Monday, December 9, 2019
Reagan Lives On in Biden
BY BRANKO MARCETIC
Dec. 3, 2019
http://inthesetimes.com/article/22148/Joe-biden-economics-global-recession-reagan-republican-liberal-tea-party
Amid warnings of a coming global recession, it’s worth asking what the 2020 presidential aspirants would do during an economic downturn. When it comes to Joe Biden, we may already know.
Biden’s formative political years were spent in the shadow of economic crisis. After more than a decade of economic expansion and blissful, carefree consumerism, recession hit in 1973, the same year Biden entered the Senate. Two years later, 2.3 million jobs had disappeared. Americans also had to contend with runaway inflation that reached double digits by 1974. The United States had barely exited that recession when it plunged into another one in the early 1980s, with unemployment climbing past 10% by 1982.
During this economically turbulent decade, Biden fended off Republican challenges to his seat by embracing right-wing doctrine—specifically, that restraining federal spending is more important during economic downturns than priming the pump.
This fiscal austerity would become a core conviction of Biden’s and help animate a lifelong belief that compromise and reaching across the aisle are the perennial solution to what ails America.
Biden had always been a somewhat ambivalent New Deal liberal—fretting about government spending as early as 1975, even as he garnered positive scores from liberal groups for his voting record—but the recession and his time in the halls of power nudged him in a more conservative direction.
“I must acknowledge that when I first came to the U.S. Senate at age 29, not too long out of college, many economists had been telling me why deficit spending was not all that bad,” he told the Senate in 1981.
“So I was not very convinced of the arguments made by my friends here, who I must acknowledge, were mostly on the Republican side of the aisle.” But, he went on, “as I listened over the years in this body, I became more and more a believer in balanced budgets.”
By the close of the 1970s, Biden began calling himself a fiscal conservative and introduced what he called his “spending control legislation”: a bill requiring all federal programs to be reauthorized every four years or automatically expire. He also voted for a large but unsuccessful tax cut introduced by Sen. William Roth, his Republican counterpart.
Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, pioneering the economic program of generosity to the rich and stinginess to the poor that became known as Reaganomics. Biden was right there with him.
Biden, Reagan and other conservatives pushed the flawed idea that the government is like a household and must take drastic measures to pay off debt to stay solvent. Six months into Reagan’s first term, Biden called the reduction of deficit spending “the single most important” path toward “an economically sound future.”
To curtail government spending, Reagan severely scaled back or eliminated federal programs—even as he slashed tax rates for the rich. Biden voted for both (including an updated version of Roth’s failed tax cut). When the president proposed a budget freeze in 1983—to cut the enormous deficits that, ironically, his tax cut helped produce—Biden one-upped him, working with two Republican senators to propose an even more aggressive budget freeze doing away with scheduled cost-of-living increases for Medicare and Social Security.
This idea is contrary to what economists and experience tell us is the proper course of action in times of economic downturn. Economist Joseph Stiglitz credits Obama’s 2009 big-spending stimulus for ameliorating the recession (criticizing it only for being too small) and criticized austerity politics for undermining it. Meanwhile, countries like the United Kingdom and Greece stand as living monuments to the economic ravages of budget cutting during a recession, something even the International Monetary Fund belatedly acknowledged.
The economy under Reagan did recover—even as he slashed programs for the poor and vulnerable, he ramped up defense spending, in effect creating an economic stimulus much larger than what would come in the wake of the Great Recession.
Meanwhile, Biden voted three years in a row for a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget. When the 2008 financial crisis plunged the world into recession, Republicans again called for cuts to entitlement programs. As ever, Biden stretched out a bipartisan hand. As Obama’s lead negotiator during the “grand bargain” negotiations, Biden—to his Democratic colleagues’ horror—capitulated to every one of Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell’s demands, including cuts to Medicare, Social Security and food stamps, and warned in 2013 that, left untouched, deficits “may become a national security issue.”
