Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?

by Bill McKibben

  Rupert Murdoch, the planet’s dominant communicator, provides a case in point because for a moment he appeared to be an exception to the rule. In 2007, in the wake of popular acclaim for Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth, he actually announced that he’d found climate religion. In a speech that he reprinted in his newspapers, he said, “Climate change poses catastrophic threats” and “[W]e can’t afford the risk of inaction.” He pledged to make NewsCorp carbon neutral, promising everything from electric golf carts on the 21st Century Fox studio lot to “the latest LED lighting technology in the master control rooms at Fox News.” His outlets, he said, would “change the way the public thinks about these issues.” Reality seemed to have broken through.15 But that reality was always at war with Murdoch’s deeper Randian ideology, the idea that government was out to steal from him. “What’s fair about taking money from people who earned it and giving it to people who didn’t?” he wrote a few years later.16 This rhetoric sounded more authentic, and so it was probably inevitable that his pledge to spread the word about climate change would give way to lying about it in the service of the larger antigovernment cause. Between 2012 and 2016, even as the scientific case for climate danger became ever more obvious, Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal published 303 op-eds, columns, and editorials on climate change, 287 of which were “misleading and debunked denial talking points, conspiracy theories, and political attacks.” Or, put another way, roughly 95 percent of what he published “disagreed with the roughly 97 percent consensus among climate scientists.”17 In 2016, the hottest year ever recorded on our planet, Fox News devoted six minutes to covering the issue,18 which may have been just as well, given that when the network’s anchors did mention it, they were likely to say things like “No one is dying from climate change.”19 By the summer of 2018, even as the world experienced record heat and fire, the Journal was concluding, in proper antigovernment fashion, that “climate change is over. All that remains is … bureaucratic mandates on behalf of special-interest renewable-energy rent-seekers.”20

  The chair of the economics department at George Mason University, where James Buchanan ended his days in a Koch-funded sinecure, explained it perfectly: “Those of us who recognize these important benefits of capitalism … are reluctant to yield power to governments to tackle global warming.” Indeed, he continued, perhaps “the best policy regarding global warming is to neglect it.”21

  This ideological idée fixe explains the single most bizarre talking point of the standard climate denier: the idea that climate scientists are “in it for the grant money” and hence skewing their results in a conspiracy to whip up anxiety and produce more government funding. The claim is obviously absurd, at least to anyone who has had the opportunity to meet climate scientists and oil executives and compare their lifestyles, but it draws from this deep well of suspicion about anyone who works for the government. In the early 1990s, scholars at the Center for the Study of Public Choice at George Mason wrote a book called The Economics of Smoking, which argues that because a cure for cancer would “put many anti-cancer bureaucrats out of work,” these scientists had weak “incentives to find and develop effective treatments” and strong “incentives to magnify the risk of cancer.”22 Another of Buchanan’s acolytes explained that “health officials’ interest in testing small children’s blood for lead made sense when one considered that finding poisoned children validated their jobs.”23 In other words, who would worry about lead poisoning in children if they weren’t getting paid for it? (Probably not the key billionaire member of the Koch donor network whose company was found marketing arsenic-tainted mulch as “ideal for playgrounds.”) 24 Believing that government doctors care about kids only in order to make more money, or that climate scientists pursue their work with profit in mind, is such a cynical view that it can be explained only as a reflection of life in the billionaire bubble. If greed warps your life, you assume it must warp everyone’s.

  So: global warming is the ultimate problem for oil companies because oil causes it, and it’s the ultimate problem for government haters because without government intervention, you can’t solve it. Those twin existential threats, to cash and to worldview, meant that there was never any shortage of resources for the task of denying climate change.

  We’ve already seen how it began in the late 1980s, with Exxon-funded groups such as the Global Climate Coalition, but by the new century, it had morphed into a massive web of plutocrats and their functionaries. Koch-funded professors at four hundred colleges across America were busy teaching the new gospel. “Only idiocy would conclude that mankind’s capacity to change the climate is more powerful than the forces of nature,” one explained to his charges in Maryland. In Colorado, another produced and starred in the slyly titled film An Inconvenient Truth … or Convenient Fiction? At the University of Kansas, the former chief economist for one of the Kochs’ enterprises took over the new Center for Applied Economics (funded by the Kochs) and went to work trying to repeal the state’s “renewable portfolio standard,” which mandated the construction of at least a little solar and wind power.25 The Kochs’ Kansas network also flew in a climate change–denying scientist who had received $230,000 in grants from the Charles G. Koch Foundation (and who explained in one memo that he was in the business of creating “receivables” for his fossil fuel industry clients). This “scientist” was joined by a confrère from the Heartland Institute, the Exxon-funded group that had put up the billboards comparing climate scientists to Charles Manson. Year after year they kept up the pressure, with endless radio ads promoting the (false) notion that wind power was raising electric rates for Kansans. Finally, they won, and the mandatory targets for renewable energy were replaced with a “voluntary commitment.”26

  This kind of effort was replicated, successfully, in one state capital after another. In Wisconsin, Governor Scott Walker, a Koch acolyte, ordered employees charged with oversight of state-owned land from even discussing climate change on the job.27 In North Carolina, a dime-store magnate named Art Pope, a member of the Koch donor network, became the most powerful player in the state’s politics, making immense campaign donations. One of his organization’s first goals was repealing the state’s commitment to modest levels of wind and solar power. It helped sponsor the “Hot Air Tour,” set up by the Kochs’ Americans for Prosperity, which brought prominent climate deniers to the state. Eventually, North Carolina decided that it would ban state policy makers from using scientific estimates of sea level rise in the coastal planning process.

