On this day, 15 June 1994 the Canberra Times publishes a frankly embarrassing piece by IPA operative Andrew McIntyre in “No proof of global warming” (Canberra Times, June 15, p.17).
A rebuttal by Greenpeace was published on 20th and tireless climate scientist Neville Nicholls had two letters published on 26th and 29th.
But the time taken to rebut nonsense is time you don’t spend advancing a positive agenda. As the great thinker Toni Morrison said of racism, part of its power is in distraction and exhaustion…
“The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.
Why this matters The denial and delay and stupidity rolls on and on and on.
What happened next?
McIntyre had another one – ahead of carbon tax decision, 30 November 1994
The Canberra Times has been much better than this, both before and since. Solid newspaper.
On this day, 25 years ago, (June 8th 1997) US business interests went very public in their ongoing campaign against both domestic legislation but also international agreements on climate change.
The background, quickly – by 1989 US business interests were pushing back hard against (some) politicians concern about “the greenhouse effect.” They created a front group, with the typically misleading name “The Global Climate Coalition” to slow down (or ideally, from their perspective, stop) moves towards putting a price on carbon dioxide, encouraging renewables etc. They rendered the UNFCCC largely toothless, and they’d killed off President Clinton’s proposed BTU tax. But by 1997, pressure was growing. A big international meeting was to be held in December 1997, in Kyoto, at which rich countries were supposed to come up with plans not merely to stabilise emissions, but actually reduce them.
On 8 June 1997, the Business Roundtable sponsored full-page advertisements in the US press signed by 130 CEOs, arguing against mandatory emissions limitations at the forthcoming Kyoto conference. Eighty Business Roundtable members did not endorse the advertisements, however. Monsanto had led an unsuccessful effort to draft an alternative text, which acknowledged that sufficient scientific evidence had accumulated to warrant concern and industry’s engagement in developing precautionary measures. This dissenting view was brought to President Clinton’s attention at the June 1997 meeting of the President’s Council of Advisers for Science and Technology (PCAST). According to Jon Holdren, Harvard scientist and chair of the PCAST panel on energy, the President’s awareness of the minority industry faction had significant political ramifications: ‘We actually did get the President off the dime at that meeting. He mobilized an interagency task force, and started a process which eventually converged on a set of policy recommendations for Kyoto.’
Splits within the business front (you go, Monsanto, you cuddly treehuggers you!) meant that President Clinton had a little more wiggle room. For what THAT was worth. It’s worth pondering that, by the way – this often happens – different businesses/sectors, with different interests and vulnerabilities, perceive the best course of action differently. Trade associations/business groupings are often sites for those conflicts.
What happened next?
We shall come back to the Byrd-Hagel resolution soon… Kyoto got agreed, and signed. The US and Australia pulled out before ratifying. It became international law because the Russians wanted into the WTO. It was toothless, and not replaced at Copenhagen. Then in Paris… oh, blah blah blah. The. Emissions. Have. Kept. Climbing.
On this day, May 25, 2011 noted climate scientist and deep thinker Alan Jones [that is irony – the man is a particularly shocking “shock jock”] tried to undermine a climate scientist on his radio show.
The context was that the minority Labor government of Julia Gillard was trying to get a carbon price (“a carbon tax” according to its opponents) through Parliament. There was an extremely virulent agitation against this.
Jones had David Karoly, Professor of Meteorology at the University of Melbourne and a contributor to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on his show.
Jones: Are you being paid for being on the Government’s Climate Commission Science Advisory Panel?…
Karoly: No, my salary is not being paid by that.
Jones: Are you in any, and in receipt of any, benefits or funds or anything at all from the…
Karoly: I am receiving a travel allowance to cover the costs of going to meetings of the Science Advisory Panel and I am receiving a small retainer which is substantially less than your daily salary.
Jones: So you’re paid by the Government and then you give an opinion on the science of climate change. Have you ever heard about he who pays the piper calls the tune?’ (Cited in Barry 2011b) (Ward, 2015: 235)
Why this matters.
This is a classic technique, to say that if someone gets any money at all from Them, then they and their work can be dismissed without any discussion of its merits, shortcomings, implications.
It’s a lazy (but necessary for the thick) shortcut to “winning.”
