Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming (29 page)

Together, all these polls seem to indicate the following: people don’t trust business; they don’t trust government; and on issues of sustainability at least, half the people don’t even trust one another. No wonder so few people are struggling to make a large personal contribution in the battle to limit the effects of climate change: nobody wants to be a chump. Nobody wants to be the only person on the block who is spending money to repower their heating system. No one wants to give up their car, change their diet, or limit their consumption if their efforts will be rendered irrelevant by the consumption patterns of those around them.

That leaves us in a grim space. We don’t trust our neighbors to do the right thing. We don’t trust our leaders to look after our interests. And we doubt our personal ability to stop climate change that seems both debatable and increasingly unavoidable. But before you conclude that it’s best to just get on with your life and hope this whole thing will fade away, Gwynne Dyer, writing in
Climate Wars,
offers the following as one of the possible future scenarios generated by the Center for a New American Security:

And so we are plunged into the nightmare world of scenario two, a world only thirty years hence in which the average global surface temperature is 2.6 degrees Celsius [4.7 degrees Fahrenheit] above 1990 levels, with higher temperatures over land and much higher temperatures in the high latitudes. Accelerated melting of the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets has already raised sea levels worldwide by half a meter [twenty inches], and storm surges driven by much more powerful weather systems are already causing crippling inundations in low-lying port cities like New York, Rotterdam, Bombay and Shanghai. London might buy itself fifty or a hundred years by building a second, higher Thames Barrier, but in general the outlook is for successive retreats inland to new, makeshift ports that will eventually be inundated in their turn as the sea level continues to rise. This continuing abandonment of existing assets and reinvestment in new, temporary port facilities will impose heavy burdens even on once-rich societies.

Meanwhile, densely populated river deltas such as those in Bangladesh, Egypt and Vietnam are already generating huge numbers of refugees as the land is eaten away by successive storm surges. Crop yields are falling steeply in these regions (which provide a disproportionate amount of the world’s food). The irreversible destabilization of the ice sheets means that a further sea-level rise of four to six meters [thirteen to twenty feet] is inevitable over the next few centuries, so all the major river deltas are ultimately doomed, and civilization is condemned to centuries of continuous retreat as coastal lands are drowned.

Agriculture has become “essentially non-viable” in the dry subtropics as “irrigation becomes exceptionally difficult because of dwindling water supplies, and soil salination is exacerbated by more rapid evaporation of water from irrigated fields.” Desertification is spreading in the lower mid-latitudes. Fisheries are damaged worldwide by coral bleaching, ocean acidification, and the substantial loss of coastal nursery wetlands—but then most major ocean fisheries will probably have collapsed through overfishing well before 2040 anyway.

In other parts of the book Dyer talks more about what all this flooding and storming might mean. He suggests, for example, that when “agriculture . . . become[s] ‘essentially non-viable’ in the dry subtropics,” people in nuclear-armed countries like India and Pakistan might start to take that personally. You begin to understand why Dyer says that activists avoid talking about consequences for fear of pushing people directly from denial to despair. It’s true that this particular scenario is particularly dire—it sits at the outer edge of what is expected in terms of rising temperatures. But political pressure has forced the IPCC to work only with the most well-established (and therefore older) data, while the observed world climate has been shifting with unprecedented speed. Just as an example, the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report suggests “Arctic late-summer sea ice disappears almost entirely by the latter part of the 21st century.” But after two successive years with the lowest ice cover since satellite monitoring of Arctic ice began in 1979, the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, is now suggesting that the late-summer sea ice could be clear as early as 2013—not seventy or ninety years from now, but four or five. Thus, Dyer’s Center for a New American Society scenario is worryingly within the bounds of what might happen, especially if we continue to ignore the problem.

Yet our industry and government leaders are urging us to do just that: ignore the problem. When someone says it isn’t practical to address climate change, when they say there is no reason for countries like the United States and Canada to show leadership when China and India may not fall immediately into step, the deniers and delayers are urging us ever closer to the cliff without regard for who or how many people might fall to the rocks below.

In that light we actually face two challenges right now, one less daunting than the other. The easier test, if we chose to grapple with it, would be to create the technology and impose the discipline necessary to deal with climate change. Indeed, a June 2008 report by the McKinsey Global Institute suggests that the climate crisis is manageable, and that the costs are manageable as well. McKinsey estimates that the macroeconomic costs of what it calls the “carbon revolution” would be between 0.6 and 1.4 percent of GDP by 2030. McKinsey adds, “To put this figure in perspective, if one were to view this spending as a form of insurance against potential damage due to climate change, it might be relevant to compare it to global spending on insurance, which was 3.3 percent of GDP in 2005.” So mitigating the threats of climate change is the easier part: take out the insurance and minimize the risk. You do that on your house every year; the bank insists. In most jurisdictions, the government has another set of laws that force you to insure your car as well. And in both cases the risk of disaster is significantly less than the greater than 90 percent certainty that scientists ascribe to the climate crisis.

The more difficult task will be to forge the political consensus nationally and internationally to face this problem head on. For the world is not primarily wrestling at this moment with a climate crisis—that’s proceeding apace with very little engagement. The world is in the grip of a crisis of political inaction, a crisis of political leadership—or a complete lack thereof.

None of this is to suggest that mitigating the threats of climate change will in fact be easy. When McKinsey talks about a carbon revolution, he strikes the right tone. Look at any of the good scientific books and reports on this subject and they will tell you that we need to reduce our carbon dioxide output by something close to 80 percent by 2030 to be comfortably assured of avoiding the Center for a New American Security’s disaster scenario. That doesn’t mean that we can continue building coal-fired power plants (carbon-capture ready
after
2018) as fast as possible or stay the course to triple tar sands production in Alberta, “stabilizing emissions,” as Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper proposes, only in 2020. That means we will have to make every effort to conserve energy, to constrain increases in large carbon sources, and to invest heavily in energy alternatives.