  While this was going on, the network was pushing at least as hard in Washington. The Kansas congressman Mike Pompeo, who had taken more money from the Kochs than any other member of the House (and who is now secretary of state), sponsored legislation upon his arrival in Washington to kill tax credits for wind power, saying it should “compete on its own,” which is particularly unfunny given the vast federal subsidies for fossil fuel. Other officials, such as Scott Pruitt, then the attorney general of Oklahoma, were launching one lawsuit after another against the Environmental Protection Agency—in one case, Pruitt literally took a letter from Devon Energy, one of the state’s leading frackers, and simply copied it onto his official stationery before mailing it off to Washington.

  The point is, long before Donald Trump took over, the Kochs’ network had shut off the possibility of any serious action on climate change. I remember, way back in 2004, interviewing Senator John McCain, who had decided that global warming was a crucial challenge. “I do believe that Americans, and we who are policy makers in all branches of government, should be concerned about mounting evidence that indicates that something is happening,” he said, and he convened hearings on climate science that led to a modest bill. It lost 55–43, but it seemed like a start. “The race is on,” he told me. “Are we going to have significant climate change and all its consequences, or are we going to try to do something early on? Right now, I don’t think we’re going to act soon enough without significant degradation of our envi
ronment. I hope I’m wrong.”28 He was, of course, not wrong—in fact, after a Koch-backed Tea Party challenger came after him, McCain himself started blasting away at those he’d once agreed with. When Secretary of State John Kerry called climate change a “weapon of mass destruction,” McCain responded, “On what planet does he reside?”29 By 2014, when McCain made that sneering jape, only 8 of 278 Republicans in Congress were still willing to acknowledge that man-made climate change was real, much less do anything about it.

  The campaign against renewable energy was particularly effective given how fast the cost of solar panels and wind power was falling. By 2017, as countries around the world accelerated their efforts to put up windmills and solar arrays, growth in rooftop solar came to a “shuddering halt” in the United States, mostly because of a “concerted and well-funded lobbying effort by traditional utilities, which have been working in state capitals across the country to reverse incentives,” according to the New York Times.30 The utilities had turned to the (Koch-funded) American Legislative Exchange Council for model legislation, and in one place after another, Koch-funded utility commissions were putting the brakes on renewables.

  Take Arizona, which should be about the easiest place on the planet to make solar power work—Phoenix boasts 299 sunny days a year. On an agreeably cool March morning a few years ago, I stood on the roof of a suburban ranch house in Surprise, a suburb of Phoenix, with Elon Musk’s cousin Lyndon Rive, who was at the time the CEO of Solar City, the biggest installer of rooftop solar in the country. Around us, a five-man crew was laying out a grid of solar panels, following a plan designed by an employee in California who had measured the roof by looking it up on Google Earth. The crew had assembled at the house at seven that morning, and by five in the afternoon the new solar array would be ready to be turned on. The homeowner was paying nothing up front, and within the first month, she would see her total electric bill decline—why would anyone not do it? “It’s like email in 1991,” Rive said. “When I look out at this street, there’s no reason every one of these houses can’t have solar in a decade.” That year, 2015, his company was finishing a solar array somewhere in its eighteen-state service area every three minutes. “That sounds impressive, but it’s only two hundred thousand homes so far, out of forty million. My goal is to get it to one home every three seconds. Or maybe we could go faster than that—one every second,” he said, snapping his fingers. He pulled an iPhone out of his pocket, called up the calculator app, and punched in some numbers. “At that rate, we could do every house in … seventy-six years. No, that’s too long—I forgot a division. In a year and a half.”

  Numbers like that terrified the utilities and the Koch network, and so they set to work. An industry trade group warned that utilities faced “a death spiral.” As customers began to generate more of their own electricity from solar panels on their roofs, utility revenues would begin to decline, and the remaining customers would have to pay more for the poles and wires that keep the grid alive, increasing the incentive for the remaining customers to leave. Instead of figuring out (like some California and New York utilities) how to profit from that transition by brokering energy efficiency, Arizona utilities mustered their political power to simply block change. The state’s biggest utility, Arizona Public Service (APS), started making big campaign contributions to sympathetic candidates for the Corporation Commission, its regulator. That is to say, it was paying to pick its own bosses. (APS even helped fund the campaign of a candidate for Arizona secretary of state because the candidate’s father was a key vote on the Corporation Commission.) Those regulators in turn soon allowed some of the state’s utilities to start levying a hefty fee on customers who wanted to put panels on their roofs, at which point Solar City’s business dried up. It started laying off workers and closing down its distribution centers.

