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Climate-Change Fervor Cools Amid Disputed Science, Defections |
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-02-22/climate-change-fervor-cools-amid-disputed-science-defections.html
U.S. Representative Bob Inglis went from climate-change skeptic to believer four years ago as opinion leaders from Al Gore to General Electric Co. chief Jeffrey Immelt called for laws to curb global warming.
Today Inglis, a South Carolina Republican, is a convert who’s watching the public become more doubtful.
“I have many people saying, ‘Now don’t you see the problem with the science?’” said Inglis, who dismissed global warming until 2006, when scientists showed him evidence in the melting ice of Antarctica.
Three years after former Vice President Gore won a Nobel Prize for sounding the alarm on climate change and GE joined a coalition of companies pushing for a cap on greenhouse gases, public concern is flagging, along with U.S. and global efforts to mount government responses.
Polls find more Americans questioning whether human activity is leading to climate change, or whether the trend is so dire as to justify reshaping U.S. energy use during an economic slump, as President Barack Obama has proposed. Record snowfalls in the U.S. also are fueling doubts.
“The consensus of anybody who studies American opinion has to be that there’s less concern, rather than more, on global warming,” said Frank Newport, editor-in-chief of the Gallup Organization Inc., a Washington-based polling company.
The latest blow to those urging action against global warming came last week, when Yvo de Boer said he would step down as United Nations climate chief, two months after 193 countries meeting in Copenhagen failed to reach a binding agreement on curbing greenhouse gases.
‘Sad Day’
The resignation may reduce the possibility that a worldwide market aimed at reducing carbon emissions is within reach, said Trevor Sikorski, an emissions analyst for Barclays Capital in London.
“It’s a sad day for the carbon market, and we’ll be lucky to get somebody with Yvo’s dedication and hard work as a successor,” Sikorski said.
UN carbon credits have fallen 13 percent on the European Climate Exchange in London since the start of the Copenhagen meeting, which was aiming to set limits for emissions after 2012. The NEX index tracking shares of 86 companies involved in clean energy has tumbled 12 percent since the talks.
Also last week, ConocoPhillips, BP Plc and Caterpillar Inc. said they will quit the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, a group of companies created in 2007 to push for legislation to reduce carbon pollution.
GE Chief Executive Officer Immelt, who helped spearhead formation of the coalition, says legislation is needed so companies know how to proceed with long-term investments.
Challenge to Obama
ConocoPhillips CEO Jim Mulva said proposals in Congress “unfairly penalized” domestic refineries. Houston-based ConocoPhillips, the third-largest U.S. oil company, was the first oil producer to join the group.
London-based BP, Europe’s biggest oil company, and Peoria, Illinois-based Caterpillar, the world’s largest maker of bulldozers, said they’ll focus on their own approaches to global warming. Both were founding members of the coalition.
The defections underscore the challenge Obama and Democratic lawmakers face in getting a climate bill passed, said Frank Maisano, an energy specialist for Bracewell & Giuliani, a Washington lobbying firm.
“One reason people signed on to USCAP when it was trendy was the notion that the train was leaving the station,” Maisano said. “Now that movement on legislation has slowed to a crawl, many of these companies don’t see a benefit in being involved.”
Obama came to office last year pledging to enact “cap- and-trade” legislation that would limit carbon-dioxide emissions and establish a market in the trading of pollution allowances. A House-passed measure has stalled in the Senate.
Leaked E-mails
“The push to move very rapidly on new climate-change laws looks like it has hit a stone wall,” said Walter Russell Mead, a senior fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll in December showed 54 percent of those questioned believe that action should be taken to deal with climate change, down from 64 percent in 2007.
Skepticism also may be on the rise in the U.K. A poll conducted for BBC News this month found 25 percent of people surveyed didn’t believe in global warming, a rise of 10 percentage points from November.
Public doubt has been fed by climate scientists’ e-mails obtained from computers at the University of East Anglia in the U.K. in November, Representative Inglis said.
Scientists referred in the messages to a “trick” used to smooth out data showing an anomaly in the trend toward higher global temperatures, and wrote about blocking articles by climate-change critics from a report by a UN panel.
Science ‘Debunked’
“Now we see that that science has been pretty well debunked,” Senator James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican who has called man-made global warming a hoax, said on CNN in December.
The UN panel, which shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Gore, has been faulted for exaggerating the pace at which Himalayan glaciers are melting and for using reports by environmental advocacy groups as a basis for some findings.
Peabody Energy Corp., the biggest U.S. coal company, said in a court challenge Feb. 12 that the Obama administration’s Environmental Protection Agency relied on flawed science by the UN panel in its decision last year to regulate carbon-dioxide emissions.
The EPA “needs to step back and begin a thorough review of the real state of scientific understanding of greenhouse gases,” Beth Sutton, a spokeswoman for the St. Louis-based company, said in an e-mail.
“The opposition is trying to blow up a few mistakes in the science,” said former Senator Tim Wirth, a Colorado Democrat who heads the UN Foundation, a Washington-based philanthropy backed by billionaire Ted Turner. “It’s a conspiracy that simply doesn’t exist. The basic science hasn’t changed.”
Economy, Snow
Uncertainty about the economy also has made Americans wary about shifting from fossil fuels, said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change in New Haven, Connecticut.
“Americans are frustrated and angry and scared about the current economic situation, and that has pushed a lot of other issues, including climate change, off the table,” he said.
A harsh winter in some regions has added to skepticism that the world is warming. “It’ll keep snowing in D.C. until Al Gore cries uncle,” Senator Jim DeMint, a South Carolina Republican, said in a Twitter message on Feb. 9, as the Washington area was blanketed in record snowfall.
Advocates for climate-change legislation say a single snowy winter doesn’t disprove the long-term trend toward warming and may even bolster the argument that weather patterns are growing more extreme.
“Climate change doesn’t mean just global warming, it means climate disruption,” Wirth said.
--With assistance from Alex Morales in London, Simon Lomax in Washington and Jim Efstathiou Jr. in New York. Editors: Larry Liebert, Joe Winski
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