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Getting the Market to Tell the Truth
Lester R. Brown
www.earth-policy.org/book_bytes/2012/wotech13_ss1
Earth Policy Release
Book Byte
April 11, 2012
Four Goals
Moving the global economy off its current decline-and-collapse path depends on reaching four goals: stabilizing climate, stabilizing population, eradicating poverty, and restoring the economy’s natural support systems. These goals—comprising what the Earth Policy Institute calls “Plan B” to save civilization—are mutually dependent. All are essential to feeding the world’s people. It is unlikely that we can reach any one goal without reaching the others.
Full-Cost Pricing
The key to restructuring the economy is to get the market to tell the truth through full-cost pricing. If the world is to move onto a sustainable path, we need economists who will calculate indirect costs and work with political leaders to incorporate them into market prices by restructuring taxes. This will require help from other disciplines, including ecology, meteorology, agronomy, hydrology, and demography. Full-cost pricing that will create an honest market is essential to building an economy that can sustain civilization and progress.
Carbon Tax
For energy specifically, full-cost pricing means putting a tax on carbon to reflect the full cost of burning fossil fuels and offsetting it with a reduction in the tax on income. Some 2,500 economists, including nine Nobel Prize winners in economics, have endorsed the concept of tax shifts. Harvard economics professor and former chairman of George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors N. Gregory Mankiw wrote in Fortune magazine:” Cutting income taxes while increasing gasoline taxes would lead to more rapid economic growth, less traffic congestion, safer roads, and reduced risk of global warming –all without jeopardizing long-term fiscal solvency.” This may be the closest thing to a free lunch that economics has to offer.
Gasoline
The failure of the market to reflect total costs can readily be seen with Continue reading Getting the Market to Tell the Truth
Open Letter to the Secretary General for the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD), Co-Chairs of the Bureau for Rio+20 and Member-States of the United Nations
 RIGHTS AT RISK AT THE UNITED NATIONS
We – the civil society organizations and social movements who have responded to the call of the United Nations General Assembly to participate in the Rio+20 process – feel that is our duty to call the attention of relevant authorities and citizens of the world to a situation that severely threatens the rights of all people and undermines the relevance of the United Nations.
Remarkably, we are witnessing an attempt by certain countries to weaken, or “bracket” or outright eliminate nearly all references to human rights obligations and equity principles in the text, “The Future We Want”, for the outcome of Rio+20.
This includes references to the right to food and proper nutrition, the right to safe and clean drinking water and sanitation, the right to development and others. The right to a clean and healthy environment, which is essential to the realization of fundamental human rights, remains weak in the text. Even principles previously agreed upon in Rio in 1992 are being bracketed – the Polluter Pays Principle, Precautionary Principle, Common But Differentiated Responsibility (CBDR).
Many member states are opposing prescriptive language that commits governments to actually do what they claim to support in principle and act as duty bearers of human rights, including the provision of finance, technology and other means of implementation to support sustainable development effort in developing countries. On the other hand, there is a strong push for private sector investments and initiatives to fill in the gap left by the public sector. This risks privatizing and commoditizing common goods – such as water – which in turn endangers access and affordability, which are fundamental to such rights.
Although economic tools are essential to implement the decisions aiming for sustainability, social justice and peace, a private economy rationale should not prevail over the fulfillment of human needs and the respect of planetary boundaries. Therefore a strong institutional framework and regulation is needed. Weakly regulated markets have already proven to be a threat not only to people and nature, but to economies and nation states themselves. Markets must work for people, people should not work for markets.
From the ashes of World War II humanity gathered to build institutions aiming to build peace and prosperity for all, avoiding further suffering and destruction. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights spells out this collective will, and the United Nations organization was created to make it a reality. Alarmingly, this very institution is now being used as a platform to attack the very rights it should safeguard, leaving people without defense and putting the very relevance of the UN at stake.
We urge member states to bring the Rio+20 negotiations back on track to deliver the people’s legitimate agenda and the realization of rights, democracy and sustainability, as well as respect for transparency, accountability and non-regression on progress made.
We call on the UN Secretary General to stand up for the legacy of the United Nations by ensuring that Rio+20 builds on the multi-generational effort to strengthen rights as the foundation of peace and prosperity.
