Great public relations disasters of our time

by | Jun 26, 2008


A few weeks back, I wrote a post about Abengoa – a biofuels company which has been taking out full page ads in the FT and elsewhere, arguing that biofuels are nothing to do with rising food prices (an argument that calls to mind the image of Lt. Frank Drebbin in The Naked Gun, standing before an exploding fireworks factory and calling through a loudhailer “Move on! There is nothing to see here!”).  As I said at the time, Abengoa’s ad campaign was pure cornwash.

So it’s with great satisfaction that I pass on news of the following letter in the Financial Times today:

Sir, in an advertisement in the FT on June 18, Abengoa Bioenergy stated that “Bioethanol is currently the only real alternative for eliminating our addiction to oil”, citing our report “Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Transport in the EU25 (2004)” as one of two sources to justify that claim.

It is impossible for a reader of our report to reach the conclusion Abengoa draws. It does not even mention biofuels or bioethanol. If the company is genuinely interested in “supported evidence”, as it claims, it must know that T&E’s view on biofuels bears no resemblance to its own. T&E has consistently warned against volume targets for biofuels at European Union level since at least 2004, when we published our report “Sense and Sustainability”. We believe Europe should set an environmental target to cut greenhouse gas emissions from the production of all transport fuels, not a biofuels quantity target that gives a boost to the fuels Abengoa produces regardless of their environmental performance.

Running Europe’s fleet of heavy, gas-guzzling cars on biofuels rather than petrol is no cure. If Europe truly wants to end its addiction to oil, it should start by making cars twice as fuel-efficient as they are today.

Abengoa has misused our name and research in an advertisement claiming to separate “manipulation” from “evidence”. That is reprehensible. As an environmental group, our main capital is our reputation and credibility, which we will defend.

Jos Dings,
Director,
European Federation for Transport and Environment (T&E),
B-1000 Brussels, Belgium

Wow.  What a truly monumental PR cock-up by Abengoa.  They probably retain the same PR firm as the PRC.

Author

  • Alex Evans is founder of Larger Us, which explores how we can use psychology to reduce political tribalism and polarisation, a senior fellow at New York University, and author of The Myth Gap: What Happens When Evidence and Arguments Aren’t Enough? (Penguin, 2017). He is a former Campaign Director of the 50 million member global citizen’s movement Avaaz, special adviser to two UK Cabinet Ministers, climate expert in the UN Secretary-General’s office, and was Research Director for the Business Commission on Sustainable Development. Alex lives with his wife and two children in Yorkshire.

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