The Art of Spinning: how to treat a clear agenda as 'counterculture'

[c1ue]

I saw this today on the SF Chronicle web site, and had to laugh:

http://www.sfgate.com/science/articl...ar-4781833.php

{Top level teaser}

Climate perils of pop. growth


The environmental dangers of a booming population are very real, but making this link is for various reasons political taboo.

{in body}For various reasons, linking the world's rapid population growth to its deepening environmental crisis, including climate change, is politically taboo. In the United States, Europe and Japan, there has been public hand-wringing over falling birthrates and government policies to encourage child-bearing.

The article goes on to reference all the latest consensus scare stories and numbers.

The problem is: how can you say population effects on environment and climate are politically taboo when:

1) Obama talks about it in public fairly frequently - and it has been in the State of the Union addresses
2) Dan Holdren, the present 'science czar', was a co-author along with Paul Ehrlich for the article which later was popularized in 'The Population Bomb'
3) Billions, if not tens of billions, of dollars are spent every year just by the federal government on climate change related areas - including both research and alternative energy
4) Not a week goes by without one of the following being featured in a major news outlet: Al Gore, James Hansen, Bill KcMibben (deliberately mispelled), or one of a half dozen other spokesmodels.

Now, the clear direction of this article is to attempt to defuse the ongoing Republican attack on federal funding for contraception/abortion - nonetheless a particularly weak (i.e. obvious) astroturfing.

[c1ue]

Re: The Art of Spinning: how to treat a clear agenda as 'counterculture'

More info on just how ridiculous the above article is:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/evanmcsan/al...ange-footprint

WASHINGTON — Last January, Al Gore took a boatload of scientists, donors, and celebrities to Antarctica to talk about climate change. Richard Branson, James Cameron, Ted Turner, Tom Brokaw, and Tommy Lee Jones joined more than 100 other paying guests — Gore’s handpicked best and brightest — on the National Geographic Explorer, an ice-class 367-foot cruise ship, to see “up close and personal” the effects of a warming planet, courtesy of the former vice president’s environmental nonprofit, the Climate Reality Project. Singer Jason Mraz, another passenger aboard Gore’s Antarctic voyage, would later describe the trip on his blog as “a kind of floating symposium, much like the TED Talks series.”

Back in the more populated areas of the world, climate change activists snickered. The trip, and the Climate Reality Project, drew headlines but did little, they said privately, to affect the movement Gore hoped to revolutionize when he founded the group in 2006.

In the years since the Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth and the Nobel Peace Prize that followed made Gore the No. 1 climate change advocate in the world, the activist group he created with his fame has been steadily shrinking, as has its once-lofty mandate: to create a new nonpartisan global movement around climate change.

The numbers, according to a review of the nonprofit’s tax filings, show the change has been severe. In 2009, at its peak, Gore’s group had more than 300 employees, with 40 field offices across 28 states, and a serious war chest: It poured $28 million into advertising and promotion, and paid about $200,000 in lobbying fees at the height of the cap-and-trade energy bill fight on Capitol Hill.

Today, the group has just over 30 people on staff and has abandoned its on-the-ground presence — all of its field offices have since shut down — in favor of a far cheaper digital advocacy plan run out of Washington. Advertising expenses have decreased from the millions to the thousands, and the organization no longer lobbies lawmakers. Donations and grants have declined, too — from $87.4 million in 2008 to $17.6 million in 2011, and many of its high-profile donors have drifted away, one telling BuzzFeed she now sees the group’s initial vision as “very naïve.”

Slick and omnipresent television ads from the group’s early years, produced by the same agency that made the Geico Auto Insurance gecko famous, have been replaced by smaller web-based programs. One ongoing effort, “Reality Drop,” helps activists post boilerplate comments to blog entries written by climate change skeptics.
Some climate change activists look at the Climate Reality Project today and question whether it can do much in its newest, stripped-down iteration. In a testament to Gore’s celebrity, however, most of these comments come in private.
“I can’t really think of much to say about Gore’s efforts that I’d want to put on the record,” a prominent climate change activist told BuzzFeed in a typical email.

