The Competitive Enterprise Institute released what it calls “a citizen’s guide to climate change” last week. While we would normally try to ignore the atonal screechings of industry-funded science guides, given reports last week that the EPA tapped CEI’s Myron Ebell to provide a defense for Scott Pruitt’s denial, odds are better than we’d like that Wheeler will make use of the document.
The guide, by CEI’s Marlo Lewis Jr., starts off well, stating that “climate change is not a hoax”--certainly true. Unfortunately, that’s not the end of the sentence. Lewis continues: “as a political matter, [climate change] is a persistent pretext of expanding government control over the economy, redistributing wealth, and empowering unaccountable elites at the expense of voters and their elected representatives.” According to Lewis, climate change isn’t a hoax, just a fake excuse for “bureaucratic power grabs and corporate welfare schemes.”
Overall, the guide doesn’t necessarily bring anything new to the argument. Most of its points can be rebutted by pointing to one of Skeptical Science’s list of debunked arguments. But CEI warns against the conservative instinct to “deny or doubt industrial civilization’s enhancement of the greenhouse effect, which puts them crosswise with nearly all scientists.” So to ensure that conservatives opposed to climate solutions aren’t “vulnerable to attack as ‘anti-science’” CEI recommends a more sensible alternative to denial: lukewarmism.
In other words, don’t flat out deny climate change--use sophistry do it! For example, don’t rely on the thermometer record for temperatures, instead point only to satellites and weather balloons to claim that warming over the last 40 years “has been gradual and remarkably consistent” as opposed to “rapid and accelerating, as often claimed.” For most people, thermometers are more reliable than bouncing radar waves off of satellites and using complex calculations to infer temperature, but since deniers Christy and Spencer run a(n infamously wrong) satellite record, it’s a convenient excuse to ignore reality.
Then, CEI invokes the perennially debunked premise of the CO2 fertilization effect to pretend like CO2 emissions and warming will actually be good for agriculture, as opposed to leading to a world where agricultural activity across the southern US is ground to a halt as temperatures reach lethal levels for outdoor work.
The guide continues on that line, pointing to improvements in life expectancy, crop yields and water access over the past century, as though fossil fuels are somehow uniquely responsible for technological advancement and not a product of human’s ever-advancing ingenuity.
It then moves to meatier topics, casting doubt on climate models despite their repeated validation, and cherry-picking on extreme weather to make it seem like climate change isn’t burning down the west, flooding coastal communities or destabilizing nuclear waste repositories.
After picking a pie’s worth of cherries out of real data, the report then moves to the section on climate policy, where the citations go from mostly industry-funded deniers to pretty much exclusively industry-funded deniers to support an argument that “all regulatory climate policies” are too expensive and won’t actually change the global temperature and therefore “regulations can easily do more harm than good.”
Of course, if your paycheck comes from the fossil fuel industry, you’re going to argue that policies to reduce fossil fuel use are going to do more harm than good. And for you, that will be true. For the rest of the planet though, it’s just more lies from CEI.