Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet (36 page)

In a radical departure from their long-term alliance with science and technology, industrial enterprises and free market theorists found it expedient to attack science itself and the scientific community that produced it. A number of analysts argue that this strategy was adopted after the American public objected to the Reagan administration’s attempts to roll back environmental protections in the 1980s.
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If the public was inclined to insist on remedies for environmental damage, it was preferable that they saw no damage in the first place.

On the question of global warming, David Goldston, Republican chief of staff for the House of Representatives Science Committee until 2006, told
Newsweek
that opponents of greenhouse curbs had “settled on the ‘science isn’t there’ argument because they didn’t believe they’d be able to convince the public to do nothing if climate change were real.”
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Since scientific studies gave substance to many calls for environmental action, science and scientists would have to be challenged: the best tactic was to cast doubt on the seriousness of environmental problems and depict environmentalists—and environmental scientists—as extremists who would be willing to falsify evidence so as to exaggerate the problems.
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Although denial of the reality of global warming is the most palpable manifestation of this strategy, the entire gamut of environmental science is subject to it. First, environmental skepticism denies that environmental problems are serious and dismisses scientific evidence; second, it denies any need for policies to protect the environment or remedy damage; third, it opposes regulation and corporate liability; and last, it attacks environmentalism as a threat to Western progress.
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Along these lines, the commentary of the mainstream economists when
The Limits to Growth
was first published in 1972 featured out-and-out denial of limits to economic growth. Such denial became a key tool for the opposition to environmental protection. Free market advocates had always rejected regulation, seen as an unwanted imposition on profitability. This was even more imperative for business when the pollution of air, water, and soil increased dramatically in scale after World War II and as clearing, logging, and mining decimated human communities and natural habitats worldwide. If this was the price of economic growth, however, it was a price that corporations wanted people to pay.

Environment and the Neoliberal Think Tanks

The “New Right” Skeptics

In 1985 the Australian journalist Tim Duncan, who has since worked for the Business Council, Rio Tinto, and the PR company Hinton, published his sympathetic portrait of the Australian “New Right.” Duncan tabulated the political and social beliefs that have buttressed neoliberal economics in Australia. Alongside “the rescue of Australian history” and “reasserting traditional social values,” a detailed table spelled out the New Right’s approach to “the future of mankind.” In response to environmentalist attitudes, which he termed the “orthodoxy,” Duncan set out the beliefs of the free marketeers about resources, growth, and progress, uncanny in their resemblance to the economists’ attack on
Limits
back in 1972. According to Duncan, the New Right believed there were “more resources available now than ever before” and that “energy [is] cheaper now because there is so much of it. If oil gets more expensive it will become redundant.” As for economic growth, “[a] sustainable society is an ecological dreamtime—something which has never happened in human history,” and “there are no physical or economic constraints to continued progress.” In Duncan’s picture, Australia’s New Right was not only dismissive about limits, it rejected notions of sustainability as well.
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In the United States, free market think tanks promoted environmental skepticism almost single-handedly. Of the 141 books published between 1972 and 2005 that denied or downplayed environmental problems, more than 90 percent had a clear link to one or more think tanks. The bipartisan conservationism of the Nixon era had been abandoned and the prevalent cultural practice of accepting the scientific integrity of the academy discarded. In 2005, 90 percent of think tanks that addressed the environment issued policy statements that embraced a skeptical view of environmental damage and all eight of the climate-focused entities contested the reality of global warming.
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These US think tanks went on to lead the climate “skeptics” worldwide.

The gathering torrent of antienvironmental literature began slowly in the 1970s when the first neoliberal think tanks were being established. In the 1980s, fourteen books that dismissed environmental problems were published and all were linked to conservative think tanks. The 1990s saw a fivefold increase over the previous decade, spiking at the time of the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 and again around Kyoto in 1997.
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The production of such books continued to build in the first decade of the new century, when sixty-four books characterized by climate change denial were published.
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Ongoing attempts at global regulation and reduction of greenhouse gas emissions play an important part in the intensity of this backlash, which clearly aims to obstruct, if not prevent, any such action.

Explicit Political Connections in the United States

The substantial interpenetration between free market think tanks and US administrations, Republican in particular, is an open secret. The Heritage Foundation provided the newly elected Reagan administration with its
Mandate for Leadership
, a massive guide to free market policies. Think tank influence was similarly reflected in the appointments George W. Bush made to his new administration in 2001. He told the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) that “some of the finest minds in our nation are at work on some of the greatest challenges to our nation. You do such good work that my administration has borrowed 20 such minds.”
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Vice President Cheney’s wife Lynne was and remains a Senior Fellow at the AEI. Edward Feulner, president of the Heritage Foundation, claimed in 2001 that the Bush administration had dipped “deep into the Heritage pool of talent.”
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According to the journalist Sharon Begley, Myron Ebell from the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) arranged to apply pressure on the administration when rumors circulated that the new president was going to announce he would honor his campaign pledge to cap carbon dioxide emissions. The CEI’s president told Begley that the CEI had alerted anyone who might have influence to get the line out of the speech—if it was, in fact, in there.
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By March, not only had Bush abandoned his pledge to cap carbon dioxide emissions, he had withdrawn from the Kyoto treaty altogether.

