Sunday Reads #158: How Big Oil has misled us since the '70s...
... and how we mislead ourselves everyday.
Hey there!
Hope you had a good week!
Thanks to everyone who answered my poll last week, and sent me their recommendations. Back to regular fare this week.
Today, let’s talk about a predictable way in which we get fooled… and fool ourselves.
1. “Bait and switch”, OR How we answer hard questions.
This week, I re-read How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled.
The article says... well, the title is a good summary. As is this quote from the start of the article:
"I remember the first meeting where I actually told a city council that it was costing more to recycle than it was to dispose of the same material as garbage," she says, "and it was like heresy had been spoken in the room: You're lying. This is gold. We take the time to clean it, take the labels off, separate it and put it here. It's gold. This is valuable."
But it's not valuable, and it never has been. And what's more, the makers of plastic — the nation's largest oil and gas companies — have known this all along, even as they spent millions of dollars telling the American public the opposite.
But today's post is not about how Big Oil has played the long con on us, over the last 50 years. Or at least it’s not only about that.
It's also about a predictable way in which our brains fail.
I call it the "bait and switch".
Formally, it’s called attribute substitution, but I call it bait and switch: when faced with a hard question, we often surreptitiously replace it with an easy one.
“Should I worry about the shadow in the long grass?” is a hard question. Without more data, it may be unanswerable. So we substitute an easier question: “Can I easily recall a lion attacking someone from the long grass?”
That easier question becomes a proxy for the original question. And if the answer to this second question is yes, then the answer to the first also becomes yes.
What happened with plastic recycling is a special case of this general tendency.
If you work hard for something, you think it's valuable.
Many things are intangible, or hard to measure. It can be difficult to decide how important they are. So, if a simpler question is available, you often interchange it without noticing.
One such simple question is: "Have I worked hard to get this?". Then of course it's valuable! (yes, our brains are that stupid).
So it is with plastic recycling. We take the effort to clean the plastic boxes. We take the labels off. We segregate them in the right bins.
Of course this stuff is useful! We're doing something for the environment!!
Well. The plastic industry has known - since the 1970s - that plastic recycling doesn't work.
From the article:
At Syracuse University, there are boxes of files from a former industry consultant. And inside one of them is a report written in April 1973 by scientists tasked with forecasting possible issues for top industry executives.
Recycling plastic, it told the executives, was unlikely to happen on a broad scale.
"There is no recovery from obsolete products," it says.
It says pointedly: Plastic degrades with each turnover.
Recycling plastic is "costly," it says, and sorting it, the report concludes, is "infeasible."
But they also knew that it would distract the public.
"If the public thinks that recycling is working, then they are not going to be as concerned about the environment," Larry Thomas, former president of the Society of the Plastics Industry, known today as the Plastics Industry Association and one of the industry's most powerful trade groups in Washington, D.C., told NPR.
So, they did the conscientious, moral thing. Exactly what we’d expect them to do.
They doubled down on this false message.
Starting in the 1990s, the public saw an increasing number of commercials and messaging about recycling plastic.
"The bottle may look empty, yet it's anything but trash," says one ad from 1990 showing a plastic bottle bouncing out of a garbage truck. "It's full of potential. ... We've pioneered the country's largest, most comprehensive plastic recycling program to help plastic fill valuable uses and roles."
These commercials carried a distinct message: Plastic is special, and the consumer should recycle it.
It may have sounded like an environmentalist's message, but the ads were paid for by the plastics industry, made up of companies like Exxon, Chevron, Dow, DuPont and their lobbying and trade organizations in Washington.
Industry documents from this time show that just a couple of years earlier, starting in 1989, oil and plastics executives began a quiet campaign to lobby almost 40 states to mandate that the [♻] symbol appear on all plastic — even if there was no way to economically recycle it. Some environmentalists also supported the symbol, thinking it would help separate plastic.
This misdirection worked!
Over time, the '80s public furor over plastics quietened down. The question changed from "Why is the world using so much plastic?!" to "What can I do to defeat the scourge of plastics?".
Put plastics in recycling bin if they have a ♻ symbol ✅👏👏
Warm feeling in heart.
Scourge of plastic defeated (not).
Shocking, right!
Well, let me shock you even more.
What if I told you they're doing it again? And not just with plastics.
You might want to sit down for this.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice...
Here's the first paragraph from another article:
In a dark TV ad aired in 1971, a jerk tosses a bag of trash from a moving car. The garbage spills onto the moccasins of a buckskin-clad Native American, played by Italian American actor Espera Oscar de Corti. He sheds a tear on camera, because his world has been defiled, uglied, and corrupted by trash.
