Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax has never been as relevant as it is today. We live in a world ruled by Onselers. Corporations like to use their bountiful resources to manipulate government regulation in their favor. In the United States, they spend $2.6 billion a year on lobbying in Congress. Though this practice is threatening to democracy in and of itself, big business has switched to an even more dangerous method of persuasion: astroturfing. As the name subtly suggests, astroturfing refers to the practice of big corporations sponsoring fake grassroots organizations in an effort to spread misinformation on various topics - such as climate change or medicine - in their favor.
These fake public campaigns are particularly bad for climate change advocates. The oil and gas industry has done a particularly good job at dividing the United States public on changes that 97% of scientists agree are caused by human activity. Dr. Michael E. Mann, author of the famous “hockey stick graph” explains that one of the reasons oil and gas are so successful at manipulating government policy in their favor is because they just have to create public doubt, not credible scientific evidence, to get what they want.
These astroturf organizations often start with trusting, populist-sounding name to trick the public into thinking that they care about something they are really against. Examples of these include the “National Wetlands Coalition” (which is really funded by real estate developers and oil companies), “The Heartland Institute” (which is funded by Koch Industries), and “Washington Consumers for Sound Fuel Policy” (funded by the Western States Petroleum Association). These groups often have websites with articles “debunking” recent findings published by “climate alarmists.” There’s also, of course, alternate solutions to government climate policy. A particularly jocular idea put forth by the Heartland Institute is to completely dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency and instead create a committee of all of the individual state environmental agencies.
The problem is, if you’re not going out of your way to look for these discrepancies, it’s very easy to be bamboozled by the misinformation. The general public rarely go out of their way to look for inconsistencies when they’re being presented with information, nor do they go digging around for where the organizations are getting their funding from. Astroturf organizations take advantage of this, and it works. The California Drivers Alliance, another front group for the WSPA, ran a successful campaign in 2015 to kill a bill to reduce California’s oil use in half by 2030. And it’s not just the United States where these organizations operate. The “Friends of Science Society,” a group based in Calgary, have been scrutinized for their billboard campaigns declaring that the sun is the main contributor to climate change, not humans. Unfortunately, they failed to declare that their organization was started with a hefty donation from a fossil fuel company to campaign against the Canadian government’s climate initiatives.
Astroturfing is a threat to democracy because it is another unfortunate example of corporate money being used to manipulate the government and the public for financial gain. Regular citizens are not able to come up with the resources to combat this influence, which undermines core democratic principles. Until governments, particularly the United States, pass stricter campaign finance reform laws, we need learn how to detect astroturf organizations. Journalist Sharyl Attkisson recommends looking out for inflammatory language against scientific studies, like ‘conspiracy’, ‘pseudo’, and ‘nutty’. Astroturfers also tend to attack those who question authority rather than the authority itself, as
This recurring theme of corporate greed in our political economy is getting seriously old. The Lorax was written in 1971 and though we are beginning to see the story play out to the end, governments and the oil and gas industry has done very little to heed its warnings. Until they do, we have to actively resist - whether that means voting, calling your representatives, or even just staying informed - the short term interests of corporations who don’t care about the long term interests of the planet and the people who live on it.
