2013-06-07

Marketing campaigns influence your future

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Graham Readfearn provided us with a fairly succinct review of the PR campaign mounted by people who care more about profit than about pretty much anything else... the so called "Climate Deniers".



I dislike the term "Climate Denier" simply because the "Denier" part implies that there is some sort of debate, an Approve versus Denied false dichotomy. The use of the term promotes the idea that the changes that we see, that we record, that are wreaking havoc around the world might not be real. It's pretty much real as the massive destruction, the body blows to our economy, and the body counts continue to climb. These soulless spawn keep on pushing their positions in the face of verifiable facts, their eyes glazed over with the need to grab all that wonderful money before someone else gets it.



The people who succumb to the "denier" bullshit are the ideological descendants of people who wanted to stay aboard the Titanic because they believed the "unsinkable" hype from the newspapers and White Star Line mouthpieces. (For more of this discussion to chew over, have a look at "How an ‘Unsinkable’ Marketing Campaign Led to the Titanic to Disaster")








What's interesting to me here is how the Fossil Fuel Industry has adopted the same tactics that the tobacco companies used over a generation ago. Some sharp marketeer figured out that they didn't have to disprove anything, they just had to raise doubts and keep raising the doubts, no matter how clear the evidence was. If you keep doing this, you paralyze effective effort to change the status quo. Which in the case of the cigarette folks meant that people kept buying their products, and kept becoming sick and dying, all the while hanging on to the "reasonable doubt" that said they "might not" die from their habit. Here's an old commercial I remember seeing quite clearly, have a look.



Surely Peabody Coal and Exxon/Mobil aren't anything like R. J. Reynolds was back before we stopped them from marketing cancer to our kids.... wait... uh...



Well, so what color is your lifeboat going to be?


Read the article... it starts here:



The Campaigns That Tried To Break The Climate Science Consensus (via Desmogblog)
So just in case anyone wasn’t sure, a major study of almost 12,000 scientific papers on global warming between 1991 and 2011 finds less than one per cent disagree that humans are the main cause. Published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, the study led by John Cook, the Australia-based…