Again, when it is clear that the thread was not read, one can disregard your opinion as usual.
As it is a straw man, no one is recommending the end of civilization, no one is recommending the ban of the internal combustion engine, only that it has little to no emissions. There is also that item that while it is too late to prevent some damage, it is not too late to prevent worse effects.
As pointed before your “advise” also includes a jab at the idea that our efforts will be little. It is like recommending a smoker to **not **stop smoking because he or she is getting emphysema already. Well, of course the damage is done and little it can do to prevent the damage that took place, but one should disregard that kind of advise because even more damage will happen in the future if one does not stop.
And finally, the costs were analyzed by many experts before the IPCC came with even better numbers regarding the total costs if we deal with the issue now, rather than later. Your advice here is to continue to listen to the real alarmists: the ones that claim that the costs will end civilization as we know it.
Denial of hybrids? Denial of CO2 capture technology? Nah, I do not think you are thinking this carefully in order to continue a hijack and a straw man.
Well of course we have a choice. And we (collectively) make that choice every day: Live our lives as richly as we can without being a bastard. We want clean surroundings, so we don’t burn leaves in the city, nor let people fling too much garbage around indiscriminately.
But I think what you are implying is that we won’t have a choice about how to behave now because of the predicted consequence 50 years down the road. And that’s completely naive, not to mention incorrect. We’re borrowing money from our kids like there is no tomorrow–and that tomorrow is going to show up a helluva lot sooner than Florida drowns.
It’s in the nature of humans to participate in the Tragedy of the Commons. Where we are not convinced everyone will sacrifice, we won’t individually sacrifice. And right now most of the world–most–is so far behind the developed world that the amount of energy required to bring them closer to par is staggering, creating an insatiable demand for all energy producible from all sources.
The choice that will be made every day is to live as richly as possible, including jetting off to the world cup even if Florida just drowned. If that choice is unavailable, it’s unavailable. But if it exists, it will be chosen with trivial regard to the world good. And no scenario modeled for ACC produces some sort of instantaneous global catastrophe that wakes us all up and keeps us on the straight and narrow sacrificial trail. Instead, each horrible hurricane will cause a temporary brouhaha for those directly affected by it, and each quiescent season (like the last) will cause a backslide in resolution to sacrifice. And for those way way behind the developed 8-ball, there is no catastrophe that would prevent any given individual from living more richly.
Why don’t you offer a Bengali delta peasant, after the next big Bay of Bengal cyclone, a private jet for his family to a new mansion at a destination of his choice, and see which of us is more correct about human nature and its consequent effect on AGW?
Look at the link he posted … in the previous post that contained this quote:
The article is at the website of the CEI, the rabidly denialist pro-oil organization that once ran the unintentionally humorous pro-CO2 ads featuring the tagline “they call it pollution – we call it life” that were so embarrassing that the blowback and satire that ensued was fun to watch. So what do they have to say this time? I quote: “…global warming … is to Mr. Gore “the most dangerous of all” environmental threats. As writers including Fred S. Singer have noted on this page, the data have yet to support such a conclusion.”
Now this is funny on several levels. Since the data DO “support such a conclusion” there’s your definition of denialism. To add to the fun, S. Fred Singer (they got the name wrong) is one of the most unprincipled, reprehensible lying denialists in the business – as much a lying shill today for the oil industry as he was formerly a lying shill for the tobacco industry.
As for “banning the internal combustion engine” which this article was supposed to show us that Gore wants to do, what it actually confirms is that “In his book [Gore] advocates ‘the strategic goal of completely eliminating the internal combustion engine over, say, a twenty-five year period’.” Gore was advocating a strategic program of research to develop the necessary technologies to eventually replace the ICE, which we are already doing. How this can be equated with “banning the ICE” cannot be explained by any known interpretation of the English language.
So yeah, lots of denialism going on, and it’s coming from all the usual places.
This is doubly dumb. On the one hand, no one but you is proposing universal access to private jets. It is a straw man that has noting but a harangue about your personal bête noire.
More importantly in the context of this thread, it is a hijack. If you wish to debate the approaches humanity should take regarding climate change, (with or without straw Gores), open a new thread.
This thread addresses the issue of whether the oil companies should be regarded as “denialists” if they fund propaganda to bad science to promote the idea that here is no impending AGW. Evidence or logic indicating that they are or are not engaged in such propaganda is valid. A hijack to discuss other issues its not.
Perhaps you can provide an alternate calculation to this oneabout where the energy is going to come from to develop the world.
Burn all the straw I’m creating, maybe?
And when, exactly, did I accuse the environmentalists of driving a socialistic scheme?
Really, Gb, you gotta start reading what I say more closely.
I’m just a pragmatist. A plain ole observer of human nature. I don’t want Florida to drown, and I care about this earth. That I care doesn’t mean I have to accept that we can create Shangri La. I care about indebting my children too, but I still think most political systems that permit borrowing are going to live for today above the responsibility to leave a fiscally sound state or nation to their children.