Gore poses for a photo with singer Jason Mraz (left) on the Climate Reality Project ice cruise to the Southern Hemisphere last January. Jason Mraz / Via jasonmraz.com

Supporters of Gore’s team, including the current leadership of his group, say the changing focus of the organization — first called the Alliance for Climate Protection — reflects the shift in the climate debate that has transformed nearly every player in the movement since Gore won his Oscar in 2007.

In those six years, a Democratic president was elected; a Democratic-led Congress tried and failed to pass legislation limiting carbon emissions; and a conservative revolution inside the GOP has all but banished talk of a bipartisan climate change bill from mainstream Republican politics. In 2008, both candidates vying for the White House had to sell their solutions to climate change on the national stage; in 2012, the subject didn’t come up in a single debate question. The issue got something of a reboot this year when, in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, President Obama gave it top billing in his inaugural address, delighting activists and putting the issue back on the table in an era when skeptics are as powerful as ever.

Yet there’s no denying the Gore organization is significantly smaller in size and scope than when it first launched. Back then, the Nobel laureate aimed for a “blitz as sweeping and expensive as a big corporation’s rollout of a new product,” according to a 2008 60 Minutes segment on Gore’s early efforts. Press coverage at the time noted blanket coverage by the group’s signature ads featuring unlikely political allies: Al Sharpton and Pat Robertson in one spot, Nancy Pelosi and Newt Gingrich in another. The ads appeared on American Idol and across prime-time television.

Now, discussing their efforts online, Gore staffers say the effort isn’t smaller — the group has just found its “niche,” said Dan Stiles, the chief operating officer of the Climate Reality Project, in a wide-ranging interview with BuzzFeed on the organization’s history. “I don’t think what we’re doing right now is any less expansive than what we were doing before,” Stiles said. “We’re not narrowing the blitz, but we’re doing it in a digital space.”

Rev. Al Sharpton and Pat Robertson, an unlikely bipartisan pairing, film a climate commercial on Virginia Beach for Gore’s group in 2008 as part of a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign. Alliance for Climate Protection / Via thedailygreen.com

But a person close to Gore, who was present at the creation of the Alliance for Climate Protection and was a former senior official with the group, described an original plan to create something like the Apple Computer of climate change. There was the expensive signature logo, described in The New York Times as an update of “1960s Swiss/Modernist poster design.” There was the CEO, Maggie Fox, a 30-year veteran of environmental and progressive organizing. And then there was the goal: to revitalize climate change activism, building a national movement with fans focused on unique solutions to the problem rather than fear-mongering about a future in which climate change goes unchecked.

“When we first started it, it was about lobbying big national groups and rallying the country,” the former official said. “The Alliance was supposed to be the big force in climate change, the group that united America behind the problem.”

In 2009, the political landscape changed. With climate change-friendly leadership in Washington, Gore’s group shifted gears to focus almost entirely on lobbying Congress to pass climate change legislation. That year, the organization invested in 40 field offices around the country, poured hundreds of thousands into lobbying government officials directly, and beefed up its staff and volunteer army to partner up with older and larger grassroots organizing groups like the Sierra Club. “After the stimulus bill, the decision was made to move [the Alliance] to D.C. and go full-court press on a climate bill,” the senior person familiar with the early years of the group said.

Stiles described the significant and expensive change of course as a period referred to internally as Climate Reality Project’s “Chapter 2.” (“Chapter 1,” he says, spanned years 2007 and 2008, when the group focused its national media campaign.) “To build broad public support for the passage of climate change legislation,” Stiles said, the organization “focused on building out a full-scale boots-on-the-ground campaign across the United States, which involved expanding our staff greatly.”

That move turned out to be a mistake. Instead of turning Gore’s group into a major national institution, it left it much diminished.

“Turning the organization into a lobbying group didn’t really work,” the former Alliance official said.

Conservatives quickly villainized the cap-and-trade bill that became the focus of advocates’ efforts in 2009, and the legislation died in the Senate, sending the climate change community and the Gore group into a tailspin from the defeat.
“We all know what happened there,” said Stiles, referring to the failed legislation. “We came up short in the legislative battle, and we took some time as an organization, with our chairman Vice President Gore, to take a step back and look at what was missing, and why we had come up second as a movement.”

