Tom Tomorrow and Our Sanguine (and Absurd) Response to the Chemical Spill in West Virginia's Elk River

This is in one of our local papers, CityBeat, which publishes one of Tom Tomorrow’s This Modern World cartoon once a week. I found a link to it on the the Daily Kos website.

            I usually enjoy reading this comic. Dan Perkins, who has produced this strip for about 25 years, can usually sum up the absurdity of a situation pretty well in five or six frames. Here he takes on the immense stupidity surrounding the chemical spill in West Virginia’s Elk River.

Throughout this whole disaster, why have we been so sanguine?

Appalachians Get Zero Hope or Change in the President's State of the Union Address

The number of times president Obama mentioned in his State of the Union Address the chemical spill in West Virginia’s Elk River that denied drinking water to 300,000 residents: 0

The number of times that the president talked about mountaintop removal: 0

I admit that this administration has an uphill battle against big business, King Coal, and the GOP. But if you’ve got a “pen and a telephone,” as the president says, maybe you could write up an executive order or two or make a phone call or two to help the folks in Appalachia.

The amount of hope and change promised to Appalachians by the president last night

Manchin, Rockefeller, and Boxer Introduce the Chemical Safety and Drinking Water Protection Act

I have my fingers crossed on this one. In the wake of the chemical spill in West Virginia's Elk River that left 300,000 without drinking water, Senators Joe Manchin, Jay Rockefeller, and Barbara Boxer introduced the Chemical Safety and Drinking Water Protection Act, which would, once enacted provide for the following:

1. Require regular state inspections of above-ground chemical storage facilities.
2. Require industry to develop state-approved emergency response plans that meet at least minimum guidelines.
3. Allow states to recoup costs incurred from responding to emergencies.
4. Ensure that drinking water systems have the tools and information to respond to emergencies.

This is a good move on the part of West Virginia’s senators and my senator here in California. I’m pretty certain that the GOP controlled House will delay, water down, or kill this legislation—I can hear their usual canards already: “overregulation,” “jobs killing,” “jobs or the environment,” “war on coal,” and a few others—before president Obama can sign it into law. But it is still a development that gives me hope for West Virginia and West Virginians.

Safe drinking water is a right.

A Great Idea: Invite Maria Gunnoe to the State of the Union Address

This is a really great idea. Annie Leonard, who became well known for her Story of Stuff critique of consumerism, says in answer to the New York Times’ “Room for Debate” question “Who Should be Invited to the State of the Union?” that Maria Gunnoe, the noted mountaintop removal activist and one of the 300,000 West Virginia residents who were left without water from the Freedom Industries chemical spill, should be among the president’s guests.

Mr. President, invite Maria Gunnoe to your State of the Union Address.

Leonard points out, rightly, that having Gunnoe as an invited guest to the State of the Union Address would, “point to the urgent need to reform both our antiquated chemicals policy—the compound that was spilled was not regulated by state or federal law—and our energy policy, which must quickly achieve a transition to clean, renewable sources.”

            In 2009 Gunnoe received Goldman Environmental Prize. She also received the prestigious Raoul Wallenberg Medal from the University of Michigan in 2012. Gunnoe received the Wallenberg award, given to individuals who have worked against great odds for peace and human dignity, for her years of work organizing against mountaintop removal. Besides highlighting the chemical spill, her presence at the president’s speech would point up this holocaust that is devastating Appalachia and the lives of Appalachians.

A Chemical Spill in West Virginia and It's Not Big News

There has been a great deal of finger pointing going on ever since Freedom Industries leaked toxic chemicals into the Elk River in Charleston, West Virginia and poisoned the water for 300,000 West Virginians. Folks have rightly excoriated the coal mining industry and the industry’s political enablers, both Democratic and GOP. West Virginians themselves have even received some of the blame for the toxic water. (I’ll have more to say about this in a later post.)

            As so much of what I like to blog about here is the way we think about the environment and why we think about it the way we do, my interest is first directed to the press. It just baffles me that the news outlets have treated this story with such an amazing lack of interest or engagement.

