The men from Koch — and the groups, politicians, and disinformation they fund — are now the Sith Lords of climate and clean energy inaction in the country.
It is no coincidence that countries with large mining sectors have the lowest levels of public support for the transition to a low-carbon economy. Renewables have been implemented most strongly by European countries with limited fossil fuel reserves and small mining industries. As a result, they have no home-grown propaganda industry to restrain investment in renewables.
Public opinion in the U.S., Canada and Australia has been strongly influenced by propaganda campaigns and misinformation as well as fear mongering and lobbying by the mining sector.
These miners protect their own interests at the expense of the wider community and the whole ecosphere. As well as direct political ads and lobbying, miners regularly fund climate change deniers and support their attack campaigns.
Paul Gilding describes the Koch brothers as "the corporate bad guys from central casting".
Little wonder that Joe Romm calls corporate deniers the Sith Lords. In Star Wars mythology, the Sith Lords represent the dark side – the forces of destruction, division, selfishness, and chaos.
Mother Jones reports on 'Dark Money' – the secretive funding for U.S. political campaigns.
In the climate wars, the forces for good are ranged against the forces for evil.
Climate change deniers claim that "the most prominent advocates of globabl warming aren't scientists. They are murderers, tyrants and madmen".
Do they mean it literally or metaphorically? Who knows?
They throw caution and logic to the wind as they unleash these blind and crude insults in a living example of the Climate Wars.
How to respond? This is not a time for reason, or for the finesse of metaphor. The most effective retaliatory action is to demand that responsible corporations withdraw their financial support from the offensive Heartland 'Institute'.
Below is the petition we will send to the CEOs of Microsoft, State Farm, Pfizer, and every other corporation that funds the Heartland Institute.
All corporations should immediately pull their funding from the Heartland Institute in light of Heartland's ongoing and extreme support of climate change denial.
You can add your name here. A previous Forecast the Facts petition was successful in getting General Motors to withdraw funding from Heartland, so there's a good chance that this petition will be effective too.
But only with your help!
And after you have done that, check out the parodies this foolish billboard has generated. Heartland pulled the billboard after 24 hours because it "angered and disappointed many of Heartland’s friends and supporters". This lapse of judgement has associated them with the loony fringe and made them a figure of fun. Very satisfying. [You DID sign the petition, didn't you?]
UPDATE: Johnny Walker and Moet and Chandon owners, Diegeo, will no longer fund Heartland. (Why did they ever??)
Scott Mandia's open letter to his insurance company, State Farm, a Heartland donor, is eloquent and powerful. Your letter can be as brief as a postcard. It only takes a postcard and a couple of sentences for customers to have an impact.
UPDATE: 8 May, State Farm announced on Facebook that: "State Farm is ending its association with the Heartland Institute. This
is because of a recent billboard campaign launched by the Institute." They're getting lots of approving comments.
E&E Publishing report that this gaffe has cost Heartland hundreds of thousands of dollars from insurance companies and alienated key staff. They quote Brad Kading, president of the Association of Bermuda Insurers and Reinsurers, as saying:
The billboard just crystallized what the divide was. It just
means the brand is tarnished and there really is no way to separate
yourself without just leaving.
UPDATE 14 May: Eli Lilly, BB&T and Pepsi will no longer support the Heartland
Institute. That brings the number of companies dropping Heartland to
11. According to Forecast the Facts, more than 150,000 citizens have
weighed in against the organization’s messaging strategy. Board members, staff and 'Heartland Experts' have also left the organisation. Source: Climate Progress.
UPDATE 17 May: Peter Sinclair made this brilliant 11-minute video to debunk Heartland nonsense by presenting some of the key advocates for climate change since 1950s. The video is framed around Margaret Thatcher's key speech on global warming.
Click 'share'... it deserves to go viral.
UPDATE 24 May: The Heartland Conference (an annual gathering of climate change deniers and disinformers — mostly hardcore libertarians — who attempt to spread doubts about climate science) was a washout. Cancellations and no-shows resulted in attendance of about 170, compared with 800 in some previous years. Heartland announced that they will not run the conference again.
Some people reject new systems and technology saying, "If it worked it would
already have been done".
This is like the economist who says that
the twenty dollar note lying on the pavement doesn't exist, because if
it were there, someone would already have helped themselves.
We are in the midst of a massive decarbonisation of world economies that is bringing rapid and dramatic changes to technology and systems. Things that weren't feasible 10 years ago are not only possible now, they are highly desirable. Look at how affordable solar PV has become.
