-Caveat Lector-
Bush's Climate Follies
by Ross Gelbspan
http://www.prospect.org/print/V12/13/gelbspan-r.html
By withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocol--the attempt by 160 nations to forge a treaty
that will reduce worldwide emissions from coal combustion and oil burning, thus
averting a global-warming catastrophe--President George W. Bush trashed years of
work by European negotiators just as he was about to make his European diplomatic
debut.
By declaring climate science "unsettled" and calling on the National Academy of
Sciences (NAS) to review the dire findings of the United Nations-sponsored
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), he made an even greater
miscalculation. For just as domestic attention focused on the infuriated Europeans, the
NAS reported back that the international panel was, in fact, correct.
The outrage in Europe and Japan over Bush's pullout from the three-year-old Kyoto
talks--not to mention the Cheney-Bush energy plan to increase fossil-fuel burning by
the
world's biggest fuel burner--was loud and nearly unanimous. The thousands of angry
demonstrators who greeted Bush in Spain and Sweden mirrored the reaction of
European leaders. The Swedish government described the Kyoto withdrawal as
appalling and provocative. Other crucial nations were just as clear. Not only Japan and
Brazil but also Australia and Canada--coal-rich countries that had both supported U.S.
foot-dragging in earlier negotiations--called on Bush to reverse his decision. Even
Chinese officials blasted it as "irresponsible." (China's position was put in
perspective
by a recent New York Times report indicating that the country had cut carbon
emissions by 17 percent since 1997, even as its economy grew by 36 percent. By
contrast, U.S. emissions have risen by 4.5 percent in the same period though the
American economy grew far less.) "This is not just an environmental issue," said
British
Environment Minister Michael Meacher, summing up the magnitude of Bush's
diplomatic trouble. "It's an issue of transatlantic global foreign policy."
A succession of countries have now vowed to pursue the Kyoto goals without the
United States. It will be a tough haul, since this country is the source of 25 percent
of
the world's carbon emissions and the treaty goes into effect only if it is ratified by
55
nations whose combined emissions account for at least 55 percent of the worldwide
total. It will be even tougher if the Bush administration succeeds in pressuring the
Japanese to drop out of the process. But if, as seems likely, the rest of the
industrialized world nonetheless goes forward with climate-stabilizing efforts, these
will
further embarrass and isolate the United States diplomatically--and Bush domestically.
Economically, too, we will be left out. As other countries meet emissions goals by
deploying more clean-energy resources, Bush's policies will further cripple America's
renewable-energy industry and, ultimately, turn the United States into consumers,
rather
than producers, of wind farms, solar systems, and fuel cells.
Meanwhile, regardless of how the Kyoto efforts fare, "the United States now stands
indicted in the court of public opinion as an environmental rogue nation," according to
Phil Clapp, president of the National Environmental Trust, an influential advocacy
group
based in Washington, D.C. Clapp added: "Bush's trip may turn out to be the landmark
loss of America's moral authority around the world."
The diplomatic debacle, however, could pale in comparison to the political damage at
home. A relentless 10-year campaign of disinformation by the fossil-fuel lobby had left
many Americans uncertain about the reliability of climate science and unmoved by the
findings of the UN panel on global warming, even though the ongoing IPCC research,
under-taken by 2,000 scientists from 100 countries, is the largest, most transparent,
and most rigorously peer-reviewed scientific collaboration in history. But when the
Cheney-Bush team decided that the IPCC suffered from what their Senate point men
on the issue called an "internationalist perspective"--when the administration
determined that Americans should trust only the "American science" of the NAS--they
made a mistake that may prove to be their undoing.
The NAS report affirmed that the earth's climate is changing faster than at any time in
10,000 years and that human activities are the cause. Moreover, "American science"
also echoed the international panel's concerns about future food crises and the very
real potential for global warming to transform America's wheat fields into deserts. The
NAS even suggested that the international panel, which had predicted a sea rise of up
to three feet and temperature increases of up to 10 degrees Fahrenheit, had
understated the catastrophic potential: By limiting its projections to the next 100
years,
the IPCC "may well underestimate the magnitude of the eventual impacts," the NAS
found. The report, which generated front-page headlines across the country, will likely
mark a watershed in American public opinion.
