Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull has been asked to front the
Senate inquiry into his government's controversial $443 million grant to
the Great Barrier Reef Foundation early next year.
The request
comes as state and federal environment ministers meeting in Canberra on
Friday failed to agree on the wording over climate action, and a
separate report identified a heavy environmental toll if the Galilee
Basin coal mines including Adani's proposed Carmichael project proceed.
Malcolm Turnbull is not about to leave centre stage. Credit: Janie Barrett
Mr
Turnbull has been offered any dates "that would be appropriate between
now and early February", and at "your preferred location" for a public
hearing into the controversial grant to the non-profit organisation
announced last April.
The former prime minister's attendance is
voluntary and it is understood he is the final witness the committee
wants to interview. The inquiry has also won an extension to provide its
final report by February 13.
The grant surprised even the foundation, which at that point had just six full-time employees. It also bypassed established government agencies such as the CSIRO and the Australian Institute of Marine Science.
Meanwhile
at a meeting of environment ministers in Canberra, the Labor-led state
and territory ministers criticised Melissa Price, the federal
Environment Minister, for again omitting climate change from the agenda
of the regular gathering.
"The
science is frightening, unequivocal and clear - we are running out of
time," the Labor ministers said in a statement. "We must take swift and
strong measures to reduce emissions now."
"Yet
the response of successive Liberal prime ministers has been one of
delusion and deliberate inaction - and it is unacceptable that any
action on climate change has again been left off the agenda at today’s
meeting of environment ministers," they said.
Ms Price later told
journalists that the ministers had had "a very good conversation", but
could not agree on common wording. The minister will attend global
climate talks in Poland from Sunday.
The environment ministers also secured only an agreement in principle over a national waste policy to deal with the country's mounting recycling issues after China limited waste imports.
NSW,
Queensland and Victoria agreed to work together "to deliver real
outcomes when it comes to waste", Gabrielle Upton, NSW Environment
Minister, said.
"We disagree on many things, but on this issue,
urgent national action is required," Ms Upton said. "The Commonwealth is
now locked into playing a clearer real role in terms of leadership and
funding."
Separately, the federal government has its "bioregional assessment" of the cumulative impacts on groundwater, creeks and rivers from opening central Queensland's Galilee Basin for mining.
Despite
only modelling seven of 17 proposed coal and gas developments -
including the Adani mine - the report predicted widespread impacts over
1.4 million hectares and as much as 6285 kilometres of streams.
“Given
that the Suttor River is the target of Adani’s plans to extract up to
12.5 billion litres of water per year, this should be enough to ensure
that project is rejected once and for all," Lock the Gate, an
anti-mining group, said in a statement.
“It’s
clear from this analysis that mining the Galilee Basin will have a very
significant and irreversible impact on our water resources," including
damaging as many as 181 wetlands, the group said.
Leeanne Enoch, Queensland's
Environment Minister, said the Palaszczuk government "takes its
environmental responsibilities very seriously and makes its decisions
based on the best available science".
“At
this point in time, the government is undertaking the work to allow
consideration of the declaration of a cumulative management area over
the Galilee Basin," Ms Enoch said.
“This allows government to consider the combined impacts of projects.”
Carmel Flint, a spokeswoman for Lock the Gate, said water was "the key to survival in such a dry region".
"The
full scale of the water impacts exposed here should lead to urgent
action by the Queensland government to reject the final water management
plan which Adani are seeking to have approved before Christmas," she
said.
The Prime Minister of Tuvalu Enele Sopoaga has warned Australia that its "Pacific pivot" risks being fatally undermined by its climate change policies ahead of crucial talks in Poland.
Tuvalu's PM made the comments ahead of COP24, the most important climate talks since the Paris agreement
He says Australia's return to the Pacific undermined by climate change inaction
Tuvalu is particularly vulnerable to climate change, being made up of low-lying atolls
Australia has unveiled an ambitious suite of policies to cement its
position in the region and push back against China, including a massive
new infrastructure bank and an ambitious move to electrify much of Papua
New Guinea.
But Mr Sopoaga has declared climate change could
"totally destroy" his tiny Pacific nation, and he called on Australia to
help fight it by blocking the contentious Adani coal mine in Queensland
and making deeper cuts to carbon emissions.