While that effort collapsed due to Tea Party obstinacy, a President Biden could get one last shot. Following the Reagan playbook, the Trump tax cuts have sent the national debt soaring, and Republicans and conservative groups are now pushing for stringent budget cuts. Biden stands alone among the leading Democratic presidential candidates in his insistence that Democrats can work with McConnell’s GOP. Add a recession into the mix and the temptation to resume what he and Reagan began may be too great. Who says the era of bipartisanship is dead?
US Media Is Blatantly Ignoring Uprisings Across the Globe
DEC 09, 2019
The Media Is Blatantly Ignoring Uprisings Across the Globe
Two thousand and nineteen may be remembered as the year of the protest, as demonstrations are engulfing the world. From the Yellow Vests in France to demonstrations in Lebanon, Gaza, Chile, Ecuador and Haiti, sustained movements all over the planet have taken to the street demanding change. Yet US corporate media have been disproportionately interested in only one: the Hong Kong protests.
As FAIR argued previously (FAIR.org, 10/26/19), this disparity in coverage can largely be explained by understanding who is protesting and what they are protesting against. The unrest in Hong Kong flared up in March in response to a proposed extradition treaty between the island city, the Chinese central government and Taiwan, which many residents feared would be used by Beijing authorities to arrest and persecute opponents of the Chinese state. Thus, the target of Hong Kong’s protesting is an official enemy of the US, hence the extent and favorability of the coverage.
FAIR conducted a study of New York Times and CNN coverage of four important protest movements around the world: Hong Kong, Ecuador, Haiti and Chile. Those outlets were chosen for their influence and their reputation as the most important, agenda-setting outlets in the print and television media. Full documentation, including links to all articles in the sample, can be found here. All relevant results to “country+protests” on those outlets’ websites were counted, except purely rehosted content, since each protest began. This was March 15 for Hong Kong, October 3 for Ecuador, October 14 for Chile and July 7, 2018, for Haiti. The end date for the study was November 22, 2019.
Protest stories in the New York Times and CNN through November 22, 2019.
In total, there have been 737 stories on the Hong Kong protests, 12 on Ecuador, 28 on Haiti and 36 on Chile. As the graph illustrates, both the Times and CNN had similar ratios of coverage.
This enormous disparity cannot be explained by the other protests’ size or significance, nor the severity of the repression meted out by security services. After barely a week’s worth of turmoil, the death toll in Ecuador was eight, according to that government’s own Human Rights Defender, while the UN confirms that 42 Haitians have been killed in the last two months alone. And in Chile, where right-wing President Sebastian PiƱera literally declared war on the population, sending tanks through the streets, 26 have died and over 26,000 have been arrested. In contrast, no one has died at the hands of the Hong Kong security forces, although one protester died after falling from a building, and a 70-year-old man was killed by a brick thrown by protesters, both deaths occurring in November after months of demonstrations.
Of course, the protests in Chile and Ecuador started well after Hong Kong, so it would be unwise to compare the totals directly. But even taking that into account, the disparity is still enormous; during the hottest moments of the Ecuador crisis (October 3–14), the New York Times ran six stories covering it, CNN three. This is in contrast to 33 and 38 articles on Hong Kong over the same time period. And since the beginning of the Chilean protests (October 14), while the Times has covered the event 14 times and CNN 22, the two news organizations ran 59 and 92 articles on Hong Kong, respectively.
Meanwhile, the Haitian protests have been raging for twice as long as Hong Kong, yet the coverage of the far more deadly repression on the Caribbean island has been minute in comparison, with Hong Kong receiving more than 50 times the total attention Haiti has.
However, the quantitative difference, while great, actually undersells the disparity of the coverage in a number of important ways. Firstly, many Ecuador and Chile stories were not focused on events in those countries, but were merely “protests around the world” roundup articles, with barely a sentence or two about events (e.g., New York Times, 10/23/19; CNN, 11/3/19). In fact, CNN has run a total of only two stories (10/8/19, 10/13/19) focused mainly on the events in Ecuador. In contrast, the great majority of the Hong Kong stories were dedicated to events on the island city-state, and articles that merely mentioned the protests, such as CNN’s report (11/13/19) about the decline in the Asian stock market, were not included in the count towards the Hong Kong total. Meanwhile, almost half of CNN’s Haiti coverage (e.g., 2/16/19, 2/18/19) centered on US citizens affected in some way by the upheaval.
