by Al Gore
Over the last four decades, the largest carbon polluters have become charter members of the antireform counterrevolution described in Chapter 3 that was organized in the 1970s under the auspices of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—out of fear that the tumultuous protest movements of the 1960s (against the Vietnam War, for civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, disability rights, the consumer movement, the passage of Medicare and programs to assist the poor, and so on) were threatening to spin out of control in ways that would disadvantage powerful corporations and elites. In their view, these movements threatened to undermine capitalism itself.
One of the enduring consequences of this counterreform movement was the establishment of a large network of think tanks, foundations, institutes, law schools, and activist organizations that turn out an endless stream of mostly contrived “reports,” “studies,” lawsuits, testimony before congressional and regulatory panels, op-eds, and books that all promote the philosophy and agenda of the new corporate Musketeers:
• Government is bad, cannot be trusted, should instead be feared, and must be starved of resources so that it is capable of interfering as little as possible with the plans of corporations and the interests of elites;
• Hardship is good for poor people because it’s the only thing that will give them an incentive to become more productive; hardship also makes them more willing to accept lower wages and fewer benefits;
• Rich people, on the other hand, should be taxed as little as possible in order to encourage them to make even more money—which is the only tried-and-true way to produce more growth in the economy, even if there is too little demand because consumers don’t have enough money to buy more goods and services;
• More inequality is a good thing, because it simultaneously inspires poor people to more ambition and rich people to more investing, even if the evidence shows that the highest-income groups are primarily interested in wealth preservation when the economy is weak; and
• The environment can take care of itself nicely, no matter how much pollution we dump into it. Anyone who believes otherwise is motivated by a barely concealed love for socialism and an abiding determination to thwart business.
To one degree or another, of course, there is a natural incentive to build broad coalitions among differing interests in most political parties. I certainly experienced such pressures as a member of the Democratic Party when I served in Congress. Yet there is something different about the lockstep discipline in the new U.S. right-wing coalition—a discipline that is enforced by extremely wealthy contributors who are primarily interested in policies that increase their already unhealthy share of America’s aggregate income.
In today’s world, the challenge of global warming has, unfortunately, led to an almost tribal division between those who accept the overwhelming scientific consensus—and the evidence of their own senses—and those who are bound and determined to reject it. The ferocity of their opposition is treated as a kind of badge signifying their membership in the second group and antagonism toward the first.
The organized deniers know that in order to maintain their control of the coalition opposed to policies reducing greenhouse gas emissions, they do not have to prove that man-made global warming is not real—though many of them do assert as much over and over again. All they really need to do is create enough doubt to convince the public that “the jury is still out.” This strategic goal was explicitly spelled out in an internal document from a business coalition dominated by large carbon polluters.
Leaked to the press in 1991, the document stated that the group’s strategic goal was to “reposition global warming as theory not fact.” A charitable interpretation would be that these companies had long felt besieged by what they perceived as hyperbolic claims on the part of environmental activists seeking more regulation of various forms of pollution, and that they developed a habit of reflexively countering any claim of impending harm by going all-out to undermine the credibility of the claims and of those making them.
However, in light of the decades of extensive documentation making this deadly threat crystal clear, and in light of the national academies of science around the world proclaiming that the evidence is now indisputable, it is no longer easy to be charitable in assessing what these wealthy, powerful, and self-interested deniers are doing. They reject the spirit of reasonable dialogue. They reject and vilify the integrity of the scientific process. Nothing has worked to hold them to their obligation to the greater good. Some, it is true, have examined both the evidence and their conscience and have changed. But those who have done so are still in the tiny minority. The deniers’ assault on the future of our world continues.
There is, after all, no longer any reasonable doubt whatsoever that man-made emissions of CO2 and the other global warming pollutants are seriously damaging the planetary ecological system that is crucial to the future survival of human civilization. Many of the extreme weather disasters that have already claimed so many lives and caused so much suffering are now being directly linked to global warming. The damage that is being done to hundreds of millions in the present generation makes it impossible, in my view, to ignore the moral consequences of what is being done.
Most legal systems in the world make it a criminal offense, as well as a civil offense, for anyone to knowingly misrepresent material facts for the purpose of self-enrichment at the expense of others who rely on the false representations and suffer harm or damage as a result. If the misrepresentation is merely negligent, it can still be a legal offense. If the false statements are reckless and if the harm suffered by those induced to rely on the false statements is grave, the offense is more serious still. The most common legal standard for determining whether or not the person (or corporation) misrepresenting the material facts did so “knowingly” is not “beyond a reasonable doubt,” but rather the “preponderance of the evidence.”
