Greenwash Guerillas

Image by fotdmike on flickr.com

Afraid not, according to Greenpeace. The corporate PR strategy of ‘deny, delay, dominate, dump’ - which we all became so familiar with in relation to climate change and the Kyoto Protocol - had also been deployed 40 years ago in relation to the ozone layer and the Montreal Protocol.

In the early 1970s, when scientists began to point out their concerns about ozone depletion, Du Pont, the company that had invented CFCs and was the world’s largest producer of ozone-depleting chemicals, promptly went into Stage 1 of the ‘deny, delay, dominate, dump’ sequence. They encouraged denial by focusing (now here’s a surprise) on the uncertainty of the science. Sound familiar?

Ozone depletion just happened naturally, they said; it was unproven that it had anything to do with the human factor. The Chair of the Board of Du Pont was quoted as saying that the very idea was ‘a science fiction tale... a load of rubbish... utter nonsense’ [Chemical Weekly, 16 July 1975].

Sometimes they went further into denial, casting doubt on whether ozone holes existed at all. In 1979, Du Pont announced: ‘No ozone depletion has ever been detected.’

Hmmm. Isn’t that a bit like saying: ‘My dog didn’t bite you – and I don’t have a dog.’

But after years of denial failed, Stage 2 – Delay - was duly put in motion. In 1987, the year the Montreal Protocol was signed, Du Pont testified before the US Congress that ‘there is no immediate crisis that demands unilateral regulation’ [my italics].

Now it seems they are admitting there is a problem after all, it’s just not a ‘crisis’ – or, at least, not an ‘immediate’ one. So that’s all right then.

Fortunately, 43 governments remained determined to sign the Protocol, and it was duly signed on 16th September 1987.

Game over for the corporate PR strategists? Well, the Deny and Delay part of the game was over. Then came a clever judo step – turning their crisis into a commercial opportunity. Du Pont was ready for Stages 3 and 4: to Dominate and Dump. Here’s how it worked.

In the period before the Protocol was signed, while Du Pont were insisting that their CFCs were innocent, they had been busy developing an alternative: a new generation of chemicals called HCFCs (hydro-chloro-fluoro-carbons) and HFCs (hydro-fluoro-carbons). As soon as the Protocol was signed, these new chemicals were lined up, ready and waiting to fill the void left by the banned CFCs - and dominate the market.

Du Pont's Freon Division Director, Joseph Glass, stated it baldly: ‘When you have $3 billion of CFCs sold worldwide and 70 percent of that is about to be regulated out of existence, there is a tremendous market potential.’

But what to do with the remaining 30% of CFCs that hasn’t been ‘regulated out of existence’? That’s where the fourth and final stage of the strategy comes into play: Dump. And the dumping grounds for Du Pont were the impoverished communities of global south.

Although Du Pont took out a full page ad in th New York Times [April 27, 1992] to let the world know that ‘we will stop selling CFCs as soon as possible’, their promise only applied to the US and other developed countries, not the developing countries. CFCs are still being sold in the global south now – and the Montreal Protocol allows this to go on till 2010. So much for global justice.

Greenpeace estimates that ‘the international chemical industry made nearly US$30 billion worth of ODS [ozone depleting substances] sales between 1986 and 1995.’ So short-term profit, in disregard of the welfare of the people and the planet, was still the industry’s motivation, years after the Montreal conference. And the industry continues to profit ‘handsomely’ from the sale of HCFC and HFC substitutes for CFCs.

Even so, aren’t we relieved that the chemical giants did make these substitutes for the ozone-depleting CFCs?

If only it was as simple as that. HCFCs may have slowed down the depletion of the ozone layer - but they were horrifically destructive when it came to climate change. Each HCFC molecule is around 10,000 times as damaging as a CO2 molecule. And so now the world is struggling to manage the use of HCFCs.

So what’s the moral of this sad and frightening story? Don’t fall for the PR pattern of deny-delay-dominate-dump. When you see the climate deniers coming, remember that hard on their heels will come the climate delayers, the climate dominators and the climate dumpers. There are plenty of them about, all doing their PR thing.

 

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