We urge our fellow citizens of the world to stand up for the future we want, and let their voices be heard. To that end the Rio+20 process should be improved by adopting the proposals we submit below.
On Greater participation for Major Groups
We are concerned by the continuing exclusion of Major Groups from the formal negotiating process of the Rio+20 zero draft. Unlike in the Preparatory Committee Meetings and the Intersessional Meetings, Major Groups and other Stakeholders have not been allowed to present revisions or make statements on the floor of the meeting. Nor, we suspect will we be allowed to make submissions or participate fully in the working negotiation group meetings that are likely to follow. Despite the UN DESA having compiled a text that shows all the revisions suggested by Major Groups, these revisions to the zero draft have so far not been included in the official negotiating text.
We request that the Major Groups be given the opportunity to submit suggestions and wording which would then be added to the official text for consideration, indication of support or deletion, and potential inclusion by governments.
We appeal to the UNCSD Secretary General to urgently reverse this state of affairs and to ensure that Major Groups have a seat at the table and a voice in the room where the negotiations are taking place. Please ensure that at the very least, Major Groups are allowed a formal statement at the commencement of the next negotiating session and at every session where a new draft text is introduced.#
The Great Carbon Bubble:
Why the Fossil Fuel Industry Fights So Hard
Copyright 2012 Bill McKibben
 If we could see the world with a particularly illuminating set of spectacles, one of its most prominent features at the moment would be a giant carbon bubble, whose bursting someday will make the housing bubble of 2007 look like a lark. As yet — as we shall see — it’s unfortunately largely invisible to us.
In compensation, though, we have some truly beautiful images made possible by new technology. Last month, for instance, NASA updated the most iconic photograph in our civilization’s gallery: “Blue Marble,” originally taken from Apollo 17 in 1972. The spectacular new high-def image shows a picture of the Americas on January 4th, a good day for snapping photos because there weren’t many clouds.
It was also a good day because of the striking way it could demonstrate to us just how much the planet has changed in 40 years. As Jeff Masters, the web’s most widely read meteorologist, explains, “The U.S. and Canada are virtually snow-free and cloud-free, which is extremely rare for a January day. The lack of snow in the mountains of the Western U.S. is particularly unusual. I doubt one could find a January day this cloud-free with so little snow on the ground throughout the entire satellite record, going back to the early 1960s.”
In fact, it’s likely that the week that photo was taken will prove “the driest first week in recorded U.S. history.” Indeed, it followed on 2011, which showed the greatest weather extremes in our history — 56% of the country was either in drought or flood, which was no surprise since “climate change science predicts wet areas will tend to get wetter and dry areas will tend to get drier.” Indeed, the nation suffered 14 weather disasters each causing $1 billion or more in damage last year. (The old record was nine.) Masters again: “Watching the weather over the past two years has been like watching a famous baseball hitter on steroids.”
In the face of such data — statistics that you can duplicate for almost every region of the planet — you’d think we’d already be in an all-out effort to do something about climate change. Instead, we’re witnessing an all-out effort to… deny there’s a problem.
Our GOP presidential candidates are working hard to make sure no one thinks they’d appease chemistry and physics. At the last Republican debate in Florida, Rick Santorum insisted that he should be the nominee because he’d caught on earlier than Newt or Mitt to the global warming “hoax.”

Most of the media pays remarkably little attention to what’s happening. Coverage of global warming has dipped 40% over the last two years. When, say, there’s a rare outbreak of January tornadoes, TV anchors politely discuss “extreme weather,” but climate change is the disaster that dare not speak its name. And when they do break their silence, some of our elite organs are happy to indulge in outright denial. Last month, for instance, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by “16 scientists and engineers” headlined “No Need to Panic About Global Warming.” The article was easily debunked. It was nothing but a mash-up of long-since-disproved arguments by people who turned out mostly not to be climate scientists at all, quoting other scientists who immediately said their actual work showed just the opposite.
It’s no secret where this denialism comes from: the fossil fuel industry pays for it. (Of the 16 authors of the Journal article, for instance, five had had ties to Exxon.) Writers from Ross Gelbspan to Naomi Oreskes have made this case with such overwhelming power that no one even really tries denying it any more. The open question is why the industry persists in denial in the face of an endless body of fact showing climate change is the greatest danger we’ve ever faced.
