Climate Change--Clash of the Corporate Titans

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Clash of the Titans

An excerpt from Boiling Point highlights a clash of interests over climate
change

21 July 2004

<http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=25450&cgi=product&isbn=04
6502761x>Boiling Point
By Ross Gelbspan

Journalist Ross Gelbspan's new book,
<http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=25450&cgi=product&isbn=04
6502761x> Boiling Point (out in late July from Basic Books), reveals how
politicians, big oil and coal, the media, and even activists have fueled the
climate crisis -- and how we might still avert disaster. This excerpt traces
what Gelbspan describes as a corrupt relationship between the Bush
administration and the fossil-fuel industry.

Under the administration of George W. Bush, the White House has become the
East Coast branch office of ExxonMobil and Peabody Coal, and climate change
has become the preeminent case study of the contamination of our political
system by money.

With its heavy bankrolling of the Bush campaign in the 2000 presidential
election, the fossil-fuel industry won a victory beyond its wildest dreams.
That industry's long-running campaign of climate-change denial and public
deception rapidly became presidential policy. In short order, President
Bush reneged on his campaign promise to cap emissions from coal-burning
power plants, unveiled the fossil fuel-friendly Cheney energy plan (a fast
track to climate chaos), and withdrew the U.S. from the Kyoto negotiations.
Then, in a truly Orwellian stroke, the White House altered a U.S. EPA
report, removing all references to the dangerous impacts of climate change
on the United States.

Apologists for the administration have justified its climate policies by
citing politically conservative principles -- the withdrawal of onerous
regulations, a belief in unencumbered free markets, and the appeal of
corporate voluntarism.

In fact, the Bush climate policies have nothing to do with political
conservatism. Rather, they represent corruption disguised as conservatism.

For starters, many White House watchers have already documented this
administration's strong ties to the fossil-fuel lobby. The president tops
the list of past oil company executives, followed by Vice President Dick
Cheney, former CEO of Halliburton, the country's largest oil-field services
firm. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice served on Chevron's board
of directors, while Secretary of Commerce Donald Evans worked for a Denver
oil and gas company, Tom Brown, Inc. Philip Cooney, chief of staff for the
White House Council on Environmental Quality, was formerly head of the
climate unit of the American Petroleum Institute, the main lobbying arm of
the oil industry, and a group that is among the most rabid critics of
climate science.

Bush's electoral success, moreover, was heavily funded by big coal and oil.
His 2000 presidential win can in large measure be traced to his victory in
West Virginia, a state no other Republican presidential candidate had ever
won. That win resulted from the substantial support of the state's coal
industry. One coal executive alone, James Harless, raised $275,000 for the
Bush campaign in West Virginia, five times more than Al Gore raised there.

Five months after Bush's inauguration, a West Virginia Coal Association
official told a meeting of the organization: "You did everything you could
to elect a Republican president. Now you are already seeing in his actions
the payback ... for what we did."

That "payback" came in the form of an about-face on a campaign promise
Candidate Bush made in 1999 -- to repeat nationally what he had done as
governor of Texas, imposing a carbon dioxide emissions cap on the state's
coal-fired power plants. In a letter to four Republican senators, Bush said
he was backing away from the cap because of the "incomplete state of
scientific knowledge of the causes of, and solutions to, global climate
change and the lack of commercially available technologies for removing and
storing carbon dioxide."

Particularly pleased by Bush's flip-flop was Irl Englehardt, chair of the
Peabody Group, the country's biggest coal company. Englehardt had donated
$250,000 to the Republican National Committee, and served as an adviser to
the Bush-Cheney Energy Transition Team. On May 17, 2001, when the Cheney
task force unveiled its new energy plan, it not only called for an expanded
role for nuclear power and the opening of the Arctic National Wildlife
Refuge to oil exploration, but for the construction of between 1,300 and
1,900 new power plants, most of them powered by coal. Within a week of the
plan's unveiling, the Peabody Group -- a privately held entity for its
entire 120-year life -- made an initial public offering (IPO) of shares and
went public. Overnight, its stock jumped from $24 to $36.

