Vanity Fair has an article by Mark Hertsgaard, While Washington Slept, in its most recent edition which spells out the connection between the scientists who helped the Tobacco lobby fend off legislation and regulation of cigarettes and other tobacco products, and those who now seek to create a controversy about the causes of global warming. Indeed, in many cases, they are literally the same people:
Call him the $45 million man. That’s how much money Dr. Frederick Seitz, a former president of the National Academy of Sciences, helped R. J. Reynolds Industries, Inc., give away to fund medical research in the 1970s and 1980s. The research avoided the central health issue facing Reynolds—”They didn’t want us looking at the health effects of cigarette smoking,” says Seitz, who is now 94—but it nevertheless served the tobacco industry’s purposes. Throughout those years, the industry frequently ran ads in newspapers and magazines citing its multi-million-dollar research program as proof of its commitment to science—and arguing that the evidence on the health effects of smoking was mixed.
In the 1990s, Seitz began arguing that the science behind global warming was likewise inconclusive and certainly didn’t warrant imposing mandatory limits on greenhouse-gas emissions. He made his case vocally, trashing the integrity of a 1995 I.P.C.C. report on the op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal, signing a letter to the Clinton administration accusing it of misrepresenting the science, and authoring a paper which said that global warming and ozone depletion were exaggerated threats devised by environmentalists and unscrupulous scientists pushing a political agenda. In that same paper, Seitz asserted that secondhand smoke posed no real health risks, an opinion he repeats in our interview. “I just can’t believe it’s that bad,” he says.
Just when the money tap from the Tobacco industry was drying up, along came a new opportunity for these rent-a-hack “scientists” — Global Warming. And the large multinational energy companies (a/k/a Big Oil) were more than willing to pay for their expertise in confusing the issue. Only this time it wasn’t individual lives cut short by smoking, but the life of an entire planet at stake. Indeed, they may have helped delay the best opportunity we had in the 90’s to prevent the worst impacts of global climate change from being realized:
“Not trivial” is how Seitz reckons the influence he and fellow skeptics have had, and their critics agree. The effect on media coverage was striking, according to Bill McKibben, who in 1989 published the first major popular book on global warming, The End of Nature. Introducing the 10th-anniversary edition, in 1999, McKibben noted that virtually every week over the past decade studies had appeared in scientific publications painting an ever more alarming picture of the global-warming threat. Most news reports, on the other hand, “seem to be coming from some other planet.”
The deniers’ arguments were frequently cited in Washington policy debates. Their most important legislative victory was the Senate’s 95-to-0 vote in 1997 to oppose U.S. participation in any international agreement—i.e., the Kyoto Protocol—that imposed mandatory greenhouse-gas reductions on the U.S.
The ferocity of this resistance helps explain why the Clinton administration achieved so little on climate change, says Tim Wirth, the first under-secretary of state for global affairs, who served as President Clinton’s chief climate negotiator. “The opponents were so strongly organized that the administration got spooked and backed off of things it should have done,” says Wirth. “The Kyoto negotiations got watered down and watered down, and after we signed it the administration didn’t try to get it ratified. They didn’t even send people up to the Hill to talk to senators about ratifying it.”
“I wanted to push for ratification,” responds Gore. “A decision was made not to. If our congressional people had said there was even a remote chance of ratifying, I could have convinced Clinton to do it—his heart was in the right place.… But I remember a meeting in the White House with some environmental groups where I asked them for the names of 10 senators who would vote to ratify. They came up with one, Paul Wellstone. If your most optimistic supporters can’t identify 10 likely gettables, then people in the administration start to ask, ‘Are you a fanatic, Al? Is this a suicide mission?’“
Not trivial. Our best hope of passing effective legislation, and implementing international agreements to reverse the emissions of green house gases was probably during the Clinton years. Without effective American leadership and cooperation, any international regime to forestall global warming was doomed to fail. Now we may be too late. The first signs of likely impacts from climate change are already being seen in the rapidly melting glaciers and polar ice, in the intensity and frequency of severe storms, in the increase in drought across much of the globe.
