I swear I’ll give the climate change issue a rest, but I need to vent my spleen just a bit more. So I’m strolling through Barnes and Noble this last weekend and spot a cute book cover depicting a penguin sporting a lei. The title? A Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming. The back cover proclaims the book as a provocative, entertaining, and well-documented expose of some of the most shamelessly politicized pseudo-science we are likely to see in our relatively cool lifetimes. Ah, I stumbled across a climate change denier.
I don’t know of the author, nor do I really care to. But this is the latest release from the same publishers who have brought us A Politically Incorrect Guide to Evolution (basically dressed-up creationist clap-trap) and A Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (a book you just know is balanced as it features a masked gunman on the cover.) What’s next? A Politically Incorrect Guide to the Holocaust? I mean, how do these people sleep at night?
A fellow associated with the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) pens the global warming book. An alleged think-tank, their website proclaims Advancing Liberty and Public Policy Research. Rather than spending time in ad hominem attack on the author, I’d prefer to look at the agency he represents. So I spent some time surfing the Web and found a strong correlation of criticism of CEI, nicely collected on Wikipedia.
According to SourceWatch (a collaborative project documenting the PR and propaganda activities of public relations firms and public relations professionals engaged in managing and manipulating public perception, opinion and policy) CEI is an "ideologically-driven, well-funded front for corporations opposed to safety and environmental regulations that affect the way they do business"
In May 2006, CEI released a controversial ad campaign featuring two separate television commercials arguing that global warming is not a problem. The commercials used the tagline "Carbon Dioxide - They call it pollution; We call it life." The ad cited two Science articles to support its claims. However, the editor for Science stated that the ad "misrepresents the conclusions of the two cited Science papers... by selective referencing". The author of the articles, Curt Davis, director of the Center for Geospatial Intelligence at the University of Missouri-Columbia, said CEI was misrepresenting his previous research to back their claims. "These television ads are a deliberate effort to confuse and mislead the public about the global warming debate," he said.
Confuse and mislead the public? Not an institute dedicated to Advancing Liberty and Public Policy Research.
Perhaps individuals and funders associated with CEI deserve closer inspection. Steven Milloy, a CEI Adjunct Scholar, is also a Fox News reporter who has spent considerable energy in attempts to debunk what he alleges to be false claims regarding global warming, DDT, breast implants, passive smoking, ozone depletion, and Mad Cow Disease among other topics. Milloy has written extensively on global warming and other topics while receiving undisclosed funding from ExxonMobil. In fact, there’s quite an interesting litany of Big Petroleum, Big Industry and Big Tobacco names listed as funders:
Amoco Foundation, Inc.
Ford Motor Company Fund
Philip Morris Companies, Inc.
Precision Valve Corporation (the world’s largest producer of aerosol product valves)
and Texaco, Inc., among others.
ExxonMobil Corporation, a well-documented funder of climate change deniers and others who use Big Tobacco-like disinformation tactics, was a major donor to CEI, with over $2 million in contributions between 1998 and 2005. In 2002 the company gave $405,000; in 2004 it gave CEI $180,000 that was earmarked for "global climate change and global climate change outreach." I'm hoping hell has a particularly foul ring for the avaricious, money-grubbing execs behind this.But despite the evidence that A Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming is clearly corporate propaganda manufactured for the express purpose of spreading disinformation, I say read what you choose. No book-burner here. I just wish that books came with a variation on those nutritional labels ubiquitous on food packaging. That way, less skeptically inclined readers can know right away they are holding the literary equivalent of a Twinkie.
2 comments:
Greetings from the Netherlands.
Lind@
If you think the situation in the US is bad, well it's worse here in Melbourne, Australia.
Over the past eleven years, Melbourne's rainfall has declined by thirty percent, with not one year above the 1885 to 1996 average.
Southern Australia's low runoff ratios mean this causes critical water shortages. This should require that Australia has by far the lowest per capita greenhouse gas emissions in the world - far lower than even developing nations. That would mean by 2007 Australia would have ceased all car and coal use - I even think international scientists ought to recognise this requirement and the astronomical ecological cost of living in Australia.
Yet, as it is Australia has the world's highest per capita greenhouse gas emissions - and I have enough experience in sociology to know the prospect of that changing is nil, owing to increasing dominance by a free-market, socially ultraconservative, outer subruban population.
Australia's appalling greenhouse gas emissions are directly traced to dictatorship of its transport and energy policy by a "greenhouse mafia". This "greenhouse mafia" writes government energy policies to exclude any renewable energy development or investment is mass public transit - and has done so ever since the 1950s. Its power and structure is quite unlike anything found anywhere else in the world, and operate through direct and totally free infiltration of the major parties. This infiltration is so much a part of their operation that no major party dare require the complete phase out of
1) private road transport
2) coal-fire power
3) domestic smelting of aluminium, magnesium and titanium
- that should have been demanded both in Australia and abroad back in the 1990s when Tim Flannery and Tom McMahon exposed the ecological "otherworldliness" (for want of a better term) of Australia.
Australia - which should have had a target of 100 percent renewable energy by 2005 - has set a target of only 2 percent by 2015 - and the way I see it, it is unlikely renewable energy will ever be developed here, when countries with dirt-cheap ecological living costs like Denmark switch completely to renewable energy!
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