Back in 2022, I completely missed this accusation crash. Allow me to setup the situation this way: Dave Anderson of the Energy Policy Institute still follows my Twitter/X account to this day, which may explain why his Nov 2024 “Duke Energy Knew” report – which I detailed in my prior blog post – had switched from showcasing the never-published “Chicken Little” ‘newspaper advertorial’ in his prior two 2017 / 2022 EPI reports as evidence for his false accusations about electric utilities deceiving the public, and instead featured advertorials in his month-old EPI report that were actually published . . . . where he may perhaps have learned where to find those published ads from me right here. But I don’t follow Dave Anderson. He’s the johnny-come-lately repeater of the standard accusation about ‘Big Coal/Oil running disinformation campaigns employing skeptic climate scientists‘ who I’d accidentally learned about back in mid-2017 and then described in my April 2020 blog post as my then-new Twitter follower. It didn’t take long to find out he’s apparently a disciple of Kert Davies, provider of worthless docs to law firms filing “ExxonKnew” lawsuits who has a whole lot of ‘splainin’ to do on how he traces back to the origins of when the “reposition global warming” / alleged “ICE” advertorials” / “older, less-educated men” / “younger, low-income women” first began to get ongoing, growing news media traction.
But again, I don’t follow Anderson’s work, thus it was Ross Gelbspan himself who indirectly alerted me to Anderson’s 2022 “Southern Company Knew” report, and it was the errant link by a careless enviro-activist writer a few weeks back who alerted me to Anderson’s Nov 2024 “Duke Energy” report. While compiling my prior blog post dissection of the Carrboro v Duke Energy lawsuit to find out what that filing’s sources were, I revisited Anderson’s 2022 “Southern Knew” report, and spotted how he could not keep his mouth shut about details which completely undermine the now over 33½ year-old false accusation that the “Information Council for the Environment” (“ICE”) public relations campaign targeted a specific gullible audience of “older, less-educated men” / “younger, low-income women.” Dave Anderson is a gift that keeps on giving.
People who’ve pinned all their faith in that specific sinister audience targeting objective — ranging from Al Gore back in 1991-’92 right up to Kert Davies today and the present-day folks at the Sher Edling law firm (with their first to most recent filings) and others hoping to cash in on lawsuits — should be furious at Anderson for his inept undercutting of their longtime beloved accusation. His huge mistake in the “Southern Knew” report was to include an oddball link to a “babel.hathitrust.org” document uploads site. This one, a 900 page upload of a set of May 1, May 2, June 26 1991 U.S. House hearings on “Bills On Electricity Regulation And Transmission Access.” Geez. Who would ever have the time to read a pile that big?
My educated guess is that Dave Anderson is not actually any kind of documents researcher, he’s handed a pile of references to use in an ‘energy companies knew’ report, and he never read what was handed to him. For his “Southern Knew” report, it seems he needed some kind of confirmation – outside of lousy and possibly self-incriminating Greenpeace scans – that the “ICE” ran in three small cities.
See what just happened there? The president of Southern just said the advertorials targeted the entire population. Anderson’s report continues on with the head of the advertising campaign itself saying the ads “were placed in the local daily newspapers that reached the largest number of adults in these markets.”
Dave Anderson shot down basically three decades’ worth of accusations that a disinformation campaign sought to only target a narrow gullible audience. The accusation sounded like it might be true, thus it’s taken to be true right up to the present day. A hallmark of the far-left is to psychologically project their own mindset out (e,g, targeting especially gullible audiences) as accusations of what their opponents do, which would explain why they believe the otherwise ludicrous notion that anyone in the fossil fuel industry would want to deceive particular segments of the public. The idea of such a narrow ‘uneducated / poor’ audience is patently ridiculous. As was stated back in the day by one of the people associated with the PR campaign, the goal was to present the entire population with the science side of the issue they were not otherwise being told about.
While Dave Anderson’s “babel.hathitrust.org” documents link went straight to the ad agency’s confirmation about the three cities (screencapture for posterity here), it’s worthwhile to ask why the confirmation was subsequently supplied to the House committee member after the hearing (6 additional pages from Simmons Advertising follow what’s seen in that screencapture, of the ad campaign schedule). The answer, as it turns out, only further erodes the 3-decade false “older, less-educated men” / “young, low-income women”
Dave Anderson was probably hoping nobody would scroll further up in this 900 page pile or do word searches within it. Here’s what’s further up:
[Rep Jim Cooper, (D-Tennessee), during the June 26th hearing session, pg 725]: I realize this is a transmission access hearing and not a global warming hearing, but I was distressed when I saw yesterday in Energy Daily an allegation that Southern Co., among others, was paying tens of thousands of dollars to target, as I understand it, elderly males with low incomes and young females of low income, low education, to try to persuade them that there was no scientific basis whatsoever to the global warming phenomenon. Is Southern Co. taking an active part in this campaign and targeting particular groups that are maybe disadvantaged to persuade them in a sort of astroturf campaign?
[H. Allen Franklin, President, southern Company]: Not everyone in Arizona fits that description, everyone in the Dakotas, or in Bowling Green, Ky. The Southern Co. alone, with a lot of other entities interested in coal have been running surveys to determine the current public perception of the global warming issues and running some advertising to see how that perception is changed by advertising, but it is not targeted. It is newspaper and radio which are targeted to the entire population.
Rep Cooper was referring to the (still elusive for me to find) June 24, 1991 vol. 19, no. 120 “Greenhouse Ads Target ‘Low-income’ Women, ‘Less-educated’ Men” article by Mary O’Driscoll in The Energy Daily trade magazine. In Franklin’s supplied response letter, he categorically stated,
I said it was my understanding that the Council was market testing an educational program aimed broadly at the adult population of selected cities. I have now confirmed that my initial response was correct. As you’ll note from the attached materials provided by Simmons Advertising of Grand Forks, North Dakota, the media schedule for this project used a combination of newspaper and radio advertising to communicate with a large majority of the adults in Fargo, North Dakota; Flagstaff, Arizona; and Bowling Green, Kentucky. I might add that the Energy Daily article which prompted your question was grossly in error. And the statements about demographic targeting were published by Energy Daily without any effort to confirm whether they were correct.
Apparently Naomi Oreskes didn’t bother to confirm if The Energy Daily‘s assertions were correct, either, when she included that magazine reference in her obscure 2010 “How Well Do Facts Travel?” chapter 5 contribution that was an indictment of the Western Fuels Association’s efforts to ‘reposition global warming’ in the eyes of ‘older, less-educated men” / “younger, low-income women.’ She only mentions the Edison Electric Institute one single time, in cursory fashion on a barely related tangent, in her book chapter.
She is a self-proclaimed expert on these matters. She would be one more on the list of people livid with Dave Anderson for undermining the accusation about the Western Fuels Association – representing ‘Big Coal’ conspiring to deceive “older, less-educated men” / “younger, low-income women.”
Previously, and essentially in ironic fashion, I’d only had Ross Gelbspan’s last gasp at fair-and-balanced journalism to show that the plan to have such a narrowly targeted PR campaign audience was not true. Now I have both the president of Southern and the head of Simmons Advertising, courtesy of Dave Anderson.
And certainly, what congressional investigators and law firms representing energy company defendants now have is even more evidence, courtesy of one really weak link person in this whole climate lawfare effort, that not a single thing lines up right in the accusation about fossil fuel companies running disinformation campaigns.’