That soul-searching process, said Stiles, led to the group’s current iteration: “Chapter 3.” From the embers of the lobbying effort came a smaller, less ambitious Alliance. The group that had planned to bring revolution to climate change advocacy instead sought out a smaller part of the existing movement. “We saw as our niche to bring together leaders in the advertising and social media and marketing worlds from some of the world’s most innovative companies,” Stiles said.

The former top official said it was an end to the broad ambitions. “Everyone hunkered down and stopped going for the moon shots,” the former official said. Gore himself took a step back, as his involvement was seen as politicizing in a way that it hadn’t at the outset, when his documentary was an international hit.

The smaller operation has drawn less interest from the national media — and even from some of the group’s own early backers. Susie Tompkins Buell, a California-based Democratic donor and one of Hillary Clinton’s closest friends, seeded $5 million in 2007 to the organization, but now says she hasn’t “followed it very much” or contributed since.

Buell cited her admiration for Gore — for “sticking with it,” she said in an interview by phone — but acknowledged her frustration at the lack of progress from the group, and the climate movement on the whole. (Last year, she notably declined to contribute to Obama’s reelection campaign because, she said, he had not been “vocal enough” on environmental issues.)
“I don’t regret doing it,” Buell said of her initial donation. “I think, honestly, we were all very naïve. We thought this would catch on. I really felt with the right media, with everything in place, we could really bring this problem to the forefront and really solve it.”

The Gore group’s current era, Stiles said, is focused on a “lean, mean machine” — but practically, that means an organization that is spending less, raising less, and employing fewer people.

Gore gives the climate change slideshow presentation that served as the centerpiece of his Academy Award-winning documentary. Eric Lee / Paramount Classics

Current efforts include “leader trainings” for the “Climate Reality Leadership Corps,” a volunteer group well acquainted with the up-to-date science on climate change, tutored on public speaking best practices, and versed in the rhetoric that made An Inconvenient Truth so accessible. Earlier this year, Gore held two climate leader trainings, one in Istanbul and the other in Chicago. Between the two events, the group trained 1,500 new people, 100 of whom were members of Organizing for Action, Obama’s outside grassroots organizing group, and the latest player in the climate movement. An attendee at the Chicago training said she learned “how to communicate climate change in a compelling and informative way” at the session.

Outside the trainings, the Gore group focuses on the digital world, trying to tell the story of climate change and shame skeptics online. The “Reality Drop” program, still in beta phase, allows users to post prewritten comments on articles the group says distort the facts about climate change. The effort has caught the attention of the Heartland Institute, the biggest skeptic group in the country — but it hasn’t impressed officials there.

“They credit themselves with 55 ‘drops’ into one of our recent environment blog posts, of which I approved one for posterity,” said Jim Lakely, communications director at Heartland and the main author of posts on the group’s blog, “making their claims of ‘victory’ as exaggerated as their claims of man-caused climate catastrophe.”

More than one climate change activist said privately it might be better for Gore to divert his fundraising prowess and brand awareness to other, longer-lasting groups at this point and abandon the idea of running his own operation. Gore and his prowess are still praised, but there seems to be confusion about what exactly the group does.

“[They] did an amazing production end of last year, a 24-hour live broadcast on climate that circled the globe,” said Kert Davies, research director at Greenpeace, referring to a live-stream video project the group aired last November that picked up 14 million unique viewers worldwide. Davies also cited Gore’s continued influence as a singular voice in the climate change community; the former vice president recently gave an interview on the subject to the Washington Post. “They have creative juices and cash and also do a lot of work behind the scenes. And they have Al Gore.”

Though the group has long since abandoned lobbying, current climate change activists still associate the group with those efforts.

“I’m on their email list and that’s about all I know,” said Daniel Kessler, spokesperson for 350.org, a grassroots climate change startup that has worked with billionaire Democratic donor Tom Steyer. “Their emphasis seems to be ongoing after congressional deniers.”

