Like an adult who can’t come to grips with the notion that Santa Claus isn’t real, it must be tough to still deny the existence of global warming. After all, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change just declared with 90 percent certainty that greenhouse gases are largely responsible for heating the planet. The White House didn’t even try to deny or push back against the report. Al Gore’s slide show just won an Oscar. Even TV preacher Pat Robertson concedes that global warming in undeniable — and when it comes to modern science, Robertson isn’t exactly progressive.
So, what’s a group like the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) to do? You remember CEI — it’s the group funded by ExxonMobil to confuse Americans about the evidence on climate change. CEI backed into the comedic hall of fame last year when, in an effort to undercut the message of An Inconvenient Truth, the group aired minute-long commercials about the wonders of carbon dioxide. The tagline: “They call it pollution … we call it life.”
Having lost the debate, CEI is learning to adapt, in part by pretending to shift to the left. Brad Plumer explains.
Although there are still plenty of unabashed global-warming deniers out there…many skeptics are now coalescing around a more moderate-sounding approach. [The group’s director of energy and global warming policy, Myron Ebell] insists that neither he nor his colleagues dispute the fact of global warming as they once did. “We try to react to the scientific research that comes out–and we’ve adjusted our political rhetoric as well,” he says. And adjust they have, developing a new line that goes something like this: Sure, we’ll accept that global warming is occurring and humans bear some responsibility. But it’s hard to predict exactly how bad a warmer world will be. And the proposals for reducing emissions in the United States are all costly and rife with problems. And, even if they could work, we can’t stop climate change because it’s impossible to convince India and China to curb their rapidly growing emissions. And so on.
One tactic that lately seems to give deniers special pleasure is mounting their case against the global-warming consensus from the left. So you get the odd spectacle of Smith going before the Senate to denounce cap-and-trade–the widely endorsed idea that the government should set a national ceiling on carbon emissions and then allow companies to buy and sell pollution credits–on populist grounds. “The corporations we see baying for a cap-and-trade program are out to enrich themselves without thought for the poor,” he told Congress. (He even pointed out that–horror–Enron had once supported the idea.) Or you get conservative Senator James Inhofe referring to companies that would benefit from a cap-and-trade regime as “climate profiteers.” Or Paul Driessen–the author of Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death–saying things like, “It’s incredibly patronizing and colonialistic to tell Africa you can’t develop because we’re concerned about global warming,” while arguing that funding the fight against global warming “takes money away from spending on malaria.”
Yes, the ExxonMobil-funded conservative policy shop now feels justified lecturing others on colonialism and the plight of developing nations in Africa. You’re persuaded, aren’t you?
Of course, it’s just as bad on Capitol Hill, where only 13% of Republicans believe that global warming has been proven — a number that’s been going down, not up, as the evidence grows more overwhelming. And why is that? Jonathan Chait took a stab at explaining the depressing dynamic of why conservatives and their lawmakers resist.
The truth is more complicated — and more depressing: A small number of hard-core ideologues (some, but not all, industry shills) have led the thinking for the whole conservative movement.
Your typical conservative has little interest in the issue. Of course, neither does the average nonconservative. But we nonconservatives tend to defer to mainstream scientific wisdom. Conservatives defer to a tiny handful of renegade scientists who reject the overwhelming professional consensus.
National Review magazine, with its popular website, is a perfect example. It has a blog dedicated to casting doubt on global warming, or solutions to global warming, or anybody who advocates a solution. Its title is “Planet Gore.” The psychology at work here is pretty clear: Your average conservative may not know anything about climate science, but conservatives do know they hate Al Gore. So, hold up Gore as a hate figure and conservatives will let that dictate their thinking on the issue. […]
The phenomenon here is that a tiny number of influential conservative figures set the party line; dissenters are marginalized, and the rank and file go along with it. No doubt something like this happens on the Democratic side pretty often too. It’s just rare to find the phenomenon occurring in such a blatant way.
No, conservatives are just special this way.