Polluting Industries Winning the Message War on Climate Change

In 2007, 71% of Americans believed climate change was being caused — at least in part — by the burning of fossil fuels.  In 2009, only 51% held that belief.  And as of June 2011, only 44% of Americans still believe this.

According to the director of survey research for the Pew Research Center, “this is among the largest shifts over a short period of time seen in recent public opinion history.”

And these percentages aren’t the worst of it.  In addition, there’s a new religious zealotry and emotional intensity among the reactionary anti-science tools.  They don’t just scoff at the idea of climate change and then change the subject.  They believe, they know — they’ve  seen the light! — that climate change (a more accurate term than global warming) is just a trumped-up excuse for power-grabbing socialists to take over America and steal our property rights.  Disagreeing on this issue is the equivalent of telling a born again Christian that there’s no God.

This mass viewpoint shift — and the culture war intensity — didn’t just “happen.”  It’s been meticulously orchestrated and heavily funded.  It’s a perfect storm of wealthy industrialists‘ massive funding, rightwing think tanks cranking out their “message” 24/7/65, and millions of gullible inbreds who keep falling for it hook line and sinker.

Two examples of these think tanks are the Heartland Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute.  In the linked article, Naomi Klein describes the Heartland Institute’s Sixth International Conference on Climate Change as “the premier gathering for those dedicated to denying the overwhelming scientific consensus that human activity is warming the planet.”

At this conference, a member of the Competitive Enterprise Institute gave a speech with the obligatory references to Saul Alinsky and the terrifying agenda of international socialists disguised as environmentalists:

“You can believe this is about the climate…but it’s not a reasonable belief…No free society would do to itself what this agenda requires…. The first step to that is to remove these nagging freedoms that keep getting in the way.”

This conference was basically two days of instilling fear in the hearts of the gullible.  When Obama made a campaign promise to support locally owned biofuel refineries, he was actually carrying out a long-running Maoist plot.  The editor of ClimateDepot.com compared environmentalists to Aztec priests sacrificing people to appease their gods.  Speaker after speaker derided the whole notion of climate change as a Trojan Horse designed to destroy capitalism and replace it with a sinister eco-socialist police state.

Larry Bell, the author of Climate of Corruption, says climate change “has little to do with the state of the environment and much to do with shackling capitalism and transforming the American way of life in the interests of global wealth redistribution.”

Well, there you have it.  This is what we’re up against.  Environmentalists — meaning anybody who wants this planet to survive — need to get involved in this message war and start fighting back.

Four years ago, when most people were aware of the cause and effect between fossil fuel burning and climate change, it seemed like we could count on informed voters to unite and stave off the pending ecological nightmare.

Obviously we can’t.

Disaster Capitalism

This phrase was coined by Naomi Klein. Two recent examples of disaster capitalism: Hurricane Katrina provided an opportunity to close down housing projects in New Orleans; and the chaos in Iraq has made it possible to ram through an oil privatization law.

As Klein puts it: “The window of opportunity opens up, and it is deliberately exploited.” Her newest book is called The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

For years, global corporations have been thriving on national economies that are in meltdown. And to complete the circle, these meltdowns are often created or exacerbated by the IMF and the World Bank.

Using Katrinagate as an example, Klein says: “I was in New Orleans when the city was still flooded. I was interviewing lobbyists who were already camped out at the state legislature building in Baton Rouge, talking about all the tax cuts they were going to get, and the new labor flexibility, and what a great opportunity this was…There was a great deal of excitement.”

The term “reconstruction” is just a euphemism for a war on the public sector. In present-day New Orleans: “The public housing projects are boarded up and stand empty. You have condo developers circling. Their largest public hospital, Charity Hospital, is empty. This was the hospital that was treating the uninsured. The New Orleans public education system is now the country's leading laboratory in the charter school model…All of that happened, not because there was a community consensus for it, but because the disaster was expertly exploited by politicians, think tanks, and lobbyists to push through radical policies in the chaos after the disaster. That's disaster capitalism.”

She continues: “New Orleans is a laboratory for the corporatization of disaster response. You had Carnival Cruise ships providing housing. You had the big contractors from Iraq such as Bechtel building privatized trailer parks guarded by private security. What we're seeing is that, first, disasters are used to push through the radical privatization of hospitals, schools, roads, and so on.”

And the parallels between Iraqmire and Katrinagate: “Many of us in New Orleans who had been to Iraq felt that the Green Zone had just been lifted out and moved to the Gulf Coast…The parallels were very striking. There were the same contractors — Blackwater-Halliburton-Bechtel. The point of this is that disaster zones are laboratories. They're testing grounds. In the chaos of this moment, you have these leaps forward for the privatization agenda. What was Blackwater doing there? They claim that they had just seen the disaster on television and wanted to help, right? But this was an extraordinary incursion into what we think of as a core state function. Why wasn't the National Guard there? Where were the local authorities?”

And referring to the “reconstruction” in Iraq, she says: “The dream of building a model state in someone else's land is a deeply dangerous and racist dream, and a violent dream.”

So it appears.

Here are some more links to Disaster Capitalism.