Stiles described a third iteration of Gore’s climate change group that no longer casts Gore as Steve Jobs. Rather than revolutionize the movement, Gore’s group is settling into a role of support player in climate change fight.

“Everything from what 350.org is doing and their impact on the movement to what we’re doing and our impact on the movement — we’re all contributing to the momentum that’s out there that we can feel,” said Stiles, when asked what specifically Gore’s group had brought to the climate change movement. “It takes all of us, so that’s really how we’re moving forward on this issue. That’s together, and not really pointing to any particular impact that one organization is having over the other.”

$28 million dollars in one year? 40 field offices with 300+ employees?

Hardly a small effort.

[DSpencer]

Re: The Art of Spinning: how to treat a clear agenda as 'counterculture'

I'm in favor of slowing or halting population growth if possible. Not because of Al Gore's "climate change" but more of a general feeling that I'd rather have more resources per person and we already have more people than are really necessary to take advantage of certain economies of scale.

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: The Art of Spinning: how to treat a clear agenda as 'counterculture'

I'm in favor of slowing or halting population growth if possible. Not because of Al Gore's "climate change" but more of a general feeling that I'd rather have more resources per person and we already have more people than are really necessary to take advantage of certain economies of scale.

I agree. Too many monkeys on the rock.

[BadJuju]

Re: The Art of Spinning: how to treat a clear agenda as 'counterculture'

Don't worry about me. I won't be having children. Neither will my brother, I believe.

[shiny!]

Re: The Art of Spinning: how to treat a clear agenda as 'counterculture'

I agree. Too many monkeys on the rock.

All well and good, until someone more powerful than you decides that you and yours are the superfluous monkeys. I'm not saying that there aren't too many people, but I don't have a moral solution to the problem. Watching people die from starvation, disease, war and poverty and doing nothing to help them just isn't right. But trying to save everyone, eliminate disease, prolong life for as many as possible for as long as possible doesn't seem sustainable with current resources and technology.

What's the solution? Pandemic plagues for which there is no cure, or a cure only for a small percentage of the wealthy? Endless wars? Massive redistribution of resources on a world scale, taken from the haves by force for the have-nots? The haves voluntarily choosing to downsize their lifestyles, giving their resources to the have-nots?

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: The Art of Spinning: how to treat a clear agenda as 'counterculture'

I endorse a slow stabilization and reduction in population over the next few generations.
Discouraging couples to have more than two children by tax policies and widespread access to free birth control everywhere, especially in poor nations.
No Soylent Green scenarios, no head-count reductions among the living.

[ProdigyofZen]

Re: The Art of Spinning: how to treat a clear agenda as 'counterculture'

More info on just how ridiculous the above article is:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/evanmcsan/al...ange-footprint



$28 million dollars in one year? 40 field offices with 300+ employees?

Hardly a small effort.

Speaking of McKidden:

A New Divestment Focus: Fossil Fuels

By RANDALL SMITH

Mylan Cannon for The New York Times

Chloe Maxmin is part of Divest Harvard, which encourages colleges to reconsider investments.
In the 1980s, it was South Africa. In the 1990s, it was tobacco.
Now fossil fuels have become the focus of those who would change the world through the power of investing.
Article Tools

A student movement has gathered momentum at more than 300 campuses over the last year. Members have encouraged college and university endowments to divest themselves of their holdings of companies in the fossil fuel business to avoid profiting from the release of carbon associated with the risk of global warming.

While the efforts have gained some traction, they have also met strong opposition from critics who favor the traditional proxy-voting process of engagement, in which institutional investors try to prod corporations to change their practices, with divestiture a last resort.
The push also comes as some big institutional investors are paying more attention to broader programs devoted to environmental, social and corporate governance issues.

For example, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System has a sprawling program that includes 111 initiatives. They include proxy voting, investing in funds devoted to green energy or to urban and rural areas “underserved” by investment capital, and an annual list of underperforming companies. Calpers is working to integrate such issues throughout its $264 billion fund, including research to determine how such factors affect risk and return.

