Weber Shandwick UK counts among its clients Viking Energy, a company "seeking to build a 153-turbine wind farm in the Shetlands." But the PR firm's chair of public affairs, Jonathan McLeod, recently launched an anti-wind power campaign, using his Weber Shandwick email address. McLeod announced the formation of the "National Alliance of Wind farm Action Groups," or NAWAG, stating: "For too long, the 'greenwash' of the wind industry has gone unchallenged." Asked about the contradiction, McLeod said NAWAG is a personal campaign and he would, in the future, use a different email for NAWAG business. "It's true our company does specialise in community relations with these kind of projects," he added. As NAWAG's chair, McLeod criticized wind farm developers' efforts to "force turbines on communities." New Energy Focus notes that "such techniques, presumably, include hiring his own company to promote wind farm projects." NAWAG, which counts 30 anti-wind farm groups across Britain as its members, plans to lobby the Conservative Party's shadow cabinet for restrictions on wind farms.

In a major article profiling Roger Bate, one of the leading think tank players, Adam Sarvana writes that Bate is "to the environmental movement what Bugs Bunny is to Elmer Fudd, a clever, slippery and often triumphant adversary. But unlike Bugs, who cuts a wide swath, Bate is unknown even to his favorite targets. Indeed, it’s safe to say that his name is unknown to many of the players in the ongoing conflict over science’s role in public policy." Bate has worked for a range of think tanks including the Institute for Economic Affairs in the UK, the Competitive Enterprise Institute and more recently the American Enterprise Institute in the U.S. Sarvana, who drew background material in part from the Center for Media and Democracy's SourceWatch website, concludes that in the debate over health care reform in the U.S., "Roger Bate has once again found a signature issue and staked out a comfortable, lucrative position that will keep him active for years to come."

The Denver public relations firm MGA Communications boasts that it has won a Silver Anvil Award from the Public Relations Society of America, for its work organizing a special event at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal for Shell Oil. Chemical weapons had been manufactured at the site for for the U.S. Army before it was leased to Shell, which manufactured pesticides there until 1982. In 1987 the site was designated as one of the most polluted Superfund toxic waste cleanup sites in the country. MGA, which has worked for Shell for over 20 years, states on its website that "the task was to ... dispel false claims, and shift focus back to where it should be -- the cleanup and transition of the Superfund site to a national wildlife refuge worthy of the nation's pride." In 1995, Greg Marsh, an environmental chemist with a local watchdog group described the information given to the public by MGA/Thompson as "watered down statements written by slick-talking liars."

Following a December 2008 massive coal ash spill at the Tennessee Valley Authority's (TVA's) Kingston coal-fired power station in Roane County, Tennessee, local officials want a three-year, $1.9 million public relations campaign. The Roane County Long Term Recovery Committee is asking the TVA to bankroll the campaign, which would be carried out by a Nashville PR firm, McNeely Pigott & Fox. "The campaign would feature tracking polls to gauge current perceptions about Roane County," with "two years of advertising and a 'news bureau' that would cost $726,000 each year," reports the Knoxville News Sentinel. One of the PR firm's partners said the goal would be "overall reputation building for Roane County to the tourism and economic development industries." Another Nashville firm, Cooley Public Strategies, would assist with the campaign. "Soon after the ash spill, TVA contracted with The WadeGroup Inc., of Washington, D.C.," but "TVA has not provided a copy of the WadeGroup's contract despite several requests from the News Sentinel." TVA had earlier "agreed in principle" to fund a longer PR push. The coal ash spill released 5.4 million cubic yards of sludge, 100 times larger than the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska.

