Shannon Stapleton/Reuters
So once again I am deviating from my usual discussion about energy and climate to address something that just happened which necessarily requires our attention. The US Capitol in Washington DC was stormed and looted on Wednesday, and five people lost their lives in the chaos. The people responsible were supporters of outgoing President Trump, who has repeatedly claimed without presenting evidence that the election was unfairly stolen from him. What is truly frightening about this is that many people went to the length of committing what is essentially treason because they were lied to. However, having a quarter century of experience in climate science, I can tell you that the lying is nothing new. As hideous as Donald Trump is, and I see nothing to be gained by continuing to be diplomatic about that, he is more of an effect of the culture of lying that has developed in this country than the cause.
When I first started doing graduate research at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City in 1996, I didn't appreciate the degree to which basic science was being questioned by the public at large. I understood why some people had concerns that addressing the problem of global warming would do more economic harm than environmental good, but I didn't think people would go so far as to deny the actual science and attack the character of the scientists. I was in my mid 20s, and I was naïve. I soon realized that people were being fed misinformation through all layers of the media, from talk radio, to relatively unknown sites on the nascent World Wide Web, to large newspapers and television networks owned and run by Rupert Murdoch. Some people had honest enough intentions, but spread falsehoods regardless. Others had intentions that were more genuinely malevolent. Most of the malevolence came from people in the fossil fuel industry, who had a vested interest in maintaining the status quo and maximizing their profits regardless of the damage their industry causes to the long-term stability of the Earth’s climate. Some even came from a tiny minority of scientists themselves. These scientists took grant money from the fossil fuel industry, and reveled in getting far more press for being contrarian than their peers got for filling in the details. Meanwhile, the rest of the climate science community were (and still are) frequently accused of being willing to say anything for money and attention. As somebody who lived in Manhattan on $30,000 a year as a grad student and $50,000 a year when I became a postdoc, I tried to laugh off the insinuations. But they were not intended to be funny, and they got progressively more sinister as time went on. I suppose being on the low end of the totem pole had some benefits, as I never did anything that warranted enough attention to expose myself to death threats. Other people I worked with got such threats routinely. And once Andrew Breitbart (co-founder of the conservative website that bears his name) posted a tweet calling for the execution of my boss, I never felt comfortable working in my office again.
When Andrew Breitbart passed away in 2012, full control of the Breitbart website passed to its other co-founder, Stephen Bannon. Bannon, of course, is now best known for being the chief architect of Donald Trump’s successful Presidential campaign in 2016. So the people who had created and profited from a media ecosystem that actively misinformed a large portion of the population, and had made a point of using dehumanizing and threatening language against anyone who contradicted their narrative, didn’t simply have their foot in the door in the halls of government in Washington – they had control of the White House.
And now we’re here, with people from all parts of the country and walks of life (at least, all the ones where you’ll find white people) converging on Washington and going to absurd and horrifying lengths to defend a bald-faced lie. I pity them, but I will not forgive them so easily – plenty of otherwise decent, well-intentioned people who believed the wrong information lived in Germany in the 1930s. I have always wanted this blog to be a dialogue, where nobody needs to agree with me to feel welcome here. But in light of recent events, I am going to require a few things from my readers moving forward.
First of all, nobody is under any obligation whatsoever to like President-elect Biden. I’m personally concerned that his response to the climate crisis will consist of too much lip service and not enough aggressive action. But a free and fair election was held in this country in November, and Joe Biden won it. That is not up for discussion. Second, we are in the middle of a global pandemic that has already killed well over 300,000 Americans and is presently getting worse. You can feel that our economic needs have not been properly accounted for in our response to the pandemic. That is a reasonable and defensible position. But you cannot argue that COVID-19 isn’t real or is not a big deal, or that we have in any way overreacted to it. The body count overwhelmingly indicates otherwise. And finally – since this is a climate blog, after all – you have to acknowledge that global warming is real, and serious, and our doing. You can have honest questions about the science or how we know what we know, and I will happily answer any that you have, but I am 100% finished with debating the existence of the problem. We should be debating what to do about it, and there is plenty of room for people of all perspectives and persuasions to contribute. But there is no room for lies. It does not matter if you’re one of the people who knows the truth but doesn’t care, or if you are their willing conduit. We have lost too much time. And this week made clear that we are in imminent risk of losing far more than that, before we even consider the consequences of a warming world.
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