What’s “The Big Lie” of climate politics?
By Francesca Rheannon
Eric Pooley has written a spell-binding political thriller about who killed the climate bill and how they did it. It’s called THE CLIMATE WAR. Pooley largely blames the fossil fuel lobby and its PR men for the failure to get a climate bill through the Congress. But he also points the finger at the White House. In this first part of a three part series, Pooley talks about the climate denial lobby, their “Big Lie”, and what capitalism’s creative destruction means for the clean energy economy.
Francesca Rheannon: The personalities and issues that have framed the war over climate policy is the subject of your book. Let’s start with one side of that climate war — the deny and delay movement, as you call them. Could you first tell us, who are they and who’s behind them?
Eric Pooley: When I set out to write this book I didn’t expect that that would be a big part of this story because I thought the debate was shifting from the science to the politics and economics — in other words from whether climate change was real to what we were going to do about it. But the deny and delay crowd are dedicated to sowing doubt and confusion on this issue. They’ve done an extremely good job and have been very persistent. So that question about whether it’s really happening or not continues to be a source of real power and it’s derailed, or at least helped to derail, legislation because there’s about a third of the country that is not at all sure that this is really happening.
That didn’t happen by accident. That’s a result of a concerted effort on the part of paid public relations people. The one that I focus on most is a man by the name of Myron Ebell. He’s director of global warming policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. The CEI is a conservative think tank in Washington that opposes taxation and regulation of any kind and it’s been part of this movement that’s been driven by ideology, anti-tax and anti-regulatory zeal, to deny the fact of global warming.
These are people whose thinking moves from effect to cause. They hate the proposed solution, they hate the idea of regulating the energy economy, they hate the idea of transitioning from dirty to clean fuels — not incidentally, they get a lot of funding from fossil fuel companies — and they’re dedicated to a two front war: one front is the science and they claim that the jury is still out over whether this is still happening — they have a different argument every day. They used to say that there was no global warming; when it became very clear that there was, they retreated to a point where now they say, well, it’s happening, but man is not the cause. They argue that it’s natural variation or that it’s sun spots or that if it is happening, we can’t do anything about it. They have a different argument depending on the day of the week, it seems. But it’s always consistent that whatever is going on, we shouldn’t do anything about it.
And the other front that they’re fighting on is over the economics. They say that if we do anything about it, it’ll break the bank, destroy the economy, drive the price of electricity up, kill jobs, move them to China: the usual scare tactics that you hear from industry anytime a new environmental regulation is proposed.
FR: The economics has been getting a lot of play recently. You call that The Big Lie of the climate debate. Could you tell us why that is such a big lie.
EP: The big lie of the climate debate is the notion that the economy and the environment need to be in opposition. In other words, if you’re going to do something good for the environment, you’re going to do something bad for the economy. This is an argument that dates back to Ronald Reagan, and it’s obsolete now because the fact is, we need to something good for the economy that’s also good for the climate and the environment. And that’s the transition from dirty fuels to clean fuels.
Now that’s not to say there won’t be any short term costs associated with this transition. Clearly there will. There’s always a great churn in the American economy and my day job is deputy editor of Bloomberg Business Week Magazine, so I’m intimately familiar with economic theory and the churn of a vibrant, changing, ever-evolving American economy. It’s like a great river. It’s what the economic theorists call “creative destruction”: as we move towards new technologies and new industries, older ones get left behind. We’re not using buggy whips anymore and the print media industry is embattled. These things happen as economies go on and new economies are created. So, that’s a larger frame.
In the energy sphere, we need to move from dirty fuels that have sustained our prosperity for the last century or more to cleaner fuels that can sustain our prosperity for centuries into the future.
Now as we make this transition, there going to be winners and losers, and what we have here are the people who think they are going to be the losers trying to prevent the transition from taking place. So they cast this false choice, if you will, between the environment and the economy.
They say if we choose the environment, if we choose to do something about climate change, then our beloved American economy is going to crash. That couldn’t be further from the truth. There are new industries waiting to be born; there are new industries waiting to create tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of American jobs. All we need to do is level the playing field, take away the subsidies that the fossil fuel industry has long enjoyed and put a price on carbon, close the carbon loophole that has prevented us from accelerating the transition to clean energies.
In Part Two of this series, Pooley will talk about closing the carbon loophole and who killed the climate bill. Can’t wait? You can hear the whole interview at the website of Francesca Rheannon’s radio show, Writers Voice.
About Francesca Rheannon
Talkback’s Managing Editor is Francesca Rheannon. An award-winning journalist, Francesca is co-founder of Sea Change Media. She produces the Sea Change Radio’s series, Back to The Future, and co-produces the Interfaith Center of Corporate Responsibility’s podcast The Arc of Change. Francesca’s work has appeared at SocialFunds.com, The CRO, and E Magazine, and she is a contributing writer for CSRwire. Francesca hosts the nationally syndicated radio show, Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon.
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