The Adventure of the Empty House, by Arthur Conan Doyle, is a classic example of a detective story and therefore also an example of crime fiction, following the conventions required by both genres, including those set out or setting, language, plot, and characters of the story.
As is typical for crime fiction, the setting is described in detail and everything is presented so that it appears to be just plausible, if nevertheless slightly out of the ordinary. Also, as is typical for crime fiction, the setting is usually in a large city, London, in this case. Doyle’s account of the time of death of the victim in this story is fitting to the conventions of the setting. On page two, Watson notes, “...his head had been horribly mutilated by an expanding revolver bullet, but no weapon of any sort was to be found in the room.” This account does not only serve to increase the suspense and the curiosity of the reader, but also the fear of such a horrendous crime. By placing crime in the most pedestrian and realistic locations, authors of crime and detective fiction can address and entertain a broad public.
To this extent, the language used in both crime and detective fiction is relatively simple. The difference between the genre of crime fiction and its subgenre of detective fiction hereby lies with the reading demographic. Crime fiction is less complex than detective fiction, which is usually centered around a complicated plot and also intended for a more demanding audience, such as the middle and the upper middle class, which began to emerge during the industrial revolution. This Sherlock Holmes story, although using a more elevated language, is nevertheless written in the past tense and uses short, non-expansive dialogue, as demonstrated by Sherlock Holmes himself on page three, when Watson recounts, “’My dear Watson,’ said the well-remembered voice, ‘I owe you a thousand apologies. I had no idea that you would be so affected.’” The register is relatively formal, but nevertheless familiar within the historical context and the spoken words are confined to two sentences, which makes the word exchange easier to follow, as is common in crime fiction.
What differentiates crime fiction from detective fiction most significantly, however, is the format of the plot. Whereas crime fiction generally follows the format of crime, investigation, and punishment, detective fiction is, for the most part, more complex. Whereas crime fiction is focused on catching the culprit, detective fiction seeks to explain every detail about the crime scenario that was presented at the beginning. As in the case of The Adventure of the Empty House, the story begins with a murder. Usually, a detective is hereafter hired, but in this case, Sherlock Holmes has a special interest to pursue in the uncovering of this mystery. During a previous case, he had almost been killed and is now convinced that the murder of the young aristocrat Ronald Adair and his near-death experience are related. This experience serves as the confrontation with a dangerous situation, required by the conventions of detective fiction and also contributes to the rising action of the story. The climax is reached with the capture of the culprit Moran in the empty house. Thereafter Holmes makes the transition to the denouement, the unknotting of the story, as he begins to put together the facts of the case for the reader and for the other characters.
As is convention, most characters in crime fiction are vaguely drawn, in detective fiction, however, the investigator is always marked by a given set of characteristics. One of them is that he is a very accomplished individual, who is competent to solve problems like no other. Sherlock Holmes demonstrates this readily, by unveiling the culprit in the empty house on page ten, when he tells the rest, “This, gentlemen, is Colonel Sebastian Moran, once of Her Majesty’s Indian Army, and the best heavy-game shot our Eastern Empire as ever produced.” He already demonstrates his intellectual superiority as he begins the denouement of the case as soon as he has captured the villain, revealing the facts of the case bit by bit, as if it were al completely logical, demonstrating his abilities as an extraordinary investigator. As is commonly done in detective fiction, the denouement then flows into the anticlimax, or the return to normality, in this case remarked upon shortly by Watson, when he says on page 13, “… and once again Mr. Sherlock Holmes is free to devote his life to examining those interesting little problems which the complex life of London so plentifully presents.”
In the end, like most pieces of detective fiction, The Adventure of the Empty House promotes the stereotype of the competent investigator and makes crime appear like a useless effort, as the tacit agreement between the author and the reader of detective fiction demands.
Montag, 10. November 2008
Summary of The Permission Problem, by James Surowiecki
The Tragedy of the Commons is a widely accepted concept, accounting for the failure of common ownership. To some extent it helps to explain, for example, why communism failed, stating that, the common ownership of a valuable asset leads to the pursuit of self-interest of the interested parties alone, resulting in the over-exploitation of the valuable asset. In his book, The Gridlock Economy, however, Columbia professor Michael Heller, outlines the antithesis to the Tragedy of the Commons, calling it the Anticommons. Proposing the alternative scenario, Heller argues that if the actual ownership of a valuable asset is divided among a large number of people, more people can veto the use of the valuable asset, resulting in the under-exploitation of the asset. This is the case, for example, in the aircraft industry, the biotechnology sector, or the transport of wind power. Although property rights are designed to encourage innovation and investment, they are thus often likely to "gridlock" a venture. Cooperation among different patent-holders would be necessary to use the asset, but the interested parties often expect unreasonable prices for their valuable shares, making the venture unviable. Strangely enough, it seems that both the Tragedy of the Commons and that of the Anticommons result in similar outcomes, because in both cases the valuable asset turns out not to be of use to any party.
Mittwoch, 5. November 2008
The Role of the Media in Triggering the Financial Crisis
The American banking system may be on the verge of collapse. Surely, people saw this danger coming from a far way away. Why is it then, that nobody was able to prevent it and why is was there no hysteria beforehand? A lot of it can be attributed to the role of the media. Newspapers, for example, have always been in the business of information and have, over the recent decades, become ever more involved in the business of entertainment. What this means, is that in-between the advertisements, a newspaper needs to offer a reader something that is spectacular and sensational. This is an integral part of the tacit agreement that each newspaper has with its readership, but it is also a strategy for survival. Newspapers need not only compete with rival newspapers, but also with the non-print media, and increasingly, with the internet. Newspapers, just like advertisements, need to push people's reptilian hot buttons, a term coined by market researcher Dr. G. Clotaire Rapaille, designating a person's primal instincts and desires. In order to grab the attention of the audience, newspapers need to report issues that are immediate and overwhelming. A year ago, nobody would have paid much attention to headlines such as today's. Internal bank memos may well have been more alarmist. But the broad public would not have been interested. This is firstly, because the problem was set in the future, which meant that it did not matter to people at present, and secondly, it was a problem that addressed no person in particular at the time. News stories are 10% about content and 90% about timing. In order to push the reptilian hot buttons, a headline needs to appear precisely on the right day, for people to take interest. The banking crisis mirrors, to some extent, the issue of global climate destabilization. Today, the public heeds little interest in the matter, because the problem is future-oriented. Newspapers bear alarmist headlines concerning the banking crisis now, because they pertain to an immediate and overwhelming crisis. They write about hurricanes and floods, when they are occurring. After all, the media is not meant for prevention of catastrophes, it is about blowing them up to immense proportions, to attract readers to their front pages. Therefore, it is not surprising, that the banking crisis was not prevented. The mobilization of people needs to be accomplished at the right time and the media is not the medium for such actions, firstly, because of its business mentality, and secondly, because its audience has different demands.
Summary of Doctor's bill, from The Economist
When the current global financial crisis first became apparent during August of last year, the Federal Reserve responded by lowering interest rates to cushion the economy and by assisting commercial and investment banks in financing their holdings of securities. The Federal reserve was also in complete aversion to the use of public money for its operations at that point, because it believed the economy and the financial system to be solid and relatively sound. However, the crisis was gradually intensified by the growing prominence of the "shadow banking system" and its influence on the trends of global financial regulation. The remedy now proposed by Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, and Hank Paulson, the treasury secretary, is one riddled by uncertainty. The Troubled Asset Relief Program(TARP), as it is called, is an emergency measure, primarily intended to avoid any worst-case scenarios and to evade a depression of the dimensions of 1929. The plan foresees for the authorities to spend $700 billion of mortgage-related assets for this purpose, but what seems to be largely disregarded are the wide-ranging differences between the current crisis and the one of 1929. Experience, in the case of today, is a poor guide, seeing as in the past, public money was only committed to financial systems when bank failures and insolvency were widespread. Under pressure to please the taxpayer, lawmakers have opted for a response to spare him, turning instead on Wall Street. TARP may mark a turning point, however. It could break the vicious cycle referred to as the mortgage market and it could restart lending. A lot, though, depends on the vigor of the response. Politicians today, are determined, not to "underdo" it, but TARP, as it stands now, retains a number of flaws. Most prominent is the danger that the problem it seeks to address has since mutated. With high degrees of uncertainty, however, comes the risk of weakening the dollar and of encouraging the reluctance of buyers to take responsibility, once the government decides to retreat its influence. Despite its inherent flaws, however, for now, what matters is the stabilization of trading prices. What comes next, is the need to adjust to a market more heavily regulated by the government than it has been in a long time.
Selection of Article Summaries from The New Yorker
Summary of Unconventional Crude, by Elizabeth Kolbert
Today’s global oil supply can be split into two general categories: Conventional reserves and unconventional reserves. The output of conventional reserves such as crude oil is expected to decline over the next few decades, the result being blackouts, food shortages, and general economic collapse. The yields of unconventional reserves, however, are expected to double by 2010 and could potentially even keep conventional oil flowing longer. Unfortunately, however, the mining and refining processes of such resources are marked by a high demand in energy and a high output of pollution. One of the major unconventional oil sources is tar sand, found mostly in Canada, now already the number one source of American oil imports and possessor of the world’s second-largest oil reserves. It is composed of quartzite, clay, water, and tar, a mixture of bitumen (crude hydrocarbons). The process of excavating the tar, from which only ten percent, the bitumen, is eventually of value, is a long and complicated one and is, up until today, still being developed and perfected. The first step, called Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD), involves two horizontal wells, one above the other, which are inserted into the excavation site. The top one heats its surroundings with high-pressure steam, causing bitumen to flow to the bottom well. In a hot-water tank, the bitumen is then separated from the rest of the tar and from there it is then led to the “upgrader”. This first stage of the procedure alone requires 1600 mega joules of energy, about the value of one quarter of a barrel of oil. In the “upgrader”, the hydrocarbons, often twenty or more atoms in length then undergo the process of catalytic cracking, breaking down the molecules into a state in which they can be transported to the refineries, where they are mostly manufactured into transportation fuel. Overall the complete process requires more energy than that of procuring conventional oil. This is because it involves the transformation of a solid raw material to a liquid fuel, whereas conventional liquid oil is gained from liquid crude oil. Other drawbacks also include more severe landscape destruction, seeing as pipelines, drill pads, and roads are necessary for the extraction of tar from the ground. There is also a greater risk of leaks and spills of dangerous toxins, which would lead to the contamination of the surrounding natural habitats. Air pollution as a result of the burning of unconventional crude is another major issue and it has become evident that its greenhouse gas emissions are greater than those of conventional crude. Overall, even though unconventional reserves are less exploited today than are those of conventional crude, the methods of oil extraction are more demanding, more energy-consuming, and more environmentally damaging and therefore do not render a long-term solution to the coming oil crisis.
Summary of Sovereign Wealth World, By James Surowiecki
The term “sovereign wealth funds” generally refers to investment funds that are controlled by non-Western governments. Due to the rise in oil prices and the increased spending on Asian consumer goods, these funds have steadily gained prominence in the international market ever since the seventies. Today, they possess enough buying power to influence the market prices in Western nations and to gain assets there as well. Politicians representing Western countries are growing increasingly concerned with this pattern. Wide ranges of laws and regulations have been proposed to restrict the flow of capital in this respect and even most free-marketers oppose the takeover of Western companies by “foreign” governments. They fear the potential purchase of enterprises, responsible for a nation’s security or involved in the advanced technologies business and they are disturbed by the idea that the involvement of “foreign” nations might render the stock market less efficient through the protection of their national interests. The fact seems to be disregarded that such governments only seek to be involved in foreign markets because they promise themselves higher investment returns. Global economy is likely to remain largely unaffected by foreign take-overs, firstly because they only pose a threat to other shareholders and secondly, because non-western governments are well aware of the tensions that resulted from their foreign investments and are unlikely to pursue aggressive behaviour. On top of this, global economy is already “impure”, seeing as even in the West, many governments own stakes in major corporations. It is evident, that government involvement in the international market is not as dangerous as many may think. However, if certain nations happen to wish to dim its effects on their national economies, they should examine and possibly alter their own consumer patterns.
Summary of Performance-Pay Perplexes, by James Surowiecki
The mayhem that the subprime-mortgage market recently caused at Wall Street can be traced back to two major obvious blunders in the stock market. Firstly, the taking of foolish and unnecessary risks and secondly, the undertaking of such risks with borrowed money. It is less commonly known that the incentives for these actions lie within the prospect of large investment returns, which are also sources of income for two major categories of businessmen: hedge fund managers and CEOs. Hedge funds are private investment partnerships, opened to a limited number of investors on the basis o f a large initial minimum investment, promising their clients to generate high returns. Hedge fund managers are paid in such a manner that they only earn money if the investors receive returns for their investments. They are simply rewarded a portion of the winnings. In addition, at the end of each year, they receive performance bonuses. If the fund loses money, these performance fees are cancelled until the investors “get back to even”, but the hedge fund managers themselves are not compelled to feed their money into the fund. This allows the managers to “walk away” with their earnings at any time, even if they performed poorly. This often happens out of necessity, for example if all assets are erased, or merely if the fund does not generate enough of a performance fee. Hedge fund managers are thus greatly tempted to take large risks, which seem to promise great rewards without serious drawbacks for themselves. CEOs, the chief executive officers of corporations, are tempted by similar market conditions through the acquisition of stock options of other companies. These give them the right to purchase other company shares at a certain price within a certain time frame and are initially meant to give them incentives for improving the company’s performance. If the value of the stock exceeds that of what the option promises during the given time, the owner of the option can profit greatly. If it is below, the option becomes valueless at the expiration date. Because CEOs sit on entire piles of options, however, the differences in the stock values matter much less to them than to ordinary shareholders. CEOs, therefore, just like hedge fund managers, are inclined to entertain projects that promise greater returns at a greater risk. Unfortunately for the entire economy, however, the taking of such irresponsible risks, by both CEOs and hedge fund managers, with funds that were not theirs and with the financial immunity against the loss of these funds, has caused financial ruin among many investors, stockholders, and other proprietors.
Summary of The Oil Weapon, by James Surowiecki
In 1973, the OPEC oil embargo managed to throw the United States into a dire period of recession as an act of revenge for the American support of the Israelis during the conflict with Egypt. Up until this day, American foreign policy is still driven by the fear of the reoccurrence of such an incident and this has led American policy makers to allege more importance to the power of oil than it deserves. It seems to have gone unnoticed, that even though threats of oil scarcity have been plentiful, so has the amount of oil being produced in the region of the Persian Gulf. Ever since the Iranian Revolution, Arab nations have increased the rate of oil production, the Iraq under Saddam Hussein even to the extent that the United Nations was forced to limit his exports. This makes oil producing nations in the Middle East look more desperate than they try to look. What is evident, however, is that today, Western economies are stronger than they were in 1973 and that OPEC nations control a much smaller portion of the world’s oil market now. The United States is a lot less dependent on OPEC nations today, mostly because it relies on a variety of other suppliers, among them Mexico and Canada, and because, on average, it now uses less oil per dollar of G.D.P.
If an OPEC nation were to enforce another embargo, it would hurt itself more than it would hurt the Americans, because it would sell less without the United States receiving less oil. It is therefore unnecessary to be afraid of the “oil weapon” that many nations in the Middle East wield.
Summary of Global Warning, by Elisabeth Kolbert
Despite the fact that the consequences of global climate destabilization are becoming ever more evident, the government of the United States is unwilling to introduce the necessary countermeasures. The retreat of arctic sea ice causes a significant rise in sea level around the globe, in some cases, threatening to submerge entire populated islands. The thawing of permafrost, the acidification of the oceans, and the acceleration of ice streams, in addition to an increase in frequency and intensity of hurricanes, are also among the most dramatic consequences of global climate destabilization. However, the United States, one of the greatest emitters of greenhouse gases, which are known to be directly linked to global climate destabilization, are unwilling to improve their emissions profile. The Bush Administration does not perceive “global warming” as a pressing problem, and opposes any tax regulations or monetary caps to reduce their emissions, relying on a “voluntary approach” toward environmental friendliness. Given this stance, it is natural that the United States are not a party to the Kyoto Protocol and were thus also excluded from the Montreal Negotiations of 2005. However, the United States was still able to exercise defining influence over the decisions made at the conference. It is unlikely that the current government will support any agreements to follow the Kyoto protocol after its expiration in 2012, making it nearly impossible for the rest of the world to come to a decisive agreement on the issue and making it nearly certain, global climate destabilization will be allowed to worsen over the next decades.
Summary of Fuel for Thought, by James Surowiecki
It is commonly known that the automobile industry vehemently opposes new environmental or safety regulations. It did the same during the debate concerning the raise of fuel-efficiency standards, which occupied the American Congress for the first time in twenty years this July. According to the industry, such measure would be “technologically unfeasible and economically suicidal”. This is because market research conducted by automobile companies clearly proves that powerful but fuel-inefficient cars are most popular among Americans. Today, SUV’s and pickup trucks account for more than fifty percent of the car sales on the American market. The irony in respect to this phenomenon is the approval of the great majority of the American population of “dramatic increases in fuel-economy standards”. This is largely because most buyers prefer cars that guarantee more safety in a crash and which also act as a status symbol. The market creates no incentives to push people in a responsible direction, because it lives off individual purchase decisions, reflected by market research. Consumers on the other hand, indicate by their support of the fuel-efficiency standard bill, that they are not content with the collective purchasing decisions of the nation and require standards for everybody and effectively displaying their disapproval of the phenomenon that is aptly named the “Tragedy of the Commons”, which confronts all buyers with the results of individual consumer patterns in this case.
Summary of Striking Out, by James Surowiecki
During the spring of 1988 the twenty-two-week large-scale strike of television and movie writers caused notable damage to the American market. Looking back, it seems obvious that an agreement made five months earlier would have been just as beneficial to both parties. Half a billion dollars were lost in revenues and wages and network ratings dropped by an average of nine percent, costing both sides vast amounts more than the sum they were fighting over. A similar dilemma seems to be about to repeat itself now, against the odds of history, and with the awareness that, paradoxically, even unions raise the workers’ wages by more than strikes do these days. It is therefore justified to ask, why workers still engage in strikes. Most frequently, strikes occur when neither side knows the true position of the other. One side is generally more knowledgeable about the true economic situation in question than the other, a situation termed “asymmetric information” by economists. Therefore, one way to determine whether the opposing side is bluffing or being sincere is to engage in a strike. If the opponent concedes quickly, it was a bluff. If the strike is long-lasting, the opponent was being serious to begin with and stubbornly remains so. Unfortunately for both sides, however, the longer a strike lasts, the less likely it is to produce a big victory for either side. This is rather ironic, considering that both parties tend to confidently overestimate their chances of victory. They do this, because strikes, even though initiated by economic grievances, essentially revolve around fairness and justice. It is because both sides insist that their cause is just, that they are willing to pay the price for its enforcement. In the case of the television and movie writers, the writers were willing to sacrifice their pay checks, because they believed to deserve a cut of their work’s revenue, and produces were accepting losses in business, because they believed that the television shows and the movies were their property. When involved in a strike, however, as it has become fairly evident in the past, both parties will receive only financial penalties for their conviction and for their confidence in justice.
