Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming (17 page)

It’s a fascinating function, and B&G are innovators in the field. “There are a few [legal] groups that have partnerships with public relations firms,” Maisano said in the interview. “But nobody else does this in as detailed and intentional a way as we do.”

And Maisano is nothing if not intentional. Leveraging a fifteen-year career on Capitol Hill as a press secretary for Republican congressmen from Michigan and Wisconsin, he knows (and is known in) the corridors of power. From a media perspective, he also has one of the most impressive Rolodex files in the nation. For example, it is impossible to have a conversation while walking with Maisano through the crowds at a Society for Environmental Journalists conference, because nearly every reporter in the room either stops to chat or just shouts, “Hi, Frank!”

It’s no wonder. Frank Maisano gives good service. First, he sends out a weekly “energy update” to more than three thousand recipients—mostly to reporters, but also to movers and shakers in industry, politics, and the think tank brigade. The update is a quick, readable wrap-up of interesting stories from the past week and a wide-ranging look at what’s coming up in the days and weeks ahead. For reporters on the environment or energy beats, it would be a gift, keeping them current and saving them a considerable amount of leg work. If you don’t look too closely, it also seems vaguely evenhanded, talking about green energy projects like major wind farms at the same time as updating people on the latest developments in the coal-fired utility world.

Maisano doesn’t stop there. He also sends out instant responses to breaking news, complete with quotes from lawyers who are undeniably experts in the field. He also includes contact information for those experts, so if reporters want more background information, they can get it from B&G.

All of this is good garden-variety public relations. In the PR business, it’s our job to make reporters’ lives more manageable— and to do everything we can to communicate effectively on behalf of our clients. So it would be hard to criticize what Maisano does or how well he does it. His output is substantive and consistently more forthright than, say, Bjørn Lomborg’s twisted arguments. In person, Maisano is gregarious and charming in the hail-fellow-well-met style of a former jock (he was a junior hockey player, who now coaches his own kids and refs twice a week). It’s hard not to like the guy.

But it may be dangerous to interpret his bonhomie for sincerity. Maisano’s weekly Listserv output shows that he makes a consistent and compelling argument that climate change, though real, is either impossible or just too expensive to fix. For example, in a closing report about the last “UN Framework Convention on Climate Change” conference that Maisano sent out on his Listserv email on December 15, 2008, he complained that international negotiators weren’t paying enough attention to economic factors, saying, “If anything, most people seemed to keep the message that no matter the economic conditions, something must be done.
That seems to be an unrealistic approach,
given most of the globe is suffering significant economic woes” (my emphasis).

There’s something matter-of-fact in this, something almost self-evident. This is a very difficult time, politically and economically, to start talking about aggressive policy changes to address global warming. But Maisano also either overlooks or misrepresents a point that should be equally obvious. Having just come through fifteen years of robust economic growth, during which we went backwards in our effort to address climate change, he suggests that we can continue our retreat on the basis that an economic downturn makes responsible action unrealistic. Returning to the analogy of someone whose roof has sprung a leak, you cannot dismiss necessary home maintenance just because the budget is tight. You might forego buying a brand-new roof until you get a better job, but you still find a way to apply a workable patch. Besides, the leaky-roof metaphor is probably more appropriate for the ozone hole (another issue entirely). The relevant metaphor for climate change has more to do with heat. We have started a fire that is growing out of control—a fire that has the capacity to render our global home uninhabitable. Dismissing concern about that fire as “unrealistic” is irresponsible in the extreme.

As you might expect from someone advocating for energy development, Maisano also argues consistently that current environmental regulations are sufficient and that resources, once discovered, should be exploited, no holds barred. In a December 22, 2008, email he complained that court challenges had created delays that forced Shell to cancel an exploratory drilling program in Alaska’s Beaufort Sea. Maisano says, “These resources can be developed safely and in an environmentally responsible way. In fact, the environmental protections in place in the U.S. are among the most stringent of any in the world.” Five items later, in the same email, Maisano celebrates the opportunities that exist for “Brownfield Renewable Energy Developments”—basically the potential to build wind farms on contaminated lands. He writes, “EPA [the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency] estimates that there are about a half million potentially contaminated properties covering approximately 15 million acres across the U.S.”