What happened next?
The Gillard legislation got up, and was then repealed by the next Prime Minister, Tony “Wrecking Ball” Abbott.
Gillard lost a leadership challenge in 2013, was replaced by Kevin Rudd.
Jones finished as a radio presenter in 2020. His Sky News Australia contract was not renewed.
On May 14, 2002 in Washington DC the “Frontiers of Freedom” [see DesmogBlog entry] held a meeting in Washington DC – the kind of thing you do if you’re trying – as they were – to make it easier for rightwing politicians to vote against things domestic and international agreements on environment and climate. At this point, the George W Bush had pulled the US out of the Kyoto Protocol. A month later, Australian Prime Minister John Howard would do the same.
This event had the usual suspects, including Malcolm Wallop, who had been a Senator for Wyoming, and had attended a pre-Kyoto conference in Canberra in 1997,
Sen. Malcolm Wallop (ret.), chairman — The Science and Environmental Policy Project and The Cooler Heads Coalition —
John Daly, climate scientist from Australia —
Dr. S. Fred Singer, climate scientist from United States —
Christopher C. Horner, counsel to the Cooler Heads Coalition and senior fellow at CEI.
Why this matters
It is at events like these that the hegemony of the fossil way of thinking is sustained. Soothing blandishments about impact science being “junk science”, about everything being just fine, if only the Leftards would shut up/be silenced, are repeated.
What happened next
These guys have kept winning, really, haven’t they? Daly died in 2004. I just stumbled across some very forensic work on who funded him. See here.
On this day, May 6 1997 25 years ago, the “Cooler Heads – see what they did there? – coalition” was announced, with such noted climate scientists, as Danish statistician, Bjorn Lomborg. The leader was… Myron Ebell, of Exxon…
Myron Ebell, director of global warming and international environmental policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), was listed as the “group leader” when the the Cooler Heads Coalition was initially formed, and appears to maintain an important role. [18]
The context was that the Kyoto meeting at which emissions reductions for rich countries would be on the agenda – was coming. And CHC would, with an international membership, would enable opponents of it in the United States to point to some sort of international coalition of actors
By calling themselves the “Cooler Heads”, they are claiming the high intellectual ground and instantly mocking their opponents or framing their opponents as hotheads and alarmist – it’s a nicely chosen title. Some PR flak probably got a promotion for it.
Why this matters
We need to think in terms of a constant flux, push and counter push among actors, the actors who were trying to legitimise their own side and delegitimise their opponents, as we saw with the Unabomber thing the Heartland outfit did. This is a battle for hearts and minds and legitimacy.
What happened next
Lomborg kept publishing and having been members of these sorts of coalitions since. And the carbon dioxide continues to accumulate.
This met with howls of outrage and probably marks the beginning of the end or the middle of the end for the Heartland Institute as a useful-to-the-right player. Big donors to it fled….
Why this matters
What happens time and again is these right wing flak/flank organisations get overconfident, believe their own publicity get captured by the culture warriors and overplay their hand have to be disowned by the less-swivel-eyed but equally (more) ecocidal outfits.
Then the constituent parts of the machine are broken down and reconstituted. You saw it with the Global Climate Coalition by about 1996 (with their attacks on Ben Santer) – they were becoming a reputational risk for some of the more mainstream and cautious members. You see it with the Tasman Institute in Australia, and other outfits. Culture warrior-dom contains the seeds of its own destruction, to get all dialectical?
What happened next?
Kaczynski is still in jail, will die there.
The Heartland Institute is still around, heckling the Pope and spamming science teachers.
On this day, April 28 1975, Newsweek ran a story ”The Cooling World” (pdf here) based on the idea that an ice age was imminent because of the amount of particulates thrown up into the atmosphere.
It wasn’t alone in this – The previous year (June 24, 1974) Time had an article titled “Another Ice Age?” which said “the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades” but noted that “Some scientists… think that the cooling trend may be only temporary.”
These articles have been used ever since, as the part of the myth that, in the 1970s, “all scientists were convinced that an ice age was coming. And therefore, carbon dioxide build-up is just the latest iteration of a scare that we need to pay no attention to.” This idea has faded somewhat in mainstream culture, but it still persists in the nuttier corners of the internet.
