As the world gears up for the COP26 climate negotiations in Glasgow next week, deniers are already laying the groundwork for the disinformation they’ll peddle in a hopefully-vain attempt to recreate their success in using Climategate disinformation to disrupt the Copenhagen COP.
While every year brings a new and exciting display of denial, a few recent stories stand out as top candidates for the fossil fueled opposition to latch onto when confronted with the possibility that letting polluters profit our planet to death is a bad idea.
Though we can expect some totally-unhinged and unsubstantiated claims about banning beef, one of the biggest recurring arguments is also one of the most misleading, that the Texas blackouts offer a warning of what climate policies will make common. For example, Sean Spicer, who hasn’t quite danced his Trump-stained reputation clean yet, has a new book out, and the Koch-funded RealClear ran an excerpt. It opens with a heart-tugging story about a 12 year old who died of hypothermia, and then quickly exploits the child’s death to score cheap, and false, political points. The 80+ deaths “were caused by political decisions,” Spicer writes, and “the tragedy of the Texas blackout was partially the result of the growth of the green energy industry.”
But the majority of the responsibility for the blackouts can be laid at the fossil fuel industry’s failure to do the one thing it claims it does best: be reliable.
That reliability claim is also at the core of another strain of disinformation we’re seeing around COP26, which is the suggestion that the Teslas parked at the Gleneagles Hotel that the VIPs will use in Glasgow are going to be charged by diesel generators. “Couldn’t make it up,” one viral tweet claimed.
It was used as the basis for a ZeroHedge story, and the same narrative has been picked up by the UK’s Spectator magazine, and the climate denial blog Watts Up With That.
The problem? Well, it turns out you could make it up, and they did, as it turns out it’s Jaguar-brand electric vehicles they’re using, not Teslas, and while the COP26 crew may use supplemental generators to charge the vehicles somewhere, Gleneagles Hotel has denied setting up any chargers, while conference organizers told Alastair Dalton for the Scotsman that any spare generators are going to be filled with cooking waste oil, not diesel.
Although unreasonable for faux-populist conservatives to attack the rich elite pushing for climate action, it does seem odd that they’re apparently incapable of doing so in an honest way, despite that being so very, very easy to do.
For example, a recent New York Post op-ed does a fine job of criticizing the billionaire boy’s club of Bezos, Musk, Gates, and Jobs('s widow), but also throws in some fakery for good measure. While Paula Froelich is correct that “the electric cars made by Musk’s Tesla are not emissions free,” she then goes on to claim that the Wall Street Journal showed that “building one of his cars actually generates more emissions because of the metals needed for its lithium-ion batteries.”
But when you click through to the WSJ story, the subheadline notes that while “there are caveats”, “EVs produce fewer emissions overall than their gas-powered counterparts.” That’s because while the manufacturing of an electric vehicle requires more materials than a gas-powered car, the pollution from refueling soon and far outweighs that initial difference.
Drive a Tesla for more than (at most) 20,000 miles, and you’ve broken even on emissions. Drive it for a car’s average lifespan of 150,000 miles, and not only has the EV cost you less in ownership (because electricity is cheaper than gas) but you’ve also generated less than half as much pollution.
So if they had ordered and produced new electric cars for the COP26, and then immediately scrapped them afterwards, then yes, that would be hypocritical and wasteful. But the UK government has already said that the cars “have all been sourced from existing fleets in the UK,” so there’s not even that initial manufacturing pollution to count, dramatically improving the emissions footprint.
But, as one local environmental campaigner, Colin Howden, told the Scotsman, what they could’ve done to reduce emissions even further (and avoid this issue all together) is have the dignitaries take advantage of the “fleet of new electric buses” in Glasgow.