"We cannot be
regional partners under this step-up initiative — genuine and durable
partners — unless the Government of Australia takes a more progressive
response to climate change," Mr Sopoaga said.
"They know very well that we will not be happy as a partner, to move forward, unless they are serious."
Tuvalu's low-lying atolls are particularly vulnerable
Delegates from almost 200 countries are gathering in the city of
Katowice for the COP24 talks, the most important UN meeting on global
warming since the landmark Paris deal.
The talks are designed to get all 195 countries to agree to a binding set of conventions in order to reduce carbon emissions.
Tuvalu
is made up of nine low-lying coral atolls and its highest point is only
4.5 metres above sea level, making it particularly vulnerable to
climate change.
US President Donald Trump has already pulled the
US out of Paris and Mr Sopoaga warned the world risked "going backwards"
unless countries made concrete commitments to cut pollution.
He
also revealed all Pacific nations — including Australia and New Zealand —
would sign a "new declaration" on climate change during the talks in
Poland.
"The idea is to further project to our world the necessity
and imperative of collective actions against climate change," Mr
Sopoaga told the ABC.
"There's no point of talking about economic growth unless you deal with the issue of climate change and sea level rise."
Some Pacific nations have been pushing for the declaration to specifically call for coal mining to be phased out.
But Mr Sopoaga indicated Pacific nations had agreed to use softer language in order to get Australia on board.
"It
will focus on the necessity of moving to renewable-energy-based
economies which is safe and friendly to the environment, and impress on
all parties the need to develop renewable technology," he said.
Mr
Sopoaga wasn't purely critical of Australia — he praised Prime Minister
Scott Morrison for resisting calls to get out of the Paris deal, and
said Australia was "seriously looking" at taking a more ambitious
approach on renewable energy.
But he pleaded with the Coalition to prevent Indian company Adani from pressing ahead with its plan to open a new coal mine in Queensland, although the project has been scaled down.
"This
will only go into causing a lot of serious damage to the environment,
and eventually causing destruction to the people of the Pacific", Mr
Sopoaga said.
"So it is my strong prayer that Australia will reconsider opening this new coal mine."
The Guardian - Oliver Milman Up to 96% of all marine species and more than two-thirds of terrestrial species perished 252m years ago
A model in the study mimicking conditions in the Permian period suggests
marine animals essentially suffocated in the warming waters.
Photograph: John Raoux/AP
Rapid global warming
caused the largest extinction event in the Earth’s history, which wiped
out the vast majority of marine and terrestrial animals on the planet,
scientists have found.
The mass extinction, known as the “great dying”, occurred around 252m
years ago and marked the end of the Permian geologic period. The study
of sediments and fossilized creatures show the event was the single
greatest calamity ever to befall life on Earth, eclipsing even the
extinction of the dinosaurs 65m years ago.
Up to 96% of all marine species perished while more than two-thirds
of terrestrial species disappeared. The cataclysm was so severe it wiped
out most of the planet’s trees, insects, plants, lizards and even
microbes.
Scientists have theorized causes for the extinction,
such as a giant asteroid impact. But US researchers now say they have
pinpointed the demise of marine life to a spike in Earth’s temperatures,
warning that present-day global warming will also have severe
ramifications for life on the planet.
“It was a huge event. In the last half a billion years of life on the
planet, it was the worst extinction,” said Curtis Deutsch, an
oceanography expert who co-authored the research, published on Thursday,
with his University of Washington colleague Justin Penn along with
Stanford University scientists Jonathan Payne and Erik Sperling.
The researchers used paleoceanographic records and built a model to analyse changes in animal metabolism, ocean and climate
conditions. When they used the model to mimic conditions at the end of
the Permian period, they found it matched the extinction records.
According to the study, this suggests that marine animals essentially
suffocated as warming waters lacked the oxygen required for survival.
“For the first time, we’ve got a whole lot of confidence that this is
what happened,” said Deutsch. “It’s a very strong argument that rising
temperatures and oxygen depletion were to blame.”
The great dying event, which occurred over an uncertain
timeframe of possibly hundreds of years, saw Earth’s temperatures
increase by around 10C (18F). Oceans lost around 80% of their oxygen,
with parts of the seafloor becoming completely oxygen-free. Scientists
believe this warming was caused by a huge spike in greenhouse gas
emissions, potentially caused by volcanic activity.
