Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet (38 page)

Pearse exposes Howard’s links to the world of global warming denial and his long-standing doubt about the science. His decision to embrace the IPCC’s science and commit to an emissions trading scheme (ETS) in late 2006 was a political decision, forced on him by public concern in Australia. His ultimate successor at the helm of the Liberal Party and now prime minister, Tony Abbott, is another self-confessed denier; although he adopted a climate policy after gaining the leadership, he told a forum in March 2011 that the science on climate change is still not settled. “Whether carbon dioxide is quite the environmental villain that some people make it out to be is not yet proven,” he told his audience.
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With a mandate for action, the incoming Labor government of 2007, headed by Kevin Rudd, ratified the Kyoto Protocol and set out to put a price on carbon via an ETS. But the carbon lobby was already entrenched inside the institutions that were to be responsible for the curtailment of its emissions, as well as enjoying the formidable organizational assets built up over decades in think tanks and industry associations. It continued to dominate the policy process, artfully confusing the national interest with its own.
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Pearse points out that Australia’s reliance on coal-fired electricity had deepened since the 1970s under governments of all stripes, fostering an alliance between key unions and the corporations who employ their members. He identifies an alliance between polluters, elite politicians, and elite bureaucrats, the so-called “iron triangle,” one that persisted, he argues, when the government changed in 2007.
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While power generators warned of blackouts and price spikes and industry associations forecasted deep job losses,
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the actual details of Rudd’s scheme were extremely friendly to fossil fuel interests. A modest reduction target of 5 percent from 2000 levels was adopted. Electric utilities, which had known for decades that carbon would one day be priced, were to be absolved of responsibility for their decisions and paid nearly $4 billion in compensation for the reduced value of their businesses.
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Transport emissions were to be excluded, at least initially. On average, heavy polluters would get four out of five pollution permits for free, while the heaviest would receive up to 90 percent for free. “Clean coal” would also be generously funded, without reference to the actual scale required to make a tangible difference, a scale that the Canadian scientist Vaclav Smil has quantified. In order to sequester
just 10 percent
of current global CO
₂
emissions, the world would need to force underground annually a volume of compressed CO
₂
comparable to the volume of crude oil extracted annually by the global petroleum industry—whose infrastructures and capacities have been put in place over a century of development. Achieving even this limited degree of sequestration appears to be highly unlikely.
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What most of the public was not clearly told, or did not really grasp, was that the Rudd trading scheme would not launch new, cleaner industries at home and would not reduce actual emissions from Australian industry at all in the first few decades. The reduction, already very modest, would be accomplished by buying low-cost permits from countries such as Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, mainly in exchange for forest preservation. The Australian Treasury estimated that the country would be emitting 585 million tonnes (Mt) of greenhouse gases in 2020 (about 560 Mt excluding land-use change and forestry),
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34 percent more than comparable emissions in 1990. Not until 2050 would the actual emissions approach the 1990 level. Australia’s apparent compliance with Kyoto during the Howard years was achieved by reductions in land clearing, while its industrial emissions actually rose 38 percent. Under Rudd’s scheme, the country’s ongoing compliance with greenhouse targets was to be achieved largely by paying others to reduce land clearing. Thus, the Australian economy was not slated to emit much less carbon in the next few decades and would not commence a transition to low-carbon alternatives.
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In addition to the coal burned at home, Australia provides 25 percent of the entire world’s supply, including more than half of its high-grade metallurgical coal,
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but this is ignored under current accounting rules, as is the carbon emitted in the production of most of Australia’s consumer durables by countries such as China.

As the ecological economist Michael Jacobs has observed, many governments have resisted the fossil fuel industry’s attempts to crush their moves to reduce emissions. According to Jacobs, only in the United States, Canada, and Australia have the arguments of climate change deniers weakened the government’s resolve to act on climate change.
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The approach of the conservative coalition in Australia is typical of the politicization of environmental issues described above, where science—and even fact—is irrelevant and the objective is denial, delay, or the transfer of costs. These tactics have been less effective in Europe and other parts of the world. Why this is so merits further research, but it may be connected to the influence of fossil fuel interests and conservative think tanks over the governments and media of the three rogue nations Jacobs cites.

While Abbott pledged a “citizen’s revolt” against carbon pricing, a tactic along US tea party lines, a broad coalition of business interests began an advertising campaign to oppose the Gillard government’s “carbon tax” (though it was merely a lead-in phase to the ETS framework that business had always favored).
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The campaign relied on fostering fear and doubt and circulating half-truths and distortions. It included the spurious idea that Australia should not act if countries such as China did not, and asserted that Australia was acting ahead of other major industrialized nations.
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The government’s Productivity Commission report found this not to be the case: Australia ranks behind Germany and the UK and is in the mid-range of countries when it comes to addressing carbon emissions.
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Rhetorics of Environmental Denial

Rhetorics of Obfuscation

The master propagandist of Nazi Germany, Joseph Goebbels, is widely credited with the observation, “If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth.” Closer to the present time, Wendell Potter, a US insurance executive who resigned from his post in 2008, has revealed a similar duplicity involved in his prior PR work. Speaking of the deployment of the term “socialized medicine” to demonize the public option during President Obama’s health care reform efforts, Potter commented, “When you say something like that, it’s not true, but it doesn’t have to be true. You just say it, and you say it over and over and over again. You get your allies to say it over and over again, to the point that Americans believe it.”
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Frank Luntz epitomizes this type of PR practice. Pollster, focus group guru, and Republican political consultant, Luntz is notorious for writing a memo that was used by the George W. Bush administration in framing its messages in the early 2000s.
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The climate section of Luntz’s memo constitutes an astute compilation of phrases that manipulated debate in the interests of delayed action and the rollback of regulation, while appearing to seek a “cleaner,” “safer” environment through a more “commonsense” approach to the problems. He advised that “climate change” is less frightening than “global warming,” a proposal derived from focus groups, who thought it sounded less “catastrophic.” It is perhaps an indication of the ubiquitous influence of right-wing PR that “climate change” quickly became the accepted terminology in public discourse.

