‘Energy wars’: Global PR and public debate in the 21st century

Introduction context and research questions and approach

Despite the mounting scientific evidence, some industry players have displayed a vice-like resistance in acknowledging that the production processes of modernity have contributed to our changing climate. This is particularly the case with the fossil fuel lobby, which Anthony Giddens (2009) defines as ‘heavy industry, transportation, coal, oil and chemical’ (p.119). He says, this alliance has ‘mostly taken a sceptical position, as is shown in surveys of their literature and that of the think tanks they help fund. The American Petroleum Institute, an industry research organization, claimed as its main goal to make sure ‘climate change becomes a non-issue’’ (Giddens, 2009: 119). Mirowski et al. (2010) explain that this conviction to extinguish any public discussion of an alternative means to address the environmental crisis is ideological because the neoliberals have reified ‘the market’ as an ‘omniscient arbiter of truth’.

A contested political problem like ‘climate change’ can be understood as ‘wicked’. According to Head (2008: 102) the term has been in usage since the early 1970s and refers to those political difficulties that are socially intractable, multi-causal and typified by failure. Applied in contemporary policy research today, Manning and Reinecke (2016) specifically define the term in relation to difficult situations when cause–effect relations are complex and solutions unclear; when the problems are urgent, and yet there is no central authority to solve them; when their magnitude is often hard to estimate; and those trying to solve them may even contribute to causing them. A complicating dynamic for Head (2008) is that: ‘Both the nature of the ‘problem’ and the preferred ‘solution’ are strongly contested (p. 101)’. The climate debate, compounded by the ideological dynamic of ‘market reification’ and entwined by competing discourses, such as CO2 emission reduction advocates on one hand and the denialism from fossil fuel lobby on the other, may go some way to explain the impasse around energy policy in leading coal export nations like Australia (Mirowoski et al., 2010, Giddens).

Tightly bound to business and political networks, ‘PR’ is focused on corporate self-interest and the use of discursive strategies to control the thought, speech and action of individuals and groups in society to progress its agenda. Persuasive tactics used for this purpose include the dissemination of ‘seemingly independent’ scientific evidence to confuse the public or obfuscate criticism (Miller, 1999: 190) and deploying trusted and credible interlocutors, such as politicians, high profile citizens and celebrities, to deliver strategic messages to key media syndicates. Templates based on such tactics were used in the 20th century and were often successful in delaying political reform, notably in harmful industries like tobacco and asbestos (Demetrious, 2013). However, in tandem with its rise, the social impacts and ethics of PR have come under intense scrutiny and criticism for its covert practices, conflict of interest, manipulation of the science and ‘truth’ and undermining of democratic ideals such as people’s right to engage with protest (Beder, 1997; Conway and Oreskes, 2010; Stauber and Rampton, 1995).

Expensive, ethically questionable public relations (PR) campaigns to promote the controversial idea of ‘environmentally sustainable coal products’ are not new. Hudson and Wright (10 August 2015) write that ‘In 2008 the Australian Coal Association launched NewGen Coal campaign, trumpeting carbon capture and storage (CCS) and “clean coal” (a promise made since the 1980s) as the answer to mitigating the industry’s greenhouse gas emissions’. They also reveal that in 2013, ‘Peabody hired public relations firm Burson-Martseller to design a new pro-coal campaign’. (Hudson and Wright 10 August 2015).

With 10 mining operations in Australia, Peabody Energy promotes itself as ‘the leading global pure play coal company and a member of the Fortune 500, serving power and steel customers in more than 25 countries on six continents’. However Peabody has also been long been accused of being an aggressive and active ‘climate denier’, funding covert communications operations, think tanks and astroturfing ‘or fake grassroots, campaigns (among them Citizens for a Sound Economy and Citizens for the Environment) (which) have targeted legislators, governments, and, overwhelming through the mass media, public opinion’ (Holmes, 2009: 93). Moreover in 2015, after a 2-year investigation by the New York Attorney General, the New York Times reported that Peabody had been less than transparent with its stakeholders about climate change impacts. It reported that the global coal company had agreed ‘to make more robust disclosures to its investors about the financial risks it faces from future government policies and regulations related to climate change and other environmental issues that could reduce demand for its product’ (Krauss, 2015). Peabody is now actively trading, but in 2016, it was declared insolvent due to a range of factors, but crucially, some that pertained to its Australian operations. According to Rucinski and Hals (2016), Peabody Energy Corp ‘filed for U.S. bankruptcy protection on Wednesday after a sharp drop in coal prices left it unable to service debt of $10.1 billion, much of it incurred for an expansion into Australia’. In the legal process, court documents revealed the coal company ‘has financial ties to a very large proportion of the network of groups promoting disinformation around climate change’ (Surgey, 2016).