            The Charleston Gazette, the newspaper based in Charleston where the spill occurred, has of course published a number of stories on the spill, with updates continuing to come in for the last two weeks. Other papers have not shown as much interest. The story has been largely absent from the pages of my local paper, the San Diego UT. And as I noted in a previous blog, the Sunday talking heads have been silent on the subject of the chemical spill in the Elk River.

The Los Angeles Times has only printed eight stories on the spill since the news of the 4-mathylcyclohexane methanol leaking into the Elk River first broke16 days ago. In comparison, from March 20^th 2012, when the story broke out to the national press, till March 31^st 2012, eleven days in all, the Times published 20 articles about the shooting of Travon Martin by George Zimmerman. The next month the paper published 30 articles about Zimmerman and Martin and published 207 articles in all about the killing and trial.[i] It’s true that, as the police initially released Zimmerman, the story pointed up the problems of Florida’s Stand Your Ground law. Why, though, would this story get so much more attention from the Times?

            Newspapers and broadcast news tell us about new highways being built, local crimes committed, who won an Oscar, strife in Syria, and the latest sports scores. These are all things we want to be informed about, and we get to read about them in the paper or hear about them on the radio news. But by their coverage, as well as the lack of coverage, the folks who put together the newspapers, Internet news sources, and television news also give us an indication as to how important something is. You could sum up this phenomenon by a simple intuitive graph. More important means more stories.

It seems that, for whatever reason, the press has decided that a major chemical spill in West Virginia is important, but only so important.

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[i] I used Proquest searches to find this information. I concentrated on the Los Angeles Times because its database of stories is readily available in my access to Proquest. I’d be interested if anybody finds differing search results.

So What Do They Do With That Chemical When They're Not Spilling It In Rivers?

So, I guess as no big surprise, we’re finding out that a second chemical was spilled from the Freedom Industries tank along the Elk River in West Virginia. And the great consolation to southern West Virginians, whether they were sickened by their water or not, is that it appears that the second chemical, a mixture of polyglycol ethers known as PPH, is no more toxic than the 4-methylcyclohexane methanol that was spilled into the Elk River earlier this month. I'm sure that's a big relief for those folks!

            Officials at Freedom Industries knew of the other leak, but only let the state of West Virginia know about the second leak two days ago, more than ten days after the spill. And they are not being forthcoming about the nature of PPH because Freedom Industries considers the nature of this compound “proprietary.”

            My guess is that if the MCHM hadn’t made the water smell like licorice—if people couldn’t smell that their water was bad—then we may not have known about this spill until many more people had been sickened.

More compounds for your drinking pleasure in West Virginia

The 4-methylcyclohexane methanol has been used by the coal industry for years, and now it’s time to connect the dots. OK, if the mining companies have been using this stuff for a long time, where do the put it once they are through with it? You got it. They throw it in the coal slurry ponds or down old mine shafts. Joe Stanley, a former miner and union president, claims that coal companies have been poisoning the waters of Appalachia for years. He says:

I watched the coal industry poison our water for years. Now they're telling us not to drink the water? We've been dumping this stuff into unlined ponds and into old mines for years. This MCHM was just one of the chemicals we were told was highly toxic but that we dumped into old mine shafts and slurry ponds, and it's been seeping into the groundwater for years. As soon as we're out of that mine it immediately fills with water. And where does it go from there? I don't know. Your guess is as good as mine.

Robert Johnson and Gus Lubin who wrote this Business Insider feature on Stanley go on to say:

An Environmental Protection Agency assessment last year identified 132 cases where coal-fired power plant waste has damaged rivers, streams and lakes, and 123 where it has tainted underground water sources, according to an AP investigation by Dina Cappiello and Seth Borenstein. Nearly three quarters of the 1,727 coalmines in the U.S. have not been inspected in five years to see if they are following water pollution laws, according to the same investigation, which cites these and other alarming findings about coal pollution. (Italics mine)

Just Google "Global Warming" and Get a Wealth of Misinformation

I heard this show on the radio yesterday morning, Public Radio’s To the Point. Oren Olney, the host of the show, lets people talk instead of yelling at each other. How cool is that? On the show Olney and his guests said that despite the nearly unanimous consensus as to the science of climate change, the American public is increasingly skeptical about global warming. People just don’t believe in climate change the way they used to, despite the increasing evidence.