Why doesn’t it fold the way the tobacco industry eventually did? Why doesn’t it invest its riches in things like solar panels and so profit handsomely from the next generation of energy? As it happens, the answer is more interesting than you might think.
Part of it’s simple enough: the giant energy companies are making so much money right now that they can’t stop gorging themselves. ExxonMobil, year after year, pulls in more money than any company in history. Chevron’s not far behind. Everyone in the business is swimming in money.
Still, they could theoretically invest all that cash in new clean technology or research and development for the same. As it happens, though, they’ve got a deeper problem, one that’s become clear only in the last few years. Put briefly: their value is largely based on fossil-fuel reserves that won’t be burned if we ever take global warming seriously.
When I talked about a carbon bubble at the beginning of this essay, this is what I meant. Here are some of the relevant numbers, courtesy of the Capital Institute: we’re already seeing widespread climate disruption, but if we want to avoid utter, civilization-shaking disaster, many scientists have pointed to a two-degree rise in global temperatures as the most we could possibly deal with. If we spew 565 gigatons more carbon into the atmosphere, we’ll quite possibly go right past that reddest of red lines. But the oil companies, private and state-owned, have current reserves on the books equivalent to 2,795 gigatons — five times more than we can ever safely burn. It has to stay in the ground.
Put another way, in ecological terms it would be extremely prudent to write off $20 trillion worth of those reserves. In economic terms, of course, it would be a disaster, first and foremost for shareholders and executives of companies like ExxonMobil (and people in places like Venezuela).
If you run an oil company, this sort of write-off is the disastrous future staring you in the face as soon as climate change is taken as seriously as it should be, and that’s far scarier than drought and flood. It’s why you’ll do anything — including fund an endless campaigns of lies — to avoid coming to terms with its reality. So instead, we simply charge ahead. To take just one example, last month the boss of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Thomas Donohue, called for burning all the country’s newly discovered coal, gas, and oil — believed to be 1,800 gigatons worth of carbon from our nation alone.
What he and the rest of the energy-industrial elite are denying, in other words, is that the business models at the center of our economy are in the deepest possible conflict with physics and chemistry. The carbon bubble that looms over our world needs to be deflated soon. As with our fiscal crisis, failure to do so will cause enormous pain — pain, in fact, almost beyond imagining. After all, if you think banks are too big to fail, consider the climate as a whole and imagine the nature of the bailout that would face us when that bubble finally bursts.
Unfortunately, it won’t burst by itself — not in time, anyway. The fossil-fuel companies, with their heavily funded denialism and their record campaign contributions, have been able to keep at bay even the tamest efforts at reining in carbon emissions. With each passing day, they’re leveraging us deeper into an unpayable carbon debt — and with each passing day, they’re raking in unimaginable returns. ExxonMobil last week reported its 2011 profits at $41 billion, the second highest of all time. Do you wonder who owns the record? That would be ExxonMobil in 2008 at $45 billion.
Telling the truth about climate change would require pulling away the biggest punchbowl in history, right when the party is in full swing. That’s why the fight is so pitched. That’s why those of us battling for the future need to raise our game. And it’s why that view from the satellites, however beautiful from a distance, is likely to become ever harder to recognize as our home planet.
Bill McKibben is Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College, founder of the global climate campaign 350.org, a TomDispatch regular, and the author, most recently, of
Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch and join us on Facebook.
Copyright 2012 Bill McKibben
2011 was ninth-warmest year since 1880: NASA
Thu Jan 19 21:57:37 UTC 2012
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The global average temperature last year was the ninth-warmest in the modern meteorological record, continuing a trend linked to greenhouse gases that saw nine of the 10 hottest years occurring since the year 2000, NASA scientists said on Thursday.
A separate report from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said the average temperature for the United States in 2011 as the 23rd warmest year on record.
The global average surface temperature for 2011 was 0.92 degrees F (0.51 degrees C) warmer than the mid-20th century baseline temperature, researchers at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies said in a statement. The institute’s temperature record began in 1880.
The first 11 years of the new century were notably hotter than the middle and late 20th century, according to institute director James Hansen. The only year from the 20th century that was among the top 10 warmest years was 1998.