Peabody’s AEFL campaign key messages ‘energy poverty’ and ‘clean coal’ were propelled at a financially perilous time for the company and as such it is reasonable to assume this was a high stakes campaign, especially in Australia where it had encountered pressure. Bearing these dynamics in mind, the 2014 launch of Peabody’s Advance Energy for Life campaign media release stated:

Calling global energy poverty the world’s number one human and environmental crisis, Peabody Energy (NYSE:BTU) today launched a comprehensive global campaign aimed at building awareness and support to eliminate energy poverty, increase access to low-cost electricity and improve emissions through advanced clean coal technologies.

AEFL key messages like ‘energy poverty’ and ‘clean coal’ can also be understood as ‘tropes’ or specific word combinations that ‘are crucial in structuring conscious and unconscious activity’ (Morgan, 1983: 602). They have powerful properties that can propel and shape debate, action and policy. Green et al. (2010) explain that ‘Tropes are more than merely literary devices or figures of speech. Tropes are figures of thought; they constitute and establish objects’ (p.26). Therefore, carefully constructed key messages such as these, working as tropes for highly resourced and globally networked PR campaigns such as Peabody’s should not be underestimated in their capacity to direct thought and action, and in time, contour and set the course of public debate.

This article investigates global coal producer Peabody Energy’s Advanced Energy for Life PR campaign. Drawing on the literature from economics, policy and social media studies to progress the analysis, it takes a critical PR lens to investigate its reception in Australia over 2014–2017. In doing so, it builds on previous research: first, a period of Twitter engagement from January 2014 to January 2016 in which key AEFL campaign ideas appeared to falter and fail with Australian publics (Demetrious, 2017); and second, and in the context of the initial poor reception, an unusually high spike in Twitter engagement with key campaign ideas in February 2017 (Demetrious, 2019). This article focuses on the overall impact of the AEFL campaign between 2014 and 2017, both in Twitter and in traditional media coverage and discusses its impacts and effects. The content analysis draws from publicly available Internet records such as reports, media releases, newspaper articles and television interview transcripts and Twitter data (tweet, hashtag and key word searches), over the same period accessed through Tracking Infrastructure for Social Media Analysis (TrISMA). The research asks: what purpose did the AEFL campaign tropes serve in relation to the trajectory and tenor of the public debate? And, is there evidence that Twitter using publics can disrupt of inertia and policy stagnation in energy policy in Australian public debate? The article will argue that global modes of PR are contributing to the stagnation of ideas in relation to climate change as a ‘wicked problem’. At the same time, it will point to unexamined assumptions in some social media research about the scope and power of PR in the 21st century that perpetuates a misunderstanding of ‘PR’ in this new context as benign.

Hypertension: ‘PR’ pressure and resistance

The study of activists who are resisting ‘PR’ campaigns like the AEFL provides a window into PR understanding of societal values, public debate and ethics. But significantly, this intersection also shows how it can mirror activism in its discursive choices to persuade and change opinion. Therefore, I have argued that when activism changes – so does PR (Demetrious, 2013). Activism can be defined as ‘a category of participatory political action’ which is a ‘publicly declared and open contribution to political life’ (Yeatman, 1998: 33). Taking up complex matters in the public domain in collective ways to achieve social change demands focus, time and energy. Therefore, those who participate both collectively and individually ‘are society’s most active, committed citizens’ Raymond (2003: 208). Issues important to activists changed over the 20th century, from a narrow focus on improving workers’ wages and labour conditions within nation states to broader international social change movements in resisting the ‘Global Project’ which Esteva and Prakash (1998: 1) define as the dominant ideology’s imposition and promotion of programmes and policies to achieve global economic integration in modernity. In this 20th-century context, PR played a key role in controlling public opinion and debate. Conditions favoured PR practitioners who were able to access the media gatekeepers and use their considerable financial resources to influence the limited entrée to ‘mass’ audiences. In this setting, activists – chanting and protesting – to catch media gatekeepers’ attention were often relegated to the sidelines (Ryan, 1991). This mechanistic and hierarchical organisational media culture enabled PR to silence, discredit and do harm to activists, for the most part, with the social effects absorbed invisibly (Demetrious, 2013). While the study of activism has afforded insight to explain PR tensions and relationship with society, arguably Web 2.0 has moved both PR and activism into a new social space and more hybridised form. According to Hopke (2015), forms of resistance on Twitter are a ‘shift from traditional forms of collective action to connective action” (p. 2). This does not mean that activism outside social media has become obsolete, but it is less important than it has been in the past when the gatekeeper model dominated access to the public sphere (Hopke, 2015: 2).

