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Abstract
Policy debate about global warming has been framed in the public sphere in the manner of most political topics, as a matter of “skeptics” and “supporters,” making it very difficult for many US publics to know what to believe. This essay critically reads a preeminent public policy debate—that of global warming—with a twofold purpose. I first array the extensive commercial and political efforts to manipulate public information about global warming in order to illustrate that this debate is a “disingenuous” or “pseudo-controversy,” which can be seen in the asymmetrical resources, motives, and authority behind the scenes. Second, I ask what institutional and discursive conditions have enabled this moment, in which the ideals of academic freedom and protocols of scientific inquiry hold precarious authority in the public arena, and argue that contemporary critical perspectives on knowledge and truth have been co-opted in public discourse, making it more difficult to intervention in commercial and political efforts to obfuscate and mislead US publics.
Notes
1. Global warming is due to the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the earth's atmosphere that capture heat. Increased accumulation of greenhouse gases in the earth's atmosphere has been attributed primarily to the burning of fossil fuels, although a secondary source of human-caused climate change is traced to land-use changes, such as the clearing of forests for agriculture, urbanization, and roads. Global warming has been occurring since the Industrial Revolution, has increased in intensity the past few decades, and has rapidly increased in the past few years. Oxfam, the British-based international aid agency, reports that natural disasters have quadrupled over the last two decades, from an average of 120 a year in the early 1980s to as many as 500 today. Oxfam Press Release, “Disasters Escalating Four-fold as Climate Change hits Poor Hardest,” November 23, 2007. http://www.oxfam.org/en/news/2007/pr071125_climate_change_hits_poor_hardest (accessed March 3 2008).
2. United States House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, White House Engaged in Systematic Effort to Manipulate Climate Change Science Under the Bush Administration, 110 Cong. (December 12, 2007). See http://oversight.house.gov/story.asp?ID=1653 (accessed December, 13 2007).
3. White House Engaged in Systematic Effort to Manipulate Climate Change Science, 3.
4. Though I watched several news shows in the days after the report was released and checked online news sources for coverage of the report, I found none. Instead, I found several January 2007 news reports on hearings for the COGR report.
5. John Fritch, Catherine Palczewski, Jennifer Farrell, and Eric Short, “Disingenuous Controversy: Responses to Ward Churchill's 9/11 Essay,” Argumentation and Advocacy 42 (Spring 2006): 190–205.
6. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 50, 80–81.
7. Michael Calvin McGee, “Text, Context, and the Fragmentation of Contemporary Culture,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 54 (1990): 279.
8. By the term “poststructural,” I am gesturing broadly to the work of theorists such as Barthes, Foucault, and Kristeva. The prevalent discourses on knowledge, truth, and power can be grouped under a range of terms from philosophy of science, pragmatism, and social construction to poststructuralism and postmodern. They include work by figures such as Derrida, Feyerabend, Lyotard, and Rorty. Philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn, whose work was influential in initially demystifying science, is likely to be labeled a social constructionist.
9. Key scientific communities conducting and/or evaluating research on climate change include the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
10. The United Nations Environment Program and the World Meteorological Organization jointly established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988 to study climate change. The IPCC does not monitor climate-related data or conduct new research, but instead assesses the scientific, technical and socioeconomic information relevant for understanding the risk of human-induced climate change. It consists of international climate change experts who are invited to become its members.
11. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Fourth Assessment Report, Climate Change 2007: The Physical Basis, Summary for Policy Makers, 5.
12. The Union of Concerned Scientists say that authors who participate in writing the reports for IPCC say that its review process ranks among the most extensive that they have experienced for any scientific document. See Citizens and Scientists for Environmental Solutions, “The IPCC: Who Are They and Why Do Their Climate Reports Matter?” available from their website, http://www.ucsusa.org. However, government representatives do participate in the line-by-line review and revision of the summary for policymakers, or SPM, for each technical report, which has led some scientists to argue that they have watered down and weakened the conclusions, including John Walsh, a climate expert at the University of Alaska Fairbanks who helped write a chapter on the polar regions. Thomas H. Maugh II and Alan Zarembo, “Dire Warming Report too Soft, Scientists Say,” Los Angeles Times (April 7, 2007). See http://articles.latimes.com/2007/apr/07/science/sci-warming7 (accessed April 7, 2007).
13. Oversight Hearing on the 2007 IPCC Assessment, US House of Representatives Committee on Science and Technology, “Written Testimony of Dr. Susan Solomon, Senior Scientist, Earth System Research Laboratory, Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, US Department of Commerce” (February 8, 2007).