In addition to more circuitous avenues of persuasion through its funding of think tanks, industry exerted a direct influence on the appointments of the 2001 Bush administration through its lobbying apparatus. The ExxonMobil lobbyist Randy Randol asked the newly inaugurated president to remove the British scientist Robert Watson, then chairman of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), from his post.
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Watson’s acceptance of the consensus position on global warming, that humans were very likely responsible, seems to have troubled Exxon. Watson was denied a second term and replaced in 2002 by Rajendra Pachauri; though Pachauri’s scientific views were similar, the Bush administration backed his declared “political neutrality.”
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Randol also recommended that a fierce opponent of climate action, Harlan Watson (unrelated), who was trained in physics and economics but was not a climate specialist, be seconded to help the United States with its climate negotiations; he became the US lead negotiator at subsequent post-Kyoto climate conferences.
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Philip Cooney, a former attorney for the American Petroleum Institute, was appointed to head the Council on Environmental Quality, where he later came to prominence for his role in unilaterally amending the reports of the actual scientists who worked there. On resignation, he joined ExxonMobil.
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The major industry associations also opposed action on global warming directly. The National Association of Manufacturers wrote to President Bush in 2001 congratulating him on reversing his pre-election promise to cap carbon emissions:

Dear Mr. President: On behalf of 14,000 member companies of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM)—and the 18 million people who make things in America—thank you for your opposition to the Kyoto Protocol on the grounds that it exempts 80 percent of the world and will cause serious harm to the United States.
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The US Chamber of Commerce was on much the same track, telling the president, “Global warming is an important issue that must be addressed—but the Kyoto Protocol is a flawed treaty that is not in the US interest.”
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Think Tanks, Front Groups, and Corporate Money

The establishment of a business-friendly reservoir of alternative scholarship in the free market think tanks was to serve American business well, just as Lewis Powell had foreseen. Alongside AEI and the Heritage Foundation, openly favored by President Bush, the Cato Institute and the CEI also commanded extensive media attention.
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The same family foundations and the same corporations, mainly linked to fossil fuels or motivated by regulatory issues, also funded a number of smaller think tanks and front groups dedicated to antienvironment and counterconsumer work.

The American Council on Science and Health (ACSH), founded in 1978, still claims to promote “coverage of health issues … based on scientific facts—not hyperbole, emotion, or ideology.”
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While presenting itself as a consumer advocate, the group has consistently supported industry, playing down risks from DDT, dioxin, and asbestos,
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supporting bovine growth hormone for dairy cows, and opposing EPA regulation of the defoliant 2,4,5-T in 1981 and the fumigant ethylene dibromide in 1984. The ACSH has acknowledged receiving “40 percent of its money from industry, particularly manufacturers in the food processing, beverage, chemical and pharmaceutical industries, and much of the remainder from industry-sponsored foundations.” Monsanto was a prominent contributor, as were Exxon and several other chemical industry giants such as American Cyanamid, Dow, Union Carbide, and Uniroyal.
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Fred Singer, a physicist who characterized himself as a contrarian and whose activities are explored below, founded the Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP) in 1990 with money from Monsanto, Texaco, and the Bradley, Forbes, and Smith Richardson Family Foundations;
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Bradley and Smith Richardson are listed as the top two in Lapham’s 2004 list of the richest. Oil companies such as Arco, Exxon, Shell, Sun Oil, and Unocal also funded Singer’s research.
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Fred Seitz, another of the contrarian physicists, served as chairman of SEPP’s board, and yet another, William Nierenberg, was on SEPP’s Board of Science Advisers.
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Singer has held positions with many think tanks and front groups, including Steve Milloy’s Advancement of Sound Science (see below), the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Environmental Conservation Organization (ECO), and Elizabeth Whelan’s ACSH.
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Almost all of the free market think tanks are staffed by economists, policy analysts, and lawyers rather than scientists,
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so it is all the more extraordinary that their dismissive views on environmental science have been taken so seriously by so many. The cultivation of an appearance of credible scholarship has assisted them in this but, while their staff members are frequently qualified in economics, their claims to legitimate expertise in science are often dubious.

Ronald Bailey is typical. Affiliated with both the Cato Institute and the CEI, Bailey has written numerous antienvironmental books, including
Eco-scam
and
Global Warming and Other Eco-Myths
,
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yet his BA is in philosophy and economics. Myron Ebell from CEI appears frequently in the US and UK media attacking mainstream climate science. Trained in philosophy, history, and political science,
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Ebell is another example of a nonscientist who portrays himself as a climate expert. In his BBC interview with
Today
anchor John Humphrys, Ebell attacked the UK’s chief scientist, Sir David King, as “ridiculous,” “alarmist,” and having “no expertise in climate science,” and went on to pontificate on the faults of climate modelers. In a subsequent BBC interview with Jeremy Paxman, however, he was obliged to admit that, unlike King, he is not a scientist of any sort.
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Julian Simon, associated with both the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation,
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made the first concerted denial of the environmental crisis in
The Ultimate Resource
, and followed up with
The Resourceful Earth
—a reply to President Carter’s
Global 2000
report—which he coedited with Herman Kahn.
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Simon was an economist with dense think tank affiliations. The Danish statistician Bjørn Lomborg, who cited Simon as his inspiration, is another nonscientist who has had an enormous impact on the public assessment of the scientific evidence of environmental damage.

Fostering Doubt

Global Warming: Science versus Fiction

Scientists have been almost unanimous about global warming since the 1990s, and have endorsed the consensus position embraced in the IPCC’s Third and Fourth Assessments of 2001 and 2007, respectively—that the climate is warming and human greenhouse gas emissions are the likely explanation.
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Conservative think tank commentators, however, maintained their dissent throughout the same period, and as late as 2007 Vice President Cheney, while conceding that warming was happening, still claimed there was no consensus about whether it was part of a “normal cycle” or not.
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