Surviving the Century

Facing Climate Chaos and Other Global Challenges

Herbert Girardet

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781844074587
• eBook ISBN: 9781136556159
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

'The combined analysis presented here of why current arrangements are failing the future and clear insights of the way to go, offer us hope.'
Mary Robinson, President of Realising Rights, Ethical Globalisation Initiative, and former President of Ireland and United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights

Environmental and human catastrophe looms ever larger for planet Earth. Powerful action is required now to turn a deepening global crisis into an unprecedented opportunity for positive change. This book shows how a dramatic transformation of how humans relate to the Earth, and to one another, can be achieved.

Surviving the Century is the first major publication by the World Future Council (WFC), a new international voice for future generations. Reflecting the positive mission of the WFC, each chapter addresses a different critical issue in a systematic and constructive way, describing and analysing the topic before indicating real solutions. The eight main issues covered are: countering climate chaos, renewable energy policy, local farming systems, rainforests and climate change, creating sustainable cities, cradle to cradle production systems, a radical vision for trade and creating a living democracy.

Surviving the Century is a must-have primer and action plan for all leaders in government, business and NGOs, and for all who want to be part of the historic opportunity to provide solutions to the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced.

Published with the World Future Council.

one

Addressing
Climate Chaos

Ross Gelbspan

Nature is on a collision course with history – and that collision is being powered by two diametrically opposed forces. On the one hand, the climate is changing far more quickly than scientists had anticipated even five years ago. Natural systems are taking on their own momentum and scientists are now beginning to express profound fears about the increasingly real prospect of runaway changes. On the other, the subject has barely made a dent in the public consciousness – especially in the US. There are institutional reasons for this – primarily the negligence of the mainstream news outlets in the US, which will be examined in some detail below. This is unquestionably the biggest story certainly of this new century and, arguably, in the last several thousand years. Ye t the denial, especially within the US, remains apparently intractable. This state of denial is of concern not just in the US, but all over the world, because the US has a systemic reliance on fossil fuels more than any other country in the world. There seems, moreover, to be a more personal, less institutional, response among much of the public, the press and policy makers within the US. It is not unreasonable. When people are confronted with an apparently overwhelming problem and they don't see an intellectually persuasive remedy it leaves them mired in feelings of impotence. Tat is an extremely uncomfortable feeling. So a very natural reaction in the face of such a situation is not to want to acknowledge the problem. Denial, after all, can serve as a means of protecting one's emotional equilibrium. Parenthetically, that is the reason I wrote the book, Boiling Point (Basic Books, 2004). The centrepiece of the book's last chapter revolves around a set of three inter-related global-scale, macro-level policy strategies that could, if fully implemented, propel a rapid global transition to clean energy. In the process, those same strategies (which also will be detailed later in this chapter) would create large numbers of jobs all over the world, especially in developing countries. It would begin to reduce the widening gap between the world's rich and poor. It would lay the groundwork for a much more sustainable future. And it would jump-start the renewable energy industry into being a central driving engine of growth for the global economy. The book was prompted by a deep belief that if people see a credible solution to an apparently overwhelming problem, they will then acknowledge the bad news, roll up their sleeves and overcome the paralysis that has so far characterized much of the reaction within the US to the escalating pace of global climate change.

Much of the failure of the press to address this problem originated with a sustained and very effective campaign of deception and disinformation by the coal and oil lobby within the US. The reasoning of the fossil fuel lobby was not complicated. The science tells us that climate stabilization requires humanity to cut its use of carbon fuels by at least 70 per cent.¹ Tat, of course, would essentially spell the end of big coal and big oil, which, together, have businesses worth over $1 trillion a year. The response of those industries was to mount a very successful campaign of disinformation, using a tiny handful of ‘greenhouse sceptics’, most of whom failed to voluntarily disclose the fact that they were funded by fossil fuel interests.

