Are the denialists winning? Or is the real problem stasis?

George Monbiot certainly thinks the first is true. Here are some quotes from a post on his blog on Monday (you’ll find all the data footnoted in the blog):

There is no point in denying it: we’re losing. Climate change denial is spreading like a contagious disease. It exists in a sphere which cannot be reached by evidence or reasoned argument; any attempt to draw attention to scientific findings is greeted with furious invective. This sphere is expanding with astonishing speed.

A survey last month by the Pew Research Centre suggests that the proportion of Americans who believe there’s solid evidence that the world has been warming over the past few decades has fallen from 71% to 57% in just 18 months. Another survey, conducted in January by Rasmussen Reports, suggests that, due to a sharp rise since 2006, US voters who believe that global warming is the result of natural causes (44%) now outnumber those who believe it is caused by human action (41%).

A study by the website Desmogblog shows that the number of internet pages proposing that manmade global warming is a hoax or a lie more than doubled in 2008. . . . On Amazon.co.uk, books championing climate change denial are currently ranked at 1,2,4,5,7 and 8 in the global warming category. Never mind that they’ve been torn to shreds by scientists and reviewers, they are beating the scientific books by miles.

As he asks, ‘What is going on?’. One possibility he raises draws on the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker’s idea that we protect ourselves with “vital lies” when under threat. I’m not so sure. As Monbiot says, there are two opposed armies at war here: armies of right wing bloggers and their ilk in one corner, and concerned scientists in the other.

What we are seeing, then, is the wash-up of years of political tribalism; a kind of gruesome end-game to the culture wars, and a weak media that lumps science in with questions of ‘balance’ as if scientific opinion were like any other, and that reports climate change as a kind of remote novelty. What chance did science really have?

Meanwhile, Ross Gittins has an excellent column in today’s Fairfaxes, reporting on Treasury Secretary Ken Henry’s recent speech about ‘The Shape of Things to Come’ in Oz. Population growth, global warming, technological change and the rise and rise of India and China are Henry’s themes. But warming is the bit where he gets really interesting. As Gittins says:

His second long-term force bearing on us is climate change. So far, the main thing occupying the minds of our business people and politicians is how we can introduce an emissions trading scheme without hurting anyone.

Henry offers the tart observation that the introduction of such schemes ”is intended to cause a significant shift in the structure of the Australian and global economies over coming decades; quite possibly the largest structural adjustment in economic history. That is the point of doing it.”

Translation: It’s meant to hurt because that’s what changes people’s behaviour. If it doesn’t hurt it won’t work.

So there’s another plank in Monbiot’s thesis about growing denialism: it doesn’t hurt as much right now. But perhaps denialism isn’t the real problem so much as stasis. Gittins continues with a spot-on assessment of the consequences of Ruddism:

Even if the world does get its act together on fighting climate change, we’re in for a fair bit of it anyway. And if the rest of the world is being led by far-sighted leaders like Kevin Rudd, with oppositions like ours, the likelihood is the world won’t get its act together.

If so, we’ll reap the whirlwind. If we find the consequences of mitigating climate change so daunting, what’s it going to be like adapting to it? Our already dry continent will become drier. It’s likely some of our agriculture will be wiped out, with much of the rest having to move north.

It could be that much of the population has to move from the south-eastern corner of the continent. You think we’ve got a problem with boat people? Can you imagine how many there’ll be if the Pacific islands and half of Bangladesh are under water?

But he’s not done yet:

It’s how these four disparate forces could fit together that worries me. Analysis is one thing, synthesis quite another. The possibility of our indulged and indulgent electorate successfully navigating all these cross-currents I find remote.

Which brings us back to where we started: we are now paying the price for an era of extreme political populism is which every voter whim has been pandered to, and in which people expect every policy solution to be cost free to them. Rampant denialism, in other words, is just one more symptom of a deeper political disease. The old public sphere and its redoubts in science, expert opinion and rigorous reporting, has fractured, with some gains (it was rather paternalistic and white and blokey, chums), but at what cost considering that what remains has been handed over to and is dominated by a conservative movement far more powerful and less democratic than its (lefty) critics ever anticipated was possible?