These high global temperatures come even with the cooling effects of a strong La Nina ocean temperature pattern and low solar activity for the past several years, said Hansen, who has long campaigned against human-spurred climate change.
The NASA statement said the current higher temperatures are largely sustained by increased concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, especially carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is emitted by various human activities, from coal-fired power plants to fossil-fueled vehicles to human breath.
Current levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere exceed 390 parts per million, compared with 285 ppm in 1880 and 315 by 1960, NASA said.
Last year was also a year of record-breaking climate extremes in the United States, which contributed to 14 weather and climate disasters with economic impact of $1 billion or more each, according to NOAA . This number does not count a pre-Halloween snowstorm in the Northeast, which is still being analyzed.
NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center said the average 2011 temperature for 2011 for the contiguous United States was 53.8 degrees F, which is 1 degree above the 20th-century average. Average precipitation across the country was near normal, but this masks record-breaking extremes of drought and precipitation, the agency said.
(Reporting By Deborah Zabarenko, Environment Correspondent; Editing by Xavier Briand)
More Election Time Anti-Immigrant Antics
There are several things the public can count on each election season – a deluge of non-stop political advertising, daily tracking polls, and now to an increasing degree, false claims about immigrants by politicians looking for a cheap way to score political points.The first example comes from Kansas where anti-immigrant zealot Kris Kobach (running for Secretary of State) is claiming that non-citizens are fraudulently voting en masse on election day. The charge is so ludicrous that he has not presented any evidence to support the claim. This red-herring of non-citizen voting is so flimsy that both conservative and liberal groups have responded to the myth. Read more…
Georgia Board of Regents Attempts to Ban Undocumented Immigrants from University System
Last week, the Georgia Board of Regents decided to effectively ban undocumented students from attending 5 of the 61 Universities and Technical College Systems of Georgia starting in the fall of 2011 through a series of admissions provisions. Georgia becomes the second state (after South Carolina) to attempt to prevent undocumented students from attending its universities. This effort comes despite the fact that of the 310,000 students in the Georgia system, only 501 are undocumented – all of whom pay out of state tuition (which more than covers the cost of their instruction). Read more…
U.S. Border Czar Calls on Congress to Get Serious about Immigration Reform
While some candidates continue to make political fodder out of immigration and border security on the campaign trail, administration officials are pushing Congress to get real about overhauling our broken immigration system. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Commissioner, Alan Bersin, recently commented that Congress needs to ‘get serious about a post-election immigration overhaul if the nation is to deal with the duality of enforcing border security while facilitating trade.’ In the wake of the nation’s SB1070-inspired border frenzy, some may be surprised to learn that there’s more to immigration than targeting undocumented immigrants and securing the border. A big part of Bersin’s job also involves regulating the flow of trade and commerce across the border, as well as expediting travel – priorities that tend to get lost in empty debate over who’s the toughest on undocumented immigration. Read more…
Kevin Cawley note:
We may want to look at this ethical analysis concept more closely. Professor Donald Brown of Penn State University in the USA, spoke at the final 2011 meeting of the Committee on Sustainable Development at the United Nations on December 15, 2011. (There is a link to his blog, Climate Ethics Campaign, in the links section on the right hand column of this page of the website.)
There is a strong indication that many are beginning to see the way forward is not going to be via UN member states because they are acting mostly in their own interests in the short term. The developed nations privatize gains and socialize losses while the poor nations fall back and suffer. The way forward may well depend on the ability of civil society to make the ethical argument that developed nations have ethical duties to the poor in other parts of the planet. Responsibilities, obligations and duties to others must be more clearly a feature of nation states behavior but generally it is faith-based institutions and civil society making these arguments at this time. The media have not been completely persuaded about the urgency of the problem and this reality may in some measure be due to the failure of civil society to make the most compelling argument in part because the disinformation campaign has been more successful in controlling the narrative, especially in the United States.
Support for the ethical critique here can also be found in the writings of Thomas Berry, in particular his analysis of the origin, differentiation and role of Rights. Examples abound but here is a sample where Thomas is speaking about the rights of all beings: “Planet Earth is a single community bound together with interdependent relationships. No living being nourishes itself. Each component of the Earth community is immediately or mediately dependent on every other member of the community for the nourishment and assistance it needs for its own survival.”
