“There are many true things that are not useful for the vulgar crowd to know; and certain things, which although they are false it is expedient for the people

to believe otherwise.”

- Augustine of Hippo, City of God, 426 A.D.

Car salesmen and burger tycoons have sabotaged the most important decision of our generation.

As the highly-anticipated Copenhagen climate summit limps toward indecision, the largest money-making corporations on the planet privately celebrate their ability to undermine science and hijack the international political process.

The US – the greatest historic source of greenhouse gases – set the tone of duplicity in Copenhagen by offering “provisional targets” (translation: fantasy targets) and “politically binding” agreements (translation: non-binding) and by replacing the 1990 greenhouse gas baseline with a 2005 baseline (to make the non-binding, fantasy “targets” sound more impressive.) China played along with this deception by offering to “cut emissions … relative to economic growth,” known as “carbon intensity reductions.” (Translation: no reduction at all). China’s actual emissions, and the world’s emissions, will continue to increase through the next decade.

A year ago – as research data showed rates of melting ice and rising methane accelerating faster than the most extreme International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projections – it appeared that Copenhagen represented humanity’s last chance to reverse global warming. Now, decisive action appears to be melting with the ice sheets. Apologists for business-as-usual have forged scientific rigor into “uncertainty,” spun lies into doctrine, offered frivolous quibbling for serious debate, masqueraded corruption as compromise, and finally delivered double-talk for real commitment.

Like Augustine – who sixteen centuries ago rationalized war and torture for his bosses in the Roman state religion – our own modern sophists spin truth, rationalize crime, and scorn genuine science. Like ancient patricians, modern corporate royalty devise evermore extravagant comforts for themselves while banishing dispossessed multitudes to the evaporating elements. And how did the wealthiest captains of industry sabotage the climate action that might have saved our progeny from a century of chaos? As history has taught us: follow the money.

Crime of the Epoch

“ Ecology… if taken seriously as an instrument for the long-run welfare of mankind, would endanger the assumptions and practices accepted

by modern societies.

Paul Sears (1964)

Four years ago, in December 2005, the IPCC published an upbeat “Report on demonstrable progress under the Kyoto Protocol,” showing European nations on course, as promised, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by eight percent from the 1990 baseline levels.

Meanwhile, in the United States, polls conducted by the University of Maryland and Chicago Council on Foreign Relations showed that over 70 percent of US citizens supported the Kyoto Treaty and carbon emission reductions. The developed nations, responsible for the scale of global warming, appeared ready to act.

However, behind the scenes, in private board rooms and industry front groups, a powerful cadre of fossil fuel executives had a different and darker plan: Sabotage Kyoto and undermine the best scientific minds of our era. Like any other corporate project, these executives began by striking a budget.

In 2008, the U.S. oil and gas industry added $46 million to its existing $82 million lobby budget, specifically to undermine climate action leading up to Copenhagen. This massive crusade – $128 million, 770 companies, and 2,340 lobbyists – set out to control the U.S. Congress and confuse the unsuspecting public. Meanwhile, American coal companies invested $40 million to sell the illusion of “clean coal,” while failing to install sequestration technology in even one single power plant.

The campaign to deny human-based global warming and spread misinformation about climate science has been documented by hundreds of journalists, including David Adam and George Monbiot at the UK Guardian, Elizabeth Kolbert at The New Yorker magazine, and Andrew Revkin at The New York Times. Internet sites such as The Royal Society, OpenSecrets, PR Watch, DeSmogBlog, and Greenpeace’s ExxonSecrets have exposed the denialist tricks and tracked money back to the corporations that funded them. A new book by DeSmogBlog writers James Hoggan and Richard Littlemore, Climate Cover Up, documents the historic facts of this dark crusade.

The campaign to sow confusion about global warming has been funded by ExxonMobil, Shell Oil, BP, Texaco, the American Petroleum Institute, the Western Fuels Association, coal companies, and automobile companies such as General Motors, DaimlerChryler, and Ford. According to records kept by Bob Ward at the London School of Economics, Exxon has continued to subsidize lies about global warming for three years since promising to stop.