The influence of big coal and big oil became more public under the Bush administration. For one example, researchers at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the largest federal climate research centre, were prohibited from discussing climate change with reporters unless an agency ‘minder’ were present to monitor and direct the conversation.²

That disclosure followed an allegation by NASA scientist James Hansen that the Bush administration had tried to prevent him from speaking out about the urgency of the situation.³ As late as October 2006, the Bush administration called on Lee Raymond, the recently retired CEO of ExxonMobil, to help chart America's future energy course.⁴

From my point of view, the subordination of the accelerating threat of global climate change to the financial interests of the coal and oil industries constitutes the clearest kind of crime against humanity. But if the public relations specialists of the oil and coal industries are criminals against humanity, the US press has basically played the role of unwitting accomplice by consistently minimizing this story, if not burying it from public view altogether.

As early as 1997, Dr Bert Bolin, at the time chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), declared: ‘The large majority of governments, while recognizing uncertainties, believe that we know enough to take action now. This position was supported by an independent group of 2,000 scientists.’⁵ Or, as Dr James McCarthy, who would later chair working group II of the IPCC, noted several years ago: ‘There is no debate among any statured scientists working on this issue about the larger trends of what is happening to the climate.’⁶

That is something you would never know from the American press coverage. While the scientific community has known definitively since 1995 that we are changing our climate, the US press has done a deplorable job in disseminating that information – and all its implications – to the public.

There are a number of reasons for this – none of them, given the magnitude of the story, justifiable. On a somewhat superficial level, the career path to the top at news outlets normally lies in following the track of political reporting. To p editors tend to see all issues through a political lens. For instance, while climate change has been the focus of a number of feature stories (and small, normally buried reports of scientific findings), the only times it has gained real news prominence is when it has played a role in the country's politics. During the 1992 presidential campaign, the first President Bush slapped the label of ‘ozone man’ on Al Gore because of his book, Earth in the Balance. (It does not seem like a coincidence that Gore totally ran away from the climate issue during the 2000 campaign.)

The issue again received prominent coverage in 1997 when the Senate voted overwhelmingly not to ratify the Kyoto Protocol – not because of the substance but because it signalled a political setback for the Clinton administration at the hands of Congressional Republicans. Remarkably, the press paid scant attention to an industry-funded advertising blitz in the run-up to that vote. Tat campaign, which cost US$13 million, centred on the message that the Kyoto Protocol ‘isn't global and it isn't fair’ (because it exempts the developing countries from the first round of emissions reductions). Tellingly, the ads all appeared in Washington-based media outlets that were seen by the real targets of the campaign – US senators.⁷

Most recently, the issue surfaced when President Bush withdrew the US from the Kyoto process. Again, the coverage focused not on climate change but on resulting diplomatic tensions between the US and the European Union (EU). Prior to his withdrawal from Kyoto, President Bush declared he would not accept the findings of the IPCC – because they represented ‘foreign science’ (even though about half the 2000 scientists whose work contributes to the IPCC reports are American). Instead, Bush called for a report from the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS), which would provide ‘American science’. The subsequent response from the NAS not only affirmed the findings of the IPCC, but indicated that the IPCC may even have understated the magnitude of some coming impacts.⁸ Astonishingly, even as the Washington press corps reported this story, few – if any – reporters bothered to check the position of the NAS. Had they done so, they would have found that as early as 1992, three years before the IPCC determined that humans are changing the climate by our burning of oil and coal, the NAS recommended strong measures to minimize climate impacts.

The culture of journalism is, basically, a political culture that is not particularly hospitable – that is, in fact, institutionally arrogant – towards non-political areas of coverage. If the press were disposed to look beyond just the politics of Kyoto, it would be an eye-opener for the American public. Aside from the pledges by The Netherlands, Germany and the UK to cut emissions by 50–80 per cent in the next 40 years, the efforts by other countries to begin to address the climate crisis stand in vivid contrast to the indifference of the US. Tat contrast is apparent in the difference between the coverage of the climate crisis in the American press and the news media in other countries. While there has been no systematic and thorough analysis of comparative media coverage of the climate crisis in different countries, one recent study compared the attention given to the climate by The Washington Post, The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times to three major newspapers in the UK and Germany. According to a weighted sampling between September 1999 and March 2000, the coverage in the UK was almost twice that of the press in the US. The UK paper, the Guardian, for example, accorded more than three times more coverage to the climate issue than The Washington Post, more than twice the coverage of the New York Times and nearly five times more coverage than the Los Angeles Times. (The German papers surveyed during the same period provided more coverage than the US press – but less than expected, given the prominence of climate and energy issues in Germany's political life. Anja Kollmuss, who conducted the study, attributed that result to the fact that her sample spanned a period in which the German press was in full pursuit of a major financial scandal involving former Prime Minister Helmut Kohl.)⁹

