Big Green Lie

ExxonMobil is leading an astonishing cast as a "prominent sponsor" of a so-called "Green Gala" by the International Conservation Caucus Foundation. Does partying with the likes of the Nature Conservancy and the World Wildlife Federation make them green-by-association? Or perhaps they will pay for the carbon offsets to fly in beef from Texas and roses from Ecuador?

ExxonMobil has along history of spin and a leading position on this blog's Roll of Shame. Climate Progress (h/t) notes:

The oil giant has spent millions of dollars over the years as a principal sponsor of the global warming disinformation campaign aimed at stopping efforts to conserve a livable climate — even after they said they stopped such funding.

This is the corporate greenwashing version of the Big Lie. I'm not sure which dismays more, the brazen effort to jump onto the green bandwagon, or the wagonmasters in the environmental community who have prostituted their ideals and traded green for gold.

Anecdotal Reasoning on Climate Change

There's an old joke about the weather: Everyone talks about it, but no one ever does anything about it. When it comes to the climate, however, we really are doing something, and not in a good way. The distinction between weather and climate is important; treating them interchangeably confers undue importance to the transient weather while it trivializes the significance of consequential climate trends.

Many people are confused about climate change. It's not hard to understand some of the confusion because many laypeople find the numbers of climate change small or largely meaningless. How can measurements of invisible gases in parts per million have any real significance? (Too bad greenhouse gases aren't bright pink so everyone could see their accumulation.) Why should anyone care about a temperature change of a few degrees? (If it were your body you would have a fever.) Besides, wouldn't a little warming be a good thing anyway, since we'd spend less to heat our homes? (The effects go far beyond temperature; other costs will dwarf any such savings.)

The most pernicious of these "common sense" arguments against the significance of climate change draws on the unfortunate popularization of it as "global warming." People smirk, "Quite a cold snap lately, eh? Well, so much for global warming!" Otherwise intelligent people utter such nonsense perhaps because it seems innocuous--just a throw-away comment about the weather, everyone's favorite small talk subject.

Others are ideologically motivated to distort the importance of weather observations. A current favorite is claiming that 2008 "was the coldest year this century." This disingenuous phrasing is crafted to imply that 2008 was the coldest in a hundred years, rather than what it really was: the (marginally) coldest of the 8 years of the current century. The statement also avoids the deeper truth, that every year this century is on the top-10 hottest list, and 2008 was warmer than all but two years of the 20th century.

Similar foolishness, drawing climate trend conclusions from recent cold weather, was recently dashed out by the Telegraph, one the leading bastions of dotty UK wingnuttery. (The "Telegraph"? Isn't that like getting your science news from the "Buggy Whip"?)

George Monbiot at the Guardian dispatches:

The weather of the past few weeks would have been unexceptional in the early 1980s. Today it is being cited as definitive proof that man-made climate change can't be happening. There's a splendid example of such blithering idiocy here: Gerald Warner, writing in the Telegraph, contends that the cold snap lends more support to the idea of a new ice age than to global warming theory. Were he to apply this reasoning consistently, he would have to write another blog on Sunday showing that, due to the unseasonably warm temperatures the Met Office forecasts for the UK this weekend, global warming is definitely happening. And the following week, if there's another cold snap, he should predict a new ice age again.

To infer long term climate trends from the immediate weather is to generalize from a single instance. It's reasoning by anecdote.

There's an evident need for factual, clear and straightforward education about climate change (as distinct from the weather) to correct uninformed comment and to counteract the depressingly relentless logorrhea of deliberate misinformation from climate change deniers. Sensible information that debunks climate change myths can readily be found online here and here, as well as routinely on many excellent blogs, including Climate Progress, Gristmill, DeSmogBlog, and Real Climate, amongst numerous others. The 70% of the public that relies on TV for most of their news will need to be disabused of such lazy notions, gently but firmly, by the rest of us.

What is a Conservative?

When it comes to climate change, and to the environment generally, what does being a conservative mean?

It's resolution season, as well as the time for posting lists of predictions and top-10 retrospectives of the past year. The hard-working folks at Climate Progress posted their list of the top stories of 2008, and I'm going to quote in its entirety their #2 because it almost certainly will be a top story of the coming year as well:

Conservatives go all in on climate denial and delay. While the grim implications of the science and observational data discussed above have become painfully obvious to everyone else, conservatives simply refuse to accept reality. For instance, even though a very warm 2008 makes this the hottest decade in recorded history by far — and even though 2008 was about 0.1°C warmer than the decade of the 1990s as a whole (even with a La-Niña-fueled cool winter) for some deniers, “2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved.” Seriously.

The entire conservative movement, including pundits, think tanks, and politicians, now appears willing to stake the future of humanity on their willful ignorance.

• Virtually every conservative in the Senate voted against the Boxer-Lieberman-Warner climate bill even though that bill was inadequate to stopping catastrophic warming.


• James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) believes a cap & trade bill will return GOP to power “in 2010″


• Grover Norquist asserts that calls to take global warming more seriously will be “cheerfully ignored“


• 64% of GOP voters say global warming denier Palin is their top choice for 2012,


• “Several prominent party officials said they believe the GOP’s message is fundamentally sound when it comes to energy policy, pointing to that issue as one of the few political bright spots in recent years.“


• The Heritage Foundation even opposes energy efficiency


• The American Enterprise Institute is still crazy with denial and delay after all these years


• The Cato Institute believes adaptation is cheaper than mitigation.