An Ethical Analysis of the Climate Change Disinformation Campaign: Is This A New Kind of Assault on Humanity?
By DONALD A BROWN on December 2, 2011 9:47 AM
Introduction: The following is an ethical and moral critique of the climate change disinformation campaign made at an event at COP-17 in Durban, South Africa on November 29th 2011. In addition to Donald A. Brown, a number of philosophers, scientists, and lawyers who work on the ethical dimensions of climate change participated in this event. They included Stephen Gardiner from the University of Washington, Jon Rosales from St. Lawrence University, Katherine Kintzell from the Center for Humans and Nature and the IUCN Environmental Law Commission Ethics Working Group, Kenneth Shockley from the University of Buffalo, and Marilyn Averill from the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Climate Change as Ethical Problem. Climate change must be understood at its core as an ethical problem because; (a) it is a problem caused by some people in one part of the world that are hurting poor people who are often far away and poor, (b) the harms to these victims are potentially catastrophic, and (c) the victims can’t protect themselves by petitioning their governments- they must hope that those causing the problem will see that their ethical duties to the victims requires them to drastically lower their greenhouse gas emissions.
Because climate changeis an ethical problem, those causing the problem may not use self-interest alone as justification for policy responses, they must respond in light of their responsibilities, obligations and duties to others. This is also true about how we respond to scientific uncertainties about climate change. We must be very careful about making claims about uncertainty because overstatements of uncertainty may lead to harsh consequences. That is to not act has consequences and uncertaity arguments discussed here have led to thirty years of inaction on climate change
Moral Failing of Disinformation Efforts. We are here today to encourage greater reflection on the moral travesty of the climate change disinformation campaign. We will argue that this campaign is some kind of new assault on humanity. Let me stress we are not attacking scientific skepticism. Skepticism is the oxygen of science. Climate science continues to need skeptical approaches to current understandings of how human activities may affect the climate to help scientists understand what we don’t know about human impacts on the climate system.
We are also not denying that individuals have unalienable rights to free speech. Yet free speech about something that is dangerous has responsibilities and lying and misinformation is always morally reprehensible even if the right to free speech is conceded. Free speech must not deceive.
However, I will in a minute review the tactics of the climate change disinformation campaign. We think you will agree that these are not acceptable ways of acting skeptically but malicious, morally unacceptable disinformation. To understand the full moral depravity of the climate change disinformation campaign, one must know something about the state of climate science. There is a “consensus” view on climate science that has been articulated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This consensus is not a consensus on all scientific issues entalied by climate change; it is a consensus about the fact that the planet is warming, that this warming is largely human caused, and that under business-as-usual we are headed to potentially catastrophic impacts for humans and the natural resources on which life depends. Furthermore, these harms are likely to be most harshly experienced by many of the Earth’s poorest people.
Academies of Science Concur. Every Academy of Science has issued reports supporting the consensus view including four reports by the US Academy of Science. Well over 100 scientific organizations with expertise in climate science have also issued reports or statements in support of the consensus view. At least 97 % of all scientists that actually do research in climate science support the consensus view according to two recent surveys in respectable scientific journals.
Investigations of Disinformation Campaign. There are six recent books that have investigated the disinformation campaign on climate change science. (See references below) What follows is an ethical analysis of the disinformation campaign based upon the findings in these books.
The disinformation campaign began in the 1980s when some of the same scientists and organizations that fought government regulation of tobacco began to apply the tactics honed in their war on the regulation of tobacco to climate change. For almost 25 years this campaign has been waged to undermine public support for regulation of greenhouse gases.
The organizations trying to undermine public support on climate policies by exaggerating scientific uncertainty have expanded over the last few decades to include think tanks, front groups, astroturf groups (that is groups pretending to be bottom-up citizen responses), PR firm led campaigns financed by fossil fuel interests and free-market fundamentalists philanthropic funding organizations. Much of the funding support for these efforts has come from some fossil fuel interests.
