Page 217 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

18 CONCLUSION: ONE MONTH IN THE LIFE OF THE PLANET … 213

mounted challenges to EPA provisions on 14 occasions, often in collab-
oration with fossil fuel company interests. Interviewed in his new position
by CNBC at the beginning of March he dismissed the incontrovertible
research evidence linking global warming to emissions of carbon dioxide
reiterating the entirely erroneous claim that scientist could not agree on the
impact, telling the interviewer:

that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something
very challenging to do and there’s tremendous disagreement about the
degree of impact, so no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to
the global warming that we see (Milman 2017).

This put him at odds with his own agency, whose web site clearly states in
the section headed “Causes of Climate Change” that:

Recent climate changes, however, cannot be explained by natural causes
alone. Research indicates that natural causes do not explain most observed
warming, especially warming since the mid-20th century. Rather, it is
extremely likely that human activities have been the dominant cause of that
warming (United States Environmental Protection Agency 2017).

It also puts him at odds with the 68% of Americans who, according to a
Gallup poll published on 14 March 2017, now accept that global warming
is caused by human activities and the 71% who agree that “most scientists
believe global warming is occurring” (Saad 2017). These figures however
still leave around a third of American citizens refusing to endorse the
majority opinion.
One explanation for this is the deepening crisis of public communica-
tion, which is making it increasingly difficult to counter dismissals and
misrepresentations of the scientific research supporting the urgency of
taking comprehensive action to address climate crisis. Evidence and argu-
ment demonstrating the destructiveness of the fossil fuel industries is now
routinely labelled as ‘fake’, not only by militant climate change deniers on
alt-right web sites but, as we have seen here, by Government Ministers. In
his landmark 2006 documentary, Al Gore characterized the mounting
scientific evidence on climate change as ‘An Inconvenient Truth’. The
decade since then has seen research across the entire range of relevant
scientific specialisms confirm the severity and extent of the impacts gen-
erated by carbon capitalism met by a proliferation of convenient untruths.