Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), Mitt Romney’s vice-presidential pick, is a virulent denier of climate science, with a voting record to match.
A favorite of the Koch brothers, Ryan has accused scientists of engaging in conspiracy to “intentionally mislead the public on the issue of climate change.” He has implied that snow invalidates global warming.
Ryan has voted to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from limiting greenhouse pollution, to eliminate White House climate advisers, to block the U.S. Department of Agriculture from preparing for climate disasters like the drought devastating his home state, and to eliminate the Department of Energy Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA-E):
Paul Ryan Promoted Unfounded Conspiracy Theories About Climate Scientists. In a December 2009 op-ed during international climate talks, Ryan made reference to the hacked University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit emails. He accused climatologists of a “perversion of the scientific method, where data were manipulated to support a predetermined conclusion,” in order to “intentionally mislead the public on the issue of climate change.” Because of spurious claims of conspiracy like these, several governmental and academic inquiries were launched, all of which found the accusations to be without merit. [Paul Ryan, 12/11/09]
Paul Ryan Argued Snow Invalidates Global Warming Policy. In the same anti-science, anti-scientist December 2009 op-ed, Ryan argued, “Unilateral economic restraint in the name of fighting global warming has been a tough sell in our communities, where much of the state is buried under snow.” Ryan’s line is especially disingenuous because he hasn’t been trying to sell climate action, he’s been spreading disinformation. [Paul Ryan, 12/11/09]
Paul Ryan Voted To Eliminate EPA Limits On Greenhouse Pollution. Ryan voted in favor of H.R. 910, introduced in 2011 by Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI) to block the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gas pollution. [Roll Call 249, 4/7/11]
Paul Ryan Voted To Block The USDA From Preparing For Climate Change. In 2011, Ryan voted in favor of the Scalise (R-LA) Amendment to the FY12 Agriculture Appropriations bill, to bar the U.S. Department of Agriculture from implementing its Climate Protection Plan. [Roll Call 448, 6/16/11]
Paul Ryan Voted To Eliminate White House Climate Advisers. Ryan voted in favor of Scalise (R-LA) Amendment 204 to the 2011 Continuing Resolution, to eliminate the assistant to the president for energy and climate change, the special envoy for climate change (Todd Stern), and the special adviser for green jobs, enterprise and innovation. [Roll Call 87, 2/17/11]
Paul Ryan Voted To Eliminate ARPA-E. Ryan voted in favor of Biggert (R-IL) Amendment 192 to the 2011 Continuing Resolution, to eliminate the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA-E). [Roll Call 55, 2/17/11]
Paul Ryan Voted To Eliminate Light Bulb Efficiency Standards. In 2011, Ryan voted to roll back light-bulb efficiency standards that had reinvigorated the domestic lighting industry and that significantly reduce energy waste and carbon pollution. [Roll Call 563, 7/12/11]
Paul Ryan Voted For Keystone XL. In 2011, Ryan voted to expedite the consideration and approval of the construction and operation of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. [Roll Call 650, 7/26/11]
Paul Ryan Budget Kept Big Oil Subsidies And Slashed Clean Energy Investment. House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) proposed FY 2013 budget resolution retained a decade’s worth of oil tax breaks worth $40 billion, while slashing funding for investments in clean energy research, development, deployment, and commercialization, along with other energy programs. The plan called for a $3 billion cut in energy programs in FY 2013 alone. [CAP, 3/20/12]
In short, Paul Ryan stands with Big Oil against scientific fact and the future of human civilization.
The record heat wave in the United States is raising a lot of questions about whether this is a preview of our future. It takes extreme weather events to get long term global climate change any attention. Who knows, enough wildfires and droughts and 115 degree temperatures in Kansas might get someone to notice what is happening over the long run. If you have any hope that the recent meteorological catastrophes will have an upside of increasing public awareness of its causes, well, don’t count on it.
Take a look at the recent study by Media Matters, which shows that the Kardashians still get 40 times more news coverage than global warming’s “evil twin,” ocean acidification. Ha! Am I the only person in America who would not recognize a Kardashian if I bumped into one here in Canandaigua? What exactly are they famous for anyway, other than being famous? I need to get out more.
