Carly on Climate – State-of-the-Art Climate Denial
August 24, 2015
It’s hideous, sad, darkly funny, but all too true, “state of the art” of climate denialism comes out of the mouths of US presidential candidates, of the once-great Republican Party. These are people clearly smart enough to know better, with funding to hire staff who certainly know that the majority of US voters are now concerned about climate change, and in favor of dealing with it.
But the job these briefers have is not enviable, because they have to craft statements that steer a narrow passage between the rabidly anti-science base of that party, those most motivated to turn out in early primaries next year, and the remainder of the population, many of whom are concerned, but confused and unclear on the facts of climate threats, and solutions.
The ideal statement will convey something like “of course we all want clean air” platitudes, sprinkled with enough distortions to placate the uninformed, and ideally, kick the wormcan of ignorance down the campaign trail a few more months so that said candidate might somehow remain acceptable to sentient voters, as well as those with barely functioning brainstem awareness.
Not long ago, I posted a notable example from Louisiana Guv Bobby Jindal – but this week’s winner is former Hewlett Packard exec and newly buzzy it-girl Carly Fiorina, in an interview with Katy Couric, above.
Dave Roberts in Vox provides cliff notes:
1) “One nation, acting alone, can make no difference at all”
This is the argument du jour on the right, pushed most prominently by writers at the Cato Institute. The idea is that climate policy is all pain for no gain. For instance, they note that according to EPA’s own model, the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, aimed at reducing carbon emissions from power plants, will only avert 0.018°C of warming by 2100. Why bother?
This is a daft argument, for two reasons.
First, it’s not true that one nation can make no difference at all (0.018 is not 0.000). It’s just that a single policy by a single nation can make only a small difference.
But … so what? Climate change is a big problem, global in scope, affecting this generation and all future generations. We don’t have much experience with problems like that, but we know, via logic and math, that the only way to solve such a problem is for every major country to do its part, in a coordinated effort that is sustained over the remainder of the century. So America is doing its small part and working to coordinate with other countries doing the same, building a framework of trust that may allow for greater ambition down the road.
What’s the alternative? Unchecked climate change will lead to immense suffering, concentrated in but not confined to the world’s poorer countries. Unless we’re willing to accept that suffering — and you never quite hear Republicans own up to that — we have to do our part.
Second, there’s a growing body of research showing that an aggressive transition to clean energy pays for itself even aside from its effects on climate. Reducing the use of fossil fuels will have enormous “co-benefits,” including better health, cleaner air and water, and a much lower fuel bill. And while renewable energy is still more expensive on average, its costs are rapidly falling, and most analysts expect it to outcompete most fossil fuels in most places within the next few decades. Cleantech industries are booming, offering great advantages to first movers. The transition is inevitable; only the speed is to be decided, and the winners and losers.
So “one nation, acting alone” can make a difference, by doing something that’s worth doing anyway. And refusing to do it would be a gross abdication of moral leadership.
2) California “destroys lives and livelihoods with environmental regulations”
California’s climate regulations are indeed the most ambitious in the nation, and they just keep getting more ambitious. (A pair of new climate bills has cleared the Senate and is headed to the Assembly.)
If California were its own country, it would be one of the world’s top 10 in total renewable energy generation and one of the bottom two in carbon intensity. It is the top state in the nation for venture capital investments in cleantech, cleantech patents, and advanced-energy jobs. In fact, it leads the nation in virtually every cleantech category, from electric vehicles to green buildings to solar capacity to policy to investment, reliably topping the US Cleantech Leadership Index.
Meanwhile, between 1993 and 2013, thanks to energy efficiency, the average residential electricity bill in California declined, on an inflation-adjusted basis, by 4 percent, even as bills rose elsewhere in the country. Between 1990 and 2012, the state cut per-capita carbon emissions by 25 percent even as its GDP increased by 37 percent. Its total carbon emissions are declining, even as its economy continues to grow.
Oh, and California created more jobs than any other state in the nation last year, with the fifth-highest GDP growth rate. And its budget is balanced.
Looks like the state is surviving its environmental regulations so far.
3) “The answer to this problem is innovation, not regulation”
This is another recent Republican favorite — Jeb Bush has been testing it out as well. In practice, it typically means tax breaks for favored industries like natural gas and “clean coal.” (If any Republican has a broader plan to spur clean-energy innovation, I haven’t seen it.)
