The Heartland Institute To Pope Francis: Don't Believe the Science of Global Warming

I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of embarrassment when I read about this. Apparently the Heartland Institute, possibly the most rabid of the conservative “think tanks” when it comes to denying the existence of global warming, is sending a contingent of its folks to Rome to, in their eyes, set the pope straight about climate change.

            The American organization sponsors an annual bizarro world version of the UN’s IPCC, in which they bloviate as best they can about conspiracies, money-grubbing climate scientists falsifying data, and imaginary cooling trends. They even call their get together the International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC) in the hope, I image, that the initials are close enough to fool people into thinking that they are the same as the UN’s IPCC.

The Heartland folks are on their way to Rome as they anticipate the Pontiff’s upcoming encyclical. The pope is expected to say that, given our present situation, reducing greenhouse gasses has become a moral imperative.

The pope is called upon to be gracious to those who seek his audience, so Pope Francis will meet with the representatives from the Heartland Institute. But they should already know that the pope receives some of the best council when it comes to science. OK, the Church really blew it with Bruno and Galileo, but that was over 300 years ago. Things have changed since then.

            Years ago, when scientists were uncertain if other factors besides CO2 might mitigate the warming effects of our release of greenhouse gasses, the Heartland Institute could gain some traction in the news and opinion pieces. But since that time they have painted themselves into an intellectual corner, and now they are quite stuck.

Pope Francis is expected to say that reducing greenhouse gasses is a moral imperative.

And they are now desperate. Until now global warming has been something scientists studied; it has been an issue for which governments and politicians have made laws and created policies. It has been something that most people ignored, too.

But with this his encyclical, Pope Francis takes global warming into our spiritual realm, a place where the Heartland Institute does not go. The “think tank” can have success with some folks as they sow doubt, and they can have even more success as they lobby Congress and make their large campaign contributions. But the pope, particularly this pope, holds great influence over his Catholic Church, as well as a great deal of the rest of the Christian world. With his upcoming encyclical, climate change becomes part of our spiritual lives, the subject of homilies from the pulpit, and a concern of our prayers. It goes from an abstract thing to something quite human.

In their campaign to keep us from addressing climate change, with this latest development with the pope, the Heartland Institute should know that they no longer have a prayer.

Maybe It's Time to Talk About Geoengineering, and Maybe We'll Do Something About CO2

I’ve only blogged about geoengineering once or twice. My feeling has been that it is an inevitability. Most folks know of and are concerned about global warming, yet we still keep electing politicians who make no promise of reducing our carbon output. We even elect politicians who are hostile to the idea that climate change is even real.

Senator James Inhofe calling Climate Change a hoax on the Senate Floor

We elect individuals like this to Congress. Who is to blame? 

So nothing gets done. In the meantime the world warms. I see things going from bad to worse until desperation sinks in somewhere, possibly India or another powerful country with a lot of land giving way to a rising sea, and that government will start shooting sulfate aerosols into the air to cool things down. We will then have crossed the threshold from inadvertently rearranging the dynamics of the atmosphere to intentionally manipulating the atmosphere.

Most folks, me included, have a very natural reaction to these ideas, that they remind us of the workings of some mad scientist. We see Vincent Price or Bella Lugosi in a black and white B movie crazily using his evil genius to despoil an innocent world.

Atomic supermen? Or sulphate aerosols. You decide. 

Lex Luthor, Superman won't let him geoengineer the world.

So are you scared now? Are you sufficiently freaked out by the idea of scientists taking a monkey wrench to the atmosphere to cool down the world that we’re warming with our power plants and automobiles? It seems that this is the real irony of geoengineering. Climate change freaks out some folks, but not all that many. And there are folks who aren’t freaked by it at all or deny that it’s happening. But geoengineering freaks the bejesus out of everybody.

At least that seems to be the conclusion of a study by Yale Law School’s Cultural Cognition Project, a group of scholars who looks into how people’s values influence how they process information and assess risk. I won’t go into the details of the study. You can find it here, published by the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and there is a Grist article about the study here. I’ll just sum up that the study found that if you have folks read about global warming and scientists advocating for stricter controls on carbon emissions, it only made folks more entrenched in the beliefs they had before, whether they thought of global warming as a threat or were skeptical or doubtful.

If folks read about global warming and scientists advocating for geoengineering, then skeptics were open to the reality of climate change. Also, those who believed in global warming were left more ambivalent after reading about geoengineering.