            Wow. I knew that a large portion of our population remained skeptical. But that portion of our population is increasing? What is happening? Is the warmer air making us stupider? Is there some ratio between sea level and intelligence? As the oceans rise, do our IQs go down?

            As a possible reason for this increasing doubt Olney brought up the subject of “climategate,” that supposedly revealed nefarious ways of some climate scientists. But differing investigations into the whole affair, eight in all, found no evidence of fraud or misconduct in this “scandal.” And this all happened back in 2009, long ago enough for folks to reassess the continuing science that comes in on our greenhouse gas problems.

            A couple of the guests on the show, Michael Brune of the Sierra Club and Michael Mann, the Pennsylvania State Professor of Meteorology who developed the “hockey stick” graph to display the sharp rise in recent global temperatures, talked about the global warming denial and delay industry. Right after they mentioned this, I did a Google search on the news of global warming in the past 24 hours. Here is some of what I got:

            Among the first ten search returns were three articles that depicted a skeptical view of global warming. Over at Forbes, Larry Bell, who has written skeptical pieces on climate change for the magazine for some time, has Miss Global Warming Yet? If Not, Just Wait And You Might that actually warns of a global freeze.

            Sawing an old horse from the GOP and big business that the media are biased on the issues, a site called NewsBusters claims that, on the issue of global warming, the media are also biased in favor of covering climate change. Why this bias would exist, no one knows. Once again, these folks use the canard that the press must always present an opposing view, no matter how crazy that view is, in order to exemplify “balance.”

            And there was this one from the most peevish person on the planet. John Stossel who says something about Bill Nye the Science Guy. I couldn’t open the video, but well, I’m pretty certain that John Stossel is not saying anything particularly complimentary about Bill Nye the Science Guy.

            With such nonsense being brought up on a global warming Google search, the way a lot of people get their information, no wonder so many people are in the dark on global warming.

GOP to 300,000 Thirsty West Virginians (and the Rest of Appalachia, too): Screw You!

As though things aren’t bad enough for West Virginia. At a time when the residents who live in the southern part of the Mountain State have been living through a massive coal mining related disaster, members of the House GOP quietly slipped into the $1-trillion budget appropriations bill a rider that would forbid the Army Corps of Engineers—the government agency that issues Clean Water Act 404 permits that allow for the dumping or dredging of material into streams and rivers—from redefining stream “fill material” so as to include the waste and overburden material that results from mountaintop removal mining.

            As part of a mountaintop mining operation, the top of the mountain that is removed to get at the coal is routinely dumped into adjacent valleys, burying mountain streams. It is estimated that over 2,400 miles of streams, the length of the Mississippi, have been buried or destroyed in Appalachia due to mountaintop removal.

Amount the GOP cares about West Virginia and the rest of Appalachia

The Obama administration has been trying to reintroduce stream protection provisions that were tossed out the window by the administration of George W. Bush. Now, even with the stream protection rules, valleys were filled in and streams destroyed. This rider will ensure that even the minimal protections afforded rivers and streams will not be reintroduced. Think of it. The type of lawlessness and lack of regulation that poisoned drinking water for 300,000 people will continue for mining in Appalachia. For this disaster there are no lessons learned, no urging to ameliorate a bad situation, and zero concern for the health and lives of those who live in Appalachia. 

Chemical Spill Leaves More Questions in West Virginia

As the chemical spill in the Elk River drifts downstream and more and more West Virginians are turning their taps back on, and as the story drifts off the front pages of the press, a few questions remain.

Safe to drink yet? No one really knows.