14. IPCC, Fourth Assessment Report, Climate Change 2007: The Physical Basis, 5.
15. White House Engaged in Systematic Effort to Manipulate Climate Change Science, 3.
16. “The Second Gore–Bush Presidential Debate,” Commission of Presidential Debates (October 11, 2000), http://www.debates.org/pages/trans2000b.html (accessed August 1, 2005).
17. Office of the Press Secretary, “President Bush discusses Global Climate Change” (June 11, 2001), http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/06/20010611-2.html (accessed August 6, 2005).
18. George Bush, Office of the Press Secretary, “President Announces Clear Skies & Global Climate Change Initiatives” (February 14, 2002), http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/02/20020214-5.html (accessed August 1, 2005).
19. White House Engaged in Systematic Effort to Manipulate Climate Change Science, 3.
20. The memo was obtained by the Environmental Working Group, an environmental advocacy organization, and given to the New York Times. It is http://www.ewg.org/briefings/luntzmemo/ (accessed December 12, 2005). See Oliver Burkeman, “Memo Exposes Bush's New Green Strategy,” Guardian (March 4, 2003), http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,906978,00.html (accessed March 5, 2003).
21. Luntz is president and CEO of a political consulting, polling, and message-marketing firm and an Adjunct Fellow at the Hudson Institute, an anti-environmental and right-wing think tank based in Washington, DC. He gained national media recognition for crafting the wording of the Republican “Contract with America” for former House Speaker Newt Gingrich in 1994, and more recently, infamy amongst pollsters for having the distinction of being one of the few pollsters reprimanded for his polling practices not only once, but twice by professional polling organizations.
22. Oliver Burkeman, “Memo Exposes Bush's New Green Strategy,” Guardian (March 4, 2003), http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,906978,00.html (accessed March 5, 2003).
23. This language appears on page 137, titled “Winning the Global Warming Debate,” of the document Straight Talk distributed by Luntz's public relations firm from a section titled “The Environment: A Cleaner, Safer, Healthier America” (2002) ewg.org/pdf/LuntzResearch_environment.pdf.
24. “Winning the Global Warming Debate.”
25. Jennifer Lee, “A Call for Softer, Greener Language,” New York Times (March 2, 2003), http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=F3061EF73A580C718CDDAA0894DB404482 (accessed March 5, 2003).
26. Prior to his White House assignment, Cooney headed the American Petroleum Institute's climate program.
27. White House Engaged in Systematic Effort to Manipulate Climate Change Science, 4.
28. See Andrew C. Revkin, “Editor Of Climate Reports Resigns,” New York Times (June 11, 2005), http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D00E4DF1E38F932A25755C0A9639C8B63 (accessed June 14, 2005); and H. Josef Hebert, “White House Official Singled Out for Editing Climate Reports to Work for Exxon Mobil,” Associated Press (June 15, 2005), http://www.enn.com/today.html?id=7964 (accessed June 15, 2005).
29. H. Josef Hebert, “White House Official Singled Out.”
30. Daniel Smith, “Political Science,” New York Times (September4, 2005), http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/04/magazine/04SCIENCE.html (accessed September 10, 2005).
31. White House Engaged in Systematic Effort to Manipulate Climate Change Science, 30.
32. This new Chief of Staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality was James Connaughton. Betty Ann Bowser, “Climate Tension,” The News Hour with Jim Lehrer (July 5, 2005).
33. Greenhouse gas intensity is defined as the ratio of carbon dioxide to a measure of economic output. The measure of economic output is usually defined as the emissions produced per dollar of gross economic product.
34. The policy gives transferable credits to companies that voluntarily participate in the program and that can demonstrate that they have reduced emissions. If the economy grows more quickly than the rate at which emission intensity improves, however, then overall emissions will continue to increase.
35. Steve Connor, “Scientists Condemn US as Emissions of Greenhouse Gases Hit Record Level,” Belfast Telegraph (April 19, 2006), http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/story.jsp?story=687519 (accessed April 20, 2006).
36. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon, 1988), 26.
37. To give a sense of the relative percentage of federal funding that climate change research receives, in 2007 military spending was 29 percent of the budget at $598 billion, health research and services was 20.5 percent of the budget at $423.7 billion, and science, energy and environmental spending was 2.6 percent of the budget at $53.7 billion. Funding for climate change science was $1.7 billion, a relatively small portion of the federal funds dispensed. Friends Committee on National Legislation: A Quaker Lobby in the Public Interest, 43% of Your 2007 Tax Dollars Go to War (March 7, 2008), http://www.fcnl.org/issues/item.php?item_id=2336&issue_id=19 (accessed June 17, 2008).
38. Richard Lindzen, “Climate of Fear: Global-warming Alarmists Intimidate Dissenting Scientists into Silence,” Wall Street Journal (April 12, 2006), http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110008220 (accessed June 17, 2008).
39. Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 159.