Shedding light on the origin of the hashtag as a means facilitating public participation in social media debate, Meraz and Papacharissi (2013) write that ‘Hashtag tokens emerged organically by users seeking to pool information and organize content along themes or keywords before they were eventually incorporated as a structural feature of Twitter’s design’ (p. 3). Making tweets more searchable, hashtags increase exposure and optimise wider distribution. But Meraz and Papacharissi (2013) argue that hashtags also shape conversation or ‘frame’ stating: ‘Addressivity markers and hashtags shape the conversationality and flow of news streams on Twitter, giving voice to marginalized issues and publics, especially in situations where access to media is restricted, controlled, or otherwise not accessible’ (p. 4). This hashtag affordance provides the means to publicly capture grassroots responses/resistance to global issues, and hence develop collective participatory political action in ways that accord with Yeatman (1998), Raymond (2003), Esteva and Prakash (1998). Ostensibly therefore, Twitter aids increased public participation in social change, and represents a more open and accessible period for activists than the 20th century. However, Meraz and Papacharissi do not examine the possibly of global discursive interventions like the AEFL campaign in this digitised context and how this may impact on accessibility in giving voice to people or groups on the margins. Investigations into this dynamic could shed light on the seemingly embedded assumptions about the extent and authenticity of social media platforms like Twitter in providing new spaces for public participation and developing authenticity in debates.

Calling it niche, Hopke (2015) traces Twitter’s role in hashtagging activism in the anti-fracking 2013 Global Frackdown event. She argues:

Twitter’s real-time curated and episodic news feed functionality, through #globalfrackdown hashtag indexing, allows both core activist and more casual Global Frackdown tweeters to engage with the day of action in the moment as events took place in a widely disparate geographical locations on a transnational scale. (Hopke, 2015: 10)

Pre-dating the mainstream adoption of the Internet, Charlotte Ryan (1991) observed: ‘Gaining attention alone is not what a social movement wants; the real battle is over whose interpretation, whose framing of reality, gets the floor’ (p. 53). Hopke (2015) argues that the hashtag provides activists with an unprecedented opportunity to connect wider and more disparate groups and individuals, and also the capacity to frame reality and gain influence on the media’s interpretation of news events in ways described by Ryan (1991) as vital for success. However complicating this may be, Hopke points out social media as a platform that has other properties which bolster its interpretation and framing function, but has limitations in building wider and more disparate public participation. She writes: ‘Twitter served as a performative, identify-building space, more than a mechanism to reach external audiences’. Discussing the idea of ‘digitally mediated activism’ as highly personalised, she says in this context ‘activist framing processes’ are reformed with ‘organisations taking a backseat to individuals’ (Hopke, 2015: 3). In this context the offline activists remain ‘core organizers working in a sustained manner, beyond episodic participation in Global Frackdown day of action events’ (Hopke, 2015: 9).

Given hashtags can frame reality and influence public debate, it is salient to understand their provenance. Dubois and Gaffney (2014) compare political hashtag use over a 2-week period in Canada to identify key influencers. They found ‘that in terms of network placement, political elites such as media outlets, journalists, and politicians are most influential in each network. When interaction and content are considered both at the network level and globally, the political elite remain prominent but political commentators and bloggers are integrated into the lists of most influential’. However, they also found that opinion leaders who were socially embedded were able to influence their personal networks. ‘Unlike our key journalists and politicians, who have network-wide patterns of influence, these opinion leaders influence those in their personal network’ (Dubois and Gaffney, 2014: 1274). Their work points to the relevance of both institutional and personal network formations working on Twitter as nodes of significant influence which can shape framing and messaging on hashtag resistance.

