Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming (16 page)

When someone passed a copy of the DVD to Richard Lit-tlemore, he was struck by the two-videos-in-one effect and curious what the Greenland participants had been told. So he phoned Rie Oldenburg. Her response: “I am somewhat horrified.” The effects of climate change are more evident in Greenland than almost anywhere else on Earth, and Oldenburg had just helped convene an environmental seminar intended to call people’s attention to the dangers and explain the human causes. As to the video, far from being forthright about their purpose, she said the producers had called on short notice and told her they were working on a film about Viking history. Although they provided nothing in writing as to their intentions, they said they were shooting for the Discovery Channel.

The real client was the Idea Channel, an advocacy organization that exists to promote the free-market economic theories of Milton Friedman. Idea Channel spokesperson Christina Bel-ski said the video was funded by a private donor and by the Heartland Institute, which was distributing it to high schools in Canada and sending it out, unsolicited, to other individuals. It seems revealing, though, that while they had budgeted to send eleven thousand unsolicited copies to schools and other individuals, they couldn’t scrape up postage to send a copy to Oldenburg, or even to send her an email advising that it was available for viewing on YouTube. It’s almost as though they had something to hide.

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ten
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FROM DENIAL TO DELAY
A more reasonable—and more dangerous—
trend in obstructing action on climate change

A
s the evidence of climate change has become more compelling— as the science has grown more certain and as people have come to recognize the changes occurring before their very eyes—a new and more dangerous form of junk scientist has begun to emerge: the nondenier deniers. These are people who put themselves forth as reasonable interpreters of the science, even as allies in the fight to bring climate change to the public’s attention. But then they throw in a variety of arguments that actually undermine the public appetite for action. They say, for example, that it’s too late to stop the warming, so we should concentrate on adaptation. They suggest that warming may not be bad, and might even be good. They argue that we must “balance” action on climate change with concern for the economy. And one bait-and-switch specialist suggests that we should withhold spending on climate change mitigation as long as there are other, arguably higher priorities, such as poverty, HIV, or malaria, that remain unfunded. This is Bjørn Lomborg, the Danish game theorist whom we met in Chapter 1.

Lomborg’s debating style emerged in his 2001 best-seller,
The
Skeptical Environmentalist
—a hymn to industrialization, which argued that the environment was not getting worse, it was getting better. Papering over evidence to the contrary, Lom-borg compiled a whole volume of anecdotes and statistics that appeared to show how our technological mastery of nature had improved the world in which we live. He concentrated especially on the degree to which air and water quality improved in the industrialized world between the early 1970s and the late 1990s.

This example illustrates one of Lomborg’s first lapses in logic, one common to many antigovernment, antiregulation campaigners. Lomborg and his industry supporters frequently use the success of old environmental regulations to argue that new environmental regulations are unnecessary. They say we don’t need to worry about air pollution now because the private sector has already shown that it can solve the problem: you can, for example, see across California’s San Fernando Valley with a frequency that was unimaginable thirty years ago. But it’s important to remember that industry didn’t make those positive changes of their own volition. Air quality improved in California, and throughout the U.S., because the state of California took the lead in passing emissions-control and antipollution legislation—and many other states followed suit. But when Californians recently tried to take similar initiative by imposing innovative climate change policies, the Bush administration threw up legal hurdles to block progress, and the automakers took the state to court.

For all its reasonable tone, it would be an understatement to say that
The Skeptical Environmentalist
was controversial. So many scientists complained about its content that the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty launched a review of the book and, in a report delivered early in 2003, concluded: “Objectively speaking, the publication of the work under consideration is deemed to fall within the concept of scientific dishonesty . . . In view of the subjective requirements made in terms of intent or gross negligence, however, Bjørn Lomborg’s publication cannot fall within the bounds of this characterization. Conversely, the publication is deemed clearly contrary to the standards of good scientific practice.”

