Edelman Touts Its Green PR "Cred", But Took $4 Million From Oil Lobby Too Extreme For BP, Shell
Edelman, one of the largest public relations firms in the world, has pledged never to work with climate deniers and proudly touts its work on environmental justice campaigns with brands like Tazo Tea. But newly released tax filings obtained by BuzzFeed News show that in 2019 the company accepted more than $4 million from the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, a major US oil trade organization that even Shell and BP had recently dumped for its aggressive opposition to popular climate solutions.
"Edelman is basically misleading the public about its so-called green reputation,” Robert Brulle, an environmental sociologist at Brown University who studies climate lobbying and advertising, told BuzzFeed News. The global public relations powerhouse has roughly 6,000 employees working to “promote and protect” prominent brands like Ikea, KFC, and Dove. Selling its own socially conscious image, the company has repeatedly stressed its commitment to efforts to “reduce emissions,” “work with an environmental conscience,” and “lead in the transition to sustainable and socially responsible business models.” On its website, Edelman proudly declares it worked with cleantech companies “long before climate change became a buzzword.”
But in recent years, Edelman has faced a backlash, both publicly and internally, over its willingness to take on high-profile campaigns for clients that are big polluters. After four high-level executives quit in 2015 citing this issue, the firm publicly pledged never to work with coal clients or climate deniers. The vague commitment left the door open to a broad range of work for fossil fuel businesses or companies that have fought against regulations cutting carbon pollution.
“Right now the only categorical exclusion we have is on climate denial and coal,” Michael Stewart, then a top Edelman executive, told the Guardian in 2015. “When you are trying in some way to obfuscate the truth or use misinformation and half-truths that is what we would consider getting into the work of greenwashing, and that is something we would never propose or work we would support our client doing.” But AFPM, a trade group that pulled in more than $55 million in revenue in 2019 alone, has aggressively opposed climate action and provided funding to the Heartland Institute, a climate denial group. AFPM has paid Edelman at least $12 million for public relations work from 2017 to 2019, tax filings show.
AFPM has taken some of the most extreme positions among fossil fuel trade groups, including helping create Energy4Us, a group that ran Facebook ads supporting the Trump administration’s rollbacks of national fuel efficiency standards without initially disclosing its ties to the oil and gas industry. The trade group also helped fund a campaign opposing a carbon tax in Washington state.
EDIT
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/zahrahirji/edelman-fossil-fuel-pr-climate