Innovation is a big and arguably undervalued piece of the climate policy puzzle, but there is no credible analyst on the planet who thinks that it will be possible to reduce emissions enough, or fast enough, purely through subsidizing R&D. On its own, it simply isn’t a credible answer.
In reality, of course, it’s not an either-or. The solution will inevitably be a mix of innovation, regulation, and investment, all three of which Obama has supported, not just regulation. The clean energy loans that conservatives now demonize through Solyndra were one attempt to spur innovation. The administration’s funding of “regional innovation clusters” is another. But it realizes, as anyone who looks seriously at the issue does, that regulations are needed as well (and that regulations often spur innovation).
The implicit political promise embedded in “innovation, not regulation” is that some industries will gain, but none will suffer. That promise is not commensurate with serious climate policy.
4) “China could care less” if we try to reduce carbon
Republicans seem convinced that China is sitting back on a mountain of coal, laughing at us for fighting climate change. It is not so.
China clearly cares what the US does; it would not have made the promises it did in its climate pact with the US if Obama had not made policy gestures of good faith. It’s true that China, like any country, acts primarily in its own interests, not based on what America does. But that’s precisely why it’s investing more in clean energy than any other country in the world ($89.5 billion to the US’s $51.8 billion in 2014), even as it puts increasingly tight restrictions on coal, leading its coal consumption to decline for the first time in years. It cares very much about reducing its crippling air pollution and dominating 21st-century growth industries.
5) “China is delighted we’re not spending any time or energy figuring out clean coal”
This makes no sense.
First, China very much wants affordable “clean coal” technology and would happily buy it from the US if the US developed it, so it has no reason to be delighted by the US’s failures in the area.
Second, Fiorina seems to envision a booming market for “clean coal” that the US is in danger of losing out on. But coal power plants with carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) have been behind schedule and over budget in the few cases they’ve been attempted. The only conceivable way they could compete in power markets is under a high carbon price or with heavy government subsidies.
But with renewable energy prices falling so fast that they’re becoming competitive with dirty coal in more and more places, even absent subsidies, who is going to opt for a more expensive low-carbon option that requires billions of dollars of new infrastructure? Lots of people are convinced clean coal will eventually play a role, but at the very least it’s a far less certain growth area than renewable energy and cleantech. If China is “delighted” by anything, it’s delighted to be kicking our ass in renewable energy.
There’s more on China, but, skipping down to the obligatory “renewables are bad” passage –
8) “Do we tell people the truth, that [wind technology] slaughters millions of birds?”
A recent peer-reviewed survey of bird mortality studies found that wind turbines kill between 214,000 and 368,000 birds a year, compared with 6.8 million that die from colliding with cell and radio towers and between 1.4 and 3.7 billion killed by cats. Wind turbines kill a relatively tiny number of birds.
And it’s usually the older, poorly sited wind turbines that kill any. The conservation director for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds wrote of “the large body of science” that supports the contention that “appropriately located windfarms have negligible impacts” on birds. (A roundup of the evidence can be found here.)
Here’s a comparison of bird kills by energy source, compiled by US News & World Report:
Coal degrades and pollutes bird habitats at every stage of its life: extraction, transportation, burning, and ash disposal. (“Clean coal” would solve none of these problems.)
Meanwhile, according to the Audubon Society, hundreds of species of birds, including bald eagles, will be put at “serious risk” by climate change.
So, yes, let’s tell people the truth about birds.
There’s more at the link, – but Roberts aptly concludes:
Fiorina’s comments reveal the difficulty facing moderate Republicans on this issue. They want to put the science question behind them, but they don’t seem to realize that once you acknowledge the science, you’re trapped on a slippery slope. You have to explain how the policies you support produce the kind of carbon reductions the science implies are needed.
If you refuse to offer any credible policies, you end up in a worse place than science denialists like Ted Cruz. You’ve angered the conservative base with your “climate political correctness,” but all everyone else has heard is that there’s a huge problem you have no plan to solve.
Climate Denial Crock of the Week 
August 24, 2015 at 7:42 am
Every time they kick the wormcan down the road, it doubles in size.
Republicans made a tiger they have to keep riding because it’ll eat them when they try to climb down.
