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a brown shade of PR green on a stupid planet.......

The U.S. public relations firm helping Egypt organise COP27 also works for major oil companies and has been accused of greenwashing on their behalf, openDemocracy can reveal.

Hill+Knowlton Strategies, which has worked for ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron and Saudi Aramco, is managing communications for Egypt’s presidency of the U.N. climate conference, which will take place next month in Sharm El Sheikh.

 

By Ben Webster and Lucas Amin
openDemocracy

 

Hill+Knowlton’s clients have also included Coca-Cola, which last month was controversially named as a sponsor of the conference despite having been declared the world’s worst corporate plastic polluter for four years in a row.

Kathy Mulvey, accountability campaign director at the Union of Concerned Scientists — a non-profit advocacy group — told openDemocracy that Hill+Knowlton had a “shameful track record of spreading disinformation” on behalf of oil companies.

“The COP presidency should use a PR firm committed to achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement,” she said. “All bad actors involved in climate deception —including the PR industry — must be held accountable.”

[Related: COP26: Fossil Fuel Lobbyists Outnumber Any Nation’s Delegates]

U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres recently called out the “public relations machine raking in billions to shield the fossil fuel industry from scrutiny.”

“Just as they did for the tobacco industry decades before, lobbyists and spin doctors have spewed harmful misinformation,” Guterres said last month. “Fossil fuel interests need to spend less time averting a PR disaster — and more time averting a planetary one.”

Hill+Knowlton, one of the oldest PR firms in America, did indeed work extensively for the tobacco industry during the 20th century and is now employed by the oil and gas sector. But its track record has not stopped it winning business at COP27.

Greenwashing

Hill+Knowlton has been accused of greenwashing over its PR work for the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative (OGCI) — a group of 12 fossil fuel industry CEOs, including those of ExxonMobil, Shell and BP.

As well as being named on OGCI press releases since at least 2016, Hill+Knowlton has acted as the OGCI’s secretariat, according to a U.N.-backed website, suggesting it coordinated the group’s work.

Hill+Knowlton’s “leadership” of the OGCI earned it a satirical prize earlier this year for “environmental impact” at the “F list awards,” a tongue-in-cheek initiative aimed at exposing greenwash in the “most egregious campaigns on behalf of fossil fuel companies.”

The awards are organised by Clean Creatives, a campaign group that encourages PR and advertising agencies to boycott fossil fuel companies.

Duncan Meisel, executive director at Clean Creatives, told openDemocracy: “Hill+Knowlton were leading pushers of misinformation on behalf of the tobacco industry, and they are continuing that legacy by misleading the public and policymakers on behalf of fossil fuel polluters.”

The OGCI says on its website that it “aims to accelerate action towards a net zero emissions future consistent with the Paris Agreement” — a claim it has repeated in press releases linked to Hill+Knowlton. The goals of the Paris Agreement are to keep global warming to well below 2C, and to pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5C.

But Meisel questioned the OGCI’s commitment to those goals.

“The International Energy Agency says that there is ‘no room’ for new oil and gas projects if we are to achieve the Paris climate goals,” he said, “but the members of the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative are collectively spending tens of billions of dollars to expand production of fossil fuels. Any statement or campaign implying they support keeping warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius is rightly classified as a lie.”

Further criticism of the OGCI’s spin has come from the campaign group Oil Change International, which described an OGCI report in 2019 on net zero emissions as “bad science, full of holes,” and the OGCI itself as “nothing but a greenwashing effort”.

Last week, the climate journalist and author Naomi Klein wrote about how Egypt’s ruler Abdel Fatah al-Sisi was using COP27 to greenwash his “police state.”

Klein said that “Sisi’s Egypt is making a big show of solar panels and biodegradable straws ahead of next month’s climate summit — but in reality the regime imprisons activists and bans research”.

Hill+Knowlton did not respond to requests for comment. Neither did OGCI, which employs Hill+Knowlton to handle media inquiries, nor the COP27 spokesperson within the Egyptian government.

 

Ben Webster works on investigations for openDemocracy into climate, environment and biodiversity issues. Ben spent 24 years at The Times, 11 of them as environment editor.

