Signs of climate chaos are all around us. A winter of bitter cold and spectacular storms in some areas is accompanied by breathakingly warm temperatures in others. But don't look to the nation's dominant source of information to Americans, Fox News owned by Rupert Murdoch, to explain how and why.
A rare expose on the dark genius of Fox News, Roger Ailes, offers insight into the antagonism of Fox to the environment. As detailed in The New Yorker Magazine's "Fox Among The Chickens" (Jan 31, 2011), Ailes and his wife, Elizabeth, triggered a tempest in a small upstate New York community, Garrison, where they own a second home, after buying the local weekly newspaper as a hobby. (Click, 'read more')
The town business, years ago, had become preservation after the community united to defeat a major electric plant planned by the region's super-power, ConEd. Ailes moved his family to Garrison for its natural beauty. He expresses his profound antipathy for environmentalists and "the outsized influence of nonprofit entities with green agendas. "The environmentalists always tell you it's for the greater good." Ailes and his family meanwhile benefit from the natural beauty those green agendas insured in Garrison.
Well yes, the urgency to prevent climate change from wrecking humanity is for the greater good.
The part of extreme weather patterns that the mainstream media seems so reluctant to engage is the simple connection to food production. Commodity prices for many food staples have doubled in just the past year. Rising demand in Asia is part of the reason. The other part, devastating losses in food crops due to climate disruption. But Ailes and his employees at Fox would never, ever acknowledge to audiences they have spent decades dumbing down, that altering investment and patterns of consumption through government policies are essential to reversing course. Instead, Fox has lead the way in inspiring voices and politicians in the opposite direction.
Nor is there any help from Republicans in the state legislature, like Scott Plakon, a representative from Longwood, Florida, who filed a bill that would scrap a program the GOP legislature had already approved but failed to enact; to create a state cap and trade program for greenhouse emissions. Plakon pulled out of his hat a pair of rabbits: that cap and trade would be "job killing" and that the science of climate change is unsound. He told the Florida Tribune, "Until we have a better grasp of the science, I don't think this belongs in the Florida statutes."
We have a plenty good grasp of science. What we don't have, are public officials willing to tell the truth to naysayers who are leaning for support on the polluters who are creating a chaotic climate. (File this, under Tea Party funded by Big Polluters like the Koch brother enterprises)
Harvey Ruvin, Miami Dade Clerk of the Court, has done his level best to raise climate change as an issue or urgent concern, only to be thwarted by the county commission. In 2010, Natacha Seijas -- the county commissioner now facing recall in Hialeah-- single-handedly prevented sophisticated mapping of low lying and flood prone areas to be included in projections of sea level rise.
Part of the truth is that although the science is inexact, the models predicting our current climate chaos events are dead on target. Fox News has paralyzed the national debate on the environment and, as a result, marginalized the United States. (For an interesting, if lengthy, explanation read "Can we trust climate models ? Increasingly the answer is 'yes')
The "funny" part about all the ignorance awash in states like Florida is that we presume the devastating consequences to be so far away that we can just wait a little while longer. "Don't impose government mandates to protect Americans from climate chaos!" That would be socialist! Communist! But let me put the response in terms that may be understandable, even to the Republican majority that controls the Florida legislature and the House in Congress: how many lost seasons for crop growing do you think world markets can endure before we have to share what is left?
2 comments:
Thanks for hitting the nail on the head by exposing the hypocrisy of hating environmentalists while enjoying the fruits of their labor.
University of East Anglia data is solid I tell you! Ailes or Fox would not have a reason to question any of their stuff that governments use to base their climate change policy. Nothing to see here, just keep moving!
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