DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Climate-change deniers on the
ropes By Bill McKibben
It's been a tough few weeks for the forces
of climate-change denial.
First came the
giant billboard with Unabomber Ted Kacynzki's face
plastered across it: "I Still Believe in Global
Warming. Do You?" Sponsored by the Heartland
Institute, the nerve-center of climate-change
denial, it was supposed to draw attention to the
fact that "the most prominent advocates of global
warming aren't scientists. They are murderers,
tyrants, and madmen." Instead it drew attention to
the fact that these guys had over-reached, and
with predictable consequences.
A
hard-hitting campaign from a new group called
Forecast the Facts persuaded many of the
corporations backing Heartland to
withdraw US$825,000 in
funding; an entire wing of the institute, devoted
to helping the insurance industry, calved off to
form its own nonprofit outfit. Normally friendly
politicians like Wisconsin Republican Congressman
Jim Sensenbrenner announced that they would
boycott the group's annual conference unless the
billboard campaign was ended.
Which it
was, before billboards with Charles Manson and
Osama bin Laden could be unveiled, but not before
the damage was done: Sensenbrenner spoke at last
month's conclave, but attendance was way down at
the annual gathering, and Heartland leaders
announced that there were no plans for another of
the yearly fests. Heartland's head, Joe Bast,
complained that his side had been subjected to the
most "uncivil name-calling and disparagement you
can possibly imagine from climate alarmists",
which was both a little rich - after all, he was
the guy with the mass-murderer billboards - but
also a little pathetic. A whimper had replaced the
characteristically confident snarl of the American
right.
That pugnaciousness may return:
Bast said last week that he was finding new
corporate sponsors, that he was building a new
small-donor base that was "Greenpeace-proof", and
that in any event the billboard had been a fine
idea anyway because it had "generated more than $5
million in earned media so far". (That's a bit
like saying that for a successful White House bid
John Edwards should have had more mistresses and
babies because look at all the publicity!)
Whatever the final outcome, it's worth noting
that, in a larger sense, Bast is correct: this
tiny collection of deniers has actually been
incredibly effective over the past years.
The best of them - and that would be Marc
Morano, proprietor of the website Climate Depot,
and Anthony Watts, of the website Watts Up With
That - have fought with remarkable tenacity to
stall and delay the inevitable recognition that
we're in serious trouble. They've never had much
to work with. Only one even remotely serious
scientist remains in the denialist camp. That's
MIT's Richard Lindzen, who has been arguing for
years that while global warming is real it won't
be as severe as almost all his colleagues believe.
But as a long article in the New York Times
detailed last month, the credibility of that sole
dissenter is basically shot. Even the peer
reviewers he approved for his last paper told the
National Academy of Sciences that it didn't merit
publication. (It ended up in a "little-known
Korean journal".)
Deprived of actual
publishing scientists to work with, they've relied
on a small troupe of vaudeville performers,
featuring them endlessly on their websites. Lord
Christopher Monckton, for instance, an English
peer (who has been officially warned by the House
of Lords to stop saying he's a member) began his
speech at Heartland's annual conference by
boasting that he had "no scientific qualification"
to challenge the science of climate change.
He's proved the truth of that claim many
times, beginning in his pre-climate-change career
when he explained to readers of the American
Spectator that "there is only one way to stop
AIDS. That is to screen the entire population
regularly and to quarantine all carriers of the
disease for life." His personal contribution to
the genre of climate-change mass-murderer
analogies has been to explain that a group of
young climate-change activists who tried to take
over a stage where he was speaking were "Hitler
Youth".
Or consider Lubos Motl, a Czech
theoretical physicist who has never published on
climate change but nonetheless keeps up a steady
stream of web assaults on scientists he calls
"fringe kibitzers who want to become universal
dictators" who should "be thinking how to undo
your inexcusable behavior so that you will spend
as little time in prison as possible." On the
crazed killer front, Motl said that, while he
supported many of Norwegian gunman Anders
Breivik's ideas, it was hard to justify gunning
down all those children - still, it did
demonstrate that "right-wing people... may even be
more efficient while killing - and the probable
reason is that Breivik may have a higher IQ than
your garden variety left-wing or Islamic
terrorist."
