One of the arguments I have been making in talking to journalists is to beware the hype over the relative impact of the climate skeptics movement in contributing to societal inaction on climate change. As many studies, articles, and experts have documented and described, the impact of the skeptic movement is only one of several significant contributors to political gridlock and perceptual differences on climate change.
In a recent blog post on Copenhagen, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus adeptly argue this point. I don't agree with all of their post and I don't share the same pessimism on Copenhagen, yet as they often do, they raise important issues and meaningfully expand the scope of discussion. Here's their specific point on the climate skeptic blame game:
Copenhagen was preceded by a seemingly genuine fight between skeptics who deny the reality or threat of global warming, and greens who deny the political economy of carbon. In their respective simulacra, they see each other as mortal enemies. In reality, they desperately need each other.
In a brilliantly timed release of emails and data stolen from Britain's East Anglia Climate Research Unit, skeptics managed to create an international debate over the evidence of climate change, calling the hack "climategate." The emails didn't challenge human-caused global warming. But that didn't stop the skeptics from waving the emails around as proof that it was all a hoax. Greens dismissed the controversy and the bad behavior of prominent climate scientists, aggressively spinning the CRU hack as "swift-boating."
The result was a phony debate. It served greens and skeptics well but did nothing to spark an honest discussion of economics and technology. Instead, climate scientists and environmental activists continued their running battle with skeptics over trivial disputes such as warming and cooling in the medieval period -- a subject that offers no insight whatsoever into what we should do about today's global warming.
Journalists and activists alike value "global warming deniers" because they are useful villains in the story. Reporters and activists never tire of writing about Exxon-Mobil's funding as some kind of a major scoop, and a researcher at Media Matters can feel like Woodward and Bernstein after just a few hours downloading IRS 990 financial statements from Guidestar.
But really it is phony investigative journalism posing as the real thing. In truth, skeptics of global warming are poor, not rich. According to Media Matters, Exxon-Mobil has given conservative think tanks less than $7 million total since 2001 -- about $1 million a year. By contrast, the combined annual budgets of America's leading environmental philanthropies and NGOs total well over $500 million a year. Two funders alone have promised to spend $2 billion on climate communications over the next few years. And governments collectively spend billions annually, as they should, funding climate scientists to conduct research and publish their work.
Activists, with the help of reporters, have grossly exaggerated efforts by the Bush administration to muzzle NASA scientist James Hansen, perhaps the best-known scientist in the world. Hansen routinely publishes blunt attacks on Congressional proposals and advocates his own agenda all as a government employee. After the Bush Administration attempted to censor his work he complained to the New York Times and the problem disappeared. Hansen has one of the safest jobs in America.
The notion that climate skeptics are to blame for collective government inaction is as phony as the debate over whether the stolen emails change our understanding of the science. Neither skepticism of anthropogenic warming nor the belief that scientists are divided nor the public's lack of understanding of science have been significant factors in preventing action on global warming.
The big story is that there is now 20 years of evidence that green communications on climate have backfired. Public concern about global warming today is no greater than it was 20 years ago. Public support for action to reduce carbon emissions quickly evaporates as soon as there is a serious price tag attached. Increasingly dire warnings of impending climate catastrophes have triggered apocalypse fatigue and rising skepticism about climate science. Greens have not only failed to achieve action, they have made the situation worse, alienating the public even more than they had alienated them before 2004, when the two of us denounced apocalyptic environmentalism in "The Death of Environmentalism."
The reason for inaction is the same today as it has been for 20 years. Consumers and businesses alike are loath to increase energy costs in order to address global warming. Fossil fuels are cheap. Low carbon power sources are expensive or, like nuclear power, politically unpopular. No political economy in the world is going to significantly raise energy prices and slow its economy to deal with climate change. So long as the primary lever that climate policy proposes to use to address global warming are mechanisms that, one way or another, increase energy prices, efforts to substantially reduce global carbon emissions will fail.
This reality is as firm as the relationship between emissions and warming, but it is one that the United Nations, the world's largest governments, and green activists refuse to accept. For this reason, global warming deniers are, for greens, highly useful enemies -- ones they simply cannot let go.
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There is a group of graphic facilitators in Copenhagen right now. The group of 5 people are illustrating the discussions with real-time graphics as they occure. It's a fun way to stay involved in the conversation. You can check it out here www.cop15visualised.com
There was an article in the New York Times by TOM ZELLER Jr, "Climate Talks Open With Calls for Urgent Action" that addressed the climate skeptic blame game. The illustration and article are here: http://www.blog.imagethink.net/line-by-line/2009/12/7/climate-talks-ope…
Um...no. Environmentalists need global warming deniers rhinos need poachers. Comparing the budgets of environmental organizations and a couple of think tanks is absurd. "Green" organizations worry about other issues in addition to global warming, and it costs money to put satellites into space and collect data from all over the world. On the other hand, it costs the salary of a couple of hacks and their assistants to write a bunch of disingenuous nonsense and email it to the press, which will grant them attention for free.
