Subject: Big Oil's Secret Plan to Block the Global Warming Treaty:
"New York Times-artikkel" (?) som forteller hvordan fossil-industrien
jobber for å
så tvil om den menneskeskapte drivhuseffekten:
http://www.uwsp.edu/geo/courses/geog100/globwarm-educ.htm
(Jeg har dog ikke kunnet finne artikkelen i NY. Times ennå)
Se også:
http://www.millennium-debate.org/gua7may.htm
(gjengitt under)
Karsten Johansen
7 May 1998
Experts with a price on their heads
The US oil industry is feeling the heat from international agreements to
reduce greenhouse gas emissions. According to a leaked report, Washington
lobbyists want to sign up scientists to challenge conventional theories on
global warming – and money won’t be a problem. Fred Pearce reports
It is a job opportunity you just might want to pass up. The US oil industry
wants to recruit a team of "independent scientists" to do battle against
climatologists on global warming, according to a plan leaked in the US last
week.
The boffins are to be deployed as part of a multi-million dollar offensive
to roll back decisions taken at last December’s Kyoto climate agreement
before a follow-up meeting scheduled to finalise its terms in Buenos Aires
in November. The plan includes training scientists to rubbish the scientific
consensus and setting up a scientific rival to the UN’s Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The plan is the brainchild of officials from the powerful American Petroleum
Institute (API) and US oil giants such as Exxon and Chevron. It is the
latest and biggest initiative from US corporations who want to scupper
international controls on burning fossil fuels.
The scheme has already sent ripples across the Atlantic. Late last week,
Greenpeace wrote to British-based BP and Shell. Both are members of the API
but have recently become converts to limiting emissions of greenhouse gases.
Greenpeace asked them to withdraw from the institute, as they have from
another American organisation opposing the Kyoto Protocol, the Global
Climate Coalition.
The eight-page Global Climate Science Communications Plan was drafted last
month by Joseph Walker, a public relations executive at the API. Its stated
goal is to change the US political climate so that "those promoting the
Kyoto treaty on the basis of extant science appear to be out of touch with
reality". Its first task would be to "identify, recruit and train a team of
five independent scientists to participate in media outreach" over the next
six months.
Currently saddled with a small group of ageing and over-exposed scientists,
the group says it wants to find "new faces…..who do not have a long history
of participation in the climate change debate". These media-trained
scientists will brief science writers, contribute "a steady stream of
columns and letters to the editor", appear regularly on radio talk shows and
organise university campus "debates" on climate science.
Some of this is standard PR practice. The Global Climate Coalition, for
instance, has for several years maintained a list of scientists that it
briefs to write articles and letters to the media. But the latest initiative
is distinguished by its size, its budget and its determination to deploy
apparently "independent" scientists. There is no suggestion that they would
declare their links when appearing in the media.
The budget for this propaganda team until next November is $600,000. While a
substantial sum to "run" a small group of scientists, the figure is small
beer compared to the budget for a another part of the plan—a proposal to
establish a full-scale "alternative" to the UN’s IPCC.
The IPCC is an umbrella group of some 2,000 climate scientists, whose work
is part-funded by the British Government through the Meteorological Office’s
Hadley Centre. But it will soon be a pauper compared to its proposed
industry-funded rival, which would cost $5 million over two years.
The new Global Climate Science Data Center would operate in Washington DC
under the cover of a "non-profit educational foundation". It would have an
advisory board of "20 respected climate scientists" but be "staffed with
professionals on loan from various companies and associations with a major
interest in the climate issue." It would fund research, provide "grants for
advocacy on climate science" and compile "a complete scientific critique of
the IPCC research and its conclusions."
The plan has yet to receive funding from US corporations. This week, the
API’s vice president William O’Keefe distanced the institute from the plan,
which he described as the result of an "informal brainstorming session". But
he said the institute opposed the Kyoto agreement and would "continue to be
active in the scientific and policy debate."
The initiative comes as the Clinton administration faces pressure from all
sides over its agreement in Kyoto to cut US emissions of greenhouse gases by
7 per cent in the next decade. European governments signed the protocol en
masse in New York last week, and called on the US to follow suit. But, in
keeping with a past Congressional resolution, Clinton promised that he will
not ask Congress to ratify the protocol until he gets commitments to limit
greenhouse gas emissions from developing nations such as China, which are
not covered by the agreement.
Despite their power in Congress, however, the industry lobbyists recognise
that they are losing the PR battle with the US people and the rest of the
world. The new plan to attack the scientific underpinning of the Kyoto
protocol represents a return to an old strategy that lobbyists ditched two
years ago after the administration’s chief climate negotiator Timothy Wirth
attacked them as "special interests bent on belittling, attacking and
obfuscating climate change science."
During the run-up to the Kyoto meeting last year, the Global Climate
Coalition, switched its attack to economic issues. It argued that controls
on emissions of greenhouse gases would cost American jobs and cause a 2–4
per cent downturn in economic growth.
But the new plan admits that this strategy has failed. The American public,
it says, "has been highly receptive to the Clinton Administration’s plans"
for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Moreover, "it has been difficult for
the US to oppose the treaty solely on economic grounds. It makes it too easy
for others to portray the US as putting preservation of its own lifestyle
above the greater concerns of mankind." The document continues, "if we can
show that science does not support the Kyoto treaty….this puts the US in a
stronger moral position and frees its negotiators from the need to make
concessions as a defence against perceived selfish economic concerns".