Within the PR discipline, there are a raft of studies examining Twitter which are useful in understanding these communicative changes to the media and society, but these studies are largely based on conceptions of ‘mass communication’ linked to functionalist notions of communication transmission with the associated ideas of ‘relationship building’, ‘agenda setting’ and of messages being a ‘public relations tool’ (Lee and Xu, 2017; Saffer et al., 2013; Sancar, 2013; Watkins, 2015). The narrow and essentialist lens of mass communication research has the effect of privileging some areas over others and concealing a range of significant absences and deficiencies; especially in relation to conflict and unequal power relations for different groups in society and therefore of limited value to this study (Demetrious, 2013; Pieczka, 1996). This article argues that a focus on PR must be central to any meaningful analysis of resistance, political agency, identity formation and performativity on Twitter (Hopke, 2015). In taking this position, this research challenges some social media research that promotes the assumption of ‘organically developed hashtags’ (Meraz and Papacharissi, 2013: 140).

Familiar sounds, sound familiar

Key AELF campaign tropes ‘energy poverty’ and ‘clean coal’ were conspicuous in the Australian public sphere over 2014–2017, including on social media site Twitter. In propelling these terms, the 2014 AEFL campaign launch made prominent use of the trope ‘energy poverty’, which in turn was successful in gaining social traction and hegemonic uptake at high political levels, especially in 2014 and 2015. While similar to the term ‘fuel poverty’, Azpitarte et al. (2015) argue that scholars “have distinguished between energy poverty as access to energy (especially in an international development context) and fuel poverty as relating to affordability” (p. 1). They say that these ideas have been in usage ‘over the past four decades’, nonetheless in Australia ‘the concept of fuel or energy poverty has received minimal direct attention’ (Azpitarte et al., 2015: 1). At the launch of the AEFL campaign, Gregory H. Boyce Peabody Energy Chairman and Chief Executive Officer discussed the idea of ‘energy poverty’ with particular reference to international development contexts. Boyce said in a publicly released statement:

The world continues to turn to coal to solve its largest energy and economic challenges, but we need far more action to expand access to low-cost electricity to help families, power economies and pull billions out of energy poverty. (Peabody Energy, 2014)

Other business voices amplified these sentiments in the media. Coinciding with the AEFL launch chief executive of the Minerals Council of Australia, and former vice-president of Government Relations and Corporate Affairs at Peabody Energy Brendan Pearson released an op-ed piece ‘Coal the answer to energy poverty’ to the ABC (Australia’s national broadcaster) current affairs show The Drum. Pearson (2014) wrote:

Energy poverty is still more common than we appreciate with millions of people either without access to electricity or forced to rely on wood, crop residue or animal waste as their main fuel. The world’s cheapest, most versatile and abundant fuel–coal–must be a major part of the solution to global energy poverty. Without it, the task is insurmountable and the human cost incalculable.

A counterpoint from Chaitanya Kumar, campaigns coordinator for international environment organisation 350.org, was published on The Drum on 11 April 2014, titled: ‘Coal is no cure for energy poverty’. Kumar argued that instead ‘Coal is mired in deep social inequities’ and that ‘Pearson et al. are clearly making a last ditch effort to revive an obsolete and dangerous industry and we would do our future generations and ourselves a favour by giving coal the boot’ (11 Apr 2014).

Within a short time the AELF key message ‘energy poverty’ and significantly its associated ideas to eliminate want with greater coal production found its way into a number of high-level conservative Australian politician’s mouths. Examples are Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s address to the Asia Society Texas Centre (Abbott, 2014), mere days after the AEFL campaign launch, who said ‘there’s more that we can do together to end energy poverty and give people everywhere the better life we all seek’. On 22 August 2014, the federal Environment Minister Greg Hunt ‘equated stopping massive coal export projects to condemning people to poverty’ (Readfearn, 2014). In another example, Prime Minister Tony Abbott in October 2014 used the phrase: ‘coal is good for humanity’ (10 August, Hudson and Wright, 2015). In 2015, Josh Frydenberg Energy Minister told the ABC’s Insiders programme, ‘Most importantly of all it will help lift hundreds of millions of people out of energy poverty, not just in India but right across the world’, he said ‘I think there is a strong moral case here’. In response, the ‘Greens Deputy Leader, Larissa Waters, hit back at Mr Frydenberg and said his claim there was a strong moral case for the Adani coal mine was a “sick joke” … “Of course, the biggest problem it creates is global warming, which is devastating the poorest countries the most”’ (Kelly, 2015).