Demonstrators in Hong Kong are almost universally referred to as “pro-democracy protesters” (e.g. CNN, 8/30/19, 10/15/19; New York Times, 10/15/19, 11/21/19), whereas the protests rocking Chile were commonly denigrated as “riots” (e.g., CNN, 10/19/19) or “looting and arson” (New York Times, 10/19/19). Likewise, the violence of the Ecuadorian protestors was constantly emphasized (e.g., New York Times, 10/9/19; CNN, 10/8/19). The “wrath of labor and transport unions,” CNN (10/9/19) told us, was “unleashed” as “violent protests have raged” in Quito, and protestors held military members hostage.
This sort of language is rarely used with regards to the Hong Kong protesters, even when it is arguably more applicable. In addition to widespread property damage and the aforementioned bricking of a retiree, protestors recently doused another elderly man in flammable liquid and set fire to him on camera. He spent more than ten days in a coma.
The New York Times (11/17/19) used passive voice to describe protesters shooting an arrow through an officer’s leg: “A police officer was hit in his leg with an arrow” as “activists resisted” the police onslaught to “suppress them,” it told its readers. Times reporters also describe seeing the rebels producing “hundreds or thousands of bombs” they were going to use. Despite this, the paper continued to describe the militants as “pro-democracy activists.”
Perhaps most worryingly, CNN (11/17/19) shared an image of a homemade gas canister-sized bomb, not unlike the one used by Dzhokhar Tsarnaev at the Boston Marathon, except much larger. CNN also noted it received confirmation that protesters had already used these bombs against police. If, for instance, Black Lives Matter or Antifa had killed passers-by, shot police or created Tsarnaev-style bombs, would they be called “pro-democracy demonstrators,” as both CNN (11/22/19) and the New York Times (11/22/19) have continued to do for those in Hong Kong?
Corporate media has glossed over many of the more unseemly details of the Hong Kong protests to continue the simple narrative of lauding the “democracy-minded people of Hong Kong,” fighting for freedom against the repressive “Communist authority” of Beijing, as the New York Times editorial board (6/10/19) puts it.
The quantity of Hong Kong articles is inversely proportional to the diversity of opinion. The reality of the situation is much more nuanced, but this nuance is entirely lacking in the hundreds of articles sampled. Corporate media sing the same song on Hong Kong, presenting the situation in a lockstep single-mindedness that would impress any totalitarian propaganda system.
The Media Is Blatantly Ignoring Uprisings Across the Globe
Two thousand and nineteen may be remembered as the year of the protest, as demonstrations are engulfing the world. From the Yellow Vests in France to demonstrations in Lebanon, Gaza, Chile, Ecuador and Haiti, sustained movements all over the planet have taken to the street demanding change. Yet US corporate media have been disproportionately interested in only one: the Hong Kong protests.
As FAIR argued previously (FAIR.org, 10/26/19), this disparity in coverage can largely be explained by understanding who is protesting and what they are protesting against. The unrest in Hong Kong flared up in March in response to a proposed extradition treaty between the island city, the Chinese central government and Taiwan, which many residents feared would be used by Beijing authorities to arrest and persecute opponents of the Chinese state. Thus, the target of Hong Kong’s protesting is an official enemy of the US, hence the extent and favorability of the coverage.
FAIR conducted a study of New York Times and CNN coverage of four important protest movements around the world: Hong Kong, Ecuador, Haiti and Chile. Those outlets were chosen for their influence and their reputation as the most important, agenda-setting outlets in the print and television media. Full documentation, including links to all articles in the sample, can be found here. All relevant results to “country+protests” on those outlets’ websites were counted, except purely rehosted content, since each protest began. This was March 15 for Hong Kong, October 3 for Ecuador, October 14 for Chile and July 7, 2018, for Haiti. The end date for the study was November 22, 2019.