The attack on modern science resembles Seventeenth Century attempts to deny the cosmological observations of Copernicus and Galileo, and Nineteenth Century attempts to deny the biological observations of Lamarck and Darwin. Whereas the status quo once burned annoying scientists at the stake, they now bury them under a tsunami of public relations hype. 

Science by slogan

“… one of the most disgusting stories ever hidden about corporate disinformation …proof of an intergenerational crime.”

Dr. David Suzuki, geneticist, ecologist on Climate Cover-Up

Rather than use their resources to support data collection, the denial campaign invested in advertising slogans and public relations pitch artists. They created phony “citizens” groups, fake “green” astroturf organizations such as the Greening Earth Society (Western Fuels); the Global Climate Coalition (Exxon, Shell, GM); and the Natural Resources Stewardship Project (Canadian Gas Association) with the stated goal to “counter the Kyoto Protocol and other greenhouse gas reduction schemes.” They hired anyone who could pass as a “scientist” or “environmentalist,” as long as they repeated the industry talking points.

Frank Luntz – a U.S. public relations mercenary, who once concocted slogans for embattled pharmaceutical companies, fast food chains, and the U.S. Republican Party – became one of the chief script writers in the crusade against global warming science. In 2007, after being accused of being “Orwellian,” Luntz told Terry Gross on National Public Radio that “to be Orwellian is to speak with absolute clarity,” a lie typical of Orwell’s “doublespeak.” Luntz advised the fossil fuel industry that the term “global warming … connotes catastrophic consequences,” and he taught spokespersons to say “climate change,” which presented “less of an emotional challenge.” He tutored them to call oil drilling “energy exploration” and to exploit common scientific dialogue as “uncertainty,” and to “portray the scientific community as divided.”

Key early denialist sloganeers – S. Fred Singer, Frederick Seitz, and industry front groups Heartland Institute and Competitive Enterprise Institute – had previously worked in tobacco industry campaigns to help conceal the health effects of cigarettes. There, they pioneered the tactics of creating phony “citizen” groups, avoiding real science journals, and sowing public confusion by parading hired “scientists” before sympathetic journalists.

Certain media began to restate oil industry slogans to cast doubt on global warming. On February 15, 2009, Washington Post columnist George Will repeated in print the falsehood that global sea ice was expanding. In Canada, Lawrence Solomon – in the National Post on January 12, 2007 – misrepresented the views of Cambridge University scientist Dr. Nigel Weiss, a past president of the UK Royal Society. Even Burger King fast-food restaurants got into the act. In the state of Tennessee in the U.S., a dozen Burger King restaurants displayed signs proclaiming, “Global warming is baloney.” In this crusade, science appeared unnecessary wherever slogans could confuse the gullible public.

Real science

For almost two centuries, human scientists have known that carbon-dioxide and other gases in the atmosphere warm the earth. Joseph Fourier hypothesized the effect in 1824, John Tyndall proved it true thirty years later, and Svante Arrhenius predicted global warming from industrial carbon emissions in 1894, during the coal era.

In the 1950s, Roger Revelle and James Lovelock possessed the data about human carbon heating the atmosphere. Greenpeace had the data in the 1970s, when we first raised the issue. Science demonstrates that the current impact, or “forcing,” caused by human greenhouse gases is equal to about two and a half watts of energy per square-metre of Earth’s surface. James Hansen at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies compares this heat force to stringing six 0.4-watt coloured light bulbs over every square meter of the earth’s surface, 3-million-billion bulbs burning year around, giving off heat, 24 hours a day. This represents the heat generated by human carbon in the atmosphere, melting the ice sheets, releasing methane, and generating forest loss, drought, and increased fire.

The November Scientific American provides a special issue on climate science, including “Seven Answers to Climate Contrarian Nonsense,” as “evidence for human interference with Earth’s climate continues to accumulate.”

