When the Penguins Vote Republican
Published on December 23, 2009
Why would the science on global climate change look so different, depending on your politics?
Perhaps as compensation for the blessing of my four wonderful sisters, fate also bestowed upon me a genetic predisposition to asthma and bronchitis. Since Lyndon Johnson’s Presidency, each common cold slides me toward debilitating lung infections. As I’ve learned again this week, there’s not a lot you can do to argue with a bad case of bronchitis. You do have to adapt to the symptoms and in order to try to keep the lungs clear, it does help to sit up. For me, the best way to pass time sitting up is to read.
Because I lean toward magazines, National Geographic is always a good choice and a couple recent editions have been in my stack this week. But there’s also an important article in the current New Yorker by Fen Montaigne, “The Ice Retreat,” about the dramatic decline of Adélie penguins in Antarctica.
Montaigne’s article is told largely through the eyes of a 58 year-old scientist, Bill Fraser, an expert on penguins who has basically devoted his life to studying Adélies. The Adélies are one of only two species of penguin, along with the Emperor penguin, that breed exclusively in Antarctica. While much scientific and public attention has been given to the effects of global warming on the Arctic, there are dramatic warming effects being visited upon the Antarctic as well. One of them is the rapid retreat of sea ice off the Antarctic Peninsula, an appendage that forms an “S” shaped tail off the continent, reaching up toward Tierra del Fuego.
There are at least two consequences of the rapidly shrinking sea ice that are combining to wipe out the Adélies. The krill that are the foundation of the Antarctic food chain (and a staple of the Adélies’ diet) feed on phytoplankton that grow on the underside of sea ice. Thus, as sea ice diminishes, so does food for the krill. But the main effect sinking the Adélies is the disappearing sea ice itself which, during the southern hemisphere’s winter, effectively doubles the size of Antarctica, in that it provides a walkway of ice on which penguins and others can travel before entering the liquid ocean. What Fraser’s research shows is that sea ice provides a crucial platform for the Adélies as they try to reach their feeding grounds.
“What we’re looking at here,” Fraser tells Montaigne, “is an entire ecosystem that is changing, and it’s not changing in hundreds of years, which is what we used to be taught. It’s changed so quickly that it has encompassed the research lives of a few people who have spent a lifetime here.”
Fraser doesn’t mince words about the context and the personal effect on him in having to bear witness to the grim fate of the penguins.
“I have real affection for the Adélies, but everything seems to be working against them. Here you have this unbelievably tough little animal, able to deal with anything, succumbing to the large-scale effects of our activities. And that’s the one thing they can’t deal with, and they’re dying because of it. And that’s the sad thing side of that story for the Adélies. It’s such a long-distance effect. The industrial nations to the north are having an impact that Adélies are being subject to down here. That’s what sort of pisses me off about the whole picture, that these incredible animals have to take it in the neck because a bunch of humans can’t get together to decide what to do about the planet.”
Montaigne’s well-constructed piece is just the latest in a long series of compelling journalistic profiles about how global warming has already begun to cause major disruptions to the world’s ecosystems. It’s not just penguins, of course, but people who rely upon those ecosystems for their survival as well.
The preponderance of the scientific evidence is that climate change is real and that the increase in global warming corresponds to a steady rise in concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) caused principally by the burning of fossil fuels. Some refer to it as the “greenhouse effect” and, frankly, it’s not hard to understand. It’s not string theory. As I noted in a piece last summer, it’s fair to report there is consensus among the world’s credible scientific bodies that global warming is occurring and that it is caused by human activity. It’s what brought the world to Kyoto in 1997 and to Copenhagen last week to at least appear to be working the problem.
What’s missing is not necessarily the urgency to address global warming. As exemplified by Bill McKibben and the worldwide 350 campaign, there is a planetary public uprising underway to push the world’s governments into making the changes necessary to reduce carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.
Perhaps those bellicose climate students, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, are helping Republicans see in the climate science both the pernicious motives and data/analytic errors that our National Academy of Sciences experts have overlooked. In any event, either Republicans have supernatural powers of scientific criticism or we are arguably witnessing the most important and destructive exercise of delusional thinking in human history.
What is missing is any sanity in the character and machinery of U.S. governance. I don’t mean to excuse China and India, whose willingness to develop their economies without a reliance on fossil fuels is vital. But, really, this is about us. The American Century was built upon a fossil fuel binge Not that the odds of a solution are great even with American leadership, but without it the science indicates that global warming is swiftly headed toward a tipping point that would end the natural world as we’ve known it.