Protest stories in the New York Times and CNN through November 22, 2019.
In total, there have been 737 stories on the Hong Kong protests, 12 on Ecuador, 28 on Haiti and 36 on Chile. As the graph illustrates, both the Times and CNN had similar ratios of coverage.
This enormous disparity cannot be explained by the other protests’ size or significance, nor the severity of the repression meted out by security services. After barely a week’s worth of turmoil, the death toll in Ecuador was eight, according to that government’s own Human Rights Defender, while the UN confirms that 42 Haitians have been killed in the last two months alone. And in Chile, where right-wing President Sebastian PiƱera literally declared war on the population, sending tanks through the streets, 26 have died and over 26,000 have been arrested. In contrast, no one has died at the hands of the Hong Kong security forces, although one protester died after falling from a building, and a 70-year-old man was killed by a brick thrown by protesters, both deaths occurring in November after months of demonstrations.
Of course, the protests in Chile and Ecuador started well after Hong Kong, so it would be unwise to compare the totals directly. But even taking that into account, the disparity is still enormous; during the hottest moments of the Ecuador crisis (October 3–14), the New York Times ran six stories covering it, CNN three. This is in contrast to 33 and 38 articles on Hong Kong over the same time period. And since the beginning of the Chilean protests (October 14), while the Times has covered the event 14 times and CNN 22, the two news organizations ran 59 and 92 articles on Hong Kong, respectively.
Meanwhile, the Haitian protests have been raging for twice as long as Hong Kong, yet the coverage of the far more deadly repression on the Caribbean island has been minute in comparison, with Hong Kong receiving more than 50 times the total attention Haiti has.
However, the quantitative difference, while great, actually undersells the disparity of the coverage in a number of important ways. Firstly, many Ecuador and Chile stories were not focused on events in those countries, but were merely “protests around the world” roundup articles, with barely a sentence or two about events (e.g., New York Times, 10/23/19; CNN, 11/3/19). In fact, CNN has run a total of only two stories (10/8/19, 10/13/19) focused mainly on the events in Ecuador. In contrast, the great majority of the Hong Kong stories were dedicated to events on the island city-state, and articles that merely mentioned the protests, such as CNN’s report (11/13/19) about the decline in the Asian stock market, were not included in the count towards the Hong Kong total. Meanwhile, almost half of CNN’s Haiti coverage (e.g., 2/16/19, 2/18/19) centered on US citizens affected in some way by the upheaval.
Demonstrators in Hong Kong are almost universally referred to as “pro-democracy protesters” (e.g. CNN, 8/30/19, 10/15/19; New York Times, 10/15/19, 11/21/19), whereas the protests rocking Chile were commonly denigrated as “riots” (e.g., CNN, 10/19/19) or “looting and arson” (New York Times, 10/19/19). Likewise, the violence of the Ecuadorian protestors was constantly emphasized (e.g., New York Times, 10/9/19; CNN, 10/8/19). The “wrath of labor and transport unions,” CNN (10/9/19) told us, was “unleashed” as “violent protests have raged” in Quito, and protestors held military members hostage.
This sort of language is rarely used with regards to the Hong Kong protesters, even when it is arguably more applicable. In addition to widespread property damage and the aforementioned bricking of a retiree, protestors recently doused another elderly man in flammable liquid and set fire to him on camera. He spent more than ten days in a coma.
The New York Times (11/17/19) used passive voice to describe protesters shooting an arrow through an officer’s leg: “A police officer was hit in his leg with an arrow” as “activists resisted” the police onslaught to “suppress them,” it told its readers. Times reporters also describe seeing the rebels producing “hundreds or thousands of bombs” they were going to use. Despite this, the paper continued to describe the militants as “pro-democracy activists.”