A report this year from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology shows:

1. Global greenhouse gas emissions rising faster than previously expected

2. Ocean and forest absorption of carbon dioxide is weaker than hoped

3. Self-reinforcing warming from methane, deteriorating forests, and other feedback effects is now occurring.

The World Meteorological Organization reports that in 2008, human CO₂ levels in the atmosphere grew at a record pace, 2 parts per million (ppm) over 2007 reaching 385.2 ppm.

The Standing Committee on Antarctic Research – comprised of over 100 scientists from 13 countries – has issued their 2009 report, showing CO₂ and Methane levels higher and increasing faster than at any time in the last 800,000 years. The loss of Antarctic sea ice is directly affecting krill and penguin populations.

Meanwhile, 26 of the world’s most imminent scientists from Germany, France, Switzerland, Austria, Canada, U.S., and Australia – including Dr. Robert Bindschadler at NASA; Dr. Hans J. Schellnhuber from Germany’s Potsdam Institute; Dr. Richard Somerville, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Scripps Institution of Oceanography; Dr. Konrad Steffen, director of the Swiss Institute of Technology; and 22 other impeccable, senior world scientists – released the Copenhagen Diagnosis: An update of the latest climate science. The report shows that ice is melting faster than previously predicted and that claims of recent global cooling are wrong. These scientists warn humanity:

1. Surging greenhouse gas emissions: CO₂ emissions in 2008 are nearly 40% higher than 1990.

2. Recent warming trends demonstrate human-based warming: The temperature increase rate over the last 25 years is 0.19°C / decade, matching predictions. Despite a recent decrease in solar forcing, the warming trend continues and short-term fluctuations do not change this underlying trend.

3. Accelerated melting of ice sheets, polar caps, and glaciers: Satellite measurements show “beyond doubt” that the Greenland & Antarctic ice sheets are losing mass at an increasing rate.

4. Rapid sea-ice decline: Summer melt of arctic ice has accelerated to 40% beyond the average of predictions from IPCC climate models.

5. Sea level rise greater than expected: The global average sea rise of 3.4 mm/yr over 15 years is 80% above previous IPCC predictions. The scientists now expect at least 1-2 meters of sea rise this century. (A complete runaway ice melt would raise sea level by over 75 meters.)

6. Action delay risks additional deterioration of ice sheets, forest, and rain patterns. A business-as-usual scenario increases the risk of runaway global heating.

7. Turning point needed soon: To avoid catastrophic heating, average annual per-capita emissions must shrink 80-95% below developed nations emissions in 2000.

Human industrial fossil fuel burning has already triggered hotter global temperatures, forest die-off, drought, fires, and methane releases. These and future disasters remain the legacy of the denial crusaders. Future generations living with the consequences will judge these anti-science miscreants as we now judge those who once denied that the earth orbited the sun or those who argued that slavery was necessary for the economy. The climate deniers will go down in history as traitors to the planet.

In the 1970s, during the early years of Greenpeace, we used to light-heartedly describe the emerging environmental movement as “a 2000-year post-industrial mop up operation.” That now sounds like optimism.

The average global temperature increase of human

industrialism, caused primarily by the burning of

coal and oil and secondly by the destruction of the

world’s carbon capturing forests.

Note that short term fluctuations — up or down —

do not significantly change the modern warming trend.

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Most species, when confronted with abundant food and no predators, will outgrow their environment. Locusts or pine beetles will devour their hosts and crash. Bacteria in a petri dish will exhaust the food capacity and breed themselves to death. This is overshoot. 

In 1944, the US military brought 29 reindeer to St. Matthew Island in the Bering Sea as food for soldiers. However, the war ended, the Americans abandoned the island, and the reindeer remained. With no predators and lots of lichen, the herd grew to over a thousand reindeer in fifteen years. Biologists estimated that the island might have sustained this herd of a thousand reindeer, munching moderately within the Island’s carrying capacity. However, the herd grew to 6,000 reindeer by 1965, then, in one winter, with the lichen obliterated, the herd crashed back to 44 animals. This is overshoot.