 

Pumping sea water into the atmosphere, one proposed geoengineeering idea 

Besides cluing us in, once again, to the reality that people are quirky and don’t behave predictably, what does this study tell us? I think we all feel that if we talk more about geoengineering, then it will normalize the idea, making all that much easier to consider and make us complacent about reducing our CO2 emissions. But maybe if we started to include the topic more in our discussions, it might be a way to loosen the skepticism of a good number of people. And it might get them to sign on to reducing our emissions and adequately dealing with global warming, instead of waiting for somebody to come along and start making atomic supermen to suck up carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

What do you think? Should we talk about geoengineering, even though we don’t want to do it?

Or we could throw these giant parasols into orbit Good idea, or scary?

King Coal Gins Up Animus For Obama and the EPA

Mines have been closing throughout Appalachia, with hundreds of miners laid off. Some of these men have been on the job for years; others have worked decades in the mines. These men are laid off in an area that has been economically depressed since at least the early eighties. Prospects for finding other well-paying work are not good.

            Mine closings also affect the barbers, restaurant owners, waitresses, and just about everybody else who works for a living in a mining community. Paychecks that no longer come in also affect the children.

            Mines close and everybody suffers.

Poverty reigns where they mine coal. Lose your job and the chances of finding other good-paying work are slim.

Miners and residents of coal communities have a right to be upset and angry when their mines close. I just don’t like it when the coal companies spend time and money to channel that anger to advance their agenda.

            Coal companies are spending big bucks to sponsor rallies, and PR campaigns to get the message out that miners have lost their jobs and Appalachians suffer because of Barack Obama, the EPA, and environmentalists. Big Coal and its supporters have created organizations such as Coal Mining Our Future that sponsor rallies and distribute T-shirts with pro coal industry messages. These organizations also encourage Appalachians to contact politicians with pro coal mining memes. Like any other industry, King Coal has always had its lobbyists. But by enlisting the public to contact their Congressional representatives, they have created a coal constituency to support their industry in the state houses and Capitol Hill.

            Apparently, these campaigns are paying off for King Coal.  Public opinion favoring the coal companies and their mining practices has increased in the last six years. In a speech titled “From Villain to Victim: The Coal Industry’s New Image in Appalachian Kentucky,” Al Cross, the director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues at the University of Kentucky, said of the coal companies, “[They] are in a defensive mode, and they’re gathering their friends around them. This has created, I think, kind of a siege mentality and a regional solidarity. There used to just be sympathy for miners. Now there is sympathy for an industry.”

            Traditionally, miners viewed their employers with a jaundiced eye. For good reason. They knew that without their union, the coal companies would have them working under extremely hazardous conditions for subsistence wages. So for me, having grown up in West Virginia, it’s a little disorienting to see miners taking the side of the coal companies, but I guess that a well-planned and financed PR campaign can bring over a lot of people to your side.

A scene from Matewan, about the beginnings of the United Mine Workers, when miners trusted water moccasins more than the coal companies

Regulations on power plants aside, coal mines have closed because of increased transportation costs and a great decline in the price of natural gas. Warmer than average winters also mean that people are burning less coal and lessening the demand for the mineral. Are these reasons for the decline in coal mining brought up at the industry sponsored rallies?

            I didn’t think so.

            Burning coal throws more CO2 in the atmosphere than anything else; one of the best strategies to reduce our CO2 emissions would be to phase out its use. I can understand that miners’ discontent, and if we as we as a country make the decision to turn away from coal, we owe the miners and other Appalachians a path for them to move on economically, whether that be through regional economic development, education and job training, or aided migration to other areas of the country that aren’t as economically depressed.

            Whether it be the automobile industry exiting Detroit and leaving that city in an economic vacuum or clothing companies buying garments from unsafe factories in Asia, the track record of corporations caring about their workers is not a good one. I don’t believe that the coal companies really care about the miners holding onto their jobs. The coal industry wants less regulation, and they are successfully channeling the anger of the miners, their families, and their neighbors to achieve that goal. But while they hold rallies and hand out T-shirts, mountains crumble, people get sick and die from polluted waters, and others lose their homes and communities to rising seas.

             

            

Good News: Federal Appeals Court Rules That the EPA Has the Authority to Regulate Greenhouse Gasses

The ability of the EPA to regulate the gasses that are warming our world was affirmed today in a Federal Appeals Court decision that ruled that the agency was “unambiguously correct” in its use of existing law to curb global warming. Several states and greenhouse gas emitting industries had challenged the move by the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate CO2 and other global warming gasses.

            I’m certain that this decision will be appealed to the Supreme Court and, considering the present rightward political leaning of the Court, this may only be a temporary victory for people and the planet. It is nonetheless good news.