In 2015, the trajectory of the key trope ‘clean coal’ encountered an obstacle when a breach of ethics was deemed to have occurred. According to Nelsen (2014): ‘The UK’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has ruled that an advertisement for ‘clean coal’ by the world’s largest private sector coal firm, Peabody Energy, was misleading and should not be published again in its current form’. Post September 2015, there was less talk of both ‘energy poverty’ and ‘clean coal’ by Australian government politicians after progressive liberal-minded Malcolm Turnbull deposed hard right Tony Abbott as Prime Minister of Australia in a leadership spill. This signalled a change in the tenor of discussion associated with minerals and moral imperatives. Turnbull’s (2018 website declared: ‘My Government is committed to delivering affordable and reliable energy with a plan that is based on economics and engineering, not ideology’. Nonetheless the muddled idea of ‘energy poverty’ survived. Drawing on recent census data in December 2017, KPMG published a report ‘The rise of energy poverty in Australia’, seemingly conflating ‘energy poverty’ with the idea of ‘fuel poverty’ or household affordability issues as defined by Azpitarte et al. (2015).

To ascertain how the tropes served in relation to the trajectory and tenor of the debate Twitter data between January 2014 and March 2017 was profiled by keywords (advanced energy for life, energy+poverty and clean+coal) and hashtags (#AEFL, #cleancoal, #energypoverty) and showed these terms had little impact over that period. However, search of Twitter data was broadened and the keyword ‘coal’ yielded considerable results in engaging with the AEFL campaign themes. In particular, spikes in the keyword ‘coal’ were linked to two current affairs programmes, both of which enlisted a Twitter feed via hashtags to engage with audiences aired on Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) in 2015; one Q and A a discussion panel forum with an edition titled ‘Spills, Bills, Coal and Kills’ on 9 February 2015. Shortly after, the ABC’s eminent current affairs programme Four Corners produced a documentary titled ‘The End of Coal’ on 15 June 2015. Hashtagging ‘QandA’ or ‘qanda’, tweet content was overwhelmingly hostile to coal’s impact on the environment and in particular government subsidies for the coal industry at the expense of renewable energy industries and citizens:

RT @tweeter 1: It’s a choice between food or coal. And we can’t eat coal. #QandA

RT @tweeter 2: Solar and wind are fuel-less and waste-free, coal can’t compete without Govt subsidy. #qanda

The Twitter response to Four Corner’s ‘The End of Coal’ had similar theme and tenor to the Q and A discussion panel. However, the term ‘clean coal’ was far more prominent with tweeters pointing out the oxymoronic qualities of ‘clean coal’ and the hegemonic capacities of public relation and spin in promoting these false ideas:

RT @tweeter 3: ‘Clean coal’ is an oxymoron and a PR stunt. #endofcoal

RT @tweeter 4: Clean coal. Bwahahahahaha! #endofcoal #4corners

Another large and anomalous spike for coal was evident on 15–25 February 2017 (see Figure 1) and again the culture jamming of ‘clean coal’ gained prominence and momentum:

RT @tweeter 5: #LNPDoesAUS there is no such thing as #cleancoal Anyway you package it

RT @tweeter 6: Are the coal giants who are profiting from global warming now going to clean up their mess when they’re done? https://t.co/1ZIav…

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Twitter discussion of ‘clean coal’ between January 2014 and April 2017.

Significantly, in 15–25 February 2017 peak, the majority of tweets referring to ‘clean coal’ were retweets and shares rather than originally generated content without a reference to another account. Further research into this period showed five key accounts were the top influencers, although amplification of these accounts was not consistent over the time frame, rather more episodic.