Humans at Earth Scale

The Rapanui on Easter Island, with a population of only a few hundred in 900 AD, had already degraded the island’s capacity by cutting down trees to transport giant stone statues. As the Rapanui population grew to over 7000 by 1350 AD, their forest disappeared, they splintered into sects, and fought over the remnants. When Europeans arrived in the eighteenth century – seeking resources to solve their own overshoot problems in Europe – only a few hundred Rapanui remained, scraping for survival on a depleted landscape.

Throughout human history, settlements and cities have overshot local environments in Pleistocene watersheds, Mesopotamian floodplains, or the American dust bowl. In these cases, communities could migrate, relocate, or shift food sources. Now, in the twenty-first century, the human enterprise has reached the scale of the planet. This time, we cannot abandon our watershed. We will not sail away to a new island or discover a new hemisphere. We’re flat out of hemispheres.

The new dream for sustaining human consumption is “innovation.” Our alleged leaders – political and corporate – denied global warming for decades. Then, they blamed it on sunspots or claimed it might be a good thing that would allow us to grow avocadoes in Norway and drill for oil in the arctic.

Now, we hear claims that industrialists take global warming seriously. Witness the tsunami of proposals to create a “green economy,” cool the planet with sulfate aerosols, fertilize the dying oceans with iron, build hybrid cars, and construct giant “green energy” systems.

Some so-called “green ” projects may indeed play a role in a human future, but not if we rush to treat the symptoms while ignoring the disease. A friend in Los Angeles told me: “You used to see Porsches everywhere. Now everyone has a Prius.” In Washington D.C., hip lobbyists drive $100,000 electric Tesla sports cars. Did trading in the Porsche for a Prius or Tesla help the planet? No. It cost the planet in metals, plastics, toxins, energy, and CO2, the burgeoning throughput of human overshoot.

“Customers who embrace green products,” says Sandy Di Felice of Toyota Canada, “don’t want a radical change to their lifestyle.” Therein lies the problem: The world’s most voracious consumers cling to a hope that technology will rescue them from having to change their lifestyles. Tech-fix entrepreneurs, their academic apologists, and political cheerleaders scramble to create new “green” products, but fail to address the cause of the fever: reckless human consumption of Earth’s natural bounty. We need to produce and consume less stuff, not more.

The tech trance

The builder, who only has a hammer, treats everything as a nail. In the US, the earnest Obama administration has leapt to solve global warming with the tools they know: money and engineering. In a world addicted to a growing energy supply, they seek a cleaner, greener strain of the drug, while simultaneously and contradictorily launching “shovel ready” highway projects and applying Band-Aids over the inevitable consequences.

Obama science adviser, John Holdren proposed blasting sulfate particles into the atmosphere to block the rays of the sun. In fairness to Holdren, he acknowledged, “It would be preferable by far to solve this problem by reducing greenhouse gas emissions.” However, in April, Holdren claimed, “global warming is so dire, the Obama administration is discussing radical technologies to cool Earth’s air.”

In 1971, scientist Paul Crutzen first proposed the idea of cooling the atmosphere with sulfur particles, mimicking a volcanic eruption, to reflect solar energy and offset the effect of greenhouse gases. This plan treats the symptoms while ignoring the disease. Global warming is caused by burning hydrocarbons and depleting forests, not by the sun. The sun is not our enemy.

A program to launch sulfates into the atmosphere will burn more fossil fuel energy, the source of the problem, risk depleting the ozone layer, and would likely dry the Mediterranean and Mideast climates. Blocking the sun is going backwards to sustain the unsustainable.

Engineers at Columbia University are developing a “carbon scrubber” that could remove over 300 tons of carbon from the atmosphere each year. The challenge with this approach is that humanity is currently emitting over 20 billion tons of carbon annually, and increasing at 3% per year. Capturing even half of this carbon in scrubbers would require over $6 trillion in initial costs, plus operation, maintenance, and eventual replacement of the scrubbers. If the public pays this, it amounts to a bailout of the energy companies on the scale of the current banking bailouts, and would contribute to another global recession.