I have been reading a lot of terrific work these past few months about things I had been blogging about, like what exactly Americans think about big issues. So instead of writing, I have been walking around scratching my head and saying things like, “Really?!” I gave a few lectures about topics that have included how to talk to people who do not want to be reasoned with, including this one about climate climate communication, caught on video, where I mostly presented some ideas developed by John Cook and Stephan Lewandowsky:
One of the main points in this talk was to explore what we have learned since realizing that “the information deficit model” is false; that is, that people will not think differently about climate change just because they are provided with more information about what is really going on. Recently, a number of writers have drawn a pretty idiotic lesson from this, namely, that it is pointless to learn about what is really going on.
Here is an excellent piece posted the other day by Mark McCaffrey, in which he makes that point as a guest blogger for Climate Access, a site which with I am just becoming familiar. For those of you who do not know Mark McCaffey’s work, he helped establish the Climate Literacy Network and the related Climate Literacy & Energy Awareness Network (CLEAN), which includes a catalog of online resources as well as tips on the challenges/opportunities of teaching about climate and energy. He is now Programs and Policy Director for the National Center for Science Education, a fabulous organization that has for years been fighting the good fight against anti-science forces on two fronts: evolution, and, more recently, climate change.
There’s a dangerous meme drifting through the climate community: that when it comes to “solving” climate change, literacy does not matter. True, years of promoting filling the information deficit with more facts hasn’t worked, but the current “literacy bashing,” repeated in climate blogs and conversations, is unfortunate, oversimplified and, to be blunt, nonsense. Literacy, particularly about 21st century challenges such as climate and energy, does matter.
But sometimes the researchers themselves suggest, sometimes intentionally, sometimes overtly, that literacy isn’t important.
The Kahan study — which did not look at people’s knowledge about climate change — examined the cultural and political profiles along with the science literacy and numeracy of some 1500 U.S. adults; none of the science literacy questions related to climate science. The study concluded that as “respondents’ science literacy scores increased, their concern with climate change decreased.”
But a closer look at the study, particularly the part that generated much of the media attention, reveals that both of the deliberately polarized groups were essentially illiterate in terms of science and numeracy. When asked post-publication which group was more scientifically literate, Kahan responded on his blog “neither, as far as I can tell.”
Too often researchers examining attitudes about climate change and the media reporting on them ignore or gloss over the depth of illiteracy, framing the problem solely or primarily as a cultural, ideological issue.
Paul Stern writes in a recent article in Nature Climate Change that “the lack of understanding at the individual level is not the problem,” and “believing that public opinion reflects a knowledge deficit is naïve…” And in the same issue, Paul Bain and colleagues in Australia parse the debate into “deniers” and “believers,” suggesting that deniers can be tricked to support enlightened climate policies by convincing them that mitigation efforts can promote a better society, downplaying climate change risks. “Don’t worry, be happy!” seems to be the take-home message of this approach, which the current U.S. Administration has tried, emphasizing Clean Energy and Green Jobs over risk reduction and preparation.
To be clear, information is not enough to develop policies, political will or technological solutions. But without current, accurate information, none of the above is possible. The fact that few people are literate about science in general and climate/energy in particular and, that in the absence of literacy, opinions, ideologies and psychological biases run riot, isn’t a surprise.
A few data points to consider:
Fewer than 20% of secondary school students are “very well informed” about climate science and solutions, and only 27 percent feel they’ve learned “a lot” about global warming in school, according to the Six Americas research conducted by the Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media. Most teens (and adults) would receive a D or an F if quizzed on the basics of climate or energy.
28% of U.S. adults pass the muster for basic civic science literacy, says researcher Jonathan Miller, and the bulk of them became literate in college because they were required to take general education science courses to graduate, although they generally needed three years of high school science to be accepted into college to begin with.
The Six Americas research has also found that those who are the most concerned about climate change have relatively more knowledge about it, while those who are least concerned know the least. While most people do fail when quizzed on climate and energy basics, graded on a curve, 97% of those alarmed about climate change receive a passing grade, versus 56% of those who are dismissive of current climate science findings.