So the U.S., with environmental protections in place that are “among the most stringent of any in the world,” has still rendered 15 million acres so toxic that they are not fit for much more than wind farming. This picture of unrestrained and “realistic” progress is chilling if you let it play out in perpetuity.

Still, you have to marvel at Maisano’s ability to present half a million contaminated sites as a good thing. And listening to him, you might find yourself nodding in agreement in spite of yourself. In the February 2009 interview with Littlemore he said, “These issues are so complex—there are so many facets— that you have to step back to get a grander picture of what we are really intending to do.” That’s what he and the team at B&G are trying to do. “We just want to help people find a better balance in how we address climate change, how we provide for our energy needs and how we make sure that people have economic opportunities.”

It sounds right, this notion of stepping back, of finding a better balance. But Maisano always seems to hold the picture frame tight enough that all we can see is the economy (and especially the economic opportunity for the companies his firm represents). He never steps back far enough to get a full view of the damage that we are doing to the world and the implications for the billions of people who will never enjoy the economic opportunities of which he now speaks.

Finally, while never quite dipping into the language of denial himself, Maisano maintains his street cred in the denier camp by circulating a steady flow of skeptical reports from places like D.C.-based think tank the George C. Marshall Institute. He also promotes deniers and denier events in his emails: “More than 70 of the world’s elite scientists specializing in climate issues will confront the subject of global warming at the second annual International Conference on Climate Change in New York City March 8-10.” And he lauds those who have stood up against factual science and common sense in their enthusiasm to present an alternative view: “Another sad note this week as we heard about the passing of the great writer Michael Crichton.”

For a last word on Maisano, however, it’s hard to improve upon this comment from Associated Press science writer Seth Borenstein: “Frank is the good cop to Marc Morano’s bad cop.”

It’s an astute assessment of the role both men play. Morano’s willingness to be totally outrageous in his promotion of denial opens up considerable middle ground, which means that Mai-sano looks like a pillar of reason by comparison. After dealing for fifteen years with people who refused even to acknowledge that the science is real and the situation serious, it’s a relief, at first, for environmental journalists to talk to someone like Mai-sano, who, like Lomborg, begins with a smile and a willing admission that the scientific explanation of human-induced global warming is undeniable. Yet both men come to the same conclusion that Morano has been promoting all along: they suggest that action is unnecessary, unaffordable, or unrealistic. And Maisano, picking up the bar tab in a room full of environmental reporters, offers condolences while gathering up everyone’s business card—the easier to ensure that the next time they’re writing a story, they’ll be well-served with a big helping of B&G spin.

WHEN IT COMES to staking out positions and shifting the middle ground, industry-funded strategists seem to have seized and kept the strategic initiative. Any time anyone on the science side makes even the smallest overstatement, they immediately face the full resources of a think tank echo chamber attack. And because conscientious scientists are so quick to recognize and acknowledge when something is not exactly correct, the attackers have won many apologies, corrections, or reinterpretations, which they have used to argue that all of climate science is frail and uncertain.

At the same time, the more exuberant deniers have often said things that were flat-out wrong, and then have refused to acknowledge or apologize for their misrepresentations. In response the environmental community—lacking both the resources and the sense of common purpose more typical of the antiscience crowd—has been ineffective in launching countercriticism.

The February 15, 2009, George Will column in the
Washington
Post
that I mentioned in Chapter 8 was a disappointing example. Will dismissed concern about climate change partly on the basis that global sea ice, frequently reported to have declined dramatically over the past several years, was actually equal in extent to what it had been when monitoring began in 1979.

