Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet (37 page)

The denial of global warming continues to affect public opinion and political processes, especially in the United States and Australia. A poll in the United States showed a steady rise, between 2006 and 2010, in the belief that global warming is exaggerated and a corresponding rise in the belief that increases in temperature are due to natural causes rather than human activities.
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A similar though less pronounced trend was seen in Australia, where a poll in late 2009 found a decline in community concern over climate change.
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These trends in public opinion ran counter to the increasing confidence expressed by the IPCC in its endorsement of anthropogenic global warming.

In the US Congress, which has resisted measures to control greenhouse gas emissions, the novelist and global warming skeptic Michael Crichton was the star witness at a 2005 Senate hearing before the Committee on Environment and Public Works, prompting Senator Jim Jeffords
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to ask, “Why are we having a hearing that features a fiction writer as our key witness?”
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Crichton’s techno-thriller,
State of Fear
, depicts ecoterrorists plotting to fake weather catastrophes and fuel unfounded fear, something the committee must have regarded as qualifying Crichton for his appearance. Across the Pacific, the Australian conservative politician Tony Abbott, who had declared climate change science to be “absolute crap” only a few months earlier,
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won the leadership of the Australian Liberal Party in 2010. He became prime minister after the conservative coalition won the September 2013 election with the slogan “Axe the tax” at the center of his campaign—aiming to abolish the Gillard Labor government’s carbon price.

“Doubt Is Our Product”: Tobacco, Acid Rain, and CFCs

In
Merchants of Doubt
(2010), Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway examine in detail the networks that have fostered environmental denial from the late 1970s on—and that continue in the current century. They identify the key players as the conservative think tanks; a handful of self-styled contrarian scientists, including a core group of physicists who worked on the US weapons program during the Cold War; vested interests such as tobacco corporations, electric utilities, and chemical industry front groups; a naive and sometimes partisan press; and free market fundamentalists of all shades, whether academics, fellows at conservative think tanks, or bureaucrats and politicians.

The tobacco industry pioneered the deployment of doubt. In 1969, a notorious industry memo maintained, “Doubt is our product, since it is the best way of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.”
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Big tobacco had realized that doubt could undermine fact. Two of the prominent physicists who disagreed with the science of environmental impacts, Fred Seitz and Fred Singer, had already worked for the tobacco industry. Seitz joined R. J. Reynolds Tobacco in 1979, supervising a massive research program designed to establish alternative causes of diseases attributed to smoking. Another physicist, the rocket scientist Fred Singer, was involved in the work of APCO, the PR firm hired by Phillip Morris to counteract the evidence of passive smoking risks. Seitz, a Cold War physicist, was one of the founders of the George C. Marshall Institute in 1984, along with his Manhattan Project colleague William Nierenberg and fellow physicist Robert Jastrow.
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All three were men with towering reputations. They had held prestigious posts as heads of America’s premier scientific institutions and had enjoyed long careers in military and security arenas. They had excellent connections to the highest echelons of government and personal involvement in matters of national security and in weapons-oriented solutions to Cold War conflict. Though it may seem odd that such eminent scientists would contest the scientific work of climate specialists, Oreskes and Conway suggest that these physicists, veteran Cold War hawks with deep roots in the Republican Right, transferred their hostility from socialism to the “new great threat” of environmentalism. As the perceived Soviet threat disappeared, the physicists’ distrust of regulation and “government interference” was transferred to a new target. Green became the “new red,” “the last vestige of communism’s collectivist, one world government plot to subjugate the planet.” Along with many other conservatives, they saw people expressing environmental concerns as “watermelons”—thinly disguised communists.
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These same influential physicists reappeared regularly in the campaigns against action on acid rain and ozone depletion. In 1982 the Reagan administration appointed Nierenberg and Singer to a peer review panel on the connection between acid rain and emissions from coal-fired power stations. In the 1950s, coal-fired electric utilities had declined to remove sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides at source and instead had installed tall chimneys with scrubbers to diminish local effects. The removal of particulates (soot), however, led to increased acidity. When it became clear that these emissions were the main cause of acid rain, the utilities had resisted regulation, arguing that the science was “fuzzy” and the costs of removing sulfur dioxide so “prohibitive” that installing suitable new scrubbers would “break the economic backbone of the Midwest.” The Nierenberg report emphasized uncertainties and recommended more research, delaying action until after Reagan left office.
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The campaign against regulation of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), designed to stop the destruction of the ozone layer in the stratosphere, reveals similar dynamics. CFC manufacturers reacted to early concerns in 1971 by setting up their own research organizations, which attacked the academic science as disaster-mongering and blamed volcanic eruptions for ozone loss. Singer attacked the “ozone scare” as an overreaction of panicky scientists, claiming that fluctuations in the ozone layer were part of “a natural cycle.” Even if there was a problem, he insisted, solutions would be too difficult and expensive to pass a cost–benefit test.
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Singer’s predictions of the catastrophic costs involved in remedies for power plant emissions and CFCs fit the “Chicken Little” and “Doomsday” description better than any of the measured warnings of ecological disruption that came from the scientific community. Business has a track record of resistance to ameliorative change, despite its supposed immersion in a heroic narrative of “creative destruction.” The American Automobile Manufacturers Association resisted seat belts in the 1960s, fuel economy standards on numerous occasions, and the 1970 Clean Air Act, claiming that manufacturers “would be forced to shut down.” Industry officials insisted in 1990 that further reducing auto emissions “is not feasible or necessary and that congressional dictates to do so would be financially ruinous.” Despite such claims, the car industry boomed in the decade after the reductions went into force.
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Countless environmental and health regulations, including the removal of lead from petrol, the introduction of catalytic converters, and the transition to alternative refrigerants, were all accomplished without precipitating the predicted economic apocalypse.