Exxon, Exx Off

If the administration's energy plan was covered with the fingerprints of
the country's biggest coal company, its climate policies appear to have
been directly dictated by the planet's largest oil company.

Just weeks after Bush assumed office, ExxonMobil official Randy Randol sent
a memo to the White House, which was subsequently obtained by the Natural
Resources Defense Council through a series of Freedom of Information Act
requests. The memo cited a quote from Robert Watson, chair of the U.N.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: "The United States is way off
meeting its targets. A country like China has done more, in my opinion,
than a country like the United States to move forward in economic
development while remaining environmentally sensitive." Clearly, Watson's
assertion did not sit well with the memo's authors, who went on to ask:
"Can Watson Be Replaced Now At the Request of the United States?"

ExxonMobil recommended that the Bush administration remove Watson, along
with two officials instrumental in producing the U.S. National Assessment
on Climate Change, an EPA document that the White House would seek to
eviscerate in the spring of 2003. In their place, the oil giant recommended
appointing longtime climate "skeptics" John Christy and Richard Lindzen.

Ultimately, the Bush administration did scuttle Watson's reappointment.
But, apparently fearing a major backlash, it decided not to back such vocal
contrarians as Christy and Lindzen.

ExxonMobil achieved an even greater success in directing Bush
administration climate change diplomacy. Urged on by the company, the White
House hired Harlan Watson (no relation to Robert) as its chief climate
negotiator. In May 2002, Watson announced that the U.S. would not
participate in the Kyoto process for at least 10 years, saying that the
White House "wanted no part" of a 2005 international review of greenhouse
gas reductions. "The next time we take stock on climate change," he said,
"has been set by the president at 2012."

In November 2002, in an effort to improve its environmental image,
ExxonMobil trumpeted its investment in hydrogen fuel research. But the
company's disingenuous plan was not to derive hydrogen from water, a
process that generates no carbon emissions, but to make it from oil and
coal -- a process that emits so much carbon dioxide as to virtually
neutralize the climate-friendly benefits of the new fuel. Two months later,
in his 2003 State of the Union address, Bush revealed his own
petroleum-based hydrogen initiative. It exactly embraced the ExxonMobil
strategy, preserving America's oil infrastructure at the expense of climate
destabilization.

ExxonMobil and the Bush administration have also united in sowing climate
change disinformation and deception among U.S. citizens. By 2001,
ExxonMobil had replaced the coal industry as the major funder of prominent
"greenhouse skeptics," a handful of "experts" who spout bogus science,
raising doubts about climate change to preempt the public's demand for
action. By 2003, ExxonMobil was giving more than $1 million a year to an
array of right-wing organizations opposing action on climate change --
including the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Frontiers of Freedom, the
George C. Marshall Institute, the American Legislative Exchange Council,
and the American Council for Capital Formation Center for Policy Research.

The striking success of the fossil-fuel lobby's disinformation strategy is
reflected in two Newsweek polls. The first, in 1991 -- prior to the
industry's global-warming misinformation campaign -- found that 35 percent
of Americans saw global warming as a serious problem. By 1996, that share
shrank to 22 percent -- despite the advent of far more conclusive science,
documenting human-caused global warming.

The usefulness of bogus science was not lost on the Luntz Group, a private
consulting firm advising Bush on climate policy presentation. "Americans
... believe all environmental rules and regulations should be based on
sound science and common sense," said a Luntz memo. "Similarly our
confidence in the ability of science and technology to solve our nation's
ills is second to none. Both perceptions will work in your favor if
properly cultivated."

Sure enough, a new effort by the "skeptics" surfaced in spring 2003. A
study by lead authors Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon at the
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and published in an obscure
journal, Climate Research, concluded that the 20th century is neither the
warmest century, nor the century with the most extreme weather, of the past
1,000 years. Both researchers had previously contended that the recent
warming was due, almost entirely, to solar variations -- a finding long
since disproved by peer-reviewed scientific studies.

As it turns out, the report by Baliunas and Soon was funded in part by the
American Petroleum Institute. It was also coauthored by Craig Idso and
Sherwood Idso, whose Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide has been funded
by the coal industry and ExxonMobil.

