Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
Industry Ignored Its Scientists on Climate
Andrew C. Revkin, New York Times
For more than a decade the Global Climate Coalition, a group representing industries with profits tied to fossil fuels, led an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign against the idea that emissions of heat-trapping gases could lead to global warming.
[Steam billows from a factory near the US Capitol building in Washington, DC. (AFP/File/Tim Sloan) ]Steam billows from a factory near the US Capitol building in Washington, DC. (AFP/File/Tim Sloan)
“The role of greenhouse gases in climate change is not well understood,” the coalition said in a scientific “backgrounder” provided to lawmakers and journalists through the early 1990s, adding that “scientists differ” on the issue.
But a document filed in a federal lawsuit demonstrates that even as the coalition worked to sway opinion, its own scientific and technical experts were advising that the science backing the role of greenhouse gases in global warming could not be refuted.
“The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied,” the experts wrote in an internal report compiled for the coalition in 1995.
The coalition was financed by fees from large corporations and trade groups representing the oil, coal and auto industries, among others.
(24 April 2009)
Also at Common Dreams.
EB contributor billhook writes:
It is good to see documentation of the corrupt conduct of the now-defunct Global Climate Coalition. Yet Revkin’s article may be read to imply that such corruption is history, that the fossil fuel lobby no longer funds its shills and propagandists – which would be a truly naïve assumption.
Consider, the billions of fuel-sales profits at stake are small beer compared to the hegemony, and low cost commodity supplies, conferred by the leverage of the petro-dollar; of course the shills are still funded, but just more discreetly. Their job has not been to win the debate; it was and is only to maintain debate over AGW, thereby hindering constructive discussion of the requisite global climate-policy framework.
Personally, I find it repugnant that their lies are tolerated in public media, given that not only all of the world’s Academies of Science but also its Governments have signed formal endorsement of the IPCC’s findings of catastrophic outcomes of fossil fuelled BAU.
Given that, even with rapid mitigation, we face unavoidable drought and predictable famine on an unprecedented scale, it seems fair to observe that if what we faced were a climate-holocaust of tens of millions of Westerners, rather than of the poorest Africans and Asians, the shills would be silenced overnight and the US would be instigating rigorous global action – rather than failing even to commit to Kyoto-level cuts by 2020.
As we stand, with the ‘help’ of the industry shills, Obama is accepting a personal complicity in instigating the greatest genocide ever seen. America should be ashamed of failing to demand better of him.
[UPDATE April 28: Added the two last paragraphs of billhook’s comments.]
Rich nation greenhouse gas emissions rise in 2007
Michael Szabo and Alister Doyle, Reuters
Greenhouse gas emissions from industrialized nations rose by nearly one percent in 2007, led by strong gains in the United States, official data showed.
Carbon emissions from countries signed up to the Kyoto Protocol climate pact edged up by 0.1 percent in 2007, mainly due to rises in Japan and Canada.
“The numbers are … a bit depressing,” said Knut Alfsen, research director at the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo, saying they showed a failure to shift away from fossil fuels. “It shows that we are not able to de-link economic growth from emissions.”
(23 April 2009)
Forest Fires Mostly Overlooked by Climate Modelers
Jeremy van Loon, Bloomberg
Forest fires worsen global warming and make it harder for societies to adapt to drought and higher temperatures, scientists said.
Trees and brush set ablaze, by accident or through slash- and-burn farming in the tropics, fuel hotter weather, said Jennifer Balch, a researcher at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara, California. That’s because smoke adds more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.
“We don’t think about fire correctly,” Balch said. “It’s very intrinsic to the planet.”
(24 April 2009)
Is White the New Green?
Sam Kornell, Miller-McCune
Three California energy experts make a convincing — and sincere — case that painting roofs white in the hot parts of the planet could offset the greenhouse gas woes caused by the world’s cars
—
n early January, Hashem Akbari sent federal officials a rather improbable sounding proposal. An Iranian-born nuclear engineer who, for the last three decades, has worked as a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Akbari would like to see $3 billion of the economic stimulus package directed toward painting white or a light color as many of the nation’s roofs, and as much of its pavement, as possible — all with the goal of directing more solar radiation into space.
Akbari, along with Surabi Menon, another LBNL scientist, and Arthur Rosenfeld, a former LBNL scientist and now a California Energy Commission board member, claim that painting urban surfaces in warm parts of the world white or a light color could offset the carbon emissions of all 600 million of the world’s cars for 18 to 20 years — at a savings equivalent to at least $1 trillion worth of CO2 reductions.
(3 April 2009)