The new research, published in Science,
found that the drop in oxygen levels was particularly deadly for marine
animals living closer to the poles. Experiments that varied oxygen and
temperature levels for modern marine species, including shellfish,
corals and sharks, helped “bridge the gap” to what the model found,
Payne said.
“This really would be a terrible, terrible time to be around on the
planet,” he added. “It shows us that when the climate and ocean
chemistry changes quickly, you can reach a point where species don’t
survive. It took millions of years to recover from the Permian event,
which is essentially permanent from the perspective of human
timescales.”
Over the past century, the modern world has warmed by around 1C due
to the release of greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels such
as coal, oil and gas, rather than from volcanic eruptions.
This warming is already causing punishing heatwaves, flooding and wildfires around the world, with scientists warning that the temperature rise could reach 3C or more by the end of the century unless there are immediate, radical reductions in emissions.
At the same time, Earth’s species are undergoing what some experts have termed the “sixth great extinction” due to habitat loss, poaching, pollution and climate change.
“It does terrify me to think we are on a trajectory similar to the
Permian because we really don’t want to be on that trajectory,” Payne
said. “It doesn’t look like we will warm by around 10C and we haven’t
lost that amount of biodiversity yet. But even getting halfway there
would be something to be very concerned about. The magnitude of change
we are currently experiencing is fairly large.”
Deutsch said: “We are about a 10th of the way to the Permian. Once
you get to 3-4C of warming, that’s a significant fraction and life in
the ocean is in big trouble, to put it bluntly. There are big
implications for humans’ domination of the Earth and its ecosystems.”
Deutsch
added that the only way to avoid a mass aquatic die-off in the oceans
was to reduce carbon emissions, given there is no viable way to
ameliorate the impact of climate change in the oceans using other
measures.
The research group “provide convincing evidence that warmer
temperatures and associated lower oxygen levels in the ocean are
sufficient to explain the observed extinctions we see in the fossil
record”, said Pamela Grothe, a paleoclimate scientist at the University
of Mary Washington.
“The past holds the key to the future,” she added. “Our current rates
of carbon dioxide emissions is instantaneous geologically speaking and
we are already seeing warming ocean temperatures and lower oxygen in
many regions, currently affecting marine ecosystems.
“If we continue in the trajectory we are on with current emission
rates, this study highlights the potential that we may see similar rates
of extinction in marine species as in the end of the Permian.”
French Prime Minister
Edouard Philippe said Dec. 4 that fuel tax hikes would be suspended in
response to nationwide anger that he said has “deep roots.”(Reuters)
The single most effective weapon in the fight
against climate change is the tax code — imposing costs on those who
emit greenhouse gases, economists say. But as French President Emmanuel
Macron learned over the past three weeks, implementing such taxes can be
politically explosive.
On Tuesday, France delayed
for six months a plan to raise already steep taxes on diesel fuel by 24
cents a gallon and gasoline by about 12 cents a gallon. Macron argued
that the taxes were needed to curb climate change by weaning motorists
off petroleum products, but violent demonstrations in the streets of Paris and other French cities forced him to backtrack — at least for now.
“No
tax is worth putting in danger the unity of the nation,” said Prime
Minister Édouard Philippe, who was trotted out to announce the
concession.
It
was a setback for the French president, who has been trying to carry
the torch of climate action in the wake of the Paris accords of December
2015. “When we talk about the actions of the nation in response to the
challenges of climate change, we have to say that we have done little,”
he said last week.
Macron is hardly alone in his
frustration. Leaders in the United States, Canada, Australia and
elsewhere have found their carbon pricing efforts running into fierce
opposition. But the French reversal was particularly disheartening for
climate-policy experts, because it came just as delegates from around
the world were gathering in Katowice, Poland, for a major conference
designed to advance climate measures.
“Like
everywhere else, the question in France is how to find a way of
combining ecology and equality,” said Bruno Cautrès, a researcher at the
Paris Institute of Political Studies. “Citizens mostly see punitive
public policies when it comes to the environment: taxes, more taxes and
more taxes after that. No one has the solution, and we can only see the
disaster that’s just occurred in France on this question.”