40. Daniel Grossman, “Dissent in the Maelstrom,” Scientific American (November 16, 2001), http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=00095B0D-C331-1C6E-84A9809EC588EF21 (accessed June 18, 2008).
41. Andrew Gumbel, “An Immovable Obstacle to Action on Climate Change,” Independent (June 1, 2006), http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article622746.ece (accessed June 3, 2006).
42. Bob Ward, Royal Society Exxon Letter Copy. PDF, September 4, 2006.
43. Exxon Mobil is the world's largest publicly traded corporation.
44. Among the most prominent of these 43 recipients were the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), to which Exxon-Mobil has contributed more than $1.6 million; the George C. Marshall Institute (contributed $630,000); and the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), which has received more than any other beneficiary (more than $2 million).
45. Jim Lobe, “Exxon Mobil Accused of Disinformation on Warming,” Inter Press Service News Agency (January 4, 2007), http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=36063 (accessed January 4, 2007).
46. Rob Gelbspan, “The Coal Industry's ‘ICE’ Campaign,” The Heat is On, http://www.heatisonline.org/contentserver/objecthandlers/index.cfm?ID=4461&Method=Full&PageCall=&Title=The%20Coal%20Industry's%20%22ICE%22%20Campaign%20(1999)&Cache=False (accessed June 20, 2005).
47. Gelbspan.
48. David Helvarg, “Energy Companies Try the ‘Tobacco Approach’ to Evidence of Global Warming,” The Nation (November 1996), from Global Policy Forum http://www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/envronmt/helvarg.htm (accessed December 21, 2007).
49. Amy Goodman, “Corporate Propaganda Still on the News,” Democracy Now (November 14, 2006), http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/14/1518200 (accessed September 12, 2007). For a complete list of the stations that improperly used VNRs, go to http://www.prwatch.org/fakenews_station.
50. Joe Garofoli, “Probe of Non-news News Sought,” San Francisco Chronicle (November 15, 2006), http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/11/15/MNGB4MCURM1.DTL (accessed November 22, 2006).
51. Intergovernmental Panel Climate Control Working Group I, Fourth Assessment Report, Climate Change 2007: Summary for Policymakers (February 5, 2007).
52. The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, Online News Audience, Larger, More Diverse: New Audiences Increasingly Politicized (June 8, 2004), Pew.2004.Report.NewsAudiences.Increasingly.Political.pdf (accessed July 21, 2005).
53. Geoffrey Lean, “Global Warming Approaching Point of No Return, Warns Leading Climate Expert,” lndependent/UK (January 23, 2005), http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print.cgi?file=/headlines05/0123-01.htm (accessed January 25, 2005).
54. Paul Brown, “Republicans Accused of Witch-Hunt Against Climate Change Scientists,” Guardian (August 30, 2005), http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1558884,00.html (accessed September 10, 2005).
55. Gardiner Harris, “White House Is Accused of Putting Politics Over Science,” New York Times (July 10, 2007), http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/10/washington/11cnd-surgeon.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin (accessed July 10, 2007).
56. Josh Holusha, “Exxon Mobil Posts Largest Annual Profit for US Company,” New York Times (January 30, 2006), http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/30/business/30cnd-exxon.html?hp&ex=1138683600&en=ed7ac90463244e93&ei=5094&partner=homepage (accessed January 31, 2006).
57. “Exxon Mobil Posts Largest Quarterly Profit Ever,” Associated Press (October 27, 2005), http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9837574/ (accessed October 27, 2005).
58. Steven Mufson, “Higher Oil Prices Again Help Set Record Profit,” Washington Post (February 2, 2006), http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/01/AR2007020100452.html (accessed February 2, 2006).
59. I am indebted to one of my reviewers for the notion that political and commercial entities are perhaps, to quote, “occupying a shell that has been hollowed out long before their arrival on the scene” favorable to their activities.
60. I offer two caveats here. Corporate and conservative foundation sponsorship of academic department and programs—particularly in the life sciences but across disciplines—can significantly impinge on the principles and protocols that conventionally have guided academic scholarship and research and this sponsorship has significantly altered research practices. In other words, the “wolf appears in sheep's clothing.” Second, while scientism has not disappeared from the academy, post-positivism and anti-scientism across the social sciences and humanities—alternatively labeled the rhetorical, linguistic, interpretive, or reflexive turn—has led to an increased focus on the role of language and interpretation in research.
61. One result of the postmodern intellectual movement and poststructural discourses on knowledge, truth, and power has been new spaces carved out in the academy for subjugated or marginal knowledge, voices and methods. These appear in academic units like ethnic studies, women studies, and African American studies and across the disciplines in forms such as critical and cultural studies. In a concurrent development across the latter part of the twentieth century, the state shifted from its post World War II policy of widely supporting research defined as “basic” but which was tied to war, and increasingly outsource its “research funding functions” from the university “to the private sector.” Steve Fuller, The Governance of Science (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2000), 118–23.
