11
The Climate Denial Machine
the term “climate change denial machine” was coined by journalist Sharon Begley in 2007, part of a sweeping Newsweek cover story that shined a light on the industry of denial that now surrounds our world’s most existential threat.1 This denial machine has been wildly successful in stymying restorative action, even as its case against the science of climate change becomes more desperate and fatuous by the day.
The success of the climate change denial machine may have something to do with the public vernacular. The term “climate change” has a nonjudgmental, inoffensive tone, one that minimizes the forces that are driving fierce wildfires, famine, and changes in ocean levels that will soon create millions of refugees. “Change” doesn’t capture what we are witnessing; rather, it is an increasingly rapid, catastrophic breakdown of the climate, with disastrous impacts on people and environments across the globe.2
But “change” has proven a useful term for those with an interest in suppressing public action in the midst of our climate breakdown. After all, change isn’t necessarily a bad or unnatural thing. Such was the denial case as offered by Diana Furchtgott-Roth, formerly chief economist at the Department of Labor in the George W. Bush administration, then nominated to head the Department of Transportation’s Office of Research and Technology under President Trump. (I use this example because climate change denial is a de facto litmus test for Trump appointment.) Representing the free-market think tank Manhattan Institute, Furchtgott-Roth gave a testimony to a congressional hearing in 2013 in which she opposed all legislative and regulatory efforts to limit greenhouse gas emissions, including cap-and-trade, a market-based approach that a free marketeer might actually support, if they believed that it was imperative to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.3 Furchtgott-Roth is a labor economist with no particular expertise in climate science. But that did not stop her from asserting in 2015 that “the Earth has been warming and cooling for millennia, certainly before the Industrial Revolution. It has been steadily warming since the Little Ice Age of the 1700s. Over the past 15 years, despite increasing greenhouse gas emissions, the warming by some measures has stopped.”4
Let’s unpack this summary, and with it the persisting argument that climate change is somehow not cause for alarm:
Yes, the earth’s temperature is somewhat cyclical. It undergoes very slow warming and cooling trends that take place over millennia. That is not what we are undergoing at present. What’s happening now is a rapid spike of temperatures globally, a trend unlike anything we’ve seen in human history.
A common talking point for climate deniers is that this warming actually stopped in 1998—a date evidently chosen because of the record high temperatures that year. And by cherry-picking the data, it was at least temporarily a useful argument for them: 1998 saw a strong El Niño, a warm water event in the eastern Pacific Ocean, which made that year the hottest one to that date, and something of an anomaly. The next few years were slightly cooler, which made the talking point about 1998 wildly helpful and popular. But global temperatures in 2005 soon exceeded those in 1998, and global temperatures remain hotter than those of 1998. Since then, for the most part, each year has been hotter than the one before it. The seven warmest years on record have all occurred since 2010.5 It seems that the 1998 talking point is an old habit that won’t die.
Within the scientific community, there is little doubt that climate change is being driven by human caused greenhouse gas accumulation. Multiple, massive reports have been written on the subject. The overwhelming proportion of papers in scientific journals work accept this premise.6 Most climate deniers don’t even publish in scientific journals, often claiming bias against their positions. (Many others, including the labor economist Furchtgott-Roth, are operating outside their areas of expertise by even entering its public discourse.) Many of their arguments require if not torturing, then cherry-picking data. It would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic.
Given all this, there is no need to dig deeper into the scientific manipulations of climate change deniers here. The science is settled, and its refutations are silly. My focus here is the other component of the efforts to manufacture and promote scientific uncertainty: the public relations efforts to convince the public that climate change is, in the words of Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.”7
At many scientific meetings and conferences, some experts who talk about climate breakdown believe that what we need is more evidence in order to convince everyone about its urgency. Conversely, I’ve been to other meetings with PR specialists who believe that if we can just get the message right—if we can make clear that climate breakdown is about more than polar bears, or if we just focus on the human health impacts—people will finally understand and embrace action. I appreciate the optimism of both groups. But new scientific and anecdotal evidence comes in all the time, different messages are floated, news stories proliferate, and none of it seems to be having much impact.
For most of the classic controversies around scientific cause and effect, the development of additional evidence eventually results in general acceptance of the causal relationship. Even Big Tobacco’s most fervent defenders—pretty much only tobacco executives by then—finally conceded (after about half a century) that the lung cancer cases seen in so many smokers were tobacco-related. No such luck with the climate breakdown terrorists so far. “Terrorists” is a loaded term, I realize, but it’s a warranted label. At one time, this small group of fringe scientists (mostly with little training in climate science) were labeled skeptics. But skepticism doesn’t describe their views. We’re no longer dealing with science, really. This is a dangerous ideology.
