Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
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The trust barometer has “always been positioned as this quasi-academic contribution of Edelman: ‘We’re just looking at how things are shaped in the world,’ as if they’re doing it in some magnanimous gesture or service to the world,” Kert Davies, director of special investigations at the nonprofit Center for Climate Integrity, told the Lever. “This report shows that the trust barometer is built to generate business.”
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“Energy Citizens,” an ultimately successful astroturf campaign launched by the American Petroleum Institute while Edelman was the organization’s single largest contractor, hewed closely to Edelman’s proprietary insights about trust. The effectiveness of Energy Citizens, which involved making oil and gas workers the “human face” of the fossil fuel industry to create the impression of widespread grassroots support, contributed to the defeat of US climate legislation in 2010.
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the firm leveraged its survey findings for TransCanada, a Canadian oil and gas giant that needed help persuading the public to support the construction of Energy East, its controversial tar sands pipeline from Alberta to the Atlantic coast.
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Edelman suggests a “recruitment goal” of 35,000 “advocates” for the pipeline — including 1,200 TransCanada employees, or around a quarter of the company’s workforce — who would be “tagged and tracked” in part by “how they perform over time” in pushing for the pipeline.
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such examples illustrate how Edelman has used its insights — under the guise of studying public trust — to help the fossil fuel industry fight climate action.
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“Edelman uses the trust barometer as a way to greenwash — or trustwash — their own reputation around this issue. And it’s a way to have them position themselves as supporters of the principles of climate action, while also doing quite the opposite with their actual work.”