No wonder we can’t move forward on climate change.

'What's the Matter With Cultural Studies?'

I’ve always enjoyed Michael Bérubé’s criticism, and his take on the fate of cultural studies versus the failures of the left, in a recent Chronicle of Higher Education is well worth reading:

. . . has cultural studies transformed the disciplines of the human sciences? Has cultural studies changed the means of transmission of knowledge? Has cultural studies made the American university a more egalitarian or progressive institution? Those seem to me to be useful questions to ask, and one useful way of answering them is to say, sadly, no. Cultural studies hasn’t had much of an impact at all.

Unclean coal and the democratic race to the bottom

It’s no news that the Rudd government’s ETS is probably the policy failure of the decade. But that hasn’t stopped to coal lobby from pulling out all stops to see how low they can go. Here’s their lobbying site and the ads they’re running in key marginals. And apparently it’s working. According to Get Up, a few waverers in government circles are being impressed by the latest lobbying efforts, even if, obviously, all the talk about ‘clean coal’ is total bunk.

GetUp are running a fund-raiser to get a counter-ad shown. It’s excellent.

And Hungry Beast (disclaimer: I was involved in the backgrounding for the show) have also done a pretty good take on things as well:

But perhaps pollies are right to be backing away from the ETS. After all, according to a Lowy Institute poll released today, as reported in the Oz, the public appear to be losing interest in the issue:

In 2007, tackling climate change was perceived as the joint top foreign policy goal, together with protecting the jobs of Australian workers.

In 2007, 75 per cent of those surveyed said climate change was a very important issue. Last year, this fell to 66 per cent, and this year to 56 per cent.

Global warming was viewed as “a critical threat” by 68 per cent in 2007, 66 per cent last year and 52 per cent this year.

Admittedly the sample was only 1003. But the government has done its best to run dead on the issue and kill any real expectations of change, and the rear-guard action from denialists has been strong, especially those arguments that counterpose action on warming against job losses and energy price increases – both issues bound to make any marginal seat holder nervous. And other immediately pressing issues like the GFC have also raised fears about job security for many.

The public and pollies seem to be caught in a mutually reinforcing downwards spiral. Pollies won’t act because the public doesn’t care. No-one in power is showing real leadership, so the public have switched off. 

Global warming? Oh that was so 2007.

Ian Plimer's junk science

Over the past month or two I’ve been disturbed to meet a couple of sane people who I otherwise respect, who have been impressed by Ian Plimer’s nutty denialist tome, Heaven + Earth — Global Warming: The Missing Science. To anyone with even a passing familiarity with the scholarly discussion about global warming, the book is obvious junk science. I mean, even the title is misleading. The ‘missing science’ Plimer refers to isn’t missing at all: it’s all already in the IPCC reports, for instance.

So here, for those who may be confused (and Plimer’s aim, like all denialists, is to confuse rather than illuminate), are some good old-fashioned factual analyses of his arguments. Actually, you don’t even need to go as far as the argument to see what unmitigated nonsense the book is. 

Don't look now, it's another literary skirmish

One can only wonder if political journo Christine Wallace had any idea what she was doing when she penned her review of Jacqueline Kent’s The Making of Julia Gillard for the latest Monthly. I mean, apart from anything else, didn’t she realise that her own biography of Gillard, due out next year, will be doubly held up for scrutiny? She’s just published the first, unfortunate chapter in the reception of her own book.

Vale Irving Kristol

Irving Kristol, who died last week, was probably one of the most influential political figures of the twentieth century. He was one of the Encounter group who during the cold war covertly channeled CIA money into a range of anti-communist cultural front organisations (the story is best told in Frances Stonor-Saunders’ Who paid the piper?). And he famously founded neoconservatism. It was he who, along with figures such as Paul Weyrich, helped reinvent conservatism as a highly organised radical political force, and helped turn the US Republican Party into the political war machine it became in the 1980s.

