Stop Talking to Ourselves and Talk to Middle America

thinkstock

Published September 19, 2014.

Will 2014 be the year in which climate change becomes a third rail?

Never before has there been an issue of such moral clarity. We have known for 25 years that the earth is warming more rapidly now than at any other time in history. We have begun to see the effects, in the form of massive die-offs (bees, frogs) and increased severe weather events. Coastal cities (like New York) are beginning to be affected.

Climate change should not be a political issue, let alone a partisan one. Rather, it is a profoundly moral issue, threatening the stability of life on Earth. And yet, even the existence of climate change as a phenomenon has become partisan in nature. Only 50% of self-identified conservative Republicans believe that the earth is getting warmer at all a simple factual matter, like whether Earth is round. Only 30% of Republicans accept what 99.5% of climatologists know: that human actions are causing the change.

Compare that to 90% of Democrats who believe the facts of climate change, and 60% who accept the theory.

Why this difference?First and foremost, lies. Thanks to rigorous investigative journalism by Naomi Oreskes, James Hoggan, the DeSmog Blog and many others, we now know why the United States has done so little to combat it: because of massive spending on propaganda by the fossil-fuel industry, which has established a legion of phony think tanks to create the impression of scientific uncertainty.This tactic has worked spectacularly well. Conservative media continues to insist that there is scientific uncertainty where there is none. To choose one of hundreds of examples, consider an oft-cited 2012 article in Forbes by Peter Ferrara, which notes that from 1998 to 2012, average mean temperature went down rather than up.What Ferrara doesnt note is that 1998 was an anomaly, due to El Nino. When you measure from 1980, or from 1950, or from 1900, the sharp upward trend is unmistakable.

Ferrara also didnt disclose that he and organizations he founded have received millions of dollars from ExxonMobil, the Koch Brothers and the conservative Scaife family foundations to name a few. DeSmogBlog did, ??? and also noted that Ferrara has admitted to writing client-subsidized op-eds in the past.

In short, Ferrara is a paid lackey who twists the numbers to make a case for his clients. But that hasnt stopped him from getting cited over and over again as some kind of expert. Multiply Ferrara by 1,000 times, add billions of lobbying dollars, and junk science becomes public (and congressional) opinion.

Read the original post:
Let's Make Climate Change the New 'Third Rail' of American Politics