Follow the Money

November 06, 2019

“This is how wealthy individuals or corporations translate their economic power into political and cultural power. They have their profits, so they hire people to write books that say climate change is not real. They hear people to go on TV and say climate change is not real. People without economic power don’t have the same size voice as people who do have economic power, and so it ends up distorting democracy.”

— Robert Brulle, Drexel University

I came across the group Climate Realists by accident. Twitter has a way of doing that to one: You follow a long list of environmental awareness groups, scientific organizations, climate activists, field biologists, palaeontologists and ecologists of all stripes, and it’s only a matter of time before social media algorithms point you in the direction of any group that has “climate” and “reality” in the same name field.

Only, in this case, I quickly learned that Climate Realists are in fact climate deniers.

Or, rather, they agree that something is wrong with the climate; they just don’t agree that it’s man-made, or even influenced by human activity. The Earth’s climate is cyclical they say, and is forever going through tectonic shifts. Humankind’s presence on Earth can be measured in the blink of an eye, time-wise. The climate has been misbehaving — or behaving erratically — for millions if not billions of years.

Here, though, some of their arguments get harder to follow. Science is on their side, they say. Furthermore, most scientists agree with them. When a news story makes headlines, as one did just 24 hours ago, that says 11,000 scientists from across the world have united to declare a global climate emergency that is already causing “untold human suffering,” climate deniers dismiss that as exaggerated alarmism at best and fake news at worst.

There is a scientific consensus on climate change, they insist, but that consensus is that all this talk of a climate emergency is bogus.

But wait, there’s more. One of Climate Realist’s most startling argument — to me, anyway — is that there’s big money to be made in climate activism. Those Tesla-driving millionaires who swan around the high seas in their solar-powered racing yachts are gulling gullible donors into giving more and more money to climate studies that show the polar ice caps are melting at an alarming rate, and that polar bears won’t be with us for much longer. Pity Big Oil and the fossil fuel industry: If only they had the money to match those granola-crunching hippies with their ponytails and 4Ocean bracelets.

This idea that climate activists have deep pockets, deeper than anyone else’s, won’t go away, though.

That’s what prompted Smithsonian magazine to do a exposé a number of year back headed, helpfully, “Meet the Money Behind the Climate Denial Movement.”

Just in case one didn’t get the message at first glance, it was accompanied by an equally

helpful subhead: “Nearly a billion dollars a year is flowing into the organized climate change counter-movement.”

Shocker! It turns out money is not with the granola hippie crowd after all, but rather with those very same climate deniers — backed by Big Oil — who accuse granola-crunching hippies of having cash to burn. When they aren’t chaining themselves to old-growth trees, that is.

“The overwhelming majority of climate scientists, international governmental bodies, relevant research institutes and scientific societies are in unison in saying that climate change is real, that it's a problem, and that we should probably do something about it now, not later,” Colin Schultz wrote in Smithsonian. “And yet, for some reason, the idea persists in some peoples' minds that climate change is up for debate, or that climate change is no big deal.

“Actually, it's not ‘for some reason’ that people are confused. There's a very obvious reason. There is a very well-funded, well-orchestrated climate change-denial movement, one funded by powerful people with very deep pockets.”

In a detailed and thorough study, Drexel University (Philadelphia) sociologist Robert Brulle took a deep dive into the financial structure of the climate deniers, to see who’s controlling the purse strings.

According to Brulle's research, the nearly 100 think-tanks, advocacy groups and trade associations that make up the North American climate denial industry pull down just shy of a billion dollars a year to lobby and sway public opinion on climate change and other environmental issues.

“The tactics that this movement uses were developed and tested in the tobacco industry first,” Brulle explained, “and now theyʼre being applied to the climate change movement, and in fact, some of the same people and some of the same organizations that were involved in the tobacco issue are also involved in climate change.”

Imagine that.

Mind you, when you think about it, it’s only natural that the climate denial movement would have roots in the tobacco industry. Plausibility is deniability. Tobacco is a plant, after all. A tree by any other name.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/11/google-contributions-climate-change-deniers

Extinction Rebellion and Unpredictable Outcomes

October 08, 2019

“Non-violent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks to dramatize the issue so that it can no longer be ignored.”

— Martin Luther King

Climate activists covered in fake blood staged a die-in this week at Wall Street’s famous charging bull statue. They were part of the week’s global #ExtinctionRebellion resistance protests demanding immediate action on climate change. The dye was cast.

True, the very name Extinction Rebellion sounds like an anachronism. If extinction is real — and few doubt that it is, given our present climate emergency and growing talk of a looming Sixth Mass Extinction — rebellion seems pointless.

Even now, though, there are those who refuse to believe, let alone take decisive action. The climate-denying group Climate Realists, for one. The human mind is capable of many things, and denial in the face of overwhelming evidence is one of them. Big Oil has much to lose if the industrialized world switches to green energy, and there’s evidence to suggest that Big Oil is spending big money to tar climate activists with the brush of extremism — snowflakes with radical ideas and a penchant for disruption and violence.

