CSSN Director of Research Robert J. Brulle is cited in Bill McKibben’s New Yorker piece on public relations and advertising firms’ role in promoting fossil fuels.

“The sociologist Robert Brulle, who is a visiting professor of environment and society at Brown, has studied such marketing extensively. The campaigns, he said, are ‘integrated efforts that combine lobbying with P.R. ad campaigns, editorial writing efforts, outreach to sympathetic media outlets, and grassroots mobilization. There is pretty much no real difference in the aims of lobbying and advertising, as they are all part of a large-scale coördinated effort to shift public policy in a specific direction.’ And that direction is always the same: go slowly toward the energy future, if you go at all.”