Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming (22 page)

But Oreskes’s criticism is slightly different. She says she and her colleagues are inclined to practice “supply-side science,” counting on a “trickle-down effect” and relying on a “diffusion model” to get the word out. These are intentionally funny economist-talk descriptions, but they get to a serious point. Knowledge does not redistribute itself by osmosis. It doesn’t flow automatically from the areas of greatest concentration, usually universities, to the neighborhoods that need it most. Knowledge has to be distributed with a sense of purpose and often a talent for engaging your audience. That’s why public relations people have jobs: we specialize in communicating the kind of information that might get overlooked if our clients didn’t take the initiative.

The good news about mainstream media generally is that they seem to be moving in a better direction. When Max Boykoff followed up in 2006 on the research that he and his brother had published in 2003, he wrote a paper called “Flogging a Dead Norm? Newspaper Coverage of Anthropogenic Climate Change in the United States and United Kingdom from 2003 to 2006.” Boykoff found that most media outlets had abandoned the balance model in covering climate change. No longer were they regularly soliciting (or allowing) a quote from “the other side” every time they ran a story about global warming.

But it hasn’t stopped altogether. While working on this book, I took a break one morning and flicked on the BBC World Service. The British network offers a different perspective on international news than you get watching Canadian or American television, and the BBC was one of the first networks to declare as an organization that they accepted the science of climate change and no longer felt compelled to accommodate an argument in every story. But here, in February 2009, was a presenter introducing a climate change story with this self-censoring aside: “Although some scientists say that humans may not be causing global warming.”

I wanted to scream at the television: That’s not true! If Benny Peiser can’t find a single peer-reviewed article in any reputable science journal any time in the last fifteen years, if Lawrence Solomon can’t find even one well-qualified “denier” who in point of fact
denies
the human contribution to potentially dangerous climate change, well, this alleged scientific controversy can only be dismissed for what it is—a carefully constructed ruse to keep people from supporting the kinds of actions that will compromise the profit potential of ExxonMobil, the Western Fuels Association, and the American automakers, whose fortunes were shattered after they bet their futures on the continued gullibility of the SUV-buying public.

It’s not true, and it’s past time for people in the media to check their facts and start sharing them, ethically and responsibly, with a public that is hungry for the truth.

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thirteen
]
MONEY TALKS
Calculating the heavy weight of political capital

T
here is a quaint assumption in North America that corporations invest in democratic politics out of a sense of public spiritedness. It would not fit with our egalitarian illusions to believe that people with a lot of money could just buy politicians and then order up whatever policy served their interests, and such a belief would demean politicians to the point that their current reputation (above car thieves; below car salesmen) might decline even further.

Traditionally, major corporations and industry associations have tried to encourage this mythology by keeping their contributions relatively even among the major parties. In the United States, this old habit has given belligerent independents like Ralph Nader an important talking point: that the Democrats and Republicans are (or have been) equally beholden to their corporate donors. But it also offered a vague sense of reassurance that political contributions were somehow nonpartisan. The situation is a little different in Canada, where you have a socialist/labor contingent in the form of the New Democratic Party. But generally, here too corporations honor the tradition of distributing their political largesse roughly equally between the two major parties (the Liberals and the Conservatives).

Within the energy industry the tide started to shift in the early 1990s, most obviously in the United States and most definitely away from the Al Gore Democrats. If you look at the fabulous records kept at OpenSecrets.org by the Center for Responsive Politics, you notice that oil-and-gas-industry contributions to U.S. politicians, which were divided by less than 60/40 between Republicans and Democrats in 1990, have swung toward the Republicans, reaching 75/25 during the later Clinton years and rising to 80/20 under the Bush administration. President George W. Bush himself received more than US$1.5 million in direct contributions from the oil industry in the run-up to his first presidential election—at the time, the largest amount of money the industry had ever given to a presidential candidate.
¹

Other sectors that are heavily invested in fossil fuels followed suit. Contributions from coal-mining firms, also sitting around 60/40 for Republicans versus Democrats in 1990, favored Republicans 90/10 by the middle Bush years. This was a particularly fortuitous influx of support for Bush in the controversial 2000 election. By winning five electoral votes from the traditionally Democratic coal state of West Virginia, Bush advanced to within a Supreme Court decision of the president’s office.

The same movement of political cash can be tracked in the spending of electrical utilities (almost all coal fired) and other fossil fuel-dependent industries such as the automotive sector. Industries that had always more or less split the difference were suddenly and dramatically favoring the Republicans.

We’re talking serious money. In 2004 the Center for Public Integrity reported that the oil-and-gas industry had spent more than US$420 million on lobbying and political contributions in the preceding six years. ExxonMobil alone had spent US$60 million. The numbers were similarly large in the other energy sectors. According to Jeff Goodell, author of the 2006 book
Big
Coal,
the coal-fired electrical giant Southern Company spent US$25 million on lobbying between 2001 and 2004 and an additional US$4.4 million in political contributions—a single, comparatively small utility company outspending much larger corporations such as Ford, Pfizer, and Monsanto.

George Bush might argue that it was a total coincidence that one of his administration’s first decisions was to walk away from its responsibilities under the Kyoto Protocol, the agreement negotiated in 1997 under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change that committed developed nations (and the biggest polluters in the world) to reducing their carbon dioxide emissions by set amounts before 2012. Other countries, most notably Canada, were failing to meet their targets, but among the major players only the United States walked away from the table altogether.

