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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsHow Extreme Weather Is Shrinking the Planet With wildfires, heat waves, and rising sea levels, larg
Excellent article. Worth your time to read IMHO.
November 26, 2018 Issue
How Extreme Weather Is Shrinking the Planet
With wildfires, heat waves, and rising sea levels, large tracts of the earth are at risk of becoming uninhabitable. But the fossil-fuel industry continues its assault on the facts.
By Bill McKibben
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/26/how-extreme-weather-is-shrinking-the-planet
.................On a December morning in 1997 at the Kyoto Convention Center, after a long night of negotiation, the developed nations reached a tentative accord on climate change. Exhausted delegates lay slumped on couches in the corridor, or on the floor in their suits, but most of them were grinning. Imperfect and limited though the agreement was, it seemed that momentum had gathered behind fighting climate change. But as I watched the delegates cheering and clapping, an American lobbyist, who had been coördinating much of the opposition to the accord, turned to me and said, I cant wait to get back to Washington, where weve got this under control.
He was right. On January 29, 2001, nine days after George W. Bush was inaugurated, Lee Raymond visited his old friend Vice-President Dick Cheney, who had just stepped down as the C.E.O. of the oil-drilling giant Halliburton. Cheney helped persuade Bush to abandon his campaign promise to treat carbon dioxide as a pollutant. Within the year, Frank Luntz, a Republican consultant for Bush, had produced an internal memo that made a doctrine of the strategy that the G.C.C. had hit on a decade earlier. Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community, Luntz wrote in the memo, which was obtained by the Environmental Working Group, a Washington-based organization. Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate.
The strategy of muddling the publics impression of climate science has proved to be highly effective. In 2017, polls found that almost ninety per cent of Americans did not know that there was a scientific consensus on global warming. Raymond retired in 2006, after the company posted the biggest corporate profits in history, and his final annual salary was four hundred million dollars. His successor, Rex Tillerson, signed a five-hundred-billion-dollar deal to explore for oil in the rapidly thawing Russian Arctic, and in 2012 was awarded the Russian Order of Friendship. In 2016, Tillerson, at his last shareholder meeting before he briefly joined the Trump Administration as Secretary of State, said, The world is going to have to continue using fossil fuels, whether they like it or not.
Its by no means clear whether Exxons deception and obfuscation are illegal. The company has long maintained that it has tracked the scientific consensus on climate change, and its research on the issue has been published in publicly available peer-reviewed journals. The First Amendment preserves ones right to lie, although, in October, New York State Attorney General Barbara D. Underwood filed suit against Exxon for lying to investors, which is a crime. What is certain is that the industrys campaign cost us the efforts of the human generation that might have made the crucial difference in the climate fight.
Exxons behavior is shocking, but not entirely surprising. Philip Morris lied about the effects of cigarette smoking before the government stood up to Big Tobacco. The mystery that historians will have to unravel is what went so wrong in our governance and our culture that we have done, essentially, nothing to stand up to the fossil-fuel industry.
There are undoubtedly myriad intellectual, psychological, and political sources for our inaction, but I cannot help thinking that the influence of Ayn Rand, the Russian émigré novelist, may have played a role. Rands disquisitions on the virtue of selfishness and unbridled capitalism are admired by many American politicians and economistsPaul Ryan, Tillerson, Mike Pompeo, Andrew Puzder, and Donald Trump, among them. Trump, who has called The Fountainhead his favorite book, said that the novel relates to business and beauty and life and inner emotions. That book relates to . . . everything. Long after Rands death, in 1982, the libertarian gospel of the novel continues to sway our politics: Government is bad. Solidarity is a trap. Taxes are theft. The Koch brothers, whose enormous fortune derives in large part from the mining and refining of oil and gas, have peddled a similar message, broadening the efforts that Exxon-funded groups like the Global Climate Coalition spearheaded in the late nineteen-eighties.
Fossil-fuel companies and electric utilities, often led by Koch-linked groups, have put up fierce resistance to change.....................................
https://media.newyorker.com/cartoons/5bee0dd2050708639d6e1405/master/w_280,c_limit/181126_a21933.jpg
I hope this visit from your king has brightened your outlook on things.
malaise
(267,797 posts)Get thee to the greatest page
SunSeeker
(51,367 posts)Achilleaze
(15,543 posts)republican lies about climate change are dangerous for America
republican lies about climate change are dangerous for America
republican lies about climate change are dangerous for America
republican lies about climate change are dangerous for America
republican lies about climate change are dangerous for America
republican lies about climate change are dangerous for America
republican lies about climate change are dangerous for America
republican lies about climate change are dangerous for America
republican lies about climate change are dangerous for America
republican lies about climate change are dangerous for America
republican lies about climate change are dangerous for America
republican lies about climate change are dangerous for America
republican lies about climate change are dangerous for America
republican lies about climate change are dangerous for America
republican lies about climate change are dangerous for America
and the world
PoindexterOglethorpe
(25,746 posts)Habitable areas are shrinking. There's a difference.
dalton99a
(81,065 posts)because people didn't rake the forest
Great article