This is the second of my two-part conversation with historian, novelist and essayist Ronald Wright, the award-winning author of nine books, including the influential, A Short History of Progress.

In Part 1 we talked about why Wright sees North Americans as the greatest “villains” when it comes to climate change and why society has fallen into what he calls, “The Progress Trap.”

In Part 2, we discuss why the solution to problems caused by technology isn’t more technology, and the false argument that the environment and the economy are in conflict. 

Jim Hoggan: You talk about society’s attempt to fix problems with more technology and why that’s not the answer to the big environmental challenges we face today. Can you explain your argument?

Ronald Wright: A lot of people want to believe that to solve the issue of climate change we just need to keep on inventing, to keep on letting progress rip, and that the solution will be found with perhaps a new source of power, such as fusion energy, or a new way of manufacturing or new ways to produce food, such as genetic modifications. A lot of people want to believe that the solution for the problems caused by technology is more technology.

While some technological advances offer partial solutions, such as greater efficiency, many of the new, untried technologies can be dangerous because we don’t understand the potential consequences. For example, we can’t foresee what might happen if genetically modified organisms get out and wipe out the natural diversity on which we truly depend for all of our food and medicine. Or, what if Nano technology was to get out of hand and we have self-replicating Nano machines?

It’s a sort of science fiction nightmare, but it’s not all that far-fetched if we don’t exercise a precautionary principal. Even though, in theory, we may be able to keep expanding our technologies, even if they are safe – which is a big if – we certainly cannot continue the way we have been. We are on one earth, which is only so big, and can only produce so much of the basic necessities of life. By this of course I don’t mean iPhones, but the necessities of life that we take for granted, namely clean air, land and water.

JW: Do you think it’s misinformation or a resistance to change that prevents society from not repeating its past mistakes?

RW: I think we are seeing both of those things at play in our own society. We are seeing great reluctance to face up to the fact that the party is over. Also, we are seeing cynical manipulation on the part of people who are absurdly wealthy to share any of their wealth. For example, just look at the changes in tax structure over the past 30 years, and the income spread in income between a CEO of a major American corporation and a shop floor worker.

If you look at any economic indicator you will see a vastly expanded gap between rich and poor both within countries and between countries. All of this has happened very recently. We see fabulous amounts of wealth in a few hands and almost a third of the human race living in dire poverty.

I think that is the greatest tragedy that the lesson of the 20th century. When I was a kid growing up in England you never saw beggars on the street. Of course, now you go to London you see beggars on the streets everywhere, and this is happening at a time when we have more wealth per head than ever in the history of the world. There really is no excuse for these huge disparities between obscene wealth and desperate poverty.

If we stopped the higher levels of consumption from getting out of control, there is enough for everybody to squeak through in a sort of modest prosperity, modest decency of life. The problems are political. They are problems of distribution.

JH: Do you have any particular thoughts on the way the environment is discussed today in Canada?

RW: I think the most troubling thing is the way in which our present Canadian government positions it: That we have to balance the environment with the economy. It’s as if the economy is a good thing on one side and the environment is something on the other that, if we deal with it, will drag down the economy. Of course that is absolute nonsense.

One of the absolutely clear lessons of history and archeology is that a healthy economy depends on a healthy environment. There is no economy without a sound environment beneath it, sustaining it.

The problem is that with our rapid technological advance, we have found ways to get more and more out of the environment and make it seem as though human prosperity is detached from natural systems. Of course, the reverse is true. What we’ve been doing by these very sophisticated means of extracting things is actually taking out stuff that can never be replaced.

Here’s one very simple example: a lot of the irrigation in North America, particularly in the United States, depends on the use of fossil water with these great underground aquifers. These aquifers are not water that is being replenished to any large extent. It’s called fossil water because it’s been there underground for a very long time. The levels of these aquifers are falling at an alarming rate. I think most predictions now suggest that there’s really only another 30 years of water left in much of the American west. Once it’s gone it’s gone. That’s the end of it.

That is an example of how technology appears to create prosperity because you pump up this water and suddenly you can produce more food or golf courses or whatever you happen to be using it for. But, in actual fact, all you are doing is plundering nature. I think that’s where we have to make the distinction: There is nothing wrong with exploiting nature through technology. That’s something human beings have always done.

My point is that it needs to be done in a way that doesn’t start eating into the capital of nature. We can live on the interest of nature, like we do from a bank.

JH: Do you have any thoughts on how we move from the thinking of the plunderer to a new thinking of where you draw the line?

RW: I think that it is very difficult and it’s part of our animal human nature to sort of gobble up everything in front of us, rather than leave it for a rainy day. The tar sands are a very valuable and useful resource, but it makes no sense to gobble them up quickly with all the consequences of pollution and the problems of supply and demand and the huge economic and political distortions they’ve introduced in this country. It should be done slowly and wisely.

What’s more, the corporations who are making all these vast amounts of money from the tar sands should be taxed should have to pay royalties. Right now, the royalty rates are laughably low. We are descending into the condition of a petro state – our political system is bought and paid for by big oil and the companies essentially have a license to plunder and only paying token amounts to the public purse that’s not acceptable.

One thing that can be done is introducing full-cost accounting in any measurement of economic progress. That means you have to include all benefits arising from natural systems.

JH: Are you at all hopeful that we can extract ourselves from these progress traps?

RW: The degree of hope I have goes up and down from day to day. I think our situation is very serious, but I don’t think it’s hopeless. Even if we do think it’s hopeless some of the time, we still have to act on the assumption that it isn’t too late. If we give up, we’ve lost the plot. If we stop trying to deal with our problems, the problems have won. When that happens, we’re done for.  

JH: What is your message about the environment?

