Energy: Corporate Denial Campaigns with Barbara Freese
Industry Focus
The Motley Fool
4.6 • 854 Ratings
🗓️ 3 September 2020
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
For generations, businesses faced with evidence that their products cause harm to consumers have used public relations campaigns to deny culpability. This week’s guest is Barbara Freese, author of the recent book Industrial Strength Denial: Eight Stories of Corporations Defending the Indefensible, From the Slave Trade to Climate Change. Our conversation delves into corporate denial campaigns in the British slave trade, the fossil fuel industry, the tobacco industry, and more, as well as what changes we can make to make corporate denial less likely.
Stocks Mentioned: XOM, BP, GM, F
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Industry Focus. The podcast that dives into a different sector of the stock market each day. |
| 0:11.0 | I'm your host Emily Flippin. I'm Jason Moser. I'm Nick Seyphill. I'm Dylan Lewis. And today |
| 0:16.0 | we're talking financials. Today we're talking consumer goods. |
| 0:19.1 | Wild-C-C-C-Chert Wednesday. And we're talking energy. And today we're talking tech. Let's dive in. |
| 0:27.3 | Welcome to Industry Focus. I'm Nick Seideple. Today we'll be discussing |
| 0:30.4 | how businesses throughout history have distorted the facts in the face of clear |
| 0:34.2 | evidence that they were causing harm. My guest is environmental attorney and author Barbara Freese. Her |
| 0:38.8 | latest book is Industrial Strength denial, eight stories of corporations defending the indefensible from the |
| 0:44.0 | slave trade to climate change. Barbara Fries, thanks so much for joining us on the |
| 0:47.3 | podcast. Thanks for having me, Nick. So first off, just off the bat, what got you |
| 0:51.9 | interested in this topic of corporate denial? |
| 0:53.7 | Well, as you said, I'm an environmental attorney and for a number of years I worked as an assistant |
| 0:59.9 | attorney general for the State of Minnesota. |
| 1:03.0 | And I found myself in a proceeding back in the mid-1990s, |
| 1:09.0 | effectively litigating the science of climate change |
| 1:12.0 | against the coal industry and was faced with a lot of |
| 1:15.9 | scientists that the coal industry brought to the state that were telling us that we didn't have to worry about |
| 1:20.5 | climate change and as the years went on I saw that denial spreading from the |
| 1:26.8 | coal industry really through society and into the political sphere and to the point where now climate denial has a clear footing |
| 1:36.9 | in the federal government and the White House. |
| 1:39.4 | And I started thinking about this kind of denial, you know, not so much as individuals making a decision |
| 1:47.6 | to ignore data, but as a social phenomenon. |
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