In a twisted parody of the band that played on to calm the doomed passengers of the Titanic, a conservative chorus—horribly off key to science, but music to the ears of its fossil fuel patrons—continues to belt out disinformation in full throat to drown out the urgency of climate catastrophe. Nothing seems to make them to stop singing songs of denial, not even after last summer when United Nations General Secretary Antonio Guterres said the latest data represented a “Code Red for humanity.”
In the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill signed by President Biden last November, nearly every Republican in the Senate voted against establishing a reserve fund to address the crisis of climate change. A unified front of Republicans—and Democrats heavily backed by the fossil fuel industry (Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona)—continue to present obstacles to passage of a half-trillion dollars’ worth of investments designed to mitigate climate change in the Biden administration’s stalled Build Back Better legislation. Similar denial and opposition has met the $45 billion in climate efforts in the White House’s fiscal 2023 budget proposal.
Meanwhile, in the background, a coalition of conservative states, in concert with the fossil fuel industry, recently presented oral arguments to the Supreme Court asking the justices to choke the powers of the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate global warming gases. Given the high court’s conservative supermajority, the prospect of a forthcoming decision to undermine the EPA’s authority is very real.
Primal scream of disinformation
As those who care about the reality of climate change beg Biden to use executive powers to declare a climate emergency, the chorus of denial has become even more hysterical. Last week, the ranking Republican on the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia and a host of other prominent Republicans filed legislation in the Senate and the House to bar Biden from declaring a national emergency based on climate change. Their press release last week on the legislation was a primal scream of disinformation that attempted to distort and ignore reality.
The false accusations leveled by these long-time climate deniers tried to obscure the fact that countless studies have shown renewable energy to be a cost-effective way to meet the country’s energy needs and provide American families with a clean, reliable source of electricity.
Notably, in a classic disinformation tactic, Capito and others accused the Biden administration of “coordinating with extreme environmental groups,” in a desperate attempt to flip the script away from their own extremist tendencies.
Who are the extremists?
Disinformation often tries to turn information on its head. But labels can’t hide the real and growing body of information about the cost of inaction on global warming. No one mistakes the International Energy Agency (IEA) as a radical entity. The agency was originally created by many of the world’s richest nations to “ensure the security of oil supplies.” The IEA said last year that there is a roadmap to get to net-zero emissions by 2050, provided there is no investment in new fossil fuel supply projects and no sales of internal combustion engine passenger cars by 2035. It said that such a roadmap requires “a singular, unwavering focus.”
The IEA said that a concerted commitment to clean energy, energy efficient appliances, electric vehicles, energy-efficient construction and retrofits to infrastructure could add a total of 30 million jobs globally by 2030. That compares to 5 million fossil fuel jobs lost in the transition. The agency says the reduction in air pollution would avoid 2 million premature deaths a year by 2030.
Have you heard anyone accusing the World Bank of extremism? Citing its own data and many other studies, the World Bank says the cost of “natural disasters” has exploded nine-fold since the 1980s. Over the last four decades, such disasters have taken 2.4 million lives, mostly among the least-resourced nations.
In just the next decade alone, climate-change-related property destruction, crop failures, job losses and health care costs could thrust 100 million people into poverty. The bank says that every dollar invested in climate resilient infrastructure could provide a $4 benefit, resulting in a net total benefit of $4.2 trillion. World Bank Group President David Malpass has said, “Resilient infrastructure is not about roads or bridges or powerplants alone…Investing in resilient infrastructure is about unlocking economic opportunities for people.”
Last week, in a mixture of a warning and a recognition of what’s possible, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said that the plunging costs of renewable energy technology make it feasible to cut global warming emissions by half by 2030—if the world acts now. “There is sufficient global capital and liquidity to close investment gaps,” the IPCC said. “However, it relies on clear signaling from governments and the international community.”
It would be a massive benefit to the international community and the planet if the United States would simply take its own cost and benefit analysis seriously. As the IPCC was releasing its latest report, the White House Office of Management and Budget released an unprecedented assessment of the risks climate change poses to the federal budget. The report says that, in the absence of concerted efforts to curb global warming gases, the nation could suffer economic losses so severe they could amount to $2 trillion in lost tax revenue annually by the end of the century.
Already, the cost of “billion-dollar” weather and climate events as defined by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has mushroomed to around $150 billion a year over the last five years (adjusted for inflation). With storms expected to be more frequent and severe as the atmosphere continues to heat up, the OMB predicts up to an additional $128 billion in annual costs for disaster relief, flood insurance, crop insurance, health care spending, wildfire suppression and flood risk at federal buildings and property.
Moreover, the report said many other risks to the federal budget have yet to be quantified, such as the risks to national security, changes to ecosystems, and infrastructure expenditures. “Future damages could dwarf current damages if greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated,” the OMB said.
Fossil foolish
The biggest risk to the federal budget today? The naysayers who are paid by Big Oil and Gas to parrot the patently false party line, trying try to obscure the fact that renewable energy is affordable and reliable, that fracked fossil gas and its destructive methane emissions are a major contributor to climate change, and that a rapid clean energy transition is essential for protecting American families and our economy over the long-term.
When Sen. Shelley Moore Capito speaks for the united wall of Republicans opposing climate action, we need to remember that she took more than a quarter of a million dollars in contributions from the oil and gas industry between 2015 and 2020 alone and really speaks on behalf of a fossil fuel industry that knew full well about the harm it was doing to the planet even decades ago.
When Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema choose to be major obstacles to climate action—including Manchin’s opposition to the proposal by the Securities and Exchange Commission that would require publicly-traded companies to disclose their global warming emissions and business risks from climate change—we must remember that they are funded by a fossil fuel industry that continues to dump environmental injustice into communities with its drilling and refining operations and that smothers poor neighborhoods near highways in tailpipe emissions.
Most importantly, we must remember that the naysayers’ disinformation is penny wise but fossil foolish. The Global Commission on the Economy and Climate has estimated that the net benefits of a decisive transition to a clean energy world—accounting for jobs, less disease and death, and more usable land—add up to a $26 trillion economic gain by 2030, compared to business as usual. Co-chairs of the commission included officers of the World Bank, a former CEO at Unilever, the president of the United Kingdom’s Royal Economic Society, and president of the Asian Development Bank.
Again, this is not exactly a band of extremists.
Voices like theirs—including experts from the science, business, banking, and insurance sectors—now make up an overwhelming majority of climate mainstreamers. They tell us there is time to right the ship, if we can overcome the disinformation and get the chorus belting it out to realize that its tune, a hit with the oil and gas industry, is plunging on the charts of the investment world.