62. The distinctions between knowledge and information are widely debated across disciplines, with some theorists such as Paul Virilio and Scott Lash appearing to place all discourses and images on the same plane—including academic discourses—and then to treat these all as information. I consider it important to retain a distinction between knowledge and information, and so I refer to the conclusions of research and scholarship that are widely accepted within their areas as academic knowledge. Once these conclusions are disseminated into the public sphere they morph into information, albeit information that is likely to be more credible than information that is not based on evidence, reasoning, peer review, that generally does not abide by academic conventions for producing research, or that is produced with vested interest.
63. These empirical, historical, philosophical, and rhetorical studies demonstrated that human subjects are inextricably at the center of scientific research and employ culturally, politically, and historically specific criteria to reach conclusions, which then can be taken as contingent “truths.” This work includes the rhetoric of inquiry and studies by sociologists and philosophers of knowledge and science who focused, for example, on discrete settings such as the lab, case studies (or a series of case studies such as Thomas Kuhn used to illustrate belief change in science), or the journals of individuals in mathematic or scientific study. For some time, as John Lyne writes in reference to the Iowa Symposium on Rhetoric and the Human Sciences, it looked as though “rhetoric were scouted as a possible answer to the central dilemma of post-positivism: how to move beyond acultural, ahistorical conceptions of knowledge without plunging into sheer relativism or as Richard Bernstein has phrased it, how to get beyond objectivism and relativism.” See “Rhetorics of Inquiry,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 71 (1985): 65.
64. This incredulity has not been limited to scientific conclusions but has been extrapolated to all theoretical, hermeneutic, and empirical–analytic knowledge claims presented as stable, neutral, and universally applicable. See Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979).
65. This conclusion assumes that discourses, in the same way as scientific paradigms, structure different ways of knowing, ways of perceiving, and other social practices; all are fundamentally intertwined with issues of power. Like all discourses, academic discourses “in themselves,” as Michel Foucault influentially noted, are “neither true or false,” and—like all discourses—they are power-laden. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 118.
66. Writing in reference to scientific research, Thomas Kuhn in particular clarified that “fact and theory are not categorically separable, except perhaps within a single tradition of normal-scientific practice.” See The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 7.
67. Scott Lash, Critique of Information (London: Sage, 2002), 2.
68. I use the phrase “Conservative Right” to include multiple US political and religious entities and movements that emerged in the late twentieth century.
69. The question of cultural relativism in the social sciences, to paraphrase Steve Woolgar, focused on the problem of understanding the beliefs and actions of members of various cultures other than one's own and the problem of translating a culture's rationality; that is, the question of whether or not it was possible to translate the meanings and reason of one culture into the language of another. See Steve Woolgar, Knowledge and Reflexivity (London: Sage, 1988), 17–18. The form of cultural relativism strategically deployed in public discourse and to which I refer here is linked to moral relativism—the belief that all ideas have equal merit and that there are no adequate methods by which the relative merit of the ideas could be sufficiently determined. The form of cultural relativism strategically deployed in public discourse conflates moral relativism with slippery slope reasoning—if there is no one way of seeing the world, if there is no absolute, one universal truth, but many ways to read the word and world, then all ways of seeing and all ideas must have equal merit and no adequate methods exist by which the relative merit of the views or ideas could be sufficiently determined.
70. This selection, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” is originally in Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche's Notebooks of the Early 1870s, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1979) and reproduced in Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg, The Rhetorical Tradition (Boston: Bedford, 1990), 891.
71. Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies.”
72. Steve Fuller, The Governance of Science.
73. See Citizens and Scientists for Environmental Solutions, “The IPCC: Who Are They and Why Do Their Climate Reports Matter?” http://www.ucsusa.org (accessed April 16, 2007).
74. See Sharon Crowley, Toward a Civil Discourse: Rhetoric and Fundamentalism (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), 22; and Janet Atwill, Rhetoric Reclaimed: Aristotle and the Liberal Arts Tradition (Ithaca: Cornell, 1998) for their careful articulations of the ethical stance toward the political in the rhetorical tradition. Atwill and Crowley advance the position that respect and justice between adversaries are fundamental when the resources of each party in a dispute are unequal.
75. To place this comment in context, Mouffe approaches democracy as a conflicted trope that has been conflated with neo-liberalism and capitalism, and as a politic that is defined by a struggle for popular sovereignty against relations defined by subordination.
76. Chantel Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2000), 20.
77. Fred Barnes, Rebel-in-Chief: Inside the Bold and Controversial Presidency of George W. Bush (New York: Crown Forum, 2006), 22–23.