Prior to 1998, although the evidence was clear if you actually looked at it, it was possible for mainstream politicians to get away with dismissing the scientists who predicted that the buildup of greenhouse gases would result in significant changes in the climate. But no longer. As the weight of calamitous events and statistical evidence for global warming approaches “overwhelming” status, denial becomes harder and harder, just as it did with cigarette smoking during the second half of the twentieth century. But when we humans are threatened in our deeply held beliefs, we tend to double down on our commitment. This is what’s happening now. The denial machine has successfully turned climate breakdown into a partisan political issue, and the deniers enjoy and take full advantage of the cover and comfort provided by the Republican Party. (I regret having to call out a specific political party so bluntly, but, in any honest discussion, what’s the choice? It’s a fact, and in my book, there are no alternative facts.)
That climate denial has become a loyalty test for GOP politicians is a relatively recent development. In the 1980s, even into the 1990s, the U.S. government enjoyed a tenuous, bipartisan consensus on the problem posed by the ever-accumulating greenhouse gases. As recently as 2000, both candidates vying for the Republicans’ presidential nomination, George W. Bush and John McCain, recognized the imperative to reduce greenhouse gases. For good reason: if there were ever an instance when the precautionary principle makes sense, climate change would seem to be it. But that tentative bipartisan consensus fell apart for a host of reasons—political and cultural—and rather quickly degenerated into a no-holds-barred confrontation between an alliance of libertarian free-market ideologues funded by the fossil fuel industry and those with the temerity to suggest that factors other than that one industry’s profits—public health, planetary health—should be prioritized. Opposing efforts to limit greenhouse gas emissions has become an official plank in the Republican Party platform, and dissenters are unceremoniously drummed out of the party. Remarkably, in the words of Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz, “the Republican Party is the only major political party on the planet that is explicitly dedicated to making climate change worse.”8
In the old days of cigarette smoke and lung cancer, the broad public awareness around the issue was ahead of the game, recognizing the cancer link years before industry’s scientists finally threw in the towel and acknowledged the truth. The same is not true of climate breakdown. Today a solid majority of Americans acknowledge the ongoing climate breakdown, but a substantial minority does not. These citizens deny the science behind anthropogenic climate breakdown, and like the rump group of denial experts, this cohort is locked in; while the scientific evidence increases, this cohort isn’t getting much smaller. Belief in the existence of climate change has become tribal. The issue is perceived as preeminently political, not scientific. This is evidenced by the regular invocation of Al Gore’s name in conjunction with climate change. And here I’m talking about the climate changing at all, irrespective of causes. Thirty-five percent of Republicans believe the climate is not changing, period, compared with 2 percent of Democrats. On the flip side, 90 percent of Democrats think there is solid evidence, compared with 50 percent of Republicans. Almost four in five Democrats agree that humans are at least partially responsible for these changes, compared to only 35 percent of Republicans. These numbers have changed little over the past decade or more.9
How did we arrive at this dispiriting, divided state of affairs? It’s pretty simple. The pseudo-scientific and political opposition to acknowledgment of climate breakdown is aligned—ideologically, tactically, and now politically—with the same gang that, for almost three-quarters of a century, has specialized in manufacturing uncertainty when it comes to the science of certain economically important issues. It is the same crowd funded by the same money employing the same tactics. They’re playing a long game, and their concerted effort, funded by some of the largest corporations, wealthiest families, and most conservative foundations in the United States, has convinced a substantial and politically potent portion of Americans that government regulations of any kind are an attack on the free-market “liberty” of corporations, families, and individuals. These groups have lots of practice in this double-dealing sleight of hand, having perfected the art of manufacturing uncertainty about the proven dangers inherent in human exposure to things like cigarette smoke, lead paint, industrial chemicals—the list goes on and on. And now these identical strategies are being employed in what would be the obstructionists’ greatest—and quite possibly most dangerous—achievement: denying and undermining the science that documents the atmospheric buildup of greenhouse gases and the impacts of this accumulation on weather and life on this planet.