Note: 'Today' = 2009. Source Emmanuel Sachs (MIT)
To see a $20 note on the ground, we only need to open our eyes. To decarbonise the economy we have to look for opportunities, not obstacles.
Methane is a deadly, odourless gas that seeps out of coal mines. Today, these are called 'fugitive emissions' and the escaping methane is one of the worst greenhouse gases.
It is largely due to the fugitive emissions from its coal mines that CO2-e emissions of Queenslanders are twice the rate of Australia overall.
Escaping methane is deadly for underground miners, so they implemented an early warning system that alerted them when they hit a pocket of the odourless gas. They took canaries down into the coal mines. The small birds are very susceptable to methane and after a few whiffs they keel over. When their little friends stopped singing, the miners beat a hasty retreat and many human lives were saved.
And so we got the English expression for an early warning system – the canary in the coal mine.
As the most dramatically visible effect of global warming, the rapid retreat of Arctic sea ice is often interpreted as the canary in the mine for anthropogenic climate change.
The ongoing rapid retreat of Arctic sea ice is often interpreted as
the canary in the mine for anthropogenic climate change. In a new study,
scientists have now systematically examined the validity of this claim.
They find that neither natural fluctuations nor self-acceleration can
explain the observed Arctic sea-ice retreat. Instead, the recent
evolution of Arctic sea ice shows a strong, physically plausible
correlation with the increasing greenhouse gas concentration.
Dr. Dirk Notz and Prof. Jochem Marotzke
Gretchen Hofmann, associate professor of biology at the University of
California, Santa Barbara, warns that pteropods, tiny marine snails the size of
a lentil, that she refers to as the "potato chip" of the oceans because
they are eaten widely by so many species, are endangered by ocean acidification. A collapse in pteropods would make them a canary in the coalmine of climate change.
Early warning systems demand rapid and decisive responses. What are nations and individuals doing in response? Could we act faster, more decisively?
Moving money from one money box to another will not make you richer.
Windmills move air around, they don't make it warmer.
A recent study showed that overnight ground temperatures near windmills were a little higher (0.72 C in winter) than otherwise. This phenomenon is well known by orchardists who sometimes prevent frosts by hiring helicopters to hover over their trees and keep the air moving.
The study found that daytime temperatures were not affected. So it appears that the windmills are just moving air around, like a kid moving coins from one money box to another.
This picture shows clouds formed in the wake of Denmark's Horns Rev windfarm – one of the world's largest at sea. While wind turns the turbines, the turbines also change the patterns of air movement.
Source: Aeolus on the Guardian
Scott Mandia used the banking analogy when he debunked the claim (in comments) that windmills cause global warming.
When you're driving a car, you can slow down in seconds.
When you're driving a truck it takes longer, and when you're playing with the planet's atmosphere, you need to start putting on the brakes decades ahead.
Today's greenhouse gases will affect Earth's climate for another
hundred years. We're committing ourselves to a long, hot
future. How hot depends on how quickly we put on the brakes.
Some say that as well as applying the brakes, it would be good to take the foot off the accelerator!
According to International Energy Agency (IEA) research, 37 governments spent $409bn on artificially lowering the price of fossil fuels
in 2010. Critics say the subsidies significantly boost oil and gas
consumption and disadvantage renewable energy technologies, which
received only $66bn of subsidies in the same year.
The IEA demonstrates that phasing out subsidies to fossil fuels, if
well-executed, can generate important economic, energy security and
environmental benefits. About half the identified countries have begun measures to withdraw subsidies from fossil fuels.
In a stacked deck the cards are no longer in random order, instead they are arranged to favour specific outcomes.
Climate
change stacks the deck for certain types of extreme weather events. As the planet warms scientists expect heat waves to become more frequent, longer lasting,
and more intense. With them will come droughts and wildfires. As well as more 'hot and dry' events scientists predict there will be more extreme wet weather including storms and flooding.
This has tremendous implications for water resources
and agriculture. When we break records now—and we are breaking thousands
of them—we break them by a lot.
Reinsurers like MunichRE report that extreme weather/climate events have
increased in recent decades. This graph shows events for 1980-2010. It's interesting to see that geophysical (earthquakes, tsunamis & volcanoes) events have not changed much, whereas the climate/weather related events have increased markedly over the 30 years.
[Click to enlarge]
Global warming has stacked the climate deck towards more exteme weather events that will destroy livelihoods and wealth in rich countries as well as poor countries.
