Jerome Powell
Jerome Powell

Touting the Fed. In what might be one of the toughest jobs in PR, the board of governors of the Federal Reserve is looking for a communications partner.
On Nov. 2, the Fed’s division of financial management sent an email to firms on its bidder’s list asking if they were interested in handling PR and outreach support.

The lucky firm will be responsible for making sense of Fed chair Jerome Powell’s “war on inflation.”

While Wall Street buzzed this week after the Fed issued a statement that offered various economic scenarios that would slow its policy of jumbo-sized rate increases.

Hopes of lower rate hikes were soon dashed.

At a follow-up press conference, Powell called it “very premature” to think about letting up on .75 percent rate hikes.

“We have a ways to go,” said Powell. He wants to forge ahead to two percent inflation just like it was in the good old days.

The Fed set Dec. 1 as the deadline for responses to its PR inquiry.

Don’t hold your breath. More than 400 scientists signed a letter that was released on Nov. 4 demanding that Hill+Knowlton Strategies drop its fossil fuels clients “that are worsening the climate crisis and commit fully to the climate action the world desperately needs.”

There’s a better chance of Santa Claus firing its reindeer than H+K voluntarily paring its roster of multi-million dollar accounts.

According to the letter from Clean Creatives, H+K played an enabling role in campaigns launched by Saudi Aramco, ExxonMobil and the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative to mislead the public.

Clean Creatives letter

Those clients used H+K and other PR agencies “to spin, delay and mislead, in order to continue expanding fossil fuel production and thereby increasing heat-tripping emissions.”

The scientists believe H+K’s work for its energy clients is incompatible with its role leading public communications at the annual United Nations climate talks that kick off Nov. 6 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt.

H+K is not exactly a PR wallflower. The UN knew what it was getting into when it hired the WPP unit.

The verdict is in. Nearly half (49 percent) of sports fans believe Saudi Arabia launched its LIV Golf tour as an exercise in sportswashing. Twenty-one percent disagree and the rest have no opinion, according to the Seton Hall Sports Poll released Nov. 3.

More than four-in-ten (41 percent) of sports fans say the image of professional golf has been diminished by the existence of two leagues. Thirty percent say golf’s image hasn’t suffered because of the LIV.

The Saudis launched the LIV to modernize, supercharge and reinvigorate the world of professional golf.

Sports fans are still waiting for that to happen.

Seton Hall Sports Poll

C’mon, Pope Francis. A study by the University of Cambridge says the Catholic Church can play a big role in reducing carbon emissions by bringing back meatless Fridays.

Meat agriculture is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions.

Even if a small portion of the world’s 1.1B Catholics agreed to abstain from meat on Friday, the payoff would be huge.

The researchers found that Catholic bishops in Wales and England in 2011 called for meatless Fridays.

A quarter of the flock compiled and saved 55 tons of carbon, which is the equivalent of 82K annual round trips from London to New York.

Pope Francis has called for “radical responses” to counter climate change.

Meatless Friday is one of them.