On November 7th, all 435 U.S. House seats and 33 of the 100 Senate seats are up for grabs. If you’ve seen Gore’s movie or read any of the recent articles about global warming, you know that the time to get busy on the issue is right exactly now. It doesn’t matter what president we have in 2008 if we can’t get any bills through Congress because we sat on our palms in ’06.
If you’ve turned on a TV, opened a newspaper, or gone to a newstand in the last six months, you know the time is ripe for real action on global warming right now. Al Gore’s new movie is scaring the bejesus out of people all over the country. Roger Ebert is saying it’s the most important movie he’s seen and it aint because Al Gore is sexy. The other side is blasting away with new TV ads that have a soothing tone assuring viewers that CO2 is a-okay to burn because it comes from animals and plants and kids blowing bubbles. Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Time, and the USA Today have all shot out cover stories finally deeming the debate “over”. This is dramatic, edge-of-your-seat, red hot cinema folks.
Well, ya. It’s not every day you hear that all of humanity may have less than 10 years to fundamentally shift the way it gets its energy before we head into an endless planetary tailspin of starvation, disease, draught and massive sea level rise. Or is it? Didn’t the media outlets get their talking points for this story from the same guy that testified about global warming on the floor of the US Senate 18 years ago? Hmm…
Yes, our beloved Congressional representatives, many of whom are still in office, sat down with top climate scientist James Hansen as he explained how human-burned CO2 was heating up the climate at dangerous rates in 1988. That same year, Margaret Thatcher warned that with global warming, “we may have unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the system of the planet itself” and a major drought and heat wave hit North America. By 1990 the world’s top scientific panel on climate, the IPCC, reached general consensus that immediate action should be taken to combat global warming. In response, the US Congress has done essentially nothing about global warming for 18 years.
The hot news story about global warming broke years ago all over the world. Here in the US when we did hear something about climate change or global warming in the last two decades, it was almost always shrouded in skepticism or controversy. Consider one of the most disturbing facts in An Inconvenient Truth: Of 928 peer-reviewed articles dealing with climate change that were published in scientific journals during the previous ten years, none of them disagreed with the consensus point that human-caused global warming was occurring. So, how the crap did it take 18 years for the US media to get the story right on global warming? One word – illusion. In the face of near perfect scientific consensus, the newspapers portrayed the issue as balanced between believers and skeptics of global warming.
President Bush nailed it on the head last year when he came out and admitted that the US is addicted to oil. What might not be so clear to the average Joe is how deeply the American addiction to fossil fuels has penetrated politics and the media in the 18 years since Hansen’s testimony. The oil and gas industry is still spending more than $150 billion every year drilling for new oil. The industry is propped up by $ billions in US federal subsidies, treaty loopholes, concessions, and royalties every year. After more than 90 years, coal companies are still getting tens of billions in tax breaks and subsidies every year for new development from taxpayers including an absurd $1.3 billion tax break for spraying on substances like diesel or starch, which qualifies their product as “non-conventional”. Given all of this pork, it’s not all that surprising that somebody wouldn’t want the US Congress and the mainstream media to get the straight story that this addiction was killing the planet.
Since 1998 ExxonMobil has spent more than $12 million funding junk science on global warming. While smart climate scientists like James Hansen were telling people that carbon dioxide from coal plants and tailpipes was raising CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere quicker than any time in history, skeptics like Richard Lindzen were telling people that the only way to restrict CO2 is to restrict wealth creation. Right. And innovation and investment in new technologies had nothing to do with every economic boom in history.
How did so many people buy this nonsense from the same three scientists who were paid by think tanks funded by oil companies to tour the country while the rest of the planet tuned them out? One word – money. According to Oil Change International, oil companies donated over $25 million to candidates in the US during the 2004 campaign. And while Big Oil wasn’t donating to candidates, it was busy writing the Bush Administration’s energy plan, or lobbying for the $6 billion in subsidies from the 2005 Energy Bill.
There are a hell of a lot of reasons to be pissed off at Congress and the President at the moment. From the Jack Abramoff scandal to Tom Delay’s money laundering dealio to the $ millions in donations from oil companies, our representatives are looking awfully dirty. The good news is we American’s love to give second chances and there are still five whole months for the incumbent and challenger candidates in the 2006 mid-term elections to prove to the people that they’ve got some chutzpah! The bad news is that politicians hardly ever grow cojones on a controversial issue until their constituents give them a spanking.
The enemies of climate action solutions are still out in full force spending like banshees and winning over Congress on every new proposal. So if you want a shot at a future beyond the climate crisis, it’s time to pony up and get political. Stretch out that dialing finger, strap on those door-knocking boots, and get out the climate vote in 2006. There’s nothing hotter.
Thanks, Josh, for such a timely post. Let’s all get the House in order this fall, and the Senate too, by volunteering in our local elections, wherever they may be!
Many campaigns, for US House of Reps, Senate, and state races, are just getting kicked off, and so now is a vital time to raise the issue of climate change and clean energy to candidates. A simple phone call to a campaign office, asking “What’s your plan to address global warming?” can have a big impact on shaping candidates’ agendas. Time for me to go make some phone calls . . .