If the oil and gas industry wants to prevent its opponents from slowing its efforts to drill in more places, it must be prepared to employ tactics like digging up embarrassing tidbits about environmentalists and liberal celebrities, a veteran Washington political consultant told a room full of industry executives in a speech that was secretly recorded. The blunt advice from the consultant, Richard Berman, the founder and chief executive of the Washington-based Berman & Company consulting firm, came as Mr. Berman solicited up to $3,000,000 from oil and gas industry executives to finance an advertising and public relations campaign called Big Green Radicals. The company executives, Mr. Berman said in his speech, must be willing to exploit emotions like fear, greed and anger and turn them against the environmental groups. And major corporations secretly financing such a campaign should not worry about offending the general public because you can either win ugly or lose pretty, he said. [...] Mr. Berman is well known in Washington for his technique of creating nonprofit groups like the Center for Consumer Freedom that secretly collect corporate donations to finance the aggressive, often satirical media campaigns his team conceives. They are intended to undermine his opponents, like labor unions or animal rights groups that have tried to spotlight the treatment of animals at meatpacking plants. I get up every morning and I try to figure out how to screw with the labor unions — that’s my offense, Mr. Berman said in his speech to the Western Energy Alliance. I am just trying to figure out how I am going to reduce their brand. [...] Mr. Hubbard also discussed how he had done detailed research on the personal histories of members of the boards of the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council to try to find information that could be used to embarrass them. [...] Mr. Berman repeatedly boasted about how he could take checks from the oil and gas industry executives — he said he had already collected six-figure contributions from some of the executives in the room — and then hide their role in funding his campaigns. [...] In fact, at least one of the major oil and gas companies that had executives at the event — Anadarko, a Texas-based company that operates 13,000 wells in the Rocky Mountain region — now says that it did not agree with the suggestions that Mr. Berman offered on how to combat criticism of oil and gas drilling techniques.
Posted on: Sun, 02 Nov 2014 00:20:09 +0000
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