Left News and Views

I finally got around to watching former Vice President Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth last night. We have had it on our Tivo list for quite a while, but I just didn’t get the chance to sit down watch it. In a very sober and calm manner, Gore lays out how seriously global warming is threatening the equilibrium of our planet.

Gore demonstrates that if dramatic action isn’t taken now, millions of lives throughout the world could be threatened by rising ocean waters — not 50 or 100 years from now, but as soon as 2017. The good news is that the trend can be reversed if a number of not-so-drastic steps are taken by individuals and governments that ultimately will not only improve our chances for survival but have economic benefits as well.

It’s no wonder that Gore has been nominate for the 2007 Nobel Prize.

But, before we can go anywhere in the U.S., we need to reverse the devastation President Bush and company have wreaked on our regulatory agencies.

Let’s first look at the major, overriding reason those who put Bush in office have been so successful in convincing people that global warming isn’t a serious issue.

In the spring of 1998, the New York Times unveiled a memo detailing plans by parties within the American energy industry to derail the Kyoto Protocol. (Keep in mind that Vice President Dick Cheney was president of Halliburton at the time, a position he obtained mainly because of his ties within the U.S. government.)

The Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is an amendment to the international treaty on climate change, assigning mandatory emission limitations for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions to the signatory nations.

The objective is the “stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.”

The document published in the Times laid bare a sophisticated, multi-million-dollar scheme to influence the discourse on global warming over a span of years. The key? Tapping scientists to express skepticism about climate change and developing a sophisticated media and public outreach campaign to get that message out to the public.

This plan pretty much followed the tactics used by the Tobacco Industry to deflect calls for regulatory restrictions on its deadly industry after the Surgeon General first issued its report on the impact on a person’s health and smoking in 1964. Think how long it took for people to realize that this threat was real and not just an overreaction by us liberals.

We don’t have that long for the government to take serious action and sign on to the Kyoto Protocol. But we have some serious roadblocks from both the energy industry and the Bush government.

Exxon, subsequently merged with Mobil to form ExxonMobil, has funneled about $16 million between 1998 and 2005 to a network of ideological and advocacy organizations that manufacture uncertainty on the issue.

Earlier this year, ExxonMobil seemed to indicate that they saw the writing on the wall – probably in no small part because of An Inconvenient Truth.

In a report by PBS’s Frontline, ExxonMobil chief executive Rex Tillerson is quoted as saying, “Our industry has a responsibility to contribute to policy debates and to take concrete steps to reduce emissions. We know our climate is changing, the average temperature of the earth is rising, and greenhouse gas emissions are increasing.”

Has ExxonMobil really changed, or do its leaders believe they have their tentacles so thoroughly embedded in the Bush Administration that they no longer need to spend money on disinformation campaigns?

In the past five years, according to Frontline, even as energy industry groups were changing their public position about climate change, the federal government was acting to influence scientific discussion in controversial ways. Since President Bush took office, government climate change experts at a range of federal agencies have complained that administration officials have attempted to bar them from bringing grim news about rising temperatures, increased potential storm activity and other data to the public.

“And even as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2007 report removes what little scientific doubt remained,” Frontline reports, “the U.S. President and Vice President remain unconvinced. At a press conference last year the president told a reporter that the ‘fundamental debate’ was whether climate change was “manmade or natural.” Vice President Dick Cheney echoed that view in a recent interview with ABC News.”

If our Democratic Congress ever gets the guts to make the changes U.S. voters demanded in the last election, they might begin to look at a few other holes in the regulatory dike that need to be plugged as well.

According to a small, upfront story in this week’s Time magazine, “In 2004 the Denver Post found 100 Bush appointees regulating industries they used to represent as lobbyists or lawyers. That didn’t include former quasi-lobbyists like Vice President Dick Cheney, who became a CEO because Halliburton wanted government contracts.”

Among the advocates-turned-regulators are a former meat-industry lobbyist who helps decide how meat is labeled; a former drug-company lobbyist who influences prescription-drug policies; a former energy lobbyist who, while still accepting payments for bringing clients into his old lobbying firm, helps determine how much of the West those former clients can use for oil and gas drilling.

It’s just one big scary story.