Get popcorn…
August 24, 2015 at 7:59 am
Ride the tiger, indeed. With what’s coming in the next year—-El Nino, record temperatures, record wildfires, the upcoming Paris talks, ice sheet collapse, etc—-and nearly 15 months until the election for the situation to worsen and the tiger to get bigger and hungrier, they truly are in trouble.
You’d think that they would have learned in 2012 that the “race to the bottom” and “clown car” strategy doesn’t work. Actually, I have read some disturbing leftish “conspiracy” opinion that says the Kochs and friends actually want the presidential race to be another disaster for the Repugs and don’t care if the Democrats win the White House.
They want it to be a distraction from their real goals—-continuing their efforts at the state level to take over the country, suppress voting, increase the Repug margins in congress, destroy the EPA, shrink government and regulation, and slow down progress on dealing with climate change until they extract every penny they can from fossil fuels.
Get LOTS of popcorn…
August 24, 2015 at 7:44 am
“It’s hideous, sad, darkly funny” is true of the Repugnant stance on climate change, and that describes this interview very well. I would add “scary, dishonest, and as “chock full of lying horsepuckey” as any interview I can remember. I was madly taking my own Cliff Notes, not having looked down the page to see that Dave Roberts had done that and Peter posted them.
This woman is dangerously slick and has her BS down pat—-tell the truth, read the fine print, frankly ridiculous, hyperbole, clean coal, technology will save us, Obama lies, and wind turbines are slaughtering birds? Lord love a duck and JFC! There will likely be too many right-leaning women who will see her as a viable alternative to Hillary and will “vote their sex” (those who are not in love with The Donald, of course).
August 24, 2015 at 8:21 am
Amazing what “low information” voters will believe. Things get dicy when “odd weather” destroys their homes and businesses. It’s a lot easier to “believe” when it doesn’t affect you directly.
August 24, 2015 at 9:07 am
The argument that one nation acting alone can’t make a difference abdicates global leadership. The US was great at leading global sanctions against Iran, so why can’t we lead on crafting global policies to combat climate change.
The inability to conceive of a leadership role in global initiatives is exactly what we shouldn’t want in a President. It reveals a lack of imagination and a lack of executive ability that make the candidate unworthy for office.
August 24, 2015 at 11:30 am
“So “one nation, acting alone” can make a difference” point is that all nations have to act what ever their share of the problem.
It also highlights how the media is manipulated. The interviewer should have addressed this BS from the beginning.Should have kicked her off the program if she didnt relent.
August 24, 2015 at 12:22 pm
This is a wonderful parsing of her bullshit. I’m glad I read this article before watching the video because it made my heart race just listening to her lie with such conviction. Thankfully I knew it was coming so I didn’t spontaneously throw my laptop out the window. Watching her speak I see the true definition of evil. That’s really all that comes to mind. Hate is such a strong word, but it’s also the right word. I feel hate for someone who can speak like this.
August 24, 2015 at 3:09 pm
And with an aura of authority Carly said, “Solar is great, but solar takes huge amounts of water.”
August 24, 2015 at 4:41 pm
I heard that too, and wondered what the %#@**% she was talking about, but in the greater context of her comments, a little simple ignorance of the facts pales in comparison to her deliberate lying. I agree with blied that she gives the impression of truly being “evil”, and I’m adding her to my hate list also—-and that’s a pretty good jump for her considering I’ve only heard her speak s couple or three times—it took longer for Cruz, Inhofe, Santorum, and the other women like Bachmann and Palin to make it on there.
August 24, 2015 at 5:28 pm
Point #1 is, alas, totally valid. The Republican response to that truth is “do nothing”, or rather, “subsidize us to innovate our way out” (which won’t work, as Tim Garrett has shown). My response is – yeah, so instead we have to be much TOUGHER; a stiff Tax-and-Dividend and COMBINED with crippling trade sanctions against any other country which doesn’t pass their own. I’d welcome other countries to pass the same, and crippling trade sanctions against US if we don’t pull ourselves together. Will that save the future? It’ll at least make a very meaningful improvement on any other alternative I’ve seen.
To remind – the vast industrial transformation that has to happen worldwide to support 8 billion people with no carbon, is going to generate a LOT of carbon, so I don’t see any way out of a very bad future. But there’s bad, and there’s “The Road” (my all-time #1 on the GRIM scale).