What we learn is that journalism around climate is very difficult because the issues are very complex, and that people choose not to accept the journalists and scientists can get it wrong and change their mind because they are looking to have a gotcha moment.
On April 26 1998 the New York Times ran a front page story. It began thus.
Industry opponents of a treaty to fight global warming have drafted an ambitious proposal to spend millions of dollars to convince the public that the environmental accord is based on shaky science.
Among their ideas is a campaign to recruit a cadre of scientists who share the industry‘s views of climate science and to train them in public relations so they can help convince journalists, politicians and the public that the risk of global warming is too uncertain to justify controls on greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide that trap the sun’s heat near Earth.
An informal group of people working for big oil companies, trade associations and conservative policy research organizations that oppose the treaty have been meeting recently at the Washington office of the American Petroleum Institute to put the plan together.
Cushman, J. 1998. Industrial Group Plans to Battle Climate Treaty. New York Times, 26 April, p.1
The context is that the US had signed the Kyoto Protocol (this in itself was a meaningless gesture – it only had force if ratified, and the Clinton administration had no intention of trying to get it through the Senate, especially given the previous year’s Byrd-Hagel resolution, which had insisted the US should not sign any treaty that didn’t put emissions constraints on developing countries (looking at you, China). This was of course exactly the opposite of what they’d signed off on in 1992 (Rio) and 1995 (Berlin Mandate) but hey, consistency and hobgoblins, amirite?
On one level, this was hardly “news” – anyone who had been paying any attention at all from 1989 onwards; the George Marshall Foundation got going on climate, and then the Global Climate Coalition and the “Information Clearinghouse on the Environment” (1991) and the attacks on IPCC second assessment report by various well-connected loons, and THEN the attacks on Kyoto in the run up to the meeting in 1997.
See for example Cushman’s report on 7th December 1997, during the Kyoto meeting – “Intense Lobbying Against Global Warming Treaty: U.S. Negotiators Brief Industry Groups and Environmentalists Separately in Kyoto”
Why this matters
A part of the reason (not the most important part necessarily, and not the part we can do that much about) “we” have done so little on climate change is because of staggeringly successful campaigns of predatory delay.
See also – Ben Franta’s work on the American Petroleum Institute.
On this day, the 23rd of April 2009 journalist Andy Revkin broke a story in The New York Times about the Global Climate Coalition.
The Global Climate Coalition – cuddly-sounding name aside – was an industry pressure group that had between 1989 and 2002 been a major player in stopping any meaningful international action on climate change.
Revkin’s story – you can read it here – was that the head honchos at the Global Climate Coalition got given the truth about climate change by their own scientists,, and they chose to ignore it because it didn’t fit their in needs for predatory delay and doubt
Why this matters.
We need to know in the words of Nick Tomalin, the British journalist who died in 1973, that “they lie, they lie, they lie”. If the truth is going to get in the way of their profits, they will lie. And these lies will be repeated by time policy wonks to create a “common sense” that maintains the status quo. Nothing that Gramsci would be surprised that nothing that you or I should be surprised that
On the 19th of April 2002, the chair of the IPCC, Bob Watson failed to get a second term as chair, even though he wanted one, and (almost) everyone else wanted him to have it.
“At a plenary session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in Geneva, Robert Watson, a British-born US atmospheric scientist who has been its chairman since 1996, was replaced by an Indian railway engineer and environmentalist, R K Pachauri.
Dr Pachauri received 76 votes to Dr Watson’s 49 after a behind-the-scenes diplomatic campaign by the US to persuade developing countries to vote against Dr Watson, according to diplomats. The British delegation argued for Dr Watson and Dr Pachauri to share the chairmanship.
The US campaign came to light after the disclosure of a confidential memorandum from the world’s biggest oil company, Exxon-Mobil, to the White House, proposing a strategy for his removal.”
tt’s an example of how the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change works – the word to look for is governmental.
Why this matters.
We’re not getting the politics- free science, which the denialists say they want. We’re getting the science that has been deemed acceptable to the politicians who are often little more than Meat Puppets for vested interests.
And this is a very, very familiar story.
What happened next?
The IPCC has kept going. The message hasn’t changed. Except the time horizons keep shrinking (have shrunk to nowt).
