The Bush administration appears to be succeeding in its efforts at the world climate change meeting in Bali to block any meaningful action. And back in Washington, the House and Senate, despite being in the hands of a party that claims to take climate change seriously, are throwing section after section of the once highly touted energy bill over the side, in a thus far desperate attempt to whittle the bill down far enough to at least get 6o votes in the Senate, if not survive a threatened Bush veto.
These non-actions are exactly what the latest generation of global warming delayers like Bjorn Lomborg have been calling for. How could such a small handful of naysayers have such an enormous effect on policy?
If you want to see one of the best answers around, check out The Denial Machine, a recently updated show on the Canadian Broadcasting Company's "the fifth estate." In a 40-minute show, host Bob McKeown does an outstanding job of going back in time to show us a detailed history of the birth and rise of the oil-industry funded group of global deniers.
Early on in the show, I thought something had gone wrong. Instead of talking about oil and energy, McKeown went off into the history of how the tobacco industry fought back for decades against claims that cigarettes caused cancer. Very nice Bob, ,but what did a panel of tobacco industry CEOs lying to a Congressional committee have to do with global warming deniers.
Everything. McKeown makes a solid case that the oil industry adopted the tobacco industry's denial model, lock, stock, and barrel. APCO, the international public relations agency, worked for the tobacco industry. Then the oil industry hired APCO to manage the global denying fight. Some of the same men who appeared as scientific experts for the tobacco industry pop up years later, only now they are testifying that global warming is a hoax. One of the best known of these labile scientists is S. Fred Singer. McKeown also shows how the oil companies used a variety of foundations and front groups to wash their money, making it hard for the public to understand that it was the oil companies who were actually funding prominent denier scientists.
The other principal villain that McKeown pulls out of the mud is Republican pollster/strategist Frank Luntz. Luntz wrote a famous 16-page memo in which he explained to Republican candidates, on a word-by-word basis, how to confuse the voters about global warming. For example, Luntz said that Republicans should never use the term "global warming," that they should say "climate change" instead. As Luntz tells McKeown in an interview, warming sounds bad, while climate change sounds less threatening, like something that will happen over a long period of time. Never call yourself an environmentalist: too "radical." McKeown then showed a clip of President Bush talking about "climate change" in which Bush refers to himself as a "conservationist."
The Denial Machine is a great show, far and away the single best visual presentation I've seen of why the United States continues to be the world's biggest obstacle to dealing with global warming.(The show was first broadcast in 2006, and updated and rebroadcast on October 24, 2007.)