Summary of Troubled Waters over Oil, by James Surowiecki
The year 2006 witnessed a radical decline in oil prices. After political confrontations between Iran and the United States, the prices increased again, and it is highly probable, that their relationship directly influenced the price of oil. It could thus be said that Iran might have economic incentives to pursue mercurial relations with the United States. This is because as soon as conflict possible, oil importers, in fear of a potential decrease in oil supply in the near future are more willing to pay higher prices for oil today, to be sure to receive it before the tap closes. This forecasting of supply and demand is referred to as “risk premium”, and because of risk premium strategies, statements by the U.S. suggesting armed conflict immediately result in higher oil prices, ironically strengthening the Iranian regime. Iran’s economic incentive to confront the United States, however, is deeply rooted in desperation. Lacking investments in its oil infrastructure might result in its inability to export oil at all in near future and financial commitments, such as subsidies on bread, gas, gasoline, and heating fuel or the “keeping-alive” of money-losing businesses for example. In order to avoid economic collapse, the Iranian regime needs to keep the oil prices high. Therefore, if the White House wishes to weaken Iran, they need only to stop their threatening rhetoric.
The subprime mortgage crisis, which is troubling the American if not the global economy at the moment, is not unlike the situation facing the American financial system in late October of 1907. Today, like then, the government became involved. Many subprime mortgages sold today were coupled with low interest rates, which rose alarmingly fast, for many borrowers. In 2008, these rates are planned to be reset. This means, however, that the payments of a large percentage of borrowers will actually increase and that increases the likelihood of mounting numbers of foreclosures. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson now proposes to postpone the interest rate resets of 2008 by five years. It is a solution that lenders could actually have come up with themselves. Government involvement was necessary because at this point, lenders no longer possess the capability to evaluate each case individually to determine whether a loan renegotiation or a foreclosure would be advisable. The government simplifies the process of renegotiations and simplifies the defining of “creditworthiness”. Strangely, it also allows for banks to cooperate on the setting of new loan prices and reduces the risk that investors and mortgage owners opt for suing. However, the Paulson’s Plan will only be beneficial to a limited number of borrowers. To be precise, it will only help those people, who cannot afford the rising interest rates, excluding those that can and those that could not pay the rates to begin with. It does not change the fact that too many borrowers cannot repay their debts and its effects are restricted, because interest-rate-resets are only a small portion of the mortgage market and the credit market crisis is no longer limited to subprime loans. It is therefore not certain, whether government involvement will save the economy this time, the way it did in 1907.
Summary of Our Precious Fossil Fluids, by James Surowiecki
The Bush Administration has, over the past few years, effectively promoted methods of oil production that would make the United Stated independent of expensive oil imports. The administration seems to believe that a self-sufficient economy would allow it to avoid dependence on foreigners, which, in the words of Vice-President Cheney, “do not wish [them] well”. However, such an economy is “neither attainable nor desirable,” because it is globalized trade that lets each nation specialize in what is does best and leave the rest to others. The real problem that the United States faces is the dominating control of cartels over the oil price. OPEC is said to be taking the lead on the matter of oil prices, and multinational corporations such as Exxon Mobil and Texaco, will follow its lead, regardless of the interests of the United States. Therefore, the Bush Administration should take globalization seriously and abandon the idea of a secluded oil market. In the words of Surowiecki, they ought to “go after OPEC”, just like the Justice Department went after international cartels in vitamins, lysine, and graphite electrodes in the 1990s. Foreign policy concerns could resolved, using the World Trade Organization, of which six OPEC member states are members, and which Saudi Arabia also wishes to join. In any case, the United States is the only player with sufficient power to take action against the “oil price conspiracy”.
Summary of All the Oil in China, by James Surowiecki
In 2005, a bid for the American oil company Unocal by the Chinese "cnooc" aroused a heated debate about American national security in relation to the free market. However, cooperation, or even competition with the Chinese could potentially be profitable for the United States. The bid by "cnooc", which is 70% government, owned was seen as a primary example of Chinese market expansion and many Americans feared that the Chinese would intend to buy up all oil and natural-gas reserves, which were already at a high price, and which were said to slowly become scarce. This stance was absurd, because the world market operated, even then, in the interests of the highest bidder, meaning that oil would be available even to countries with limited access to means of oil production such as the United States. Opening American markets to Chinese investments without government interference would, however, provide ideal conditions for free asset flow, which would strengthen the American economy. Americans could profit from cheap Chinese goods and harmonic relationships with China would ensure their continued interest in American government bonds, a major source of income for the American government. America and China are thus dependent on each other if they want to ensure the continued well-being of their economies and it would be unwise of the American government to interfere with the deal surrounding Unocal, because good relationships with its competitor would be strained otherwise.
Summary of A Buyer’s Christmas, by James Surowiecki
Today’s global oil supply can be split into two general categories: Conventional reserves and unconventional reserves. The output of conventional reserves such as crude oil is expected to decline over the next few decades, the result being blackouts, food shortages, and general economic collapse. The yields of unconventional reserves, however, are expected to double by 2010 and could potentially even keep conventional oil flowing longer. Unfortunately, however, the mining and refining processes of such resources are marked by a high demand in energy and a high output of pollution. One of the major unconventional oil sources is tar sand, found mostly in Canada, now already the number one source of American oil imports and possessor of the world’s second-largest oil reserves. It is composed of quartzite, clay, water, and tar, a mixture of bitumen (crude hydrocarbons). The process of excavating the tar, from which only ten percent, the bitumen, is eventually of value, is a long and complicated one and is, up until today, still being developed and perfected. The first step, called Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD), involves two horizontal wells, one above the other, which are inserted into the excavation site. The top one heats its surroundings with high-pressure steam, causing bitumen to flow to the bottom well. In a hot-water tank, the bitumen is then separated from the rest of the tar and from there it is then led to the “upgrader”. This first stage of the procedure alone requires 1600 mega joules of energy, about the value of one quarter of a barrel of oil. In the “upgrader”, the hydrocarbons, often twenty or more atoms in length then undergo the process of catalytic cracking, breaking down the molecules into a state in which they can be transported to the refineries, where they are mostly manufactured into transportation fuel. Overall the complete process requires more energy than that of procuring conventional oil. This is because it involves the transformation of a solid raw material to a liquid fuel, whereas conventional liquid oil is gained from liquid crude oil. Other drawbacks also include more severe landscape destruction, seeing as pipelines, drill pads, and roads are necessary for the extraction of tar from the ground. There is also a greater risk of leaks and spills of dangerous toxins, which would lead to the contamination of the surrounding natural habitats. Air pollution as a result of the burning of unconventional crude is another major issue and it has become evident that its greenhouse gas emissions are greater than those of conventional crude. Overall, even though unconventional reserves are less exploited today than are those of conventional crude, the methods of oil extraction are more demanding, more energy-consuming, and more environmentally damaging and therefore do not render a long-term solution to the coming oil crisis.
Summary of Sovereign Wealth World, By James Surowiecki
The term “sovereign wealth funds” generally refers to investment funds that are controlled by non-Western governments. Due to the rise in oil prices and the increased spending on Asian consumer goods, these funds have steadily gained prominence in the international market ever since the seventies. Today, they possess enough buying power to influence the market prices in Western nations and to gain assets there as well. Politicians representing Western countries are growing increasingly concerned with this pattern. Wide ranges of laws and regulations have been proposed to restrict the flow of capital in this respect and even most free-marketers oppose the takeover of Western companies by “foreign” governments. They fear the potential purchase of enterprises, responsible for a nation’s security or involved in the advanced technologies business and they are disturbed by the idea that the involvement of “foreign” nations might render the stock market less efficient through the protection of their national interests. The fact seems to be disregarded that such governments only seek to be involved in foreign markets because they promise themselves higher investment returns. Global economy is likely to remain largely unaffected by foreign take-overs, firstly because they only pose a threat to other shareholders and secondly, because non-western governments are well aware of the tensions that resulted from their foreign investments and are unlikely to pursue aggressive behaviour. On top of this, global economy is already “impure”, seeing as even in the West, many governments own stakes in major corporations. It is evident, that government involvement in the international market is not as dangerous as many may think. However, if certain nations happen to wish to dim its effects on their national economies, they should examine and possibly alter their own consumer patterns.
Summary of Performance-Pay Perplexes, by James Surowiecki
The mayhem that the subprime-mortgage market recently caused at Wall Street can be traced back to two major obvious blunders in the stock market. Firstly, the taking of foolish and unnecessary risks and secondly, the undertaking of such risks with borrowed money. It is less commonly known that the incentives for these actions lie within the prospect of large investment returns, which are also sources of income for two major categories of businessmen: hedge fund managers and CEOs. Hedge funds are private investment partnerships, opened to a limited number of investors on the basis o f a large initial minimum investment, promising their clients to generate high returns. Hedge fund managers are paid in such a manner that they only earn money if the investors receive returns for their investments. They are simply rewarded a portion of the winnings. In addition, at the end of each year, they receive performance bonuses. If the fund loses money, these performance fees are cancelled until the investors “get back to even”, but the hedge fund managers themselves are not compelled to feed their money into the fund. This allows the managers to “walk away” with their earnings at any time, even if they performed poorly. This often happens out of necessity, for example if all assets are erased, or merely if the fund does not generate enough of a performance fee. Hedge fund managers are thus greatly tempted to take large risks, which seem to promise great rewards without serious drawbacks for themselves. CEOs, the chief executive officers of corporations, are tempted by similar market conditions through the acquisition of stock options of other companies. These give them the right to purchase other company shares at a certain price within a certain time frame and are initially meant to give them incentives for improving the company’s performance. If the value of the stock exceeds that of what the option promises during the given time, the owner of the option can profit greatly. If it is below, the option becomes valueless at the expiration date. Because CEOs sit on entire piles of options, however, the differences in the stock values matter much less to them than to ordinary shareholders. CEOs, therefore, just like hedge fund managers, are inclined to entertain projects that promise greater returns at a greater risk. Unfortunately for the entire economy, however, the taking of such irresponsible risks, by both CEOs and hedge fund managers, with funds that were not theirs and with the financial immunity against the loss of these funds, has caused financial ruin among many investors, stockholders, and other proprietors.
Summary of The Oil Weapon, by James Surowiecki
In 1973, the OPEC oil embargo managed to throw the United States into a dire period of recession as an act of revenge for the American support of the Israelis during the conflict with Egypt. Up until this day, American foreign policy is still driven by the fear of the reoccurrence of such an incident and this has led American policy makers to allege more importance to the power of oil than it deserves. It seems to have gone unnoticed, that even though threats of oil scarcity have been plentiful, so has the amount of oil being produced in the region of the Persian Gulf. Ever since the Iranian Revolution, Arab nations have increased the rate of oil production, the Iraq under Saddam Hussein even to the extent that the United Nations was forced to limit his exports. This makes oil producing nations in the Middle East look more desperate than they try to look. What is evident, however, is that today, Western economies are stronger than they were in 1973 and that OPEC nations control a much smaller portion of the world’s oil market now. The United States is a lot less dependent on OPEC nations today, mostly because it relies on a variety of other suppliers, among them Mexico and Canada, and because, on average, it now uses less oil per dollar of G.D.P.
If an OPEC nation were to enforce another embargo, it would hurt itself more than it would hurt the Americans, because it would sell less without the United States receiving less oil. It is therefore unnecessary to be afraid of the “oil weapon” that many nations in the Middle East wield.
Summary of Global Warning, by Elisabeth Kolbert
Despite the fact that the consequences of global climate destabilization are becoming ever more evident, the government of the United States is unwilling to introduce the necessary countermeasures. The retreat of arctic sea ice causes a significant rise in sea level around the globe, in some cases, threatening to submerge entire populated islands. The thawing of permafrost, the acidification of the oceans, and the acceleration of ice streams, in addition to an increase in frequency and intensity of hurricanes, are also among the most dramatic consequences of global climate destabilization. However, the United States, one of the greatest emitters of greenhouse gases, which are known to be directly linked to global climate destabilization, are unwilling to improve their emissions profile. The Bush Administration does not perceive “global warming” as a pressing problem, and opposes any tax regulations or monetary caps to reduce their emissions, relying on a “voluntary approach” toward environmental friendliness. Given this stance, it is natural that the United States are not a party to the Kyoto Protocol and were thus also excluded from the Montreal Negotiations of 2005. However, the United States was still able to exercise defining influence over the decisions made at the conference. It is unlikely that the current government will support any agreements to follow the Kyoto protocol after its expiration in 2012, making it nearly impossible for the rest of the world to come to a decisive agreement on the issue and making it nearly certain, global climate destabilization will be allowed to worsen over the next decades.
Summary of Fuel for Thought, by James Surowiecki
It is commonly known that the automobile industry vehemently opposes new environmental or safety regulations. It did the same during the debate concerning the raise of fuel-efficiency standards, which occupied the American Congress for the first time in twenty years this July. According to the industry, such measure would be “technologically unfeasible and economically suicidal”. This is because market research conducted by automobile companies clearly proves that powerful but fuel-inefficient cars are most popular among Americans. Today, SUV’s and pickup trucks account for more than fifty percent of the car sales on the American market. The irony in respect to this phenomenon is the approval of the great majority of the American population of “dramatic increases in fuel-economy standards”. This is largely because most buyers prefer cars that guarantee more safety in a crash and which also act as a status symbol. The market creates no incentives to push people in a responsible direction, because it lives off individual purchase decisions, reflected by market research. Consumers on the other hand, indicate by their support of the fuel-efficiency standard bill, that they are not content with the collective purchasing decisions of the nation and require standards for everybody and effectively displaying their disapproval of the phenomenon that is aptly named the “Tragedy of the Commons”, which confronts all buyers with the results of individual consumer patterns in this case.
Summary of Striking Out, by James Surowiecki
During the spring of 1988 the twenty-two-week large-scale strike of television and movie writers caused notable damage to the American market. Looking back, it seems obvious that an agreement made five months earlier would have been just as beneficial to both parties. Half a billion dollars were lost in revenues and wages and network ratings dropped by an average of nine percent, costing both sides vast amounts more than the sum they were fighting over. A similar dilemma seems to be about to repeat itself now, against the odds of history, and with the awareness that, paradoxically, even unions raise the workers’ wages by more than strikes do these days. It is therefore justified to ask, why workers still engage in strikes. Most frequently, strikes occur when neither side knows the true position of the other. One side is generally more knowledgeable about the true economic situation in question than the other, a situation termed “asymmetric information” by economists. Therefore, one way to determine whether the opposing side is bluffing or being sincere is to engage in a strike. If the opponent concedes quickly, it was a bluff. If the strike is long-lasting, the opponent was being serious to begin with and stubbornly remains so. Unfortunately for both sides, however, the longer a strike lasts, the less likely it is to produce a big victory for either side. This is rather ironic, considering that both parties tend to confidently overestimate their chances of victory. They do this, because strikes, even though initiated by economic grievances, essentially revolve around fairness and justice. It is because both sides insist that their cause is just, that they are willing to pay the price for its enforcement. In the case of the television and movie writers, the writers were willing to sacrifice their pay checks, because they believed to deserve a cut of their work’s revenue, and produces were accepting losses in business, because they believed that the television shows and the movies were their property. When involved in a strike, however, as it has become fairly evident in the past, both parties will receive only financial penalties for their conviction and for their confidence in justice.
Summary of Troubled Waters over Oil, by James Surowiecki
The year 2006 witnessed a radical decline in oil prices. After political confrontations between Iran and the United States, the prices increased again, and it is highly probable, that their relationship directly influenced the price of oil. It could thus be said that Iran might have economic incentives to pursue mercurial relations with the United States. This is because as soon as conflict possible, oil importers, in fear of a potential decrease in oil supply in the near future are more willing to pay higher prices for oil today, to be sure to receive it before the tap closes. This forecasting of supply and demand is referred to as “risk premium”, and because of risk premium strategies, statements by the U.S. suggesting armed conflict immediately result in higher oil prices, ironically strengthening the Iranian regime. Iran’s economic incentive to confront the United States, however, is deeply rooted in desperation. Lacking investments in its oil infrastructure might result in its inability to export oil at all in near future and financial commitments, such as subsidies on bread, gas, gasoline, and heating fuel or the “keeping-alive” of money-losing businesses for example. In order to avoid economic collapse, the Iranian regime needs to keep the oil prices high. Therefore, if the White House wishes to weaken Iran, they need only to stop their threatening rhetoric.
Summary of Oil Change, by James Surowiecki
Rising oil prices after the Arab oil embargo, in 1973, the Iranian revolution of 1979, the Iran-Iraq war of 1980, and Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 have all caused great uncertainty, followed by a decrease in the number of purchases or investments, and slowing the economy overall. It is, however wrong to assume that oil prices have a great influence on the economy in general. The above incidents do not mirror a continuous pattern. Oil prices today are even higher then they were in those times, even in the absence of a major crisis, which was the crucial factor, causing the above incidents. High oil prices generally have small impacts. There might be slight tax increases or minor occasions of unemployment in oil-dependent industries; however contradictory evidence suggests that high oil prices are no cause for panic. Between 1999 and 2000, healthy economic growth was not disturbed by increasing oil prices. A significant decline in oil prices, on the other hand, has never spurred great economic boom and recessions have not always been triggers by the oil industry. It can be said quite safely, that patterns in history are not always applicable to the present, especially now that America has embarked on “more efficient” energy use and that declines in manufacturing and improvements in money policies have allowed it to become more resistant to oil price fluctuations. On top of that, the increase in oil prices we witness today is mainly due to increasing demand, especially by India and China, and not due to its decreasing supply because of war or revolution.
Summary of Paulson’s Plan by James Surowiecki
Rising oil prices after the Arab oil embargo, in 1973, the Iranian revolution of 1979, the Iran-Iraq war of 1980, and Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 have all caused great uncertainty, followed by a decrease in the number of purchases or investments, and slowing the economy overall. It is, however wrong to assume that oil prices have a great influence on the economy in general. The above incidents do not mirror a continuous pattern. Oil prices today are even higher then they were in those times, even in the absence of a major crisis, which was the crucial factor, causing the above incidents. High oil prices generally have small impacts. There might be slight tax increases or minor occasions of unemployment in oil-dependent industries; however contradictory evidence suggests that high oil prices are no cause for panic. Between 1999 and 2000, healthy economic growth was not disturbed by increasing oil prices. A significant decline in oil prices, on the other hand, has never spurred great economic boom and recessions have not always been triggers by the oil industry. It can be said quite safely, that patterns in history are not always applicable to the present, especially now that America has embarked on “more efficient” energy use and that declines in manufacturing and improvements in money policies have allowed it to become more resistant to oil price fluctuations. On top of that, the increase in oil prices we witness today is mainly due to increasing demand, especially by India and China, and not due to its decreasing supply because of war or revolution.
Summary of Paulson’s Plan by James Surowiecki
The subprime mortgage crisis, which is troubling the American if not the global economy at the moment, is not unlike the situation facing the American financial system in late October of 1907. Today, like then, the government became involved. Many subprime mortgages sold today were coupled with low interest rates, which rose alarmingly fast, for many borrowers. In 2008, these rates are planned to be reset. This means, however, that the payments of a large percentage of borrowers will actually increase and that increases the likelihood of mounting numbers of foreclosures. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson now proposes to postpone the interest rate resets of 2008 by five years. It is a solution that lenders could actually have come up with themselves. Government involvement was necessary because at this point, lenders no longer possess the capability to evaluate each case individually to determine whether a loan renegotiation or a foreclosure would be advisable. The government simplifies the process of renegotiations and simplifies the defining of “creditworthiness”. Strangely, it also allows for banks to cooperate on the setting of new loan prices and reduces the risk that investors and mortgage owners opt for suing. However, the Paulson’s Plan will only be beneficial to a limited number of borrowers. To be precise, it will only help those people, who cannot afford the rising interest rates, excluding those that can and those that could not pay the rates to begin with. It does not change the fact that too many borrowers cannot repay their debts and its effects are restricted, because interest-rate-resets are only a small portion of the mortgage market and the credit market crisis is no longer limited to subprime loans. It is therefore not certain, whether government involvement will save the economy this time, the way it did in 1907.