While we still have a fuzzy understanding of what the chemical 4-methylcyclohexanemethanol is and remain uncertain of its toxicity, the EPA is uncertain as to how much of the licorice smelling substance leaked into the river. Officials acknowledged that they don’t know how much of the substance may have leaked into the soil with the potential of seeping into the river if there aren’t proper clean up measures implemented.

            The West Virginia legislature has been quick to aide small businesses affected by the spill. HB 4175, the “West Virginia Small Business Small Business Emergency Act,” has already passed the West Virginia House of Delegates and would allow for small businesses to apply for grants and low or no-interest loans. Small businesses could also defer paying state payroll and sales taxes.

            I don’t disfavor helping small business. In this economy, a disruption of a week’s business could be a make or break situation. But the monies that would be helping these businesses would be coming from state tax dollars. In essence, with this bill, the people of West Virginia are going to be asked to compensate businesses because of an industrial accident of a poorly regulated corporation. Isn’t there a sense of robbing Peter to pay for what the corporation Paul is responsible for?

            And it’s curious that this is the first bill to come out of the West Virginia legislature after this accident. What of legislation to avoid such accidents in the first place? Wasn’t West Virginia urged to do so years ago?

            And though Senator Joe Manchin is reintroducing a bill that would provide for more stringent regulation of hazardous chemicals, West Virginia’s legislators are still voicing strong support for industry and trying their best to distance this accident from the coal industry. Remember, as they say, it is a chemical spill, not a coal industry related chemical spill.

            Finally, I found this over at Forbes. Ken Silverstein, at the business oriented publication calls for “corporate social responsibility,” saying that:

Devoted corporate citizens are endearing themselves to not just their shareholders but also to the communities where they live and conduct commerce. In turn, they are validating their brands and adding value. Conversely, cutting corners and evading responsibility diminishes their goodwill.

Well, well, well. I guess that Silverstein thinks that if we just left businesses alone, they, through their self-enlightened ways, would always do the right thing and soon we would be living in an Ayn Rand utopia of environmentally friendly corporate profits.

            I don’t dismiss what Silverstein says out of hand. There are many good people in charge of companies who want to do the right thing. But there are enough of them—and this spill gives us a good example of one—who are willing to cut corners, to disregard worker safety and health, to consider the environment as only a source for timber and minerals. This is why we need laws and regulations to make sure that they don’t hurt people or the environment.

            Most employees won’t steal from their employers, but we still have embezzlement laws to punish the no goodnics who do try to enrich themselves at their employers’ expense. Few people want to hurt other folks, but we still have laws against assault and murder to safeguard us against those who would.

It’s the same with business. Maybe we don’t need laws to keep us safe from Kumbaya Incorporated, but we should have some safeguards for the companies that aren’t so enlightened.

Jon Stewart Points Out the Absurd Nature of West Virginia's Chemical Spill

Once again Jon Stewart and the Daily Show hit the nail on the head, pointing up the absurdity of our obsession with “security” while refusing to take common sense steps to actually ensure safety for ourselves.

In West Virginia an Experiment With 300,000 Test Subjects

Well, folks can turn on the tap, fill up the ice trays, and get those showers flowing in southern West Virginia. Official have given the green light that the water from the Elk River is now safe to drink and bath in.

            While there might be something of a licorice smell to the water, utility officials say it was safe to drink. But if your one of the folks who live in and around Charleston, West Virginia, you may still want to wait a day or two before turning on the tap. Apparently, there is not much science behind the establishment of one-part-per-million safety threshold for this substance, 4-methylcyclohexane methanol. The level was established based on a single unpublished study in which this threshold amount killed 50 percent of test animals.

            So 50 percent of the test animals died, and officials say it’s OK to drink this water? To my thinking, these 300,000 West Virginians are now capitalist guinea pigs in a huge uncontrolled health experiment. If I lived there, I’d be buying bottled water for the next week, at least.