When Chevron "learned that '60 Minutes' was preparing a potentially damaging report," it "hired a former journalist" to tell its side of the story. For five months, former CNN reporter Gene Randall worked for the oil company. The subject of his video -- and CBS's "60 Minutes" segment -- is "a class-action lawsuit filed by Ecuadoreans who accuse Texaco, a company acquired by Chevron in 2001, of poisoning the rain forest," reports the New York Times. "An Ecuadorean judge is expected to rule soon on whether Chevron owes up to $27 billion in damages, which would make the case 'the largest environmental lawsuit in history.'" Not surprisingly, the Chevron-funded video is much kinder to the oil company. The Chevron video, which was posted online three weeks before the "60 Minutes" report aired, features company executives and consultants, but no interviews with the plaintiffs in the case. The video uses such news conventions as "Gene Randall reporting," which may confuse viewers. A producer with "60 Minutes" remarked that "his staff would have liked the same access that Mr. Randall had to Chevron. The oil company's chief environmental scientist appears in the corporate video, but 'they wouldn't let us interview her,'" he said. A member of the group Amazon Watch called the Chevon video "embarrassing public relations tactics" designed "to place all of the blame for Texaco's environmental disaster in Ecuador on PetroEcuador."

In Scotland, police have been offering environmentalists money in return for information about activist groups. "They said 'if you help us, we will help you,'" one anti-nuclear activist stated, referring to military police officers. The Guardian reports that "a network of hundreds of informants ... claim to have infiltrated a number of environmental groups," providing police with "information about leaders, tactics and plans of future demonstrations." One of the groups targeted by police, Plane Stupid, was previously infiltrated by a corporate spy. A police statement stressed their "responsibility to gather intelligence," saying contacts were made "to ensure that any future protest activity is carried out within the law." Plane Stupid responded, "Our civil liberties were invaded and our right to peaceful protest called into question simply to defend the interests of big business." Scotland's Sunday Herald reports that the covert police campaign goes back to at least 2005, when military police set up "cosy chats" with people arrested during a protest at a nuclear arms site.

For decades, government agencies and polluters have cynically and dangerously used the magic of PR to reclassify toxic sludge as "beneficial fertilizer," and thus haul it to rural farmlands where it is spread on fields out of sight, out of mind. CMD's John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton wrote the first major expose of this practice in their 1995 book Toxic Sludge Is Good for You. Now the Kansas Star reports on a Missouri lawsuit claiming "that a St. Joseph tannery had allowed sludge containing a carcinogen to be used as fertilizer on fields in four counties, causing brain tumors in at least two patients. Because of a state law, the Missouri Department of Natural Resources has not been sampling the contents of the sludge -- the waste from the tanning process. That is because the law allowed officials years ago to declare the sludge a fertilizer. As a result, that left most of the responsibility for regulating the sludge to the University of Missouri -- but only as a fertilizer, not as a hazardous waste."

We must destroy the environment in order to save it, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's new campaign against government oversight and what it calls "green tape." "We cannot mandate excessive reductions in greenhouse gases, fuel our future and apply green technologies if we don't address the green tape, excessive permitting requirements, and activist opposition," complained Chamber vice-president for environment, technology and regulator affairs William Kovacs. The Chamber's new campaign, called "Project No Project," includes a website, advertisements and social media outreach. It highlights "green projects" the Chamber claims have been stalled because of excessive regulations and pesky activists. Among the highlighted projects is the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada, which the Obama administration says it will abandon due to safety concerns. "All types of clean energy projects -- from renewables to nuclear to clean coal to natural gas -- find themselves mired in 'green tape,'" states one of the Chamber's campaign alerts.

A front group for the UK bottled water industry, "which is perceived to be expensive and environmentally unsound," signed a "six-figure" contract with the public relations firm Munro & Forster. The Natural Hydration Council was "set up by Nestle Waters, Highland Spring and Danone Waters last September." Its new PR firm "will attempt to stop bottled water being compared with tap water," reports PR Week. Natural Hydration Council director Jeremy Clarke claims that the recent decline in bottled water sales doesn't mean more people are drinking tap water. "Rather, they were turning to obesity-causing soft drinks, he argued." Munro & Foster will try "re-educating consumers about the benefit of drinking water, as Clarke argued consumers had become 'fuzzy' about what they should be drinking. Further, the agency will handle stakeholder engagement, reaching out to the Government and environmental groups, and lobbying the health community." British media have run negative articles about bottled water, under headlines like "Bottled water is an eco no-no" and "Bottled water is immoral."