The large public multinational fossil fuel companies have an estimated $7 trillion in assets that are at risk if the global scientific consensus is accepted by publics and governments around the world. That is the reason that several of them have been misrepresenting to the public—and to investors—the material facts about the grave harm to the future of human civilization that results from the continued burning of their principal assets in such a reckless manner. The value of similar and larger reserves owned by sovereign states, when combined with the assets owned by private and public companies, adds up to a total of $27 trillion. That is why Saudi Arabia, until recently at least, has been so vehement in its efforts to block any international agreement to limit global warming pollution. In 2012, a member of the royal family, Prince Turki al-Faisal, called for Saudi Arabia to convert its domestic energy use to 100 percent renewables in order to preserve its oil reserves for sale to the rest of the world.
“SUBPRIME CARBON ASSETS”
The oil, coal, and gas assets carried on the books of fossil fuel companies is valued at market rates based on the assumption that they will eventually be sold to customers who will burn them and dump the gaseous global warming pollution that results into the Earth’s atmosphere. In the past, I have referred to these reserves as “subprime carbon assets,” in order to draw an analogy to subprime mortgages, which the market and most banking experts also believed had extremely high value. Actually, however, these subprime mortgages had an illusory value that was based on the absurd assumption that people who obviously couldn’t pay them back somehow would. They were often referred to in the industry as “low documentation loans,” or more simply as “liar loans.”
I remember vividly when I signed my first home mortgage as a young man. I sat across the desk from Walter Glenn Birdwell Jr., the man in charge of Citizens Bank in Carthage, Tennessee. Before giving me the mortgage, Mr. Birdwell required me to provide written answers to a long series of questions about my income and net worth. Even though neither was very high, he gained enough confidence that I would be able to make the monthly payments. He then require
d me to make what was for me at the time a considerable down payment.
By contrast, the subprime mortgages were given to people who had no earthly way of paying them back—a fact that would have been immediately clear if any of them had been required to answer questions from Mr. Birdwell. Nor were these homebuyers asked to make any down payment. So, if a reasonable person could easily determine that the mortgages were unlikely to be paid back, and that it was only a matter of time before the homebuyers defaulted, why would the banks nevertheless enter into such transactions?
The answer is that in the age of Earth Inc. and the Global Mind, the banks originating these flawed mortgages were able to use powerful computers to combine many thousands of such mortgages—in the aggregate, 7.5 million of them in the U.S. alone—slice them and dice them into financially engineered derivatives products too complex for most of us to comprehend, and then sell them into the global marketplace. In other words, the ridiculous assumption was that the risk inherent in providing a mortgage to someone who couldn’t pay it back could be magically eliminated if a great many such mortgages were all packaged together and sold into the global marketplace.
When this assumption was tested during the slowdown of the global economy in 2007–08, it suddenly collapsed and the bankers had an unpleasant encounter with reality. The unpleasantness didn’t linger for them, however, because they were able to use the overwhelming political power they had purchased with campaign contributions and lobbying activities—with a little help from officials that had gone through the revolving door connecting governments and banks—to be bailed out by the taxpayers, who had to borrow the money for the purpose. The net result was a credit crisis and a global Great Recession, which economists may yet relabel a depression.
Subprime carbon assets have a similarly inflated value in the marketplace, undergirded by an assumption even more absurd than the ridiculous idea that it was perfectly okay to give mortgages to millions of people who couldn’t ever pay them back. In this case, the assumption is that it is perfectly all right to burn every last drop of oil in the oil companies’ reserves and destroy the future of civilization. It’s not all right.
Yet the market value to the oil, coal, and natural gas companies of this particular absurd assumption is extremely high. Ultimately, that is the reason they have been willing to devote billions of dollars to defend it—by organizing a massive and highly sophisticated campaign of deception designed to convince people—and policymakers—that it may very well be fine to burn as much carbon fuel as we can.
These carbon polluters have also deceived coal miners and other employees in the fossil energy industry into ignoring the reality of the change that is inevitable. In a courageous and eloquent speech on the Senate floor in 2012, Senator Jay Rockefeller, from the most coaldependent state in the U.S., West Virginia, said, “My fear is that concerns are also being fueled by the narrow view of others with divergent motivations—one that denies the inevitability of change in the energy industry, and unfairly leaves coal miners in the dust. The reality is that many who run the coal industry today would rather attack false enemies and deny real problems than find solutions.”
The dominance of wealth and corporate influence in decision making has so cowed most politicians that they are scared to even discuss this existential threat in any meaningful way. There are more than a few honorable exceptions, but on issues that engage the interests of Earth Inc., Earth Inc. is fully in control of global policy. The carbon fuel companies hired four anti-climate lobbyists for every single member of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives in their fight to defeat climate legislation. They have become one of the largest sources of campaign contributions to candidates in both parties—though significantly more goes to Republicans.
Many of these companies have provided large amounts of money over the last two decades to “liars for hire” who turn out a seemingly endless stream of misleading, peripheral, irrelevant, false, and unscientific claims:
• Global warming is a hoax perpetrated by scientists who are scheming to receive more government research funding and by activists who want to impose socialism or worse.