Climate-breakdown denial began with and is closely linked to Big Tobacco, which in its decades-long fight to deny the link between smoking and lung cancer established both the playbook and the founding organizations for science and public relations against the public interest. The connections here comprise a long and somewhat winding road, but I want to lay out the essential elements as they have played out over the past three-quarters of a century.
The George C. Marshall Institute, named in honor of the titan of the World War II era, was founded in 1984 by three brilliant physicists—Frederick Seitz, Robert Jastrow, and William Nierenberg—all of whom had long and distinguished careers in science. They were also deeply immersed in the ideological conflicts around the Cold War, and they were vehement opponents of Soviet socialism and threats of expansion. Their visceral animosity toward the Soviet Union blended to an instinctive suspicion of anti-nuclear activists and “environmentalists” in the United States, whom the three physicists viewed as deluded do-gooders at best, socialists and Marxists at worst. In fact, the Marshall founders regarded virtually all claims of harmful health and environmental effects associated with pollution or toxic chemicals not just as greatly overblown, but as existential threats to free-market capitalism and the future of Western civilization. As conservative George Will described this ideology in a Washington Post column: “Some environmentalism is a ‘green tree with red roots.’ It is the socialist dream—ascetic lives closely regulated by a vanguard of bossy visionaries—dressed up as compassion for the planet.”10
The three famous names on the Marshall Institute letterhead endowed any issue they addressed with a valuable patina of credibility, and the institute exploited that advantage in suppressing science they regarded as threatening. Remember acid rain, a major environmental issue in the 1970s and 1980s? Nierenberg collaborated with Fred Singer, another physicist (now closely associated with the Heritage Foundation), to ensure that a presidential review panel underplayed the severity of it. The report exaggerated the uncertainties in the scientific evidence, which in turn provided the rationale to take no action to address the problem. The same thing happened with chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and the ozone hole, also a contentious issue of the era. The narrative that CFCs damaged the ozone layer was deemed another threat—not to the environment, but to the free-market system, and Singer was one of the headliners questioning the studies linking the two. Science historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway wrote that Singer’s opposition “had three major themes: the science is incomplete and uncertain; replacing CFCs will be difficult, dangerous, and expensive; and the scientific community is corrupt and motivated by self-interest and political ideology.”11
In their obfuscating on acid rain and the ozone hole, the Marshall scientists and their associates contributed to delaying environmental action for only a few years. Their assertions about the uncertainty of the science and the costs of addressing the problem proved to be greatly exaggerated; their distortions of the scientific evidence were soon overtaken by an accumulation of studies and implementation of environmental controls that quickly reduced the problem. (Three of the authors of the disputed studies on CFCs disputed would be awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1995.) The United States and 195 countries signed a treaty, the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, which has been remarkably effective in reducing CFC releases and protecting the ozone layer although Singer has long maintained his opposition to it.12 And according to the U.S. State Department (on a 2018 web page that seems to have survived at least the first half of the Trump administration), the treaty is expected to contribute to prevention of more than 280 million cases of skin cancer, approximately 1.6 million skin cancer deaths, and more than 45 million cases of cataracts in the United States alone by the end of the century.13
The Marshall Institute’s prevarications on acid rain and ozone never appeared in the actual scientific literature and were soon forgotten—at least by the outside world. But in the eyes of the tobacco industry, these failed campaigns amounted to dress rehearsals for the arguments and tactics they’d need in opposition to action on secondhand smoke. And the Marshall Institute had shown itself to be a useful actor.
Frederick Seitz, the most prominent of the Marshall founders, was a former president of Rockefeller University and former president of the National Academy of Sciences. He also had a side job: running a grant-making program for R. J. Reynolds Tobacco, the giant manufacturer of cigarettes. The principal goal of this program, according to numerous tobacco industry documents, was to develop “an extensive body of scientifically well-grounded data useful in defending the industry against attacks.”11 Seitz engaged in this work long after the causal relationship between cigarette and lung cancer was settled science. He would later claim that conflicting scientific points of view had deserved “equal time” in public discourse. (The “equal time” gambit is pure sophistry—but also a go-to strategy of the product defense industry, one that continues in public discourse today.)
By the late 1980s, studies increasingly showed that nonsmoking spouses of smokers were at risk of tobacco-related illnesses, and the Environmental Protection Agency moved to protect these nonsmokers from the cancer risk arising from exposure to tobacco smoke. As the government geared up to increase these public health protections, Big Tobacco mobilized its response: front groups. Front groups were organizations (or coalitions, or centers—any name that conveyed authority, with bonus points for “common sense” values) that advanced a worldview in which private industry is unfairly hampered by government regulation. It’s noteworthy that even though these front groups were funded by tobacco, they never defended tobacco use per se; that train had left the station. Instead, they opposed higher taxes on cigarettes and restrictions on smoking in public areas because those regulations undermined freedom.
