I don’t see a lot of movies, except on airplanes, and this is not the kind of movie that airlines like to show. The film is a documentary about how climate change deniers twist the truth and cast doubt on theories that are scientifically well established, reflecting a combination of interest-group money and personal ideological motivations.
It starts by showing how the tobacco industry denied that cigarettes caused cancer and were addictive in the face of evidence that the companies already had and knew. What was interesting is not just that the climate deniers used the same playbook for their advocacy as the tobacco and disease deniers, but that in many cases it was the exact same people!
What is the story the climate deniers are making up?
I don’t see a lot of movies, except on airplanes, and this is not the kind of movie that airlines like to show. The film is a documentary about how climate change deniers twist the truth and cast doubt on theories that are scientifically well established, reflecting a combination of interest-group money and personal ideological motivations.
It starts by showing how the tobacco industry denied that cigarettes caused cancer and were addictive in the face of evidence that the companies already had and knew. What was interesting is not just that the climate deniers used the same playbook for their advocacy as the tobacco and disease deniers, but that in many cases it was the exact same people!
What is the story the climate deniers are making up?
First, they argue that climate science is not conclusive about the risks of climate pollution. The film showed how through having high-visibility spokesmen say things that were just plain incorrect they were able to create public doubt and to make climate denial a touchstone of faith for conservatives.
But one thing the show talked about, but didn’t note the significance of, was that the denial faction had managed to frame the issue incorrectly. The issue, as we have all heard it debated, is “are we sure that human activity is already causing climate change?” But that is not the policy issue we have to deal with as a nation and as a civilization. If we have already affected climate, that may be a problem, but it is a fact. What is interesting is the question: “Will future greenhouse pollution cause climate change?”
Because when the question is framed properly the evidence is not just overwhelming, it is beyond doubt. The models that predict catastrophic climate change have predicted the last 30 years of climate pretty well, so that even if you believe that observed climate change to date is noise, it is indisputable that further pollution will cause trouble.
Note that this is a truly conservative argument. If you are trying to convince your child that sex might lead to STDs or unwanted pregnancies, a conservative would not be impressed by the child’s argument that “well, I’ve been doing it for two years and nothing bad has happened yet.” They would note that the child’s behavior is risky and irresponsible, and tell them to stop it.
Climate change does not have to be proven to have already caused damage to take action to prevent it: one just has to show a significant risk that it might.
The second element of the story is even more implausible, and I am surprised that it hasn’t attracted more discussion in the 10 years since I first pointed it out in Saving Energy Growing Jobs.
Climate change deniers claim that those who say they are worried about climate change are not acting in good faith. What they actually want, deniers assert, is worldwide Soviet-style central planning. We are “watermelons”, they assert: green only on the outside but (Soviet) red on the inside.
How can otherwise intelligent people believe this? They believe that somehow the environmental movement--and NRDC alone has a million and a half members and supporters--has somehow been able to hide its real motivations from everyone for 45 years? They believe that we were all duped by some master manipulator??
I have worked professionally as an environmentalist for 40 years, and I don’t believe I have met even a single individual whose personal politics were Communist.
And, by the way, they also expect us to believe that Communists wanted or still want to limit climate change. Really?? The Soviet Union had a terrible record on climate change. When I traveled there to talk about issue in 1987, the Soviets were even more uncomfortable with the prospect of restraining climate pollution than the Americans were. More than one scientist in the room said something like “we like the idea of climate change: it will give us an all-year open sea port.”
China, as I recall, is led by the Communist Party, and for decades they were resistant to doing anything to control climate emissions. Not just resistance to controlling their own emissions, but resistant to anyone’s having to do so. Fortunately, that has begun to change, not out of Communist ideology but out of the practical realization that pollution hurts their country.
Oh, deniers might respond, but don’t you see, controlling climate will require global government controls on what you can or cannot do. It will force you to give up your way of life.
That was a pretty weak argument even 35 years ago, when scenarios for a painless transition to low emissions were first published and they showed how controlling pollution would increase consumer economic welfare. But it’s just plain loony now that major global institutions are all saying this, and especially since California has developed and is already implementing a plan to cut emissions by 80% by 2050. We don’t have just to look at the plan, we can see the effect on a real economy and on people’s lives.
What is happening is that the California economy is generating more jobs than the rest of the country, and that the big hand of government is invisible, or at least no more visible than it was 10 or 20 or 30 years ago. Consumers are being offered more choices on where they can live, how they can travel, how they can improve the comfort of their homes and workplaces, as part of the climate plan. Low income household are appreciating the cash payments they are receiving twice a year on their utility bills, a dividend funded by pollution permit fees levied on utilities. Government restrictions are being reduced: property owners are being allowed to build to higher intensities, mandatory requirements for parking are being eased, barriers to shared-economy enterprises are being lowered while consumers who want to deal in these markets are being offered more protections.
If you want to talk about restrictions on our way of life, one of the key elements of an American way of life, at least to many Americans, is home ownership. Yet today, with no climate pollution cap for the nation as a whole, fewer and fewer Americans are able to qualify for a home loan. This is an unfortunate outcome of the mortgage collapse, where Fannie Mae, which for all intents and purposes writes lending rules, responded to the losses it took on defaulting loans by knee-jerk. The Federal government has custodial control over Fannie, which means that big government is restricting people’s ability to be homeowners.
Rather than addressing newly understood explanations of the cause of the defaults—unaffordable energy and transportation costs—Fannie ignored this evidence and instead tightened all of the old-fashioned criteria they had been relying on for decades. I predicted that this would kill the housing market, and it did.
The point is—what we are doing NOW on lending policy is that the government is interfering with families’ ability to buy homes and reducing their choices. It is cutting housing construction, killing jobs and increasing government deficits. That’s what we already have. But doing something about climate solves the problem.
A key component of climate policy is reforming lending criteria. Reforms that I have advocated repeatedly will allow more people to qualify for a mortgage while reducing the risk of lenders and reducing government deficits. So this is less Big Government, not more. It is more jobs with pollution limits and more growth.
Every tenet of the climate denier’s story is wrong. Environmentalists’ goals are as resonant with traditional Republican goals of freedom, limited government, balanced budgets, personal responsibility, growth in jobs and prosperity, and taking prudent care of the future, as they are with traditional Democratic goals—perhaps even more so.
If “conservative” means something different than “owned by the fuels industries” or “repeating uncritically what others who are owned by the fuel industries tell us to think”, it is time for them to agree that there is a problem and embrace a market-based approach to solving climate change.