West Virginians need to ask "Is the glass half full of  4-methylcyclohexane methanol or half empty of 4-methylcyclohexane methanol?"

One of the questions that lingers, is how does such a large geographic area come to rely on a single source for its drinking water? Well, it turns out that the coal industry is to blame here as well. I’d like to see some more hard numbers on this, but according to Nora Caplan-Bricker at the New Republic, mountaintop mines have contaminated local water sources throughout the Mountain State’s southern and central regions, leaving residents no choice but to end the use of well water and pump in the water from the Elk River.

With a "Trickle" of Drinking Water, Questions Remain in Elk River Chemical Spill

OK, so the latest word is that, after four days, most of the residents in southern West Virginia are still without water due to the chemical spill in the Elk River. There is a “trickle” of water to some residents and business, but most folks are still high and very dry from this industrial disaster. In the meantime there are a few things that have been pointed out.

            Pointed out by the Huffington Post is the immense oversight made by the Sunday morning talking heads shows, the ones with George Stephanopoulos, David Gregory, and other well-dressed and well-spoken folks. Apparently, one of the greatest disasters to affect health and the environment since the BP oil spill received zero airtime during these political talk shows.

 

Amount David Gregory and George Stephanopoulos and the other talking heads  mentioned the chemical spill that deprived 300,000 West Virginians of their drinking water

More than 300,000 people without drinking water is a big story. And there are implications for the rest of the country. Are there other chemical storage places for chemicals that could potentially foul the water in other states? What responsibility doe the state have? What responsibilities are to be born by the federal government in such a matter? It seems that Cokie Roberts could have something to say about this.

            Maybe it’s just that this happened in West Virginia. Mountaintop removal has seriously altered much of the landscape and affected the lives of tens of thousands, yet the news coverage of this crisis has remained slim over the decades.

            Aljazeera reminds us that there is a long history of coal operations polluting the wells and streams of the Mountain State. Wilson Dizard, the author of “Coal mining’s long legacy of water pollution in West Virginia” in Aljazeera America, tells us that the coal industry has been fouling streams and wells for years and years. In his story Vivian Stockman of the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition says that for years and years the coal companies have been pumping chemical-laden wastewater directly into the ground. Once there, it can spread to other parts of the water table and poison wells.  “All this waste is going underground for years, and then one day people start noticing their well water turning sometimes orange, sometimes black. The water stinks,” says Stockman. “For more than a century, the coal industry has had pretty much free rein to do whatever it wants.”

            And once again some of the best coverage of the incident and its ramifications has been done by Ken Ward of the Charleston Gazette. As he points out in his Coal Tattoo blog, governor Ray Tomblin and the coal companies are trying to distance the coal industry from the incident by insisting that the spill is a “chemical company incident” and not a “coal company incident.”

            Ward also points out that the West Virginia took no steps to create a program that would have prevented chemical accidents like this spill, even after a team of federal experts urged the state to do so after an industrial explosion and fire killed two workers in Institute, West Virginia in 2008. And what is that stuff that poured into the river anyway? It seems that no one is certain.

Should Protesters Compensate UBS? And Who Should UBS Compensate For Mountaintop Removal?

This is a little follow-up story on a protest that some folks concerned about mountaintop mining performed in Stamford, Connecticut a while back. During the protest some protesters commandeered a construction crane and unfurled a large banner that voiced the demand that UBS, a Swiss-based financial company that has financed a great deal of mountaintop removal, stop its unsavory business practice.

            Now get this. Prosecutors are continuing the cases of some of the protesters, 14 in all, for another three weeks so that the prosecutors have the time to tally how much the protest may have cost local businesses.

            Yes, I imagine that the disruption from the protest may have inconvenienced a number of folks and their businesses. Shoppers may have been kept out of stores; diners may have avoided restaurants; and offices of other businesses may have had trouble keeping their workers on task.