This has been the largest failure of our current media’s (both television and print) predilection for “balance” in their news reporting. They have treated the ginned up claims of controversy by these rogue scientists as newsworthy events, even though they must have been aware that these so-called global warming experts were many of the same individuals who had taken Tobacco industry money in order to prevent the news of smoking’s harmful effects from influencing both the government’s public health policies, and public awareness of the dangers tobacco products posed.
Only a little digging by reporters would have been required to expose the connections these “contrarians” had to the fossil fuel companies. Yet, no one paid much attention to those connections which were not exactly hidden from public view. Take the case of Seitz, for example:
Seitz earned approximately $585,000 for his consulting work for R. J. Reynolds, according to company documents unearthed by researchers for the Greenpeace Web site ExxonSecrets.org and confirmed by Seitz. Meanwhile, during the years he consulted for Reynolds, Seitz continued to draw a salary as president emeritus at Rockefeller University, an institution founded in 1901 and subsidized with profits from Standard Oil, the predecessor corporation of ExxonMobil.
Of course, Seitz was far from the only one:
As a former president of the National Academy of Sciences (from 1962 to 1969) and a winner of the National Medal of Science, Seitz gave such objections instant credibility. Richard Lindzen, a professor of meteorology at M.I.T., was another high-profile scientist who consistently denigrated the case for global warming. But most of the public argument was carried by lesser scientists and, above all, by lobbyists and paid spokesmen for the Global Climate Coalition. Created and funded by the energy and auto industries, the Coalition spent millions of dollars spreading the message that global warming was an uncertain threat. Journalist Ross Gelbspan exposed the corporate campaign in his 1997 book, The Heat Is On, which quoted a 1991 strategy memo: the goal was to “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact.”
A carefully crafted corporate campaign to (if I may bend a well worn phrase from the Intelligent Design advocates) “Preach the controversy.” And it worked. By the mid 90’s, the vast majority of scientists with hard earned credentials in climate science came to the overwhelming consensus view that global warming was real and was largely man-made. Nonetheless, our press corps and television talking heads were spouting nonsense about how global warming was only a theory for which no hard evidence existed.
The fact that global warming had been substantiated by reams of data meant nothing. The fact that we were documenting an accelerating rise in average global temperatures every year for the last several decades was pooh-poohed as inconsequential. The public was confused by all the hot air (pun intended) and so tended to discount both sides, and the vast majority of politicians, with their fingers in the wind, followed suit. Thus nothing was accomplished to halt or slow global warming, which naturally favored the designs of those who had a vested interest in seeing that no limits be placed on green house gas emissions.
The well paid global warming deniers have already won.
[I]f the deniers appear to have lost the scientific argument, they prolonged the policy battle, delaying actions to reduce emissions when such cuts mattered most. “For 25 years, people have been warning that we had a window of opportunity to take action, and if we waited until the effects were obvious it would be too late to avoid major consequences,” says Oppenheimer. “Had some individual countries, especially the United States, begun to act in the early to mid-1990s, we might have made it. But we didn’t, and now the impacts are here.”
“The goal of the disinformation campaign wasn’t to win the debate,” says Gelbspan. “The goal was simply to keep the debate going. When the public hears the media report that some scientists believe warming is real but others don’t, its reaction is ‘Come back and tell us when you’re really sure.’ So no political action is taken.”
The problem isn’t just Bush, or the Republican party, though they are the most egregious purveyors and benefactors of the lie that global warming has nothing to do with human activity. Many democratic politicians are also to blame, as Al Gore’s failure to find more than one Senator to support ratification of the Kyoto protocols proves. No, the real problem is our political system which allows a legalized form of graft and bribery to fund political campaigns. As long as we continue to allow those with the largest moneybelts to literally buy the government they want rather than what the public good requires, we will continue to see this same game played out into the indefinite future. A game of public relations and campaign contributions, of earmarks and industry lobbyists writing the very legislation which concerns the powerful corporate clients they represent.
Please go read all of Mark Hertsgaard’s article, than email the link to all your friends and family. It may be too late to stop all of the impacts of global warming from occurring, but it is never too late to begin waking people up to the real danger posed by their continuing apathy to politics, on the one hand, and/or their misguided “conservative” ideological beliefs, on the other.
