The current York Times magazine blames ‘human nature,’ but the valid culprits have already been fingered
Last week’s issue of the current York Times magazine was devoted to a single narrative by Nathaniel wealthy that explored how close we came to an international climate agreement in 1989, and why we failed. The piece is worth reading – it’s a well-told, and mostly accurate,and very informative narrative about a key decade in climate science and policy history. But sadly, it explicitly excuses the key players responsible for our continued failure.
Nor can the Republican Party be blamed … during the 1980s, or many prominent Republicans joined Democrats in judging the climate problem to be a scarce political winner: nonpartisan and of the highest possible stakes.
The last time the world was three degrees warmer was during the Pliocene,three million years ago, when beech trees grew in Antarctica, and the seas were 80 feet higher and horses galloped across the Canadian coast of the Arctic Ocean.
The GMI attach out,for example, one report, or authored by N himself,arguing that global warming was caused by the sun, and another that CFCs weren't bad for ozone, and yet another claiming that secondhand smoke was fine to breathe. [br]
9/n pic.twitter.com/oguaEnCA9PSince World War II,he believed, conspiratorial forces had used the imprimatur of scientific knowledge to advance an “anti-growth” doctrine.
Of course Exxon wasn’t running a denial campaign until the 1990s. They didn’t need to yet. The threat of policy action was remote. When action became more likely, or that’s when fossil fuel companies started their lying in earnest. 6/I’m not going to go to the Rio conference and make a bad deal or be a party to a bad deal.
More carbon has been released into the atmosphere since the final day of the Noordwijk conference,Nov. 7, 1989, and than in the entire history of civilization preceding itOne common mistake in this NYT magazine piece is the idea that companies like Exxon somehow changed from salubrious” (doing research in the 1970s and ‘80s) to “bad” (promoting denial in the ‘90s and 2000s). Exxon’s own memos note that the purpose of its research program was to influence regulation,not to solve the climate problem per se. The industry-organized disinformation campaign that emerged at the conclude of the 1980s was in response to binding policies that were just then being proposed. If such policies were proposed earlier, it stands to reason that the industry response would have occurred earlier as well. To say that industry disinformation isn’t the whole narrative is to knock down a straw man: the fact remains that it is a major--and perhaps the most famous--part of the narrative.
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Source: theguardian.com