The tactics deployed by this campaign are now all well documented including in the six books mentioned above. These tactics have included:
A. Lying. Some of the claims made by some of those engaged in the disinformation campaign have been outright lies about such things as the claim that the entire scientific basis for human-induced climate change is a hoax or that there is no evidence of human causation of climate change Given that every Academy of Science in the world has issued reports in support of the consensus view, it is a clear lie that the basis for human-induced warming is a hoax and that such claim is preposterous. This is far from reasonable skepticism but a lie. The same could be said of the claim that there is no evidence of human causation. There are many independent lines of evidence that humans are changing the planet including multiple finger-print and attribution studies, strong correlations between fossil fuel use and increases in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, carbon isotopic evidence that carbon dioxide elevations are from fossil sources, and model predictions that best fit actual observed greenhouse gas concentrations that support the conclusion that human activities are the source of elevated atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gase. It is clearly a lie to assert there is no evidence of human causation of observable warming.
B. Focusing On An Unknown While Ignoring the Known. Frequently those engaged in the disinformation campaign stress what is unknown about climate change science while ignoring the huge amount of well-settled climate change science that supports the consensus view. This tactic is often referred to as cherry-picking the evidence.
C. Specious Claims Of Bad Science. . Those engaged in the disinformation campaign often characterize matters that are not fully proven as “bad science” even in cases where there is strong evidence for conclusions that are based upon “the balance of the evidence. ” Because climate change science will never be able to fully prove all future climate change impacts, insisting on absolute proof creates a burden of proof that can’t be met. This is not reasonable skepticism but an ideological assumption that would make protective action impossible.
D. Creation of Front Groups. Those opposed to action on climate change have often created front groups that hide the real parties in interest and that sometimes have held fake conferences attended by scientists that never or infrequently publish in peer-reviewed journals. These friont groups then publish the results of these conferences and send them to the media as if they were entitled to the same respect as peer-reviewed science. This is a species of “manufacturing” science, a tactic that fails to abide by the scientific norm that scientific conclusions be published in peer-reviewed journals whose mission is to review scientific claims for accuracy and completeness.
E. Creation of Misleading Lists of Climate Skeptics . Organizations engaged in the climate change disinformation campaign have created lists of climate skeptics that are highly misleading because they often are comprised mostly of people who have questionable, at best, scienitific credentials and who infrequently, if ever, publish in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
F. Think Tank Campaigns.. Fossil fuel interests and right-wing, anti-regulatory philanthropic organizations have funded think tanks that have held forums or published non-peer reviewed reports on climate change science or economics. These reports are then widely circulated to the press and legislators as if they were entitled to the same respect as peer-reviewed research. Neither the press nor the legilators usually have the credentials to critique these fake reports
G. Public Relations Led Campaigns to Convince the Public That There is No Scientific Basis for Climate Science. Fossil fuel related interests have sometime hired public relations firms to create a campaign to convince citizens that climate change science is deeply unsettled and therefor any action taken is a waste of money.
H. Astroturf Groups.. Organizations engaged in the disinformation campaign have created astroturf groups designed to give the impression that there is wide-spread, bottom-up opposition to climate change policies that disguise that the funding and organization of these efforts actually come from organizations engaged in the disinformation campaign.
I.Cyber-Bullying Scientists and Journalists. Organizations engaged in the climate change campaign have encouraged the cyber-bullying of climate change scientists or journalists that publically claim that human-induced climate change is a significant threat. In this effort, they have sometime posted the picture and email on climate denial websites of scientists and journalists who are viewed to be supportive of action on climate change and encouraged followers to send nasty, threatening emails to the target journalists and scientists. This is sheer intimidation not reasonable skepticism.
None of these tactics constitute reasonable skepticism. In fact, given the potential catastrophic harm from climate change, these tactics constitute some kind of new assault on humanity. In fact, these tactics are likely to have been the cause for failure of the United States and several other large emitting countries to enact strong greenhouse gas emissions reductions policies.
Skeptics Must Adhere to Rules of Science. A few things we are not saying. We are not against skepticism but skeptics must play by certain rules of science including:
a. Publish results in peer-reviewed literature.
b. Stop claiming that anything that is not fully proven is bad science.
c. Not lie about or overstate their scientific conclusions.
d. Not cherry-pick scientific evidence by focusing on what is not known while ignoring what is known.
e. Not repeat scientific arguments that have been fully refuted.
Deeper Reflection Needed. We are not trying to limit free speech but encourage people to see that lying or misinformation is ethically problematic particularly in cases when deception can lead to immense harm. For all of these reason, we would like to encourage civil society and the press to engage in deeper reflection on a few of these matters including:
A. How do we classify this troublesome behavior: although its is obviously unethical, is it also criminal or civilly actionable?
