The author of a book on climate change says the US is unlikely to pass legislation this year, writes Frank McDonald, Environment Editor
NOT EVEN a “watered down” version of the climate change and energy Bill before the US Senate is likely to be passed this year because of “entrenched opposition from deniers and sceptics”, according to American author Howard Friel.
Friel, who spoke at a Trinity Week event in Trinity College Dublin. on the theme What will the world be like in 10 years' time?said in an interview with The Irish Timesthat he had also lost faith in President Barack Obama's ability to set the climate agenda in the US. His latest book, The Lomborg Deception, dissects and debunks claims by Danish statistician and academic Bjørn Lomborg that global warming might be good for the planet and that resources would be better spent on health, education and ending world hunger.
Friel deconstructs Lomborg's claim that climate change is "no catastrophe" by exposing misrepresentations in his most recent book, Cool It: The Sceptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming, and argues that this practice is at the core of climate scepticism generally.
Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat and one-time presidential candidate, who has co-sponsored the Senate Bill and read Friel's typescript, said: "The Lomborg Deception sets the record straight with a rigorous, readable, body-blow to climate complacency."
The author meticulously checked all of Lomborg’s footnote references and found that he had “misrepresented sources to a staggering degree” – something Friel had previously found with American books advocating an invasion of Iraq before it happened in March 2003. “His scholarship is phoney and that’s why I wrote this book. When he says something like ‘the sea level increase will be 12 inches by 2100’, then footnotes figures from the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] that don’t exist, that’s pretty straightforward.”
Friel decided to take on Lomborg because he has been quite influential in the US, reinforcing its growing ranks of climate change sceptics and deniers. "He's got access to the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, was featured by Timemagazine, and he's on TV a lot."
Asked if he had talked to Lomborg while writing his book, he said: "No, I've never been in touch with him, though we have been fighting each other behind the scenes via Newsweek. Lomborg said I didn't know anything about anything and had got everything wrong."
Friel believes that climate change scepticism and denial has “really taken off in the US over the past year or so” – for example, in the Republican Party, the Fox News network and numerous right-wing lobby groups.
“There is no social democracy in the US. What you’ve got is this undereducated, disenfranchised mob blaming the government in an irrational way for their demise. The health insurance debate was a good example, with people acting against their own self-interest.” Friel says that “war 24/7 and terrorism 24/7 take up a hugely disproportionate political focus of government, as well as causing a misallocation of resources to the Pentagon that could be going to climate action, health or education . . . and Obama hasn’t changed that.”
Unless the president “has an epiphany about this and acts accordingly”, he said it was unlikely that the legislation co- sponsored by Senator Kerry – aimed at cutting US emissions by 17 per cent – would be adopted before the next UN climate summit in Mexico in December.
Friel, who is of Irish descent, previously co-authored a book on how the New York Timescovers the conflict in the Middle East. It argued that the paper had "severely diminished" Americans ability to understand the conflict by shielding its readers from Israel's "lawlessness".