Fostering doubt about the validity of the climate science was a central Luntz recommendation, calculated to justify delay:

The scientific debate remains open. Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community.… You need to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate.… Emphasize the importance of “acting with all the facts in hand.” …

The scientific debate is closing [against us] but not yet closed. There is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science.
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It should be remembered that the
scientific
debate did not, in fact, remain open at all.
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Luntz summarized tactics typical of the overall neoliberal assault on environmental action, centered on opposition to regulation and what was called “bureaucracy.” He also alluded to the fear of a conspiracy to create world government, common on the fringes of the American Right:

Give citizens the idea that progress is being frustrated by over-reaching government.… Emphasize how voluntary innovation and experimentation are preferable to bureaucratic and international intervention and regulation.… Unnecessary environmental regulations hurt moms and dads, grandmas and grandpas. They hurt senior citizens on reduced incomes. They take an enormous swipe at miners loggers truckers farmers—anyone who has any work in energy intensive professions.
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Luntz also proposed to emphasize reciprocal restrictions and penalties on the developing world in any climate negotiations. The third world had been excluded from the commitments of the Kyoto Protocol, much to the chagrin of the US negotiators and fossil fuel representatives.
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According to Luntz, “The international fairness issue is the emotional home run. … Americans will demand that all nations be part of any … treaty. Nations such as China, Mexico and India would have to sign.… Every nation must do its part.”
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With his grasp of the importance of emotion, Luntz is a direct heir to Bernays. “My job is to look for the words that trigger the emotion.… We know that words and emotion together are the most powerful force known to mankind.” He also noted that “a compelling story, even if factually inaccurate, can be more emotionally compelling than a dry recitation of the truth.”
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This attitude often defeats the scientific community, whose loyalty is to the accumulation of provisionally valid beliefs based on all the evidence.

Reverse Rhetoric: Sound Science/Junk Science

The terms “sound science” and “junk science” illustrate well what might be called “reverse rhetoric,” where the target is accused of the most obvious weaknesses of the attacker. While advocating emotional triggers and encouraging strategic factual inaccuracies, Luntz also stressed that “the most important principle in any discussion of global warming is your commitment to sound science.”
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This would, of course, be a contradiction in terms if taken at face value, but Luntz reflects the quest to corner the label “sound” in order to sanitize denial and delay. In Luntz’s view of reality, like Ivy Lee’s in 1915, facts and factoids are equally valid.

The use of the term “sound science” as an antiregulatory slogan has been in circulation since at least 1982, when Dow Chemical claimed to be using sound science in its $3 million program to reassure Michigan residents about local dioxin pollution.
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To counter the move toward banning smoking in public places, Philip Morris was instrumental in setting up The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC) in 1993, through its PR agent APCO Associates. TASSC, describing itself as “a not-for-profit coalition advocating the use of sound science in public policy decision making,” set to work to recruit representatives from other industries subject to regulation, such as food, plastics, chemicals, and packaging, so as to blur any focus on its campaign against smoking restrictions; the dangers of passive smoking would be obscured among numerous examples of alleged “unsound, incomplete, or unsubstantiated science.”
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Conflicts over fact had emerged as the industrial economy developed through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; efforts to regulate toxic substances often met with denial from manufacturers. Adulteration and poisoning of foods was controlled from 1906 in the United States, but the burden of proof lay with the government, which had to show that the additive was dangerous for humans. In 1938, a modification allowed poisonous substances in food, within a “safety” margin set by the government, if they were “essential” to its production.
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These food rules illuminate the main territory of the conflict between industry and citizens over environmental pollutants. Industry always sought a high bar when it came to proof, advocating absolute certainty. Where small populations with scattered incidences made such proof difficult or impossible to establish, people could be disregarded—even when pollution was “easy to smell” and they could not breathe or developed cancer.
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In pushing absolute proof as the only valid standard for assessing pollution, regulation of toxic substances could be delayed. Industry characterized precaution as a recipe for economic disaster, equating it with “economic and social stagnancy.… [It was] an unnecessary interference with the scientific advances essential to progress.”
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The pursuit of such objectives earlier in the century became intrinsic to the idea of sound science as it was pushed by antienvironmentalists in the late twentieth century. What was always at stake here was the right of enterprise to pollute or poison rather than risk a reduction in its profit. In the case of lead, for example, despite evidence of its dangers dating back to the nineteenth century
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and grim warnings from public health officials at the time, the petroleum and automobile industries succeeded in their bid to add tetraethyl lead to ordinary petrol in the 1920s. From that time, lead was gradually dispersed through every street in the world where people drove cars. Lead manufacturers insisted that there was no danger and, above all, that there was no
absolute
proof of danger. At the same time, they suppressed evidence that indicated risk and funded research that would treat it as minimal, as other manufacturers did with numerous suspected toxins.
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Lead in petrol visited fifty years of poisoning on the entire developed world and parts of the rest before regulation began in the 1980s. Computer monitors containing an average of four pounds of lead are nonetheless disintegrating in countless landfills and leaching into groundwater at the present time. In
Deceit and Denial
, their book on industrial pollution, the historians Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner target the lead and vinyl industries, yet they make it clear that “lying and obfuscation were rampant in the tobacco, automobile, asbestos, and nuclear power industries as well.”
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