B. What does reasonable skepticism look-like?
In conclusion we encourage civil society to turn up the volume on the highly unethical and deeply malicious tactics of the climate change disinformation campaign. We believe we need a new word for morally irresponsible behavior that attempts to undermine through disinformation political action needed in response to very threatening human activities.
By: Donald A. Brown
Associate Professor Environmental Ethics, Science, and Law,
Penn State University
References:
The Inquisition of Climate Science by James Lawrence Powell, Columbia University Press, 2011, Global Warming and Political Intimidation, How Politicians Cracked Down On Scientists as the Earth Heated Up, Raymond Bradley, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011, Merchants of Doubt, How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth On Issues From Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, Bloomsbury Press, 2010, Climate Cover Up, The Crusade To Deny Global Warming, James Hoggan, Greystone Books, 2009, Climate War, True Believers, Power Brokers and The Fight to Save the Earth, Eric Pooley, Hyperion, 2010, Climate Change Denial, Heads in the Sand, Hayden Washington and John Cook, Earthscan, 2011
by Professor Steve Schneck, CACG Board Member
October 26, 2011
The Church, which has long experience in human affairs and has no desire to be involved in the political activities of any nation, seeks but one goal: to carry forward the work of Christ under the lead of the befriending Spirit. And Christ entered this world to give witness to the truth; to save, not to judge; to serve, not to be served.
 Cardinal Peter Turkson This quotation from Paul VI’s encyclical Populorum Progressio prefaced Monday’s release of an extraordinary document in Rome. Authored by the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace it is a breath-taking analysis of the moral failing behind the current economic crisis. Even more, signed by the Council’s head, Cardinal Peter Turkson, and by its secretary, Bishop Mario Toso, the document charts what might be called a Catholic way forward from the present morass.
The analysis of the intrinsic moral failing of modern economic life is particularly compelling. For while the authors detail how the economic crisis of our day has revealed behaviours like selfishness, collective greed and the hoarding of goods on a great scale, it is not the greedy sinfulness of individuals that is emphasized. Instead, analysis here focuses on certain structural aspects of contemporary civilization that have abetted and facilitated such greed. Greed no doubt is an endemic temptation for our fallen nature, as it were, but special failings of current institutions, practices, and ideology corrupt the process of human formation in a fundamental way.
What practices and ideologies are to blame? First and foremost, we’re told is an economic liberalism that spurns rules and controls, an approach unsympathetic towards public intervention in the market. The European terminology might confuse American readers (who’d likely call such ideology conservative, not liberal). But, this is what Blessed John Paul II once called the idolatry of the market, which is described in Monday’s release as a system of thought, a form of economic apriorism that purports to derive laws for how markets function from theory, these being laws of capitalistic development.
Such thinking is neither radical nor new. Radical as it might seem to Americans, this analysis from the Pontifical Council fits comfortably within magisterial traditions. From the 19th century onward encyclicals and other Church teachings, including the writings of Blessed John Paul II and Benedict XVI, have preached that unregulated market forces endanger the common good. Valuable as they are for economic development, without moral safeguards markets are perceived to foment attitudes toward others and toward the community that not only oppose Christian values but also are unsustainable for an enduring and just social and political order. Market operations incline us to valorize the self and self-interests and to do so in opposition to and competition with others. In individual moral terms, the worry is selfishness, greed, and pride. We’re nudged by market forces, as the document puts it, to live like a wolf among our fellow men and women. Understood more broadly, the Church’s long-standing argument is that the unregulated market’s invisible hands erode caritas and concern for others (especially concern for those Jesus called the least of these) and militate against the primary purpose of our public life as citizens which is the common good of the whole community in light of salvation. More of Schneck commentary here.
Full text of Vatican document here.
Civil Defense JOHN F. KAVANAUGH | OCTOBER 3, 2011
In early September The Wall Street Journal and NBC News conducted a poll that presages an election year of deep political turmoil. Of the Americans interviewed, 73 percent judged the United States to be headed in the wrong direction (no doubt for contradictory reasons). Only 44 percent of those polled approve of President Obamas leadership; 33 percent approve of his economic plans. Congress was held in worse regard: 82 percent judged the two houses unfavorably. In fact, more than half (54 percent) would prefer that the whole gang (including their own senators and representatives) be thrown out. Many commentators think the discontent is due to the terrible economic mess we are in. That is only part of the problem. It is exacerbated by hardened ideologies.