Yellow-vested demonstrators block a fuel depot Tuesday in Le Mans, France. (David Vincent/AP)
“Higher taxes on energy have always been a hard
sell, politically,” said N. Gregory Mankiw, an economics professor at
Harvard University and advocate of carbon taxes. “The members of the
American Economic Association are convinced of their virtue. But the
median citizen is not.”
In
the United States — where energy-related taxes are among the lowest in
the developed world — politicians, their constituents and their donors
have repeatedly made that clear.
President Bill
Clinton proposed a tax on the heat content of fuels as part of his
first budget in 1993. Known as the BTU tax, for British thermal unit, it
would have raised $70 billion over five years while increasing gasoline
prices no more than 7.5 cents a gallon.
But
Clinton was forced to retreat in the face of a rebellion in his own
party. “I’m not going to vote for a BTU tax in committee or on the
floor, ever, anywhere. Period. Exclamation point,” said then-Sen. David
L. Boren (D-Okla.).
The state of Washington has also tried — and failed twice — to win support for a carbon tax or carbon “fee.” In 2016, the state’s voters rejected a ballot initiative that
would have balanced a carbon tax with other tax cuts. In 2018, a wider
coalition sought backing for an initiative that would have poured fee
revenue into clean energy projects, job retraining and early retirement
plans for affected workers. The fee would have started at $15 a ton and
gone up $2 a ton for 10 years. It, too, failed.
A worker removes graffiti reading "Macron resignation" from the Arc de Triomphe following protests in Paris. (Thibault Camus/AP)
To be sure, some climate-conscious countries have adopted carbon taxes, including
Chile, Spain, Ukraine, Ireland and nations in Scandinavia. Others have
adopted cap-and-trade programs that effectively put prices on carbon
emissions.
Only around 12 percent of global
emissions are covered by pricing programs such as taxes on the carbon
content of fossil fuels or permit trading programs that put a price on
emissions, according to the International Monetary Fund. Policy experts say that to some extent the prospects of carbon taxes may depend on what happens to the money raised.
Using the revenue for deficit reduction, as was planned in France, is a no-no.
“Even
in the best of times, carbon taxes must be carefully crafted to avoid
political pitfalls,” said Paul Bledsoe, a former Senate Finance
Committee staffer and Clinton White House climate adviser. “In
particular, much of the revenue raised must be recycled back to
middle-income workers. Macron’s approach put the money toward deficit
reduction, stoking already simmering class grievances.”
Last
year, a group of economists and policy experts — including former
treasury secretaries James A. Baker III and Lawrence H. Summers and
former secretary of state George P. Shultz — advocated a
tax-and-dividend approach. It would feature a carbon tax of $40 a ton,
affecting coal, oil and natural gas. The revenue would be used to pay
dividends to households. Progressive tax rates would mean more money for
lower- and middle-income earners.
“Because
the revenue is rebated equally to everyone, most people will get more
back than they pay in carbon taxes,” said Mankiw, who is part of the
group. “So if people understood the plan, and believed it would be
carried out as written, it should be politically popular.”
So far the group, called the Climate Leadership Council, has not been able to generate much support from members of Congress.
But Canada is about to offer a test case.
Prime
Minister Justin Trudeau has unveiled a “backstop” carbon tax of $20 a
ton, to take effect in January, for the four Canadian provinces that do
not already have one.
Trudeau was elected
partly on a promise of this sort of measure, but it’s costing him more
political capital than expected. Conservative premiers oppose the plan,
which looks set to become an election issue.
Trudeau’s
policy, however, is designed to withstand criticism. About 90 percent
of the revenue from the backstop tax will be paid back to Canadians in
the form of annual “climate action incentive” payments. Because of the
progressive tax rates, about 70 percent of Canadians will get back more
than they paid. If they choose to be more energy efficient, they could
save even more money.
The first checks will arrive shortly before Canadian elections.
Climate policy doesn’t only suffer from lack of enthusiasm. It also arouses the ire of right-wing populist movements.
Many
of the people most angry at Macron’s tax come from right-wing rural
areas. The German right-wing opposition party Alternative for Germany
has called climate change a hoax. And in Brazil, a new populist
president had indicated he will develop, not preserve, the Amazon
forests that pull CO2 out of the air and pump out oxygen.
President
Trump, who has said he does not believe climate science, also took to
Twitter to say Macron’s setback showed Trump was right to spurn the Paris climate agreement.