Perhaps most worryingly, CNN (11/17/19) shared an image of a homemade gas canister-sized bomb, not unlike the one used by Dzhokhar Tsarnaev at the Boston Marathon, except much larger. CNN also noted it received confirmation that protesters had already used these bombs against police. If, for instance, Black Lives Matter or Antifa had killed passers-by, shot police or created Tsarnaev-style bombs, would they be called “pro-democracy demonstrators,” as both CNN (11/22/19) and the New York Times (11/22/19) have continued to do for those in Hong Kong?
Corporate media has glossed over many of the more unseemly details of the Hong Kong protests to continue the simple narrative of lauding the “democracy-minded people of Hong Kong,” fighting for freedom against the repressive “Communist authority” of Beijing, as the New York Times editorial board (6/10/19) puts it.
The quantity of Hong Kong articles is inversely proportional to the diversity of opinion. The reality of the situation is much more nuanced, but this nuance is entirely lacking in the hundreds of articles sampled. Corporate media sing the same song on Hong Kong, presenting the situation in a lockstep single-mindedness that would impress any totalitarian propaganda system.
Study Confirms Hurricanes Are More Frequent, More Destructive Than Ever
Dec. 9, 2019
Tim Radford / Climate News Network
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/hurricanes-are-more-destructive-than-ever/
Danish researchers have settled a problem of US disaster accounting, confirming that in the last century North America’s worst hurricanes have become three times more frequent – and significantly more destructive.
Such calculations sound as though they ought to be simple. They are not. In 1900, the entire population of the planet was about 1.6 billion people, most of whom lived in rural areas. By 2018, global population had reached 7.5 billion, and more than half of the world was concentrated in cities. In effect, any hurricane would threaten more victims, and there would be more, and more expensive, property to be destroyed.
So the damage from hurricanes would tend always to rise, and the count of destructive hurricanes would grow, because any violent windstorm would be more likely to slam into an urban area rather than sweep over a few farms.
Tropical cyclones, typhoons and hurricanes start at sea, as sea surface temperatures rise. With ever-increasing global temperatures, driven by profligate combustion of fossil fuels, more hurricanes would be expected, with higher windspeeds and ever-greater burdens of rain to bring disastrous floods as well as severe damage.
But it is harder to show that the climate crisis is intrinsically more dangerous, even though windstorm damage is on the rise. Researchers tend to use economic accounting to try to work out what a hurricane in, for example 1950, would cost if it swept in from the ocean today.
Hurricanes are the costliest natural disasters in the US. Scientists at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen set about making their comparisons in a new way. Rather than match financial losses on a case by case basis, they tried to calculate how large an area would have to be completely destroyed to account for a particular financial loss.
They extended this “area of total destruction” accounting back to 1900, to see what the new comparison approach would reveal.
And, they report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they found what they call “an emergent positive trend in damage, which we attribute to a detectable change in extreme storms due to global warming.” And they add: “The frequency of the most damaging hurricanes has increased at the rate of 350% per century.”
The Great American Shakedown
Chris Hedges
Dec. 9, 2019
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-great-american-shakedown/
The Democratic Party and its liberal supporters are perplexed. They presented hours of evidence of an impeachable offense, although they studiously avoided charging Donald Trump with impeachable offenses also carried out by Democratic presidents, including the continuation or expansion of presidential wars not declared by Congress, exercising line-item veto power, playing prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner to kill individuals, including U.S. citizens, anywhere on the planet, violating due process and misusing executive orders. Because civics is no longer taught in most American schools, they devoted a day to constitutional scholars who provided the Civics 101 case for impeachment. The liberal press, cheerleading the impeachment process, saturated the media landscape with live coverage, interminable analysis, constant character assassination of Trump and giddy speculation. And yet, it has made no difference. Public opinion remains largely unaffected.