In June 2003, the EU pledged to cut emissions by 8 per cent below 1990 levels by 2010. In December 2002, the 15 EU governments established a system in which companies in industries that are especially energy-intensive will be assigned quotas for carbon dioxide emissions. The story was prominently featured in the European press, but was virtually ignored in the US.¹⁰

Nor have American journalists paid much attention to the growth of renewable energy around the world. Wind power in Europe, for one example, has been growing at a rate of 40 per cent a year – much of it in the form of offshore windfarms. ‘It's going so fast now because there is a race to go offshore, with manufacturers and utilities competing for the jobs’, said Corin Millais of the European Wind Energy Association. ‘Companies are now talking of wind fields, like oil reserves or coal reserves, waiting to be tapped’, Millais added.¹¹

Journalists might also have done a bit of checking on President Bush's assertion that one reason the US has refused to accept emission reduction goals is because it would put the US at a competitive disadvantage relative to developing countries. In fact many developing countries have taken very significant strides in this area. Trough its development of hydro-power and natural gas, for instance, Argentina has cut emissions by about 500 million tons over a 25-year period. India is deploying a range of climate-friendly technologies, including solar-electric facilities in rural areas, fuel cells for transportation, an array of wind farms and the use of biomass to generate electricity.¹² Even China, with its vast deposits of coal, has managed to cut its greenhouse emissions by 19 per cent during a five-year period in which its economy grew by 36 per cent.¹³ Were journalists to look beyond short-term political implications, their reporting would bring home how profoundly out of step the US is relative to the rest of the world.

The next reason the issue is so neglected by the US media has to do with the campaign of disinformation perpetrated by big coal and big oil. While that campaign targeted the public and policy makers, it also had a profound effect on journalists.¹⁴ For the longest time, the press accorded the same weight to the ‘skeptics’ as it did to mainstream scientists. This was done in the name of journalistic balance. In fact it was journalistic laziness. The ethic of journalistic balance comes into play when there is a story involving opinion: should abortion be legal? Should we invade Iraq? Should we have bilingual education or English immersion? At that point, an ethical journalist is obligated to give each competing view its most articulate presentation – and equivalent space. But when it is a question of fact, it's up to a reporter to dig into a story and find out what the facts are. The issue of balance is not relevant when the focus of a story is factual. In this case, what is known about the climate comes from the largest and most rigorously peer-reviewed scientific collaboration in history. As James Baker, former head of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said, ‘There's no better scientific consensus on any other issue I know – except perhaps Newton's second law of dynamics.’¹⁵

Granted there may be a few credentialed scientists who have published in the peer-reviewed literature and who minimize climate change as relatively inconsequential. In that case, if balance is required, it would suggest that a reporter spend a little time reviewing the literature, talking to some scientists on background, learning where the weight of scientific opinion lay – and reflecting that balance in his or her reporting. Tat kind of truly accurate balance would have reflected the position of mainstream scientists in 95 per cent of the story – with the sceptics getting a paragraph at the end. Today, that is finally beginning to happen.

A separate explanation for the failure of journalists to cover the climate crisis thoroughly lies in the fact that few journalists are comfortable with complex scientific information. While a small number of news outlets have permanent science or environmental reporters on their staffs, more typically scientific and environmental stories are covered by general assignment reporters with no background in complex, scientific data. Tat lack of preparation is compounded by the daily deadlines which frequently deprive reporters of the time to fully digest complex scientific pap...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Boxes
• List of Contributors
• Foreword by Jakob von Üxkuell
• List of Acronyms and Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Addressing Climate Chaos
• 2 Renewable Energy is the Future
• 3 Feeding People in an Age of Climate Change
• 4 Climate and the Amazon
• 5 Creating Sustainable and Liveable Cities
• 6 Cradle to Cradle Production
• 7 A Radical New Vision for World Trade
• 8 The Promise of Living Democracy
• Index