Summary of Our Precious Fossil Fluids, by James Surowiecki
The Bush Administration has, over the past few years, effectively promoted methods of oil production that would make the United Stated independent of expensive oil imports. The administration seems to believe that a self-sufficient economy would allow it to avoid dependence on foreigners, which, in the words of Vice-President Cheney, “do not wish [them] well”. However, such an economy is “neither attainable nor desirable,” because it is globalized trade that lets each nation specialize in what is does best and leave the rest to others. The real problem that the United States faces is the dominating control of cartels over the oil price. OPEC is said to be taking the lead on the matter of oil prices, and multinational corporations such as Exxon Mobil and Texaco, will follow its lead, regardless of the interests of the United States. Therefore, the Bush Administration should take globalization seriously and abandon the idea of a secluded oil market. In the words of Surowiecki, they ought to “go after OPEC”, just like the Justice Department went after international cartels in vitamins, lysine, and graphite electrodes in the 1990s. Foreign policy concerns could resolved, using the World Trade Organization, of which six OPEC member states are members, and which Saudi Arabia also wishes to join. In any case, the United States is the only player with sufficient power to take action against the “oil price conspiracy”.
Summary of All the Oil in China, by James Surowiecki
In 2005, a bid for the American oil company Unocal by the Chinese "cnooc" aroused a heated debate about American national security in relation to the free market. However, cooperation, or even competition with the Chinese could potentially be profitable for the United States. The bid by "cnooc", which is 70% government, owned was seen as a primary example of Chinese market expansion and many Americans feared that the Chinese would intend to buy up all oil and natural-gas reserves, which were already at a high price, and which were said to slowly become scarce. This stance was absurd, because the world market operated, even then, in the interests of the highest bidder, meaning that oil would be available even to countries with limited access to means of oil production such as the United States. Opening American markets to Chinese investments without government interference would, however, provide ideal conditions for free asset flow, which would strengthen the American economy. Americans could profit from cheap Chinese goods and harmonic relationships with China would ensure their continued interest in American government bonds, a major source of income for the American government. America and China are thus dependent on each other if they want to ensure the continued well-being of their economies and it would be unwise of the American government to interfere with the deal surrounding Unocal, because good relationships with its competitor would be strained otherwise.
Summary of A Buyer’s Christmas, by James Surowiecki
In the United States, the world’s greatest consumer, the Christmas shopping season represents 40% of the annual revenue for retail stores and roughly 75% of their annual profit. However, retailers find that consumer spending habits have shifted considerably over the last couple of years. This, coupled with the anxiety of a slowing economy has caused a steady erosion of the power of retailers. In the past, successful selling strategies have been extensively focused on control over the context in which consumers shop. Retailers have exercised a sense of pressure on shoppers and have made their products appear like bargains. The profusion of products has also lead to more strategic consumer choices in favour of the sellers. However, such strategies were quickly imitated by competitors, which presented a major problem to each retailer. The internet, however, has proven to pose an even greater threat. This is not because of inline shopping, which today still only accounts for about three percent of the total retail sales in the U.S. It is that the internet has allowed shoppers to make more informed purchases. They are a lot more knowledgeable about prices, quality, and value of products and are given the opportunity to compare products of different retailers. This makes it more difficult for sellers to shape consumer perception of quality and value. Shoppers respond less to retailers’ selling tactics and this has lead to a shift of power from the sellers to the buyers. Today, if retailers want to make a profit, they need to offer good value for the money.
Summary of Changing Lanes, by Elizabeth Kolbert
Senator John McCain used to be primarily concerned with telling the people the truth. He is known to have announced, “I've been telling people the truth, whether I thought that's what they wanted or not," on numerous occasions. Recently, however, he seems to have changed course, most probably when he discovered that presidential campaigns do not necessarily reward integrity. Settling on a new approach, which seems to favor telling people what they want to hear, rather than what they have to hear, McCain tackled the issue upmost on the minds of the American voters: Oil prices. The majority of the American people believe that drilling for more oil in the United States would solve the issue of high prices. In fact, almost 73% share this opinion and some even support it, despite the subsequent negative side effects for the environment. McCain brilliantly rides on this wave of concern in his television advertisement "Pump", in which he blames the Democratic refusal to drill for more oil onshore for the oil prices. That McCain has opted for a strategy less oriented by the truth is supported by the fact that U.S. oil could in fact only support the world's thirst for oil for roughly seven months. On top of this, oil prices are dependent on the global markets, not simply by the American ones. The government cannot lower oil prices and should not try to either. It should primarily advocate more ethical consumption patterns and show concern for the environment to decrease America's dependence on oil.
Summary of Always with Us, by John Cassidy
After his insightful recommendations concerning the Bolivian hyperinflation of 1985, few economic minds of the day could afford to ignore Jeffrey Sachs. His insights brought an immediate end to the three-year crisis and from then on, Sachs became one of the most prominent economic advisors on the planet. In his book, The Endo of Poverty, he addresses several of his key ideas regarding some of his most prized projects. He was a key contributor to the Earth Institute at Columbia, for example, and a great addition to the United Nations Millennium Project. This project had the ambitious aim of reducing world poverty by half, combating starvation, malnutrition, and disease and attempting to save millions of children, in danger of dying before reaching adulthood. Sachs’ work also encompassed other dimensions, however. He is probably best known for the concept of "shock therapy", the practice, which, he argued, would revive former communist economies and convert them to efficient capitalist economies. Freeing the new Polish and Russian markets from government control, however, produced a little much "shock" and provided relatively little "therapy". Prices soared, savings were lost, and unemployment rose, especially in the heavy industry. "Shock therapy" was a questionable practice at the time. Today, however, Sachs' supporters can rightfully claim that the nations that experienced the therapy were among the most successful post-communist nations.
Summary of Bad Environments, by Elizabeth Kolbert
The Bush Administration is arguably one of the most environmentally unfriendly ever to be witnessed by the American people. It has done almost everything in its power to loosen environmental agreements and to alter them in favor of economic interests. Only recently, it engineered the permission to dispose of mine waste in any given location in cooperation with the National Mining Association. Reclassified as mere "fill", this waste poses a great setback to the Clean Water act of 1972. Alternatively, the restriction of the Environmental Protection Agency from performing the duties, for which it was created, further suggests that the administration is in favor of economic progress over environmental protection. During his years in office, George Bush has scuttled new standards for arsenic drinking water, pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol, and expedited the permit-granting process for power companies. On top of this, he allowed logging companies to construct roads in national forests and Alaska to be explored and exploited more than ever before. He has allowed outdated power plants to pursue power generation. He has been successful in these undertakings, which also include the blocking of the nomination of the American Robert Watson as chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, because he has in many ways, remained true to American values. As long as the American people care little about the environment, Bush could pursue his methods largely unopposed.
Summary of Hot Topic, by Elizabeth Kolbert
Almost since its initial foundation in 1988, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has faced resistance from the U.S. Government. Its main task, upon was, and still is, to submit updated reports on the status of the world climate approximately every four to five years. Thousands of scientists participate in the peer-reviewing process that eventually leads to the publication of the Assessment Reports, for which the IPCC is so well known. What hinders this process, however, is the required approval of the governments of the member states to the IPCC. As such, the United States has done much in the past, to water down the contents of the IPCC reports. Recently, however, this trend seems to have begun to reverse. The submission of a bill to cut U.S. Emissions by 80% by 2025, submitted by Senator Bernie Sanders is just one example. A democratic majority in the House has allowed the succession of Joe Barton of Texas as Chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee, by John Dingell, who has promised to hold more hearings on climate change. A "green wave" seems also to have overcome the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, whose members include Duke Energy, Alcoa, DuPont, and G.E. The partnership is known to have promoted emissions reductions of up to 60% by mid-century, counter to the general attitude in the energy sector. These changes in sentiments may even have come from the final realization that current trends in energy consumption and environmental pollution can no longer be maintained.
Summary of Getting Warmer, by Elizabeth Kolbert
The policies of the United States, regarding environmental protection, especially climate change, are, although vigorously defended by the current Administration, difficult to ethically and scientifically justify. One attempt has been made by novelist Michael Crichton in his fictitious account of a climate change Armageddon, engineered by environmentalists. Strangely, Crichton is respected by the administration for his point of view. This is especially evident in its comportment in regard to its approach to the Kyoto Protocol of 1997. Said protocol required at least 55 nations to approve of it, including at least 55% of the industrialized world's greatest carbon dioxide emitters. The proposals of the protocol include numerical targets for emissions reductions, global markets for emissions credits, and incentives for investing in clean-energy technology in the developing world. Most importantly, however, the signatory countries to the Kyoto Protocol recognize the existence of the problem of global climate destabilization. The Bush Administration and Michael Crichton share a common opinion in this respect. They do not believe in the science that proves the existence of such a problem. The U.S. Senate already made it known during the term of the Clinton Administration, that it would oppose Kyoto, but Bush was the one to eventually withdraw the United States from its commitments. Ever since the Bush Administration took office, climate change policy has been backward and ineffective. This can hardly be justified in light of scientific evidence that proves the magnitude of the threat posed by climate change.
Summary of Storm Warnings, by Elizabeth Kolbert
When the United States withdrew from the Kyoto negotiations, it did so mainly based on two faulty premises. Firstly, it argued that the science behind the protocol was insufficient to force it to undertake costly emissions reductions, and secondly, that the treaty "did not suit American needs", as President Bush once stated during an interview. Hurricane Katrina, however, proved this assumption wrong as well. The destruction inflicted by the hurricane was so great that entire towns and cities were completely devastated. Anybody who was bold enough to criticize the Administration for its policies (dis)regarding climate change, such as German environmental minister Jürgen Trittin, was immediately labeled insensitive, even though, in order to prevent such catastrophes from occurring in future, this would be desperately needed. In fact, climate change, as some may argue, cannot be made completely responsible for Hurricane Katrina. It can, however, be made responsible for the overall statistical pattern, regarding the connection between the consumption of fossil fuels, rising carbon dioxide levels, and the increasing intensity of hurricanes. These facts are of great concern to the world's major insurance companies. Unlike the Bush Administration, they are greatly concerned by the correlation between rising sea temperatures, which encourage the formation of hurricanes in the Tropics, and the corresponding losses in insurance monies. It is estimated that insurance losses from extreme storms could rise to roughly 150 billion dollars in the coming decades and this does not even account for the growing number of people and their increasing wealth, in storm-prone areas. Weather-related insurance losses are already known to have increased in the United States in the past, so it cannot possibly e that the Kyoto protocol and the science behind it are of no interest to the U.S. government.
Summary of High Costs, by John Cassidy
In the United States of America, global climate destabilization remains an issue of low priority for most citizens, thanks to, among other factors, the efforts of the Bush Administration and its corporate allies, who have done much in the past, to downplay scientific evidence, proving the not only the existence, but also the considerable scale of the threat posed by climate change. Thankfully, the British government, in contrast to that of the USA, has recognized the threat and has begun to give it more prominence in its policies. While the Bush Administration claims that mitigation efforts would do excessive damage to the economy, Sir Nicholas Stern, Head of the British Government Economic Service, has laid out extensive proof on the contrary in a report published in 2006. Stern, whose credentials range from an academic background at Cambridge, Oxford, and the London School of Economics, to practical experience at the European Bank for reconstruction and Development and at the World Bank, has made a good case for climate change science, when he evaluated the economic consequences of the scientific findings in his report. He argued that currently, the consumption of energy products does not reflect their cost, leading to externalities on a large scale. This not-paying-the-consequences-for-one's-actions results in global market failures, which can be in nobody's interest, not even in those of the Bush Administration and its allies. Stern proposes taxes, regulations, and compulsory voucher schemes to compensate for current externalities. Mitigation, he says, if tackled now, would cost the world roughly one percent of its annual global GDP, if greenhouse gas levels were to be stabilized by 2050. No action would result in costs between five to twenty percent of annual global GDP in the near future. Paradoxically, however, in order to reduce costs for the global economy, the world is in need of the cooperation of the U.S. government.
Summary of Ozone Man, by David Remnick
Today, there exists greater concern for global warming in America than could have been imagined by the international community, which explains the elevated interest for movies such as Ice Age: The Meltdown and Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. The topics that these productions focus on have never seemed to be an issue for the Bush Administration, which has never shown great concern for environmental protection. Bush's victory over Al Gore in the 2000 elections has marked a decisive breach in the environmental policies of the United States and many voters still lament the flaws in the voting procedures of that year. Had Al Gore been made president, it is safe to say, the world would look quite different today. Instead, he has been reduced to the role of a Willy Loman character, trying to change public perception of this environmental catastrophe. Had he been made president, he would not be struggling in the way that he is right now. The Kyoto Protocol would have been endorsed, the EPA would have been supported in its investigations, and fuel-efficiency standards would have been adjusted in the United States. However, Gore would also have made a number of different decisions apart from those regarding the environment. He would have acted differently, regarding domestic surveillance, torture, and welfare and federal deficit reform, and he would probably not have entered Iraq. It is safe to say that the next president of the United States would have an easier job, had Al Gore preceded him.
Summary of Changing Lanes, by Elizabeth Kolbert
Senator John McCain used to be primarily concerned with telling the people the truth. He is known to have announced, “I've been telling people the truth, whether I thought that's what they wanted or not," on numerous occasions. Recently, however, he seems to have changed course, most probably when he discovered that presidential campaigns do not necessarily reward integrity. Settling on a new approach, which seems to favor telling people what they want to hear, rather than what they have to hear, McCain tackled the issue upmost on the minds of the American voters: Oil prices. The majority of the American people believe that drilling for more oil in the United States would solve the issue of high prices. In fact, almost 73% share this opinion and some even support it, despite the subsequent negative side effects for the environment. McCain brilliantly rides on this wave of concern in his television advertisement "Pump", in which he blames the Democratic refusal to drill for more oil onshore for the oil prices. That McCain has opted for a strategy less oriented by the truth is supported by the fact that U.S. oil could in fact only support the world's thirst for oil for roughly seven months. On top of this, oil prices are dependent on the global markets, not simply by the American ones. The government cannot lower oil prices and should not try to either. It should primarily advocate more ethical consumption patterns and show concern for the environment to decrease America's dependence on oil.
Summary of Always with Us, by John Cassidy
After his insightful recommendations concerning the Bolivian hyperinflation of 1985, few economic minds of the day could afford to ignore Jeffrey Sachs. His insights brought an immediate end to the three-year crisis and from then on, Sachs became one of the most prominent economic advisors on the planet. In his book, The Endo of Poverty, he addresses several of his key ideas regarding some of his most prized projects. He was a key contributor to the Earth Institute at Columbia, for example, and a great addition to the United Nations Millennium Project. This project had the ambitious aim of reducing world poverty by half, combating starvation, malnutrition, and disease and attempting to save millions of children, in danger of dying before reaching adulthood. Sachs’ work also encompassed other dimensions, however. He is probably best known for the concept of "shock therapy", the practice, which, he argued, would revive former communist economies and convert them to efficient capitalist economies. Freeing the new Polish and Russian markets from government control, however, produced a little much "shock" and provided relatively little "therapy". Prices soared, savings were lost, and unemployment rose, especially in the heavy industry. "Shock therapy" was a questionable practice at the time. Today, however, Sachs' supporters can rightfully claim that the nations that experienced the therapy were among the most successful post-communist nations.
Summary of Bad Environments, by Elizabeth Kolbert
The Bush Administration is arguably one of the most environmentally unfriendly ever to be witnessed by the American people. It has done almost everything in its power to loosen environmental agreements and to alter them in favor of economic interests. Only recently, it engineered the permission to dispose of mine waste in any given location in cooperation with the National Mining Association. Reclassified as mere "fill", this waste poses a great setback to the Clean Water act of 1972. Alternatively, the restriction of the Environmental Protection Agency from performing the duties, for which it was created, further suggests that the administration is in favor of economic progress over environmental protection. During his years in office, George Bush has scuttled new standards for arsenic drinking water, pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol, and expedited the permit-granting process for power companies. On top of this, he allowed logging companies to construct roads in national forests and Alaska to be explored and exploited more than ever before. He has allowed outdated power plants to pursue power generation. He has been successful in these undertakings, which also include the blocking of the nomination of the American Robert Watson as chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, because he has in many ways, remained true to American values. As long as the American people care little about the environment, Bush could pursue his methods largely unopposed.
Summary of Hot Topic, by Elizabeth Kolbert
Almost since its initial foundation in 1988, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has faced resistance from the U.S. Government. Its main task, upon was, and still is, to submit updated reports on the status of the world climate approximately every four to five years. Thousands of scientists participate in the peer-reviewing process that eventually leads to the publication of the Assessment Reports, for which the IPCC is so well known. What hinders this process, however, is the required approval of the governments of the member states to the IPCC. As such, the United States has done much in the past, to water down the contents of the IPCC reports. Recently, however, this trend seems to have begun to reverse. The submission of a bill to cut U.S. Emissions by 80% by 2025, submitted by Senator Bernie Sanders is just one example. A democratic majority in the House has allowed the succession of Joe Barton of Texas as Chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee, by John Dingell, who has promised to hold more hearings on climate change. A "green wave" seems also to have overcome the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, whose members include Duke Energy, Alcoa, DuPont, and G.E. The partnership is known to have promoted emissions reductions of up to 60% by mid-century, counter to the general attitude in the energy sector. These changes in sentiments may even have come from the final realization that current trends in energy consumption and environmental pollution can no longer be maintained.
Summary of Getting Warmer, by Elizabeth Kolbert
The policies of the United States, regarding environmental protection, especially climate change, are, although vigorously defended by the current Administration, difficult to ethically and scientifically justify. One attempt has been made by novelist Michael Crichton in his fictitious account of a climate change Armageddon, engineered by environmentalists. Strangely, Crichton is respected by the administration for his point of view. This is especially evident in its comportment in regard to its approach to the Kyoto Protocol of 1997. Said protocol required at least 55 nations to approve of it, including at least 55% of the industrialized world's greatest carbon dioxide emitters. The proposals of the protocol include numerical targets for emissions reductions, global markets for emissions credits, and incentives for investing in clean-energy technology in the developing world. Most importantly, however, the signatory countries to the Kyoto Protocol recognize the existence of the problem of global climate destabilization. The Bush Administration and Michael Crichton share a common opinion in this respect. They do not believe in the science that proves the existence of such a problem. The U.S. Senate already made it known during the term of the Clinton Administration, that it would oppose Kyoto, but Bush was the one to eventually withdraw the United States from its commitments. Ever since the Bush Administration took office, climate change policy has been backward and ineffective. This can hardly be justified in light of scientific evidence that proves the magnitude of the threat posed by climate change.
