Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming (28 page)

That, unfortunately, leaves everything up to you. No matter where you live, whether you’re an Albertan in Premier Stelmach’s own provincial riding or a Californian filling up your car with tar sands gasoline, you’re the person who is going to have to start taking responsibility, not just for your own actions, but for the position of your government and the integrity of the public climate change conversation. That’s a daunting prospect, for reasons that I will explore at greater length in the next chapter. It’s clear that the political and economic momentum is pushing us hard and at ever-increasing speed in the wrong direction. But it’s just as clear that personal action by each of us will be essential to changing course because in this jurisdiction, at this time, the lifeguards are off duty.

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sixteen
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NOBODY WANTS TO BE A CHUMP
How the debate cripples public
policy and paralyzes private action

I
n a number of the great powers, climate change scenarios are already playing a large and increasing role in the military planning process. Rationally, you would expect this to be the case, because each country pays its professional military establishment to identify and counter “threats” to security, but the implications of their scenarios are still alarming. There is a significant probability of wars, including even nuclear wars, if we ever reach the range of +2 to +3 degrees Celsius [4 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit] hotter. Once that happens, all hope of international cooperation to curb emissions and stop the warming goes out the window.

The activists who warn about the consequences of climate change generally do not go too deeply into these issues, perhaps for fear of inducing despair in those whom they seek to mobilize. Back in the days when the climate change denial industry was still manufacturing a fake “debate” to cast doubt on the whole phenomenon of global warming, especially in North America, there may have been a tactical case for soft-pedalling the consequences for fear of sounding too extreme. (Although I don’t think so really. It almost always turns out to be better in the end to state the facts as you see them as clearly as possible, and let the chips fall where they may.) At any rate, the denial industry is now in full retreat, and it’s high time for everybody to say exactly what they mean.

That is the flyleaf version of an introduction to Gwynne Dyer’s excellent and sometimes apocalyptic book
Climate
Wars.
Dyer is no agenda-driven alarmist, even if he is raising the alarm. He’s a former sailor, having served in the Canadian, American, and British navies, who went back to school and did a Ph.D. in war studies at the University of London, in the United Kingdom. He has taught at the Canadian Forces College and at Britain’s Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. He is also a respected geopolitical analyst whose writings appear regularly in 175 newspapers and whose broadcast efforts, culminating in the celebrated NFB-CBC series
War,
have won him accolades that include an Academy Award nomination.

Dyer stumbled onto the topic of global warming all but inadvertently. A couple of years ago he noticed an outbreak of reports from senior military analysts and defense-industry think tanks looking at the risks and dangers in a climate-changed world. Immersing himself in the field, Dyer grew increasingly nervous, partly because the scenarios were so bleak and partly because the conversation about alternatives was stifled by what he refers to as “the Bush ban on treating climate change as a real and serious problem.”

Thus in the United States, we have had a situation in which a government, under pressure from its biggest and most self-interested supporters, actively frustrated the efforts of its own military to protect the country from risk. We also have seen an attack on the integrity of the scientific community and a disinformation campaign that was so well-funded and widely executed that the public is lost in confusion. Businesses, individuals, and governments in North America have, as of this writing, done nothing to even constrain the growth of greenhouse gas emissions, much less begin to meet agreed targets for reduction.

But Dyer comes off the rails in his conclusion that “the denial industry is now in full retreat.” On the contrary, the evidence indicates that the denial industry is digging in with more determination than ever, even if it is growing more sophisticated in its tactics.

The resistance was perhaps predictable. The great Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu had this figured out in the 6th century BCE when he wrote his definitive manual,
The Art of War.
He wrote: “When you surround an army, leave an outlet free. Do not press a desperate foe too hard.” The reason, Sun Tzu said, is that soldiers who find they have no room for escape “will prefer death to flight . . . Officers and men alike will put forth their uttermost strength.” That’s a reasonable description of the position the deniers and their sponsors find themselves in today. The Big Oil and Big Coal barons, and the public relations advisors, lobbyists, and junk scientists who have been advancing their case, have no reasonable line of retreat. ExxonMobil, which for the past four or five years has been recording bigger profits than any company in the history of companies, has invested almost nothing in renewable or alternative energy sources and next to nothing in climate change mitigation strategies such as carbon sequestration. The coal, railroad, and electrical utility companies have similarly committed themselves to a strategy of disinformation and resistance rather than working diligently to figure out ways to use coal safely or use alternative sources of energy.

As for die-hard deniers like Fred Singer or Steven Mil-loy, it would be incredibly difficult for them today to accept, in a modern epiphany, the undeniability of climate science. Rather than retreating, they have redoubled their efforts. The Heartland Institute held the first “International Conference on Climate Change” in 2008, the same year that Dyer published
Climate Wars,
and they advertised the 2009 conference as “the world’s largest-ever gathering of global warming skeptics.” The creators of the Oregon Petition, as well, continue to troll for signatures, having plumped their suspicious numbers from seventeen thousand skeptical “scientists” in 1999 to more than thirty thousand in 2009.

The DeSmogBlog’s Kevin Grandia did a quick analysis for the Huffington Post in January 2009 on the frequency of denier material being posted on the Internet and found that skeptical content had at least doubled from the previous year. Searching for linked phrases such as “global warming” with “hoax,” “global warming” with “lie,” and “global warming” with “alarmist,” Grandia found that far from being in retreat, the “officers and men” of the denial industry were fighting like never before.