This sidebar began with my point that Big Oil gives lip service to AGW because it’s convenient to do so, probes anything that may affect market demand or price for weaknesses, and has no real need for any Denialism because the demand for all energy from all sources is insatiable. They are not not climate change Denialists out of a good heart; the reason they aren’t climate change Denialists is that there is no particular need to do anything except patronize the opposition, so to speak. For the forseeable future, we’ll burn all the oil they can find, and use all other energy as well.
But OK; I’ve sorta beat up my point anyway. I notice you don’t seem to feel quite the same need to moderate pro-AGW comments, but perhaps that’s just my own bias.
PS: I have not proposed universal access to private jets. I have proposed universal use of them were they available to Everyman, as a simple way of demonstrating that we all deny (in practice) what we advance for public consumption. Just like Big Oil.
Just a clarification as this is hijack still, I inferred that from your repeated insistence of claiming we are proposing that all will reach the same levels as Gore. Seen that before also coming from deniers out there.
But one pertinent note has to be noticed here: the last part of my reply to you was cut conveniently by you in your reply, since it is precisely about the subject of the thread, it is clear that you do read carefully indeed, but cut what it is inconvenient.
Your rationalization for why the oil industry aren’t denialists is pretty funny and rather refuted by the fact that they are, as shown in the many links that have been posted here to back that up. In fact, along with the coal industry, they’re among the most egregious denialists in existence. So let me offer instead an explanation for that. They could not be happy about the increasing public awareness and concern about climate change which is blamed squarely on the one and only major product they produce; they could not be happy about declining vehicle-miles-traveled numbers; they could not be happy about strategic proposals like the one from Al Gore just discussed, about developing technologies to enable us to eventually phase out the mainstay of their market, the internal combustion engine. They are no different than any other producer of any commodity or anything else: demand for their product is everything. And that demand is at risk, your claims and no doubt your investments in the oil industry notwithstanding (I say that because you said earlier that your investments are guided by your putative knowledge of human nature).
You’re right about one thing, though. Their website platitudes are indeed just a smokescreen to patronize the opposition, and to improve their tattered public image.
The reason that demand for the oil companies’ product is at risk – and the basic flaw in all the rest of your arguments – is that you’ve created this strawman where apparently the only way climate change is going to be addressed is if we all individually decide that we’re going to sacrifice and consume less and voluntarily become poor, and then you rhetorically ask your audience how likely it is that we’re all going to be willing to sacrifice and live poorly. Aside from the fact that this is not a necessary consequence – unless you’d feel like a pauper driving a Tesla Model S instead of a Mercedes S550 – that’s not how problems like sulfate emissions and acid rain, or lead pollution from tetraethyl lead, or any other environmental problems have been or ever will be solved. They are solved by government leadership that provides or incentivizes the needed technologies and changes behaviors by education, incentives, and most importantly by public policy that focuses on appropriate regulation. And this is what the oil companies fear. A lot. And that’s why they’re still fervent denialists underground, with a public display of crocodile tears for their exposed past transgressions.
But you are not, factually, Al Gore. You are (AFAICT from your statements) nowhere near as wealthy as he is, and your comparative obscurity means that you consume vastly less resources than he does in his career as a world-famous and influential public figure.
Moreover, the vast majority of the world’s population is not, factually, you. No matter how much everybody in the world wants to “live richly”, it’s not economically possible for them to do so on the scale that you practice it, and it never will be. To use your actions, incentives and lifestyle as a proxy for humanity as a whole, on the flimsy grounds that yours is the sort of life all the poors would prefer if only they could get it, is a massive red herring as far as practical policy thinking is concerned.
To be “in some tiny fraction of the top one percent for wealth and income” means you are in a tiny tiny minority of the world’s population. According to the Global Rich List, an annual income of $100K puts you approximately in the top 1/25 of the top one percent, which is a small fraction but not quite “tiny”; an annual income of $1M is in the top 1/100 of the top one percent.
This is just a superficial rationalization of your own chosen behavior: “I don’t bother with making any sacrifices to reduce my environmental impact because the rest of the world wouldn’t either if they were in my shoes, so there’s no point!”
But what you’re missing is that you are irrelevant, statistically speaking. The more vastly wealthy you are and the fewer there are of you, the less it matters what you do as far as your personal wastefulness and extravagance is concerned. Your incentives and your choices are simply not a useful proxy, realistically, for most of the approximately 99.95% of the world’s population that are poorer than you.
No matter how much you try to insist upon a fundamental spiritual brotherhood between yourself and Joe Poor because you both want “to live as richly as possible”, the fact is that you might almost as well be an extraterrestrial alien for all the practical connection there is between you and Joe Poor.
