The Atlas Network: Big Oil, Climate Disinformation and Constitutional Democracy

Comms Critical Webinar Series #2

The Atlas Network:
Big Oil, Climate Disinformation and Constitutional Democracy

10-12 noon, Friday 8 December, Sydney time
6-8pm, Thursday 7 December, New York time

Welcome James Goodman
Chair Scott Ludlam

Speakers
Dr Jeremy Walker (Silencing the Voice)
Prof Nancy MacLean (Democracy in chains)
Amy Westervelt (Drilled)
Prof J. Timmons Roberts

Research tools and strategy
Brendan DeMelle - Desmog
Jeremy Walker, Climate Files Collection at the Climate Investigations Center 

Background
Whether we look at climate disinformation, attacks on constitutional democracy and Indigenous rights, the criminalisation of civil protest, the return of white nationalism and authoritarian ‘populism’, or the acceleration of fossil-fuel extraction against the UN Paris Climate Accord, there is a common pattern to be found: the transnationally co-ordinated campaigns of the little-known Atlas Network, a permanent architecture of political influence through which fossil fuel (and other) corporations and the ultra-wealthy seek to ‘manufacture consent’ and capture state power. The purpose of this global webinar is to familiarise those of us engaged in public policy with the history, methods and present activity of the global Atlas Network – now comprising c. 600 ‘thinktanks’ in 100 nations - and to equip scholars, civil society organisations, public lawyers, and investigative journalists with the tools to identify, research, report on, and counter the transnational strategies deployed by Atlas actors and their allies to neutralise democracy.

Since the economic counter-revolution of the Thatcher and Reagan era, we have understood ‘neoliberalism’ in terms of the policies advocated by law and economics scholars Friedrich von Hayek, Milton Friedman and James M. Buchanan: free trade, deregulation, privatisation. These intellectuals would likely have remained isolated on the radical far-right fringe were it not for the English entrepreneur Antony Fisher.  Fisher pioneered the free-market ‘think-tank’ as a means by which financial elites and global corporations could continuously influence public opinion, swing elections, and shape law, legislation and government policy -  all without appearing to engage in political activity at all.

Building on his success in establishing the Institute of Economic Affairs (UK, 1955), the Fraser Institute (Canada, 1974), the Centre of Independent Studies (Australia, 1976), the Manhattan Institute (USA, 1978), and providing the model for the Heritage Foundation (US, 1973) and the Cato Institute (USA, 1977) - all of which founded with oil-derived core funding - in 1981 Fisher founded the Atlas Economic Research Foundation (now the Atlas Network). Not itself a thinktank, the Atlas aims to ‘litter the world with free-market thinktanks’: to co-ordinate funding (eg. from oil billionaires Charles Koch and Richard Scaife), personnel and campaigns internationally. 

By 1981, oil multinationals already possessed two decades of internal scientific research confirming the coming planetary catastrophe caused by fossil carbon combustion. Since 1988, when Big Oil launched its permanent global campaign of counter-science disinformation and climate policy obstruction, the number of ‘thinktanks’ comprising the global Atlas Network has grown to c. 600 in some 100 nations. Climate policy has not failed, it has been defeated.  And yet few journalists, public policy actors or researchers have heard of the Atlas, despite the constant flooding of the public sphere with the output of its so-called ‘independent institutes’ and ‘adjunct scholars’. So far, the Atlas Network has successfully obscured its very existence from the public whose ‘opinions’ it constantly seeks to manipulate. With your help, we hope to change that.

Info
Prof. James Goodman, james.goodman@uts.edu.au
School of Communication, University of Technology Sydney