Summary of Storm Warnings, by Elizabeth Kolbert
When the United States withdrew from the Kyoto negotiations, it did so mainly based on two faulty premises. Firstly, it argued that the science behind the protocol was insufficient to force it to undertake costly emissions reductions, and secondly, that the treaty "did not suit American needs", as President Bush once stated during an interview. Hurricane Katrina, however, proved this assumption wrong as well. The destruction inflicted by the hurricane was so great that entire towns and cities were completely devastated. Anybody who was bold enough to criticize the Administration for its policies (dis)regarding climate change, such as German environmental minister Jürgen Trittin, was immediately labeled insensitive, even though, in order to prevent such catastrophes from occurring in future, this would be desperately needed. In fact, climate change, as some may argue, cannot be made completely responsible for Hurricane Katrina. It can, however, be made responsible for the overall statistical pattern, regarding the connection between the consumption of fossil fuels, rising carbon dioxide levels, and the increasing intensity of hurricanes. These facts are of great concern to the world's major insurance companies. Unlike the Bush Administration, they are greatly concerned by the correlation between rising sea temperatures, which encourage the formation of hurricanes in the Tropics, and the corresponding losses in insurance monies. It is estimated that insurance losses from extreme storms could rise to roughly 150 billion dollars in the coming decades and this does not even account for the growing number of people and their increasing wealth, in storm-prone areas. Weather-related insurance losses are already known to have increased in the United States in the past, so it cannot possibly e that the Kyoto protocol and the science behind it are of no interest to the U.S. government.
Summary of High Costs, by John Cassidy
In the United States of America, global climate destabilization remains an issue of low priority for most citizens, thanks to, among other factors, the efforts of the Bush Administration and its corporate allies, who have done much in the past, to downplay scientific evidence, proving the not only the existence, but also the considerable scale of the threat posed by climate change. Thankfully, the British government, in contrast to that of the USA, has recognized the threat and has begun to give it more prominence in its policies. While the Bush Administration claims that mitigation efforts would do excessive damage to the economy, Sir Nicholas Stern, Head of the British Government Economic Service, has laid out extensive proof on the contrary in a report published in 2006. Stern, whose credentials range from an academic background at Cambridge, Oxford, and the London School of Economics, to practical experience at the European Bank for reconstruction and Development and at the World Bank, has made a good case for climate change science, when he evaluated the economic consequences of the scientific findings in his report. He argued that currently, the consumption of energy products does not reflect their cost, leading to externalities on a large scale. This not-paying-the-consequences-for-one's-actions results in global market failures, which can be in nobody's interest, not even in those of the Bush Administration and its allies. Stern proposes taxes, regulations, and compulsory voucher schemes to compensate for current externalities. Mitigation, he says, if tackled now, would cost the world roughly one percent of its annual global GDP, if greenhouse gas levels were to be stabilized by 2050. No action would result in costs between five to twenty percent of annual global GDP in the near future. Paradoxically, however, in order to reduce costs for the global economy, the world is in need of the cooperation of the U.S. government.
Summary of Ozone Man, by David Remnick
Today, there exists greater concern for global warming in America than could have been imagined by the international community, which explains the elevated interest for movies such as Ice Age: The Meltdown and Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. The topics that these productions focus on have never seemed to be an issue for the Bush Administration, which has never shown great concern for environmental protection. Bush's victory over Al Gore in the 2000 elections has marked a decisive breach in the environmental policies of the United States and many voters still lament the flaws in the voting procedures of that year. Had Al Gore been made president, it is safe to say, the world would look quite different today. Instead, he has been reduced to the role of a Willy Loman character, trying to change public perception of this environmental catastrophe. Had he been made president, he would not be struggling in the way that he is right now. The Kyoto Protocol would have been endorsed, the EPA would have been supported in its investigations, and fuel-efficiency standards would have been adjusted in the United States. However, Gore would also have made a number of different decisions apart from those regarding the environment. He would have acted differently, regarding domestic surveillance, torture, and welfare and federal deficit reform, and he would probably not have entered Iraq. It is safe to say that the next president of the United States would have an easier job, had Al Gore preceded him.
Dienstag, 30. September 2008
Short-selling
The global financial crisis has its roots in various different causes, which, collectively, have resulted in what The Economist has termed a ruinous "death spiral". One of the factors contributing to the current state of the global finance environment was the widespread practice of short-selling securities, such as shares and derivatives, of major financial institutions. The term short-selling in itself refers to the selling and buying back of borrowed securities, based on the speculation of falling prices for the securities in question. This allows the short-seller to make a profit with the sole risk of potentially rising prices. Already last year, economists observed an increase in such activity, notably among financial institutions such as Bear Sterns and Lehman Brothers. Governments were relatively slow to react, because in the past, short-selling had, at times been a useful regulatory mechanism - to prevent the overvaluing of stocks, for example - as studies from the 1970s have shown. The practice of short-selling has however, especially over the last several months, contributed more to the downward spiraling of the financial sectors worldwide, than any government had predicted, now demanding the introduction of drastic control measures all over the developed world. The United States, for example, have banned short-selling in over 900 financial institutions until the October 2 and the Swiss Federal Banking Commission has threatened short-sellers with severe punitive measures, should they violate the newly introduced prohibition on short-selling. This goes to show the extent to which short-selling is perceived by governments to have influenced the global financial crisis to date.
Montag, 8. September 2008
Article Commentary 1
Article
August 26, 2008
Obama assassination plot fears as armed men arrested
Tim Reid in Denver
US police are investigating whether they have foiled an assassination plot against Barack Obama after four people were arrested near the Democratic convention in Denver in the possession of high powered rifles.
One of the suspects told police they were "going to shoot Obama from a high vantage point using a ... rifle ... sighted at 750 yards," Denver television station CDS4 is reporting. Police have told the television station that one of the suspects "was directly asked if they had come to Denver to kill Obama. He responded in the affirmative."
The suspects were arrested on Sunday when local police arrested a man, identified by the television station as Tharin Gartrell, 28, who was driving a rented pickup truck erratically. CDS4 is reprrting that in his truck police found two high powered rifles with telescopic sites, as well as camouflage clothing, walkie-talkies, a bulletproof vest, a high powered spotting scope, licences in the names of various people, and the drug methamphetamine. One of the rifles is listed as stolen from Kansas.
When police accompanied Mr Gartrell to his hotel in Denver a second man, who was wanted on a number of arrest warrants, jumped from a window and was injured in a six-story fall. He broke his ankle and was arrested shortly afterwards. Sources told the television station that he was wearing a ring with a swastika, and was thought to have ties to white supremacist organisations.
A third man, associated with Mr Gartrell, was also arrested and told police that Mr Gartrell and the second man arrested "planned to kill Barack Obama at his acceptance speech."
A woman has also been arrested.
Denver police refused to comment on reports that they might have foiled an assassination plot, but have scheduled a press conference for today.
Mr Obama, who will accept the Democratic presidential nomination in Denver on Thursday, has been under Secret Service protection for over a year after receiving credible death threats.
Article Commentary
The article entitled Obama assassination plot fears as armed men arrested follows the particular format of a newspaper article designed for an audience with relatively little time and which cares relatively little. The format of the article, its short length, the division into many smaller sections and the succession of declarative sentences assist the process of skimming for the reader. The headline is already alarming, serving to capture the reader's attention, and the introductory section at the very beginning then serves to answer the four most important questions who, what, where, and when. In this case, 32 words sufficed to answer the above questions. The "foiled assassination plot against Barak Obama" is the what. The four men, who were arrested answer the question of who and the indication that it took place at the Democratic Convention in Denver answers the where and the when, for the well-informed audience of The Times. As the piece progresses, there is more detail to be found. Essentially, however, only the introduction is really designed to be read. Like many other newspapers, The Times, seeks to save as much space as possible to save space for advertising, but it distances itself from most other publications by its thoughtfulness and consideration of the topics discussed. The Times finds that opinion is no commodity and therefore, opinion is scarce in the account above.
August 26, 2008
Obama assassination plot fears as armed men arrested
Tim Reid in Denver
US police are investigating whether they have foiled an assassination plot against Barack Obama after four people were arrested near the Democratic convention in Denver in the possession of high powered rifles.
One of the suspects told police they were "going to shoot Obama from a high vantage point using a ... rifle ... sighted at 750 yards," Denver television station CDS4 is reporting. Police have told the television station that one of the suspects "was directly asked if they had come to Denver to kill Obama. He responded in the affirmative."
The suspects were arrested on Sunday when local police arrested a man, identified by the television station as Tharin Gartrell, 28, who was driving a rented pickup truck erratically. CDS4 is reprrting that in his truck police found two high powered rifles with telescopic sites, as well as camouflage clothing, walkie-talkies, a bulletproof vest, a high powered spotting scope, licences in the names of various people, and the drug methamphetamine. One of the rifles is listed as stolen from Kansas.
When police accompanied Mr Gartrell to his hotel in Denver a second man, who was wanted on a number of arrest warrants, jumped from a window and was injured in a six-story fall. He broke his ankle and was arrested shortly afterwards. Sources told the television station that he was wearing a ring with a swastika, and was thought to have ties to white supremacist organisations.
A third man, associated with Mr Gartrell, was also arrested and told police that Mr Gartrell and the second man arrested "planned to kill Barack Obama at his acceptance speech."
A woman has also been arrested.
Denver police refused to comment on reports that they might have foiled an assassination plot, but have scheduled a press conference for today.
Mr Obama, who will accept the Democratic presidential nomination in Denver on Thursday, has been under Secret Service protection for over a year after receiving credible death threats.
Article Commentary
The article entitled Obama assassination plot fears as armed men arrested follows the particular format of a newspaper article designed for an audience with relatively little time and which cares relatively little. The format of the article, its short length, the division into many smaller sections and the succession of declarative sentences assist the process of skimming for the reader. The headline is already alarming, serving to capture the reader's attention, and the introductory section at the very beginning then serves to answer the four most important questions who, what, where, and when. In this case, 32 words sufficed to answer the above questions. The "foiled assassination plot against Barak Obama" is the what. The four men, who were arrested answer the question of who and the indication that it took place at the Democratic Convention in Denver answers the where and the when, for the well-informed audience of The Times. As the piece progresses, there is more detail to be found. Essentially, however, only the introduction is really designed to be read. Like many other newspapers, The Times, seeks to save as much space as possible to save space for advertising, but it distances itself from most other publications by its thoughtfulness and consideration of the topics discussed. The Times finds that opinion is no commodity and therefore, opinion is scarce in the account above.
Newapaper Assignment 1
The House of White LiesThe legacy of the Bush administration went up in flames with the discovery of confidential documents, asserting that George W. Bush has been brain-dead for most of his presidency. White House housekeeping staff has found the scandalous documents, asserting the existence of a Disney Bush-automaton to replace the real Bush, in the trash last Friday.
Subsequent privately funded investigations have proven the validity of the documents and disproven the desperate claims of the contrary by the now reeling administration. Not surprisingly, the government has made repeated attempts to obstruct and discredit such efforts. Nevertheless, medical records confirm that the president had curiously entered a stage of brain death shortly after the invasion of Iraq. Considering its vulnerable situation on the world stage, the US government apparently thought it wisest to preserve the facade of the strong hegemonic America as a determined soldier in the war on terror.
Terrified administrators are known to have conceived the idea of ordering a Bush-automaton from the Disney Studios in early April of 2001. It was to be fully operable with rechargeable batteries and an expiration date of four years. A second automaton was purchased from Disney in anticipation of the elections in 2004, as even CIA Director Michael Hayden deemed the plan “completely fool-proof”, which does not necessarily speak for the qualities of the former president and nor, with the benefit of hindsight, for the U.S. intelligence services.
There seems to have existed the strong underlying consent among Republicans, that a literal puppet president, would be a much more lucrative investment for campaign sponsors than a candidate whose policies could potentially threaten U.S. business interests abroad. The American public, through domestic policy, and the world at large, through America’s dominant foreign policy, was thus exposed to the moods of a selected group of influential lobbies for the past eight years. It is now questionable, whether the agreements signed ant the policies enforced by the administration are legally enforceable under federal and international law respectively and it is further doubtful, whether future agreements with the United States will ever be concluded with trust again.
The White House is known to have had to receive statements of outrage and disbelief from around the globe. Iranian president Ahmadinejad is said to even have called the White House, complaining in person about the lack of accountability in the U.S. government. Other heads of state are also known to have remarked most unfavorably about the affair. French president Sarkozy made it clear during recent mediation talks concerning the Georgian affair, that France would oppose any American interference in the conflict, if it remained uncertain, from which authority American officials were receiving their orders.
The incompetence of the White House staff has thus exposed the greatest scandal in the history of the White House. The credibility of the United States government has vanished almost overnight and foreign relations turned dire. The only party to profit from the entire mess is Bush himself. At least, he is now no longer blamed for the less fathomable policies of his administration during recent years.
Donnerstag, 4. September 2008
Private School Teachers Underpaid
Robbery at the Zurich International School
The Zurich police surprised four teachers of the Zurich International School on Tuesday evening, quarrelling over a sum of 35’000 CHF in a van parked near the Thalwil Bahnhof. The money was stolen earlier that evening, from the unsecured school safe at the Wädenswil campus. This campus is reserved for grades one to five and seems to be a calm and quiet place on the surface. What lies beneath this façade, however, is the bitter hostility between the teachers and the administration of the school. Teachers are paid a shockingly low salary, compared to the average income of public school teachers, despite the high school fees and besides the fact that attending to a wealthy and demanding student population takes a lot more patience and stamina. No wonder that the teachers were frustrated: They do the work and the administration collects the cash. Running away with it did not help four members of the staff this week. Had they planned better, they could have avoided a major scandal for the school.
The Zurich police surprised four teachers of the Zurich International School on Tuesday evening, quarrelling over a sum of 35’000 CHF in a van parked near the Thalwil Bahnhof. The money was stolen earlier that evening, from the unsecured school safe at the Wädenswil campus. This campus is reserved for grades one to five and seems to be a calm and quiet place on the surface. What lies beneath this façade, however, is the bitter hostility between the teachers and the administration of the school. Teachers are paid a shockingly low salary, compared to the average income of public school teachers, despite the high school fees and besides the fact that attending to a wealthy and demanding student population takes a lot more patience and stamina. No wonder that the teachers were frustrated: They do the work and the administration collects the cash. Running away with it did not help four members of the staff this week. Had they planned better, they could have avoided a major scandal for the school.
Dienstag, 2. September 2008
The Denial Industry
Article
ExxonMobil is the world's most profitable corporation. Its sales now amount to more than $1bn a day. It makes most of this money from oil, and has more to lose than any other company from efforts to tackle climate change. To safeguard its profits, ExxonMobil needs to sow doubt about whether serious action needs to be taken on climate change. But there are difficulties: it must confront a scientific consensus as strong as that which maintains that smoking causes lung cancer or that HIV causes Aids. So what's its strategy?
The website Exxonsecrets.org, using data found in the company's official documents, lists 124 organisations that have taken money from the company or work closely with those that have. These organisations take a consistent line on climate change: that the science is contradictory, the scientists are split, environmentalists are charlatans, liars or lunatics, and if governments took action to prevent global warming, they would be endangering the global economy for no good reason. The findings these organisations dislike are labelled "junk science". The findings they welcome are labelled "sound science".
Among the organisations that have been funded by Exxon are such well-known websites and lobby groups as TechCentralStation, the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation. Some of those on the list have names that make them look like grassroots citizens' organisations or academic bodies: the Centre for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, for example. One or two of them, such as the Congress of Racial Equality, are citizens' organisations or academic bodies, but the line they take on climate change is very much like that of the other sponsored groups. While all these groups are based in America, their publications are read and cited, and their staff are interviewed and quoted, all over the world.
By funding a large number of organisations, Exxon helps to create the impression that doubt about climate change is widespread. For those who do not understand that scientific findings cannot be trusted if they have not appeared in peer-reviewed journals, the names of these institutes help to suggest that serious researchers are challenging the consensus.
This is not to claim that all the science these groups champion is bogus. On the whole, they use selection, not invention. They will find one contradictory study - such as the discovery of tropospheric cooling, which, in a garbled form, has been used by Peter Hitchens in the Mail on Sunday - and promote it relentlessly. They will continue to do so long after it has been disproved by further work. So, for example, John Christy, the author of the troposphere paper, admitted in August 2005 that his figures were incorrect, yet his initial findings are still being circulated and championed by many of these groups, as a quick internet search will show you.
But they do not stop there. The chairman of a group called the Science and Environmental Policy Project is Frederick Seitz. Seitz is a physicist who in the 1960s was president of the US National Academy of Sciences. In 1998, he wrote a document, known as the Oregon Petition, which has been cited by almost every journalist who claims that climate change is a myth.
The document reads as follows: "We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan, in December 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind. There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth."
Anyone with a degree was entitled to sign it. It was attached to a letter written by Seitz, entitled Research Review of Global Warming Evidence. The lead author of the "review" that followed Seitz's letter is a Christian fundamentalist called Arthur B Robinson. He is not a professional climate scientist. It was co-published by Robinson's organisation - the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine - and an outfit called the George C Marshall Institute, which has received $630,000 from ExxonMobil since 1998. The other authors were Robinson's 22-year-old son and two employees of the George C Marshall Institute. The chairman of the George C Marshall Institute was Frederick Seitz.
The paper maintained that: "We are living in an increasingly lush environment of plants and animals as a result of the carbon dioxide increase. Our children will enjoy an Earth with far more plant and animal life than that with which we now are blessed. This is a wonderful and unexpected gift from the Industrial Revolution."
It was printed in the font and format of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: the journal of the organisation of which Seitz - as he had just reminded his correspondents - was once president.
Soon after the petition was published, the National Academy of Sciences released this statement: "The NAS Council would like to make it clear that this petition has nothing to do with the National Academy of Sciences and that the manuscript was not published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences or in any other peer-reviewed journal. The petition does not reflect the conclusions of expert reports of the Academy."
But it was too late. Seitz, the Oregon Institute and the George C Marshall Institute had already circulated tens of thousands of copies, and the petition had established a major presence on the internet. Some 17,000 graduates signed it, the majority of whom had no background in climate science. It has been repeatedly cited - by global-warming sceptics such as David Bellamy, Melanie Phillips and others - as a petition by climate scientists. It is promoted by the Exxon-sponsored sites as evidence that there is no scientific consensus on climate change.
All this is now well known to climate scientists and environmentalists. But what I have discovered while researching this issue is that the corporate funding of lobby groups denying that manmade climate change is taking place was initiated not by Exxon, or by any other firm directly involved in the fossil fuel industry. It was started by the tobacco company Philip Morris.
In December 1992, the US Environmental Protection Agency published a 500-page report called Respiratory Health Effects of Passive Smoking. It found that "the widespread exposure to environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) in the United States presents a serious and substantial public health impact. In adults: ETS is a human lung carcinogen, responsible for approximately 3,000 lung cancer deaths annually in US non-smokers. In children: ETS exposure is causally associated with an increased risk of lower respiratory tract infections such as bronchitis and pneumonia. This report estimates that 150,000 to 300,000 cases annually in infants and young children up to 18 months of age are attributable to ETS."
Had it not been for the settlement of a major class action against the tobacco companies in the US, we would never have been able to see what happened next. But in 1998 they were forced to publish their internal documents and post them on the internet.
