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“Vampire Memo” Reveals Coal Industry Plan for Massive Propaganda Blitz
Ross Gelbspan, DeSmogBlog
Big coal — in the form of the National Rural Electric Association, Koch Busted Industries, American Electric Power, the Southern Company, the National Association of Manufacturers and others are planning a major blitz against efforts to fight global warming.
The plan is a retread of a similar campaign launched in the early 1990s by coal interests. The latest version is spelled out in what is dubbed a “Vampire Memo” because it resurrects an earlier campaign which was discredited and abandoned in the mid 1990s. You can download the memo here.
The “Vampire Memo” from the Intermountain Rural Electric Association (IREA) draws on the work of such industry-funded skeptics as Pat Michaels, Fred Singer, Robert Balling and Craig Idso — as well as such ideologues as Richard Lindzen and William Gray who have long been laughingstocks in the community of mainstream climate scientists. It notes that the IREA alone has paid Michaels at least $100,000 — and is soliciting more money for Michaels et al from other coal outlets. Among other initiatives, the memo notes that several of the participating companies are planning to finance a major film to counteract the influence of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth.”
And, coincidentally or not, it concludes with conditions which are identical to those of President George W. Bush — that any effort to combat global warming include developing countries (specifically India and China), that all sources of CO2 be included in any such plan and that it must not be permitted to damage the US economy.
According to the memo, environmentalists’ efforts to combat global warming would realize the environmentalists’ “dream of an egalitarian society based on rejection of economic growth in favor of a smaller population, eating lower on the food chain, consuming a lot less and sharing a much lower level of resources much more equitably.”
The memo notes that such an effort has strong allies in Washington in the form of will receive help from people like Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), who has called global warming “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people” and Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) who has been leading a witch hunt against Dr. Michael Mann, one of the country’s pre-eminent climate scientists.
(27 July 2006)
Also in Ross Gelbspan’s blog: Leaked memo claims that GM, Ford financed pro-CO2 ad campaign.
Power Group Promoting Global Warming Skeptic
Timothy Gardner, Reuters via Common Dreams
A Colorado electricity cooperative is urging other power groups to support global warming skeptics and has donated $100,000 to a climatologist who has labeled some of his colleagues “alarmists.”
The Intermountain Rural Electric Association’s general manager wrote in a letter to other energy cooperatives that it also helped raise contributions from others for Dr. Patrick Michaels, a climatologist at the University of Virginia and a fellow at the CATO Institute in Washington D.C.
Many scientists believe that global warming will lead to catastrophic consequences such as the flooding of low-lying nations and stronger hurricanes.
Power plants emit 40 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide, the main gas that most scientists believe causes global warming. Coal emits more CO2 than another other fuel.
Many power companies are watching the federal government’s every step on global warming. Any future national plan in the United States, the world’s top emitter of greenhouse gases, to regulate such gases could force many companies to shut coal-fired generation or add expensive carbon-capturing devises to their equipment.
(28 July 2006)
Related: Utilities give warming skeptic big bucks.
What About Us?
Editorial, NY Times
At a time when global warming has become an overriding issue, NASA has been delaying or canceling programs that could shed light on how the climate changes. The shortsighted cutbacks appear to result from sharply limiting NASA’s budget while giving it hugely expensive tasks like repairing the stricken shuttle fleet, finishing construction of the space station, and preparing to explore the Moon and Mars. Something had to give, and NASA’s choices included research into how the planet’s climate is responding to greenhouse gas emissions.
The agency’s shifting priorities may have been signaled by subtle changes in its mission statement this year, as described by Andrew Revkin in The Times. Although the agency had previously led off its goals with “to understand and protect our home planet,” a new mission statement reads simply, “To pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research.”
Agency officials note that sub-goal 3A still proposes to “study earth from space to advance scientific understanding and meet societal needs.” But earth studies seem to be in trouble.
The agency has canceled a deep space observatory to monitor solar radiation, water vapor, clouds, aerosols and other things important to climate change. It has delayed a mission with Japan to measure global precipitation, decided not to pay for a mission to measure soil moisture around the world, and reduced the money available to analyze data. Under Congressional pressure, the agency has reinstated a mission to study aerosols and solar radiation from orbit. But it has little money to do much else in coming years. A National Academy of Sciences panel warned that the nation’s system of environmental satellites was “at risk of collapse.”
(28 July 2006)
Times’ Revkin addresses critics’ questions of objectivity in journalists’ climate reporting (VIDEO)
OnPoint, E&E TV
With some critics accusing journalists of bias when reporting on climate change, science reporters are fervently defending their objectivity. During today’s OnPoint, New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin discusses challenges facing science reporters. He addresses Hollywood’s influence in bringing climate change into the mainstream. Revkin also discusses his book “The North Pole Was Here” and talks about his experiences reporting from the North Pole.
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Darren Samuelsohn: Explain, what does it take to get a story about global warming in the New York Times?
Andrew Revkin: Well, you’re up against every possible kind of hurdle. A newspaper is biased toward stuff that happened today, war, you know the latest thing in Lebanon, earthquake, the tsunami. I wrote about it last week. And we’re biased against things that are laden with uncertainty or that are sort of prospective. And global warning is kind of the antithesis of news as we’ve known it, through the 20th century at any rate. I think it’s fairly typical of the kind of thing we’re going to have to consider in the newspapers and in the media generally in the 21st century, which we’re well into now. But we’re still sort of stuck in our 20th-century mode, that an environmental problem is Exxon Valdez. A drunken ship captain runs a tanker onto a reef in a pristine ecosystem. That’s news, but the slow doubling of a greenhouse gas that could raise temperatures, raise sea levels, change climate patterns profoundly, could, conditional, in ways that are unpleasant. That’s the harder to get into a newspaper.
(27 July 2006)
Carbon credits for the Joneses: UK politician advocates domestic emissions allowance.
Jim Giles, Nature
It sounds like a triumph for the doctrine that people should think globally but act locally – and like a nightmare scenario for libertarian opponents of big government. Last week, UK environment secretary David Miliband suggested issuing all British adults with an annual carbon allowance. Advocates say the system is fair and would focus people’s attention on conserving energy. But could it ever succeed?
Here is how the system would work. For transactions that involve direct purchases of energy, such as buying petrol or paying fuel bills, a person would hand over money and some of the carbon credits he or she had been allocated by government. If those credits ran out, the person would have to buy extra when paying for the fuel or electricity. By regulating the amount of personal credits handed out each year, the government could cap total carbon emissions and help tackle climate change.
“Instead of banning particular products, services or activities – or taxing them heavily – a personal carbon allowance enables citizens to make trade-offs,” said Miliband as he floated the idea on 19 July.
Civil servants will look into the proposal and report back to government next year. Researchers who have studied the idea say domestic quotas are a sensible way to extend emissions trading to the personal level – such trading is already used to limit emissions from some European industries. And unlike a blanket carbon tax, it encourages individuals to think about their emissions. “It makes carbon more visible,” says Richard Starkey, a carbon-policy expert at the University of Manchester, UK.
(27 July 2006)
See also UK: Minister unveils carbon swipe-card plan
