I know that the majority of Scientists in general would prefer to just stay as far away from politics as they can. Think about it, when was the last time you heard of a scientist or engineer running for office? I’ll bet you’ve noticed how many lawyers run for public office along with some businessmen. That’s all rounded out by the occasional entertainer and even a few athletes, but not scientists. The whole political process of ‘creating a message that will resonate with the voters’, in other words lying, just goes against everything that science stands for.
I fact I didn’t even want to write this post. The whole question of Climate Change has been answered time and time again. It’s real and we need to deal with it. But in the face of steadily rising temperatures, the melting of glaciers along with the rapid increase in both wildfires and severe weather all the global warming deniers have done is to change their tactics and so now they talk about living with climate change, not stopping it.
It was when I saw one add from the American Petroleum Institute, based on those new tactics that was simply so deceitful, so devious that I decided I would write a post about the politics of climate change. Maybe you’ve seen the ad as well.
The ad begins by reminding us how important energy is to America’s economic strength and national security. It then asks whether we should rely on unfriendly counties, like Iran and Venezuela, for our oil and natural gas. Of course the answer the ad gives is ‘NO’, America should develop it’s own sources of oil and natural gas instead of being dependent on unreliable foreign regimes.
The whole ad is like a magician’s misdirection. The question isn’t whether America should get it oil and natural gas from unfriendly foreign countries but whether we should be getting our energy from oil and natural gas at all! The issue of Climate Change due to the burning of fossil fuels is completely ignored in the ad because the petroleum industry knows that they can’t talk about it anymore. Throughout the ad, which is all about energy production, solar arrays and wind turbines are never shown or mentioned.
By the way America already gets very little of its energy from foreign nations. We import less than 8% of our energy and Canada, hardly an unfriendly, unreliable nation accounts for more than half of that. In fact the US exports more petroleum products than it imports so the entire issue of our relying on foreign governments for our energy just doesn’t exist. The ad was a deceitful attempt to drum up support for the petroleum industry by arguing a false problem without mentioning the real issues, the environmental issues caused by the burning of fossil fuels!
Having decided to write a post about the politics of Climate Change it didn’t take me long to find a sample poll conducted by the University of Bath in the UK that surveyed 10,000 young people from ten countries aged 18-25 about their views concerning the future. Faced with the harm that their parents have done to our world 77% of those surveyed considered the future to be ‘frightening’ and fully 56% thought that humanity was ‘doomed’.
And if the results of such polls weren’t depressing enough the day after I read those results I was watching my local news and when an ad came on I decided to see what the other channels were showing. I ended up at ‘The Five’ on Fox news network where the hosts were laughing at all the stupid kids, 56% of whom thought humanity was doomed because of Climate Change. Seriously, the pundits on Fox thought it was just hilarious that young people would be worried about sea level rise making the coastal areas of the planet uninhabitable or droughts causing a food shortage or just the very idea that we are poisoning the only planet we have to live on.
However there are members of the media and entertainment worlds who recognize the growing danger of fossil fuel emissions and are willing to do what they can to raise public awareness of the issue, though to be honest I have to wonder how anyone today could be unaware of Climate Change. Nevertheless on the evening of the 22nd of September the hosts of eight late-night television shows, on eight different networks, all devoted their programs for a united effort to save mother Earth. The list of who joined in reads like the nominees for a Hollywood award, Steven Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers, James Corden, Trevor Noah, Andy Cohen and Samantha Bee.
“Don’t even think about switching to another show,” announced ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel at the beginning of his show. “We’re all focused on this topic tonight. You can’t escape. It’s basically an intervention. Our future is in jeopardy.”
The guests on the various shows included such environmental activists as Jane Goodall, John Kerry, Bill Gates and a host of climate scientists. Topics included the effects of temperature rise on sea turtle sex, raw sewage from homes mixing with the runoff from increasingly severe storms and the increasing risk of diseases like Covid-19 because of rising temperatures.
Unfortunately Jimmy Kimmel wasn’t quite correct about viewers not being able to escape because once again Fox news network was a place of refuge for the climate deniers. On the Greg Gutfeld show the host and his guests enjoyed themselves by mocking his competitors while touting the virtues of fossil fuels. Again it seems as if Fox’s way of dealing with environmental issues is to treat them as a joke in the hope that their viewers won’t take them seriously.
So I guess that’s an overview of the current state of the politics of Climate Change. By far the majority of people, even here in the US now recognize the coming catastrophe but the climate deniers have closed ranks and will do everything they can to keep making money off of cheap oil and natural gas. And that’s the real issue here, money, because any attempt to reduce carbon emissions will be taking money away from a rich and powerful, well established group of people while at the same time requiring tax increases to generate the huge amount of money needed to even begin fixing all of the environmental problems we’ve caused.
So the politicians will delay and dither, and do nothing until they’re forced to. Think about it, most politicians, Mitch McConnell is an excellent example, are so old now that they know the worst of Climate Change will only occur long after they are safely dead. The same is true of Fox’s CEO Roger Murdoch. Climate Change won’t hurt him but any efforts to prevent it would raise his taxes and he simply doesn’t care if it hurts anyone else. So he orders his underlings to make fun of the possible extinction of the human race.
All we can do is to keep pushing, to vote for those politicians who not only accept Climate Change but are also willing to do something about it, to write letters and emails, especially to those who oppose environmental solutions. It may not seem like much but the weight of evidence is in our favour and it’s growing. As conditions get worse more people will recognize the danger and demand action. Eventually even the politicians will have to do something.
We can only hope it’ll be in time.