Global Spin

Sharon Beder

Recent surveys in the United States and Australia have shown majorities of 75–80 per cent in favour of environmental protection ‘regardless of cost’ or ‘even at the risk of curbing economic growth’. Yet this high level of public concern is not translating into government action. This book explains why.

Global Spin reveals the sophisticated techniques being used around the world by powerful conservative forces to try to change the way the community and its politicians think about the environment.

Large corporations — acting through public relations firms, favoured think-tanks, law suits, educational and marketing campaigns, and on-side media outlets — are using their clout to reshape public opinion, to weaken gains made by environmentalists, and to persuade politicians against increased environmental regulations.

Specialised public relations firms have become adept at setting up front groups that promote the corporate agenda but pose as public-interest groups. These firms can also manufacture ‘astroturf’ — artificially created grassroots support for corporate causes — so as to help convince politicians to oppose environmental reforms.

Meanwhile, conservative think-tanks, often heavily funded by the corporations, have sought to cast doubt on the seriousness of environmental problems, to oppose environmental regulations, and to promote free-market remedies to those problems.

A vast range of techniques is being used to hold the line or roll back environmental advances. In the community, strategic lawsuits against public participation — ‘SLAPPs’ — are being used to chill dissent. In more and more schools, corporate-based ‘environmental educational’ materials are replacing independently researched materials. In the shops, ‘green marketing’ is being used to persuade consumers that serious environmental problems are being redressed. And in the media, corporate advertising and sponsorship is influencing news content, and industry-funded scientists are often treated as independent experts.

Global Spin shows how, in an awesome assault on democracy and its institutions, the massive, covert power of large corporations has enabled corporate agendas to dominate most debates about the state of the environment and what should be done about it.

When this book was first published in late 1997, Australian newspapers would not review it and commercial radio would not touch it. But individual readers and independent specialists raved about it, and the first edition sold out. Overseas editions have been published in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Japan.

This revised edition contains three eye-opening new chapters on corporate-sponsored confusion about global warming, Sydney’s phoney ‘green’ Olympics, and Greenpeace Australia’s new-found support for business interests.