More significantly, as Herman Daly pointed out decades ago in Steady State Economics, these “geo-engineering” mitigations actually make us more vulnerable. Once we prop up our unsustainable habits with counter-technologies, we are trapped. We build up a dependence on the tech-fix, and when future generations can no longer maintain the fix, the impending crash will be worse.

Daly also pointed out that these are “costs” of running society, not “benefits,” and these two get confused in our GDP analysis of economic health. We must return to authentic quality of life rather that put hope in stimulating more unsustainable growth, more stuff, and more activity.

Reviving the oceans

Carbon emissions increase ocean acidity, devastating coral reefs and contributing to ocean species die-off. Adding powdered limestone to the oceans could theoretically reverse acidity. Fertilizing the oceans with iron could stimulate phytoplankton photosynthesis, absorbing more CO2.

These “solutions” could help, but they represent patchwork mitigations with added costs. Adding iron and limestone to the oceans mimics the natural process of wind carrying fine sand over the ocean, but there are problems. For phytoplankton to sequester the CO2, the organisms have to die and sink to the bottom. A study recently published in Nature magazine showed that the projects sequestered far less carbon than predicted.

Likewise, iron fertilization tests conducted by the Alfred Wegener Institute “dampened hopes on the potential of the Southern Ocean to sequester significant amounts of carbon dioxide and thus mitigate global warming.” The iron helped Phaeocystis phytoplankton increase slightly, less than natural blooms, but copepods quickly consumed the shell-free, soft algae. Then, the copepods became food for shrimp-like amphipods, which provided additional food for squid and whales. This was a positive result, but the experiment did not result in tons of CO2 safely sequestered on the ocean floor.

Grasping at tech straws

The American conservative think tank, Enterprise Institute, which once denied global warming, has now joined the bandwagon and proposed building “artificial trees,” giant towers that suck carbon dioxide from the air and store it. Like the carbon scrubber plan, this scheme requires more materials and fossil energy, the source of the problem.

Others propose fertilizing trees with nitrogen to stimulate CO2 absorption, but high nitrogen concentrations create nitrous oxide emissions (a greenhouse gas), groundwater contamination, and water demands, since trees that consume larger amounts of nitrogen also require more water.

An episode of Discovery Project Earth tested a scheme to drop tree seedlings from the air, encased in biodegradable containers, rather than plant trees traditionally by hand. The project failed. On Earth Day this year, Obama’s Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Van Jones, promoting the social benefits of environmental mitigation, said live on CNN, “trees don’t plant themselves.” Mr. Jones appears to be a nice person and well intentioned, but he exposes a fundamental misperception about natural systems ecology. News flash: Trees do plant themselves. They only require an intact forest. Dropping trees from airplanes and building giant “artificial trees” represents industrialism gone mad.

The presumed tech-fix solutions suffer from fundamental errors because their designers do not understand ecology. They attempt to preserve a wealthy life-style that is not sustainable. They fail to perform necessary net-energy and carbon-cost accounting. They demand an ever-growing supply of material and energy, and they fail to account for total ecosystem analysis.

Humanity is in overshoot. Every day, without much comment from our “news” media, we degrade the carrying capacity of the planet, add more humans, and extend ourselves farther out over the edge of the sustainability cliff, with nothing below to stop our fall.

Worse, the tech-fix proposals avoid genuine solutions: Humanity must consume less, not more. We should replace our petroleum-guzzling car cultures with light rail transport. We should be localizing agriculture, preserving farmland, conserving energy, recycling everything, creating resilient communities, and developing a steady state economic system. If we are serious about global warming and preserving natural wilderness, we should be stabilizing human population with non-evasive means such as women’s rights and contraception. We should be leaving remnant wilderness alone to recover through natural processes.

These genuine remedies require the wealthy nations and consumers to drastically change their lifestyles, not buy hybrid sports cars. These changes prove politically difficult, but they represent the inevitable path back to paradise.

rw.

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