Putting ‘energy’ into ‘wicked problems’

This research shows that in the 21st century, fossil fuel industry actors like Peabody via their AEFL campaign continue to make disruptive ideological discursive interventions in public debates by promoting the industry or market as the means to address complex social and environmental crises (Mirowski et al., 2010). The research showed that their actions assist their short- and long-term financial self-interest but does little to provide clarity or greater rationality in relation to the issues at hand. This was underscored when it was revealed in 2016 that Peabody ‘the largest U.S. coal producer (had) filed for bankruptcy protection in April 2016 after a sharp drop in coal prices left it unable to service debt of $10.1 billion’ (Khettry, 2017). Court documents in the legal process showed a thick and submerged network of financial relations to an extensive range of climate denial groups. Matt Kasper (2016) reported that ‘The breadth of the groups with financial ties to Peabody is extraordinary. Think tanks, litigation groups, climate scientists, political organizations, dozens of organizations blocking action on climate all receiving funding from the coal industry’. The revelations contained in the court documents that Peabody Energy tabled provide rare evidence showing the extent to which this corporation funds climate denier groups. Among this list are the ethically controversial lobby group, the ‘American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity’ and the socially conservative free-market organisation, the ‘American Legislative Exchange Council’ as well as Berman and Company ‘which is a public relations firm that is currently spreading disinformation about the Clean Power Plan’ (Kasper, 2016). There are many more examples on the list. Indeed Peabody’s subterranean network shows the vast scope it has to control the public debate and corroborates the views of Giddens (2009: 119), who argued that the purpose of the fossil fuel alliance was to render the changing climate a ‘non-issue’. Moreover, the financial stakes for Peabody to disrupt the current flows in public debate which favour renewable energy are very high, especially in Australia. Economic forecasts for Peabody include a likely bankruptcy in 2020 scenario should trends towards reduced demand continue in tandem with ‘Mass extraction of shale gas and oil, increased efficiency of renewable energy and natural gas competition’ (Rocha et al., 2015: 19).

These economic undercurrents may also have contributed to the weight Peabody placed on the AEFL campaign as a driver of cultural reinterpretation in public energy debate. In deploying Peabody Energy Chairman Gregory H. Boyce in 2014 as an interlocutor to launch the trope ‘energy poverty’ and its associated idea of ‘clean coal’, the AEFL media release producers promoted an alliance between consumers, activists and the fossil fuel industry in a clever reframing of the issues at stake. Boyce aligned the social interests of the environment and community to the coal industry’s economic interests and thus placed emphasis on altruistic grounds to advance the campaign messages. In simulating activism in this way the Advance Energy for Life campaign is framed around an environmental and humanitarian mission – and includes a moral dimension that has been particularly heightened. Indeed, the overall approach and tenor of the Advance Energy for Life campaign invokes the global grassroots activist idea of aspiring and advocating to build a better and fairer world (Esteva and Prakash, 1998). These communicative choices mimic a call to citizens to form considered and rational judgements about complex issues and to think and act for themselves, and eschew a more conventional persuasive corporate mode (Demetrious, 2013). This proximity to activism shows how central it is to the discursive choices made by the PR text producers.

Twitter activity around the campaign tropes peaked at times when there was a link to a current affairs show from a trusted media source, particularly the Australian national broadcaster, the ABC. Hence, there was a reactive response and provoked by documentaries and current affairs programmes especially with hashtags or current political stimulation. While this resistance might be understood as activism – it was episodic, disconnected and circular. In this sense, it jells with Hopke’s idea of ‘connective action’ and the discontinuous nature of such activism being more akin to a current than a sustained offensive such as the ‘Fossil Free’ campaign by 350.org South Asia (2018). Hence the hashtags #qanda and #endofcoal identified a stream of resistance that linked to, but not directly for, organised counter campaigns.

Of note, the AEFL message ‘clean coal’ gathered momentum over the period despite being used reflexively, spiking dramatically in 2017. Despite this, Twitter is unlikely to be the discursive forum in the public sphere through which social change will emanate and disrupt the inertia around ‘energy wars’. Rather, it may be contributing to the deadlock. In particular, the campaign trope ‘clean coal’ interacted with public resistance in Twitter debates and as a result was reductively propelled by participants who were bent on culture jamming its meaning in an attempt to undermine or minimise the effect of the reconstructed moral and environmental frame promulgated by coal industry players like Peabody Energy Chairman Gregory H Boyce and Minerals Council of Australia chief executive Brendan Pearson. Thus, rather than extend the reach of public energy debate to external audiences, the Twitter activity served to performatively build and reaffirm the identity of the participating group (Hopke, 2015). However, more than just having neutral effects, the circularity of the Twitter resistance and the tenor of the debate may have served to isolate and alienate those facing the real-world impacts of these economic transitions, as it was ‘produced by demographically left leaning or green users who showed little inclination to canvass long term issues of adversity should it eventuate that coal mining ceases’ (Demetrious, 2019).