Gwynne Dyer, it seems, has fallen into a trap common to people who do a lot of research on climate science and its implications. As they immerse themselves in the serious science, they become chillingly certain about the threat, and they begin to dismiss the notion that anyone could still be arguing the point. As mentioned in Chapter 9, Ross Gelbspan told me in 2005 that the denial campaign was kaput—only to discover a few short months later that it was more active than ever.

The evidence of the denial movement’s success is also everywhere around us, but nowhere near as clear as when you ask people whether they believe there is still a scientific dispute. In September and October of 2008 researchers from the Yale Project on Climate Change and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication surveyed more than 2,100 Americans on their knowledge and opinions about climate change. In the resulting report, called
Climate
Change in the American Mind,
63 percent of respondents said that they were personally worried about climate change. But when asked whether “most scientists think global warming is happening,” just 47 percent said yes; 33 percent said “there is a lot of disagreement” among scientists; 3 percent said “most scientists think global warming is not happening;” and 18 percent just didn’t know. Looking back at Naomi Oreskes’s
Science
article “Beyond the Ivory Tower: The Scientific Consensus about Climate Change,” which recorded virtual unanimity in the scientific community, you realize that the continuing popular belief in the existence of a scientific debate can only stand as a tribute to the success of the disinformation effort.

The upshot of that success is twofold. First and most obviously, it has prevented, in North America at least, the implementation of any serious policy initiatives to mitigate climate change. People who believe scientists may still be arguing over the details are not going to demand urgent action from their government, and—quite clearly—governments that are in thrall of (or in debt to) private interests that are profiting from inaction are not about to impose policies that will discomfit their voters and offend their financial backers.

But what Al Gore described in the title of his 2008 book as the “assault on reason” has done more than prevent governments from acting to protect us all from the effects of global warming. The constant campaigns by organizations like TASSC—the attack on scientific integrity and literal truth that has been financed by industry players such as Philip Morris and ExxonMobil—has served to undermine public trust in a way that may actually endanger the democratic process.

In the months following the September 2008 meltdown of the global banking system it wasn’t difficult to find evidence that many people were losing faith. The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers published research in January 2009 showing that 50 percent of Canadians “do not believe what oil and gas executives say in the media,” compared to just 13 percent who do. The international public relations firm Edelman reported in March 2009 that its 10th annual “Trust Barometer” opinion poll had found that public faith in industry had hit an unprecedented low. After interviewing more than 4,400 people in 20 countries, Edelman found that in the United States, for example, 77 percent of the people trusted business less than they had just one year earlier.

In
Climate Change and the American Mind,
the Yale/George Mason University team also asked whom Americans trust as a source of information about global warming. It found that 82 percent of Americans trusted scientists, followed by environmental organizations (66 percent) and television weather reporters (66 percent). About half (47 percent) of Americans trusted the mainstream news media. Only 19 percent of Americans trusted corporations as a source of information. Against those results, which mirror Canadian results from a 2007 survey by Angus Reid Strategies, it seems that the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers may be overestimating their credibility in the public eye.

When I first saw the Angus Reid results in 2007, I was both surprised and concerned. As chair of the David Suzuki Foundation, I am gratified that environmental organizations have credibility. But that only covers one of my volunteer commitments. As the owner of a public relations company whose work comes mostly from corporations, I began to wonder, if the public doesn’t trust corporations, what do they think about public relations people? So for the next Angus Reid omnibus poll, I asked them to attach a question. They asked:

Which of the following statements best represents your own opinion of the role and function performed by public relations experts?

• PR experts help the public better understand the environmental performance of companies by providing clear and accurate information.

• PR experts help deceive the public by making the environmental performance of companies appear better than it really is.

I was expecting a negative answer, but I wasn’t expecting to hear it from so many people: 81 percent of respondents said that public relations experts help deceive the public. This suggests to me that the spin campaigns of the last century have taken their toll. Those campaigns, beginning with Edward Ber-nays and the smokin’ debutants in the Torches of Liberty parade and culminating with the massive campaign to deny what may be the greatest environmental threat ever to face humankind, may have succeeded in their short-term goals of fooling consumers and voters into doing the wrong thing. But the worst performers in the public relations world have also critically undermined public faith in business. They also seem to have made some members of the public hopelessly cynical about government and about the quality or reliability of the public conversation.

That, I fear, is why voters stay home. The turnout in U.S. midterm congressional elections has dropped to less than 40 percent. And fewer than 60 percent of Canadians participated in the 2008 federal election. If people don’t trust their leaders, they lose faith in the value of their own vote. And why wouldn’t they? According to research that the University of Chicago compiled over the last decade, 71 percent of Americans have consistently supported a government-mandated increase in fuel-efficiency standards—during which time Congress has consistently supported the Big Three automakers against the interests of the American people and the planet.

There is yet another element of mistrust, and this one might be the worst of the lot. In 2006 Hoggan & Associates led a research project on Canadian public perceptions and understanding of the concept of sustainability. In concert with a blue-ribbon group of participants, ranging from major energy and transportation firms to local and provincial governments and universities, we initiated a multilevel investigation into what people think of sustainability, asking everything from whether they understand the term to why they do (or do not) incorporate sustainable behavior into their daily lives.

The answer to the last question proved interesting. When we asked people why they don’t act more sustainably, they offered a broad and reasonable set of barriers: 45 percent blamed lack of government leadership; 43 percent said they didn’t know enough about solutions; 32 percent complained about poorly designed cities and workplaces; and 31 percent said they felt helpless to solve the problem alone. Only 5 percent said they didn’t care. But when we asked those same respondents why they thought their neighbors didn’t act sustainably, we got a surprising response. Fully 50 percent said they thought their neighbors were “not really concerned.”