In July, Harvard’s endowment, the nation’s largest at $31 billion, hired the leader of that research initiative, Jameela Pedicini, as vice president for sustainable investing, becoming only the second top college after Stanford to have full-time endowment employees devoted to such issues.

Ms. Pedicini’s appointment was seen in part as a response to two student groups that have been calling for more action. The Responsible Investment at Harvard coalition has been pushing for “more transparent and comprehensive” environmental, social and governance efforts throughout the endowment. The other, Divest Harvard, said in April, “By sponsoring climate change through our investments, our university is threatening our generation’s future.”

The campus divestiture campaigns have been spurred by a group led by the environmental activist William McKibben, who has also battled the Keystone XL oil pipeline. The McKibben group has urged the sale of the 200 companies with biggest carbon reserves globally, including Exxon Mobil and Chevron.

The push to rid portfolios of fossil fuel stocks echoes earlier movements by endowments and pension funds in the 1980s to sell stocks of companies doing business with South Africa because of its apartheid policies and in the 1990s to sell tobacco stocks because of the health hazards posed by smoking. Harvard, Stanford and Calpers all sold their tobacco stocks around that time.

A few small colleges have chosen to divest themselves of their fossil fuel stocks. Unity College in Maine, which specializes in environmental science and has a small $14.5 million endowment, this spring completed a move to a lineup of 33 exchange-traded sector funds that minimize exposure to fossil fuel stocks. “If we don’t deal with climate change now, we consign our grandkids to an unlivable planet,” said Unity’s president, Stephen Mulkey.

But officials at Harvard and many other endowments are resisting the calls for full divestiture in favor of other means of persuasion.

When three student members of Divest Harvard met in February with Robert D. Reischauer and Nannerl O. Keohane, two members of Harvard’s governing board who serve on a shareholder responsibility panel, Mr. Reischauer cautioned that advanced economies were highly energy-dependent and that divestment would not change the basic supply-demand equation, according to the students.

Mr. Reischauer added that the companies were unlikely to respond because divestiture by Harvard would not affect the price of their stocks or their products, said another person briefed on his remarks. He acknowledged that Harvard could sell the few carbon stocks it owns directly without “a major impact” on its endowment performance; such stocks account for only $30 million of the fund’s $1 billion in direct United States stock holdings, the students estimate. But Mr. Reischauer warned that selling such stocks from the endowment’s large investments in hedge funds, mutual funds and other pooled vehicles could be costly, hurting returns.

At a meeting in April, Ms. Keohane argued that the primary purpose of the endowment was to maximize returns, that divestiture wasn’t effective and that a better way to hold fossil fuel companies accountable would be through Harvard’s proxy votes as a shareholder. Yet Harvard does not disclose the names of outside managers who run one-third of its money, so students do not know many of its holdings.

A Harvard spokesman, Kevin Galvin, added, “The university has traditionally maintained a strong presumption against divesting stock for reasons unrelated to investment purposes,” preferring that the college make its “distinctive contributions to society” through its “research and educational activities.”

Christianna Wood, a trustee of Vassar College who advocates pursuing social and governance goals through engagement and proxy voting, said that when she oversaw global stock investments at Calpers from 2002 to 2007, outside consultants estimated the costs of the fund’s South Africa and tobacco stock sales at $1 billion each. She said by divesting, colleges will “not only lose money, they will lose their voice” on such issues. She predicted that the movement would fail at most schools.

Administrators at Bowdoin and Swarthmore have cited such potential costs in responding to calls for divesting, and Middlebury and Vassar have decided not to divest. Middlebury cited the difficulty, costs and risks. Vassar’s president, Catharine Bond Hill, said students “have lots of proactive ways to engage policy makers” on climate change, and divesting themselves of certain stocks could hurt endowment returns without addressing the causes of climate change.

Lucy Nicholson/ReutersAn exploratory well drilled for oil in Monterey, Calif. in April. A number of students have encouraged college and university endowments to divest themselves of their holdings of companies in the fossil fuel business.

