Civil Society Coalition On Climate Change: Astroturfing the IPCC
Posted by keith on May 20th, 2008
It’s no surprise that India is becoming a hotbed of greenwashing, with the market-friendly government and some of the richest people on Earth starting to understand the power and wealth that can be gained by brainwashing a population of a billion people into the way of industrial civilization.
For alerting me to the blatant Astroturf that is the CSCCC I have Manu Sharma to thank:
Two days ago (Apr 1, 2008) Hindustan Times carried an article titled Climate change not as big a problem: report. Lest anyone should think it as an April Fool’s joke, it was a completely serious piece based on real events. Today (Apr 3, 2008), the same correspondent published a report titled: ‘Sun too causes global warming.’
Both articles are highly misleading, contain factual inaccuracies and at the very least deliberately hide widely known facts that counter its argument to paint a biased picture. In the following paragraphs, I will attempt to highlight the key issues raised by each of the stories.
Climate change not as big a problem: report [1]
by Chetan Chauhan | Page 14, HT New Delhi, Apr 1, 2008 | 353 words
Opening excerpt:
“An international civil society report has debunked the claims of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, saying there is no evidence available to show loss of human life directly due to climate change.
The report of the Civil Society Coalition on Climate Change [CSCCC], to be released in India on Tuesday, says there is no evidence to suggest climate change has caused an increase in diseases.”
Highly Misleading
By pitting CSCCC directly against IPCC, the article creates the impression that both organisations are of similar stature. Nothing could be further from the truth. IPCC is a Noble prize winning United Nations body made up of hundreds of scientists and governmental representatives while CSCCC is merely a coalition of so-called global “think tanks” – corporate lobbyists funded by big oil corporations, the likes of ExxonMobil, to further their interests.
The HT article makes no mention of the background of CSCCC – who comprises the coalition and how are they funded. Unlike IPCC, which was formed two decades ago, CSCCC was only organised a little more than an year back [4] by International Policy Network (IPN) which is a well known recipient of Exxon funding. IPN has received $390,000 from Exxon. Several other members of the coalition have also been a beneficiary.
Paul Reiter, the expert cited in the article, for example, sits on the “Scientific and Economic Advisory Council” of an organization called the “Annapolis Centre.” What is Annapolis Centre? It’s a US based “think tank” that has pocketed $793,575 from ExxonMobil and has been very active in playing down the human contribution to global warming.
Reiter doesn’t have anything too substantiative in his research papers published in scientific peer reviewed journals to back his claims of lack of relationship between disease and climate change. It’s unclear how many other claims of CSCCC report are backed by research in peer reviewed journals.
Yet, here’s a newspaper that reaches out to a country of one billion, publishing unsubstantiated “research” of corporate lobbyists that have a direct financial interest in sensationalising their so-called findings; and pits them against a neutral, highly conservative group of scientists and government representatives whose work is completely based on pure scientific research published in peer-reviewed journals…
I strongly recommend you read the rest of this well-researched article here.
Astroturfs are not new, of course, and they are such powerful tools of business that I have a separate category for them on The Unsuitablog. The CSCC is notable, though, for purporting to be a truly international body, representative of “46 member organisations from 35 countries”. When you did down a little you find that these “46 member organisations” are also astroturfs or even more obvious corporate lobby bodies, making the CSCCC a Super Astroturf.
Time For A Game
There’s a fun game you can play, trying to find out why they are members of CSCCC — it’s called “follow the links“.
I picked the very first body on the list, the Alabama Policy Institute.
Go to http://www.alabamapolicy.org/ for the main site, then click on “About Us“. Nothing particularly exciting, except some stuff about wanting to bring religion into politics. Click on “Press and Media” instead, to find out that their President is Gary Palmer. Click on his biography and you find:
“Gary co-founded the Alabama Policy Institute, formerly known as the Alabama Family Alliance, in 1989. Gary was previously employed by Rust International in cost analysis, and prior to that with Combustion Engineering in the environmental systems division.”
A man of business clearly, and also someone who is very fond of religious censorship. But Gary isn’t our main man, it is Vice President Michael Ciamarra :
“a widely published columnist and a member of the American Legislative Exchange Council’s National Task Force on Tax Policy and The Heritage Foundation Resource Bank. He is an advisor to the National Center for Health Transformation.”
Let’s go to the American Legislative Exchange Council at http://www.alec.org. Here you will find, under ALEC Initiative > Internation Relations :
“Free trade is central to ALEC’s vision of the way nation states should relate to each other. In order to fully realize a broad and deep free market that reaches across the Atlantic, we need to mobilize strong leadership from legislators on both sides, as well as our business communities. Now, more than ever, conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic need to continue their challenge to over-taxing, over-borrowing and over-governing.”
Hmmm, wonder why preventing climate change would be a worry to ALEC then? What about the Heritage Foundation Resource Bank?
With a little digging around…bingo! Here’s a brilliant (well, crap) piece of straw man thinking:
http://theheritagefoundry.org/2008/05/19/the-polar-bears-are-coming/
And there are many more: have a look at this lot.
And finally, the National Center for Health Transformation. Take a look at their members! Clearly it’s the public whose concern is foremost in CHT’s mind — surely nothing to do with ensuring the market economy is vibrant and all powerful.
It’s a great game that all the family can play, and I think I’ll be playing it a lot more in the future.
May 20th, 2008 at 7:21 pm
The environmental movement has been taken over by those wanting to stop the development of developing countries. The industrialized nations want to stop China, Brazil and India from developing. They want to lock in 1990 economies, where they were leading. Once they started to lose, and new nations emerge, then we started to hear “stop industrialization”. Don’t let them fool you that they care about the poor and starving.
May 21st, 2008 at 3:45 am
If only it were that simple, William. “Development” in the industrial civilization sense is just a way of circulating more money around the global economy, intended primarily to make the elites even richer and more powerful. The West has fully bought into the lie for the “need” of this kind of development, and other parts of the world are toppling as the lies and deception spreads.
I think you might find this extract from A Matter Of Scale useful:
“If we judge development or progress in terms of the number of televisions, computers and cars we have, the size of home we have or the amount of energy we use; then economic growth most certainly does lead to a more “developed” human race. If we judge development or progress on rather more esoteric (and, quite frankly, more important) things such as clean water and air, physical and mental health, freedom of expression, and having a future that our descendants will be able to thrive in; then economic growth is failing on almost all of these counts. Humans in every place touched by the rank hand of industrialisation are told that development based upon economic growth, is good. When you think about it, though, the only true form of development is that which moves us into balance with our natural environment – in effect a reversal of what we are now doing. You do not have to be financially prosperous in order for your water to be clean – you just need a basic level of hygiene, sensible water management techniques and a lack of toxic muck being poured into the water supply by industrial processes.”
The environmental movement is not a movement at all: it is a collection of largely disconnected bodies and individuals who are chasing their tails trying to justify their place in society — and make themselves feel good by doing it. Scientific knowledge is important and, when acquired objectively, should be taken seriously — the scientific body of opinion (rather than that which the lobbyists would have us believe) is for anthropogenic climate change, and it is getting worse, far beyond the projections of the, frankly, conservative IPCC (it’s all relative).
Listen to your connected self. Ask it whether what we are doing is right. Non-industrial humanity, the type of fully liberated, connected, humanity that we see so little of now would tell you we are blindly going down the path to self-destruction.