            But isn’t there a little bit of bizarro world going on here? The prosecutors are tallying up the dollars lost to business so as to figure out how much the protesters might be charged with restitution, to pay the businesses for their lost business. In a larger sense, however, shouldn’t UBS be required to pay restitution? Shouldn’t this huge company that makes millions off of financing mountaintop removal be required to offer restitution to Appalachian residents for spoiled wells? Shouldn’t the bank be required to compensate the miners who have lost their jobs to the heavy machinery and high explosives that have taken their jobs away? Shouldn’t UBS be required to pay the medical bills of the West Virginians and Kentuckians who have developed kidney disease and cancers from living in the presence of a mountaintop mine? How about the lives that have been burdened by the depression that comes from living close to a mountaintop mining operation, shouldn’t UBS be required to pay for these folks’ antidepressants and medical bills? And what about the lives cut short? Shouldn’t UBS compensate the families of the deceased?

            As I said, bizarro world.

Should UBS be responsible for this?

Chemical Spill Fouls Water For 300,000 in West Virginia

A chemical spill has West Virginia residents making trips to the grocery story for bottled water and ice. Somehow or other a whole bunch of 4-Methylcyclohexane Methanol, a chemical used by the coal industry, wound up flowing into the Elk River in Charleston, the state capital, and upriver from a major water treatment plant.

            The contamination of the water has left 300,000 residents, a sizable portion of the state’s population of under 2 million, without tap water. President Obama declared a state of emergency for West Virginia, ensuring federal aid.

            There is no word on how the chemical wound up in the Elk River; no explanation as to why the water treatment plant had no plans for such a spill; and there is no explanation as to why a plant or mine with so much potentially hazardous material would be upstream from a major water treatment plant.

            But then again, this is West Virginia.

W.Va. Gov. Tomblin Easing Up On Coal Rhetoric?

W.Va. Gov. Tomblin easing up on coal rhetoric?

A great deal of what this blog concentrates on is how we think of the environment and how institutions, business, and industry try to influence our thinking on the world we live in, you might say it looks at where the rhetoric meets the rhododendron.

            In the above link, Ken Ward, in his blog Coal Tattoo, noticed a slight change of tone in West Virginia governor Earl Tomblin’s State of the State address yesterday. Although still harping on the EPA’s “misguided policies on coal,” Tomblin goes on to say that, “we should remind ourselves a challenge doesn’t always lead to confrontation. Last summer I sat across the table from EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy and shared our story. We have been hit hard. But with planning and perseverance I believe the obstacles can be overcome.”

            Wow. No mention of a “war on coal” or other such inflammatory rhetoric. Might it be that Tomblin is gently trying to let the folks of West Virginia know that the easy coal has already been mined? That he is hinting that there is less and less of a future for coal in the Mountain State? We shall see. It will be interesting to listen to what Senator Manchin has to say about coal and mining in the near future.

Ag-Gag Legislation Rears Its Ugly Head In Indiana

Just when it looked like the push for ag-gag legislation had petered out, there is now a bill in the Indiana legislature that once again tries to put the kibosh on whistleblowers that document unsafe, unsanitary, or cruel animal practices on farms or meat processing plants.

            Currently being considered by the Corrections and Criminal Law Committee of the Indiana legislature, SB 101 would expand the definition of trespass and, get this, would allow agricultural operations to write their own rules of conduct that would have the authority of state law. The proposed legislation reads in part:

(a) An agricultural operation may conspicuously post a notice at the agricultural operation’s locations that lists prohibited acts that may compromise the agricultural operation’s trade secrets or operations. The notice must be posted in such a manner that is likely to come to the attention of the public.

(b) A person who knowingly or intentionally commits an act at an agricultural operation that is a prohibited act listed on a notice described in subsection (a) commits a Level 6 felony.

The bill offers no restrictions on what these “prohibited acts” could be. Basically it would allow farmers and meat packing companies to write the laws of their own agricultural fiefdoms, prohibiting not only the documenting of such things as animal cruelty, but union activities and other personal freedoms that employees would have to check at the farm gate or slaughterhouse door.