“I
am glad that my friend @EmmanuelMacron and the protestors in Paris have
agreed with the conclusion I reached two years ago. The Paris Agreement
is fatally flawed because it raises the price of energy for responsible
countries while whitewashing some of the worst polluters in the world,”
he wrote. “American taxpayers — and American workers — shouldn’t pay to
clean up others countries’ pollution.”
Fuel
taxes, however, generate revenue that stays inside home countries
without going to pay for others’ pollution. And the Paris agreement
placed much greater responsibilities on developing countries than ever
before.
A member of Trump’s beachhead
transition team at the Energy Department also took to Twitter to
celebrate the collapse of Macron’s fuel tax plan.
“It’s
easy for politicians like #Macron to lecture us about #ClimateChange
because the elites don’t notice the economic hit. Working class people
do. Working class French people are ANGRY about unnecessarily higher
fuel taxes that are only a #virtuesignal,” wrote Thomas J. Pyle,
president of the Institute for Energy Research — a group funded in the
past by Koch Industries, the American Petroleum Institute and Exxon
Mobil.
Jason Bordoff, director of the Columbia
University Center on Global Energy Policy, said the celebration “would
be reading too much into what’s happening in France.” That’s because
Macron was already seen as favoring the rich over the working class, he
said.
Nicolas Hulot, a popular climate change
activist and Macron’s former environment minister, made national
headlines in August when he resigned from Macron’s cabinet
during a live radio broadcast. His reason: that the French government
was more word than deed when it came to fighting climate change.
On
the heels of the French government’s abrupt reversal on fuel taxes
Tuesday, Hulot praised what he couched as a necessary political
maneuver, albeit one that was not good for the environment.
“I
welcome a necessary, inescapable, courageous and common sense decision
in the current context, which saddens everyone,” he said, speaking on
France’s RTL radio. But, he added, there would probably be consequences
from the popular uprisings against the diesel taxes, which the
government has now suspended for six months.
“All that is not good news for the climate,” he said.
The
key, said Hulot, is not to impose action on climate change in a
technocratic way, in a way that ordinary people do not understand. “The
ecological challenge shouldn’t be against the French,” he said. “We need
every Frenchwoman and Frenchman. On that, there is obviously a huge
amount of misperceptions and misunderstandings.”
We are losing the war against climate change; the use of fossil fuels is driving higher carbon emissions when they need to be coming down
Steam and smoke rise from the coal-fired Belchatow power station in Poland.
Photograph: Sean Gallup/Getty Images
Outside
of the desperate and the deluded, everyone knows that the world is in
the early stages of a truly catastrophic climate change. As Sir David Attenborough told
the UN climate change conference in Poland, “the collapse of our
civilisations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the
horizon”. We have even worked out, with scrupulous care, what we must do
to avoid this or to mitigate the effects of climate change. We know
what to do. We can see how to do it. There’s only one problem: we do
almost nothing. Figures released today by the University of East Anglia for the conference in Katowice show that global carbon emissions
will be higher than ever before this year. In fact they will rise by
nearly 3%, an astonishing and terrifying annual figure at a time when
the need to diminish them has never been more urgent. The main driver of
this growth has been the increased use of coal, which is rapidly
approaching its previous peak level, from 2013. There is a particular
irony in that this conference is being held in Poland, a country that
still derives 80% of its electricity from coal, even if this is less
grossly polluting than it was in the Communist era. In fact emissions
there are down 30% from their peak in 1988. But far more must be done.
To limit global warming to the Paris agreement goal of 1.5C, CO2 emissions would need to decline by 50% by 2030 and reach net zero by around 2050.
All this destructive activity far outweighs the progress that has
been made on the use of renewable resources. That is considerable, but
so long as renewables are understood only as a pastime for the rich,
they will be wholly insufficient to meet the problems before us. The
Paris goal often looks like a drunkard’s resolution that everything will
be different as soon as tomorrow comes. Everything has stayed much the
same, and the balance of expert opinion is that three degrees is now
more likely than the target figure of half that.
It’s not just coal. China is now the biggest emitter of carbon,
followed by the US and the EU as a whole, then India, Russia, and Japan.