Where we went wrong
Climate education was, except in the rarified atmosphere of higher education, all but non-existent until 2009 when Congress authorized grants to improve climate literacy and climate change education became a presidential priority. But federal funding is now dwindling, even as attempts to defund it altogether are promoted by members of Congress who dismiss climate change as a hoax.
Fifty years ago, climate change was part of science education materials. During the International Geophysical Year in 1958, the National Academies published science education materials for students — Planet Earth: The Mystery with 100,000 Clues — that acknowledged human carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels could, through the increased warming of the atmosphere, melt ice sheets and raise sea levels. Educational films and television programs at the time, including the Bell Science Hour, examined the potential impact of human activities on the natural greenhouse effect.
Then, for fifty years, the topic was usually missing altogether from science education materials. When it appeared at all, it was in passing, perhaps one or part of a chapter out of thirty in a textbook, a few days out of an entire semester. When National Science Education Standards were developed in the mid-1990s, human impacts on the climate system were deliberately not included (as was the topic of human evolution), kicking the can down the road with the claim that there wasn’t sufficient data to say for certain. Sadly, this — along with deliberate efforts to mislead and muddy the waters with manufactured doubt — perpetuated the climate literacy deficit and contributed to our inability to have an adult conversation about climate change over the past decade and a half.
Today, when climate and related energy topics are taught at all, all too often they are taught as controversy, with “both sides” being presented due to pressure or misguided sense of fairness and balance. Climate change is happening. Or it’s not. Humans are responsible. Or they’re not. Decarbonizing our energy system will help. Or it will destroy the American way of unfettered free-market capitalism.
But usually, climate change is missing in action from science education, falling through curricular cracks or held hostage by the polarized political climate. Even science-literate students graduating from college may not have ever learned the basics of climate change or society’s fossil-fuel-intensive energy infrastructure and its role in altering the climate system.
Some incremental progress has been made in the fast few years, progress that is now in jeopardy. In 2009, in an effort to establish a foundational framework to improve climate literacy, a group of us created the Climate Literacy initiative (and this year a companion Energy Literacy framework), which the Department of Energy led the development of, was released. Both are available through the US Global Change Research Program.
Congressional support in 2009, largely from stimulus funds, led to dozens of climate change education projects, such as the Climate Literacy & Energy Awareness Network, and related curriculum development, teacher professional training programs, and strategic partnerships between climate researchers, educators and cognitive science experts.
Now, with federal funding for climate and energy literacy spent out or threatened by Congress, private philanthropies that support climate policy and communications work need to step up to fill the breach and help improve society’s basic literacy about the crucial 21st century challenges of energy and climate/global change.
Yes, we have an enormous collective climate literacy deficit, and addressing it is an integral and imperative communication and policy priority for the sake of this and future generations.
A re-post of Michael Mann’s piece on CNN today. A chilling story that many of us have been following for quite some time now. Mann’s description is really worth reading.
The famed snows of Mt. Kilimanjaro, actually glaciers, are retreating rapidly. Many scientists blame global warming.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Climate scientist Michael Mann says he was target of nasty campaign to discredit his work
Mann: Attack against scientists was funded by fossil fuel industry, anti-science ideologists
All accusations proven false, he says, but it galvanized scientists to counter misinformation
Mann: Poisonous politics must not hijack the conversation about climate change
Editor’s note: Michael E. Mann is a member of the Pennsylvania State University faculty, holding joint positions in the Departments of Meteorology and Geosciences and the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute (EESI). He shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 with other scientists who participated in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
(CNN) — Imagine you are sitting in your office simply doing your job and a nasty e-mail pops into your inbox accusing you of being a fraud. You go online and find that some bloggers have written virulent posts about you. That night, you’re at home with your family watching the news and a talking head is lambasting you by name. Later, a powerful politician demands all your e-mails from your former employer.
It sounds surreal. But it all happened to me.
What was my offense? I worked on climate change research that indicated the world is a lot warmer today than it was in the past. Because that research caught the public’s attention when it was released in 1998, I became one of dozens of climate researchers who have been systematically targeted by a well-funded anti-science campaign.