Within two months of its publication, Philip Morris, the world's biggest tobacco firm, had devised a strategy for dealing with the passive-smoking report. In February 1993 Ellen Merlo, its senior vice-president of corporate affairs, sent a letter to William I Campbell, Philip Morris's chief executive officer and president, explaining her intentions: "Our overriding objective is to discredit the EPA report ... Concurrently, it is our objective to prevent states and cities, as well as businesses, from passive-smoking bans."
To this end, she had hired a public relations company called APCO. She had attached the advice it had given her. APCO warned that: "No matter how strong the arguments, industry spokespeople are, in and of themselves, not always credible or appropriate messengers."
So the fight against a ban on passive smoking had to be associated with other people and other issues. Philip Morris, APCO said, needed to create the impression of a "grassroots" movement - one that had been formed spontaneously by concerned citizens to fight "overregulation". It should portray the danger of tobacco smoke as just one "unfounded fear" among others, such as concerns about pesticides and cellphones. APCO proposed to set up "a national coalition intended to educate the media, public officials and the public about the dangers of 'junk science'. Coalition will address credibility of government's scientific studies, risk-assessment techniques and misuse of tax dollars ... Upon formation of Coalition, key leaders will begin media outreach, eg editorial board tours, opinion articles, and brief elected officials in selected states."
APCO would found the coalition, write its mission statements, and "prepare and place opinion articles in key markets". For this it required $150,000 for its own fees and $75,000 for the coalition's costs.
By May 1993, as another memo from APCO to Philip Morris shows, the fake citizens' group had a name: the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition. It was important, further letters stated, "to ensure that TASSC has a diverse group of contributors"; to "link the tobacco issue with other more 'politically correct' products"; and to associate scientific studies that cast smoking in a bad light with "broader questions about government research and regulations" - such as "global warming", "nuclear waste disposal" and "biotechnology". APCO would engage in the "intensive recruitment of high-profile representatives from business and industry, scientists, public officials, and other individuals interested in promoting the use of sound science".
By September 1993, APCO had produced a "Plan for the Public Launching of TASSC". The media launch would not take place in "Washington, DC or the top media markets of the country. Rather, we suggest creating a series of aggressive, decentralised launches in several targeted local and regional markets across the country. This approach ... avoids cynical reporters from major media: less reviewing/challenging of TASSC messages."
The media coverage, the public relations company hoped, would enable TASSC to "establish an image of a national grassroots coalition". In case the media asked hostile questions, APCO circulated a sheet of answers, drafted by Philip Morris. The first question was:
"Isn't it true that Philip Morris created TASSC to act as a front group for it?
"A: No, not at all. As a large corporation, PM belongs to many national, regional, and state business, public policy, and legislative organisations. PM has contributed to TASSC, as we have with various groups and corporations across the country."
There are clear similarities between the language used and the approaches adopted by Philip Morris and by the organisations funded by Exxon. The two lobbies use the same terms, which appear to have been invented by Philip Morris's consultants. "Junk science" meant peer-reviewed studies showing that smoking was linked to cancer and other diseases. "Sound science" meant studies sponsored by the tobacco industry suggesting that the link was inconclusive. Both lobbies recognised that their best chance of avoiding regulation was to challenge the scientific consensus. As a memo from the tobacco company Brown and Williamson noted, "Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy." Both industries also sought to distance themselves from their own campaigns, creating the impression that they were spontaneous movements of professionals or ordinary citizens: the "grassroots".
But the connection goes further than that. TASSC, the "coalition" created by Philip Morris, was the first and most important of the corporate-funded organisations denying that climate change is taking place. It has done more damage to the campaign to halt it than any other body.
TASSC did as its founders at APCO suggested, and sought funding from other sources. Between 2000 and 2002 it received $30,000 from Exxon. The website it has financed - JunkScience.com - has been the main entrepot for almost every kind of climate-change denial that has found its way into the mainstream press. It equates environmentalists with Nazis, communists and terrorists. It flings at us the accusations that could justifably be levelled against itself: the website claims, for example, that it is campaigning against "faulty scientific data and analysis used to advance special and, often, hidden agendas". I have lost count of the number of correspondents who, while questioning manmade global warming, have pointed me there.
The man who runs it is called Steve Milloy. In 1992, he started working for APCO - Philip Morris's consultants. While there, he set up the JunkScience site. In March 1997, the documents show, he was appointed TASSC's executive director. By 1998, as he explained in a memo to TASSC board members, his JunkScience website was was being funded by TASSC. Both he and the "coalition" continued to receive money from Philip Morris. An internal document dated February 1998 reveals that TASSC took $200,000 from the tobacco company in 1997. Philip Morris's 2001 budget document records a payment to Steven Milloy of $90,000. Altria, Philip Morris's parent company, admits that Milloy was under contract to the tobacco firm until at least the end of 2005.
He has done well. You can find his name attached to letters and articles seeking to discredit passive-smoking studies all over the internet and in the academic databases. He has even managed to reach the British Medical Journal: I found a letter from him there which claimed that the studies it had reported "do not bear out the hypothesis that maternal smoking/ passive smoking increases cancer risk among infants". TASSC paid him $126,000 in 2004 for 15 hours' work a week. Two other organisations are registered at his address: the Free Enterprise Education Institute and the Free Enterprise Action Institute. They have received $10,000 and $50,000 respectively from Exxon. The secretary of the Free Enterprise Action Institute is Thomas Borelli. Borelli was the Philip Morris executive who oversaw the payments to TASSC.
Milloy also writes a weekly Junk Science column for the Fox News website. Without declaring his interests, he has used this column to pour scorn on studies documenting the medical effects of second-hand tobacco smoke and showing that climate change is taking place. Even after Fox News was told about the money he had been receiving from Philip Morris and Exxon, it continued to employ him, without informing its readers about his interests.
TASSC's headed notepaper names an advisory board of eight people. Three of them are listed by Exxonsecrets.org as working for organisations taking money from Exxon. One of them is Frederick Seitz, the man who wrote the Oregon Petition, and who chairs the Science and Environmental Policy Project. In 1979, Seitz became a permanent consultant to the tobacco company RJ Reynolds. He worked for the firm until at least 1987, for an annual fee of $65,000. He was in charge of deciding which medical research projects the company should fund, and handed out millions of dollars a year to American universities. The purpose of this funding, a memo from the chairman of RJ Reynolds shows, was to "refute the criticisms against cigarettes". An undated note in the Philip Morris archive shows that it was planning a "Seitz symposium" with the help of TASSC, in which Frederick Seitz would speak to "40-60 regulators".
The president of Seitz's Science and Environmental Policy Project is a maverick environmental scientist called S Fred Singer. He has spent the past few years refuting evidence for manmade climate change. It was he, for example, who published the misleading claim that most of the world's glaciers are advancing, which landed David Bellamy in so much trouble when he repeated it last year. He also had connections with the tobacco industry. In March 1993, APCO sent a memo to Ellen Merlo, the vice-president of Philip Morris, who had just commissioned it to fight the Environmental Protection Agency: "As you know, we have been working with Dr Fred Singer and Dr Dwight Lee, who have authored articles on junk science and indoor air quality (IAQ) respectively ..."
Singer's article, entitled Junk Science at the EPA, claimed that "the latest 'crisis' - environmental tobacco smoke - has been widely criticised as the most shocking distortion of scientific evidence yet". He alleged that the Environmental Protection Agency had had to "rig the numbers" in its report on passive smoking. This was the report that Philip Morris and APCO had set out to discredit a month before Singer wrote his article.
I have no evidence that Fred Singer or his organisation have taken money from Philip Morris. But many of the other bodies that have been sponsored by Exxon and have sought to repudiate climate change were also funded by the tobacco company. Among them are some of the world's best-known "thinktanks": the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Hudson Institute, the Frontiers of Freedom Institute, the Reason Foundation and the Independent Institute, as well as George Mason University's Law and Economics Centre. I can't help wondering whether there is any aspect of conservative thought in the United States that has not been formed and funded by the corporations.
Until I came across this material, I believed that the accusations, the insults and the taunts such people had slung at us environmentalists were personal: that they really did hate us, and had found someone who would pay to help them express those feelings. Now I realise that they have simply transferred their skills.
While they have been most effective in the United States, the impacts of the climate-change deniers sponsored by Exxon and Philip Morris have been felt all over the world. I have seen their arguments endlessly repeated in Australia, Canada, India, Russia and the UK. By dominating the media debate on climate change during seven or eight critical years in which urgent international talks should have been taking place, by constantly seeding doubt about the science just as it should have been most persuasive, they have justified the money their sponsors have spent on them many times over. It is fair to say that the professional denial industry has delayed effective global action on climate change by years, just as it helped to delay action against the tobacco companies.
Discussion
This article addresses the connection by the oil industry’s current effort to manipulate the climate change debate and similar attempts by the cigarette industry. The focus lies on the comparison between ExxonMobil and Philip Morris. ExxonMobil’s strategy was to sow doubts about the necessity to take action against climate change, which would have dramatic effects on its profits from the sale of fossil fuels. For this reason, it covertly funded roughly 124 organizations, which spread its doctrine. Such organizations included TechCentralStation, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change. On top of spreading its message under the seemingly academic cover of these institutions, the industry also associated itself with prominent individuals, willing to question the science behind climate change, such as Frederick Seitz, one of the signatories of the Oregon Petition of 1998, which sought to discredit climate change theories. During the 1990s, Philip Morris employed very similar means. When officials portrayed smoking as a dangerous practice for active and passive smokers as well as for the environment, Philip Morris launched a campaign to challenge the science upon which these claims were based. This included the questioning of the ability of the government to carry out scientific studies, allocate taxes properly, and assessing risk legitimately. By comparing the problem to large-scale issues, it hoped to make it look less threatening. One of those issues happened to be global warming. Both ExxonMobil and Philip Morris used the same terms, calling most scientific studies “junk science” and labeling what they supported as “sound science”. This attitude called into life the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition in 1993, which was to be the first organization to deny climate change. Evidently, the strategies of the industries which produce products that are potentially harmful are desperate measures. Because science is against them, all they can do is discredit it using the most primitive means.
Monbiot, George. "The Denial Industry." The Guardian 19 Sept 2006 7 Aug 2008.
ExxonMobil is the world's most profitable corporation. Its sales now amount to more than $1bn a day. It makes most of this money from oil, and has more to lose than any other company from efforts to tackle climate change. To safeguard its profits, ExxonMobil needs to sow doubt about whether serious action needs to be taken on climate change. But there are difficulties: it must confront a scientific consensus as strong as that which maintains that smoking causes lung cancer or that HIV causes Aids. So what's its strategy?
The website Exxonsecrets.org, using data found in the company's official documents, lists 124 organisations that have taken money from the company or work closely with those that have. These organisations take a consistent line on climate change: that the science is contradictory, the scientists are split, environmentalists are charlatans, liars or lunatics, and if governments took action to prevent global warming, they would be endangering the global economy for no good reason. The findings these organisations dislike are labelled "junk science". The findings they welcome are labelled "sound science".
Among the organisations that have been funded by Exxon are such well-known websites and lobby groups as TechCentralStation, the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation. Some of those on the list have names that make them look like grassroots citizens' organisations or academic bodies: the Centre for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, for example. One or two of them, such as the Congress of Racial Equality, are citizens' organisations or academic bodies, but the line they take on climate change is very much like that of the other sponsored groups. While all these groups are based in America, their publications are read and cited, and their staff are interviewed and quoted, all over the world.
By funding a large number of organisations, Exxon helps to create the impression that doubt about climate change is widespread. For those who do not understand that scientific findings cannot be trusted if they have not appeared in peer-reviewed journals, the names of these institutes help to suggest that serious researchers are challenging the consensus.
This is not to claim that all the science these groups champion is bogus. On the whole, they use selection, not invention. They will find one contradictory study - such as the discovery of tropospheric cooling, which, in a garbled form, has been used by Peter Hitchens in the Mail on Sunday - and promote it relentlessly. They will continue to do so long after it has been disproved by further work. So, for example, John Christy, the author of the troposphere paper, admitted in August 2005 that his figures were incorrect, yet his initial findings are still being circulated and championed by many of these groups, as a quick internet search will show you.
But they do not stop there. The chairman of a group called the Science and Environmental Policy Project is Frederick Seitz. Seitz is a physicist who in the 1960s was president of the US National Academy of Sciences. In 1998, he wrote a document, known as the Oregon Petition, which has been cited by almost every journalist who claims that climate change is a myth.
The document reads as follows: "We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan, in December 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind. There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth."
Anyone with a degree was entitled to sign it. It was attached to a letter written by Seitz, entitled Research Review of Global Warming Evidence. The lead author of the "review" that followed Seitz's letter is a Christian fundamentalist called Arthur B Robinson. He is not a professional climate scientist. It was co-published by Robinson's organisation - the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine - and an outfit called the George C Marshall Institute, which has received $630,000 from ExxonMobil since 1998. The other authors were Robinson's 22-year-old son and two employees of the George C Marshall Institute. The chairman of the George C Marshall Institute was Frederick Seitz.
The paper maintained that: "We are living in an increasingly lush environment of plants and animals as a result of the carbon dioxide increase. Our children will enjoy an Earth with far more plant and animal life than that with which we now are blessed. This is a wonderful and unexpected gift from the Industrial Revolution."
It was printed in the font and format of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: the journal of the organisation of which Seitz - as he had just reminded his correspondents - was once president.
Soon after the petition was published, the National Academy of Sciences released this statement: "The NAS Council would like to make it clear that this petition has nothing to do with the National Academy of Sciences and that the manuscript was not published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences or in any other peer-reviewed journal. The petition does not reflect the conclusions of expert reports of the Academy."
But it was too late. Seitz, the Oregon Institute and the George C Marshall Institute had already circulated tens of thousands of copies, and the petition had established a major presence on the internet. Some 17,000 graduates signed it, the majority of whom had no background in climate science. It has been repeatedly cited - by global-warming sceptics such as David Bellamy, Melanie Phillips and others - as a petition by climate scientists. It is promoted by the Exxon-sponsored sites as evidence that there is no scientific consensus on climate change.
All this is now well known to climate scientists and environmentalists. But what I have discovered while researching this issue is that the corporate funding of lobby groups denying that manmade climate change is taking place was initiated not by Exxon, or by any other firm directly involved in the fossil fuel industry. It was started by the tobacco company Philip Morris.
In December 1992, the US Environmental Protection Agency published a 500-page report called Respiratory Health Effects of Passive Smoking. It found that "the widespread exposure to environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) in the United States presents a serious and substantial public health impact. In adults: ETS is a human lung carcinogen, responsible for approximately 3,000 lung cancer deaths annually in US non-smokers. In children: ETS exposure is causally associated with an increased risk of lower respiratory tract infections such as bronchitis and pneumonia. This report estimates that 150,000 to 300,000 cases annually in infants and young children up to 18 months of age are attributable to ETS."
Had it not been for the settlement of a major class action against the tobacco companies in the US, we would never have been able to see what happened next. But in 1998 they were forced to publish their internal documents and post them on the internet.
Within two months of its publication, Philip Morris, the world's biggest tobacco firm, had devised a strategy for dealing with the passive-smoking report. In February 1993 Ellen Merlo, its senior vice-president of corporate affairs, sent a letter to William I Campbell, Philip Morris's chief executive officer and president, explaining her intentions: "Our overriding objective is to discredit the EPA report ... Concurrently, it is our objective to prevent states and cities, as well as businesses, from passive-smoking bans."
To this end, she had hired a public relations company called APCO. She had attached the advice it had given her. APCO warned that: "No matter how strong the arguments, industry spokespeople are, in and of themselves, not always credible or appropriate messengers."
So the fight against a ban on passive smoking had to be associated with other people and other issues. Philip Morris, APCO said, needed to create the impression of a "grassroots" movement - one that had been formed spontaneously by concerned citizens to fight "overregulation". It should portray the danger of tobacco smoke as just one "unfounded fear" among others, such as concerns about pesticides and cellphones. APCO proposed to set up "a national coalition intended to educate the media, public officials and the public about the dangers of 'junk science'. Coalition will address credibility of government's scientific studies, risk-assessment techniques and misuse of tax dollars ... Upon formation of Coalition, key leaders will begin media outreach, eg editorial board tours, opinion articles, and brief elected officials in selected states."
APCO would found the coalition, write its mission statements, and "prepare and place opinion articles in key markets". For this it required $150,000 for its own fees and $75,000 for the coalition's costs.
By May 1993, as another memo from APCO to Philip Morris shows, the fake citizens' group had a name: the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition. It was important, further letters stated, "to ensure that TASSC has a diverse group of contributors"; to "link the tobacco issue with other more 'politically correct' products"; and to associate scientific studies that cast smoking in a bad light with "broader questions about government research and regulations" - such as "global warming", "nuclear waste disposal" and "biotechnology". APCO would engage in the "intensive recruitment of high-profile representatives from business and industry, scientists, public officials, and other individuals interested in promoting the use of sound science".
By September 1993, APCO had produced a "Plan for the Public Launching of TASSC". The media launch would not take place in "Washington, DC or the top media markets of the country. Rather, we suggest creating a series of aggressive, decentralised launches in several targeted local and regional markets across the country. This approach ... avoids cynical reporters from major media: less reviewing/challenging of TASSC messages."
The media coverage, the public relations company hoped, would enable TASSC to "establish an image of a national grassroots coalition". In case the media asked hostile questions, APCO circulated a sheet of answers, drafted by Philip Morris. The first question was:
"Isn't it true that Philip Morris created TASSC to act as a front group for it?
"A: No, not at all. As a large corporation, PM belongs to many national, regional, and state business, public policy, and legislative organisations. PM has contributed to TASSC, as we have with various groups and corporations across the country."
There are clear similarities between the language used and the approaches adopted by Philip Morris and by the organisations funded by Exxon. The two lobbies use the same terms, which appear to have been invented by Philip Morris's consultants. "Junk science" meant peer-reviewed studies showing that smoking was linked to cancer and other diseases. "Sound science" meant studies sponsored by the tobacco industry suggesting that the link was inconclusive. Both lobbies recognised that their best chance of avoiding regulation was to challenge the scientific consensus. As a memo from the tobacco company Brown and Williamson noted, "Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy." Both industries also sought to distance themselves from their own campaigns, creating the impression that they were spontaneous movements of professionals or ordinary citizens: the "grassroots".
But the connection goes further than that. TASSC, the "coalition" created by Philip Morris, was the first and most important of the corporate-funded organisations denying that climate change is taking place. It has done more damage to the campaign to halt it than any other body.
TASSC did as its founders at APCO suggested, and sought funding from other sources. Between 2000 and 2002 it received $30,000 from Exxon. The website it has financed - JunkScience.com - has been the main entrepot for almost every kind of climate-change denial that has found its way into the mainstream press. It equates environmentalists with Nazis, communists and terrorists. It flings at us the accusations that could justifably be levelled against itself: the website claims, for example, that it is campaigning against "faulty scientific data and analysis used to advance special and, often, hidden agendas". I have lost count of the number of correspondents who, while questioning manmade global warming, have pointed me there.
