Florida Goes Pravda. Read it and Weep

GELFAND’S WORLD-According to a detailed story by the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting and provided by the online Miami Herald, the state of Florida has had an unofficial but severe prohibition against state government employees using the term "climate change." The story has been gaining national recognition, including coverage by Talking Points Memo. 

The prohibition was passed down to environmental workers following the election of Governor Rick Scott a few years ago. The story is worth reading in full, but a couple of details referring to Florida's Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) are worth excerpting here: 

DEP officials have been ordered not to use the term “climate change” or “global warming” in any official communications, emails, or reports, according to former DEP employees, consultants, volunteers and records obtained by the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting. 

The policy goes beyond semantics and has affected reports, educational efforts and public policy in a department with about 3,200 employees and $1.4 billion budget.

The term anthropogenic global warming, or AGW for short, is the concept that human emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere are causing a slow but significant increase in temperature in the atmosphere, the oceans, and the land that we humans live on. It is considered settled science at this point. Unfortunately, there is a sizable group of people and organizations that remain in denial. Whether that denial is sincere or just a political tool to take pressure off the fossil fuel industries, the result is damage to our ability to work together to bring the climate situation under control.

At this point, the Republican Party appears to have been captured by the denialists, to the point that a large number of elected officials and presidential candidates on the Republican side have refused to concede that AGW is a fact. 

Governor Scott is one of those denialists, as his own words and the Miami Herald article demonstrate. The fact that Scott has taken climate denialism to a whole new level of ugliness is now demonstrable. 

One of the reasons that this story is so significant is that Florida is one of the parts of the U.S. that is most vulnerable to the effects of AGW. For one thing, the predicted rise in ocean levels puts considerable parts of the Florida coast at risk. Another predictable effect of increased oceanic surface temperatures is that hurricanes will be more powerful, a subject of obvious concern to Floridians. 

There is a reason that this subject is so important, and not just another commentary on the hypocrisy in our political system. It is becoming increasingly evident, if not universally accepted, that we need to start preparing for the effects of global climate change. At one time, there was a countervailing view that making such preparations was admitting to people that they could avoid making the hard choices that are involved in preventing climate change. The argument was in effect that taking preparative action gave people the excuse to stay in denial. But curiously enough, it turns out that when people start thinking about taking preparative steps, they are also more likely to begin to believe that AGW is real. 

The net effect of making plans to prepare for AGW is to move public opinion more onto the side of science and away from political lying. 

And this is what the Florida governmental policy seems designed to prevent. 

It is the total head in the sand approach. Hear no facts, see no facts, speak no facts about global climate change, and thereby push back any real preparations. This is done in the hope that it will also push back public recognition that something has to be done. 

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Of course that denialist strategy is coming from the monied interests who are protecting the fossil fuel industry, alongside the energy industries and transportation industries that rely on fossil fuels. For Gov. Scott, the reason is probably less financial, and more brass knuckle politics. The Republican Party, in making itself the representative of the monied interests, has created a collection of litmus tests. Unfortunately, climate change denialism seems to have become one of them. 

That's why politicians intelligent enough to become lawyers and corporate executives -- people who should be smart enough to know better -- are parroting the big lie. Some of them make ignorance a virtue, pointing out that they are not scientists. The obvious retort, that there are plenty of scientists and these politicians should be listening to them, is conveniently ignored. Other Republican leaders really have swallowed the Kool Aid, to borrow that unpleasant cliche. 

In any case, we have a well-funded political operation that is dedicated, although it cannot admit the fact even to itself, to damaging all life on earth. 

It will be interesting to see whether the voters of Iowa and New Hampshire buy into this big lie, or whether they manage to reject the anti-science and profoundly inhuman line being taken by the climate denialists.

 

(Bob Gelfand writes on culture and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])

-cw

 

 

CityWatch

Vol 13 Issue 21

Pub: Mar 10, 2015