Ironically, as these attacks have grown, the scientific facts have become ever clearer. Climate scientists know the world is warming and human activity — particularly burning coal and oil — is the primary driver. The idea of addressing climate change threatens some people in the fossil fuel industry. And a vocal minority of corporate interests and their ideological allies are spending a lot of money to hijack the public debate about climate change.
Michael Mann
I call all this the “scientization” of politics. Attacks on science and scientists are an effort to advance a political agenda, not an effort to better understand science or the risks it uncovers. The tobacco industry did it when scientists linked cigarettes to cancer. The lead industry tried to discredit a scientist who found that lead exposure hurt children’s cognitive abilities.
Now, it’s climate scientists’ turn.
In the most infamous episode, somebody stole thousands of e-mails and documents from leading climate researchers, including me. They cherry picked key phrases from the e-mails and published them out of context, like a black-and-white political attack ad with ominous music. Fossil fuel industry-funded groups gleefully spread the e-mails online and badgered the mainstream media into covering the “controversy” they had manufactured.
It was no accident that this happened on the eve of a major international climate change meeting. Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest exporter of oil, was the first to call for an investigation.
The dozen independent investigations that did follow — all of which exonerated the scientists — got much less media coverage than the original nonscandal. Last year, the inspector general of the National Science Foundation found the charges against me were all baseless and reaffirmed mainstream climate science.
On March 2, the Virginia Supreme Court ruled in our favor — a Pyrrhic victory considering all of the money and resources wasted that could have been invested, for example, in measures to protect Virginia’s coastline from the damaging effects of the sea level rise it is already seeing.
These attacks have prompted me to tell my own story in a new book, “The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines.” Before it even came out, a coal industry front group ran radio advertisements condemning my employer, Penn State, for allowing me to speak on my own campus. Later, a former tobacco industry apologist offered $500 to anyone who would ask me a challenging question at another talk and provide him with video.
This is a silly — and indeed, dangerous — way to have a climate change debate in this country. What keeps climate scientists working away in our labs and in the field, is that we keep uncovering more evidence of how climate change will impact our planet and our lives.
In the face of these attacks, scientists are doing more to speak out, forming a Climate Science Rapid Response Team to connect scientists with journalists and a Climate Science Legal Defense Fund to help scientists defray legal costs. Groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists are redoubling their efforts to defend scientists and advance public understanding of climate change. And scientific societies are starting to do more to help their members deal with the poisonous political environment around climate change.
I first tackled climate science as a graduate student in theoretical physics, looking around for a topic that would be worthy of a lifetime’s work. Attacked both professionally and personally, I became a reluctant public figure in the climate wars. And now, as the father of a 6-year-old girl, I want to make sure the planet we leave her is at least as beautiful and healthy as the one we grew up on. At the very least, our nation’s political and business leaders deserve to have a debate about her future that is grounded in reality.
My daughter, and all of our children, deserve no less.
Nice lead story on Huff Post Green by Lynne Peeples. I did say everything she attributed to me, but one sentence of hers describing my aproach to these issues is the opposite of what I was trying to communicate. The sentence is “In a way, the whole discussion is beside the point, according to Brophy. The question we should be asking, he said: “What are the policies we should adopt?”
True enough, but I did not mean to imply that Krosnick and Leiserowitz’s work is not central to understanding why that’s not happening. Take Krosnick’s work, for example. His fabulously designed polls and insightful analyses go to the heart of what puzzles me: There is a huge gap between what American actually believe, and how salient the issue actually is among the general public (and the subset of it for whom environmental issues especially important), on the one hand, and our policy makers on the other. So I am also puzzled about why Bob Doppelt would say “Krosnick is not addressing the nature of our political decision-making process, which is not driven by majority rule.”
Krosnick is providing exactly the data needed to see whether our representatives are, well not representing; Leiserowit’z “Six Americas” research and Dan Kahan’s Cultural Cognition Project are helping us understand how much and why climate change actually matters to Americans.
So, yes, in a way it is nuts that when the science has been settled, we are talking about whether people believe the basic facts of human caused global warming, and how much those beliefs matters. But it is surely needed and hardly beside the point at which we should already have arrived long ago: discussing policy alternatives for mitigation and adaptation and holding legislators accountable for not doing so.