Predictably, the study was seized upon by Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.),
chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, who asserted
that this new science showed that natural variability, not human activity,
was the "overwhelming factor" influencing climate change. Inhofe received
double the campaign contributions from energy companies during the 2002
election than from any other business sector.

In short order, 13 leading climate scientists from the U.S. and U.K.
declared in a letter to the American Geophysical Union that the anomalous
late 20th century warmth cannot be explained without taking into account
the contributions of human activities.

Most telling, perhaps, was another piece of fallout from the Soon-Baliunas
controversy that received little news coverage. Three editors of the
journal that published the skeptics' study resigned in protest after they
were forbidden from writing an editorial pointing out the methodological
errors of the flawed paper by the industry-funded researchers.

While Inhofe attempted to disguise the administration's fossil
fuel-friendly policies under the cloak of "sound science," the White House
worked to scuttle the most thoroughly researched projections of coming
climate impacts inside the United States.

The report, known as the "U.S. National Assessment of the Potential
Consequences of Climate Variability and Change," is a meticulously
peer-reviewed document, drafted during the Clinton administration. The
National Assessment details a range of anticipated, mostly harmful, impacts
across U.S. geographical regions and ecosystems.

When previous Bush administration efforts failed to discount and discard
the document, the politically conservative Competitive Enterprise
Institute, which is partly funded by ExxonMobil, sued the White House
Council on Environmental Quality to remove the National Assessment from
circulation. In a press release, the CEI dismissed the assessment as "junk
science" being used "by global warming alarmists" to hamstring business.

Then, in August 2003, the attorneys general of Maine and Connecticut made
an extraordinary discovery. Through a Freedom of Information Act request,
they unearthed emails indicating that the White House had secretly urged
the private, right-wing CEI to sue it -- the White House -- in order to
have the National Assessment withdrawn.

"It appears that certain White House officials conspired with an
anti-environmental special interest group to cause the lawsuit to be filed
against the federal government," said Maine Attorney General Steven Rowe,
who complained to the U.S. Department of Justice along with Connecticut
Attorney General Richard Blumenthal.

Survival of the ...?

Stepping back, it becomes clear that the climate crisis represents a
titanic clash of interests. It pits the survival, as we know it, of the
biggest commercial enterprise in history -- big coal and oil -- against the
survival of the planet and its people. It also pits the fossil fuel
industry-dominated Bush administration against the rest of the world.

As of this month, 123 countries have ratified or acceded to the Kyoto
Protocol. Several industrial nations have also committed themselves to
carbon cuts greater than those mandated by the protocol. Moreover, a
substantial number of developing countries that are not required to cut
their emissions in the first round of the protocol have begun to do so
anyway. Clearly these governments would not be undertaking such massive and
wrenching changes if they had any doubt about the climate crisis.

When Bush withdrew the U.S. from the Kyoto Protocol in 2001, he triggered a
profound swell of outrage throughout the rest of the world. Given the
accelerating momentum of climatic instability -- and the willingness of the
rest of the world to begin addressing it -- the rage against the United
States' indifference to humanity's common future will only grow worse.

In the early 1990s, when the science was still uncertain, denial and
resistance by the fossil-fuel lobby could be excused as a predictable,
business-as-usual response. But with the science now so robust, and
negative impacts so visible, this behavior is inexcusable. In 2003 alone,
35,000 people died as the result of Europe's worst heat wave ever, while
the World Health Organization reported that climate change is already
claiming 160,000 lives annually. If temperatures climb as projected, then
the corrupt policies embraced by U.S. industry and government could put the
future of civilization at risk.

The industry-driven campaign goes far beyond traditional public relations
spin. It has led to the capture of the White House, to gross distortions of
science and truth, and to the corporate dictation of public policy. Not
that such corruption of the political process by powerful special interests
is new to our republic. But the magnitude of the potential consequences is
unprecedented.

Our fossil fuels have brought us to a level of abundance and prosperity
that was unimaginable a century ago.

Today they are propelling us forward into a century of disintegration.

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