To say the least, the US Chamber of Commerce has not been sympathetic to the US government’s response to climate change. At one stage the Chamber proposed that the science that supports concerns over climate change be “put on trial”. The Chamber later explained that this proposal was not directed to the climate science generally but the science on which the US Environmental Protection Agency based its policies.
Supporters of government intervention on climate issues have singled out the Chamber for criticism. As a way of dramatizing this criticism, the Yes Men, a group of US activists, staged a press conference at which members of the group, posing as representatives of the Chamber, announced a major change in Chamber policy: the Chamber was dropping its opposition to US legislation directed at climate change. A representative of the Chamber attended this “press conference” thirteen minutes after it started and informed all in attendance that the conference was a hoax.
The media followed the story, presumably on the Web, where the Yes Men had created a pseudo Chamber site that announced the new policy. So the “change of policy” got significant coverage before the Chamber was able to set the record straight. Not surprisingly, the media then made the hoax itself a news item.
To maintain that the change in policy was genuine, the Yes Men made liberal use of the trademarks of the Chamber in the announcement calling the Press Conference, in the written materials and presentation at the Conference, and on the pseudo Chamber Website.
The Chamber then sued the Yes Men, claiming that use of the Chamber’s Trade Marks was fraudulent and a civil wrong. Click here for full details.
The Yes Men are certainly not apologetic. Click here to go to their site, and see what they have to say. Their defence to the claim submits that:
The Court should recognize the Chamber’s lawsuit for what it is – an attempt to use intellectual property and related law to punish a political parody that the Chamber found humorless, and which cast unwanted light on its controversial position on climate change precisely when members of the organization were rethinking whether they wanted to be associated with it.
Although the Court was to hear both parties January 19 last, nothing happened and the law suit appears to be in legal limbo.
The Chamber’s response to this guerrilla theatre generated press comment critical of its tactics. My suspicion is that the Chamber realizes that proceeding with the lawsuit will only lead to more press, probably unfavourable.
The Yes Men has also made Canada a target of their pranks. In December they created two websites, “enviro-canada.ca” and “ec-gc.ca” (both have since been removed), hosted on a German server, that informed surfers that Canada would adopt science-based emission targets – reducing emissions by 40% over 1990 levels by 2020 and 80% by 2050 – and would pay countries most impacted by climate change a proportional amount of the $600 billion total recommended by the United Nations to mitigate and adapt to climate change. Of course the Canadian Government had never given such undertakings, and requested the host of the Websites to remove the two sites, which has been done.
Are you for or against these tactics employed against Governments and the critics of climate change? Let us have your views using the whitespace following the title “Comment” below.
2 Comments until now
Many would argue that the Yes Men’s tactics, always at the fringes of the law and typically featuring a healthy dose of social disobedience, are at best unproductive and at worst counter-productive to environmental causes. But I believe that political satire and parody in this form always has a place in social change.
The brilliance of the creative ploys described in this post is that it uses the media – so often an ally to the PR specialists and spin doctors of groups such as the US Chamber of Commerce – as a means to expose them. As the author of the post, Peter Jones, indicates, to pursue lawsuits and throw tantrums only serves to bring into even sharper relief the issues for which the Chamber is being criticized.
Hoaxes such as these are sometimes accused of promoting delinquency rather than constructive action, but when done appropriately, they can help bring the important issues that are too often swept away to the forefront. They get people debating about the topics that the US Chamber of Commerce, for one, doesn’t want people to talk about.
We are at the point where we must make lots of noise of many kinds to wake people up, get their attention, react in any way. Even negative reaction is good because it may make people think.
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