American environmentalist Jeremy Rifkin, who has made a career warning about the dangers of scientific arrogance, looks back on the creation of the Global Greenhouse Network in the late 1980s as “the first time NGOs from around the world worked together around a central theme.” Until then, says Rifkin, “environmental issues, and economic and social issues, could for the most part be addressed regionally and locally. Here we had a situation where the whole globe was affected.”
But time–and media interest–wait for no one and no cause. “I think we thought we’d get more done than we did,” said Rifkin. “And we didn’t anticipate how successful the [first] Bush administration would be. It did a good job of defusing the issue.” Rifkin and others found themselves up against scientists who treated global warming as a theoretical joke. The gulf war diverted people’s attention, and when the war ended, journalists felt that the environment was an old story.
Many activists credit George W with bringing global warming back to the fore. “Greenpeace would never have done as much good as he did on March 13 when he rejected the Kyoto Protocol,” says Michel Raquet, a climate adviser to Greenpeace International. “Now, even in countries like Australia, Canada and the United States, the polls show that the Kyoto Protocol and global warming are important to people.”
In politics, as George W. Bush ought to know, threats are not assessed, they are cultivated. The enormously expensive nuclear missile defense program he proposes is not–in the opinion of any other world leader–based on a realistic assessment of what America’s enemies can do or will do, but on what they might do if they are complete lunatics. By focusing on the mere possibility of the threat, the Bush administration can expect to open a vast source of funds for the defense industry and shore up support among the Republican right.
For lefty activists and politicians, global warming serves a similar purpose. The threat fits neatly into their prejudices, regardless of its plausibility. And it gives the faithful and the fearful a good reason to write checks to the cause. The Campaign ExxonMobil has a big red button on its home page that says, simply, “Donate now.” The money is used to buy stock in the American oil giant and attack it from within and without for refusing to care about global warming or alternative energy sources.
For a broader public, the global-warming issue plays on a natural suspicion of scientists. In this case, says Rifkin, environmentalists are “running with the orthodoxy. The scientific establishment is saying this looks real to us, and we’re following their lead.” Maybe the establishment is being misread. Maybe it’s plain wrong. But who wants to take the risk of apocalypse tomorrow because they guessed wrong today?