Given that the United States has, for some time, been the locomotive pulling not just the industrial revolution but the Enlightenment, a reasonable expectation by an uncynical sixth grader is that our national government would be seriously addressing this problem. Democracy would work. But our federal government is in shambles, an embarrassment not just to the world but to generations of Americans who thought they were building a great nation capable of solving problems as mundane as delivering mail and as difficult as global warming.
Suffice to say American politics is no longer about actually addressing national or international problems. It’s about partisan warfare and scorched earth strategies where reasoned debates over philosophies, policies and facts are replaced by blatant public misinformation campaigns. As Sen. Jim Demint of South Carolina proposed last July to his fellow Republicans about health care reform: “If we’re able to stop Obama on this it will be his Waterloo. It will break him.”
From there it was just a matter of the end justifying the means. Predictably, this included the patently absurd lie by former Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin, Sen. Charles Grassley, and others that the health care reform legislation then before the House of Representatives included death panels that would be empowered to kill old people.
The shameful resort to disinformation betrayed the real purpose of the Republican opposition to health care reform. As DeMint made clear, his party was primarily interested in inflicting political damage (or thwarting a political success) than in anything remotely related to health care and the welfare of hundreds of millions of Americans.
If this looks like anarchy, it really isn’t. Instead, what we’re witnessing is one of the two major political parties in the U.S. embracing a retrograde philosophy built around a contempt not just for government, but for the very idea that it is necessary or even useful to organize and act for the common good, except for national defense.
It is a philosophy espoused by the late author Ayn Rand whose work is enjoying a resurgence in Republican circles. In Rand’s world view, the gods are free market capitalism and self-interest, and the fools are those who think any good can come from restraining either.
It’s a nice formula for dispensing with a conscience, or even a healthy curiosity about what the back-cycle effects of unregulated free markets and unmitigated self-interest might be.
It’s at this juncture that science can be a real pain in the ass. Because scientists will look at things like birth defects, cancer, acid rain, fish kills, holes in the ozone, and rapidly melting polar ice sheets and have the audacity to publish studies linking these late effects to corporately or privately profitable acts of free will. You can blame science for the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration, and even the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Younger voters may not remember that there actually was a period, beginning during Richard Nixon’s Presidency, where moderate Republicans (when there were such persons) actually conceded that government ought to play a meaningful role in regulating things like environmental protection. Indeed, one of those moderate Republicans, Christine Todd Whitman, was appointed by George W. Bush to head up the EPA. She lasted only two years before resigning in frustration after being pressured by Vice President Dick Cheney to weaken air pollution control rules.
The Republican Party’s war on science reached its apogee under Bush and Cheney and it lives on in fascinating ways. Polling shows that Republicans, as a group, tend to view science through a starkly partisan lens. As Sharon Begley notes in a recent Newsweek column, this warped view on science is most pronounced when it comes to global warming. Whereas three out of four Democrats accept there is solid evidence of global warming, only one in three Republicans agrees, and less than one in five Republicans sees mankind’s activities as playing a part in global warming.
This last number, to me, is the most amazing. Less than one in five Republicans agrees with the international scientific consensus that man’s activities are causing global warming.
Wow. Perhaps those bellicose climate students, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, are helping Republicans see in the climate science both the pernicious motives and data/analytic errors that our National Academy of Sciences experts have overlooked. In any event, either Republicans have supernatural powers of scientific criticism or we are arguably witnessing the most important and destructive exercise of delusional thinking in human history.
The gridlock of Republican minds on science in general and climate change in particular is consequential. Because of the way our system is configured (particularly with the filibuster rules in the U.S. Senate) we will likely need a good number of Republicans to get anywhere close to the measures needed just to begin to cut carbon emissions.
If you see the way this is going to end well, call me. I may wheeze while answering the phone, but I’m anxious for some good news.
I’m given to thinking how a miracle could help. It’s not unthinkable. There is, after all, room for violent inconsistencies with Ayn Rand’s philosophy when it comes to buying off key Republican interest groups. Here I’m thinking of the legions of American farm families that collect five and six-figure government farm subsidies yet vote, in lockstep, for politicians like our arch-conservative Republican Rep. Cathy McMorris from Eastern Washington, who steadfastly opposes federal handouts except when it comes to propping up her peeps.
Perhaps its my low grade fever, but maybe a decent last hope for the Adelies is to become Republicans en masse and figure out a way to give an inter-species voice to their cause that can win over Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and GOP national chairman Michael Steele. I mean, the Adelies kind of look like Republicans, already, in their tuxedos.
They live and breed in the south. They eschew government handouts. They may even oppose imaginary death panels and capital gains taxes. Maybe all we have here is a tragedy born of a failure to communicate.
–Tim Connor