Bush also set about dismantling U.S. EPA pollution regulations. For example, Goodell reports in
Big Coal
that under Bush the EPA launched the 2002 Clear Skies Initiative, which, as originally written, would have cost the coal-fired electrical utility industry US$6.5 billion to implement but would have produced US$93 billion in health benefits. But Clear Skies backed away from specific pollution limits on individual plants, moving instead to a cap-and-trade system—so it would have functionally relaxed some regulations that had been passed, but not enacted, under the Clinton-era Clean Air Act. Clear Skies also completely ignored carbon dioxide as a problematic waste substance, even though coal-fired electrical utilities are the biggest source of greenhouse gas production in America—and America was then the biggest producer of those gases in the world.

Still, Clear Skies would have forced the electrical utility industry to reduce dangerous mercury emissions from forty-eight tons to twenty-six tons by 2010, and to fifteen tons by 2018 (bear in mind that
no
level of mercury is considered safe for humans). But over the next year of lobbying, Clear Skies faltered in Congress, and the Bush administration moved to dismantle the tougher Clinton standards through regulations instead. By the time the new standards passed, the EPA had unilaterally removed coal plants from the list of those facilities governed as sources of hazardous air pollutants. And the mercury limits had jumped up from twenty-six and fifteen tons to thirty-four and twenty-six tons in 2010 and 2018, respectively. Asked about the reason for these changes, Bush officials answered, “The EPA, in its expert judgment, concludes that utility [mercury] emissions do not pose hazards to public health.” But as Goodell writes, the
Washington Post
reported a few weeks later that the “expert judgment” had come directly from industry: “At least a dozen passages in the EPA’s proposal were lifted, sometimes verbatim, from memos prepared by West Associates, an industry organization representing western coal burners, and Latham and Watkins, a powerful Washington law firm that often represents corporations on environmental issues.” There was, in other words, compelling evidence that the EPA was taking direction from precisely the people it was supposed to be regulating.

While gutting environmental restrictions and promoting oil drilling (or as Frank Luntz would prefer, “energy exploration”) in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the Bush minions were also rewriting reality in the White House. Rick Piltz, who was then a senior associate in the U.S. Climate Change Science Program, described in a recent interview with John Mitchell and Jana Christy for the blog shuffleboil.com the context of scientific discussion and the Orwellian twists that prevailed at the time:

The science community tends to have a lot of integrity about “Here are the questions we still don’t have answers to,” and they’re up front about where they’re uncertain . . . But if you come into that with a predatory relationship to uncertainty, and you say, “Well, they have all these questions they haven’t resolved yet, there’s all this uncertainty, and we have a scientist here who thinks something different from that scientist there, so obviously there’s still some big debate and, of course, we can’t do something about [it] in terms of policy until all these scientific issues are resolved.” That’s what I saw the Bush administration White House people doing with the science program reports that I was working on. They were adding and deleting in such a way as to systematically—paragraph after paragraph, page after page—introduce the idea that there was some sort of fundamental scientific uncertainty that still needed to be debated and they would seize on any stray factoid or study or think tank, or whatever, in order to do that. And it was totally political. It didn’t have anything to do with science and the way scientists think and the way the scientific literature develops. It was totally predatory.

The key word here is “systematically.” Piltz is accusing the Bush administration of corrupting the public record intentionally and continually—and the accusation stood unchallenged. That’s not to say that the Republicans passed up the opportunity to attack Piltz when he resigned in 2005. But several months later, on June 8, 2005, Andy Revkin at the
New York Times
reported in a story titled “Bush Aide Softened Greenhouse Gas Links to Global Warming” that he had received copies of documents that had been subjected to just that kind of editing.

The perpetrator was Philip A. Cooney, the chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality—a position that he had received despite having no background in science. He was an economist and lawyer, and his qualification—at least for the purposes of the Bush administration—was that he had been the “climate team leader” and a lobbyist at the API. In a series of reports that passed over his desk in 2002 and 2003—science reports that had been created and vetted by government scientists, their supervisors, and, in some cases, senior Bush administration officials—Cooney had made specific editorial changes, deleting details that would raise concern about climate change and adding adjectives to play up uncertainty.

Andy Revkin reported examples in the
New York Times
such as

the insertion of the phrase “significant and fundamental” before the word “uncertainties.” In an October 2002 draft of a summary of government climate research,
Our Changing
Planet,
Cooney added the word “extremely” to this sentence: “The attribution of the causes of biological and ecological changes to climate change or variability is
extremely
difficult.” In a section on the need for research into how warming might change water availability and flooding, he crossed out a paragraph describing the projected reduction of mountain glaciers and snowpack. His note in the margins explained that this was “straying from research strategy into speculative findings/musings.”

Responding to Revkin, White House officials defended Cooney’s edits, saying that they were part of the normal review that takes place on all documents related to global environmental change. But the most damning argument that Revkin reported from the administration’s attempts to defend Cooney came from Myron Ebell, the director of global warming and international environmental policy at the CEI, who said that Cooney’s editing was necessary for consistency in meshing programs with policy. Clearly, neither Cooney nor Ebell were interested in meshing programs or policy with a reasonable and accurate version of the science.

Ebell’s interjection served as a reminder that CEI had also featured in an earlier scandal, in which Greenpeace had turned up a 2002 memo from Ebell to Cooney, thanking Cooney for inviting CEI to help the Bush administration undermine the efforts of the EPA. By the time the memo came to public attention, CEI had also sued the administration, invoking obscure provisions of the Federal Data Quality Act in an effort to block the public release of the
National Assessment of the Potential Consequences
of Climate Variability and Change.
In an interview with the De SmogBlog in 2006, Piltz said he was convinced that if the
National Assessment
had been released and had received the attention that it deserved, the administration would have no longer been able to deny the dangers of climate change or continue putting off action to address it.