The poignant ad, which won awards for excellence in advertising, promotes the catchline “People Start Pollution. People can stop it.”
What’s lesser known is [who created the PSA]. The nonprofit group Keep America Beautiful, funded by the very beverage and packaging juggernauts pumping out billions of plastic bottles each year (the likes of The Coca-Cola Company, PepsiCo, and Anheuser-Busch Companies), created the PSA.
In another example of a perfectly descriptive headline: BP created 'carbon footprint' as a devious, manipulative PR tactic.
BP contracted Ogilvy in the early 2000s to create a marketing campaign that takes the heat off them on climate change.
In a scene straight out of Mad Men, Ogilvy introduced the concept of "carbon footprint". Ogilvy told people that they themselves are responsible for climate change.
Yes, gentle reader. Your "carbon footprint" isn't a concept invented by scientists. It's a term fabricated by Don Draper the master manipulator.
The company even introduced a "carbon footprint calculator" to convince people that this is what makes a difference.
From the article:
It’s evident that BP didn’t expect to slash its carbon footprint. But the company certainly wanted the public — who commuted to work in gas-powered cars and stored their groceries in refrigerators largely powered by coal and gas generated electricity — to attempt, futilely, to significantly shrink their carbon footprint.
Doyle concludes BP sought to explain what a carbon footprint is “in a way which assigns responsibility for climate impact to the individual, while BP registers its own concerns by appearing already to be doing something about it.
Let’s take a moment to marvel at this mastery of human psychology.
The carbon footprint is such a powerful metaphor!
It does a 180-degree frame switch.
"Ask not what Big Oil can do for the Earth, ask what you can do for
Big Oilthe Earth."
And when you make something measurable, it's like you put it on steroids. We started doing whatever we could to reduce our carbon footprint.
We started using paper straws (paper decomposes, so it’s better than plastic. Even though trees are cut for it…?).
We now buy carbon credits on flights (we’ve not checked, but surely they're being offset properly!).
I first noticed something amiss with this world-view during the first COVID-19 lockdown.
Everyone was locked in at home, tweeting "Nature is healing" and all that.
But the carbon in the atmosphere? It was going up and up and up.
This wasn’t a surprise to BP, of course.
BP is still producing bounties of oil and gas every day (4 million barrels a day in 2005 versus 3.8 million barrels today).
In 2019, BP purchased its “biggest acquisition in 20 years,” new oil and gas reserves in West Texas that gave the oil giant “a strong position in one of the world’s hottest oil patches,” according to the company.
Today, BP touts its foray into lower-carbon fuels, but these are limited in scope. In 2018, BP invested 2.3 percent of its budget on renewable energies. Its bread and butter is still black oil and gas. What low-carbon diet?
As Paul Graham says: At the final count, all that remains is performative value signaling.
Now, let's be clear: I'm not saying the concept of a personal carbon footprint is useless. We do have an impact on the environment, which we need to reduce.
But I am pointing out this: It was created - not by scientists - but by the world's best persuasion machine. Who was being paid to persuade you to stop hating on Big Oil.
Make of it what you will.
Leaving aside the question of climate change for a moment (we'll come back to it), there is a general principle here:
We're always looking for easier questions to answer.
Sometimes it's almost too banal, like the classic Bike-Shed Effect, that I spoke about in The Grand Unified Theory of Management:
Seeing something that’s hard to solve, we decide to solve something easier.
A great example of this is the classic Bike-Shed Effect, or the law of triviality.
From Wikipedia:
Parkinson provides the example of a fictional committee whose job was to approve the plans for a nuclear power plant spending the majority of its time on discussions about relatively minor but easy-to-grasp issues, such as what materials to use for the staff bike shed, while neglecting the proposed design of the plant itself, which is far more important and a far more difficult and complex task.
The example is fictional. But we’ve all seen it.
Like spending a company leadership meeting discussing how to increase profits by reducing employee per diems. Instead of the real strategic choices to navigate a recession.
Like starting a meeting saying, “there are 4 topics to discuss today. Let’s do the easiest 3 topics quickly, and then devote some time to the thorny one”. And so we spend 25 min on the easy topics... and then the next 5 min scheduling a follow-up to discuss the thorny issue.
OK, I’m being a little unfair. Because this stuff is HARD. We want to make progress. It boosts our self-esteem, among other things. And ticking a box “DONE” feels like progress. Even when it isn’t.
Often, what we want is hard to measure. So we measure something easier instead. We’re like that lovable drunkard searching for his keys under a streetlight. Because “this is where the light is!”.
We want to be happy. But we don’t know how to measure happiness on an ongoing basis. So what do we do? We measure wealth instead. "How happy are you?" → "How much money do you have?".