It’s the large-scale changes in the choices “available” to the rest of the world, as wolfpup describes, that will really affect the environmental impact of humanity as a whole. Of course you personally will always “live as richly” as you want to and not care about environmental impacts, because you can afford to. But realistically speaking, you are irrelevant. And what the rest of the world would like to do if they could be you is also irrelevant, realistically speaking.
Kimstu, take it to a different thread. Regardless of anyone’s reactions to the behavior of the oil companies, this thread is a discussion of what those actions actually are.
Whether Big Oil is a “Denialist” is a label, and as the OP points, out, they have plenty of public-facing positions stating they are not.
I haven’t said they are not Denialists, because I’m not that interested in labels. I have said they care about protecting their market and will probe any weakness of anyone’s position that affects that market. But I don’t think they need to be Denialists, and I did say that.
One of the approaches of the pro AGW-concern folks is to try and get simple labels onto the opposition. I understand the marketing value of this. “You are anti-Science.” “You are a Denialist.” “You are a Conservative.” Whatever label works. And labels do work to persuade the masses.
I am personally more interested in what is; not what label markets a position. For this reason I don’t think Big Oil has to worry very much about losing the product battle for the forseeable future, and therefore doesn’t need to be a Denialist, so to speak. They can (and will) patronized the Worriers, lobby to keep their product as cheap as possible, and feed the world’s insatiable energy addiction.
Tesla makes a nice car. It would be an interesting debate–in a different thread–to discuss if we had a $1,000 all electric car tomorrow, would the world be better environmentally. (No; cheap clean energy and cheap cars would be a disaster because if Everyman can have Everything, we’d all live so large we’d finish invading the earth. Poverty is the Environmentalist’s best friend.)
You seem to be missing the same point that the OP missed at the beginning of this thread, though: namely, that what they state about their “positions” does not preclude their indirectly supporting positions that contradict those statements.
“Openly agreeing that climate change as a result of human activities is real” and “secretly funding climate change denialism” are not mutually exclusive activities.
“Probing for weakness of perceived external threats” is a pretty coy euphemism for the sort of science-distorting propaganda activities that the fossil-fuel industry has been supporting.
**If they are promoting the creation and dissemination of misinformation designed to encourage people to mistrust and/or misunderstand the conclusions of mainstream climate science research about the seriousness of climate change—and they are—then they are climate-change denialists.
If they simultaneously issue public-relations boilerplate statements about the importance of taking climate change seriously—and they do—then they are hypocritical and opportunist climate-change denialists.**
I don’t see why you are so anxious to sugar-coat this entirely predictable and unremarkable pragmatic business strategy by refusing to call a spade a spade. Your professed indifference to “labels” is not a very convincing reason, given how ready you are to apply other labels like “anti-Denialist”, “alarmists”, and “Worriers” to positions you disagree with.
But you have not made any kind of even remotely persuasive argument that this broad general point is applicable to the topic of the present thread.
On the contrary, GIGObuster and wolfpup, for example, have provided plenty of substance supporting the charge that the fossil-fuel industry has been actively supporting denialist misrepresentation of climate science. Consequently, applying the “denialist” label to them is a valid accusation rather than mere empty name-calling.
Either provide some actual evidence rebutting that substance, or sack up and admit that you are wrong.
Most people would consider $900 million a year in denialism funding (previously cited: Institutionalizing delay: foundation funding and the creation of U.S. climate change counter-movement organizations, Climatic Change, 2013) to be a matter of quite some considerable substance.
The point I’m trying making about labels has to do with the notion that the label itself has substance, versus what actually is.
Should Big Oil, for example, fund studies and institutions which have an incentive to show that “climate science” has it wrong, the application of a Denialist label may be very satisfying to those of us who want to show the climate science has it right. But the label itself is just a rhetorical label, and the assertion (for example) of “misrepresentation” is another easily applied label that represents a summary opinion.
The Denialist label is deliberately pejorative in nature; analagous to me calling AGW Alarmists “Alarmists,” or referring to them as “Pollyannas” because they think a world which is currently happy to squander its children’s financial resources in self-indulgence will somehow band together and collectively sacrifice for the sake of their children’s environmental concerns. I could just as easily apply a label of “Denier” to those whom I think misrepresent the entire history of how the world has worked so far or deny human nature or misrepresent what the energy requirements will actually be or…well; you get the idea.
Applying a broad “Denialist” label to any opposition argument is a rhetorical tool; it’s not a charge of substance, even though it may be accurate for any given point of fact. But that could be said on both sides of the ACC debate, and in fact we’ll see whether and how AGW Worriers (?)/Anti-Denialists (?) will have denied what I see the as the obvious facts of population growth, human nature and self-indulgence to live as richly as one can come 2020 when real CO2 output is supposed to start to decline under a 450 Scenario and the coming 2015 Accord kicks in.
Given how well we’ve done with kicking budget balancing down the road (and for the same reason of self interest/tragedy of the commons), I think we’ll find out soon enough which group of Deniers on which side of the debate gets the outcome they were predicting.