Ms. Wood said the proxy process had produced gains over the last decade in shareholder voting rights and the election of directors. For example, she said there was a big victory this year when shareholders successfully urged Continental Resources, an Oklahoma oil and gas company, to curb its gas emissions in North Dakota. But she acknowledged that getting the oil giants to respond to proxy proposals on greenhouse gas limits would be more difficult.

Stanford’s investment responsibility policy, adopted in 1971, addresses the risk of “substantial social injury” in categories including diversity, environmental sustainability and human rights. For example, Stanford has voted for proxy resolutions asking companies to report on their efforts to avoid using minerals whose sale finances human rights abuses in Africa. Nevertheless, Stanford does not routinely disclose specific proxy votes as Harvard does.

John F. Powers, chief executive of Stanford Management, which runs the endowment, said the school’s process for evaluating the call for fossil fuel divestiture might take the better part of the coming academic year. He said selling tobacco stocks did not hurt Stanford’s performance much because they were “a narrow universe” and “plenty of other stocks went up.”

Harvard, Stanford and the other universities whose endowments pursue environmental and social goals are in the minority. John S. Griswold of Commonfund, which tracks endowments, says one-fifth or less of endowments have such programs. He says some endowment managers prefer to “focus on producing the best returns they can,” and “don’t want to be distracted” by other issues.

Even the proxy route may be losing some of its influence.

Jon Lukomnik, a corporate governance consultant, said college endowments’ ability to use the proxy process had been curtailed by their increased holdings in alternatives like private equity, venture capital, real estate and hedge funds. That trend has left “an ever decreasing portion of their assets” in publicly traded stocks.

At Harvard, the number of proxy proposals on social issues that its shareholder responsibility committee has considered has fallen from a recent peak of 157 in 2004 to 41 in 2012. And the committee’s most recent annual report shows the limits of the tactics against some energy giants.

In 2012, Harvard voted in favor of a climate change call for ConocoPhillips to set targets for reducing its greenhouse gas emissions. But the proposal, which this year received a 29 percent vote, has failed repeatedly since 2008. “They have basically brushed it aside,” said the Rev. William Somplatsky-Jarman of the Presbyterian Church (USA), the measure’s sponsor. Harvard has also voted for such a proposal at Exxon Mobil, which this year received a 27 percent vote.
While a 20 percent vote is considered significant, “the current approach where we see incremental progress is clearly insufficient,” said Andrew Logan, an oil and gas specialist at Ceres, a sustainability advocacy group.

Max Whittaker for The New York TimesAnne Simpson, director for corporate governance at California Public Employees’ Retirement System, says the investor prefers engagement to divesting.

At Calpers, Anne Simpson, director of an 18-member global governance team, says she is “flattered” that Harvard recruited one of them. She said Calpers, which manages 80 percent of its assets internally, also prefers engagement to divesting.

“We’re such a big owner, we can’t find a tidy corner of the market of complete purity and virtue,” she said. “You’ve got to get down and dirty to deal with this. We visit companies. We meet with directors. They know we’re not going away. Walking away from that table is really not going to help.”

[shiny!]

Re: The Art of Spinning: how to treat a clear agenda as 'counterculture'

I endorse a slow stabilization and reduction in population over the next few generations.
Discouraging couples to have more than two children by tax policies and widespread access to free birth control everywhere, especially in poor nations.
No Soylent Green scenarios, no head-count reductions among the living.

First world countries are already having fewer children. In third world countries, birth control alone won't reduce the birth rate. When people expect most of their children to die before reaching adulthood, they tend to have a lot of children in the hope that a few make it through to support their parents in their old age. When women have no options in life but to be barefoot and pregnant, they tend to have more children.

You need to change laws to ban child marriages and severely punish rape. This is the work that Equality Now! does. They're a great organization!

You need to give girls and women access to education and increase the survival rates of the children they do have. That means building schools and clinics, and providing a measure of social stability (end the endless wars).

Micro-business loans to help women start cottage industries in their villages works wonders as well.

[reggie]

Re: The Art of Spinning: how to treat a clear agenda as 'counterculture'

Well, I'm taking the other approach. I'm doing my best to populate this planet with people who will see thru the Simulacra