After years of difficult negotiations, the Kyoto global climate treaty takes effect Wednesday with the world’s biggest polluter, the United States, conspicuously absent from the 150 participating countries.
The solid scientific consensus that global warming caused by human excesses is already catastrophically altering our weather is now confirmed beyond a doubt by more than 2,000 top climate experts from more than 100 countries in the largest, most rigorous peer reviewed research project ever. But you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. The evidence of climate chaos is all around us.
History’s 11 hottest years have occurred since 1990. The Arctic ice cap has lost 40 percent of its volume in 20 years and will be gone within our generation. Forests are dying, permafrost and glaciers are melting worldwide. Within decades, there will be no glaciers in Glacier National Park, no snows on Mt. Kilimanjaro. Sea levels are rapidly rising, coral reefs disappearing, weather patterns are becoming increasingly chaotic, animals and plants are changing their behavior. The frequency of catastrophic storms is increasing; 2004 was the insurance industry’s most costly year ever. England received a month’s worth of rain in a single night. Two years ago a lethal European heat wave killed 15,000 people. Former UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix warns that global warming is a greater threat to global security than war or terror, a conclusion shared by Great Britain’s top scientist David King, and by a recent Pentagon study.
Responsible foreign oil companies–like BP PLC–acknowledge the crisis and are aggressively investing in clean, efficient technologies that could help reduce carbon dioxide emissions globally by 70 percent. Similar investments by our nation would be a boon to America’s air, our economy and our national security. After all, the steps we must take to comply with Kyoto are steps we should be taking to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, our vulnerability to price shocks on the oil market and our balance of payment deficits.
Conservation and efficiency will make American industry more competitive and cleaner. Fuel efficiency will make every American richer; less money spent on gasoline means more money in our pockets. Efficient technology, like refrigerators, automobiles and air conditioners, will be key export items over the coming decades as Third World nations strive to reduce their greenhouse gases. (China has already implemented one of the world’s most aggressive programs for curbing dangerous emissions, including possible fuel taxes to steer demand away from gas-guzzling automobiles.) The patents on and profits from these technologies will go to the nation with the toughest laws at home.
But rather than investing in a sustainable future, American companies like Chevron, Exxon/Mobil, and Peabody Coal have poured millions of dollars into a campaign intended to deny the science and delay reform. With enormous profits at stake in poisoning the planet, King Coal and Big Oil are now employing diabolical public relations geniuses, biased scientists, powerful lobbyists and rivers of money to deceive the public, the press and policymakers about the climate crisis. They’ve funded phony Washington think tanks from which industry-paid scientists known as “biostitutes” grind out pronouncements that global warming is environmental henny pennyism.
Environmental groups allege that Exxon persuaded the White House to oust America’s top climatologist, Robert Watson, former chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (The U.S. and 75 other nations voted for another candidate in 2002.)
At industry behest, the administration has suppressed a dozen major studies on climate change, including studies by the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Neighborhood of Affordable Housing. American industry thugs harass Britain’s top scientist David King at public appearances and disrupt international climatological meetings. And now we can add pop-culture author Michael Crichton to the propaganda machine; his best-selling novel, “State of Fear,” takes the asinine position that environmentalists have made the whole thing up.
All that money has bought the industry public officials willing to ignore the science. Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), chairman of the powerful Environment and Public Works Committee, who has taken in substantial energy-industry contributions, says that “global warming is the biggest hoax perpetuated on the American people.” President Bush, who took $100 million in energy industry largesse, declared “the jury’s still out” on global warming, and invited the fossil fuel barons to draft a national energy policy that fills their pockets and increases our wasteful addiction.
The Machiavellian manipulation of public opinion by some energy companies helps erode our democracy and is certain to result in trillions of dollars in property damage, the loss of millions of human lives, the profound diminishment of our planet’s natural wealth and ultimately of our dignity and humanity. Will someone explain to me why the energy barons who are guilty of this public deception and injury should be considered higher on the moral scale than terrorists or the most reprehensible criminals?
