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TODAY Thursday 11 September 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site.

 

TODAY IN THE WORLD: Gratifyingly Inept Adversary

On Tuesday, in Washington, there was a press conference announcing the formation of a "broad based" coalition to "educate the American people" on the perils of an international climate treaty. This educational campaign is budgeted at somewhere from $3 million to $13 million, depending on what you read.

Yesterday, in advertisements published in major newspapers, the new coalition unveiled its first public communication. It's not over 'til the fat lady's focus group sings, but the bet here is that the ad will prove interestingly non-persuasive.

The coalition -- I'll get to its members in a moment -- is aiming at an audience a little less elite than the targets of earlier advertisements. A few months ago the Business Roundtable ran a two-page ad with modulated but anxious language about the need for reasonableness on climate negotiations. The layout dedicated about 90% of its space to the signatures of Fortune 500 CEOs. It was a Lear Jet kind of ad. Mobil, indefatigably discursive, has run a series of op-ed page ads with a similar tone of "let's not be hasty." They are all sober typeface, think tank kinds of ads.

This new campaign is pitched lower graphically and way lower textually. The big image is the back of a dark-suited, French-cuffed, white-haired white man unrolling a large map of the world. On the map most of the countries of Latin America and Africa are whited out. "THE U.N. GLOBAL CLIMATE TREATY ISN'T GLOBAL," says the main legend. The subheads say:
"Americans Will Pay the Price"
"50 Cents More for Every Gallon of Gasoline"
"Most Countries Are Exempt"
and (your theme, reprised)
"It's Not Global and It Won't Work."

There are about 75 words of explanatory text that range from false to misleading (but, hey) and at the bottom there's a little box that says "Paid for by" and then lists about two dozen sponsors from the American Automobile Manufacturers Association to the American Farm Bureau Federation to the American Plastics Council to The Fertilizer Institute to the National Mining Association to the National Black Chamber of Commerce to the Seniors Coalition. (You've got to love the sheer Barnum of those last two.) Readers are urged to call a toll-free number (1-888-54FACTS) or dial up the coalition Website.

Maybe this ad will play well among small business owners and young management men who would like to grow up to wear white hair and French cuffs. And maybe there's an audience that will read the list of sponsoring organizations and say, "Well, that's a solid group of fair-minded citizens." But I was expecting something a little more seductive, funny, memorable.

Not to mention technically competent. The white-out on the map is interestingly crude. The Gulf of California has disappeared, Cuba looks like a flying saucer, Angola and the Congo are inexplicably un-whited. And besides, they used a Mercator Projection map, which is the kind that distorts northern countries to look bigger than they really are. That's funny only because the argument of the ad is that "a few" (northern, rich) countries are going to have assume the "entire burden" of the climate treaty. I don't know, but if I'm going to try to minimize the size of thirty-odd European and North American nations, I'm not going to use a map that makes Greenland look bigger than South America.

As Jack E. Leonard used to say, they're off to a flying stop.

 

TODAY ON THE SITE:

Speaking of climate (when do we stop?), check out Leonie Haimson's new reports on recent developments in the science and diplomacy of climate change, readable and available in our In The Trenches section.

 

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9/03: Fishing
9/02: Our Biodiversity Problems
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