Businesses have the right to maintain rules of conduct and they can punish employees who break these codes. But if this bill becomes law and you’re a farmer in Indiana, your business codes of conduct would be felonies. By the way, in Indiana a Level 6 felony can be punished by up to six months in jail.

Groups Seek Federal Intervention For West Virginia Mountaintop Mining Regulation

The record of the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) has not been a good one. In her exposé of Appalachian mountaintop removal for U.S. News and World Report Penny Loeb found that enforcement of environmental regulation was lax to nonexistent in West Virginia.[i] And Ken Ward, who has covered mountaintop removal, as well as all things related to coal and coal mining for the Charleston Gazette, had once uncovered in an investigative report that the DEP did not know the number of acres under mountaintop removal operations. The West Virginia DEP did not even keep track of the number of mountaintop mining permits that it had granted.[ii]

            Well, finally after all this time, a group of environmental and religious groups hope that they can get officials from the federal surface mining office to ameliorate things in the Mountain State. They want the feds to hear the concerns of citizens who claim that they have been rebuffed by West Virginia’s environmental department. And now in response to a petition by 19 community and environmental groups, including the League of Women Voters and the Catholic Committee of Appalachia, the federal Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement said it would investigate five aspects of West Virginia’s DEP mining regulation.

            Among the complaints are wells drying up or being contaminated and damage to homes and other structures. Rob Goodwin, technical analyst for the Coal River Mountain Watch, a small grassroots organization that works to empower local residents in the face of mountaintop removal, says, “Ninety-nine percent [of the complaints], if not all, are being dismissed as frivolous or unsubstantiated.”

            The coal industry responds that it is over-regulated.

The coal industry says that this type of mining is over-regulated.

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[i] Loeb, Penny “Shear Madness,” US News and World Report 3 August 1997

[ii] Ward, Ken “Flattened,” Charleston Gazette, 9 August 1998

Big Surprise: Academic Investigation Finds a Large, Well-Financed Movement to Deny Climate Change

This is one of those academic papers that shows scientific proof that water flows downhill or that the sky is indeed blue that leaves you thinking, “Well, duh, who didn’t know that?”

Published in the journal Climate Change, Robert J. Brulle has given us a glimpse of the huge and sophisticated industry that has grown up to deny the existence of global warming. Using IRS data, his paper Institutionalizing delay: foundation funding and the creation of U.S. climate change counter-movement organizations uncovers close to a billion dollars a year that organizations and businesses such as the Koch Affiliated Foundation and Exxon Mobile give to “think tanks” such as the Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation, and the American Enterprise Institute to deny and obfuscate the issue of climate change. Not only is the money involved in this enterprise of denial astounding, but the magnitude of the enterprise is huge as well. Brulle found more than 130 institutions that fund what he calls the climate change counter-movement (CCCM). And besides the Cato Institute and Heritage Foundation, there are 19 other organizations that receive funding to spread the word that the planet is not warming and the seas are not rising. He has also found a trend of some of the larger organizations and businesses of concealing their donations to the “think tanks” by funneling the contributions through donor directed philanthropies.

            Let me stop myself there for a moment. A common strategy of these “think tanks” has been to deny the science and evidence of global warming. In light of the ever-growing evidence of climate change, the strategy of denying or denigrating the science of global warming has changed for some of these organizations. Some of them are not denying global warming, but they are still throwing cold water on the idea of doing anything about it. So Brulle’s identification of all this money financing “think tanks” as a counter-movement, rather than simply a denial movement, is apt.

            Brulle may actually underestimate the power and extent of the CCCM. Left out of his analysis are the politicians who hold sway and influence the thinking of their constituencies and who hold bogus hearings that are in tune with the CCCM. Larger still in influence are the talk radio, whose millions of listeners hear hours and hours of CCCM talk.

            As I said above, Who didn’t know that? Who didn’t know that there was a well-financed program to delay efforts at controlling global warming? But Brulle’s paper is necessary. If there is an effort to deny climate change, there is also an effort to deny the denial. We need his investigation of the CCCM.