The Danish Committees cited
The Skeptical Environmentalist
for “Fabrication of data; Selective discarding of unwanted results (selective citation); Deliberately misleading use of statistical methods; Plagiarism; and Deliberate misinterpretation of others’ results.” Ultimately, however, the committees used Lomborg’s own lack of credentials to absolve him of responsibility for his errors. They said they could not find him culpable because he was out of his depth in the fields of science. But if you are interested in an exhaustive account of Lomborg’s errors in this and subsequent books, a Danish academic named Kåre Fog keeps a Web site record at
www.lomborg-errors.dk
.

In an introduction on the Web site Fog poses the question, “Why is it essential to point out the errors?” In answer, Fog says:

First, because in the handling of errors, Lomborg is not a normal person. A normal person would apologize or be ashamed if concrete, factual errors or misunderstandings were pointed out—and would correct the errors at the first opportunity given. Lomborg does not do that. For example, when
The Skeptical Environmentalist
was heavily criticized in a review in
Nature,
Lomborg’s reaction was: “If I really am so wrong, why don’t you just document that?”—and then, when this was documented, he ignored the facts.

Second, because you cannot evaluate Lomborg’s books just by reading them and thinking of what you read. For every piece of information in the books, you have to check if it is true and if the presentation is balanced. If the concrete information given by Lomborg is correct and balanced, then it follows that his main conclusions are also correct. But if the information is flawed, then the main conclusions are biased or wrong. Therefore, in principle, you can only evaluate the books after having checked all footnotes, read all references, and checked alternative sources. This will be a huge task for any reader, but when the errors are described and presented in one place—this Web site—then the task becomes manageable.

Despite the criticisms (Fog documents 319 specific errors, exaggerations, or logical flaws), Lomborg became the toast of the antienvironmental movement, receiving the Julian Simon Award from the D.C.-based Competitive Enterprise Institute and striking out on a perpetual speaking tour in the U.K., the U.S., and, thanks to the Fraser Institute, in Canada.

In his first book, Lomborg minimized or ignored climate change as an issue, but he turned his full attention to the topic in 2004, organizing the first meeting of the Copenhagen Consensus Center. The center, founded by Lomborg and sponsored by the right-of-centre Danish government, posts this as its mission: “The Copenhagen Consensus Center is a think-tank in Denmark that publicizes the best ways for governments and philanthropists to spend aid and development money. We commission and conduct new research and analysis into competing spending priorities—especially those investments designed to reduce the consequences of the world’s biggest challenges.” It sounds wonderfully noble and urgently necessary in a world where government budgets are tight and priorities many.

In 2004 Lomborg brought together a panel of leading economists, including four Nobel laureates, and asked them to evaluate a selection of the world’s problems, weighing the costs and challenges involved in finding solutions and producing a prioritized list of those most deserving of money. In a July 8, 2006, feature story titled “Get Your Priorities Right,” the
Wall Street Journal
offered this brief summary as the “well-publicized result”: “While the economists were from varying political stripes, they largely agreed. The numbers were just so compelling: $1 spent preventing HIV/AIDS would result in about $40 of social benefits, so the economists put it at the top of the list (followed by malnutrition, free trade and malaria). In contrast, $1 spent to abate global warming would result in only about two cents to 25 cents worth of good; so that project dropped to the bottom.”

Lomborg is quite brilliant at presenting this assessment as an inevitable, even unfortunate, bit of news for people who care about the risks of climate change. He argues, with apparent passion, that he also cares about climate change—it’s just that he is trapped by the numbers and crippled by the cost of fighting climate change. By his careful economic analysis, he says it just isn’t worth diverting valuable human resources from more pressing problems like AIDS, malnutrition, and the provision of fresh water to people in the developing world. You can see the skill with which he makes this argument in a YouTube video of a TED conference presentation. He comes across as charming and sincere, truly disappointed that he doesn’t have a budget for climate change remediation, but flatly and irrevocably convinced.

