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It is really in the interest of Republicans to act against climate change

As climate change unfolds around the globe, climate disasters will give undemocratic forces the justification they seek to commandeer resources, declare martial law, interfere with the market economy, and suspend democratic processes. This means that Americans who care about political freedom shouldn’t hold back when it comes to supporting climate scientists and acting to prevent the threats they have so clearly and fulsomely documented.

To do otherwise can only increase the chances that authoritarian forms of governance will come out ahead in a future in which our children and grandchildren, including those of the climate deniers, will all be the losers, as will our planet and so many of the other species on it. Recognizing and emphasizing this aspect of the climate equation may offer some hope of enabling more moderate Republicans to step back from the brinkmanship of denial.

Climate Deniers Are Quickly Bringing About Their Own Worst Nightmare How climate denial became second nature to the new Republican Party, The Nation Naomi Oreskes  June 16, 2015  “……As unlikely as it might seem today, in the first half of the 20th century the Republicans were the party that most strongly supported scientific work, as they recognized the diverse ways in which it could undergird economic activity and national security. The Democrats were more dubious, tending to see science as elitist and worrying that new federal agencies like the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health would concentrate resources in elite East Coast universities.

Saved From the Ozone Hole

Is environmental science any different?

Consider the men and women who laid the scientific foundations for the Montreal Protocol to the Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer. Established in 1985, that convention protects us from the potentially devastating effects of ozone depletion. Today, the ozone hole is on the mend and scientists expect a full recovery in the coming decades—something that would not have happened without the work of the environmental scientists who first recognized threats to stratospheric ozone in the early 1970s.

Scientists working at NASA and the University of California realized then that chemicals released into the atmosphere from supersonic transport planes and the space shuttle could react with ozone in the stratosphere and destroy it. Because of this threat, NASA began to fund studies of the chemical reactions involved. Meanwhile, Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina at the University of California, Irvine, recognized that a certain class of chemicals known as chlorinated fluorocarbons, or CFCs, found in hairspray and other consumer products, had the potential to destroy ozone on a global scale. At first, their predictions were viewed skeptically even by their colleagues: Could hairspray really end life on Earth as we knew it? That seemed an adventurous, if not outrageous, claim………

n 1987, Harvard Professor James Anderson sent an experiment aloft in a NASA U-2 plane over the Antarctic, establishing by direct measurement that the ozone layer had been massively depleted there and that those depletions correlated with CFCs. This was a striking confirmation of the earlier hypotheses. Later, his team obtained similar measurements over the Arctic. All this research was NASA-funded.

On the basis of this work, Republican President George H.W. Bush, Secretary of State George Schultz, and Assistant Secretary of State John Negroponte gave their support to the Montreal Protocol to the Vienna Convention and so committed the world to reducing, and later to phasing out, the use of CFCs. In 1988, with the president’s support, Congress ratified the Montreal Protocol….

Bush, a Republican president, was not duped. He did the right thing and protected us from harm, but few people realize just how well the Montreal Protocol has worked and at what little cost. It was ratified by 197 nations—In other words, the whole world!—and production and consumption of ozone-depleting chemicals has fallen 98 percent.

Not only did this cost very little, as manufacturers quickly replaced ozone-depleting chemicals with new, less harmful products, but the world profited. The protocol stimulated competition in technological innovation that reduced manufacturing costs, improved efficiency and safety, and lowered prices for consumers, while we avoided significant economic losses in agricultural and fishery yields and adverse human health impacts. The indirect health profits in terms of avoided cases of cancers and cataracts alone have been estimated at 11 times the direct costs of implementation. And there was no net loss of jobs, although there was a shift to more skilled jobs carried out by better-trained workers under safer conditions.

As the risk of disruptive climate change became widely recognized in the 1990s, the ozone success story offered a model for how we might tackle climate change, especially as it refuted the familiar conservative claims that environmental protection restrains growth, hurts the economy, and leads to job loss, or that benefits accrue to polar bears but not people. But the Republican shift to the right was already underway. When it came to the subject of regulation, the GOP was on the road to rejecting any science that pointed in that direction………

Private Funding Creates a Hole in the Atmosphere

Ozone science was not attacked because it was wrong scientifically but because it was politically and economically consequential—because it threatened powerful interests. The same is true of climate science, which is telling us that business as usual will endanger our health, wealth, and well-being. Under the circumstances, it’s hardly surprising that some sectors of the business community—especially the Carbon-Combustion Complex, the network of powerful industries that centrally rely on the extracting, selling, or burning of fossil fuels—have tried to undermine that message. They have supported attacks on the science and its scientists, whilefunding distracting research and misleading conferences to create a false impression that there is fundamental scientific debate and uncertainty on the subject.

The point of all this, of course, is to confuse Americans and so delay action, which brings us to the crux of the matter when it comes to “politically motivated” science. Yes, science can be biased, particularly when the financial support for that science comes from parties that have a vested interest in a particular outcome. History suggests, however, that such vested interests are far more likely to be a feature of the private sector than the public one.

The most strikingly documented example of this is tobacco……………

June 19, 2015 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | climate change, politics, USA