Subject: Viridian Note 00126: The GCC Crumbles

Key concepts: Global Climate Coalition, Viridian class
enemies, laughing cruelly at the discomfiture of our opponents

Attention Conservation Notice: contains violent partisan attacks

Entries in the "Dead Mike" Design contest: http://www.earthlight.co.nz/~bretts/dm.html

This contest expires February 15, 02000.

A new Viridian Individual Project: From: rpuchalsky@worldnet.att.net^^^^^^^^^^^^****** (Richard Puchalsky)
http://198.5.6.200/net_calculator/ Richard Puchalsky remarks: "I previously sent in the URL for my calculator that figures out the CO2 generated from a person's residential electricity. It became a Yahoo Site of the Day, even though I never told anyone about it except the Viridian list. Now I've written a new calculator to estimate CO2 emissions from cars. It also shows you how much money you'd save and how much less CO2 you'd release if you switched to a car with better gas mileage."

Links:
http://www.pewclimate.org/
http://www.globalclimate.org/

The Global Climate Coalition is in trouble. They've
recently suffered a spate of prominent defections, among them Ford, General Motors, BP-Amoco, Shell and Dow Chemical. Not because the GCC lacks effectiveness, mind you. Mostly it's because, after 11 years, the GCC stinks so badly that it has become a public-relations burden.

The GCC's new rival is the Pew Center on Global
Climate Change, which looks and acts very much like the GCC, but isn't soiled with a legacy of logjamming, defamation and dirty tricks.

I'd predict that this GCC facade will shut down
soon. A sanitizing name-change will take place. The individuals behind the GCC will resume their lobbying labors under another guise.

One may note that the GCC website, while still up to
date, is looking rather stodgy and listless these days.

One of the most remarkable things about the GCC's
website is how amazingly thin and perfunctory their scientific evidence is. You'd think that after 11 years, they could have piled up vast formidable archives of Greenhouse-denial folderol, or at least settled on some coherent intellectual stance on the issue. But no:

Link: http://www.globalclimate.org/ScienceSub1.htm

There is no global warming; there is global warming,
but it's all-natural; there's no such thing as a stable climate to begin with; weather troubles are all media hype; there's nothing new about weird weather; it's very much hotter, but that's just a passing phase.

In other words, they're all over the map. That's because the GCC are spin-doctors rather than policy wonks. Their long-established habit is to reflexively spew soot at anything that looks like greenhouse enlightenment. Being lazy, they don't engage in the mental gymnastics that Greenhouse pseudo-science requires. They've shrugged off those labors onto their fellow-travellers in Greening Earth Society, the Marshall Institute, and Fred Singer's wacky SEPP, an organization so tiny and off-the- wall that it's basically the same size and shape as the Viridian Movement.

So the GCC's glory days are fading. They were
criminally wrong to begin with, and it's now become a case of ducking the consequences. Ford's gone already, and the Ford defection was clearly unnerving. DaimlerChrysler was the most recent to jump ship, as seen in a recent Vancouver Sun article.

"'We are now at a stage in the climate change debate
where we prefer to either speak for ourselves on this issue or pursue a dialogue on the subject through broader- based business organizations,' Jim Holden, president of DaimlerChrysler AG's Chrysler division, said in a letter to the coalition." (...)

"'With new scientific evidence of global warming
emerging daily, it excellent news that the Global Climate Coalition is losing its most prominent members,' said Dan Becker of the Sierra Club."

Neither Ford nor DaimlerChrysler are pro-Kyoto
Accords. They're simply anti-GCC. They're warily distancing themselves from the hell to come. However, the GCC still has plenty of corporate and business-NGO muscle behind it. The most recent GCC roll-call I can find looks like this:

The Air Transport Association Allegheny Power
The Aluminum Association, Inc. The American Automobile Manufacturers Assn. American Commercial Barge Line Co. The American Forest & Paper Association The American Iron & Steel Institute The American Petroleum Institute The American Portland Cement Alliance The Association of American Railroads The Association of International Automobile
Manufacturers
Atlantic Richfield Coal Company Baker Refineries
Bethlehem Steel
BHP Minerals
Chemical Manufacturers Association Chevron
Cinergy
CONRAIL
Consumers Energy
Council of Industrial Boiler Owners CSX Transportation, Inc. Cyprus-Amax
Drummond Company
Duke Power Company Eastman Chemical
Edison Electric Institute ELCON
ExxonMobil
Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. Greencool
Hoechst Celanese Chemical Group Illinois Power Company Kaiser Aluminum and Chemical Corp. McDonnell-Douglas
National Association of Manufacturers National Lime Association National Mining Association Natural Rural Electric Cooperative Association Norfolk Southern
Northern Indiana Public Serv. Co. Ohio Edison
Parker Drilling Company Process Gas Consumers Society of the Plastic Industry Southern Company
TECO Energy Inc.
Texaco, Inc.
U.S. Chamber of Commerce USX Corporation
Union Carbide
Union Pacific
Virginia Power
Western Fuels Assn.

This is not to say that all these companies and
organizations really care about their Beltway lackeys in the GCC. Most of them signed up many years ago, and probably can't be bothered to do much now but sign the checks. The operational slack is therefore taken up by committed zealouts like the American Petroleum Institute and, especially, the Western Fuels Association, the crazily radical patrons of the Greening Earth Society.

What does this mean for the world? Well, if you're
in Paris right now, wondering who should hang from a lamppost because you're lost a quarter of your city's lovely trees == well, look up there at that phalanx of fatcats. See them? See how many there are, and how large they are, and how rich, and how entirely American? They are the biggest smut-spewing industries in the biggest smut-spewing country on Earth. J'accuse!

It's rather unconscionable, but if you hadn't lost
your trees and roofs in the City of Light, they would have lost their livelihoods.

The GCC's arguments seem ditzy and perfunctory for a
simple reason. The GCC doesn't require good arguments. Open scientific debate was never their objective. Even the GCC itself turned out to be a mere smokescreen. When push came to shove, the carbon industries defeated the Kyoto Accords by simply buying the United States Senate wholesale.

With this operational chock firmly in place, the
GCC are free to fill the airwaves with transparent absurdity. Let them defame scientists, spread disinformation, spew alarmism about the purported fate of the children and elderly; the GCC came into existence in order to stop Kyoto, and there, the news is very good. No amount of public rage is going to rip the Kyoto logjam loose in the US Senate. The US Senate enjoys its power to indefinitely stymie international accords. It's absurd for the Senate to bow to the pipsqueaks of Kyoto when they play dice with nuclear arms accords. US Senators are being highly-paid by the carbon industries to preserve the Senate's own imperial power over the fate of the globe. It's bliss for all concerned.

There is, however, one problem with this lovely
political hack-job. The problem is time. Roasting the buying population wholesale is not very consumer-friendly. Coal-stained troglodytes like Cyprus-Amax and the Western Fuels Association wouldn't know a consumer if they saw one. But Ford and Daimler do need to be more fastidious. So they've tiptoed away.

Eventually, everyone in that long list of GCC
sponsors will discover that their own homes, their own cities, their own children have begun to suffer in the Greenhouse heat. My prediction then: frantic lobbying for a carbon amnesty, carried out by the same malefactors, under a different name.

O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O WE'RE ALSO A GLOBAL CLIMATE COALITION O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O