  That’s in Phoenix—in the Valley of the Sun, where the basketball team is the Suns, where the college basketball and football teams are the Sun Devils—which is going to fall into a “death spiral” of its own in short order unless we get climate change under control. Multiply that story by twenty or thirty other states, and you’ll understand how solar installations came to that “shuddering halt,” even before President Trump put a tariff on solar panels. You’ll understand how solar jobs actually fell in the United States in 2017, for the first time since the industry’s great expansion had begun.

  Similar examples are everywhere. Scott Pruitt, the dutiful Koch errand boy who was the first head of Trump’s EPA, killed off plans to raise automobile mileage in an effort to undercut the market for electric cars. At the Department of the Interior, Ryan Zinke asked the staff at a Koch-funded institute to draw up language for his resolution shrinking the size of national monuments to allow for more oil and gas drilling. At the Department of Energy, Rick Perry (who once skipped his own arraignment on two felony charges to attend a Koch event) issued new analyses showing that the United States wouldn’t reduce its carbon footprint until 2050, meaning that America would “almost singlehandedly exhaust the planet’s carbon budget.”31 The key positions in the Department of Energy’s renewable energy office were filled by people coming directly from “the Koch Brothers’ numerous anti-clean-energy efforts.” The new head of the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, for instance, had gained experience for his post by urging Americans to stockpile incandescent lightbulbs from Amazon on the grounds that an intrusive federal government would next be banning night baseball to save electricity.32 If you tried to figure out the worst way to respond to climate change, all this is what it would look like.

  Actually, the worst possible plan would also include trying to squash action in every other country, too. And that’s what the entire government-hating network managed to achieve in 2017, when President Trump pulled the United States out of the Paris climate accords. It was as shameful a moment as any in our recent history: the country that produces more carbon than any other announcing that it was now the only country on earth not willing to make even a modest international commitment to solving climate change. As the Washington Post made clear in a lengthy special report, getting to that moment required a “two-decade crusade” by precisely the interbred group of antigovernment fossil fuel zealots we’ve already met. The chair of the “Cooler Heads Coalition,” the economist Myron Ebell, who was standing by the president when he made his Rose Garden announcement, worked at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the place where a staffer had once explained that it would be smartest to “neglect” climate change rather than give government the authority to deal with it. Ebell had formerly worked at a group called Frontiers of Freedom, where he helped run a “complex influence campaign” in support of the tobacco industry. In fact, Philip Morris USA was one of the early funders of the Cooler Heads Coalition, along with companies such as Chevron. They were joined by the Heartland Institute and Americans for Prosperity. (Exxon chimed in with grants to CEI to help support the work.) They worked for years, from Kyoto to Copenhagen to Paris, and they never gave up the fight. When Trump was elected, they drafted a letter reminding him of his campaign pledge to pull America out of the Paris climate accords, despite the objections of most of his advisors: “Mr. President, don’t listen to the swamp. Keep your promise.” And he did.

  The Paris Agreement had been essentially voluntary anyway—the rest of the world had given up on negotiating a real treaty because they saw, after the Kyoto talks in the 1990s, that the power of the fossil fuel industry meant that the U.S. Senate would never muster the two-thirds vote needed to ratify a treaty. Hence, international diplomats knew the best they could hope for at Paris was a set of pledges, and even those were nowhere near rigorous enough to meet the targets they set of holding the planet’s temperature increase below two degrees Celsius. Their hope coming out of Paris was that merely starting to work would set in motion a virtuous cycle: as countries saw that renewable energy was cheap and effective, they’d ramp up their commitments. But Trump’s pullout slowed tha
t momentum considerably.

  It’s not that we’ll never have a world that runs on sun and wind. We will—free energy is hard to beat, and seventy-five years from now that’s what we’ll use—but if we tarry along the way, that wind and sun will be powering a badly broken planet. These men happened to be in a place where they could use their power to slow us down precisely at the moment when we needed to speed up, at the moment when one more burst of carbon would break the planet. And so, they’ve become permanently powerful. Millennia after they’ve lost the ideological fights, the sea level will still be rising. They’ve scrawled their names into geological history, ugly graffiti that scientists will be deciphering millions of years into the future (assuming there are scientists). Many of the same people managed to cripple Obamacare, too, which is a tragedy—it means lots of people will suffer unnecessarily and die. But when eventually our politics escapes their grip, it won’t be impossible to build a health care system like those in all the other nations of the world. Climate change is different. Once the Arctic melts, there’s no way to freeze it back up again, not in human time. The particular politics of one country for one fifty-year period will have rewritten the geological history of the earth, and crimped the human game. That’s what leverage looks like.