billion in 2019 - Yet it is passing the buck of climate action on to its customers through its deceptive carbon offsetting campaign
Our subsequent requests for comment were not answered, and we have only recently been put back in touch with them having contacted Applegreen’s marketing department directly. This is a very clear case of a brand hiding behind a PR agency to avoid accountability and transparency about its actions.
While Maxol’s PR partner – Sherry Communications – were considerably more communicative and responsive to our enquiries, the answers they provided directly skirted around the questions, and failed to provide any quantifiable data to substantiate Maxol’s claims that their campaign is anything more than greenwashing.
Both of these PR agencies are enabling oil-selling businesses to get away with increasing their profit margins while at least maintaining the current amount of emissions – the transport sector accounting for 20% of all emissions in Ireland, and second only to agriculture.
In all likelihood, and from my personal experience in PR agencies, it is my suspicion that both of these campaigns were dreamed up and pitched by the agencies to their clients as a way to differentiate them for the competition and to show “green” credentials – without actually stopping to think them through or consider the environmental harm that they will contribute, despite the fact that we have just seven short years to avert the worst-case climate change scenarios.
Is This Ethical?
This is an important question that we have grappled with, and ultimately we believe that the ethics of dispelling disinformation and misinformation outweigh the public shaming of PR agencies who are helping brands to profit from the climate crisis.
In our communications with some of the PR agencies who are supporting greenwashing initiatives we have sought to reach out to the individuals behind the campaign to appeal to their personal ethics and ask them whether they would support them were they not being paid to do so – while highlighting the inherent ecological and public health harm of their campaigns.
The individuals are not at fault – we all need money, and throughout our lifetimes we will all face a moral quandary where we have to place income above the greater good. That is why we don’t name the individuals.
PR agencies are now using the tactics of deception developed by the tobacco industry to sew disinformation about the role brands play in the Climate Crisis
However, we are in no doubt that these PR agencies are responsible for promoting – if not creating – these campaigns, and are therefore responsible for the ongoing negative impact that these brands will have on the climate crisis, while directly profiting from it.
We only need to look into the relatively recent past of the 1950s for a relevant case study to show the wide-ranging societal harms that disinformation campaigns led by PR agencies can bring. Take, for example, the fundamental role that PR agency Hill and Knowlton played in developing the so-called Tobacco Strategy on behalf of the US tobacco industry, which sought to undermine the science around the harmful medical implications of smoking.
Not only has this deceptive disinformation approach had wide-ranging implications to this day, but this tactic to hoodwink consumers is now being applied by brands to avoid climate action while increasing their profit margins.
As such, we will continue to list the names of the agencies we are directed.
Do you think this is a fair approach? Is this something that you feel we should review? Get in touch on social media or via email and let us know.
What to Read Next
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The Rise of Greenwashing
We investigate the rising culture of greenwashing amongst Irish brands who are using PR to appear "green" in order to increase their profits - while placing the onus for climate action on their customers
Media Accountability: Cars & Climate Change
It’s time for the media to report on the health & environmental impact of cars, as a leading contributor to climate change