Global Warming: Creating Doubt

By the late 1960s, some climate scientists had already begun to warn about a potential major problem. Though it was not yet possible to predict the timing, climate experts declared that, given the “great and ponderous flywheel of the climate system,” the process might well be irreversible before its seriousness became obvious.
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The Reagan White House asked the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to clarify the timing. A panel chaired by the economist and game theory specialist Thomas Schelling—and including Nierenberg, who had headed the 1982 acid rain panel that recommended no concrete action—produced a brief response, recommending more research and preferring adaptation to mitigation. Mitigation involves reducing greenhouse gas emissions by modifying such core economic activities as the burning of fossil fuels, while the option of adaptation has been consistently preferred by business interests and economists. In this scenario, no great changes need be undertaken in the operation of the fossil-fuel-based world economy; growth will not be jeopardized. Human technological ingenuity is predicted to supply ongoing solutions to climate problems—and people will have to migrate to higher ground or more temperate areas if technology fails to develop quickly enough.

A further NAS panel followed, with Nierenberg in the chair and both Schelling and another economist, William Nordhaus, on the panel, alongside a number of America’s top climate scientists. The Nierenberg panel produced an extensive report, of which nearly half was written by Nierenberg and the economists, including the executive summary and policy recommendations. They stressed the need for more research, arguing that many uncertainties were associated with projecting the future, whether scientific, technological, or economic. The last chapter, on policy implications, rejected any preference for prevention rather than amelioration: “It would be wrong to commit ourselves to the principle that if fossil fuels and carbon dioxide are where the problem arises, that must also be where the solution lies.” It was suggested that building defenses against sea level rise was a straightforward matter and that selective retreat was “inevitable.”
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The brief executive summary referred to “irreducible” uncertainties, flawed models, and unpredictable outcomes. It recommended a “balanced research program,” an openness to making “adjustments,” and no change to “current fuel-use patterns.”
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As is common, the executive summary approach was the one reflected in the press. While accepting that climate change could be drastic, the
New York Times
credited the NAS with ruling that “there is no politically or economically realistic way of heading off the greenhouse effect,” so we would have to adapt. It was neither the Academy nor even the entire panel that made this judgment, but only Nierenberg and the economists. An EPA report issued at the same time called for immediate action. President Reagan’s science adviser dubbed it “unnecessarily alarmist,”
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and the Reagan White House embraced the Nierenberg strategy: research, delay, and perhaps migration to higher ground if all else failed. Though it did not deny the warming trend, the Nierenberg report demonstrated that a counsel of delay could crush action just as effectively as outright denial.

Five years later, in the summer of 1988, James Hansen delivered his famous testimony to the US Congress, stating baldly that global warming was already happening, no longer merely an imminent risk, and that he was 99 percent certain it was caused by human emissions. In the same year, the IPCC was set up to review all climate research and collate its findings, to assess impacts both environmental and socioeconomic, and articulate possible responses.

These developments provoked a surge of environmental denial from nonscientists associated with think tanks in the early 1990s. As well as the physicists at the Marshall Institute, a few other scientists also joined the effort. According to internal strategy papers obtained at the time by the journalist Ross Gelbspan, the coal industry’s generous funding of Patrick Michaels, Robert Balling, and Fred Singer was intended “to reposition global warming as theory (not fact).”
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Denial and Delay in Australia: The Greenhouse Mafia

In Australia, the conservative Howard government presided over denial and delay on global warming in much the same manner as the Reagan and Bush administrations had done. Guy Pearse, speechwriter for Robert Hill, the environment minister in the Howard government’s early years, writes of his dawning realization at the time of the Kyoto conference: “I started to think the unthinkable—the Liberal Party was taking the country in precisely the wrong direction on climate change. It had been captured by a cabal of powerful greenhouse polluters and had no intention of reducing Australia’s greenhouse pollution, ever.”
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This realization emerged from his work for the Liberal Party—senior partner in the conservative coalition that Howard led from 1996 to 2007—and his PhD research, where he sought to discover why denial was so prevalent in business circles when many industries such as insurance and tourism seemed to have so much to lose from global warming.
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Pearse interviewed members of the Australian Industry Greenhouse Network (AIGN), “a highly influential collection of Australia’s biggest greenhouse polluters” with an alarmingly blunt title for their organization. Several told him they privately called themselves, even more bluntly, the “greenhouse mafia.”
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Part 2 of
High and Dry
(2007), the book that resulted from this work, lays bare the dense web of connections linking industry funding, business coalitions and interest groups, a few key think tanks, public relations companies, supposedly independent economic modelers, lobbyists, media skeptics on both sides of the Pacific, and senior federal bureaucrats and ministerial staffers in the departments handling industry and trade—not to mention several senior cabinet ministers led by Prime Minister Howard himself. A flavor of musical chairs pervades the narrative, as the key players jump from the Canberra bureaucracy to the boards of mining and energy corporations, and on to CSIRO advisory bodies, free market think tanks, or industry peak bodies. These were the determinate influences on the climate policies of the eleven years of the Howard government, which sent AIGN representatives along on government climate negotiation teams. In their interviews with Pearse, members of this greenhouse mafia admitted they were involved in the writing of actual cabinet submissions and ministerial briefings for the government, activities properly conducted by the public service under the Westminster system rather than by lobbyists.
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In the Howard government, the polluters wrote the government’s climate policy.