Bought and Paid For: the politics and economics of climate change

I want to tell a little of the tale of the courageous Dr. James Hansen, an atmospheric physicist and leader at NASA who has gone out on many limbs to alert us to the dangers of global climate change. I believe that his tale would not be necessary but for the powerful influence of greed.

Let me begin with a personal connection that I have with Dr. Hansen, however. I'm pleased to say that I've only been arrested once, and I'm doubly pleased to say that it was in the company of Dr. Hansen. He and I (and about one hundred others) were arrested at a protest in Washington, D.C., called "Appalachia Rising". We were protesting mountaintop removal and sat down in front of the White House to express our displeasure. The park police felt obligated to handcuff the assembled crowd and take us to their jail in paddywagons -- where we were processed and released. It was an interesting exercise in ridiculous theatrics, but the good that came out of it was that I got to mingle with Dr. Hansen and other luminaries of the movement (e.g. Tim DeChristopher -- but his is another story).

If you've never heard of mountaintop removal, imagine dropping a bomb on the top of a mountain, blowing that top off, and strewing its remains into all the headwaters surrounding. Then part of the mountain is carted away as coal -- "cheap coal" -- to heat our homes or send on to China and India. Finally the coal companies come back and push the dirt around, plant an invasive species of grass, and when it looks kind of green, they say that they've put the mountain back together. Here's a picture of a mountaintop removal site, and one that's been "put back together":

Images from the advert for the film "Razing Appalachia", on PBS.

How could anyone do this to a mountain ecosystem? This gets me back to the greed. Mountains are just collateral damage in the war on climate. The real battle is over the coal, gas, and oil, buried deep in the ground...

Take a moment to digest this quote by Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

Think about that; mull it over.

Isn't self-interest at the root of self-delusion? Have you ever deluded yourself because you wanted something so badly?

Our "Captains of Industry" in the Carbon sectors "own" an incredible amount of carbon, which is primarily deep underground, put there by time and planetary evolution. (Let's say that they've staked their claim to it -- no one really owns those resources.) The only way that these "Captains of Industry" will be compensated for this is by bringing it up to the surface and burning it. If they do we're toast, according to Bill McKibben, and his group 350.org:
It's simple math: we can emit 565 more gigatons of carbon dioxide and stay below 2oC of warming -- anything more than that risks catastrophe for life on earth. The only problem? Burning the fossil fuel that corporations now have in their reserves would result in emitting 2,795 gigatons of carbon dioxide -- five times the safe amount.

Bill was one of the first to popularize the Climate Change crisis, writing a book for popular consumption (and later penning one of my favorites, "Eaarth", about the new planet we are creating).

In the summer of 2013 I had the pleasure of witnessing a lecture by Dr. Gerard Courtin, a microclimatologist (now retired from Laurentian University). He was presenting a summary and overview of anthropogenic climate change to a group of grade 10 students at the Canadian Ecology Centre, in July of 2013. I was surprised yet pleased by Prof. Courtin's forthright and direct condemnation of climate change deniers ("One can have nothing but pity for them."), and his direct attacks on the Stephen Harper government.

Often we in academia are too timid to make such remarks. One thing in Prof. Courtin's favor is that he is formally retired: hence his paycheck, his salary, isn't tied to his positions. So it's not so difficult to make him understand things! That being said, I should make it clear that Dr. Courtin's opinions haven't changed as a result of this....

Sometimes just sticking your head in the sand is the seeming answer, even if the rising sea ends up coming in and drowning you. A wonderfully comical and yet terrifying example of this occurred in the United States, where "....North Carolina, is actively ignoring the problem: The state legislature has refused to include realistic sea-level rise projections in its coastal planning policies."

You really can't make this stuff up: [A development] group said making development take into account 39 inches of sea level rise [by the end of the century] could undermine the coastal economy, raise insurance costs and turn thousands of square miles of coastal property into flood plains that could not be developed. Exactly. And that's what's going to happen. They just don't want to hear it, so they refuse to allow anyone to say it. Maybe the insurance companies will begin to ask a few questions, however, as they set their rates....

But, rather than sticking his head in the sand, Dr. Hansen has made a career of opening his mouth. Hansen testified before congress in 1988, expressing his strong belief that climate change was indeed happening, and that it was caused by human activity. Even while working at NASA, James Hansen, continued to develop and elaborate this politically and economically unpopular opinion, so much so that, during the Bush Deux years, he was shadowed by a minder who would make sure that he didn't say anything that George Bush's administration wouldn't like.

Allow me to quote liberally from a WorldWatch piece on Hansen's contributions:

he delivered a speech to the American Geophysical Union in December 2005. In addition to announcing that the year would prove to be the hottest on record, Hansen warned that the rise in sea levels was evidence that humans were causing global climate instability. "Jim took a step beyond that usual dissonance in the scientific community. He said `six to eight feet increase in sea level, I call that dangerous, don't you?'" says Rick Piltz, director of Climate Science Watch, a watchdog program of the Government Accountability Project.

The speech, which received widespread media attention, led White House-appointed NASA administrators to silence Hansen and other scientists. The White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), influenced by ExxonMobil lobbyists, singled out Clinton administration-appointed federal scientists who could be "removed from their positions of influence," according to a released memo. Among the "removed" scientists was former IPCC chair Robert Watson. American Petroleum Institute attorney Philip Cooney was appointed chief-of-staff of the CEQ. He would repeatedly edit government reports on climate change in an effort to [appear to] lessen the certainty of the science.

At NASA, orders authorized by administration-appointed public relations officers "reduced, marginalized, or mischaracterized climate change science," an agency investigation stated recently. Climate scientists were not allowed to conduct media interviews without prior approval. Hansen had to remove the 2005 temperature data from NASA's website. Even Hansen's daily schedule suddenly required prior consent.

Hansen decided he had seen enough. He sent an e-mail in January 2006 about the NASA constraints to New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin, who first uncovered the restrictions. During an interview on the CBS program 60 Minutes, Hansen said, "In my more than three decades in the government I've never witnessed such restrictions on the ability of scientists to communicate with the public."

Federal scientists, from NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and other agencies, have since acknowledged that their climate findings were also being repressed. "[Hansen] did a great deal to help unmask the Bush administration's collusion with the global warming disinformation campaign," said Piltz, who helped expose the White House when he publicly resigned from the U.S. Climate Change Science Program. "He's a bit like a lone wolf. Nobody can tell him what to say or what to do. They made a mistake when they tried to mess with him."

Source: part III (An Outspoken Truth) of a three-part series "A Climate Hero" on Hansen's history-making testimony to Congress; here are Part I (The Early Years) and part II (The Testimony)

Hansen wrote a wonderful book on climate change entitle Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity. He is constantly talking about his grandchildren, and what will become of them. This is personal with Hansen, as it should be for every one of us. The fight against climate change has made him a target, a laughingstock, a celebrity, and, I fear, it will make him out to be a prophet in the end. Keep up the good work Jim!

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