The Other Road to Serfdom and the Path to Sustainable Democracy

Oil, Economic Theory, and the Moral Culpability of a Discipline

42 oil, economic theory, and the moral culpability of a discipline a n unsustainable system, by definition, cannot last. Our society is not sustainable. Difficult truths, these. It isn’t pleasant facing difficult truths, and our tendency to avoid them is made all the easier when authoritative voices tell us that the unpleasant truths we want to avoid are, in fact, not true at all—that we only think they’re true because bad and devious people have been lying to us. This describes the current wrangle in America over climate change, which is one of the more obvious and clearly established proofs that our present system is unsustainable. The physical and chemical principles involved in climate change have been known for a centuryandahalf.By1908aSwedishscientisthadappliedthemtoatmospheric science and predicted planetary warming, and by the mid-1950s a pair of researchers—Roger Revelle at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography and Hans E. Suess, a chemist at the University of California, San Diego—had seen enough to warn that by emitting ever-increasing amounts of carbon exhaust, “humans are now carrying out a large-scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be repeated in the future.” Over the next half century scientists in a variety of disciplines worked to prove or disprove Revelle and Suess. Evidence accumulated, and gradually a near-unanimous consensus among scientists emerged: the climate is changing, and humans are driving that change. By the turn of the twenty-first century, scientific organizations were issuing position statements like this one from the American Meteorological Association in 2003: “Human activities have become a major source of environmental change. Of great urgency are the climate consequences of the increasing atmospheric abundance of greenhouse gases.” In 2004, the Pentagon gave President George W. oil, economic theory, and moral culpability 43 Bush a report (which his administration suppressed) warning that “climate change and its follow-on effects pose a severe risk to political, economic , and social stability,” with consequences for Us national security that “should be considered immediately.” “Disruption and conflict,” the report warned, “will be endemic features of life” as climate change progresses . (“This is depressing stuff,” one of the coauthors told reporters in Britain covering the story. “It’s a national security threat that is unique because there is no enemy to point your guns at and we have no control over the threat.”) In any impartial and dispassionate analysis, the evidence supporting humanly caused climate change has to be convincing. Yet there are plenty of supposedly authoritative voices telling us that the phenomenon isn’t real because the science isn’t settled or is simply and persistently mistaken. To maintain that position, climate change deniers have had to do two things: deny the existence of a scientific consensus, and explain how and why so many scientists could be so wrong. The first part of that project was outlined in a Republican strategy memo written in 2004 by pollster Frank Luntz. “The scientific debate is closing but not closed yet,” the memo asserts. “There is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science.” (You have to wonder about the motives behind the challenge: if the direction of the science is clear, why resist it?) Carefully staged hearings, chaired by Republicans, placed one climate change scientist next to one climate change skeptic—generally a scientist from a field not directly related to climate change, someone whose acceptance of evidence lagged well behind the median among scientists. The tactic wordlessly communicated a blatantly false impression that there is a fifty-fifty split on this issue in the scientific community . Efforts to portray the science as uncertain have been amply funded by right-wing billionaires like Art Pope and the Koch brothers, with money spent on political campaigns, public relations efforts, and “astroturfing ”—giving a false sense of populist roots to the denial movement. That still leaves another problem for climate change deniers: a vast majority of scientists agree that the evidence says beyond any reasonable doubt that climate change is real and humanly caused. How could so many scientists be so wrong? Few climate change deniers have been more pathetically creative in their work to obscure or discredit this consensus than Republican Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, who has 44 the other road to serfdom said repeatedly from the floor of the Senate that climate change is a hoax cooked up by Al...