• Global warming isn’t occurring; it stopped several years ago.
• If it is occurring, it is not caused by global warming pollution, but is instead the result of a natural cycle.
• The Earth’s climate system is so resilient that it can, in any event, absorb unlimited quantities of global warming pollution with no harmful consequences.
• If global warming does occur, it will actually be good for us.
• Even if it’s not good for some people, we certainly have the ability to adapt to it with little hardship.
• The ice caps on Jupiter are also melting, therefore it is logical to assume that some poorly understood phenomenon endemic to our solar system is the true cause (never mind that Jupiter doesn’t have ice caps).
• Global warming is being caused by sunspots (never mind that temperatures have continued to go upward during the long “cool phase” of the sunspot cycle now coming to an end).
• Global warming is caused by volcanoes (never mind that human-caused CO2 emissions are 135 to 200 times greater than volcanic emissions, which are in any case part of a natural process that is, in the long term, carbon neutral).
• Computer models are unreliable (never mind that more than a dozen separate and independent temperature records from the real world completely confirm what the computer models have long predicted).
• Clouds will cancel out global warming (never mind the growing evidence that the net feedback from clouds is likely to make global warming even worse, not better).
There are more than 100 other bogus arguments, or red herrings, that are pushed relentlessly in the media, by lobbyists, and by captive politicians beholden to the carbon polluters. The only thing the deniers are absolutely certain about is that 90 million tons per day of global warming pollution are certainly not causing global warming—even if the entire global scientific community says the opposite. There are, to be sure, some opponents of the scientific consensus who genuinely believe that the science is wrong. Some of them have backgrounds and personal stories that predispose them to fight on for a variety of reasons. But they are the exceptions, and their complete lack of any credible supporting evidence would quickly marginalize them except for the fact that climate science denial has become a cottage industry generously supported by carbon polluters.
To undermine the public’s confidence in the integrity of science, the carbon companies and their agents and allies constantly insinuate that climate scientists are lying about the facts they have uncovered, and/or are secretly part of a political effort to expand the role of government. The political assault against climate scientists has been designed not only to demonize them, but also to intimidate them—which has added to the naturally cautious approach that scientists habitually adopt.
One right-wing state attorney general in the United States took legal action against a climate scientist simply because his findings were inconvenient for coal companies. Right-wing legal foundations and think tanks have repeatedly sued climate scientists and vilified them in public statements. Right-wing members of Congress have repeatedly sought to slash climate research funding. To mention only one of the many consequences, the ability of the U.S. to even monitor climate change adequately is being severely damaged with multiple launches of essential monitoring satellites being delayed or canceled—just at the time when the data is most needed.
On the eve of the global negotiating session on climate in December of 2009 in Copenhagen, the entire climate science community was assaulted by what appears to have been a well-planned hacking of their private, internal emails among one another. The cherry-picking of misleading phrases taken out of context led to the trumpeting by the right-wing media of charges that the climate science community was lying to the public and to their governments. An extensive investigation determined that the hacking came from out
side the targeted research center but did not identify the perpetrator. Meanwhile, four separate independent investigations all completely cleared the climate scientists of any wrongdoing.
THE DENIAL MACHINE
The ability of the public to see through the lies and deceptions of the carbon polluters and their allies has been hampered because the traditional role of the news media has changed significantly in the past few decades—especially in the United States. Many newspapers are going bankrupt and most others are under severe economic stress that reduces their ability to fulfill their historic role of ensuring that the foundation of a democracy is a “well-informed citizenry.”
As noted in Chapter 3, the rising prominence of the Internet is a source of hope, but for the time being television is still far and away the dominant medium of information. And yet the news divisions of television networks are now required to focus on ways to contribute more profit to the corporate bottom line. As a result, they have been forced to blur the distinction between news and entertainment. Since ratings are the key to profitability, the kinds of news stories that are given priority have changed.
Virtually every news and political commentary program on television is sponsored in part by oil, coal, and gas companies—not just during campaign seasons, but all the time, year in and year out—with messages designed to soothe and reassure the audience that everything is fine, the global environment is not threatened, and the carbon companies are working diligently to further develop renewable energy sources.
The fear of discussing global warming has influenced almost all mainstream television news networks in the U.S. The denier coalition unleashes vitriol at almost anyone who dares to bring up the subject of global warming and, as a result, many news companies have been intimidated into silence. Even the acclaimed BBC nature program The Frozen Planet was edited before the Discovery Network showed it in the United States to remove the discussion of global warming. Since one of the overarching themes of the series was the melting of ice all over the planet, it was absurd to remove the discussion of global warming, which is of course the principal cause of the ice melting. As activist Bill McKibben wrote, “It was like showing a documentary on lung cancer and leaving out the part about the cigarettes.”
