The Green New Deal Has Put Climate Change Denial Out to Pasture
Cosmos has a terrific interview in its latest issue with Michael Mann, the professor of atmospheric science at Penn State who has been a winter soldier in the climate battles ever since inventing the "hockey stick" graph that Al Gore made famous in An Inconvenient Truth. Arguably, the most fascinating part of the interview comes toward the end, when Mann talks about the money and influencers behind climate denial, which he calls, "the most villainous act in the history of human civilization."
Along the way, Mann tosses some familiar names into the dock. We quote at length, because it's great.
In my recent book, The Madhouse Effect, we talk about what played out in the last presidential election. The assault on climate scientists, Climategate, was almost a training ground. It was the same actors and the same mission. Climategate was about trying to distract the public and the policymakers with a fake scandal going into the Copenhagen Summit [also known as the United Nations Climate Change Conference] in 2009, which was the first opportunity for meaningful progress on international climate policy in years.
A compelling case can be made that Russia’s involvement and Saudi Arabia’s potential involvement in the last [US] election was about a half-trillion-dollar oil deal between Russia and ExxonMobil that had been blocked because of the sanctions against Russia. What’s the first thing that happened under the now-infamous Paul Manafort? They changed the Republican platform to try to get rid of those sanctions. Then Trump appointed Rex Tillerson, the former head of ExxonMobil, as Secretary of State. Is that a coincidence? It was the same players and the same motive and the same disingenuity. In the case of Climategate, there have now been the better part of a dozen investigations in the US and the UK, and they have all come to the conclusion there was no impropriety on the part of the scientists whose emails had been stolen. The only wrongdoing was the criminal theft of the emails in the first place.
The science that we are doing is a threat to the world’s most powerful and wealthiest special interests. The most powerful and wealthiest special interest that has ever existed: the fossil fuel industry. They have used their immense resources to create fake scandals and to fund a global disinformation campaign aimed at vilifying the scientists, discrediting the science, and misleading the public and policymakers... it is about the short-term interests of a small number of plutocrats over the long-term welfare of this planet and the people who live on it.
It's been an interesting week in the climate wars. For example, the Green New Deal seems to have driven the Republicans as crazy as its primary proponent in the House does. Right up to the president*, the primary response has been to ooga-booga-death-panels! the whole notion. In El Paso, for example, the president*, because he doesn't know anything about anything, told his gathering of bot-minded fans that AOC plans to ban automobiles, airplanes, and cows. (We'll return to the cows later.)
Mitch McConnell has decided again to be a clever dick and put the proposal up to a vote, figuring that it somehow puts Democratic candidates in a bind. Tom Cotton, the bobble-throated slapdick from Arkansas, thinks the media is giving AOC a Stalinesque free ride on the monumental scandal best summed up as something-something-FAQ. Howard Schultz, the sole occupant of his own political universe, calls it "immoral." The denizens of the lower reaches of the conservative lint-trap are even more exercised.
Let's leave aside for a moment the fact that the idea of a GND is wildly popular among the people who will be voting for the next 40 years, so maybe McConnell isn't as much clever as he is a dick on this one. The GND forces on people two realities with which their 30 years of climate denial has managed to insulate them. First, the problem is so severe that it is going to require a massive national response even to mitigate the effects of the crisis which are affecting us now. (This is why the Pentagon has taken the crisis as an existential one.) Second, the denial argument itself is completely out of steam.
This is why you're hearing so much from Republicans about how "innovation" and "entrepreneurship" are going to bail us out. Senator Ben Sasse is one of the leading illusionists on this front at the moment, as is Cory Gardner of Colorado, who faces a ticking doomsday clock on his re-election in 2020. Last Sunday, on Fox News via The Hill, Sasse said:
“What the U.S. needs to do is participate in a long-term conversation about how you get to innovation, and it's going to need to be a conversation again that doesn’t start with alarmism. But that starts with some discussion of the magnitude of the challenge, the global elements to it and how the U.S. shouldn't just do this as a feel-good measure but some sort of innovative proposal.”
A number of things jump out here. First of all, we may not have time for a "long-term conversation" about how we confront this impending catastrophe. Second, we already are losing pieces of Alaska and Louisiana, Miami turns into a lagoon with some regularity these days, and Sasse's home state is being battered by wild swings of extreme weather, so maybe a touch of alarmism is warranted. And last, I don't even know what that last sentence means, except that Sasse seems to be reiterating that we should all relax and talk about it some more, chilling until the next Ice Age. One thing I do know: we aren't going to laissez-faire our way out of it, no matter how hard Republicans pray to the Deregulation Fairy.
So, in sum, the GND is at least an acknowledgement of the gravity of the situation, and an acknowledgement of the fact that it's going to take a whopping national and international commitment to ensure that this planet remains habitable. This is the Republican response:
1) Cow farts.
2) Heh, heh.
Sometimes, I just wish the polar bears would get here and end the whole thing.
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