Perhaps, supporters of impeachment argue, they failed to adopt the right technique. Perhaps journalists, by giving voice to opponents of impeachment—who do indeed live in a world not based in fact—created a false equivalency between truth and lies. Maybe, as Bill Grueskin, a professor at the Columbia University Journalism School, writes, impeachment advocates should spend $1 million to produce a kind of movie trailer for all those who did not sit through the hours of hearings, to “boil down the essentials of the film” and provide “a quick but intense insight into the characters, setting the scene with vivid imagery—to entice people to come back to the theatre a month later for the full movie.” Or perhaps they need to keep pounding away at Trump until his walls of support crumble.
The liberal class and the Democratic Party leadership have failed, even after their defeat in the 2016 presidential election, to understand that they, along with the traditional Republican elites, have squandered their credibility. No one believes them. And no one should.
They squandered their credibility by promising that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) would, as claimed by President Bill Clinton, create 200,000 new, well-paying jobs per year; instead, several million jobs were lost. They squandered it by allowing corporations to move production overseas and hire foreign workers at daily wages that did not equal what a U.S. unionized worker made in an hour, a situation that obliterated the bargaining power of the American working class. They squandered it by allowing corporations to use the threat of “offshoring” production to destroy unions, suppress wages, extract draconian concessions and push millions of workers into the temp and gig economies, where there are no benefits or job security and pay is 60% or less of what a full-time employee in the regular economy receives. They squandered it by forcing working men and women to take two or three jobs to support a family, jacking up household debt to $13.95 trillion. They squandered it by redirecting wealth upward, so that during the Clinton administration alone 45 percent of all income growth went to the wealthiest 1%. They squandered it by wiping out small farmers in Mexico, driving some 3 million of them off their lands and forcing many to migrate in desperation to the United States, a human tide that saw the U.S. right wing and President Trump direct mounting rage toward immigrants. They squandered it by turning our great cities into urban wastelands. They squandered it by slashing welfare and social service programs. They squandered it by supporting endless, futile wars that have an overall price tag of between $5 trillion and $7 trillion. They squandered it by setting up a surveillance system to spy on every American and then lying about it. They squandered it by catering to the big banks and gutting financial regulations, precipitating the 2008 economic meltdown. They squandered it by looting the U.S. Treasury to bail out banks and financial firms guilty of massive financial crimes, ordering the Federal Reserve to hand over an estimated $29 trillion to the global financiers responsible for the crash. They squandered it by not using this staggering sum instead to provide free college tuition to every student or universal health care, repair our crumbling infrastructure, transition to clean energy, forgive student debt, raise wages, bail out underwater homeowners, form public banks to foster investments in our communities at low interest rates, provide a guaranteed minimum income and organize a massive jobs program for the unemployed and underemployed, whose ranks are at least double official statistics. They squandered it by cutting child assistance programs—most drastically during the Clinton administration—resulting in 16 million children going to bed hungry every night. They squandered it by leaving over half a million Americans homeless and on the streets on any given day. They squandered it by passing laws that keep students burdened by massive college loan debt that has climbed to $1.4 trillion, debt they cannot free themselves from even if they declare bankruptcy. They squandered it by militarizing police and building the world’s largest system of mass incarceration, one with 25% of the world’s prison population. They squandered it by revoking due process and habeas corpus. They squandered it by passing massive tax cuts for the rich and for corporations, many of which—such as Amazon—pay no federal income tax, ballooning the federal deficit, now at $779 billion and climbing. They squandered it by privatizing everything from intelligence gathering to public education to swell corporate bank accounts at taxpayer expense. They squandered it by permitting corporate money—an estimated $9.9 billion will be spent this presidential election cycle on political advertising—to buy politicians in a form of legalized bribery that sees corporate lobbyists write legislation and create laws. They squandered it by doing nothing to halt the looming ecocide.
The problem is not messaging. The problem is the messenger. The mortal wounds inflicted on our democratic institutions are bipartisan. The traditional Republican elites are as hated as the Democratic elites. Trump is vile, imbecilic, corrupt and incompetent. But for a largely white working class cast aside by austerity and neoliberalism, he at least taunts the elites who destroyed their communities and their lives.
