Res Ipsa wrote: ↑Thu Dec 02, 2021 11:36 pm
Climate change is a political issue only because certain industries with a metric crapload of investment in fossil fuels politicized the science as a tactic.
As I detailed in a previous post. From
this interview, the history of climate change science:
Nathaniel Rich wrote:The industry's been following this issue for a long time. There are studies from Exxon or even Humble Oil, the predecessor to Exxon, going back into the mid-1950s, and even then, those studies were not about whether this was happening. The question was how much of the added CO2 in the atmosphere was because of Exxon, basically, because of the fossil fuel industry. And they continued to monitor this over the decades, there were occasional CO2 working groups, study groups, this was going on also at the American Petroleum Institute, the big trade group for the oil and gas industry, and at some of the other companies. And those efforts continued through the '80s, but during that decade it was never a high priority. And I spoke with a lot of people who worked in the industry during that time and people at the highest levels of API, and they really weren't concerned about it, in part because there were no serious efforts in DC to pass laws or policies to reduce emissions.
And it wasn't really until James Hansen spoke before Congress in '88 and generated huge national headlines that they started to worry. And the story of how they began to mobilize this multi-decadal effort to sow propaganda, disinformation, to buy off politicians and scientists and ultimately to convert an entire political party to denialism — the seeds of that you see emerging in the weeks and months after the Hansen hearing. Before that, it was really on the back burner.
After Hansen's hearing, there are these high-level conversations at the American Petroleum Institute and at Exxon about, essentially, what do we do about this? It seems clear that regulation is coming, George Bush is talking about it, and so on. And they reach the same conclusions, Exxon and API. They say, we need to be an active participant in any kind of policy discussion; we need to burnish our credentials as scientific experts on the subject, so we have credibility in it; we need to make sure that the policy doesn't extend beyond what science says; emphasize uncertainty in the science where it exists—that would become crucial later on—and perhaps most important, don't accept any policy that would hurt the bottom line. That's the beginning of it.
And here's the damning bit:
Nathaniel Rich wrote:And then, as almost an afterthought at the time, API through its press office, which is coordinating the press for this industry group, Global Climate Coalition, starts to reach out to a couple of scientists who are friendly with the industry who have expressed some doubt about either the ozone or CO2, and they start encouraging them to speak to the press. Sometimes that encouragement takes the form of payouts — the head of the API program told me they gave $2,000 to a scientist whenever he wrote an op-ed for a national publication.
And that is almost an afterthought at the time, it's pretty low on the totem pole of what they're doing. They're also meeting with congressmen and so on. But it pays enormous dividends, because all of a sudden, national news publications start quoting these scientists — and it's really a handful of people, four or five people — over and over again. And an issue that to this point has been a story about fear of what's going to happen all of a sudden has two sides. And of course that's like catnip for journalists, and all of a sudden you have these pieces that start to appear that say, maybe there's not scientific consensus about this problem.
It starts almost tentatively, it starts with saying, well, it's not as certain as people say it is, as James Hansen says it is, there's problems with the climate models, the computer models, that Hansen uses. And then it goes into, we really don't know what the regional effects will be. And it grows and grows. It's almost like they're encouraged by their success and they become more and more brazen.
And then ultimately you get, after a number of years, into the '90s, you get into this bizarro universe where all of a sudden they're questioning the basic fundamental science itself, and of course that science goes back not just to 1979 but to the late 19th century, about what's the effect of pumping a bunch of CO2 into the atmosphere and what warming will that cause.
And so we've entered this weird funhouse realm where now, if you jump ahead to the present day, you have a political party, the only major political party in the world that endorses a position that's essentially to the right, even, of what the industry now says in their public statements. Exxon publicly today doesn't deny climate change, but you have a party that does. And so I think it's something that future historians will spend a lot of time piecing out, is how this little lie grew into a big lie and overwhelmed our politics.