Lucas Amin is a reporter for openDemocracy’s investigations team

 

This article is from openDemocracy.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

 

 

READ MORE:

https://consortiumnews.com/2022/10/24/big-oil-pr-firm-helps-egypt-organize-cop27/

 

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UK helping violations....

By Matt Kennard 
Declassified U.K.

 

Egyptian dictator Abdul Fattah al-Sisi assumed power in 2014 after a military coup had overthrown Egypt’s first democratically-elected leader the previous year.

Since then, he has presided over a human rights crackdown in the North African country, locking up thousands of political prisoners. Arbitary arrest and torture are widespread.

Sisi’s Egypt, which is set to host the COP27 climate conference next month, is in the midst of a “human rights crisis”, according to Amnesty.

Among the regime’s detainees is British pro-democracy activist, Alaa Abdel Fattah, who has been on hunger strike since April. His family is worried he could soon die.

ritain has grown increasingly close to Egypt’s regime as repression has increased. The head of MI6, Richard Moore, met with Sisi in Cairo in late 2020 to discuss “intelligence cooperation.”

Senior officials from MI5 and MI6 train Egyptian spies every year at a U.K. military base just north of London.

But U.K. aid is another strand of British involvement in the country. The U.K. aid programme in Egypt lists its top priority as helping “public bodies begin to become independent entities’ and open protected sectors to foreign/private investment.”

It costs around £14 million a year — 98 percent of which comes Britain’s aid budget.

The aim of the economic segment of the aid programme, which costs around £4m a year, is to “implement structural reforms” in Egypt’s economy.

The programme is being planned in close coordination with the Egyptian regime — and is aimed at helping Sisi with his “reform priorities.”

It is run through the Conflict, Security and Stability Fund (CSSF), a cross-government pot of money with the stated aim of preventing “instability and conflicts that threaten U.K. interests.”

The National Security Council, which is chaired by the prime minister, sets the fund’s strategic direction. But a parliamentary committee found the CSSF was “being used as a ‘slush fund’ for projects” which “do not meet the needs of U.K. national security.”

Privatisation Drive

Egypt has many coveted assets which have long been under the control of the state or the military. But the Sisi regime has been pushing privatisation.

In 2018, as the CSSF aid programme began, Egypt named 23 state companies slated for privatisation. Then in January this year, Egypt’s planning minister said the country aimed to sell stakes in state-owned companies every month.

In May, Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouli announced another string of planned privatisations of state-owned companies. Madbouli laid out plans for 10 state-owned companies and two army-owned companies to be listed on the stock market this year.

The U.K. aid encouraging privatisation is being channelled through two World Bank projects in Egypt. The most expensive is a “strategic partnership” with the World Bank.

The other funds the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private-sector lending arm of the bank, which pushes privatisation of public services and subsidises oligarchs around the world.

The World Bank’s country partnership framework, which U.K. aid is supporting, aims at “improving the business climate for private investments.” It also encourages “investment climate reforms that would boost investor confidence and facilitate greater private sector participation.”

The World Bank, the framework notes, “will seek to encourage … cross-border private investments in energy and water.”

The Egypt programme appears to be another example of how the British aid budget is politicised to pursue state and corporate objectives under the cloak of altruism. It also appears to be an example of what has been dubbed “authoritarian neoliberalism,” the imposition of widespread privatisation by U.K.-backed dictators.

Britain backs most of the world’s authoritarian regimes and often uses its diplomatic power and aid budget to push allies to privatise state-owned assets and allow U.K. business to invest.

UK Interests

The U.K. is one of the largest investors in Egypt, with the total estimated at £50 billion and with 2,000 U.K. companies operating in the Egyptian market.

The U.K. government has made a concerted push for companies to engage in Egypt since Sisi took power, establishing a British Investors Forum to encourage investment in 2019.

Repression at the time was picking up. That year, Human Rights Watch noted that Sisi’s

“security forces have escalated a campaign of intimidation, violence, and arrests against political opponents, civil society activists, and many others who have simply voiced mild criticism of the government.”

The prize investment for the U.K. government in Egypt is that of BP, which has operated in the country for almost 60 years. “We have become a major pillar of the country’s energy industry,” the company notes.

 

 

READ MORE:

https://consortiumnews.com/2022/10/24/uk-aids-egypts-autocratic-neoliberalism/

 

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