The White House could have saved itself a lot of grief had it done even a cursory
history check. It would have found, for starters, that about half the scientists on the
international panel--and a majority of its lead authors--are Americans. In fact, back
in
1992, despite the lack of definitive evidence at that time, the NAS had already
concluded that "greenhouse warming poses a potential threat sufficient to merit prompt
response" and advised that "mitigation measures act as insurance protection against
the great uncertainties and the possibility of dramatic surprises."
But Bush allowed himself to be waltzed into a political dead end by the Neanderthal
wing of the fossil-fuel lobby--led by ExxonMobil and the Western Fuels Association--
and their paid academic mouthpieces, a group of "greenhouse skeptics" who have
long been regarded as laughingstocks in the mainstream scientific community. (In
February the most reckless and widely quoted of them, Dr. S. Fred Singer, declared in
a letter to The Washington Post that he had received no oil industry funding for more
than 20 years; but ExxonMobil documents reveal that Singer received thousands of
dollars from the oil giant as recently as 1998.)
By 1991, Western Fuels and several coal utilities had launched a half-million-dollar
public-relations campaign to "reposition global warming as theory rather than fact."
According to its strategy papers, the campaign was designed to target "older, less-
educated men ... [and] young, low-income women" in areas where electricity was
derived from coal and, preferably, in districts that had a representative on the House
Energy Committee.
Following that fraudulent campaign, Western Fuels spent $250,000 on a propaganda
video to convince audiences that global warming will actually benefit humanity by
increasing crop yields to help feed an expanding population. The video was shown
often in the White House during the first Bush presidency (insiders called it the
"favorite
movie" of John Sununu, George the elder's chief of staff). Of course, the video
overlooked at least two critical factors. The first is bugs: Insects are extremely
sensitive
to temperature changes-- and scientists agree that as the earth warms, we will see a
big increase in the population of crop-destroying, disease-spreading insects. Plant
biologists point out an even more unconscionable omission: While higher carbon
dioxide levels in the earth's atmosphere may temporarily increase plant growth near
the Arctic Circle, they will decimate food crops in the tropical regions. Even a half-
degree increase in the average temperature will cause a big fall in Southeast Asia's
rice yields and a 20 percent drop in India's wheat crop. Nonetheless, until now, the
fossil-fuel lobby had been extraordinarily successful in maintaining a drumbeat of
doubt
in the public mind. Far exceeding the reach of traditional spin, the campaign had very
nearly accomplished the privatization of scientific truth. But with the National
Academy's new report, the game is up.
One particularly telling casualty is the most academically respectable of all the
"greenhouse skeptics." Dr. Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, one of the 11 authors of the NAS report, has maintained for years that
global warming is inherently self-limiting and that its impacts will be negligible.
Lindzen
has argued that atmospheric water vapor will not amplify warming, as other scientists
assume, because it will naturally dry out at higher altitudes. But the National Academy
concludes that "water vapor feedback ... is expected to increase" and that the warming
trend is "consistent with ... the increase in upper-air water vapor and rainfall rates
over
most regions."
In other words, Lindzen--who receives $2,500 a day to consult for coal-and-oil
interests
such as Western Fuels, the Australian coal-mining lobby, and OPEC--signed off on a
report that essentially rejects his own hypothesis.
Thanks to the NAS report, the American public, already unsettled by the vivid evidence
of increasing weather extremes, now has permission to accept the grim projections of
mainstream science. And as events unfold, more and more people will make
connections between the heating of the atmosphere and events like last summer's
64,000 drought-driven wildfires in the western United States; last year's record-
breaking 84-day drought, which cost farmers in northern Texas $600 million; this
spring's long drought in the Pacific Northwest, which is intensifying California's
power
crisis by drying up its seasonal supply of hydropower; and last month's 35-inch
rainfall
in Texas, which left 20 dead and $2 billion in losses in Houston.
Given the inevitability of increasingly intense floods, droughts, heat waves, and
storms--
as well as the warming-driven proliferation of infectious diseases like West Nile virus
and Lyme disease--a public disabused of its scientific doubts will have much to be
angry about. Global warming could do to George W. Bush what the Vietnam War did to
Lyndon Johnson 33 years ago--leave him with a prematurely crippled, one-term
presidency.
Ross Gelbspan
Copyright © 2001 by The American Prospect, Inc. Preferred Citation: Ross Gelbspan,
"Bush's Climate Follies," The American Prospect vol. 12 no. 13, July 30, 2001 . This
article may not be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any kind
without prior written permission from the author. Direct questions about permissions to
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