The question, however, is this: if Lomborg were really certain that the best use of human resources (presumably including his own) was the treatment and prevention of AIDS, you would think that he would dedicate his energy to that goal. Or perhaps he would choose a more general task of trying to get world governments to divert more of their negligible international aid dollars to famine relief in sub-Saharan Africa. But that’s not what Lomborg does. Rather, he appears to spend most of his time trying to get people to dismiss climate change as too expensive—too low a priority in a world of hard choices. His most recent book,
Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide
to Global Warming,
has been an echo chamber best-seller and has created months of new work for the tireless fact-checker Kåre Fog, who has found just as many errors, omissions, and sweeping generalizations in this as in Lomborg’s last text. (For example, Fog found nineteen mistakes just within the three pages dealing with polar bears.)

One of Lomborg’s most articulate critics is the Silicon Valley software wizard John Mashey, who, on January 8, 2009, posted a devastating critique of Lomborg’s prioritizing on a blog called The Way Things Break. In it, Mashey suggests that Lomborg’s whole approach is a carefully constructed ruse to avoid paying
anything
toward climate change mitigation. According to what Mashey describes as the Lomborg method, you can avoid almost any spending issue that doesn’t suit your political or economic preferences. You begin by proposing a list of alternative priorities that include useful, desirable items that everyone must agree deserve attention—the treatment of AIDS or the provision of food and water to the desperate. Then you make sure that these are items that, for political reasons, will never get funded (foreign aid is a low political priority, especially in difficult economic times). Finally you invoke the false dilemma: you suggest that your audience must accept your prioritization, because if they can’t (or won’t) pay for items on the top of the list, it would be irresponsible to start thinking about paying for items that are a lower priority.

Tidy though Lomborg’s argument may seem when he’s making it, it contains more than a few logical fallacies. First of all, if you think about the way you prioritize spending in your own home, there is no question that you would set as the highest priority attending to the dietary requirements and good health of your family. But if your roof sprung a leak, you wouldn’t ignore it just because the grocery budget was tight. The second point that Lomborg overlooks is that climate change will make many of his other priority items worse: it particularly threatens the supply of water in the areas of the world where water is already a serious problem, and it poses a huge risk to agriculture across the mostly impoverished equatorial regions.

The beauty of the Lomborg system is that he looks like a social and environmental champion. But even as he is setting up a priority list that stresses attending to “liberal” issues such as AIDS and famine relief, he is busy taking speaking gigs from think tanks that are delighted by his suggestion that climate change mitigation is just too darned expensive.

For the record, Lomborg is a close associate to Danish prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who led a right-of-centre coalition government from 2001 to 2009. It was Fogh who, in 2002, appointed Lomborg to the newly created Environmental Assessment Institute and who gave Lomborg government support to establish the Copenhagen Consensus Center. In subsequent years, Fogh’s government backed away from its aggressive position as the world leader in wind power while at the same time cutting its international aid budget by roughly 25 percent. It had once been the world aid leader, giving 1 percent of its GDP to foreign aid, but it cut that budget consistently, until by the end of 2008, the country had slipped into fourth spot, giving 0.76 percent.
¹
It appears that Fogh was happy to pay for Lomborg’s advice—especially the part about ignoring climate change—but was equally willing to ignore Lomborg’s highest priorities.

“THE ENVIROS WANT the entire store, but I don’t think they can fit it in their car.”

With that comment, in an interview with Richard Littlemore in February 2009, the loquacious Frank Maisano dismissed the ambitions of an environmental community that, at the time of writing, was still celebrating the recent election of President Barack Obama. Accorded the title and rank of Senior Principal at the law firm of Bracewell & Giuliani (B&G—and yes, that would be Rudy Giuliani), Maisano is not a lawyer. He is listed on the firm’s Web site as a “skilled media specialist” and “co-head of the firm’s strategic communications practice.” In that role Maisano runs interference for lawyers who are trying to help big coal-fired utilities (or big wind-farm developers) site new projects. The five hundred lawyers and support staff at B&G specialize in leading developers through the sometimes byzantine permitting process, and they found that frequently their clients were getting beat-up in the local media. It was often difficult, and always time-consuming, to find local help to “manage” reporters, so B&G decided to set up its own war room, with Mai-sano in a leading role.