April/11/16

Uncovering the Corporate Influence Over Climate Change

An excerpt from a very elaborate "report" below.  It depends entirely on content analysis, a notoriously shaky procedure.  They collect documents issued by an organization and categorize  them in terms of whether the documents support or oppose the global warming religion.  But given past absurd content analyses from Warmists such as  Naomi Oreskes and John Cook, we have to expect vast mis-categorization this time around too.  

Even if done honestly, content analysis is very difficult.  I did a small bit of content analysis during my research career so I know where the skeletons are buried.  How for instance would they rate a statement that:  "there is some warming going on but we need more data to decide how dangerous it is".  My guess is that the galoots below would categorize that as anti-warmist even though it admits that warming is going on.  And that is just the first difficulty:  Deciding what goes into each category.  And then there is the problem of inter-rater reliability, rater objectivity and so on.

And the galoots below say openly that some organizations undermine the Warmist message in "ever-subtle ways" so they are obviously very inclusive in what they count as anti-Warmist.  Just a hint of being anti-Warmist is apparently enough for you to be consigned to the naughty bin.  The whole thing is prettily presented rubbish


Corporate influence over the climate change debate and policy process has at many levels been cited as a key reason for the relatively slow progress of both the UN COP process and national-level climate legislation. We have forensically evaluated the 100 leading, publicly traded companies along with 30 trade associations and have scored them according to the extent to which they are exerting this influence.

Our full ranking is now publicly available online. Below are some findings and analysis of what our scoring means for business.

More than lobbying

We use the term "influence" rather than lobbying for good reason. The capture of climate change policy by corporations extends beyond formal and financial interactions between lawmakers and corporations and their representatives. Since the 1990s corporations have invested heavily in messaging (advertising, PR, social media, etc.) to ensure their views on climate science and the appropriate policy response are heard loudly at multiple levels. Corporations try to ensure they are continuously engaging at all levels of the policy making process - from providing engineering expertise on matters technical, to CEO phone-calls to political leaders at key policy moments. All of these activities constitute corporate influence and we attempt to objectively assess as much as possible in our analysis.

Trade associations at the center

The role of trade associations and other influencers in controlling climate policy has been studied, by among others our collaborators USC in the US and our advisor Ben Fagan-Watson in the EU. The same rigorous method InfluenceMap uses on the analysis of corporations is applied to the leading trade associations they are affiliated with. In the US, the lowest scoring influencers in our system are ALEC and the American Petroleum Institute, closely followed by NAM and the US Chamber of Commerce. In Europe, powerful trade federation BusinessEurope and industry-specific trade groups CEFIC (chemicals) and ACEA (automotive) score poorly. Japan's powerful Keidanren openly opposes most climate regulations, suggesting industry can lead the way on its own terms. All of these organizations, and more, have consistently undermined climate regulations over the last decade in ever-subtle ways, increasingly arguing for a global treaty that maintains competitiveness while obstructing many of the key regulatory details needed to enforce it. Our system also assesses corporate links to these associations that results in a relationship score for each company along side its own score. In most cases these relationships greatly reduce the final performance band the corporation ends up in, in the system.

SOURCE  






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