The man who runs it is called Steve Milloy. In 1992, he started working for APCO - Philip Morris's consultants. While there, he set up the JunkScience site. In March 1997, the documents show, he was appointed TASSC's executive director. By 1998, as he explained in a memo to TASSC board members, his JunkScience website was was being funded by TASSC. Both he and the "coalition" continued to receive money from Philip Morris. An internal document dated February 1998 reveals that TASSC took $200,000 from the tobacco company in 1997. Philip Morris's 2001 budget document records a payment to Steven Milloy of $90,000. Altria, Philip Morris's parent company, admits that Milloy was under contract to the tobacco firm until at least the end of 2005.
He has done well. You can find his name attached to letters and articles seeking to discredit passive-smoking studies all over the internet and in the academic databases. He has even managed to reach the British Medical Journal: I found a letter from him there which claimed that the studies it had reported "do not bear out the hypothesis that maternal smoking/ passive smoking increases cancer risk among infants". TASSC paid him $126,000 in 2004 for 15 hours' work a week. Two other organisations are registered at his address: the Free Enterprise Education Institute and the Free Enterprise Action Institute. They have received $10,000 and $50,000 respectively from Exxon. The secretary of the Free Enterprise Action Institute is Thomas Borelli. Borelli was the Philip Morris executive who oversaw the payments to TASSC.
Milloy also writes a weekly Junk Science column for the Fox News website. Without declaring his interests, he has used this column to pour scorn on studies documenting the medical effects of second-hand tobacco smoke and showing that climate change is taking place. Even after Fox News was told about the money he had been receiving from Philip Morris and Exxon, it continued to employ him, without informing its readers about his interests.
TASSC's headed notepaper names an advisory board of eight people. Three of them are listed by Exxonsecrets.org as working for organisations taking money from Exxon. One of them is Frederick Seitz, the man who wrote the Oregon Petition, and who chairs the Science and Environmental Policy Project. In 1979, Seitz became a permanent consultant to the tobacco company RJ Reynolds. He worked for the firm until at least 1987, for an annual fee of $65,000. He was in charge of deciding which medical research projects the company should fund, and handed out millions of dollars a year to American universities. The purpose of this funding, a memo from the chairman of RJ Reynolds shows, was to "refute the criticisms against cigarettes". An undated note in the Philip Morris archive shows that it was planning a "Seitz symposium" with the help of TASSC, in which Frederick Seitz would speak to "40-60 regulators".
The president of Seitz's Science and Environmental Policy Project is a maverick environmental scientist called S Fred Singer. He has spent the past few years refuting evidence for manmade climate change. It was he, for example, who published the misleading claim that most of the world's glaciers are advancing, which landed David Bellamy in so much trouble when he repeated it last year. He also had connections with the tobacco industry. In March 1993, APCO sent a memo to Ellen Merlo, the vice-president of Philip Morris, who had just commissioned it to fight the Environmental Protection Agency: "As you know, we have been working with Dr Fred Singer and Dr Dwight Lee, who have authored articles on junk science and indoor air quality (IAQ) respectively ..."
Singer's article, entitled Junk Science at the EPA, claimed that "the latest 'crisis' - environmental tobacco smoke - has been widely criticised as the most shocking distortion of scientific evidence yet". He alleged that the Environmental Protection Agency had had to "rig the numbers" in its report on passive smoking. This was the report that Philip Morris and APCO had set out to discredit a month before Singer wrote his article.
I have no evidence that Fred Singer or his organisation have taken money from Philip Morris. But many of the other bodies that have been sponsored by Exxon and have sought to repudiate climate change were also funded by the tobacco company. Among them are some of the world's best-known "thinktanks": the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Hudson Institute, the Frontiers of Freedom Institute, the Reason Foundation and the Independent Institute, as well as George Mason University's Law and Economics Centre. I can't help wondering whether there is any aspect of conservative thought in the United States that has not been formed and funded by the corporations.
Until I came across this material, I believed that the accusations, the insults and the taunts such people had slung at us environmentalists were personal: that they really did hate us, and had found someone who would pay to help them express those feelings. Now I realise that they have simply transferred their skills.
While they have been most effective in the United States, the impacts of the climate-change deniers sponsored by Exxon and Philip Morris have been felt all over the world. I have seen their arguments endlessly repeated in Australia, Canada, India, Russia and the UK. By dominating the media debate on climate change during seven or eight critical years in which urgent international talks should have been taking place, by constantly seeding doubt about the science just as it should have been most persuasive, they have justified the money their sponsors have spent on them many times over. It is fair to say that the professional denial industry has delayed effective global action on climate change by years, just as it helped to delay action against the tobacco companies.
Discussion
This article addresses the connection by the oil industry’s current effort to manipulate the climate change debate and similar attempts by the cigarette industry. The focus lies on the comparison between ExxonMobil and Philip Morris. ExxonMobil’s strategy was to sow doubts about the necessity to take action against climate change, which would have dramatic effects on its profits from the sale of fossil fuels. For this reason, it covertly funded roughly 124 organizations, which spread its doctrine. Such organizations included TechCentralStation, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change. On top of spreading its message under the seemingly academic cover of these institutions, the industry also associated itself with prominent individuals, willing to question the science behind climate change, such as Frederick Seitz, one of the signatories of the Oregon Petition of 1998, which sought to discredit climate change theories. During the 1990s, Philip Morris employed very similar means. When officials portrayed smoking as a dangerous practice for active and passive smokers as well as for the environment, Philip Morris launched a campaign to challenge the science upon which these claims were based. This included the questioning of the ability of the government to carry out scientific studies, allocate taxes properly, and assessing risk legitimately. By comparing the problem to large-scale issues, it hoped to make it look less threatening. One of those issues happened to be global warming. Both ExxonMobil and Philip Morris used the same terms, calling most scientific studies “junk science” and labeling what they supported as “sound science”. This attitude called into life the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition in 1993, which was to be the first organization to deny climate change. Evidently, the strategies of the industries which produce products that are potentially harmful are desperate measures. Because science is against them, all they can do is discredit it using the most primitive means.
Monbiot, George. "The Denial Industry." The Guardian 19 Sept 2006 7 Aug 2008
Some like it hot
Article
WHEN NOVELIST MICHAEL CRICHTON took the stage before a lunchtime crowd in Washington, D.C., one Friday in late January, the event might have seemed, at first, like one more unremarkable appearance by a popular author with a book to sell. Indeed, Crichton had just such a book, his new thriller, State of Fear. But the content of the novel, the setting of the talk, and the audience who came to listen transformed the Crichton event into something closer to a hybrid of campaign rally and undergraduate seminar. State of Fear is an anti-environmentalist page-turner in which shady ecoterrorists plot catastrophic weather disruptions to stoke unfounded fears about global climate change. However fantastical the book’s story line, its author was received as an expert by the sharply dressed policy wonks crowding into the plush Wohlstetter Conference Center of the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (AEI). In his introduction, AEI president and former Reagan budget official Christopher DeMuth praised the author for conveying “serious science with a sense of drama to a popular audience.” The title of the lecture was “Science Policy in the 21st Century.”
Crichton is an M.D. with a basketball player’s stature (he’s 6 feet 9 inches), and his bearing and his background exude authority. He describes himself as “contrarian by nature,” but his words on this day did not run counter to the sentiment of his AEI listeners. “I spent the last several years exploring environmental issues, particularly global warming,” Crichton told them solemnly. “I’ve been deeply disturbed by what I found, largely because the evidence for so many environmental issues is, from my point of view, shockingy flawed and unsubstantiated.” Crichton then turned to bashing a 1998 study of historic temperature change that has been repeatedly singled out for attack by conservatives.
There is overwhelming scientific consensus that greenhouse gases emitted by human activity are causing global average temperatures to rise. Conservative think tanks are trying to undermine this conclusion with a disinformation campaign employing “reports” designed to look like a counterbalance to peer-reviewed studies, skeptic propaganda masquerading as journalism, and events like the AEI luncheon that Crichton addressed. The think tanks provide both intellectual cover for those who reject what the best science currently tells us, and ammunition for conservative policymakers like Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee, who calls global warming “a hoax.”
This concerted effort reflects the shared convictions of free-market, and thus antiregulatory, conservatives. But there’s another factor at play. In addition to being supported by like-minded individuals and ideologically sympathetic foundations, these groups are funded by ExxonMobil, the world’s largest oil company. Mother Jones has tallied some 40 ExxonMobil-funded organizations that either have sought to undermine mainstream scientific findings on global climate change or have maintained affiliations with a small group of “skeptic” scientists who continue to do so. Beyond think tanks, the count also includes quasi-journalistic outlets like Tech CentralStation.com (a website providing “news, analysis, research, and commentary” that received $95,000 from ExxonMobil in 2003), a FoxNews.com columnist, and even religious and civil rights groups. In total, these organizations received more than $8 million between 2000 and 2003 (the last year for which records are available; all figures below are for that range unless otherwise noted). ExxonMobil chairman and CEO Lee Raymond serves as vice chairman of the board of trustees for the AEI, which received $960,000 in funding from ExxonMobil. The AEI-Brookings Institution Joint Center for Regulatory Studies, which officially hosted Crichton, received another $55,000. When asked about the event, the center’s executive director, Robert Hahn—who’s a fellow with the AEI—defended it, saying, “Climate science is a field in which reasonable experts can disagree.” (By contrast, on the day of the event, the Brookings Institution posted a scathing critique of Crichton’s book.)
During the question-and-answer period following his speech, Crichton drew an analogy between believers in global warming and Nazi eugenicists. “Auschwitz exists because of politicized science,” Crichton asserted, to gasps from some in the crowd. There was no acknowledgment that the AEI event was part of an attempt to do just that: politicize science. The audience at hand was certainly full of partisans. Listening attentively was Myron Ebell, a man recently censured by the British House of Commons for “unfounded and insulting criticism of Sir David King, the Government’s Chief Scientist.” Ebell is the global warming and international policy director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), which has received a whopping $1,380,000 from ExxonMobil. Sitting in the back of the room was Christopher Horner, the silver-haired counsel to the Cooler Heads Coalition who’s also a CEI senior fellow. Present also was Paul Driessen, a senior fellow with the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow ($252,000) and the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise ($40,000 in 2003). Saying he’s “heartened that ExxonMobil and a couple of other groups have stood up and said, ‘this is not science,’” Driessen, who is white, has made it his mission to portray Kyoto-style emissions regulations as an attack on people of color—his recent book is entitled Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death (see “Black Gold?”). Driessen has also written about the role that think tanks can play in helping corporations achieve their objectives. Such outlets “can provide research, present credible independent voices on a host of issues, indirectly influence opinion and political leaders, and promote responsible social and economic agendas,” he advised companies in a 2001 essay published in Capital PR News. “They have extensive networks among scholars, academics, scientists, journalists, community leaders and politicians…. You will be amazed at how much they do with so little.”
THIRTY YEARS AGO, the notion that corporations ought to sponsor think tanks that directly support their own political goals—rather than merely fund disinterested research—was far more controversial. But then, in 1977, an associate of the AEI (which was founded as a business association in 1943) came to industry’s rescue. In an essay published in the Wall Street Journal, the influential neoconservative Irving Kristol memorably counseled that “corporate philanthropy should not be, and cannot be, disinterested,” but should serve as a means “to shape or reshape the climate of public opinion.”
Kristol’s advice was heeded, and today many businesses give to public policy groups that support a laissez-faire, antiregulatory agenda. In its giving report, ExxonMobil says it supports public policy groups that are “dedicated to researching free market solutions to policy problems.” What the company doesn’t say is that beyond merely challenging the Kyoto Protocol or the McCain-Lieberman Climate Stewardship Act on economic grounds, many of these groups explicitly dispute the science of climate change. Generally eschewing peer-reviewed journals, these groups make their challenges in far less stringent arenas, such as the media and public forums.
Pressed on this point, spokeswoman Lauren Kerr says that “ExxonMobil has been quite transparent and vocal regarding the fact that we, as do multiple organizations and respected institutions and researchers, believe that the scientific evidence on greenhouse gas emissions remains inconclusive and that studies must continue.” She also hastens to point out that ExxonMobil generously supports university research programs—for example, the company plans to donate $100 million to Stanford University’s Global Climate and Energy Project. It even funds the hallowed National Academy of Sciences.
Nevertheless, no company appears to be working harder to support those who debunk global warming. “Many corporations have funded, you know, dribs and drabs here and there, but I would be surprised to learn that there was a bigger one than Exxon,” explains Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which, in 2000 and again in 2003, sued the government to stop the dissemination of a Clinton-era report showing the impact of climate change in the United States. Attorney Christopher Horner—whom you’ll recall from Crichton’s audience—was the lead attorney in both lawsuits and is paid a $60,000 annual consulting fee by the CEI. In 2002, ExxonMobil explicitly earmarked $60,000 for the CEI for “legal activities.”
Ebell denies the sum indicates any sort of quid pro quo. He’s proud of ExxonMobil’s funding and wishes “we could attract more from other companies.” He stresses that the CEI solicits funding for general project areas rather than to carry out specific sponsor requests, but admits being steered (as other public policy groups are steered) to the topics that garner grant money. While noting that the CEI is “adamantly opposed” to the Endangered Species Act, Ebell adds that “we are only working on it in a limited way now, because we couldn’t attract funding.”
EXXONMOBIL’S FUNDING OF THINK TANKS hardly compares with its lobbying expenditures—$55 million over the past six years, according to the Center for Public Integrity. And neither figure takes much of a bite out of the company’s net earnings—$25.3 billion last year. Nevertheless, “ideas lobbying” can have a powerful public policy effect.
Consider attacks by friends of ExxonMobil on the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA). A landmark international study that combined the work of some 300 scientists, the ACIA, released last November, had been four years in the making. Commissioned by the Arctic Council, an intergovernmental forum that includes the United States, the study warned that the Arctic is warming “at almost twice the rate as that of the rest of the world,” and that early impacts of climate change, such as melting sea ice and glaciers, are already apparent and “will drastically shrink marine habitat for polar bears, ice-inhabiting seals, and some seabirds, pushing some species toward extinction.” Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) was so troubled by the report that he called for a Senate hearing.
Industry defenders shelled the study, and, with a dearth of science to marshal to their side, used opinion pieces and press releases instead. “Polar Bear Scare on Thin Ice,” blared FoxNews.com columnist Steven Milloy, an adjunct scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute ($75,000 from ExxonMobil) who also publishes the website JunkScience.com. Two days later the conservative Washington Times published the same column. Neither outlet disclosed that Milloy, who debunks global warming concerns regularly, runs two organizations that receive money from ExxonMobil. Between 2000 and 2003, the company gave $40,000 to the Advancement of Sound Science Center, which is registered to Milloy’s home address in Potomac, Maryland, according to IRS documents. ExxonMobil gave another $50,000 to the Free Enterprise Action Institute—also registered to Milloy’s residence. Under the auspices of the intriguingly like-named Free Enterprise Education Institute, Milloy publishes CSRWatch.com, a site that attacks the corporate social responsibility movement. Milloy did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this article; a Fox News spokesman stated that Milloy is “affiliated with several not-for-profit groups that possibly may receive funding from Exxon, but he certainly does not receive funding directly from Exxon.”
Setting aside any questions about Milloy’s journalistic ethics, on a purely scientific level, his attack on the ACIA was comically inept. Citing a single graph from a 146-page overview of a 1,200-plus- page, fully referenced report, Milloy claimed that the document “pretty much debunks itself” because high Arctic temperatures “around 1940” suggest that the current temperature spike could be chalked up to natural variability. “In order to take that position,” counters Harvard biological oceanographer James McCarthy, a lead author of the report, “you have to refute what are hundreds of scientific papers that reconstruct various pieces of this climate puzzle.”
Nevertheless, Milloy’s charges were quickly echoed by other groups. TechCentralStation.com published a letter to Senator McCain from 11 “climate experts,” who asserted that recent Arctic warming was not at all unusual in comparison to “natural variability in centuries past.” Meanwhile, the conservative George C. Marshall Institute ($310,000) issued a press release asserting that the Arctic report was based on “unvalidated climate models and scenarios…that bear little resemblance to reality and how the future is likely to evolve.” In response, McCain said, “General Marshall was a great American. I think he might be very embarrassed to know that his name was being used in this disgraceful fashion.”
The day of McCain’s hearing, the Competitive Enterprise Institute put out its own press release, citing the aforementioned critiques as if they should be considered on a par with the massive, exhaustively reviewed Arctic report: “The Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, despite its recent release, has already generated analysis pointing out numerous flaws and distortions.” The Vancouver-based Fraser Institute ($60,000 from ExxonMobil in 2003) also weighed in, calling the Arctic warming report “an excellent example of the favoured scare technique of the anti-energy activists: pumping largely unjustifiable assumptions about the future into simplified computer models to conjure up a laundry list of scary projections.” In the same release, the Fraser Institute declared that “2004 has been one of the cooler years in recent history.” A month later the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization would pronounce 2004 to be “the fourth warmest year in the temperature record since 1861.”
Frank O’Donnell, of Clean Air Watch, likens ExxonMobil’s strategy to that of “a football quarterback who doesn’t want to throw to one receiver, but rather wants to spread it around to a number of different receivers.” In the case of the ACIA, this echo-chamber offense had the effect of creating an appearance of scientific controversy. Senator Inhofe—who received nearly $290,000 from oil and gas companies, including ExxonMobil, for his 2002 reelection campaign—prominently cited the Marshall Institute’s work in his own critique of the latest science.
TO BE SURE, that science wasn’t always as strong as it is today. And until fairly recently, virtually the entire fossil fuels industry—automakers, utilities, coal companies, even railroads—joined ExxonMobil in challenging it.
The concept of global warming didn’t enter the public consciousness until the 1980s. During a sweltering summer in 1988, pioneering NASA climatologist James Hansen famously told Congress he believed with “99 percent confidence” that a long-term warming trend had begun, probably caused by the greenhouse effect. As environmentalists and some in Congress began to call for reduced emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, industry fought back.
In 1989, the petroleum and automotive industries and the National Association of Manufacturers forged the Global Climate Coalition to oppose mandatory actions to address global warming. Exxon—later ExxonMobil—was a leading member, as was the American Petroleum Institute, a trade organization for which Exxon’s CEO Lee Raymond has twice served as chairman. “They were a strong player in the Global Climate Coalition, as were many other sectors of the economy,” says former GCC spokesman Frank Maisano.
Drawing upon a cadre of skeptic scientists, during the early and mid-1990s the GCC sought to emphasize the uncertainties of climate science and attack the mathematical models used to project future climate changes. The group and its proxies challenged the need for action on global warming, called the phenomenon natural rather than man-made, and even flatly denied it was happening. Maisano insists, how ever, that after the Kyoto Protocol emerged in 1997, the group focused its energies on making economic arguments rather than challenging science.
Even as industry mobilized the forces of skepticism, however, an international scientific collaboration emerged that would change the terms of the debate forever. In 1988, under the auspices of the United Nations, scientists and government officials inaugurated the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a global scientific body that would eventually pull together thousands of experts to evaluate the issue, becoming the gold standard of climate science. In the IPCC’s first assessment report, published in 1990, the science remained open to reasonable doubt. But the IPCC’s second report, completed in 1995, concluded that amid purely natural factors shaping the climate, humankind’s distinctive fingerprint was evident. And with the release of the IPCC’s third assessment in 2001, a strong consensus had emerged: Notwithstanding some role for natural variability, human-created greenhouse gas emissions could, if left unchecked, ramp up global average temperatures by as much as 5.8 degrees Celsius (or 10.4 degrees Fahrenheit) by the year 2100. “Consensus as strong as the one that has developed around this topic is rare in science,” wrote Science Editor-in-Chief Donald Kennedy in a 2001 editorial.