The fraught and unresolved ‘energy wars’ to which the AEFL campaign contributes in Australia fulfil criteria of ‘wicked problems’ put forward by Manning and Reinecke (2016 page no?). The public debate about ‘clean coal’ in particular is characterised by disputes about the merits of science and technological aspects of the idea to deal effectively with the urgent problems caused by carbon pollution. As well, while governments are ostensibly the authority which have the remit to solve the problems, research shows that there is deep division and polarisation within their own ranks. This was evident in the different approaches by PM Tony Abbott in 2014/2015 to PM Malcolm Turnbull, especially in relation to the ideological and moral dimension ascribed to certain minerals and technology. Finally, Manning and Reinecke (2016) indicate that those trying to solve ‘wicked problems’ may be adding to them. This is a salient point, especially in relation to hashtag activism. As discussed, the longevity of ‘clean coal’ trope no matter what context it is used in, or if it is used reflexively or not, ensures discussion is channelled back to a limited set of ideas that does not necessarily advance debate. Arguably these tropes, with links stretching to a vast network of climate denier groups, cannot be controlled (Morgan, 1983) and have contributed to the cacophonous, seemingly intractable public debate around energy policy in ways characterised by Giddens (2009), and by Manning and Reinecke (2016) and Head (2008). Indeed, it is not inconceivable that the point of the AEFL campaign may have been to ensure that ‘energy wars’ continued as a ‘wicked problem’ to buy time for the coal industry in foolhardy ways (Demetrious, 2017).

For industry players such as Peabody and campaigns such as AEFL, identifying publics ‘serves as a prelude to managing them’ and thus gaining the hegemonic upper hand, especially in relation to resistance by activists (Hughes and Demetrious, 2006: 6). While this research shows that PR remains a key influencer in the Australian energy debate, particularly on Twitter, this dynamic is overlooked in social media research. In particular, the term ‘publics’ is a central concept that forms a key pillar of PR discourse (Kent and Taylor, 2002), yet rarely is its source acknowledged by scholars outside the discipline. Indeed, the nomenclature identifying the individual and groups engaging with Twitter activity and resistance is shifting and imprecise sliding between ‘networked publics’ and ‘affective publics’ (Papacharissi, 2016), ‘web publics’ ‘diasporic publics’ (Meraz and Papacharissi, 2013), ‘hashtag publics’ and ‘counter-publics’ (Hopke, 2015; Hopke and Simis, 2017). These variations point to a range of academic inflexions from social media, Internet, politics and policy studies and fail to acknowledge the domain of PR in the provenance of ideas around the term ‘publics’ and more generally. There is value in the conclusions that Hopke and Simis (2017), Hopke (2015), Meraz and Papacharissi (2013) and Papacharissi (2016) draw in explaining discursive expressions on Twitter. However their work fails to critique PR as either a social actor or an academic foci, leaving this powerful influencer on both action and the provenance of ideas that social media researchers widely invoke and promulgate, both unacknowledged and under-researched.

Conclusion

Public relations has a long history of tension with collective resistance or activism. Not only is the intersection of activism and PR important in observing changes to both the integrity and contexts of public debate, but it is the juncture where many ethical problems between ‘PR’ practice and society surface. In exploring new developments in PR in the 21st century, some of the links to activism such as Twitter resistance appear quite different to that of the past, while others such as deploying high-profile interlocutors that gain exposure to publics through mainstream media and their position of authority, are similar. Nonetheless resistance on Twitter, considered as a connective corollary to activism, is a key social site for interpreting, understanding and predicting action in PR and providing insight into the active contemporary dynamics contributing to the social inertia in energy and climate policy in sites like Australia. The Advance Energy for Life campaign shows corporate advocacy is working covertly in the public sphere and encountering new conditions and public reception. As such, there is movement in meaning around ‘public relations’ and ‘activism’ as the fields dynamically intersect in the new technological, cultural and social contexts of contemporary society. Arguably the energy debate in Australia characterised by high levels of public contestation and policy stagnation, can be characterised as a wicked problem. The research findings suggest therefore that the study of PR and activism in the 21st century is an important site to understand social change, participation and authenticity in public debate which has implications more broadly for the academic foci of critical PR. This is especially relevant in lieu of uncritical co-optation of PR discourse in social media research, and in light of the vast submerged network to climate deniers that are working through ‘PR’ and industry to control thinking and action in the global energy debate.