A tale of two papers

On holidays down at the beach (and blogging on the iPhone – pathetic ain’t it?), so as per the usual custom I bought the hard copy versions of the papers. Now, as locals will know we really only have two media proprietors here in Oz: The Australian, Murdoch-owned bell-wether of the loony right, but still a better paper than the directionless, mostly limp Fairfax offerings, like The Age. Hard not not to spot the difference beween the two, though. ‘Troop surge vital for Afghan win’ is the front page screamer on the Oz; ‘Afghan failure looms’ sez The Age. Actually the story is pretty much the same: without troops defeat looms. Moral of the story? Old hawks never say die.

No power to the pundits?

There’s been a bit of talk over on LP about the demise or otherwise of neoliberalism, with a couple of side comments about the power or otherwise of conservative pundits like Bolt, Akerman, Devine et al. This is something I’ve been wondering about a bit lately. Last year, for example, I got Bolted (I first responded then when it became clear that he is in fact bonkers, walked away from the fight) and it had no after effects whatsoever. I subsequently did two months of solid media and public forums and not one person mentioned the piece, on air or off.

But still I waver between thinking they have no power and thinking that actually there is a complex dynamic at work here that gives them a large amount of indirect political power.

The end of neoliberalism?

And while we’re talking about the inadequacies of the Rudd government, David McKnight has a piece on the significance of the Rudd piece in the Monthly here. There’s an interesting take on the essay from Greg Sheridan, here, as well. It’s perhaps not surprising that Sheridan should think that its ‘historical and intellectual claims are entirely fraudulent’, but there’s a bit of meat in his analysis as well. As Sheridan says,

Much of Rudd’s long essay is an unexceptional account of regulatory failures that contributed to the GFC. But its serious historical and intellectual claims are entirely fraudulent. It was only 18 months ago that Rudd and his senior colleagues were, rightly in my view, lambasting the Howard government as the highest taxing and highest spending government in Australian history. Labor even criticised the Howard government for keeping the top marginal tax rate at just under 50 per cent, one of the highest rates in the developed world.

You cannot credibly then turn round and claim the almost religiously non-ideological Howard government was the embodiment of market fundamentalism, low-tax, low-government extremism, or neo-liberal ideological narrowness.

Indeed. The intellectual weakness of Rudd’s piece is that he’s unable to distentangle his analysis of neoliberalism from his political debt to neoclassicism. Brnnng, brnnng, is that Treasury I hear calling? Or perhaps the Productivity Commission? But Sheridan, too, pulls back from deeper analysis:

Similarly, Rudd’s assertion that the financial crisis was caused only by the adherence of Western governments to neo-liberal economic policies simply contradicts the facts. Banking crises, as Mead shows, are a pretty regular feature of the system. Both sides of politics frequently get regulatory arrangements wrong. Republicans and Democrats both did in the US. The initial impetus for sub-prime lending was the eminently social democratic desire to make sure low-income applicants got housing loans.

Now this is pure Pollyanna. To say that all the drama was simply a routine banking crisis brought about by a bit of democratisation of the loans market isn’t to ‘contradict the facts’ so much as ignore them altogether.

Dear Kevin (why did we elect you?)

Dear Kevin,

I don’t know if you’ve noticed but Melbourne, along with most of southern Australia, has lately busted all records. Last week we had three consecutive days of well over forty degrees, the last and hottest of which saw the mercury hit 45 degrees – the hottest January day for 70 years. Most of us had never experienced anything like it. Streets were deserted. Parks were empty. Traditional places of respite like cinemas, shopping centres and public libraries filled up with people then emptied out again as air-conditioning systems failed. Railway lines buckled in the heat and hundreds of trains were cancelled. 6 people died apparently simply because of the heat. Many people came home from work and school to find family pets dead, their noses pressed into shady airless pockets of the backyard. In Yarra Bend National Park the ground was littered with the corpses of dead bats and dead possums.