If your urge is to laugh at
this kind of clown show, the joke's on you -
because it's worked. I mean, James Inhofe, the
Oklahoma Republican who has emerged victorious in
every senate fight on climate change, cites Motl
regularly; Monckton has testified four times
before the US Congress.
Morano, one of the
most skilled political operatives of the age - he
"broke the story" that became the Swiftboat attack
on John Kerry - plays rough: he regularly
publishes the email addresses of those he
pillories, for instance, so his readers can pile
on the abuse. But he plays smart, too. He's a
favorite of Fox News and of Rush Limbaugh, and he
and his colleagues have used those platforms to
make it anathema for any Republican politician to
publicly express a belief in the reality of
climate change.
Take Newt Gingrich, for
instance. Only four years ago he was willing to
sit on a love seat with Nancy Pelosi and film a
commercial for a campaign headed by Al Gore. In it
he explained that he agreed with the California
congresswoman and then-Speaker of the House that
the time had come for action on climate. This
fall, hounded by Morano, he was forced to recant
again and again. His dalliance with the truth
about carbon dioxide hurt him more among the
Republican faithful than any other single
"failing." Even Mitt Romney, who as governor of
Massachusetts actually took some action on global
warming, has now been reduced to claiming that
scientists may tell us "in 50 years" if we have
anything to fear.
In other words, a small
cadre of fervent climate-change deniers took
control of the Republican party on the issue.
This, in turn, has meant control of congress, and
since the president can't sign a treaty by
himself, it's effectively meant stifling any
significant international progress on global
warming. Put another way, the various right wing
billionaires and energy companies who have
bankrolled this stuff have gotten their money's
worth many times over.
One reason the
denialists' campaign has been so successful, of
course, is that they've also managed to intimidate
the other side. There aren't many senators who
rise with the passion or frequency of James Inhofe
but to warn of the dangers of ignoring what's
really happening on our embattled planet.
It's a striking barometer of intimidation
that President Barack Obama, who has a clear
enough understanding of climate change and its
dangers, has barely mentioned the subject for four
years. He did show a little leg to his liberal
base in Rolling Stone earlier this spring by
hinting that climate change could become a
campaign issue. Last week, however, he passed on
his best chance to make good on that promise when
he gave a long speech on energy at an Iowa wind
turbine factory without even mentioning global
warming. Because the GOP has been so unreasonable,
the president clearly feels he can take the
environmental vote by staying silent, which means
the odds that he'll do anything dramatic in the
next four years grow steadily smaller.
On
the brighter side, not everyone has been
intimidated. In fact, a spirited counter-movement
has arisen in recent years. The very same weekend
that Heartland tried to put the Unabomber's face
on global warming, 350.org conducted thousands of
rallies around the globe to show who climate
change really affects. In a year of mobilization,
we also managed to block - at least temporarily -
the Keystone pipeline that would have brought the
dirtiest of dirty energy, tar-sands oil, from the
Canadian province of Alberta to the Gulf Coast. In
the meantime, our Canadian allies are fighting
hard to block a similar pipeline that would bring
those tar sands to the Pacific for export.
Similarly, in just the last few weeks,
hundreds of thousands have signed on to demand an
end to fossil-fuel subsidies. And new polling data
already show more Americans worried about our
changing climate, because they've noticed the
freakish weather of the last few years and drawn
the obvious conclusion.
But damn, it's a
hard fight, up against a ton of money and a ton of
inertia. Eventually, climate denial will "lose",
because physics and chemistry are not intimidated
even by Lord Monckton. But timing is everything -
if he and his ilk, a crew of certified planet
wreckers, delay action past the point where it can
do much good, they'll be able to claim one of the
epic victories in political history - one that
will last for geological epochs.
Bill McKibben is Schumann
Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College,
founder of the global climate campaign 350.org, a
TomDispatch regular, and the author, most
recently, of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough
New Planet.
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