Er, read the NY Times editorial page today. Holy Crap.
In Climate Denial, Again
Former Vice President Dick Cheney has to be smiling. With one exception, none of the Republicans running for the Senate — including the 20 or so with a serious chance of winning — accept the scientific consensus that humans are largely responsible for global warming.
The candidates are not simply rejecting solutions, like putting a price on carbon, though these, too, are demonized. They are re-running the strategy of denial perfected by Mr. Cheney a decade ago, repudiating years of peer-reviewed findings about global warming and creating an alternative reality in which climate change is a hoax or conspiracy.
Some candidates are emphatic in their denial, like the Nevada Republican Sharron Angle, who flatly rejects “the man-caused climate change mantra of the left.” Others are merely wiggly, like California’s Carly Fiorina, who says, “I’m not sure.” Yet, over all (the exception being Mark Kirk in Illinois), the Republicans are huddled around an amazingly dismissive view of climate change.
A few may genuinely believe global warming is a left-wing plot. Others may be singing the tune of corporate benefactors. And many Republicans have seized on the cap-and-trade climate bill as another way to paint Democrats as out-of-control taxers.
In one way or another, though, all are custodians of a strategy whose guiding principle has been to avoid debate about solutions to climate change by denying its existence — or at least by diminishing its importance. The strategy worked, destroying hopes for Congressional action while further confusing ordinary citizens for whom global warming was already a remote and complex matter. It was also remarkably heavy-handed.
According to Congressional inquiries, White House officials, encouraged by Mr. Cheney’s office, forced the Environmental Protection Agency to remove sections on climate change from separate reports in 2002 and 2003. (Christine Todd Whitman, then the E.P.A. administrator, has since described the process as “brutal.”)
The administration also sought to control or censor Congressional testimony by federal employees and tampered with other reports in order to inject uncertainty into the climate debate and minimize threats to the environment.
Nothing, it seemed, could crack the administration’s denial — not Tony Blair of Britain and other leaders who took climate change seriously; not Mrs. Whitman (who eventually quit after being undercut by Mr. Cheney, who worked for the energy company Halliburton before he became vice president and received annual checks while in office); and certainly not the scientists.
In 2007, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its most definitive statement on the human contribution to climate change, Mr. Cheney insisted that there was not enough evidence to just “sort of run out and try to slap together some policy that’s going to try to solve the problem.” To which Mrs. Whitman, by then in private life, said: “I don’t see how he can say that with a straight face anymore.”
Nowadays, it is almost impossible to recall that in 2000, George W. Bush promised to cap carbon dioxide, encouraging some to believe that he would break through the partisan divide on global warming. Until the end of the 1990s, Republicans could be counted on to join bipartisan solutions to environmental problems. Now they’ve disappeared in a fog of disinformation, an entire political party parroting the Cheney line.
I agree with basically everything in this editorial. And I wish more people knew about the censorship of science in the executive branch agencies under the Bush administration – it was horrible and wrong. And it really happened. But mostly I am surprised to see the mainstream media actually go after this issue with a vengeance. It’s about damn time. I feel less lonely now.
Yes, I saw the article yesterday. “Same old NYT”, I thought. Not sure why you’re surprised to see it – I’ve been seeing this sort of thing in the MSM for many years.
The Republicans are simply following the public mood, and the trend in events. Fashions come and fashions go, and the AGW scare is now firmly on the way out – well on its way to being generally discredited. Or at least, so the more sceptical Republicans are willing to bet.
This bit is quite funny though.
“In one way or another, though, all are custodians of a strategy whose guiding principle has been to avoid debate about solutions to climate change by denying its existence…”
First, it wasn’t the sceptics who invented the phrase “the debate is over”, nor the side that has more commonly refused to debate. (For whatever reason.) And secondly, all sceptics believe climate change exists and always has existed – the argument is over whether it is anthropogenic, outside the bounds of natural variability, or is going to be catastrophic. I realise that “climate change” is a code phrase for a more extended hypothesis (useful for giving the impression that any evidence of changes in climate is automatically evidence that it was caused by man), but even then, to say sceptics say it doesn’t exist oversimplifies a wide spectrum of sceptical opinion.
The issue of having one viewpoint ignored, marginalised, blocked, or edited out of the official story is one that sceptics would of course support themselves. There was that EPA official (Alan Carlin, I think) who tried to get the EPA to do a serious assessment of contrary opinion and check whether there was anything to it, instead of simply taking the IPCC’s word for everything without looking at it. He got dumped on from a great height, and his work was rejected. There are plenty of other examples.
I suppose you would respond that it’s legitimate for the government to exclude contributions it considers to be incorrect, or poor science. But this point applies with equal force to Mr Cheney’s office’s actions. Having just been told by the IAC report that you have all overdone the ‘level of confidence’ thing, why is it necessarily unreasonable to “inject uncertainty” into a topic we all know to be uncertain? Is the IAC’s interference “horrible and wrong”, too?
I suppose it is almost impossible nowadays to recall the Byrd-Hagel resolution, and the partisan breakdown of the vote on it. There seems to be this common myth that George Bush was solely responsible for the whole thing, as he was for every evil that has walked the Earth since the dawn of civilisation.
My understanding was that Bush (as opposed to Cheney) officially held to the same view as expressed in Byrd-Hagel, that global warming was a problem, that CO2 from China or India worked the same way and was just as bad as that from the US, and it required all nations to take unified action, not just the rich ones. That they would not be so hypocritical as to take part in measures that would have absolutely no detectable effect on the climate (even by the IPCC’s own calculations), but would simply effect massive wealth redistribution between nations. They believed there was simply no democratic mandate for the sort of measures that would actually be required to be effective (even in the US, let alone across the whole world), and to do anything else while pretending it would or could save the climate would be unethical.
But I suppose ethics and whether politicians really have any are a matter of opinion. Anyway, things have now changed, and they don’t even believe to the extent that they once did. And after November, I expect things are going to change even more.
To answer you’re final point – you’re certainly not alone. Far from it! People have been complaining about the censoring of science in this area for many years. And I’m sure you feel the same way about it as we do.