"Will this strategy work" → "Do I remember an instance of this strategy working, in the past?".
"Will this ad result in purchases?". We can't track purchases, but we can track clicks. So then: "Will this ad result in clicks?" (I wrote about this in Digital advertising doesn’t work. And marketers don’t care).
The tyranny of the quantifiable, you can call it.
My favorite example of using this tendency in a positive way, is from Steve Blank (father of the Lean Startup movement). His company, SuperMac, was a computer graphics board manufacturer. And in the early ‘90s, this was a crowded space, with many strong competitors.
How could SuperMac showcase to its customers that its product was the best?
This is what Steve Blank did.
He created a brand-new performance metric for the industry. Which showed that his product was the best. Wow, what a coincidence! 😉
As I said in Execution trumps Strategy:
If you set the benchmarks of your industry, you win.
Supermac [Steve Blank's company] was in a unique position, that no real benchmarks existed for the industry.
So, they set out to create the benchmarks. And no prizes for guessing who came out on top.
I guess this leaves us with another timeless principle: What gets measured gets managed.
And more important: What doesn't get measured... doesn't exist.
PS. Coming back to climate change, does this mean anything we do is useless? No! Every little bit helps. But it helps to be numerate about it - to know what moves the needle, and how much - as you decide what to do.
For instance, it may be more impactful - than almost anything else we do - to advocate for Nuclear Power. It's virtually emissions free, consumes very little fuel, and produces very little waste.
Isabelle has her priorities right.
Can't say the same about Germany.
PPS. Entire article in one meme.
Hi, I’m Jitha. Every Sunday I share ONE key learning from my work in business development and with startups; and ONE (or more) golden nuggets. Subscribe (if you haven’t) and join 1,300+ others who read my newsletter every week (its free!) 👇
2. Reading and listening recommendations!
Thanks to everyone who wrote in with recommendations, after my email last week. So many things that I hadn't heard of at all!
Absolutely enjoyed this video of DALL-E. It is indistinguishable from magic! Thanks to Bhaargav for the tip!
Pair it with this clip, which I've shared before.
Reply All's "Long Distance" is officially the craziest podcast I've listened to. Check out Episodes 102 and 103. Thanks to Nitin for the reco!
And it's just like Jules to make you a tad bit uncomfortable, with The tiny mites that have sex on our faces have a problem. (You should check out her crisp Monday newsletter, Noetic Notions).
Still working through some of the other recos that came in. Tim suggested a poignant documentary, Kenny suggested a couple of books, Harshika a podcast. And several others too.
Thanks everyone for writing in!
A recommendation of my own: I loved reading Money Games by Weijian Shan. It's about the takeover and turnaround of a failing Korean bank by a Private Equity firm. Right in the middle of the ‘90s Asian Financial Crisis.
I got completely immersed in the beat-by-beat story-telling. I cringed at every difficult negotiation meeting. I smiled at every breakthrough by the deal team.
We need more such "war stories" of real-life negotiations - one full book about one deal. With all the gory details.
Another book with some great examples of difficult negotiations is Negotiating the Impossible by Harvard professor and negotiation advisor Deepak Malhotra. Check it out.
3. Chart of the week.
Visual Capitalist published this infographic a few weeks ago.
A few observations:
1️⃣ Hong Kong’s loss is Singapore’s gain. Exit from HK and entry into SG are almost 1:1.
2️⃣ To a large extent, India’s loss is UAE’s gain. I personally know so many people (millionaires and non-) who’ve moved.
3️⃣ The era of “Let’s go to the US!” seems to be in the rearview mirror. More people migrated to Singapore than the US and Canada. Combined!
4️⃣ What’s up with Portugal? Almost as many as the US!
Suspect it’s the crypto-friendly tax laws (but given the state of the market, I guess there are no profits - or capital - left to tax!) 😝
But my biggest observation is this…
5️⃣ 24,000 millionaires seem to have just disappeared!
As per the chart, 45K millionaires have left countries. But only 20K have entered others.
Wonder if they’ve already left for Mars…
4. Golden Nugget of the week.
I met a friend last week who's in the middle of a 3-year change in brand positioning.
2 years ago, I gave him 2% chance of success. It was just too hard.
Today, it seems he's getting there.
The most valuable things take time.
People won’t take you seriously at the start. You've got to repeat yourself. Again and again. Ad nauseum. And once you get tired: do it again.
You're changing a culture. Did you expect it to be easy?
5. This made me laugh.
I thought the crypto ecosystem would take at least 20 more years to get to this momentous milestone!
Paper currency! Wonder what they’ll invent next?
That’s it for this week. Hope you enjoyed it.
As always, stay safe, healthy and sane.
I’ll see you next week.
Jitha