Moreover, the goals are completely different. Environmentalists are engaged in a struggle to convince the public of something that it doesn't want to hear, convince politicians to vote in ways that anger their corporate patrons, etc. This is a Herculean and apparently futile task. Global warming deniers just need to get their nonsense out there to confuse people. They've won simply by getting attention and putting the term "climategate" everywhere you look in the media. There is no controversy about global warming and its causes. Just by getting journalists to SAY that there's controversy, the deniers win. Media outlets are complicit in this, because basically all of their major advertisers are contributing to the problem.
The public's opinion has very little to do with what sets policy in the first place. Global protests by millions of people didn't stop the Iraq war. It's hard to believe that there's widespread public support for mountaintop removal mining or giving trillions of dollars to rich people for no good reason. We'd like free health care, for the most part. Nobody in charge cares, but they make a show of it on TV sometimes.
Blaming scientists for apocalyptic warnings is just dumb. We are in the middle of a MASS EXTINCTION EVENT, which is apocalyptic if anything ever was. The condition of the world is terrible. It's not scientists' fault for pointing out the obvious.
It's true that the reasons for inaction remain unchanged: the interests of rich people and capitalism generally are opposed to the interests of life on Earth, and the people causing the problem are in charge. There is simply no way to have "economic growth" without dooming the planet. The people wasting everyone's time and rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic are the ones going on about "sustainable growth" and "green technology" and "carbon markets." We sealed our fate when we decided capitalism was nonnegotiable. Since nobody wants to hear that their standard of living needs to drop, we're taking their toys away, and you can't have a nice house, it was probably inevitable.
We build a time machine, breed less, and collapse the economy a few decades ago, or we have a catastrophic die-off. Period. The only type of discussion about global warming that still has any point whatsoever is how we're going to manage that die-off as humanely as possible. It makes no difference who emits what how much marginally slower when the permafrost is melting and our crops are drying out in the fields.
The idea that Our Leaders Will Save Us is absurd. Have you seen our leaders, lately?
I'm sorry, Matthew, but the points that inverse_agonist raises in response to your post make far more sense than yours do.
So long as the primary lever that climate policy proposes to use to address global warming are mechanisms that, one way or another, increase energy prices, efforts to substantially reduce global carbon emissions will fail.
Then we're all dead, aren't we?
That's helpful.
What's going on?
Just to clarify Matthew is posting Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus (thebreakthrough.org) perspective with a brief introduction that stating that he finds their (Shellenberger and Nordhaus's) argument useful but is not entirely ("I don't share the same pessimism, etc.") If you click the link to the blog he quotes you get their intro "Contrivance in Copenhagen," larger font, HUMOR (a risky tactic that can lead to confusion but deeper understanding if one can get around to it) and comments...
It is always worth stepping back from a polarized drama. One might see contrivance, but also complexity and possibility.
Having developed my perspectives on science under the tutelage of feminists tracking eugenics, on the tails of the "science for the people," outing of E.O. Wilson as a notorious sociobiologist, inquiring into the colonial roots of environmentalism and its continued anti-human tendency that somehow casts all humans as guilty of soiling the environment, while striving for a human ecology of possibility, all the while humming along with Public Enemy...
I can say, yes(men), "don't believe the hype!"
and look up Klimaforum the people's COP15
Ah...I am comically misunderstood: I once recommended that the Bioneers get someone from RAFI -rural aid foundation international to talk about their work calculating the reverse debt only to see that the next year they got Rafi--a songwriter for preschoolers --you now, "Baby Beluga."
I'd like to hear more about what Matthew thinks (do you have tenure yet?) Do you think that Amy Klein looks kind of like Sarah Palin?! Is it just the glasses?
What's going on?
-Jula
Oops! I mean Naomi Klein! I think Amy is someone from my childhood.
Really, what's going on?
I love this piece; it is everything that is wrong with "analyses" of environmentalist activism all rolled up in one piece. It is hard to take writing like this seriously as an analysis of the political economy of fossil fuels -- it simply looks like another skeptical assault on environmentalism -- "look, it's those damn environmentalists, if only they would communicate properly, everything would be ok."
What's the level of public understanding and pressure for action in other countries, that haven't been targets of the doubt-and-confusion effort? How about in countries where the press has consistently exposed that effort and who's behind it?
Before you conclude that they're not what's holding us back, it'd help to look at the data.