• Columns by Charles Krauthammer and George Will and John Tierney have become science-free zones that demand more climate research while inveighing against all serious climate action and against all non-nuclear clean tech.

That’s why the deniers are winning, especially with GOP voters or rather only with GOP voters.

Doubtless there are conservatives who disagree with some or all of these positions, but broadly this is the position of the movement, embraced by most conservative leaders and promulgated endlessly in a passive and uncritical media. Politically, this position looks like a loser because a majority of voters both in the United States and worldwide think climate change is an urgent problem that needs immediate action. There are many writing now in the aftermath of the November elections about what is next for the conservative movement and its primary political embodiment, the Republicans. It makes for sometimes interesting reading, but it misses the point--policy must be the focus of any climate change discussion. For political reasons leaders may wish to argue policy on such things as flag burning, GLBT rights, stem cell research and the rest, where resultant policies do certainly affect people; however, climate change is a policy question of another kind--it affects the very existence of everyone on Earth, and for generations to follow. Climate change policy is too important to be treated as another football by the likes of Sen. Sensenbrenner, Inhofe and others for scoring political points.

President-elect Obama has been refreshingly unequivocal:

Few challenges facing America — and the world — are more urgent than combating climate change. The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear. Sea levels are rising. Coastlines are shrinking. We’ve seen record drought, spreading famine, and storms that are growing stronger with each passing hurricane season.Climate change and our dependence on foreign oil, if left unaddressed, will continue to weaken our economy and threaten our national security....

Now is the time to confront this challenge once and for all. Delay is no longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response. The stakes are too high. The consequences, too serious.

The politics of the conservative position rely on a willful rejection of science, of facts, and a whole-hearted and exultant embrace of ignorance. The result is an obstinacy couched as standing on principle; but what principle is it? Is it truly a conservative principle, or something else?

Conservatism used to stand for something altruistic and prudent and reflected in the root of the word--conserve what we have. Eschew grand schemes. Keep it small and simple. Conservatism doesn't suffer changes unless they are truly essential to preserve our health, our safety, or our prosperity. None of these broader ideals are evident in the conservative approach to climate change, which is little more than playing politics, using many parts of the standard political toolkit--misinformation (it's not a big deal!), fear peddling (we can't afford it!), faux patriotism (government action is socialism!), mendacity (climate change is unproven!), and especially the creation of strawmen (look how cold the weather is this winter!) and bogeymen (liberal elites!) to distract from real issues, real economics and real science. The public and the voters aren't buying this tired old charade so much anymore.

A real conservative principle would seek to preserve core societal values as embodied in our governing documents: life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. Instead, over time, the core conservative principle has become more one of preserving the status quo, and nowhere is this more clear than in the economic area. How is it a conservative principle to protect the right of environmental degradation by the coal or oil industries and externalize the costs on all of us? What conservative principle tolerates the destruction of public lands for private profit, using public subsidies and threatening the very viability of communities? Since when is it more conservative to subsidize private interests even at the expense of our national security?

Is it a conservative principle to oppose any change that creates costs for private interests? Sometimes it seems so, especially when the subject turns to taxes, against which conservatives endlessly inveigh. No one likes taxes of course, and government must not impose costs without very good reasons. Climate change is a good reason because it threatens something more important than profits (and yes, there are things more important.) Now, I don't wish to provoke an argument of political philosophy here about capitalism, free markets, taxes, the abject failure of laissez-faire economics, and so on, although such an argument needs a more vigorous and broad-based airing in the dominant media than it is getting.

The key point is, that if conservatives truly deplore and resist the creation of economic costs on people and businesses by government, then they should be in favor of action on climate change. Government inaction on climate change will impose substantially larger costs on all of us than would result from a fact-based, scientifically-informed proactive policy. There are ample current examples of how a failure to pay for an ounce of prevention has resulted in the need for a pound of cure: exhibit one is our ongoing financial system implosion and the cost of the Splurge. More costs will surely be borne by ourselves and our descendants before economic stability is restored. Shall we learn nothing from this? One lesson plain to me and to many many others is that a doctrinaire opposition to change is dangerously simplistic; we absolutely must not assume that doing less always means doing better.

Change, as I've said before, is more than a slogan, it's an unavoidable reality. If conservatism means a resistance to change, any change--unless it is one that facilitates a reversion to any earlier and presumably better age--then understanding the conservative principle at work here becomes suddenly simpler. The result of preventing any meaningful action to arrest climate change will be continued resource depletion, wealth destruction (for all but the depleters), an exponential increase in numbers of a landless and desperate underclass, and a corresponding explosion in the number of people no longer able to provide for themselves the very basics of survival.

These conditions represent the New Dark Ages and the triumph of political system based on class ownership--feudalism. Has conservatism become synonymous with atavism?

While history can be instructive it does not provide eternal solutions to our problems. The examples of Easter Island and the Mayans show the folly of ignoring reality. Conservatives and others need to discard unexamined shibboleths, and embrace needed changes so that we can preserve the values we all believe.