The recent Gulf oil spill has prompted some climate alarmists to renew their push for federal cap-and-trade legislation to limit carbon emissions. Even before the spill, alarmists sought ways to renew interest in government restrictions on carbon dioxide. One of their chief obstacles was publicity surrounding the Climategate controversy. Earlier this year, Paul Chesser discussed Climategate for a John Locke Foundation audience. The special correspondent for The Heartland Institute and director of Climate Strategies Watch also discussed the topic with Mitch Kokai for Carolina Journal Radio. (Click here to find a station near you or to learn about the weekly CJ Radio podcast.)
Kokai: People who don’t know you in [your Climate Strategies Watch] role will probably remember [your] name as an associate editor with Carolina Journal, which is where you started on these climate issues years ago.
Chesser: That’s right. Looking at North Carolina’s climate change commission, I did a handful of stories about the group behind the scheme there, and it kind of launched me off into doing this as an independent project a couple years ago.
Kokai: Before we get into the details of what happens next, there may be some people who have not heard of Climategate. So very briefly, what is it?
Chesser: I’ll do my best as briefly as I can. Climategate was — is — a scandal that broke out of Great Britain at the University of East Anglia, their Climatic Research Unit, in which there were a lot of e-mails and some data that were released on a server publicly on the Internet that revealed that a lot of scientists who were involved basically in being the gatekeepers of the global warming science and the accompanying alarmism were excluding dissenting opinion. They were keeping scientists and scientific research from being published in peer-reviewed journals. They were planning to withhold responses to Freedom of Information Act requests. And they were fudging the data. They were talking about “hiding the decline” — hiding a decline in temperatures on a certain set of data because it didn’t fit the science that they wanted to get out to the public.
Kokai: Some people would hear this information and say OK, well, now it’s time to start over, scrap what we thought we knew about global warming, and restart this process, or just ignore it if it looks like global warming really isn’t going to be a problem. What has happened instead?
Chesser: Well, what’s happened, there are a lot of people, there are more people saying that, and we’re seeing in a lot of — in the British media, predominantly — that it was just kind of a spark that led to a lot more revelations about the U.N. IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report, which has always been held up as the authority for global warming alarmism and that we should reduce our dependence on greenhouse gases — fossil fuels which produce greenhouse gases. We’re literally seeing new revelations, several a week, about the science behind the U.N. IPCC report. A lot of it produced by the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia was not peer-reviewed science; it was information produced by green groups, by environmental pressure groups, by student dissertations, to fit the preconceived policy agenda that they wanted to pursue with global warming.
Kokai: Is it likely, given what we’ve seen with Climategate, that the ideas for cap and trade or other policies designed to fight global warming are going to go anywhere?
Chesser: It doesn’t look that way this year. Maybe not as much because of Climategate but just because of the political situation we find ourselves in. We’ve got a real depressed economy. We’ve seen some elections here in the last several months which have turned against the Democratic Party and against the Obama administration and their agenda, topped off by the election of Sen. Scott Brown in Massachusetts, which nobody thought would ever go to a Republican. That has created an environment where the agenda is stifled, is stagnated. … A lot of senators and congressmen are not willing to put any more political capital on the line on behalf of cap and trade because, for instance, Harry Reid in Nevada is up for re-election this year. He’s way — he’s at least 10 points behind … I don’t see him bringing cap and trade up for a vote.
Kokai: You were just speaking about policies at the national level, but one of the things that you mentioned in a recent presentation to the John Locke Foundation’s Shaftesbury Society is that if things are cooling off, so to speak, on the national level, perhaps we’re going to see the global warming debate heat up again state by state or regionally.
Chesser: Sure. There was a strategy going full force a couple years back where this group called the Center for Climate Strategies was going from state to state trying to get governors on board to create blue ribbon panels and appoint — to develop climate policy at the state level to reduce greenhouse gas emissions there. And they ticked off about 30 of the states and successfully got a number of them to create regional cap-and-trade initiatives. They kind of went away for a short time because they had to regroup because I and others had revealed them to be in the back pocket of a lot of environmental pressure groups funded by large foundations such as the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. But they’ve kind of come back now, and their focus is on the South because that is the last remaining unconquered territory for a regional cap-and-trade agreement. The whole scheme in total is to pursue this hopeless regulatory mishmash among the states and among the region so that the utilities and the auto companies and industry will beg for relief at the national level from this patchwork regulatory scheme and get one unified regulatory policy at the national level. And, therefore, they can have some consistency and dependability on that.
Kokai: Some people may say, “OK, this sounds kind of scary, but what does it have to do with North Carolina?” The Center for Climate Strategies has been very involved in this state.
Chesser: That’s right. North Carolina was probably one of the first six or seven states that they were in, and they developed 50 or so policy recommendations. These all have to do with raising the costs of energy or limiting people’s freedom, as far as incentivizing them to live near rail stations and things like that, making it more expensive to live out in the suburbs. Pay-as-you-drive insurance — you’re going to have to pay your insurance premiums by the mile. Anything to incentivize against using fossil fuels — gasoline, electricity. That was the agenda, and that was the agenda the North Carolina Climate Action Plan Advisory Group — CAPAG — produced. And afterward we had a lot of things become law, like a renewable portfolio standard and things like that, which basically substitute inefficient, expensive sources of energy like solar and wind for the efficient ones that we’ve historically depended on, like coal.
Kokai: If people think that Climategate is going to put the global warming debate entirely on the back burner and we won’t have to worry about it again, what’s your response to that idea?
Chesser: Well, my response is that it’s been discredited because the authority that the alarmists have always cited was the IPCC report, and they have not been shown to be true peer-reviewed, objective scientists. But the alarmists are not giving up. They’re pursuing this state-level strategy, and they’re going to continue on. But at least now we have a debate and we have a discussion, whereas we didn’t have that at all before in the mainstream media.