Democracies embrace discourse as the ultimate route to political truth. Vigorous debate homes to the essence of issues as diverse as global warming and official decorum, even if debaters themselves never yield. The reward is general illumination.
In the era of the sound bite, though, propaganda too easily short-circuits debate. Discourse gives way to what might be called miscourse: the foreclosure of whole arguments by some searing simplicity that ascends to influence for being little more than a convenient filter.
So it went with the US presidency just ended of Bill Clinton. And so it goes in the politics of global warming. The oil and gas industry should look close at the popularity reversals now buffeting the ex-president. It can learn something there about dealing with its frustrating challenges in global warming miscourse.
Manipulating opinion
In the manipulation of popular opinion, Clinton was a master. The skill enabled him to benefit politically from economic prosperity yet support policies hostile to commerce: increased taxes, economic sanctions against disfavored governments, stiffening environmental regulation, restricted development of natural resources, and support for the flawed Kyoto Protocol on climate change. One legacy of his administration's policy excesses is restriction of the oil and gas business on several strategic fronts just when energy realities say it should expand and do so rapidly.
Policy was able to diverge from national interest in this manner partly because Clinton propaganda so deftly deflected dissent with unflattering characterization of dissenters. Refiners who questioned unnecessarily large cuts in the sulfur content of diesel fuel were "polluters." Opponents of a climate change treaty poisonous to US economic interests were "un-American." And observers suggesting that a cavalier approach to energy fit a disturbing pattern of personal recklessness found themselves consigned by miscourse to the nether category of "Clinton haters."
More recently, however, the skewed urges that expressed themselves in policy while Clinton was in office have aroused horror among former supporters. In response to a gush of post-presidential extravagance, erstwhile Clinton haters, who aren't surprised by any of it, don't need to say anything. Fecklessness speaks for itself.
Miscourse similarly distorts what should be a long and complex debate over global warming. Here it hinges on allegations of "denial" in the psychological sense. Anyone citing causal complexity as a reason to doubt that humanity can influence climate trends very much is "in denial" that catastrophe looms. The same diagnosis awaits anyone questioning the political propriety of taxing into retreat the consumption of fossil energy.
It is, therefore, symptomatic of denial to challenge a product of miscourse called the precautionary principle. In this framework, the mere chance for a human contribution to flooding and glacier melting compels governments to raise taxes, even though floods happen and glaciers melt regardless of what people do. By extension, it must reflect outright neurosis to suggest that governments acting this way are seriously out of line.
The issue deserves better than this.
Riveted to CO2
Climate change miscourse rivets itself to the assumption that growth in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, a consequence of human activity, is disastrous. Because CO2 is a greenhouse gas, the argument goes, more of it in the atmosphere must mean greater temperature. And greater temperature must mean surface devastation (against the potential for which-whatever the odds-humans must be taxed into new behavior).
Yet doubt grows that observed warming results from the CO2 build-up. There are other warming causes that have nothing to do with human activity. There are even scientists who suggest that CO2-richening of the atmosphere will promote plant growth, especially if it's accompanied by moderate warming. The process thus might help humanity deal with two challenges that climate change miscourse subverts to the taxation impulse: population growth and limited supply of fresh water. If so, the last thing governments should do is raise taxes to discourage people from burning hydrocarbons.
Just as it defaulted policy opposition into the Clinton-hater dustbin, however, miscourse still calls it denial to suggest that a CO2 build-up is anything but disastrous. In the Clinton case, history will assess extent of the misjudgment. In the global warming case, it's not too late to put discourse back into play.