I have been wondering lately whether there is much value in writing about our political economy, so calcified is our national discourse. Why, after all, write a column asking for more civil debate from a relatively small readership when a media giant like Rush Limbaugh can rant over and over at 15 or 20 million listeners that President Obama wants to destroy the United States by destroying our economy? Even with the readership of a magazine like America, it becomes evident, after sifting through readers comments on our Web site, that there is little chance of persuasion in the presence of fixed opinion.
Even carefully mounted arguments meet with name-calling. If a columnist or blogger expresses concern about the inequitable distribution of wealth and income or the plight of workers or unions, this is often ridiculed by commenters as leftism, class warfare or socialism.
Discussions in the Catholic press thus mirror the polarization of the mass media, depending on whether we get our information from MSNBC or Fox News. Even carefully mounted arguments offered in our newspapers of record meet with little more than namecalling.
The prestigious financier Warren Buffett recently wrote an op-ed piece for The New York Times. He pointed out that some of the super-rich, who make money from money, often pay less in taxes than people who make money from a job: The mega-rich pay income taxes at a rate of 15 percent on most of their earnings but pay practically nothing in payroll taxes. Its a different story for the middle class: typically, they fall into the 15 percent and 25 percent income tax brackets, and then are hit with heavy payroll taxes to boot.
A frequently heard response to the Buffett column was that his ideas were job killers, even though Buffett had pointed out that an average of two million jobs a year were added between 1980 and 2000 prior to the Bush tax cut. But one of the mind-boggling refutations of his proposals was that he is a socialist. Warren Buffet: a socialist? Yes, you heard it right.
This should come as no surprise when one reflects on how the word socialism is batted around. Obamacare, we are told, is socialized medicine. This is so preposterous, one might have thought the president had actually proposed a single-payer or three-tiered plan that would cover everyone in the country. Then at least we could have seriously debated two truly competing plans for saving our troubled health care system.
If we ever come to agree to overhaul our tax code completely, let it be accompanied by an admission that the poor indeed already pay taxes. Since April, the mantra has been circulated by some news outlets that 47 percent of all households pay not a single dime in taxes. Even if that figure is true for income taxes, it will come as a surprise to middle class and poor families who pay federal payroll, state and municipal taxes. As the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy estimates, the bottom quarter of taxpayers paid 12.3 percent of their incomes in state and local taxes in 2010. So much for not a single dime.
To bring up such facts will inevitably be brushed off by some readers as just another salvo in the class war against the rich. This is simply not the case. I have only admiration for many wealthy families who have a profound commitment to service and solicitude for those in need. But if there is some kind of class war going on in our money-media society, it has already been declared against the working middle class and the poor. The only socialism we have in this country is for the super-rich and bailed-out banks.
John F. Kavanaugh, S.J., is a professor of philosophy at St. Louis University in St. Louis, Mo.
How Much Is Clean Air Worth? More than Polluters Claim | Peter Lehner’s Blog | Switchboard, from NRDC.
As my colleague Laurie Johnson noted on her blog, the National Economic Research Associates have been generating anti-regulatory studies for years. A good deal of their research has been funded by polluting industries.
In this most recent study, the authors claim that Americans do not put any value on things like having parks to walk in, breathing unpolluted air, drinking safe water, or avoiding getting sick. Of course, the paper doesn’t state it quite like that. What it says is academic-sounding, inside-baseball stuff. It claims that the Environmental Protection Agency got it all wrong in a recent analysis that found true value from less pollution. Why? Because, the authors say, you can’t put a dollar figure on the benefit of less pollution.
This assertion is not only wrong. It is Earth-is-flat fraudulent.
It ignores something that any Economics 101 student learns: people value a lot of things that you can’t put a dollar figure on. Something that economics calls “well-being.” In doing this, the paper helps give academic-sounding cover to those who want to tear down the safeguards that help keep Americans safe and healthy.
You can read the full post by clicking on the line just above “As my colleague..”
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