Oil use continues to grow. The worldwide demand for energy is outpacing
efforts to deal its climate-altering side effects. In a
characteristically greedy and destructive way, the Trump administration
proposes to destroy
one of the last great Arctic wildlife reserves in order to drill for
oil there. The great oil-producing nations of Saudi Arabia and Iran both
figure among the top 10 carbon-emitting countries despite having hardly
any other components to their economies. Add to this the effects of
deforestation in the Amazon, which will accelerate under the Bolsonaro
government, and the future looks unimaginably grim. Climate change will
exacerbate, as it already does, the world’s existing political and
economic divisions.
The most worrying feature of the latest UN report is the suggestion
that the relatively good performance of the years 2014-16 in reducing
carbon emissions was the result of an economic slowdown. The political
consequences of the resulting discontent are with us still. They
produced Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro and gravely weakened the EU.
All those factors make a sane policy on climate change less likely. The
purely physical feedback loops that drive climate change, such as the
reduction of reflective ice surface, are now well enough understood. But
it may be that the long-term message of the years since the Paris
summit is that this understanding is not enough. We must also learn
somehow to disrupt the political and economic feedback loops which are
driving our civilisation to the brink of catastrophe.
Global warming and fossil fuel pollution already killing many, UN climate summit told
Hanhan, three, receives nebuliser therapy after a Beijing red alert for air pollution in 2015.
Photograph: Jason Lee/Reuters
Tackling climate change would save at least a million lives a year, the World Health Organization has told the UN climate summit in Poland, making it a moral imperative.
Cutting fossil fuel burning not only slows global warming but slashes
air pollution, which causes millions of early deaths a year, the WHO
says. In a report
requested by UN climate summit leaders, the WHO says the economic
benefits of improved health are more than double the costs of cutting
emissions, and even higher in India and China, which are plagued by
toxic air.
“The global public health community is getting very impatient,” said
María Neira, WHO director of public and environmental health. “If you
don’t think you need to take action for the sake of climate change, make
sure when you think about the planet you incorporate a couple of lungs,
a brain and a heart. It is not just about saving the planet in the
future, it is about protecting the health of the people right now.”
The damage caused by coal, oil and gas pollution is “outrageous”, she
said. “There are words not included in the documents at [the climate
summit]: asthma, lung cancer, stroke, heart disease – they need to be
incorporated in all the decision-making processes.”
“Morally, delaying the [clean energy] transition is being responsible
for millions of deaths every year,” Neira said. “[Leaders] need to ask
themselves how many deaths are [they] willing to accept. When health is
taken into account, climate action is an opportunity, not a cost.”
Air pollution is the best known impact of fossil fuel use, and
climate change damages health through heatwaves, storms, floods and
droughts, increased spread of infectious disease and the destruction of
health facilities. Global warming is also damaging crops and reducing their nutritional value, with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization now reporting a rise in the number of hungry people going up after decades of decline.
“We now have scientific evidence that people are suffering and dying
from climate change,” said Prof Kristie Ebi, at the University of
Washington and lead author on the recent intergovernmental panel on
climate change (IPCC) report, that warned that the global temperature rise must be kept to 1.5C to protect hundreds of millions of people from harm. Another major recent report concluded that climate change is already a health emergency.
Diarmid Campbell-Lendrum, at the World Health Organization and also
an IPCC report author, said doctors needed to press hard for climate
action: “The health profession is the single most trusted profession in
the world.” Just 0.5% of multilateral climate finance is currently going
to healthcare, he said. Organizations representing more than five
million doctors, nurses and public health professionals from 120
countries have issued a call to action to the climate summit in Poland.
Tirig and her sister Saua in Somalia. Their family was forced to leave
their home in search of water and food.
Photograph: Kate Holt/UNICEF
“We should no longer be talking about the cost of [cutting
emissions], we should talk about the benefits to people’s health of
investing in what needs to be done,” Campbell-Lendrum said.
“At the moment we pretend that polluting [fossil] fuels are cheap
fuels, only because we don’t include the cost of them to our health and
economy.” The IMF estimates these subsidies to the fossil fuel industry to be $5tn a year, more than all governments currently spend on healthcare.
Almost 200 nations are meeting in Katowice, Poland, for two weeks, aiming to turn the carbon-cutting vision set in Paris in 2015 into a reality,
as well as increasing the ambition and speed of action and the funding
needed. Current pledges leaving the world on track for a disastrous 3C of warming.