RW: My message is: Look at the past, at these wrecked societies. The more we understand from archeological research, the clearer it becomes that almost all of these wrecked societies fell because of over expanding and over exploiting their environment. So, we’ve got this information about what human beings tend to do, they create messes that either get out of hand or because of belief systems they will not deal with.

Let’s look at that past and learn from it.

Read Part 1 of this interview, Locked in the Progress Trap: Interview with Ronald Wright.

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Ronald Wright, the award-winning author of A Short History of Progress, says North Americans are the greatest “villains” when it comes to climate change. While Europe has put forward some serious money and strategies to try to combat it, Canada and the U.S. are dragging their heels.

Wright’s comments are particularly noteworthy after Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver’s recent visit to Europe, where he tried to sell Canada’s approach to oil sands to a skeptical audience. Europe is considering imposing a tax on Canadian bitumen because of its emissions.

I sat down with Wright on Salt Spring Island, B.C. to talk about why society can’t seem to change its way of thinking. He blames what he calls, “The Progress Trap.”

This is the first of two parts of my conversation with Wright. Read Part 2 here. 

Jim Hoggan: Why, despite mounting evidence and calls for urgent action from experts in the atmospheric, marine and life sciences, are we doing so little to address environmental problems like climate change, the declining health of our oceans and mass species extinctions?

Ronald Wright: I think we in North America are among the greatest villains in coming to grips with these issues. The Europeans have put forward some very serious money and serious proposals. They are working towards a 20 per cent reduction in carbon emissions by 2020 (from the original benchmark back in the 1990s) and propose spending $90 billion euros a year – the kind of money the Iraq war cost the USA each year.

They have also said that if other countries get on board they will go to a 30-per-cent cut and even more funding. This hasn’t happened because of a lack of will from other countries, including Canada and the U.S. There’s a denial amongst many of our leaders, an absolute inability to face up to the fact that there are limits to the human impact. It goes against the cultural grain of North Americans who are used to the idea that the future is always going to be bigger and better and wealthier, and that they are going to have more stuff than in the past. Those days are over.

JH: Why do we resist change like this?

RW: There are two things: First, there’s a cynical propaganda campaign extremely well funded by the people who have a vested interest in hydrocarbons. Second, there is a very willing audience among people who don’t care, don’t know the facts, or can’t be bothered to look at them. People want to believe that they can just go on expecting the high consumption North American lifestyle forever, because that’s kind of American – and Canadian – dream they were promised.

Of course there are those who realize there is a problem, but enough people have been stampeded by the propaganda that climate change is a “hoax,” or a socialist conspiracy to constrain the high consumption lifestyle of North Americans, or a problem that’s so far down the road we needn’t worry about it.

JH: Winston Churchill said, “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Is that what we’re facing here? Are we not paying attention to the lessons of history when it comes to the impact of overstressing the planet?

RW: In A Short History of Progress I looked at the pattern of civilizations’ rise and fall throughout history. Many civilizations who thrived and achieved brilliant things, such as the Sumerians or the Maya, eventually fell victim to their own success. This is what I call a “Progress Trap,” which happens when technological innovations create conditions or problems that society is unable to foresee – or unwilling to solve.

An example is irrigation systems. This was a terrific idea for the Sumerians, allowing them to grow food in the desert. However, as time went on, irrigation led to a build up of salt in the land. Eventually, over a few centuries, the Sumerian fields began to turn white from salt. After about a thousand years, their crop yields fell to only a quarter of what was possible in the fields they started with. Large parts of southern Iraq had to be abandoned, and still haven’t recovered.

That is one example, but I think we can be sympathetic in the Sumerians’ case because they couldn’t have foreseen the consequences before it was too late. But in our case, we do know what’s going to happen to the planet as the climate warms and destabilizes. We have an overwhelming consensus of scientific opinion and computer modeling that shows it. We don’t have the excuse of ignorance or lack of technology.

Where I see the similarity today with these ancient civilizations is in the behaviour and denial of the elites – the political leaders – people who should be the decision-makers just hoping the problem will go away.

The ancients tended to respond by saying “the gods are angry so we need to build bigger temples.” In other words, magical thinking. Our version of this is the widespread belief that the problems caused by rampant growth and technology will be solved by more of the same.

JH: How do people respond to A Short History of Progress – this idea of too much progress? Is it a difficult concept for people to accept?

RW: It is. The success of Western society has been based upon developing new inventions quickly, harnessing them and producing wealth. Yet, we ignore the fact that not all progress is good. In fact, some kinds of progress are very dangerous. Nuclear and germ weapons, for example. Or efforts to make patented GM crops with a “terminator” gene – an invention that could wreck the food chain.

Even if things merely keep going as they are a few more decades, there’s no way that nine billion people, which is the latest population projection by mid-century, are going to be able to live like Canadians or Europeans do now – simply because the by-products of our industrial activities are overwhelming natural systems. We are trashing the planet, stealing from our children’s future. The idea that growth is infinite is the Big Lie of our times. Yet we still believe it because we find it extremely hard to shed the idea that progress is an inherent good.

I saw my role, when I wrote A Short History of Progress, as being the person who says, “The building is on fire.” I don’t necessarily know how to put the fire out, I’m not a fireman, but I smell fire. That book was really a way of saying, “Look, this is the pattern of the rise and fall of civilizations through history; if they don’t deal with their problems, if they over expand, if they wear out their welcome from nature, they end badly.”

We’re now in this situation where we are running beyond the capacity of nature to sustain us, and, for the first time in history, we’re doing it everywhere at once. Not only are we drawing down resources, but we’re damaging natural systems and polluting every corner of the world. Too many of us are taking too much. But I don’t believe our problems are hopeless, yet. It’s very late but not too late. We still have one last chance to get the future right.

**In Part 2 of the conversation, