Originally published on the CGS blog on February 12, 2014.
We welcome the following contribution to The Global Citizen by Aric Caplan, President of Caplan Communications. His fuller analysis on the intersection of climate denialism and Congressional campaign contributions can be found here.
Voters are coming to grips with our many elected officials beholden to the fossil fuel industry that finances their reelections. The Center for American Progress recently reported that 160 members of the 113th Congress have taken over $55.5 million from the industry that drives carbon pollution, which also causes climate change.
The latest climate-denying diversions peddled by lobbyists and the anti-science crowd in Congress would leave news junkies and even casual political observers skeptical or uninterested altogether in finding cleaner energy alternatives. I would argue that this response is the result of learned behavior. After all, 97% of scientists worldwide subscribe to the fact that “climate-warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activities.” Nevertheless, most scientists are impartial considering science is independent of ideology. The only disagreement in their ranks is among scientists with financial obligations to the fossil fuel industry.
Two years ago, one of the most outspoken, polarizing and climate-denying extremists, U.S. Senator Jim Inhofe (R-OK) a ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and former Chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, published “The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future.”
In his bias against science, Inhofe brazenly claims: “With all of the hysteria, all of the fear, all of the phony science, could it be that man-made global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people? It sure sounds like it.”
Inhofe relies on superficial rhetoric involving regulations that amount to higher taxes and an array of misleading talking points that play well to his supporters and con funders by hyping how “We the People” and businesses, especially, are overburdened by government. Accordingly, Inhofe maintains that “. . . for the alarmists, global warming has nothing to do with science or scientific inquiry. Science is not about the inquiry to discover truth, but a mask to achieve an ideological agenda. For some, this issue has become a secular religion, pure and simple.”
Miles Grant, a Senior Communications Manager at the National Wildlife Federation, observed at the blog TheGreenMiles that Inhofe recently slipped up and admitted the real reason why he pretends climate change doesn’t exist. By effectively manufacturing headlines for himself, Inhofe argued, “I find fewer and fewer members of the United States Senate that are sympathetic to this whole cause,” and admitted to WABC-AM’s Aaron Klein that he only denies climate science because he doesn’t like the solutions being offered. Miles astutely pointed to conservatives’ bogus academic culpability that accepting the “science” would admit that climate poses a real problem, which would lead one to discussing the need to solve it. Next, you become stuck debating the science in a seemingly “endless loop” of disinformation, opinion-as-fact and other baseless conspiracy theories.
Rallying behind a common cause would seem reasonable — and an obvious answer to solving America’s problems — but instead it appears the voters are getting what they deserved. Meanwhile, the voices of Americans besieged by climate change are drowning out the bullhorn of special interests, be it from organized labor, farmers, small and sustainable business owners, or state visitor and tourism bureaus, who have described severe drought and other burdens they’ve faced as a result of climate change, reiterating the importance in finding common sense solutions to cut carbon pollution, protect future generations from climate change, spur the economy and create jobs.