The shakedown that Trump clumsily attempted to orchestrate against the president of Ukraine in the hope of discrediting Joe Biden, a potential rival in the 2020 presidential election, pales beside the shakedown orchestrated by the elites who rule over America’s working men and women. This shakedown took from those workers their hope and, more ominously, their hope for their children. It took from them security and a sense of place and dignity. It took from them a voice in how they were governed. It took from them their country and handed it to a cabal of global corporatists who intend to turn them into serfs. This shakedown plunged millions into despair. It led many to self-destructive opioid, alcohol, drug and gambling addictions. It led to increases in suicide, mass shootings and hate crimes. This shakedown led to bizarre conspiracy theories and fabrications peddled by a neofascist right wing, deceptions bolstered by the lies told by those tasked with keeping the society rooted in truth and verifiable fact. This shakedown led to the end of the rule of law and the destruction of democratic institutions that, if they had continued to function, could have prevented the rise to power of a demagogue such as Trump.
There is zero chance Trump will be removed from office in a trial in the Senate. The Democratic Party elites have admitted as much. They carried out, they argue, their civic and constitutional duty. But here again they lie. They picked out what was convenient to impeach Trump and left untouched the rotten system they helped create. The divisions among Americans will only widen. The hatreds will only grow. And tyranny will wrap its deadly tentacles around our throats.
The Five Corrupt Pillars of Climate Change Denial
At this crossroads, it is important to be able to identify the different ways we are being told to delay action, writes Mark Maslin.
By Mark Maslin
The Conversation
https://consortiumnews.com/2019/12/09/the-five-corrupt-pillars-of-climate-change-denial/
December 9, 2019 • 0 Comments
The fossil fuel industry, political lobbyists, media moguls and individuals have spent the past 30 years sowing doubt about the reality of climate change – where none exists. The latest estimate is that the world’s five largest publicly-owned oil and gas companies spend about $200 million a year on lobbying to control, delay or block binding climate policy.
Their hold on the public seems to be waning. Two recent polls suggested over 75 percent of Americans think humans are causing climate change. School climate strikes, Extinction Rebellion protests, national governments declaring a climate emergency, improved media coverage of climate change and an increasing number of extreme weather events have all contributed to this shift. There also seems to be a renewed optimism that we can deal with the crisis.
But this means lobbying has changed, now employing more subtle and more vicious approaches – what has been termed as “climate sadism.” It is used to mock young people going on climate protests and to ridicule Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old young woman with Asperger’s, who is simply telling the scientific truth.
At such a crossroads, it is important to be able to identify the different types of denial. The below taxonomy will help you spot the different ways that are being used to convince you to delay action on climate change.
No. 1. Science Denial
This is the type of denial we are all familiar with: that the science of climate change is not settled. Deniers suggest climate change is just part of the natural cycle. Or that climate models are unreliable and too sensitive to carbon dioxide.
Some even suggest that CO? is such a small part of the atmosphere it cannot have a large heating affect. Or that climate scientists are fixing the data to show the climate is changing (a global conspiracy that would take thousands of scientists in more than a 100 countries to pull off).
All these arguments are false and there is a clear consensus among scientists about the causes of climate change. The climate models that predict global temperature rises have remained very similar over the last 30 years despite the huge increase in complexity, showing it is a robust outcome of the science.
Read more:
Five climate change science misconceptions – debunked
The shift in public opinion means that undermining the science will increasingly have little or no effect. So climate change deniers are switching to new tactics. One of Britain’s leading deniers, Nigel Lawson, the former U.K. chancellor, now agrees that humans are causing climate change, despite having founded the sceptic Global Warming Policy Foundation in 2009.
It says it is “open-minded on the contested science of global warming, [but] is deeply concerned about the costs and other implications of many of the policies currently being advocated.” In other words, climate change is now about the cost not the science.
