Industry's Hot Air
News:
Global warming is a real threat, but you'd never know it from the propaganda emitted by the big polluters.
Plus: A love letter to the president -- from an oil company.
November 25, 1997
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Scientists agree: The leading cause of global warming is the burning of carbon-based fossil fuels: oil, gasoline, and coal. So it's no surprise that the leading cause of phony propaganda about global warming is -- all together now -- the fossil fuels industry.
These polluters have collaborated on a $13 million advertising campaign in order to sabotage the impending United Nations global climate change treaty to cut greenhouse emissions, to be negotiated in the coming weeks in Kyoto, Japan. (They've already succeeded in getting Bill Clinton to adopt a weak proposal, and some have even thanked him for it.) In the ad below, which has run in dozens of newspapers and magazines over the last two months, the polluters attack the treaty effort with some arguments we found hard to swallow. We sent environmental reporter David Helvarg, author of The War Against the Greens, to look into this ad -- what he found was a lot of hot air. Click on each section of the ad for the real story behind the oily slogans.