To get to those goals, as
New York Times
writer Thomas Friedman likes to say, it will not be enough to change our light-bulbs. We will have to change our leaders. We surely will have to change our own behavior, as a necessary first step and as a show of good personal leadership—of public good faith so your neighbors know that they can trust
you.
Then we have to start demanding more from our leaders—in business and in government. The argument Friedman always makes is that we can change the lightbulbs in our house, but Congress can pass a law that says
everybody
has to change. And that’s the pace of change we need. We need, all of us, to get on course for the last chapter.

[
seventeen
]
SAVING THE WORLD
Tactics for turning back the clock on global disaster

H
ere’s the problem: the current public policy on the question of climate change is based on a lie—a carefully constructed, aggressively disseminated lie. In saying so, and before everyone named in this book starts dialling up their libel lawyers, I want to make something clear. I am not referring to the first definition in my dog-eared 1996 edition of the
Oxford English Reference Dictionary,
“an intentionally false statement
(tell a lie).
” Rather, or more frequently, I am thinking of a variant within the second definition, “imposture; false belief
(live a lie).
” We are all living a lie, all ambling along as if everything is going to turn out fine with the climate and the future, even if we currently find it “impractical” to make any realistic gesture to ensure that that is so.

I also want to be clear that in invoking the campaign of misinformation and in complaining about the lack of leadership, I am not, for example, accusing Alberta premier Ed Stelmach of being a liar. Neither am I suggesting any such thing about the oil executives in my directors course, the men and women who gave me such a hard time about the David Suzuki quote. These people live in a world in which acknowledging the reality and the dangers of climate change is an extraordinarily difficult thing to do. It’s difficult because facing the true threat of the climate crisis flies in the face of their own self-interest. In making this point in his public presentations, Al Gore often raises a favorite quotation from the American novelist and politician Upton Sinclair, who said, “It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on him not understanding it.”

It’s also difficult for your average rising oil executive to take a bold environmental position on climate change—to speak, or even know, the truth—because very few people in the executive offices in Calgary or Houston are likely to stumble accidentally across unvarnished science. If you rely for most of your information on the reports, blogs, and newsletters of the oil patch, or if you confine yourself to newspapers like the
Calgary Herald,
the
Wall Street Journal,
or Canada’s
National Post,
you will be consuming a steady diet of stories that, even today, suggest that some aspects of climate science are still in doubt or that overcoming the challenges will be so difficult and expensive that in the short term, we should maintain the status quo.

I am sympathetic to my director colleagues, but I’m not at all forgiving of political leaders like Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, who has so successfully avoided reading anything that might clear away his aggressive misinterpretations of climate science. I’m not forgiving of Alberta premier Ed Stelmach. He, like Senator Inhofe, has a responsibility, not to the oil companies who pay for his campaigns, but to the citizens he represents, people who deserve to have their interests—and their lives— protected from oil companies that can add US$46.6 million in a single year to the US$82 million that they already spend trying to influence politicians on Capitol Hill.

We have seen the power of that kind of money. We have in the preceding pages seen both the ruthlessness and the resources that can be brought to bear. In a world where mainstream media are overwhelmed, and sometimes caught napping, a well-financed campaigner can recast reality or redefine the character of a political opponent. Consider the 2004 presidential campaign, in which Marc Morano and company attacked the good reputation of John Kerry. There is no question that Kerry is a war hero. There is documentary evidence, and witnesses will stand by his side, decades after the fact, and attest to his courage and selflessness on the rivers and in the jungles of Vietnam. Yet Mora-no’s compatriots were able to marshal the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and, for long enough to affect a presidential vote, throw Kerry’s good reputation into doubt.

The people who want to continue burning coal, selling oil, and mining tar sands have been equally effective. They have told us that their resources are the only ones that will run our economies affordably, and they have ridiculed environmentalists as agenda-driven loonies—“chicken littles” who scream nervously about a sky that is getting oppressively heavy. Sometimes, the most aggressive people in environmental organizations have contributed to that image. Sometimes in moments of frustration or desperation, they have chained themselves to trees or smashed their ships into whaling vessels, adding to the image of environmentalists as inherently radical.

That tide is turning. Go to any event featuring Al Gore or David Suzuki today and you will see a crowd much bigger and much less apologetic than what you might have seen ten years ago. There is a gathering community of leaders—people like General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt, Virgin brand owner Sir Richard Branson, and Interface Global CEO Ray Anderson— who have come to understand the problem and who are refusing to let the lie linger any longer.

But they need your help. Susan Nall Bales, president of the FrameWorks Institute, always says that the media set the public policy agenda, and if the media are timid or are being manipulated, the agenda will slip into the hands of those with the most power or the best strategy for affecting the public debate. It can take a long time in that environment for truth to emerge of its own accord, and climate change is not an issue that leaves us a huge budget of time.

So what to do? First and most critically, you must inform yourself. My best advice might be that you should survey a variety of sources just to help confirm—or challenge—what you have read in this book. I am confident that it will stand up to scrutiny, but I am even more concerned that you be rock solid in your own understanding, in your conviction, of what has been happening in the global climate change conversation.

Then, if you haven’t done so already, you should read up on climate change science. Read the summary of the latest IPCC report. Read one of the books I mentioned in Chapter 2, or just google
New Yorker
writer Elizabeth Kolbert’s Climate of Man series. There is enough information there to whet your appetite, perhaps even to upset your sleep.