First Posted: 02/17/2012 7:20 pm Updated: 02/17/2012 8:48 pm
If you follow the popular polls, you might think that Americans are growing ever more skeptical about man-made climate change — despite the consensus among published climate scientists.
That’s simply not true, Jon Krosnick of Stanford University told an audience of social scientists and cognitive researchers Wednesday, in Garrison, N.Y. He maintained that most Americans do, in fact, believe.
The problem, Krosnick said during his talk at the Garrison Institute’s annual Climate, Mind and Behavior symposium, is that we haven’t been asking the public the right questions. The other problem: Legislators are reading their misleading answers and hearing from a vocal minority of constituents.
“Public opinion has the potential to move legislators,” he said. “But methods that political scientists are using to document the public will are going at a snail’s pace.”
With funding from major news outlets such as Reuters and ABC News, Krosnick’s team has been conducting its own national surveys over the last several years. Since 2009, their findings have diverged from those of other survey organizations.
Gallup and Pew polls show that the percentage of Americans that believe in climate change now hovers around 50 percent, but Krosnick’s latest poll — which asked the question in a more detailed way — suggests the figure is 83 percent — up from 79 percent in 1997. Of the global warming believers, the majority also reported thinking that the burning of fossil fuels and other human activities play a role. The trend held after the researchers broke the data down by political party: 66 percent of Republicans said climate change is happening.
Further, not a single U.S. state had a majority opinion on the skeptical side, noted Krosnick. Even in Oklahoma, the home of one of the country’s most outspoken skeptics, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), a large majority of the people polled agreed with the scientific consensus.
Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, doesn’t share the same optimism. Combining various public opinion polls, including Krosnick’s, he sees a downward trend in the percentage of Americans believing in global warming since 2007. Further, in a new open-ended poll, he’s found that the first thing that came to the minds of 23 percent of people when they thought about climate change was a naysayer thought, such as a recent record snowstorm or a conspiracy theory. This is up from 7 percent in 2003, he told The Huffington Post.
Krosnick and his colleagues also looked at two ways of framing a question about the public’s ranking of issues. In response to “What is the most important problem facing this country today?,” the economy ranked at the top with global warming dead last. When this question was reworded to ask, “What will be the most important problem facing the world in the future if nothing is done to stop it?,” the results were reversed: Global warming ranked No. 1.
“This message is not getting across to Washington,” said Krosnick.
Scott Brophy, a philosophy professor at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, agreed that politicians are “out of touch” with the thinking of their constituents. Yet the problem remains, he said, that “1 in every 3 or 4 Americans doesn’t believe in a basic fact.”
Research has shown that people are motivated to find information that supports their beliefs. “Encountering counterarguments causes us to marshal forces like an army of white blood cells to defend against them,” said Brophy.
He pointed to the influence of massive disinformation campaigns such as the recently outed Heartland Institute. “This is a real threat to democracy,” he told HuffPost.
“Krosnick is not addressing the nature of our political decision-making process, which is not driven by majority rule,” added Bob Doppelt, executive director of The Resource Innovation Group, a non-profit organization affiliated with Willamette University. “It’s driven by elites that paid for, fund and have the most access and, therefore, the most influence over officials …”
In a way, the whole discussion is beside the point, according to Brophy. The question we should be asking, he said: “What are the policies we should adopt?”
“There, reasonable people can disagree. Policy doesn’t automatically follow from the facts,” added Brophy. “Yet we continue arguing about whether the Earth is round. This is crazy.”
An update to the story about Newt posted the other day, in particular, on that John King/Newt exchange that is credited with boosting Newt’s resurgence in South Carolina. I’ll post it now that it is embedded in suitable commentary:
Now that Newt is the GOP flavor of the week, let’s have a look at what he has said and done about energy and climate. Many this week have derided John King’s utterly amateur opening of Thursday’s debate, and credited Newt’s aggressive, indignant response with assisting his surge in polls.