No. 2. Economic Denial
The idea that climate change is too expensive to fix is a more subtle form of climate denial. Economists, however, suggest we could fix climate change now by spending 1 percent of world GDP. Perhaps even less if the cost savings from improved human health and expansion of the global green economy are taken into account. But if we don’t act now, by 2050 it could cost over 20 percent of world GDP.
We should also remember that in 2018 the world generated $86,000,000,000,000 and every year this World GDP grows by 3.5 percent. So setting aside just 1 percent to deal with climate change would make little overall difference and would save the world a huge amount of money. What the climate change deniers also forget to tell you is that they are protecting a fossil fuel industry that receives $5.2 trillion in annual subsidies – which includes subsidized supply costs, tax breaks and environmental costs. This amounts to 6 percent of world GDP.
The International Monetary Fund estimates that efficient fossil fuel pricing would lower global carbon emissions by 28 percent, fossil fuel air pollution deaths by 46 percent, and increase government revenue by 3.8 percent of the country’s GDP.
No. 3. Humanitarian Denial
Climate change deniers also argue that climate change is good for us. They suggest longer, warmer summers in the temperate zone will make farming more productive. These gains, however, are often offset by the drier summers and increased frequency of heatwaves in those same areas. For example, the 2010 “Moscow” heatwave killed 11,000 people, devastated the Russian wheat harvest and increased global food prices.
More than 40 percent of the world’s population also lives in the Tropics – where from both a human health prospective and an increase in desertification no one wants summer temperatures to rise.
Deniers also point out that plants need atmospheric carbon dioxide to grow so having more of it acts like a fertiliser. This is indeed true and the land biosphere has been absorbing about a quarter of our carbon dioxide pollution every year. Another quarter of our emissions is absorbed by the oceans. But losing massive areas of natural vegetation through deforestation and changes in land use completely nullifies this minor fertilization effect.
Climate change deniers will tell you that more people die of the cold than heat, so warmer winters will be a good thing. This is deeply misleading. Vulnerable people die of the cold because of poor housing and not being able to afford to heat their homes. Society, not climate, kills them.
This argument is also factually incorrect. In the U.S., for example, heat-related deaths are four times higher than cold-related ones. This may even be an underestimate as many heat-related deaths are recorded by cause of death such as heart failure, stroke, or respiratory failure, all of which are exacerbated by excessive heat.
No. 4. Political Denial
Climate change deniers argue we cannot take action because other countries are not taking action. But not all countries are equally guilty of causing current climate change. For example, 25 percent of the human-produced CO? in the atmosphere is generated by the U.S., another 22 percent is produced by the EU. Africa produces just under 5 percent.
Given the historic legacy of greenhouse gas pollution, developed countries have an ethical responsibility to lead the way in cutting emissions. But ultimately, all countries need to act because if we want to minimise the effects of climate change then the world must go carbon zero by 2050.
Deniers will also tell you that there are problems to fix closer to home without bothering with global issues. But many of the solutions to climate change are win-win and will improve the lives of normal people. Switching to renewable energy and electric vehicles, for example, reduces air pollution, which improves people’s overall health.
Developing a green economy provides economic benefits and creates jobs. Improving the environment and reforestation provides protection from extreme weather events and can in turn improve food and water security.
No. 5. Crisis Denial
The final piece of climate change denial is the argument that we should not rush into changing things, especially given the uncertainty raised by the other four areas of denial above. Deniers argue that climate change is not as bad as scientists make out. We will be much richer in the future and better able to fix climate change. They also play on our emotions as many of us don’t like change and can feel we are living in the best of times – especially if we are richer or in power.
But similarly hollow arguments were used in the past to delay ending slavery, granting the vote to women, ending colonial rule, ending segregation, decriminalising homosexuality, bolstering worker’s rights and environmental regulations, allowing same sex marriages and banning smoking.
The fundamental question is why are we allowing the people with the most privilege and power to convince us to delay saving our planet from climate change?
Mark Maslin is professor of earth system science, UCL.
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