Intermission (And Why Bill McKibben is an Utter Fool)

This blog will return in mid-September. In the meantime, here’s a video of a presentation I gave in Australia last month – and some thoughts on the bankruptcy of contemporary green analysis.

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Masters of Hypocrisy: the Union of Concerned Scientists

A new report funded by big oil and big tobacco has the chutzpah to complain about corporate influence on the climate debate.

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Independent Bloggers vs Corporate Environmentalists

[desktop wallpaper version available here]

Another day, another smarmy accusation that people who are skeptical of climate change are being funded by a shadowy conspiracy connected in one manner or another to big oil, big coal, big tobacco or - horror of horrors - right-wing think tanks.

These accusations are tiresome. They're ugly. They're almost entirely unsubstantiated. Most of all, they're a waste of time. They amount to shooting the messenger rather than addressing the bleeping message.

So why do they keep getting repeated? I think I've sorted out two reasons. First: the lavishly-funded corporate nature of the environmental movement circa 2010. Second: modern technological wonders such as personal computers and the Internet.

Environmental organizations today bear little resemblance to the shoestring operations of yesteryear. As a book published 14 years ago observed:

While Greenpeace used to be a pair of bell-bottomed blue jeans, today it is more like a three-piece pinstripe suit.

Indeed. In 1971, Greenpeace was an "upstart peace group from Vancouver" that held meetings in a Unitarian church. After it chartered a 30-year-old "creaking fish boat" to protest a US nuclear arms test, it could barely afford to pay for the boat's fuel.

Last month, however, when The Guardian reported that Greenpeace had commissioned a brand new £14 million ($22 million US) mega-yacht, it observed that "cost should not be a problem for the group, which, with nearly three million supporters, is extremely wealthy."

How wealthy? According to publicly-available figures compiled by Climate-Resistance.org, over a 12-year period Greenpeace raised $2.4 billion. That works out to $200 million a year in resources.

If you think that's impressive, take a moment to ponder the fact that the World Wildlife Fund raised $3.1 billion in just six years (2003-2008). Which means that that organization has ready access to half a billion dollars annually.

When you're that big – and that loaded – suddenly everything costs a small fortune. Want to start a new blog? That'll require a series of meetings. You'll need to invite web design folks, IT folks, a contingent of in-house PR people, an ad agency person or two, a corporate strategy person, and probably someone from legal. You'll meet in shiny offices in a fashionable part of town and order-in sandwiches from the pricey, organic, fair-trade café at the end of the street.

Compare and contrast to how independent individuals of utterly modest means from all over the world currently behave. They sign up to a service like Blogger.com (which is owned by Google) and, within a few hours at most, for no cost whatsoever, have launched themselves as a blogger. Alternatively, for well under $10 in hosting fees a month, they can publish their own website.

For no money, therefore, climate skeptics in the early 21st century are in a position to theoretically communicate online with as many people as is Greenpeace. From their basements and their attics, in often non-trendy geographical locations, it isn't their funding that matters - it's their skill sets.

Many skeptical-leaning bloggers have scientific, mathematical, and statistical training - not to mention decades of real-world experience under their belts. Others have been professional communicators (I, myself, am a former print journalist). Some are speed-readers, others have photographic memories. Many, like the folks who rendered the Climategate e-mails fully searchable within a matter of hours, have impressive information technology skills. Some are retired, with plenty of time on their hands. Others devote as many hours to reading and writing about climate issues in a week as they'd otherwise spend on knitting or golf.

From the perspective of environmental organization staffers, research agency employees, and tenured university professors it must appear as though skeptics have access to deep pockets. In the universe those people inhabit, even the simplest tasks can end up as budget line items. There are layers of bureaucracy, paperwork, office politics, and regulations to consider.

For the small and growing army of skeptical climate bloggers, however, none of that applies. The equivalent of a battered fishing boat will do nicely, thank you.

Those vessels are now everywhere. They're being sailed by real people and fueled by grassroots concern, outrage, and passion. And they're not going away.

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>> Slurs, smears & money
>> Al Gore's tobacco hypocrisy
>> Greenpeace and the Nobel-winning climate report
>> Climate skepticism is free speech
>> Green time capsule: 1970 eco ideas not pretty

Al Gore's Tobacco Hypocrisy

You know, before I started researching the global warming debate I had no opinion on Al Gore. I suppose this was largely because I'm a Canadian who didn't follow American politics closely during the years he served as Vice-President.

My first substantive memory of him involves the hotly contested election in 2000 that led to a recount in Florida and the eventual awarding of the presidency to George W. Bush. I remember Mr. Gore, at the time, delivering a gracious concession speech. Having exhausted all legal avenues, it was the right thing for him to. The decision preserved his own dignity - and that of his country.

Having never belonged to a political party - and fully aware that some of my views align with liberals while others align with conservatives - I consider myself sincerely non-partisan. Lots of people despise Mr. Gore because they're Republicans and it goes with the territory. I'm not one of them.

But the more I see of this gentleman, the thinner grows my esteem. Rather than using logical or scientific arguments, Mr. Gore frequently smears people who hold opinions that are different from his own. He recently told CBS news:

Some of the largest carbon polluters...try to convince people - as the tobacco industry did years ago on the link between smoking cigarettes and lung disease - that there really isn't a link - between global warming-pollution and global warming. [bold added]

The CBS website highlighted this tobacco comment by incorporating it into the title of its online report: "Gore: Carbon Polluters Like Big Tobacco."

One day I'm going to make a list of all the environmentalists who use the tobacco smear. Based on my reading so far, I expect it will be a long one. For now, suffice it to say that it is highly offensive for anyone to equate well-informed, good-faith individuals who have doubts about a theory that predicts what will happen in the future with those who repudiated well-established medical facts. The two scenarios are not scientifically or historically equivalent. To pretend that they are is to value cheap politics over objective reality.

What is really beyond the pale, however, is that such a smear should be wielded by Mr. Gore - whose family grew tobacco, who has boasted about his hands-on involvement in the farming of it, and who - drum roll, please - accepted political donations from the tobacco industry over a ten-year period.

According to the New York Times, in a speech in North Carolina in 1988, Mr. Gore declared:

Throughout most of my life, I've raised tobacco...I want you to know that with my own hands, all of my life, I put it in the plant beds and transferred it. I've hoed it. I've chopped it. I've shredded it, spiked it, put it in the barn and stripped it and sold it.

This same newspaper article observes that, despite Mr. Gore's current characterization of tobacco as a great evil, even after his sister died of lung cancer it took several years for his family to walk away from the income they earned from tobacco. In other words, they knew firsthand that it killed people, but they continued to profit from it.

Mr. Gore knew, because he had knelt beside his sister's bedside, that tobacco led to bad things. Yet six years later he was still accepting campaign donations from "tobacco industry political action committees."

(click image to read full article)

And this man has the audacity to attempt to link other people - most of whom are unlikely to have come within a league of a tobacco field or to have received one red cent from a tobacco-related source in their lifetimes - with tobacco's stench?

Does Al Gore truly have no shame?

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related posts:
>> Al Gore: Not This Thinking Woman's Thinking Man
>> Al Gore Thinks Your Brain Is Too Primitive