This approach probably wasn’t going to work on its own. The cigarette manufacturers also needed to disparage the science of secondhand smoke (also discussed in Chapter 2, above), or at least raise enough questions so that the anti-tax, anti-regulatory front groups didn’t have to directly defend a product that caused cancer not just among its users (who were voluntarily exposing themselves), but also to nonsmokers who happened to be nearby.
Here, the famed cofounder of the Marshall Institute was invaluable. Seitz provided the same strategic publication relations (I don’t want to call it “science”) that many product defense firms offer today. For second-hand smoke, it meant writing a report that disputed the EPA’s approach and rejecting many of the studies the EPA considered. It didn’t matter that Seitz was a physicist with no background in epidemiology; his name gave credibility to the critiques, and tobacco exploited the imprimatur to the fullest. (They also paid. The Marshall Institute did not accept money directly from private corporations, so something had to be done about that. It was Jim Tozzi, former Reagan White House official who has been a product defense consultant to many industries trying to reduce government regulation of their deadly products, who came up with the idea of having tobacco payments to Marshall pass through his own organization.14 Tozzi’s invaluable work for the talc and cosmetics industry is featured in Chapter 9.) Seitz and Fred Singer also served as scientific advisors to the tobacco-funded lobby groups, including Philip Morris’s Advancement of Science Coalition and the Science and Environment Policy Project. The latter collaborated with Philip Morris’s public relations firm to issue a report, Junk Science at the EPA.
In 2015, with all three of its principals deceased, the Marshall Institute closed up shop, but it quickly morphed into a new organization, the CO2 Coalition.15 The coalition’s motto: “Carbon Dioxide Is Essential for Life.”16 This is true. Fire is also essential for life, but we try to control fire so it doesn’t kill us. In all its guises, the denial machine’s objective was and is to manufacture doubt and provide some kind of cover for the funders and the politicians. To a large extent, the machine has succeeded.
Looking back on the secondhand smoke science: none of it was junk.
The Marshall Institute’s work for Big Tobacco was the blueprint for today’s climate terrorists: provide scientific cover for the industry’s larger efforts to oppose regulations, including taxes. Of course, calling the publications of the Marshall Institute “science” is wholly inaccurate; the organization issued technical reports filled with charts, graphs, and citations that look impressive, but few would survive peer review in an academic journal of any repute. Marshall, and the hundreds of front groups it inspired, was in the business of undercutting science.
Climate breakdown has witnessed a condensed application of the Marshall approach because oil companies, including ExxonMobil, Shell, and their trade association (the American Petroleum Institute), did much of the earliest research on it.17 And while some of the oil giants today publicly acknowledge that anthropogenic climate change is real, they have never apologized for launching and bankrolling the deceitful organizations that have been lying about the science—and are still doing so. In many published versions of the story, ExxonMobil has been targeted as the firm most responsible for the campaign to disparage climate breakdown science. Some of that blame is earned; ExxonMobil was, until recently, the largest corporation in the world, and by virtue of being publicly traded, its behavior can be modified by the demands of its stockholders.
But it’s Koch Industries, the largest privately held oil company in the world, that appears to be applying the lessons of tobacco to climate breakdown with the greatest zeal and success. Koch Industries is owned by the brothers Charles and David Koch, who, in 1983, following the proverbial “bruising” courtroom and boardroom battle, bought out their other two brothers 16 years after the death of the founding father, Fred Koch. The money that the two active brothers (along with that of the other ultra-wealthy, free-market ideologues they have recruited) have contributed to undermining climate science dwarfs that contributed by ExxonMobil. In the book Dark Money, journalist Jane Mayer impressively documents the Kochs’ encounters with regulators attempting to protect the public from the companies’ more harmful activities (from illegal benzene emissions and dumping mercury to price fixing), as well as their systematic, generously funded attacks on the U.S. system of public protections and regulation.18
Firsthand testimony about the Kochs’ personal denial machine comes from Jeff Nesbit, who in 1993 was communications director of Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE), a front group/“wholly owned subsidiary” of Koch Industries. Researchers at University of California–San Francisco, as well as Nesbit in his book Poison Tea, have shown that the tobacco industry and the Koch donor network have been the two primary funders of a local and national chain of anti-regulatory, free-market academic centers, think tanks, and “Astroturf” and “Greenwash” groups, all with names that strike similar chords: Freedom Works, Americans for Prosperity, Enough is Enough, the Coalition Against Regressive Taxation, Get Government Off Our Backs Coalition, International Climate Science Coalition, Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, and countless more (see Figure 11.1). Each purports to be an independent grass roots operation or coalition, but each is in fact an instrument of one very big business—one with an operating goal of a “small government” that allows people (and corporations) to do what they want, unhindered by government regulation.19
Figure 11.1 A (partial) mapping of Koch-owned interest groups and Koch-allied PR firms and political actors. Reproduced from A. Fallin et al., “‘To Quarterback Behind the Scenes, Third-Party Efforts’: The Tobacco Industry and the Tea Party,” Tobacco Control, 24: 322-3312014 with permission from BMJ Publishing Group Ltd.