Where many might view this week’s Extinction protests as a legitimate expression of public concern, well-intended and backed up by the science, there are still those who insist recent climate events are part of a natural cycle that human actions have little or nothing to do with. Where you and I see people of conscience, they see anarchists — anarchists who would take down Big Oil, and take the global economy with it.

In the early moments of Monday’s first day of global protests, 30 climate activists were charged after hundreds blocked a road in Sydney, Australia; 100 more were arrested in Amsterdam.

Demonstrations took place in more than a dozen countries, including Spain, the UK, France, Austria, Germany, the United States, Canada and New Zealand. Nearly 150 people were arrested in London

More protests are expected in some 65 cities over the next two weeks. The protestors are demanding that governments take immediate, drastic action to address climate change.

The activists argue that petitions, lobbying and marches no longer work. More needs to be none, and direct action taken if necessary.

That doesn’t necessarily mean violence — taking direct action by means of violence, though some activists do see it that way. Martin Luther King viewed direct action in non-violent terms, arguing than nonviolence is a way of life for courageous people; that seeks to defeat injustice, not people; that believes suffering can educate and transform; and that believe the universe is on the side of justice.

Not everyone sees it that way, of course. According to BBC News, Australia’s minister for home affairs, Peter Dutton, said the names and photos of Extinction Rebellion protesters should be “widely distributed” to “shame” them, not understanding that protesters, far from being shamed, would welcome the chance to sign their name to the protest movement. (Australia, one of the industrialized world’s most unapologetic consumers and distributors of coal, currently has one of the most aggressively conservative, recalcitrant governments on the planet, a political fact which seemingly conflicts with the evidence of terrible droughts and catastrophic bush fires, not to mention record high temperatures in all seasons, even the southern winter.)

As it is, the protesters have thrust the issue of climate activism to the top of the public debate: Climate change is now rated one of the five most important issues facing voters in industrialized democracies today, on an equal footing with the economy. Blockades of busy streets in major cities have been met with a surprising amount of support, though not so surprising perhaps to those who fervently believe in the cause.

As Leo Barasi, author of The Climate Majority: Apathy and Action in an Age of Nationalism, wrote this past weekend in an op-ed piece in the Guardian, Extinction Rebellion has won the first battle — now it must win the war.

The protesters, he concluded, might just be the people to do it.

©Natural HIstory Museum-2018 Wildlife Photographer of the Year Awards

Beauty and the Beasts: Wildlife Photographer of the Year Finalists

October 06, 2019

“When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.”

— Ansel Adams

The 2019 Wildlife Photographer of the Year will be named little more than a week from now, and only one thing is certain: My favourite image is unlikely to be the same as yours. Your truth is not the same as mine.

That’s the nature of the beast with any photo competition, of course, but especially one with as many subjective talking points as a nature competition during our current climate crisis. The Sixth Mass Extinction looms, and we don’t need a 16-year-old climate activist from Sweden to tell us that.

Most of us, anyway. (The self-styled contrarians behind the cynically named climate-denying group “Climate Realists” are beyond hope in that regard: Big Oil has deep pockets, and is unafraid to spend large sums of cash to muddy the waters, even as they accuse climate activists of doing the same: harpooning gullible donors, as though saving the planet were just another fund-raising activity. Obscene profits have a way of warping moral perspective.)

The Wildlife Photographer of the Year awards have been no stranger to controversy in recent years. South African photojournalist Brent Stirton’s grim image of a rhino slaughtered for its horn, 2017’s winner, set off a storm of debate about what the award should be — something that upsets and angers, and galvanizes us to action, or something warm and heartfelt, that inspires more than shocks. The slaughtered rhino image was followed last year by a more safe, traditional choice, Dutch photographer Marsel van Oosten’s somewhat routine image of a pair of rare, critically endangered golden snub-nosed monkeys in southwestern China’s Qinling Mountains. At least one wildlife photographer I know — a former judge in the competition — groused privately about the use of flash to capture the winning image; a true wildlife photo, this photographer believes, should be completely natural.

The competition is in its 55th year. This is no fly-by-night affair. The WPOTY award is arguably the most prestigious honour in the field — the Nobel Prize of nature photography — and is not to be taken lightly. This year’s field included some 55,000 submissions from more than 100 countries. Awards in all categories will be announced Oct. 15, with the winners — and those who were shortlisted — invited to the annual black-tie dinner at London’s Natural History Museum. An exhibition opens Oct. 18 and will run at the NHM through the new year.

The shortlisted finalists were revealed last month. I’ve included a half-dozen or so images here that caught my eye, though I couldn’t tell you, if pressed, which is my favourite. My personal bias leans towards photojournalism, and so if I had to choose, it would be veteran Thomas Peschak’s underwater image of a whale looking at a human that appears to be reaching out under the water.

Any one of these would make a worthy winner, in my estimation, but — speaking for myself, personally, I saved the best for last.