This would have been compelling if it were true. But, thanks in part to the resulting controversy, the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, issued a press release clarifying the situation a few days later, stating, “We do not know where George Will is getting his information, but our data show that on February 15, 1979, global sea ice area was 16.79 million sq. km and on February 15, 2009, global sea ice area was 15.45 million sq. km. Therefore, global sea ice levels are 1.34 million sq. km less in February 2009 than in February 1979. This decrease in sea ice area is roughly equal to the area of Texas, California, and Oklahoma combined.”

Yet Will stuck to his guns, and the
Washington Post
insisted that the piece had been adequately fact-checked.
Post
editor Fred Hiatt defended Will’s right to his opinion and offered to open his pages to further debate. And the
Post
’s ombudsman, Andrew Alexander, followed up on February 28 in a column headlined, “The Heat from Global Warming,” saying that the paper had every right to “present a mix of respected and informed viewpoints.”

That would be true—if the information were true. The fact that it clearly was
not
true should have impressed the editors at the
Post
at least to the point of eliciting a correction. People weren’t complaining about George Will’s opinions. They weren’t trying to engage him in debate. They were complaining that he had misrepresented the facts—the first time perhaps inadvertently, and the second time through stubborn reassertion. And when you reassert something you know to be false, that could easily be called lying, not debating.

Into the midst of this fracas waded the
New York Times
’s Andrew Revkin, probably the best-read and most influential science and environment reporter in the country. Revkin is something of a hero in the science community for his hard work and his felicity to the facts. Between his stories in the
Times
and his additional writings on his popular blog DotEarth .com, he has been a leading voice for reason and accuracy on the climate file. But Revkin still hails from that world where balance is sometimes honored over accuracy. In a February 24, 2009,
Times
story, “In Climate Debate, Exaggeration Is a Pitfall,” Revkin reacted to the George Will debacle by comparing it to a recent instance in which former vice president Al Gore had been forced to remove a slide from his usual presentation because the scientific authors of the information said that Gore had overstated the impact of climate change on weather-related catastrophes. Revkin concluded, “In the effort to shape the public’s views on global climate change, hyperbole is an ever-present temptation on all sides of the debate.”

Under the circumstances Gore might reasonably have been accused of hyperbole—exaggeration or overstatement. But that’s different from lying. Gore also removed the offending slide from his presentation immediately. But Will simply repeated the misinformation, and the editors of his newspaper stood up in defense of his right to do so. Then Andy Revkin— again, probably the best and most credible climate change reporter in North America—offered this up as an indication that each side in the debate is sometimes guilty of not playing strictly by the rules.

Thus does the “middle ground” shift into unreality. The “reasonable” voices, of which Revkin must certainly be one, wind up giving assent to a scientific controversy that in fairness, and on the basis of the best and most accurate science, does not exist. With people like Benny Peiser and Marc Morano staking out the unreasonable fringe, with Fox News quoting energy lobbyists such as Steven Milloy as “experts,” people like Bjørn Lomborg and Frank Maisano start looking like the most reasonable characters around. They establish the middle ground, and they say, almost regretfully, that serious though climate change may be, it’s just too—what’s that word?—inconvenient to fix it just now. And the media look at the range of opinions and say, yes, there are exaggerations on all sides, suggesting that we should all be careful to stick to the muddied middle path.

An April 7, 2009,
Reuters News Service
story, “EU: Earth Warming Faster,” gave a chilling prediction for where that middle path leads. Reuters had chosen the eleven leading European scientists—nine of them lead authors of the last report of the IPCC—and asked for an update. They said warming was accelerating beyond what had been anticipated in the last report and that it was even more certain that humans were to blame. Worse, they said it was “unlikely”—which to them means there is less than a one-third chance—that we will limit the global temperature increase to four degrees Fahrenheit. And that increase, they say, is the trigger point beyond which climate change becomes truly dangerous.