Why couldn’t King have been even a tiny bit subtler, or more sophisticated in pointing out the relevance of the question? I know, CNN hosted the debate, and subtle is not their strong suit. And, yes, it was the day one of his former wives told an ABC interview that Newt wanted “an open marriage,’ so he could continue his affair — that she needed to “share him with other women.” I for one wouldn’t care much about that if Newt was not still preaching “family values.”
If I were King: “Mr. Gingrich, on the campaign trail you have spoken out against gay marriage and in favor of the Defense of Marriage Act by appealing to the principle that ‘Marriage is a sacred union between one man and one woman.’ Could you explain what you mean by ‘sacred’?”
(“Washington Post” image above from Don Slutes via Marion Dillon Morris. If only.)
Lots of things are popping up on the internet this weekend about Newt’s environmental views. The best one I have read is from Joe Romm, which he posted before the polls closed and I have re-posted below, in its entirety. It makes abundantly clear that Newt is about as anti-environmental as any serious candidate for president since, well, ever. It is a good antidote to those of us still shaking our heads over this clip:
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Now, onto what he really believes and what he has done over the years.
So it’s no surprise, he is also anti-antidote. In the 1990s, the Gingrich Congress tried to shut down the Department of Energy, slash all clean energy research, stop the joint government-industry effort to develop a superefficient hybrid car, and zero out all programs aimed specifically at reducing greenhouse emissions and accelerating technology deployment (for some history, see my 1996 Atlantic Monthly article and this 1997 article).
He didn’t succeed — but he did stop the significant expansion of clean energy funding Clinton-Gore had begun. And he did force the DOE to sharply scale back its programs aimed at clean energy deployment and GHG reduction.
A decade later he tried to pass himself as a friend to the environment. In 2007, he wrote A Contract with on the Earth. As I wrote at the time, if you look up the word ‘Orwellian’ on Wikipedia — “An attitude and a policy of control by propaganda, misinformation, denial of truth, and manipulation of the past” — there should be a picture of Newt’s new book.
To cut to the chase, readers will not be surprised that a conservative pretending to care about the environment adopted the anti-regulation, pro-technology approach suggested by GOP strategist, Frank Luntz, and popularized by his protege, George Bush (see Bush climate speech follows Luntz playbook: “Technology, technology, blah, blah, blah”).
Since Gingrich continues to push this misdirection, I’ll excerpt some of my earlier posts on Newt.
Newt famously co-authored and then worked to enact the anti-environmental Contract with America. But Newt tried to rewrite history with Salon:
I don’t think that the environment was a central focus of the Contract With America. I don’t think that it was bad for the environment. I don’t know of a single thing in the Contract that was bad for the environment.
I think Salon had to pause in the interview at that point to allow Newt to douse the flames that began engulfing his trousers. In fact, the CWA was a clever, stealthy attack on the environment as detailed by NRDC in a lengthy analysis (summarized here) by the Sierra Club, and by the National Wildlife Federation, which wrote at the time: “Taken as a whole, the House plan constitutes the broadest and deepest attack ever mounted against laws that protect public health, the environment, natural resources and wildlife.”
The only thing more gut-busting than Gingrich claiming that the CWA and related legislation wasn’t bad for the environment is his embrace of technology as the answer to climate/energy problems.
Last year, Newt proposed replacing the EPA with an “Environmental Solutions Agency.” It’s no surprise that Newt is unaware we already have an Environmental Solutions Agency that develops innovative new technology — it’s called the Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, which I helped run in the mid-1990s. Gingrich tried to kill it when he became speaker in 1995. He probably thinks he succeeded.
It should leave everyone ROTFLMAO that when Salon asked Newt a few years ago, “What do you think that the U.S. should do about global warming right now?” he answered:
I think we should have a billion-dollar tax-free prize for a hydrogen engine that can be produced at a commercially available price. I think that we should have a substantial prize for developing the first engine that can be mass produced that gets 100 miles or more to the gallon of fuel. I think that we should have a substantial research program under way for dramatically better ethanol products than corn or cane sugar.
We should have a 100 percent tax write-off for investment in the technology needed to make composite-material cars using the material comparable to that which works in the 787 Dreamliner that Boeing is building. Because composite material is stronger than steel and much, much lighter than steel, and you could produce a safer car at lighter weight, which would get dramatically more mileage.