Even some leading corporations that had previously supported “skepticism” were converted. Major oil companies like Shell, Texaco, and British Petroleum, as well as automobile manufacturers like Ford, General Motors, and DaimlerChrysler, abandoned the Global Climate Coalition, which itself became inactive after 2002.
Yet some forces of denial—most notably ExxonMobil and the American Petroleum Institute, of which ExxonMobil is a leading member—remained recalcitrant. In 1998, the New York Times exposed an API memo outlining a strategy to invest millions to “maximize the impact of scientific views consistent with ours with Congress, the media and other key audiences.” The document stated: “Victory will be achieved when…recognition of uncertainty becomes part of the ‘conventional wisdom.’” It’s hard to resist a comparison with a famous Brown and Williamson tobacco company memo from the late 1960s, which observed: “Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.”
Though ExxonMobil’s Lauren Kerr says she doesn’t know the “status of this reported plan” and an API spokesman says he could “find no evidence” that it was ever implemented, many of the players involved have continued to dispute mainstream climate science with funding from ExxonMobil. According to the memo, Jeffrey Salmon, then executive director of the George C. Marshall Institute, helped develop the plan, as did Steven Milloy, now a FoxNews.com columnist. Other participants included David Rothbard of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow ($252,000) and the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Myron Ebell, then with Frontiers of Freedom ($612,000). Ebell says the plan was never implemented because “the envisioned funding never got close to being realized.”
Another contributor was ExxonMobil lobbyist Randy Randol, who recently retired but who seems to have plied his trade effectively during George W. Bush’s first term. Less than a month after Bush took office, Randol sent a memo to the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ). The memo denounced the then chairman of the IPCC, Robert Watson, a leading atmospheric scientist, as someone “handpicked by Al Gore” whose real objective was to “get media coverage for his views.” (When the memo’s existence was reported, ExxonMobil took the curious position that Randol did forward it to the CEQ, but neither he nor anyone else at the company wrote it.) “Can Watson be replaced now at the request of the U.S.?” the memo asked. It went on to single out other Clinton administration climate experts, asking whether they had been “removed from their positions of influence.”
It was, in short, an industry hit list of climate scientists attached to the U.S. government. A year later the Bush administration blocked Watson’s reelection to the post of IPCC chairman.
PERHAPS THE MOST SURPRISING aspect of ExxonMobil’s support of the think tanks waging the disinformation campaign is that, given its close ties to the Bush administration (which cited “incomplete” science as justification to pull out of the Kyoto Protocol), it’s hard to see why the company would even need such pseudo-scientific cover. In 1998, Dick Cheney, then CEO of Halliburton, signed a letter to the Clinton administration challenging its approach to Kyoto. Less than three weeks after Cheney assumed the vice presidency, he met with ExxonMobil CEO Lee Raymond for a half-hour. Officials of the corporation also met with Cheney’s notorious energy task force.
ExxonMobil’s connections to the current administration go much deeper, filtering down into lower but crucially important tiers of policymaking. For example, the memo forwarded by Randy Randol recommended that Harlan Watson, a Republican staffer with the House Committee on Science, help the United States’ diplomatic efforts regarding climate change. Watson is now the State Department’s “senior climate negotiator.” Similarly, the Bush administration appointed former American Petroleum Institute attorney Philip Cooney—who headed the institute’s “climate team” and opposed the Kyoto Protocol—as chief of staff of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. In June 2003 the New York Times reported that the CEQ had watered down an Environmental Protection Agency report’s discussion of climate change, leading EPA scientists to charge that the document “no longer accurately represents scientific consensus.”
Then there are the sisters Dobriansky. Larisa Dobriansky, currently the deputy assistant secretary for national energy policy at the Department of Energy—in which capacity she’s charged with managing the department’s Office of Climate Change Policy—was previously a lobbyist with the firm Akin Gump, where she worked on climate change for ExxonMobil. Her sister, Paula Dobriansky, currently serves as undersecretary for global affairs in the State Department. In that role, Paula Dobriansky recently headed the U.S. delegation to a United Nations meeting on the Kyoto Protocol in Buenos Aires, where she charged that “science tells us that we cannot say with any certainty what constitutes a dangerous level of warming, and therefore what level must be avoided.”
Indeed, the rhetoric of scientific uncertainty has been Paula Dobriansky’s stock-in-trade. At a November 2003 panel sponsored by the AEI, she declared, “the extent to which the man-made portion of greenhouse gases is causing temperatures to rise is still unknown, as are the long-term effects of this trend. Predicting what will happen 50 or 100 years in the future is difficult.”
Given Paula Dobriansky’s approach to climate change, it will come as little surprise that memos uncovered by Greenpeace show that in 2001, within months of being confirmed by the Senate, Dobriansky met with ExxonMobil lobbyist Randy Randol and the Global Climate Coalition. For her meeting with the latter group, one of Dobriansky’s prepared talking points was “POTUS [President Bush in Secret Service parlance] rejected Kyoto, in part, based on input from you.” The documents also show that Dobriansky met with ExxonMobil executives to discuss climate policy just days after September 11, 2001. A State Department official confirmed that these meetings took place, but adds that Dobriansky “meets with pro-Kyoto groups as well.”
RECENTLY, NAOMI ORESKES, a science historian at the University of California at San Diego, reviewed nearly a thousand scientific papers on global climate change published between 1993 and 2003, and was unable to find one that explicitly disagreed with the consensus view that humans are contributing to the phenomenon. As Oreskes hastens to add, that doesn’t mean no such studies exist. But given the size of her sample, about 10 percent of the papers published on the topic, she thinks it’s safe to assume that the number is “vanishingly small.”
What do the conservative think tanks do when faced with such an obstacle? For one, they tend to puff up debates far beyond their scientific significance. A case study is the “controversy” over the work of University of Virginia climate scientist Michael Mann. Drawing upon the work of several independent teams of scientists, including Mann and his colleagues, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2001 report asserted that “the increase in temperature in the 20th century is likely to have been the largest of any century during the past 1,000 years.” This statement was followed by a graph, based on one of the Mann group’s studies, showing relatively modest temperature variations over the past thousand years and a dramatic spike upward in the 20th century. Due to its appearance, this famous graph has been dubbed the “hockey stick.”
During his talk at the AEI, Michael Crichton attacked the “hockey stick,” calling it “sloppy work.” He’s hardly the first to have done so. A whole cottage industry has sprung up to criticize this analysis, much of it linked to ExxonMobil-funded think tanks. At a recent congressional briefing sponsored by the Marshall Institute, Senator Inhofe described Mann’s work as the “primary sci- entific data” on which the IPCC’s 2001 conclusions were based. That is simply incorrect. Mann points out that he’s hardly the only scientist to produce a “hockey stick” graph—other teams of scientists have come up with similar reconstructions of past temperatures. And even if Mann’s work and all of the other studies that served as the basis for the IPCC’s statement on the temperature record are wrong, that would not in any way invalidate the conclusion that humans are currently causing rising temperatures. “There’s a whole independent line of evidence, some of it very basic physics,” explains Mann.
Nevertheless, the ideological allies of ExxonMobil virulently attack Mann’s work, as if discrediting him would somehow put global warming concerns to rest. This idée fixe seems to have begun with Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Both have been “senior scientists” with the Marshall Institute. Soon serves as “science director” to TechCentralStation.com, is an adjunct scholar with Frontiers of Freedom, and wrote (with Baliunas) the Fraser Institute’s pamphlet “Global Warming: A Guide to the Science.” Baliunas, meanwhile, is “enviro-sci host” of TechCentral, and is on science advisory boards of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow and the Annapolis Center for Science-based Public Policy ($427,500 from ExxonMobil), and has given speeches on climate science before the AEI and the Heritage Foundation ($340,000). (Neither Soon nor Baliunas would provide comment for this article.)
In 2003, Soon and Baliunas published an article, partly funded by the American Petroleum Institute, in a small journal called Climate Research. Presenting a review of existing literature rather than new research, the two concluded “the 20th century is probably not the warmest nor a uniquely extreme climatic period of the last millennium.” They had, in effect, challenged both Mann and the IPCC, and in so doing presented global warming skeptics with a cause to rally around. Another version of the paper was quickly published with three additional authors: David Legates of the University of Delaware, and longtime skeptics Craig and Sherwood Idso of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change in Tempe, Arizona. All have ExxonMobil connections: the Idsos received $40,000 from ExxonMobil for their center in the year the study was published, while Legates is an adjunct scholar at the Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis (which got $205,000 between 2000 and 2003).
Calling the paper “a powerful new work of science” that would “shiver the timbers of the adrift Chicken Little crowd,” Senator Inhofe devoted half of a Senate hearing to it, bringing in both Soon and Legates to testify against Mann. The day before, Hans Von Storch, the editor-in-chief of Climate Research—where the Soon and Baliunas paper originally appeared—resigned to protest deficiencies in the review process that led to its publication; two editors soon joined him. Von Storch later told the Chronicle of Higher Education that climate science skeptics “had identified Climate Research as a journal where some editors were not as rigorous in the review process as is otherwise common.” Meanwhile, Mann and 12 other leading climate scientists wrote a blistering critique of Soon and Baliunas’ paper in the American Geophysical Union publication Eos, noting, among other flaws, that they’d used historic precipitation records to reconstruct past temperatures—an approach Mann told Congress was “fundamentally unsound.”
ON FEBRUARY 16, 2005, 140 nations celebrated the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol. In the weeks prior, as the friends of ExxonMobil scrambled to inoculate the Bush administration from the bad press that would inevitably result from America’s failure to sign this international agreement to curb global warming, a congressional briefing was organized. Held in a somber, wood-paneled Senate hearing room, the event could not help but have an air of authority. Like the Crichton talk, however, it was hardly objective. Sponsored by the George C. Marshall Institute and the Cooler Heads Coalition, the briefing’s panel of experts featured Myron Ebell, attorney Christopher Horner, and Marshall’s CEO William O’Keefe, formerly an executive at the American Petroleum Institute and chairman of the Global Climate Coalition.
But it was the emcee, Senator Inhofe, who best represented the spirit of the event. Stating that Crichton’s novel should be “required reading,” the ruddy-faced senator asked for a show of hands to see who had finished it. He attacked the “hockey stick” graph and damned the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment for having “no footnotes or citations,” as indeed the ACIA “overview” report—designed to be a “plain language synthesis” of the fully referenced scientific report—does not. But never mind, Inhofe had done his own research. He whipped out a 1974 issue of Time magazine and, in mocking tones, read from a 30-year-old article that expressed concerns over cooler global temperatures. In a folksy summation, Inhofe again called the notion that humans are causing global warming “a hoax,” and said that those who believe otherwise are “hysterical people, they love hysteria. We’re dealing with religion.” Having thus dismissed some 2,000 scientists, their data sets and temperature records, and evidence of melting glaciers, shrinking islands, and vanishing habitats as so many hysterics, totems, and myths, Inhofe vowed to stick up for the truth, as he sees it, and “fight the battle out on the Senate floor.”
Seated in the front row of the audience, former ExxonMobil lobbyist Randy Randol looked on approvingly.
Discussion
In his article, Some like it hot, Chris Mooney outlines several of the factors that have influenced the climate change debate over the past decades, including the influence of conservative think tanks and lobbying efforts by several industries. He claims that conservative think tanks have spread disinformation campaigns regarding climate change among the public, by making skeptic propaganda appear like professional journalism. Through various connections, think tanks are to have provided ammunition for conservative policymakers. Most of them were said to have been funded by corporations such as ExxonMobil, which supported the Cooler Heads Coalition, the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, and the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, among others. Concrete, as opposed to indirect lobbying by the industry was done by channeling monies directly to government officials such as Senator Inhofe. ExxonMobil ties to the Bush Administration, for example were established through lobbyist Randy Randol or Harlan Watson, the senior negotiator of the White House Committee on Science. Further associates include Philip Cooney, Chief of Staff of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, and Larisa Dobriansky, Deputy Assistant Secretary for National Energy Policy at the Department of Energy. More general lobbying was conducted by bodies such as the Global Climate Coalition, an association of petroleum and automobile corporations and the National Association of Manufacturers. Its goal was to spread the notion that there was a great degree of uncertainty involved in the climate change debate and that professional scientists could not be relied upon. These notions successfully reached the public and the result of the entire lobbying process was clearly evident in the conduct of the administration on global environmental affairs.
Mooney, Chris. "Some like it hot." Mother Jones (2005):
WHEN NOVELIST MICHAEL CRICHTON took the stage before a lunchtime crowd in Washington, D.C., one Friday in late January, the event might have seemed, at first, like one more unremarkable appearance by a popular author with a book to sell. Indeed, Crichton had just such a book, his new thriller, State of Fear. But the content of the novel, the setting of the talk, and the audience who came to listen transformed the Crichton event into something closer to a hybrid of campaign rally and undergraduate seminar. State of Fear is an anti-environmentalist page-turner in which shady ecoterrorists plot catastrophic weather disruptions to stoke unfounded fears about global climate change. However fantastical the book’s story line, its author was received as an expert by the sharply dressed policy wonks crowding into the plush Wohlstetter Conference Center of the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (AEI). In his introduction, AEI president and former Reagan budget official Christopher DeMuth praised the author for conveying “serious science with a sense of drama to a popular audience.” The title of the lecture was “Science Policy in the 21st Century.”
Crichton is an M.D. with a basketball player’s stature (he’s 6 feet 9 inches), and his bearing and his background exude authority. He describes himself as “contrarian by nature,” but his words on this day did not run counter to the sentiment of his AEI listeners. “I spent the last several years exploring environmental issues, particularly global warming,” Crichton told them solemnly. “I’ve been deeply disturbed by what I found, largely because the evidence for so many environmental issues is, from my point of view, shockingy flawed and unsubstantiated.” Crichton then turned to bashing a 1998 study of historic temperature change that has been repeatedly singled out for attack by conservatives.
There is overwhelming scientific consensus that greenhouse gases emitted by human activity are causing global average temperatures to rise. Conservative think tanks are trying to undermine this conclusion with a disinformation campaign employing “reports” designed to look like a counterbalance to peer-reviewed studies, skeptic propaganda masquerading as journalism, and events like the AEI luncheon that Crichton addressed. The think tanks provide both intellectual cover for those who reject what the best science currently tells us, and ammunition for conservative policymakers like Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee, who calls global warming “a hoax.”
This concerted effort reflects the shared convictions of free-market, and thus antiregulatory, conservatives. But there’s another factor at play. In addition to being supported by like-minded individuals and ideologically sympathetic foundations, these groups are funded by ExxonMobil, the world’s largest oil company. Mother Jones has tallied some 40 ExxonMobil-funded organizations that either have sought to undermine mainstream scientific findings on global climate change or have maintained affiliations with a small group of “skeptic” scientists who continue to do so. Beyond think tanks, the count also includes quasi-journalistic outlets like Tech CentralStation.com (a website providing “news, analysis, research, and commentary” that received $95,000 from ExxonMobil in 2003), a FoxNews.com columnist, and even religious and civil rights groups. In total, these organizations received more than $8 million between 2000 and 2003 (the last year for which records are available; all figures below are for that range unless otherwise noted). ExxonMobil chairman and CEO Lee Raymond serves as vice chairman of the board of trustees for the AEI, which received $960,000 in funding from ExxonMobil. The AEI-Brookings Institution Joint Center for Regulatory Studies, which officially hosted Crichton, received another $55,000. When asked about the event, the center’s executive director, Robert Hahn—who’s a fellow with the AEI—defended it, saying, “Climate science is a field in which reasonable experts can disagree.” (By contrast, on the day of the event, the Brookings Institution posted a scathing critique of Crichton’s book.)
During the question-and-answer period following his speech, Crichton drew an analogy between believers in global warming and Nazi eugenicists. “Auschwitz exists because of politicized science,” Crichton asserted, to gasps from some in the crowd. There was no acknowledgment that the AEI event was part of an attempt to do just that: politicize science. The audience at hand was certainly full of partisans. Listening attentively was Myron Ebell, a man recently censured by the British House of Commons for “unfounded and insulting criticism of Sir David King, the Government’s Chief Scientist.” Ebell is the global warming and international policy director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), which has received a whopping $1,380,000 from ExxonMobil. Sitting in the back of the room was Christopher Horner, the silver-haired counsel to the Cooler Heads Coalition who’s also a CEI senior fellow. Present also was Paul Driessen, a senior fellow with the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow ($252,000) and the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise ($40,000 in 2003). Saying he’s “heartened that ExxonMobil and a couple of other groups have stood up and said, ‘this is not science,’” Driessen, who is white, has made it his mission to portray Kyoto-style emissions regulations as an attack on people of color—his recent book is entitled Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death (see “Black Gold?”). Driessen has also written about the role that think tanks can play in helping corporations achieve their objectives. Such outlets “can provide research, present credible independent voices on a host of issues, indirectly influence opinion and political leaders, and promote responsible social and economic agendas,” he advised companies in a 2001 essay published in Capital PR News. “They have extensive networks among scholars, academics, scientists, journalists, community leaders and politicians…. You will be amazed at how much they do with so little.”
THIRTY YEARS AGO, the notion that corporations ought to sponsor think tanks that directly support their own political goals—rather than merely fund disinterested research—was far more controversial. But then, in 1977, an associate of the AEI (which was founded as a business association in 1943) came to industry’s rescue. In an essay published in the Wall Street Journal, the influential neoconservative Irving Kristol memorably counseled that “corporate philanthropy should not be, and cannot be, disinterested,” but should serve as a means “to shape or reshape the climate of public opinion.”
Kristol’s advice was heeded, and today many businesses give to public policy groups that support a laissez-faire, antiregulatory agenda. In its giving report, ExxonMobil says it supports public policy groups that are “dedicated to researching free market solutions to policy problems.” What the company doesn’t say is that beyond merely challenging the Kyoto Protocol or the McCain-Lieberman Climate Stewardship Act on economic grounds, many of these groups explicitly dispute the science of climate change. Generally eschewing peer-reviewed journals, these groups make their challenges in far less stringent arenas, such as the media and public forums.
Pressed on this point, spokeswoman Lauren Kerr says that “ExxonMobil has been quite transparent and vocal regarding the fact that we, as do multiple organizations and respected institutions and researchers, believe that the scientific evidence on greenhouse gas emissions remains inconclusive and that studies must continue.” She also hastens to point out that ExxonMobil generously supports university research programs—for example, the company plans to donate $100 million to Stanford University’s Global Climate and Energy Project. It even funds the hallowed National Academy of Sciences.
Nevertheless, no company appears to be working harder to support those who debunk global warming. “Many corporations have funded, you know, dribs and drabs here and there, but I would be surprised to learn that there was a bigger one than Exxon,” explains Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which, in 2000 and again in 2003, sued the government to stop the dissemination of a Clinton-era report showing the impact of climate change in the United States. Attorney Christopher Horner—whom you’ll recall from Crichton’s audience—was the lead attorney in both lawsuits and is paid a $60,000 annual consulting fee by the CEI. In 2002, ExxonMobil explicitly earmarked $60,000 for the CEI for “legal activities.”