Will the new strategy work? Darren Goetze of the Union for Concerned
Scientists in the US says: "These companies….may find some more people, but
they won’t be from the top tier of climate scientists."
The man who leaked the plan, Phil Clapp, president of the National
Environmental Trust, takes a similar view. "If you go to climate
conferences, you swiftly realise that there simply aren’t the new faces to
do what the oil industry wants."
Meanwhile, independent scientists anxious to earn the industry’s shilling
should beware. They could find themselves chewed up and spat out by the
lobbyists. Take Thomas Karl of the federal National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration. In 1989, lobbyists lauded him for analysing areas of
disagreement between climate models. But by last year the prominent sceptic
Patrick Michaels was pillorying him for peddling "misleading climate hype"
when he reported an increase in heavy rainfall in the US at a time of floods
in California.
But some analysts believe that such abuse of scientists is the last
knockings of a failing cause. Clapp says that an increasing number of oil
companies think it is getting harder to fight the scientific consensus.
"Many accept there will be a control regime and would rather get inside the
tent to help shape it rather than staying outside, and eventually having to
accept something they have not been able to influence."
THE STRANGE WORLD OF THE SCEPTICS
It is hard to make sense of the greenhouse "sceptics", the small group of
scientists who deny that greenhouse gases are or will warm the planet.
Some say there is no warming. Others say there is, but it is natural, or
does not follow the pattern predicted by climate models. Yet others argue,
with erudition if little direct evidence, that the greenhouse effect is real
but that the atmosphere will automatically damp down any warming. Last year,
Danish researchers suggested that solar radiation is causing warming by
driving away from the Earth cosmic rays that could theoretically create
clouds in the atmosphere. The new-found confidence of the sceptics’ cause
was manifested in Britain recently with front-page treatment for the Danish
theory.
In the world of science, all the hot air has not changed anything much. None
of the sceptics has yet developed anything approaching a convincing case for
throwing out the detailed work of thousands of scientists that underpins the
need to cut emissions of greenhouse gases. But some of their science does
deserve further exploration. And the hijacking of their work by outside
interests, while it may bolster the bank balances of individuals, does not
help that cause.
The cosmic rays idea, for instance, is not helped by wild claims that it
somehow disproves the greenhouse theories—claims hawked round the media by
researchers from Cern, the international particle physics laboratory, who
are seeking funds for a large experiment to test the idea.
Of course, there are good sceptic scientists and bad practitioners in the
mainstream. And all must be judged by the science they do rather than the
company they keep. But the unprincipled politicisation and commercialisation
of the greenhouse debate is an unedifying process, bad for science and
ultimately bad for the sceptics’ cause.
GREENHOUSE SCIENCE AND THE SPICE GIRLS
Many of the people involved in the latest propaganda offensive against
climate science have a long track record of attempting to influence the
public debate on climate change. One key participant is Frederick Seitz, a
physicist and president of the National Academy of Sciences back in the
1960s. Today he chairs the George C Marshall Institute. Set up in 1984, its
prime work in recent years has been in opposing the greenhouse consensus.
Seitz also runs Access to Energy, a "pro-science, pro-technology, pro-free
enterprise" group based in Oregon. In this capacity, he hit the news last
month when he was a participant in a petition that went to the US Congress
and enraged his former employers at the National Academy of Sciences.
The petition denouncing the scientific consensus on climate change and
opposing the Kyoto Protocol was apparently signed by 15,000 scientists. It
was cited during a debate in the House of Senate as evidence that "the vast
majority" of scientists considered global warming an "exaggerated threat".
Yet the petition carried the signatures of very few climate scientists and
was littered with names unlikely to be genuine signatories let alone
scientists, including Perry Mason, John Grisham and a "biologist" in Boston
who signed the name of a Spice Girl.
This is hardly surprising since, as well as being mailed to scientists, the
petition has been open for signature on Seitz’s Access to Energy Web site.
Moreover the petition form was accompanied, both on the Web site and in
mailings, by an article from Seitz attacking climate scientists. This was
set up in a format and typeface virtually identical to papers in the
prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, though it had
never been submitted or published by the academy. The NAS last month put out
a formal disavowal of any involvement with the petition.
Other scientists who admit to receiving six-figure sums in consultancy fees
from industry lobbyists include Patrick Michaels, who combines a
professorship in environmental sciences at the University of Virginia with
running a consultancy devoted to helping out industrial clients. He
publishes a newsletter, World Climate Report, largely financed by the US
coal industry.
KYOTO OR BUST
The Kyoto Protocol set targets for most industrialised nations to reduce
their emissions of greenhouse gases to an average 5 per cent below 1990
levels by the period 2008–2012.
It agreed that nations could meet part of their reductions through so-called
"flexibility measures", such as buying spare pollution permits from other
nations or investing in clean-up technologies in countries without targets.
The US has proposed buying permits from Russia and Ukraine, which are likely
to have spares because of the collapse of their heavy industries.
Detailed rules on those measures are to be agreed at the next meeting of the
Climate Change Convention in Buenos Aires in November.
US industry lobbyists opposed to the Kyoto agreement are determined to
maintain congressional opposition to it. But they also hope to wreck the
Buenos Aires meeting by forcing the US government to reopen a debate on the
science of global warming, accepted without dissent in Kyoto.
The US, with less than 5 per cent of the world’s population, emits 23 per
cent of the carbon dioxide emissions at the heart of the global warming
concern. US emissions are approaching 6 tonnes per head per year, more than
five times the global average and 10 times the level in typical developing
countries.
© Copyright Guardian Media Group plc.1998
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