James Hoggan author of Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming

The first time I met James Hoggan was in March 2010 at a panel discussion entitled “Climate Change and the Media: Scientists, Scribes and Spinmeisters” hosted at the University of Victoria by the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions (PICS).

James was decidedly out of place on that panel. Alongside him were Lucinda Chodan editor-in-chief of the Times Colonist, Victoria’s local newspaper, Tom Pedersen, dean of Climate Studies at the University of Victoria and Peter Calamai, lead reporter for the Toronto Star.

Recently, Mr. Hoggan published a book that sent waves through the scientific and journalistic communities in North America.  Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming has had both “climate change experts” and reporters aghast and pointing fingers. Just one of the reasons behind the panel discussion taking place at UVic in March.

But Mr. Hoggan is neither a scientist nor a journalist. He does not specialize in climatology.  He doesn’t teach journalism or vie for the journalistic integrity of the CanWest news world.  So, what was he doing there?

As a leading Vancouver PR guru, James Hoggan specializes in spin. Well, not that he uses those rakish tactics himself, you see. Sure he knows the ins and outs of corporate public relations spin as well as the rest of them, or perhaps even better, but he is morally opposed to it. And besides: it’s bad for business. All of this is helpfully outlined in more detail in Hoggan’s other book: Do the Right Thing: PR Tips for a Skeptical Public.

And doing the right thing is exactly why Hoggan was invited to sit in on the climate panel at UVic. Recently in print, and hitting the climate racket with riotous force, is Hoggan’s Climate Cover-Up. The book is a culmination of years of journalistic sleuthing and the collaboration of reporters regularly contributing to Vancouver’s famed DeSmogBlog. (www.desmogblog.com)

Hoggan, founder of DeSmogBlog, in partnership with journalist Richard Littlemore, set out to discover why, despite undisputed consensus within the scientific community, there was a raging ‘debate on climate change.’ What Hoggan discovered was that this phony debate was the careful creation of PR architects and media experts, who, in short, were doing the wrong thing and doing it with oil and gas funds.

“This is a story of betrayal, a story of selfishness, greed, and irresponsibility on an epic scale. In its darkest chapters, it’s a story of deceit, of poisoning good public judgment – of an anti-democratic attack on our political structures and a strategic undermining of the journalistic watchdogs who keep our social institutions honest” Hoggan begins in the book’s preface.

“It is ultimately a story that drove me and those closest to me to outrage and to activism. And although it is not my purpose to make you angry, I hope that you may through the coming pages, come to understand the sense of indignation and injustice that brought me to write this book.”

What Hoggan uncovered is a public relations scandal not seen since the inglorious fall of the tobacco barons and their louche campaign to hide the ills of second hand, or airborne, cigarette smoke.

I began reading Hoggan’s Climate Cover Up when I was about 106 pages into Lawrence Solomon’s 2008 The Deniers: The World-renowned Scientists Who Stood Up Against Global Warming Hysteria, Political Persecution, and Fraud* *And Those Who Are Too Fearful To Do So.

I had begun reading Solomon’s diatribe against global warming ‘orthodoxy’ to do my due diligence on becoming informed on both sides of the climate debate. But what I was to soon realize, through Hoggan’s book, is that this is exactly what the ‘Deniers’ wanted me to do.

The quagmire of climate science and public opinion is somewhat akin to the sordid pairing of sustainability and consumer responsibility. Somehow, in the ruckus, the consumer has become responsible for corporate industrial waste, toxins and unrecyclables. It has become our moral obligation and duty to ourselves, our bodies, and our children, to recycle, to perpetually ‘green’ our lifestyles.

But all this offsetting of responsibility onto the consumer accomplishes is the continual deferral of stricter industrial regulations and heavy corporate taxes. It is a strategy designed to obscure the issue at hand: industrial scale polluters and government inaction.  As long as we feel like it is our responsibility, and it can be solved through bi-weekly recycling programs and green consumerism, the industrial heyday will continue.

In much the same way, the duty to understand and resolve climate change and the more general issue of sustainability has been offset onto the individual, who, for the most part, has minimal scientific discernment. The complexities of climate science are often too much to cram into the measly side column of, say, The Province and so the more difficult issues are reduced down to their simplest and inexact components.

This leaves the “debate” victim to the sharks of the PR world, the media spinsters and the occasional scientist, gone rogue and willing to pocket oil and gas money for an exchange of credentials. The news audience, unwittingly and often too easily assuaged, is an easy target for the denial machine.  Heck, we almost want someone to tell us that climate change is a giant hoax and that we can go on with our Hummer road trips plans and yes, we’ll take that latte to go.

This, unfortunately, is not the case as any reputable climate expert will tell you. But where are these experts or reputation, Hoggan asks? And where are the journalists of integrity, bringing the undisclosed truth to their hungry and dependent readers?  Where indeed?

These are some of the questions Hoggan provokes in his book, alongside his tale of the CO2-stained tailings of oil and gas funds which have found their way into the pockets of some of the world’s most prominent ‘deniers.’

In a recent interview at Mr. Hoggan’s downtown office, I asked him, “So, what can we do to counteract all of this confusion?”

“Demand more of leaders,” came as a quick first response, “political leaders and particularly people in the media.” Alleged climate experts should be questioned about their credentials and qualifications and perhaps more importantly about their funding.

Currently in both Canada and the United States grassroots organizations under certain circumstances do not have to disclose their funders.  This allows donors to give charitably without publicly advertising their affiliations or partisan leanings.  In this instance, it also serves as a discrete conduit for large corporate givers to flood the alleged grassroots movement with oil and gas funded representatives.

“We need to demand politically that there is a change in this policy…these people should be stripped of the right to hide their funding.”

Aside from the policy overhaul, Mr. Hoggan also had this to recommend: “I also think, and this is probably the most difficult piece of advice but I don’t know that there’s any way around it, is that the real anecdote to propaganda and misinformation is understanding.”

So who is on Hoggan’s recommended reading list?  Elizabeth Colbert as aperitif with Andrew Weaver for the main course.  To those in need of more still, he recommends realclimate.org.

“Today, along with poverty and population growth, there is no bigger issue than climate change.  It is the biggest environmental issue of our day” and so, Mr. Hoggan insists, “this is something that is actually worth spending time to learn about.”

For those of us on the lookout, he adds one last caveat: “Keep in mind that you can never overestimate the capacity of [the Deniers] to be deceitful.  It shocks me what lengths they are willing to go to.”

Reading Climate Cover-Up amounts to a lesson in vigilance, vigilance of the mind, of the perspective, of the opinion.  We live in an information-saturated age where even the fittest are outrun by the sheer volume and quantity of published information.  What Mr. Hoggan reminds us of is the importance of the challenge.  The difficultly of acquiring straight information should not discourage us, but only strengthen our resolve.

If it is shocking what lengths the denial campaigners are willing to go to, well, then, I want to be down right scandalous in my efforts.