August 24, 2015 at 5:36 pm
Do the Math – no, not Bill McKibbon style. The real math. The world average is 5 tons/year of CO2 per capita. For the U.S. it’s 17 tons/year. So let’s be wildly delusionally optimistic and say we can convince 1 billion people to somehow, impossibly, cut their entire carbon footprint by 50%. This is FAR beyond putting solar on your roof and getting a hybrid in the garage etc, because of all you buy which was made elsewhere using carbon. A billion is 3x the US population but still, let’s be rosy and make this billion among the highest carbon generators on the planet, and today estimate they generate an average of 9 tons/year CO2. We cut it in half, so that’s saving 4.5 tons/year x 1 billion people = 4.5 billion tons/yr of CO2. Compared to about 35 billion tons/year CO2 today (and still rising).
So the net wonderful savings is….. 13% on current CO2 emissions. Barely above the noise level.
You want to halt climate change? The things on the table are nickels and dimes from behind the sofa. Go big, or go home. We have carbon-partied hard for a hundred years, and for the sake of our children, I want to hear no sob stories from the party’rs.
August 24, 2015 at 6:21 pm
One last post in this trilogy. Suppose the entire world cuts their carbon footprint 100% – NO emissions! We’d all starve, but still, how would that affect climate? We’d be able to watch CO2 levels decline as the ocean and land continued to soak up their share of CO2 – nice! And, we’d watch temperature change not at all. Ocean thermal inertia and the fact we’re today out of thermal equilibrium by 0.58 w/m^2 means that the loss of CO2 would only balance the heat put back into the atmosphere by the oceans, and by the thermal disequilibrium. This flat temperature would last beyond the point we’d starve. It’d last for a thousand years and more (Solomon etal, Weaver and Matthews, etal etc only look out to year 3000). Flat. Is that good enough? Even if this “flat” started tomorrow, “Flat” has been enough to unhinge the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, melt most of the Arctic Ocean, and put big danger signs on East Antarctica and Greenland, and we’re at the tipping point of the Arctic Ocean ice loss triggering the melt of all of the permafrost (Vaks et al), releasing its carbon. If if it’s not the Methane Apocalypse (agreed this looks very unlikely), it’s additional carbon not in the models which makes even “flat” look optimistic.
Up the ante. Occupy DC with a million-person march, demand a stiff Tax-and-Dividend law, stiff trade sanctions, and a WWII style mobilization and funding to figure out how to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. That’s the only hopeful strategy I have heard.
August 24, 2015 at 10:24 pm
The key thing is that, despite the rabid & demented Right, renewables are now cheaper than coal. In other words, switching to renewables will not cost us anything. True, there will be capital outlays, but as old coal power stations age, they will have to be replaced anyway. In Oz (Australia) wind is 40% cheaper than NEW coal plants, though more expensive than older depreciated power stations. A cap-and-trade system would help in concentrating the minds of coal executives and consumers, and would achieve significant declines at zero net cost. For example, a 4% a year reduction in emissions under a cap-and-trade would lead to a 56% decline over 20 years, a 70% decline over 30 years, and 80% over 40. This may not be fast enough, I agree.
August 25, 2015 at 7:32 am
“Up the ante. Occupy DC with a million-person march, demand a stiff Tax-and-Dividend law, stiff trade sanctions, and a WWII style mobilization and funding to figure out how to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. That’s the only hopeful strategy I have heard”.
Yep, that’s the only NEAR hopeful strategy we can employ. I have been blessed (cursed?) with a way of thinking by birth and training that builds “spider webs” of data and is pretty good at pulling on different threads and seeing what happens. I was worried when I read The Limits to Growth, The Population Bomb, and The Tragedy of the Commons back in the 1970’s, and laying AGW on top of that has got me listening closely to Gilding and McPherson. We are plain-and-simple approaching SHTF time and too many of us will be living “The Road” if we don’t turn things around.
nick talks about “cap and trade”, which is just another kick the can down the road strategy. He thinks that might “concentrate the coal executives minds”, but says that it may “not be fast enough”? He’s surely right on the speed being too slow, in part because he’s PFTA on his projected reduction numbers. Taxing every last ounce of carbon that is burned, and doing it right NOW, is the only hope we have.