Unless you can create economically desirable, environmentally positive technologies, you are never going to get China and India to adopt.
This answer also ended any claim that Gingrich is a tech-savvy person. After all, you can build an affordable hydrogen engine today: It’s called an internal combustion engine (which can easily be modified to burn hydrogen), but it is low-efficiency, and thus worthless (since hydrogen production is also an inefficient process). What the Department of Energy has been trying to do for over a decade with Detroit — a program the Gingrich Congress (and the automakers!) ironically tried to gut — is build an affordable high-efficiency hydrogen fuel cell. And the hydrogen advocates claim fuel cells would be commercial today — if we could only get unit sales of fuel cell cars to a few hundred thousand a year (up from zero today).
Moreover, a viable hydrogen engine without a solution to the hydrogen storage problem or tens of thousands of hydrogen fueling stations around the country (costing tens of billions of dollars) is completely useless. So this prize idea is dumb. A pure waste of government dollars of a kind Newt used to mock.
To beat this near-dead hydrogen horse, let me note that Gingrich goes on to say:
If you had a hydrogen car and the French level of nuclear power production for electricity, you’d have a very high quality of life, great mobility, lots of electricity, and virtually no carbon-loading. You can create very advanced technological solutions that dramatically improve life in a way that’s better. The quality of air in California is better than it was 30 years ago. The quality of water in the country is better than it was 30 years ago.
Why is California’s air — and the country’s water — better than it was 30 years ago? Gingrich disingenuously implied the answer is “very advanced technological solutions that dramatically improve life” but, in fact, the answer is very tough government regulations — indeed, California is allowed tougher air regulations than the rest of the country, as Newt must know since he is so damn smart.
Yes the environmental gains Gingrich praised and used to defend a “technology only” strategy were made possible by the kind of regulations Gingrich tried to gut in the 1990s and that he continues to oppose today — including a cap and trade system for carbon emissions:
We have been caught in a trap where environmental solutions are defined on the left as higher taxes, bigger government, more regulation and more litigation, and so conservatives just shrug their shoulders; since they oppose all four of those solutions, they refuse to get engaged in environmental issues.
One of the major reasons that Terry Maple and I wrote A Contract With the Earth was to reopen the debate, and to say that there are solutions which involve incentives, science and technology and markets.Entrepreneurs are potentially much more powerful and successful than regulatory and litigation solutions. We ought to be having a dialogue about which solution works better rather than being engaged in a purely partisan debate to see who can yell “anti-environmentalist” more.
As someone who fought for years against the Gingrich Congress’s assault on incentives and technology and market-based solutions, I can only laugh at Gingrich’s attempt to rewrite and whitewash history.
If you seriously think we could end up with 80% of our power from nuclear energy (like France) and hydrogen cars also running on nukes any time soon — without any major new regulations — and if you think that outcome would be a good strategy for dealing with global warming (and assuming you buy anything this used-car salesman is selling), then Newt is your guy.
Otherwise, try to enjoy the unintentional humor from Gingrich’s public statements. It’s the only positive thing Newt has to contribute to the debate.
Emperor Newt spies a tasty treat [Credit: J. Maskit]. ”The scientific name of the emperor newt (Tylototriton shanjing) is derived from two Mandarin words, “shan” meaning mountain and “jing” meaning spirit or demon.”
Scott Brophy is a philosophy professor whose work is focused on the intersection of philosophy and public policy, especially on environmental issues, law, and education. He has also taught philosophy of science, logic, and the history of philosophy. He has served as a consultant for educational programs and schools throughout the U.S. and abroad, and as an adviser to several philanthropic foundations.
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), Mitt Romney’s vice-presidential pick, is a virulent denier of climate science, with a voting record to match.
Related Posts:
Scott Brophy is a philosophy professor whose work is focused on the intersection of philosophy and public policy, especially on environmental issues, law, and education. He has also taught philosophy of science, logic, and the history of philosophy. He has served as a consultant for educational programs and schools throughout the U.S. and abroad, and as an adviser to several philanthropic foundations.
