WASHINGTON — Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz dubbed it “progress” that major companies are arguing more and more that climate change is a reality.
Moniz’s comment was in response to a question by TPM at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast on Monday over increasingly public feuding between major American companies and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) on climate change. As TPM has previously noted, a number of major companies such as Microsoft and Google have publicly criticized ALEC for its position on climate change.
Recently ALEC sent cease and desist letters to liberal-leaning advocacy groups calling the conservative organization climate deniers. Moniz, in responding to TPM, noted that on climate change he’s said “it’s time to stop debating what’s not debatable” and that climate change is real.
“Also I would say that I think in the private sector we are seeing continued progress —if you like, I call it progress— in terms of CEOs and companies, global companies committing to the need to get certainty as to how we approach climate,” Moniz said. “We are seeing it from the military community. We are seeing it from the religious community and I just feel that we are on the track to in the not-too-distant future getting an economy wide approach to climate change, risk mitigation, and climate change adaptation.”
So does that mean Moniz is encouraging companies that are still members of ALEC to either speak out against the group on climate change or leave the organization all together?
“I’m not going to give them specific advice over that but my position is clear in terms of what these companies should be doing and I think in the end a lack of certainty and a lack of the kind of economy-wide approach that only legislation can deliver, ultimately, is not helpful to the private sector,” Moniz said.
As National Journal has previously noted, ALEC’s model legislation argues that there are actually benefits of climate change. The group has has said it doesn’t deny climate change but that human activity that alters the planet’s atmosphere “may lead to deleterious, neutral, or possibly beneficial climate changes.”
(Photo credit: Michael Bonfigli/The Christian Science Monitor)
Anybody who speaks or writes on the topic of climate change denialism needs to remember that there are a few orders of denial:
First Order Denialism: Global climate change (GCC) is not happening. These folks are actually pretty fringe at this point - Sen. Inhofe is a first order denier. Folks who complain about “doctored data” or show very short-term trend charts to “disprove” warming are in this group.
Second Order: GCC is happening, but completely natural. These are your “climate has always changed and will always change” folks; they accept GCC but think humans play almost no part in it. They may accept that carbon dioxide is a component, but claim that it’s really water vapor, or volcanoes, or sunspots or some bullshit like that.
Third Order: GCC is happening, humans contribute, but OMG Y U DESTROY OUR LIFESTYLE! These people usually build a nice strawman about how Algore wants to take everybody’s SUVs away and tax us all into poverty to build solar farms and bird-killing windmills.
IMO, we need to address Second and Third Order denialism, and to do that we need to specifically mention “human-caused” climate change. It’s not enough to say that “denial of climate change” is being attacked as stupid - we need to see progress in the attacks/ridicule leveraged against the natural-cycle/sunspot/lack of pirates people.
So when Sec. Moniz says, “major companies are arguing more and more that climate change is a reality”, that’s nice and all, but only fringe whackos like Inhofe deny GCC. When major companies start arguing, “these specific human behaviors are contributing to GCC and those behaviors must be reduced, modified, or eliminated,” then we’ll really be getting somewhere.
When GCCdenial causes rivers of money to dry up THEN the DumbALECs might get the message.
What we are seeing is panic on the left as fewer people are buying this stuff. Is the climate changing? Off course it is. It has always changed since there has been a climate, several billion years ago. Are WE affecting it? Much different question. Absolutely nothing is changing in a way that has not happened in the past. Danish government photos from the 30s show glaciers retreating further then than they are now. A thousand years ago Vikings were farming on the south coast of Greenland. About 20,000 years ago there were glaciers in southern Ohio, and the Great Lakes did not exist. Three million years ago there was no Antarctic Ice cap. Rock strata chemistry indicates there was 10 times as much CO2 in the air as now. The claim that we are affecting the world by fluctuations of the level of a trace gas is laughable, except when politicians use it to deceive and subjugate.