WastedEnergy

Well now.  If you missed this one, you might want to go back and have a look real quick.  In what amounts to a rather unsurprising turn of events, the number one historical benefactor of climate change denial “science” and one of the largest air pollution violators in the United States, the conglomerate Koch Industries, turns out also to be behind more than a few astroturfing efforts today to seed anti-government vitriol among the general populace.  And, frighteningly enough, it seems to be working.  Over half of Americans today either don’t believe climate change is real or don’t believe human activity is causing it, a surprising change from just a few short years ago considering all it takes to see how the climate has changed is a quick glance at this summer’s headlines and a short trip out the front door.  And an anti-government populist sentiment seems to have taken hold over the electorate as well, with fringe candidates like Sharron Angle of Nevada and Rand Paul of Kentucky making inroads right and, well, right.

Atlas Farted

If the effects of such a populist libertarian movement are rather unpredictable and could be far-reaching in producing a moment of political psychosis for the United States, the causes are quite evident and have a lot to do with this pair of Dubious Brothers.  Of course, you might say, this sentiment couldn’t possibly be based entirely on political astroturfing, right?  Aren’t people just agreeing with the standard talking points in support of neoliberal economics, as conveniently provided by the also-Koch-funded-and-founded Mercatus and Cato Institutes?

I had heard a little bit about the new exhibit at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum funded by Koch money, the Hall of Human Origins, and so I decided to check it out over the weekend.  Curiously, the exhibit opens with a statement about adaptability to changing climate conditions, as if that were the number one defining characteristic of human evolution.  A visitor unfamiliar with the Koch ideological vision might be surprised by this front-and-center emphasis on the matter of climate change, perhaps wondering why a public institution like the Smithsonian might stick its neck out in support of the claim that today’s climate changes are not really so bad (after all, we can always just adapt by building underground cities and evolving curved spines, right?).  Other gems included a graph showing global average temperature over the past ten million years (cold was up and warm was down, for some reason), to conveniently obscure the rapid changes of the past century or so as a small and steeply downward-sloping blip at the end of the graph.  With so much variation in the past, how could anyone possibly worry about the changes we are undergoing today?  Never mind that the pace of change is much faster today than any paleo-climate records show and that the causes can be more or less entirely ascribed to human-induced changes to the composition of the atmosphere from activities like Koch Industries’ lucrative oil refining operations.  Why do anything to change course when adaptation is clearly so easy?  I’m sure that twenty million Pakistanis displaced by flooding this summer would agree.

The latest Koch effort to fund “science” in the private interest comes in the form of $1 million in support of Proposition 23, a referendum that would suspend Assembly Bill 32, the California cap on greenhouse gas emissions.  And, predictably, the Koch-funded Tea Party plans to hold a rally in California on September 12 in support of Prop. 23.  Sure, that makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?  Tea Partiers care deeply about individual autonomy and states’ rights, after all, and they don’t want interference from outsiders.  Unless, of course, those outsiders happen to represent Texas oil money.  Remember, Big Government telling you what to do is Bad; Big Business is a universal Good.  Unless, of course, those big businesses happen to be a part of California’s homegrown clean energy industry that threatens to provide competition to status quo energy conglomerates and make the United States a meaningful player in the renewable energy economy of the future.  That would also be Bad.

Of course, stronger hurricanes and heat waves and more frequent droughts and floods are not the only ways the climate is changing.  With anti-government populism taking a strong foothold in American politics and threatening to overturn the Democratic majority in Congress, changes in the political climate are becoming increasingly difficult to deny as well.  Sooner or later, however, no amount of money poured into the political coffers of right-wing fringe political candidates will be enough to deny the urgency of government action on climate change.  When that happens, and it looks increasingly like it has already begun, we’ll be glad California took the lead in adopting greenhouse gas emissions caps and promoting the development of clean energy technologies, so that we have the options we need to cope.  Unless, of course, those caps are overturned and we have no plan going forward except to continue depending upon the increasingly dirty, expensive, and unreliable technologies supplied by Koch and the like. 

But that is exactly what they had in mind, isn’t it?