It’s where the conspiracy theorizing and menacing of critics began.
Vice President Mike Pence and President Trump during a briefing about Hurricane Florence in the Oval Office on Sept. 11, 2018. Credit Pete Marovich for The New York Times
Many
observers seem baffled by Republican fealty to Donald Trump — the
party’s willingness to back him on all fronts, even after severe defeats
in the midterm elections. What kind of party would show such support
for a leader who is not only evidently corrupt and seemingly in the
pocket of foreign dictators, but also routinely denies facts and tries
to criminalize anyone who points them out?
The
answer is, the kind of the party that, long before Trump came on the
scene, committed itself to denying the facts on climate change and
criminalizing the scientists reporting those facts.
The G.O.P. wasn’t always an anti-environment, anti-science party. George H.W. Bush introduced the cap-and-trade program that largely controlled the problem of acid rain. As late as 2008, John McCain called for a similar program to limit emissions of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming.
But McCain’s party was already well along in the process of becoming what it is today — a party that is not only completely dominated
by climate deniers, but is hostile to science in general, that
demonizes and tries to destroy scientists who challenge its dogma.
Trump
fits right in with this mind-set. In fact, when you review the history
of Republican climate denial, it looks a lot like Trumpism. Climate
denial, you might say, was the crucible in which the essential elements
of Trumpism were formed.
Take Trump’s
dismissal of all negative information about his actions and their
consequences as either fake news invented by hostile media or the
products of a sinister “deep state.” That kind of conspiracy theorizing
has long been standard practice among climate deniers, who began calling
the evidence for global warming — evidence that has convinced 97 percent of climate scientists — a “gigantic hoax” 15 years ago.
What was the evidence for this vast conspiracy? A lot of it rested on, you guessed it, hacked emails.
The credulousness of all too many journalists about the supposed
misconduct revealed by “Climategate,” a pseudo-scandal that relied on
selective, out-of-context quotes from emails at a British university,
prefigured the disastrous media handling of hacked Democratic emails in
2016. (All we learned from those emails was that scientists are people —
occasionally snappish, and given to talking in professional shorthand
that hostile outsiders can willfully misinterpret.)
Oh,
and what is supposed to be motivating the thousands of scientists
perpetrating this hoax? We’ve become accustomed to the spectacle of
Donald Trump, the most corrupt president in history leading the most
corrupt administration of modern times, routinely calling his opponents
and critics “crooked.” Much the same thing happens in climate debate.
The truth is that most prominent climate deniers
are basically paid to take that position, receiving large amounts of
money from fossil-fuel companies. But after the release of the recent
National Climate Assessment detailing the damage we can expect from
global warming, a parade of Republicans went on TV to declare that scientists were only saying these things “for the money.” Projection much?
But climate scientists have faced harassment and threats,
up to and including death threats, for years. And they’ve also faced
efforts by politicians to, in effect, criminalize their work. Most
famously, Michael E. Mann, creator of the famous “hockey stick” graph,
was for years the target of an anti-climate science jihad by Ken Cuccinelli, at the time Virginia’s attorney general.
And
on it goes. Recently a judge in Arizona, responding to a suit from a
group linked to the Koch brothers (and obviously not understanding how
research works), ordered the release of all emails from climate scientists at the University of Arizona. To forestall the inevitable selective misrepresentation, Mann has released all the emails he exchanged with his Arizona colleagues, with explanatory context.
There are three important morals to this story.
First,
if we fail to meet the challenge of climate change, with catastrophic
results — which seems all too likely — it won’t be the result of an
innocent failure to understand what was at stake. It will, instead, be a
disaster brought on by corruption, willful ignorance, conspiracy
theorizing and intimidation.
Second,
that corruption isn’t a problem of “politicians” or the “political
system.” It’s specifically a problem of the Republican Party, which has
burrowed ever deeper into climate denial even as the damage from a
warming planet becomes more and more obvious.
Third,
we can now see climate denial as part of a broader moral rot. Donald
Trump isn’t an aberration, he’s the culmination of where his party has
been going for years. You could say that Trumpism is just the
application of the depravity of climate denial to every aspect of politics. And there’s no end to the depravity in sight.