Ebell denies the sum indicates any sort of quid pro quo. He’s proud of ExxonMobil’s funding and wishes “we could attract more from other companies.” He stresses that the CEI solicits funding for general project areas rather than to carry out specific sponsor requests, but admits being steered (as other public policy groups are steered) to the topics that garner grant money. While noting that the CEI is “adamantly opposed” to the Endangered Species Act, Ebell adds that “we are only working on it in a limited way now, because we couldn’t attract funding.”
EXXONMOBIL’S FUNDING OF THINK TANKS hardly compares with its lobbying expenditures—$55 million over the past six years, according to the Center for Public Integrity. And neither figure takes much of a bite out of the company’s net earnings—$25.3 billion last year. Nevertheless, “ideas lobbying” can have a powerful public policy effect.
Consider attacks by friends of ExxonMobil on the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA). A landmark international study that combined the work of some 300 scientists, the ACIA, released last November, had been four years in the making. Commissioned by the Arctic Council, an intergovernmental forum that includes the United States, the study warned that the Arctic is warming “at almost twice the rate as that of the rest of the world,” and that early impacts of climate change, such as melting sea ice and glaciers, are already apparent and “will drastically shrink marine habitat for polar bears, ice-inhabiting seals, and some seabirds, pushing some species toward extinction.” Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) was so troubled by the report that he called for a Senate hearing.
Industry defenders shelled the study, and, with a dearth of science to marshal to their side, used opinion pieces and press releases instead. “Polar Bear Scare on Thin Ice,” blared FoxNews.com columnist Steven Milloy, an adjunct scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute ($75,000 from ExxonMobil) who also publishes the website JunkScience.com. Two days later the conservative Washington Times published the same column. Neither outlet disclosed that Milloy, who debunks global warming concerns regularly, runs two organizations that receive money from ExxonMobil. Between 2000 and 2003, the company gave $40,000 to the Advancement of Sound Science Center, which is registered to Milloy’s home address in Potomac, Maryland, according to IRS documents. ExxonMobil gave another $50,000 to the Free Enterprise Action Institute—also registered to Milloy’s residence. Under the auspices of the intriguingly like-named Free Enterprise Education Institute, Milloy publishes CSRWatch.com, a site that attacks the corporate social responsibility movement. Milloy did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this article; a Fox News spokesman stated that Milloy is “affiliated with several not-for-profit groups that possibly may receive funding from Exxon, but he certainly does not receive funding directly from Exxon.”
Setting aside any questions about Milloy’s journalistic ethics, on a purely scientific level, his attack on the ACIA was comically inept. Citing a single graph from a 146-page overview of a 1,200-plus- page, fully referenced report, Milloy claimed that the document “pretty much debunks itself” because high Arctic temperatures “around 1940” suggest that the current temperature spike could be chalked up to natural variability. “In order to take that position,” counters Harvard biological oceanographer James McCarthy, a lead author of the report, “you have to refute what are hundreds of scientific papers that reconstruct various pieces of this climate puzzle.”
Nevertheless, Milloy’s charges were quickly echoed by other groups. TechCentralStation.com published a letter to Senator McCain from 11 “climate experts,” who asserted that recent Arctic warming was not at all unusual in comparison to “natural variability in centuries past.” Meanwhile, the conservative George C. Marshall Institute ($310,000) issued a press release asserting that the Arctic report was based on “unvalidated climate models and scenarios…that bear little resemblance to reality and how the future is likely to evolve.” In response, McCain said, “General Marshall was a great American. I think he might be very embarrassed to know that his name was being used in this disgraceful fashion.”
The day of McCain’s hearing, the Competitive Enterprise Institute put out its own press release, citing the aforementioned critiques as if they should be considered on a par with the massive, exhaustively reviewed Arctic report: “The Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, despite its recent release, has already generated analysis pointing out numerous flaws and distortions.” The Vancouver-based Fraser Institute ($60,000 from ExxonMobil in 2003) also weighed in, calling the Arctic warming report “an excellent example of the favoured scare technique of the anti-energy activists: pumping largely unjustifiable assumptions about the future into simplified computer models to conjure up a laundry list of scary projections.” In the same release, the Fraser Institute declared that “2004 has been one of the cooler years in recent history.” A month later the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization would pronounce 2004 to be “the fourth warmest year in the temperature record since 1861.”
Frank O’Donnell, of Clean Air Watch, likens ExxonMobil’s strategy to that of “a football quarterback who doesn’t want to throw to one receiver, but rather wants to spread it around to a number of different receivers.” In the case of the ACIA, this echo-chamber offense had the effect of creating an appearance of scientific controversy. Senator Inhofe—who received nearly $290,000 from oil and gas companies, including ExxonMobil, for his 2002 reelection campaign—prominently cited the Marshall Institute’s work in his own critique of the latest science.
TO BE SURE, that science wasn’t always as strong as it is today. And until fairly recently, virtually the entire fossil fuels industry—automakers, utilities, coal companies, even railroads—joined ExxonMobil in challenging it.
The concept of global warming didn’t enter the public consciousness until the 1980s. During a sweltering summer in 1988, pioneering NASA climatologist James Hansen famously told Congress he believed with “99 percent confidence” that a long-term warming trend had begun, probably caused by the greenhouse effect. As environmentalists and some in Congress began to call for reduced emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, industry fought back.
In 1989, the petroleum and automotive industries and the National Association of Manufacturers forged the Global Climate Coalition to oppose mandatory actions to address global warming. Exxon—later ExxonMobil—was a leading member, as was the American Petroleum Institute, a trade organization for which Exxon’s CEO Lee Raymond has twice served as chairman. “They were a strong player in the Global Climate Coalition, as were many other sectors of the economy,” says former GCC spokesman Frank Maisano.
Drawing upon a cadre of skeptic scientists, during the early and mid-1990s the GCC sought to emphasize the uncertainties of climate science and attack the mathematical models used to project future climate changes. The group and its proxies challenged the need for action on global warming, called the phenomenon natural rather than man-made, and even flatly denied it was happening. Maisano insists, how ever, that after the Kyoto Protocol emerged in 1997, the group focused its energies on making economic arguments rather than challenging science.
Even as industry mobilized the forces of skepticism, however, an international scientific collaboration emerged that would change the terms of the debate forever. In 1988, under the auspices of the United Nations, scientists and government officials inaugurated the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a global scientific body that would eventually pull together thousands of experts to evaluate the issue, becoming the gold standard of climate science. In the IPCC’s first assessment report, published in 1990, the science remained open to reasonable doubt. But the IPCC’s second report, completed in 1995, concluded that amid purely natural factors shaping the climate, humankind’s distinctive fingerprint was evident. And with the release of the IPCC’s third assessment in 2001, a strong consensus had emerged: Notwithstanding some role for natural variability, human-created greenhouse gas emissions could, if left unchecked, ramp up global average temperatures by as much as 5.8 degrees Celsius (or 10.4 degrees Fahrenheit) by the year 2100. “Consensus as strong as the one that has developed around this topic is rare in science,” wrote Science Editor-in-Chief Donald Kennedy in a 2001 editorial.
Even some leading corporations that had previously supported “skepticism” were converted. Major oil companies like Shell, Texaco, and British Petroleum, as well as automobile manufacturers like Ford, General Motors, and DaimlerChrysler, abandoned the Global Climate Coalition, which itself became inactive after 2002.
Yet some forces of denial—most notably ExxonMobil and the American Petroleum Institute, of which ExxonMobil is a leading member—remained recalcitrant. In 1998, the New York Times exposed an API memo outlining a strategy to invest millions to “maximize the impact of scientific views consistent with ours with Congress, the media and other key audiences.” The document stated: “Victory will be achieved when…recognition of uncertainty becomes part of the ‘conventional wisdom.’” It’s hard to resist a comparison with a famous Brown and Williamson tobacco company memo from the late 1960s, which observed: “Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.”
Though ExxonMobil’s Lauren Kerr says she doesn’t know the “status of this reported plan” and an API spokesman says he could “find no evidence” that it was ever implemented, many of the players involved have continued to dispute mainstream climate science with funding from ExxonMobil. According to the memo, Jeffrey Salmon, then executive director of the George C. Marshall Institute, helped develop the plan, as did Steven Milloy, now a FoxNews.com columnist. Other participants included David Rothbard of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow ($252,000) and the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Myron Ebell, then with Frontiers of Freedom ($612,000). Ebell says the plan was never implemented because “the envisioned funding never got close to being realized.”
Another contributor was ExxonMobil lobbyist Randy Randol, who recently retired but who seems to have plied his trade effectively during George W. Bush’s first term. Less than a month after Bush took office, Randol sent a memo to the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ). The memo denounced the then chairman of the IPCC, Robert Watson, a leading atmospheric scientist, as someone “handpicked by Al Gore” whose real objective was to “get media coverage for his views.” (When the memo’s existence was reported, ExxonMobil took the curious position that Randol did forward it to the CEQ, but neither he nor anyone else at the company wrote it.) “Can Watson be replaced now at the request of the U.S.?” the memo asked. It went on to single out other Clinton administration climate experts, asking whether they had been “removed from their positions of influence.”
It was, in short, an industry hit list of climate scientists attached to the U.S. government. A year later the Bush administration blocked Watson’s reelection to the post of IPCC chairman.
PERHAPS THE MOST SURPRISING aspect of ExxonMobil’s support of the think tanks waging the disinformation campaign is that, given its close ties to the Bush administration (which cited “incomplete” science as justification to pull out of the Kyoto Protocol), it’s hard to see why the company would even need such pseudo-scientific cover. In 1998, Dick Cheney, then CEO of Halliburton, signed a letter to the Clinton administration challenging its approach to Kyoto. Less than three weeks after Cheney assumed the vice presidency, he met with ExxonMobil CEO Lee Raymond for a half-hour. Officials of the corporation also met with Cheney’s notorious energy task force.
ExxonMobil’s connections to the current administration go much deeper, filtering down into lower but crucially important tiers of policymaking. For example, the memo forwarded by Randy Randol recommended that Harlan Watson, a Republican staffer with the House Committee on Science, help the United States’ diplomatic efforts regarding climate change. Watson is now the State Department’s “senior climate negotiator.” Similarly, the Bush administration appointed former American Petroleum Institute attorney Philip Cooney—who headed the institute’s “climate team” and opposed the Kyoto Protocol—as chief of staff of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. In June 2003 the New York Times reported that the CEQ had watered down an Environmental Protection Agency report’s discussion of climate change, leading EPA scientists to charge that the document “no longer accurately represents scientific consensus.”
Then there are the sisters Dobriansky. Larisa Dobriansky, currently the deputy assistant secretary for national energy policy at the Department of Energy—in which capacity she’s charged with managing the department’s Office of Climate Change Policy—was previously a lobbyist with the firm Akin Gump, where she worked on climate change for ExxonMobil. Her sister, Paula Dobriansky, currently serves as undersecretary for global affairs in the State Department. In that role, Paula Dobriansky recently headed the U.S. delegation to a United Nations meeting on the Kyoto Protocol in Buenos Aires, where she charged that “science tells us that we cannot say with any certainty what constitutes a dangerous level of warming, and therefore what level must be avoided.”
Indeed, the rhetoric of scientific uncertainty has been Paula Dobriansky’s stock-in-trade. At a November 2003 panel sponsored by the AEI, she declared, “the extent to which the man-made portion of greenhouse gases is causing temperatures to rise is still unknown, as are the long-term effects of this trend. Predicting what will happen 50 or 100 years in the future is difficult.”
Given Paula Dobriansky’s approach to climate change, it will come as little surprise that memos uncovered by Greenpeace show that in 2001, within months of being confirmed by the Senate, Dobriansky met with ExxonMobil lobbyist Randy Randol and the Global Climate Coalition. For her meeting with the latter group, one of Dobriansky’s prepared talking points was “POTUS [President Bush in Secret Service parlance] rejected Kyoto, in part, based on input from you.” The documents also show that Dobriansky met with ExxonMobil executives to discuss climate policy just days after September 11, 2001. A State Department official confirmed that these meetings took place, but adds that Dobriansky “meets with pro-Kyoto groups as well.”
RECENTLY, NAOMI ORESKES, a science historian at the University of California at San Diego, reviewed nearly a thousand scientific papers on global climate change published between 1993 and 2003, and was unable to find one that explicitly disagreed with the consensus view that humans are contributing to the phenomenon. As Oreskes hastens to add, that doesn’t mean no such studies exist. But given the size of her sample, about 10 percent of the papers published on the topic, she thinks it’s safe to assume that the number is “vanishingly small.”
What do the conservative think tanks do when faced with such an obstacle? For one, they tend to puff up debates far beyond their scientific significance. A case study is the “controversy” over the work of University of Virginia climate scientist Michael Mann. Drawing upon the work of several independent teams of scientists, including Mann and his colleagues, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2001 report asserted that “the increase in temperature in the 20th century is likely to have been the largest of any century during the past 1,000 years.” This statement was followed by a graph, based on one of the Mann group’s studies, showing relatively modest temperature variations over the past thousand years and a dramatic spike upward in the 20th century. Due to its appearance, this famous graph has been dubbed the “hockey stick.”
During his talk at the AEI, Michael Crichton attacked the “hockey stick,” calling it “sloppy work.” He’s hardly the first to have done so. A whole cottage industry has sprung up to criticize this analysis, much of it linked to ExxonMobil-funded think tanks. At a recent congressional briefing sponsored by the Marshall Institute, Senator Inhofe described Mann’s work as the “primary sci- entific data” on which the IPCC’s 2001 conclusions were based. That is simply incorrect. Mann points out that he’s hardly the only scientist to produce a “hockey stick” graph—other teams of scientists have come up with similar reconstructions of past temperatures. And even if Mann’s work and all of the other studies that served as the basis for the IPCC’s statement on the temperature record are wrong, that would not in any way invalidate the conclusion that humans are currently causing rising temperatures. “There’s a whole independent line of evidence, some of it very basic physics,” explains Mann.
Nevertheless, the ideological allies of ExxonMobil virulently attack Mann’s work, as if discrediting him would somehow put global warming concerns to rest. This idée fixe seems to have begun with Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Both have been “senior scientists” with the Marshall Institute. Soon serves as “science director” to TechCentralStation.com, is an adjunct scholar with Frontiers of Freedom, and wrote (with Baliunas) the Fraser Institute’s pamphlet “Global Warming: A Guide to the Science.” Baliunas, meanwhile, is “enviro-sci host” of TechCentral, and is on science advisory boards of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow and the Annapolis Center for Science-based Public Policy ($427,500 from ExxonMobil), and has given speeches on climate science before the AEI and the Heritage Foundation ($340,000). (Neither Soon nor Baliunas would provide comment for this article.)
In 2003, Soon and Baliunas published an article, partly funded by the American Petroleum Institute, in a small journal called Climate Research. Presenting a review of existing literature rather than new research, the two concluded “the 20th century is probably not the warmest nor a uniquely extreme climatic period of the last millennium.” They had, in effect, challenged both Mann and the IPCC, and in so doing presented global warming skeptics with a cause to rally around. Another version of the paper was quickly published with three additional authors: David Legates of the University of Delaware, and longtime skeptics Craig and Sherwood Idso of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change in Tempe, Arizona. All have ExxonMobil connections: the Idsos received $40,000 from ExxonMobil for their center in the year the study was published, while Legates is an adjunct scholar at the Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis (which got $205,000 between 2000 and 2003).
Calling the paper “a powerful new work of science” that would “shiver the timbers of the adrift Chicken Little crowd,” Senator Inhofe devoted half of a Senate hearing to it, bringing in both Soon and Legates to testify against Mann. The day before, Hans Von Storch, the editor-in-chief of Climate Research—where the Soon and Baliunas paper originally appeared—resigned to protest deficiencies in the review process that led to its publication; two editors soon joined him. Von Storch later told the Chronicle of Higher Education that climate science skeptics “had identified Climate Research as a journal where some editors were not as rigorous in the review process as is otherwise common.” Meanwhile, Mann and 12 other leading climate scientists wrote a blistering critique of Soon and Baliunas’ paper in the American Geophysical Union publication Eos, noting, among other flaws, that they’d used historic precipitation records to reconstruct past temperatures—an approach Mann told Congress was “fundamentally unsound.”
ON FEBRUARY 16, 2005, 140 nations celebrated the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol. In the weeks prior, as the friends of ExxonMobil scrambled to inoculate the Bush administration from the bad press that would inevitably result from America’s failure to sign this international agreement to curb global warming, a congressional briefing was organized. Held in a somber, wood-paneled Senate hearing room, the event could not help but have an air of authority. Like the Crichton talk, however, it was hardly objective. Sponsored by the George C. Marshall Institute and the Cooler Heads Coalition, the briefing’s panel of experts featured Myron Ebell, attorney Christopher Horner, and Marshall’s CEO William O’Keefe, formerly an executive at the American Petroleum Institute and chairman of the Global Climate Coalition.
But it was the emcee, Senator Inhofe, who best represented the spirit of the event. Stating that Crichton’s novel should be “required reading,” the ruddy-faced senator asked for a show of hands to see who had finished it. He attacked the “hockey stick” graph and damned the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment for having “no footnotes or citations,” as indeed the ACIA “overview” report—designed to be a “plain language synthesis” of the fully referenced scientific report—does not. But never mind, Inhofe had done his own research. He whipped out a 1974 issue of Time magazine and, in mocking tones, read from a 30-year-old article that expressed concerns over cooler global temperatures. In a folksy summation, Inhofe again called the notion that humans are causing global warming “a hoax,” and said that those who believe otherwise are “hysterical people, they love hysteria. We’re dealing with religion.” Having thus dismissed some 2,000 scientists, their data sets and temperature records, and evidence of melting glaciers, shrinking islands, and vanishing habitats as so many hysterics, totems, and myths, Inhofe vowed to stick up for the truth, as he sees it, and “fight the battle out on the Senate floor.”
Seated in the front row of the audience, former ExxonMobil lobbyist Randy Randol looked on approvingly.
Discussion
In his article, Some like it hot, Chris Mooney outlines several of the factors that have influenced the climate change debate over the past decades, including the influence of conservative think tanks and lobbying efforts by several industries. He claims that conservative think tanks have spread disinformation campaigns regarding climate change among the public, by making skeptic propaganda appear like professional journalism. Through various connections, think tanks are to have provided ammunition for conservative policymakers. Most of them were said to have been funded by corporations such as ExxonMobil, which supported the Cooler Heads Coalition, the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, and the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, among others. Concrete, as opposed to indirect lobbying by the industry was done by channeling monies directly to government officials such as Senator Inhofe. ExxonMobil ties to the Bush Administration, for example were established through lobbyist Randy Randol or Harlan Watson, the senior negotiator of the White House Committee on Science. Further associates include Philip Cooney, Chief of Staff of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, and Larisa Dobriansky, Deputy Assistant Secretary for National Energy Policy at the Department of Energy. More general lobbying was conducted by bodies such as the Global Climate Coalition, an association of petroleum and automobile corporations and the National Association of Manufacturers. Its goal was to spread the notion that there was a great degree of uncertainty involved in the climate change debate and that professional scientists could not be relied upon. These notions successfully reached the public and the result of the entire lobbying process was clearly evident in the conduct of the administration on global environmental affairs.
Mooney, Chris. "Some like it hot." Mother Jones (2005):
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