The chorus of wealthy corporate entities calling for a return to liberty and small government have two goals: lower taxes and regulation for the “makers”; reduce vital safety net programs for the “takers” (to employ the language made famous by Mitt Romney in his 2012 presidential campaign). With climate breakdown issues specifically, the fossil fuel industry has led the fight against environmental protections, with both overt and covert campaigns to manufacture doubt and defend “the principles of free markets and limited government” in the words of one Koch-funded advocacy group.20 Not coincidentally, these free-market principles are consistent with their efforts to maximize their own wealth. Why should these companies be prohibited from operating oil pipelines that leak, or spewing carcinogens into the air of communities around refineries? In fact, firms controlled by the Koch brothers have done all of these, and actually broke some impressive records in the process. Many of the ultra-rich funders of the free market “anti-regulatory” movement are born wealthy but think of themselves as self-made. The wealth of a substantial number of them comes from government contracts and hundreds of millions of dollars in government subsidies.21 The hypocrisy is blatant. The money spent to further their goals amounts to something more than that.
Thanks to litigation, literally millions of pages of internal tobacco industry documents have given us a new understanding of how tobacco and the Koch family (through Citizens for a Sound Economy and other vehicles) have bankrolled and directed a powerful anti-regulatory campaign in the name of increased freedom and getting the government “off our backs”. (Not coincidentally, this litigation also found the tobacco industry guilty of violating federal racketeering laws.) Through these documents, we learned that the Tea Party did not spontaneously spring up in opposition to the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) in 2009. Philip Morris first developed the Boston Tea Party analogy for its grass roots operations in 1989 and continued to promote it through the 1990s. In 2002, Citizens for a Sound Economy started the U.S. Tea Party, registering the website www.usteaparty.com. The organization was able to suddenly appear on the scene to oppose President Obama and the Democrats years later because it had been cultivated and developed by the same corporations that had been fighting for lower corporate taxes and against regulation of tobacco and greenhouse gases.19 All in the name of liberty.
With the repercussions of climate breakdown increasingly visible and palpable and harder to deny, the Kochs’ denial machine has had to become more sophisticated. Increasingly we hear from experts, many of whom are economists, who appear to be more reasonable than the “just say no” deniers. Of these accommodationists (also sometimes called “lukewarmers”), the most famous is Danish political scientist Bjørn Lomborg. This class of gadflies doesn’t outright dispute the science of climate breakdown, but does argue that the alarmists exaggerate the impacts of this change, which they claim won’t be that serious. Often their commentaries focus on a need for “resilience” and emphasize what appear to be clear advantages to warming: ice-free Arctic shipping lanes, longer growing seasons in certain regions offsetting the shorter seasons elsewhere. And their main point: any costs attributed to warming will be insignificant when compared to the economic disruption and bottom-line cost of transitioning from fossil fuel combustion to an all-renewable economy.
This new lukewarmer approach monetizes the value of our planet and its human societies in their infinite wonder and variety—a calculation directly analogous to the cost-benefit analysis free-market ideologues seek to impose on every government regulation. But what are the costs associated with the impending death of the Great Barrier Reef? Is it limited to the lost income for Australia’s tourist industry? What is the value of the human life lost in a flood in Boston? In Bermuda? In Bangladesh? Are they the same? As an Oscar Wilde character so famously put it, these accountants know the price of everything but the value of nothing. They are blinded by their dollars. They also generally overstate the costs of renewable energy, which is dropping fast, and would drop even faster with stronger policy incentives. Although the lukewarmers’ view sounds more reasonable than the climate terrorists that came before them, it yields essentially the same position: continue our reliance on fossil fuels; better yet, increase that reliance. Drill, baby, drill.
Further in from this fringe ideology, some recalcitrant companies like ExxonMobil have changed the tune they sing publicly. At a recent shareholder meeting, CEO Darren Woods announced that he was “committed to being part of the solution on climate change.”22 But as ExxonMobil continues to support right-wing policy groups that deny the existence of climate change, it’s fair to say that talk is cheap.23 Sociologist Robert J. Brulle estimates that industry spent about $2 billion (in 2016 dollars) lobbying on climate issues between 2000 and 2016. Peak spending was in the first two years of the Obama administration—2008 to 2010—when it appeared that Congress might pass legislation helping to limit greenhouse gas emissions. That hope died with the off-year elections in 2010 (and the rise of the Tea Party, funded by Koch), so lobbying expenditures decreased accordingly.24
But with the rise of Donald Trump, the monster forces launched and nurtured by these industries are going stronger than ever. They have taken control of important components of the federal government. Myron Ebell, a prominent climate change denier who directed the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Center for Energy and Environment (funded by oil and coal companies), was the head of the Trump administration’s EPA transition team. He was joined by two of Big Tobacco’s leading operatives: Steve Milloy, purveyor of “junk science” stories related to climate breakdown, and Chris Horner, a climate change denier long associated with coal-funded think tanks. Some degree of climate denialism is very nearly a litmus test for a position of authority within the Trump administration.
In the all-out campaign that is under way to roll back the progress that has been made in the face of climate breakdown, the PR talking points are obvious: Climate change is fake news, maybe the original fake news, maybe the mother of all fake news. This argument, floated every day by the climate denialists on the payroll of fossil-fuel companies, is scientifically incoherent, but it doesn’t matter. This isn’t about the science; eroding trust is much more productive. As Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, described President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Accord, “He started with a conclusion, and the evidence brought him to the same conclusion.”25
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), one of the Senate’s most vociferous advocates for programs to limit greenhouse gas emissions, offered a succinct explanation for why the climate breakdown denial machine has established such an iron grip on the political class of the Republican Party: “Campaign contributions,” he said. And to be sure, corporate money has a lot of sway in today’s politics. But it’s also worth noting how the flow of corporate money, in very large amounts, has also changed the day-to-day lives and responsibilities of politicians, especially Republican politicians. Because a small number of big donors now in large part finance the campaigns of Republican candidates, the party’s elected representatives no longer have to spend endless hours on phone calls begging for contributions. This funding network has made their lives more pleasant (because they hated making the phone calls) and their campaign treasuries richer. They speak and vote accordingly. The party had been trending this direction for some time, but the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision made it exponentially worse. Today there are virtually no limits to a donor who wants to fund campaigns, and, because of certain IRS rulings, they can now do it without even revealing their identity. Dark money rules. Republican politicians who expressed concern about climate change have been treated as heretics by the base of the party and thrown from office. Republicans who at one time recognized climate change as a serious problem have abandoned that view, at least publicly.26 The profiles in courage are few; the new mavericks of the GOP are those who call for civility in conversations around climate breakdown, then vote to further defund it. Essentially, many of the same wealthy individuals and financial interests that brought us the climate denial standoff in the first place now own the Republican Party.
Of course, they have help. The anti-science fervor among the party’s base is not surprising given that the primary sources of information are Fox News, the Breitbart outlets, the Wall Street Journal editorial pages, and other more fringe platforms, all of which are happy to provide a platform for scientists whose work isn’t good enough to appear in mainstream, peer-reviewed science journals. Why does this matter? Because this type of unearned visibility has inestimable value, especially when working synergistically with journalism’s (misguided, in my opinion) “both-siderism” doctrine. The media giants on the right are lockstep in denying climate breakdown. Steve Bannon, chairman of the Breitbart News Network before leading Trump’s campaign, published pieces calling environmentalists “greentards” and “totally fucking wrong on climate change.”27 Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, led by Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, delivers the same message, but slightly more politely. According to an analysis by the website DeSmog, 95 percent of op-eds about climate change (287 out of 303) published by the Wall Street Journal between 2012 and 2016 were “full of misleading and debunked denial talking points, conspiracy theories and political attacks.”28
A stark example: Shortly before the House Science Committee held a hearing on sea level rise in 2018, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by Fred Singer (among many they’ve published) entitled “The Sea Is Rising, but Not Because of Climate Change.” Singer is a physicist by education, a free-market ideologue, and a professional skeptic. He was vocal in his skepticism about the growing “ozone hole” in the 1970s. He was wrong about that. He was also wrong about acid rain and the effects of tobacco. That’s not a good track record, but apparently nothing can thwart his regular appearances in what appear to be respectable publications.
At least Singer’s op-ed acknowledged that sea levels are rising. This could be news for many Republicans, if not for the millions of residents of Shanghai, Dhaka, Lagos, Miami and other coastal cities where rising waters will soon exact severe consequences. At those 2018 hearings of the House Science Committee, former chair Lamar Smith (R-Oil) denied that sea levels were rising, even while at the same time entering Singer’s contradictory op-ed into the record. Perhaps he felt the need to do this to counter the prior testimony of Philip Duffy, president of the Woods Hole Research Center who reported on data showing the rate of global sea-level rise is accelerating. Congressman Mo Brooks (R-AL) then also acknowledged that sea levels are rising—but declared that rocks falling into the oceans are a contributing factor. Needless to say, reports from this committee session triggered quite a bit of derision among actual scientists.29
With the United States pulling out of the Paris Climate Accord and President Trump and his appointees doing their best to roll back any regulation that would slow the accumulation of greenhouse gases, defending scientists and climate breakdown science has never been more important. And in spite of everything, there is reason for hope. There is a global consensus (excluding the U.S. government, of course) that greenhouse gas production must be controlled, and some progress is being made. The cost of renewable energy continues to drop, making some of the dirtiest and most dangerous fossil fuels financially unattractive, even with Republicans’ desperate efforts to subsidize the industry. And encouragingly, more and more media outlets have stopped applying the “both sides” approach to presenting climate change stories. The fringe deniers are quoted less, and when they are, it is common for them to be labeled as outside the mainstream of science, or confronted with in-interview fact checks. Reporters are also more often citing climate breakdown as a cause of the extreme weather events that are occurring with increased frequency and intensity.
As we’ve seen so many times, litigation and the fear of litigation has had a positive impact on corporate behavior. Aided by research documenting the oil giants’ in-house knowledge about the buildup of greenhouse gases, lawsuits demanding compensation for past damage and financial assistance to mitigate the impact of extreme weather have sprung up across the country. These suits may not be victorious, but as a strategy they are powerful. Beyond even the possibility of enormous monetary awards, these suits have terrified the companies, which quickly recognize that in defending themselves they will have to disclose many documents they would far prefer to keep secret. It’s a story that has played out time and again, and a reason for hope moving forward: damning evidence of wrongdoing brought to light through litigation. It has brought the oil industry to the negotiating table, and corporations now appear willing to accept a tax on burning carbon fuels (including oil) in order to cease litigation and avoid further discovery.
Environmental groups are also leading consumer campaigns to pressure firms to stop funding groups that are the worst perpetrators of climate change denial (including Heartland Institute), and to disconnect from the political lobbying organizations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the latter a Koch-supported organization. These pressures have produced results: Apple, Levi Strauss and several utility companies have quit the U.S. Chamber of Commerce because of that organization’s extreme position on climate change. Even ExxonMobil joined Google, British Petroleum (BP), and Shell in abandoning ALEC over its climate change policies. Breaking up ALEC is of great value, since it has been central in advancing some of the most backward public policies on many fronts, from stand-your-ground gun rights laws to cutting pensions for public sector workers like teachers and firefighters to slashing benefits for injured workers.
On the other hand, some progress made before the election of Donald Trump has undeniably been wiped away. Many of the corporations that were moving in the right direction have reversed themselves, driven in part by the chance to boost short-term profits in a regulatory vacuum and at the long-term expense of the planet.
It is now a fact of life that destructive weather-driven events will bring tragedy to many and discomfort to countless more. Nevertheless, most climate scientists believe it is not too late to head off the most catastrophic effects of climate breakdown if we take immediate, drastic steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But the fossil fuel industry and its closest ally and enabler—the Republican Party—continue to stymie or reverse those efforts. For those of us in the United States, the most important thing we can do is to advocate for public policies that dramatically reduce burning oil and coal. The Republican Party is the party of climate breakdown denial, and it must be routed or completely transformed for the sake of future generations.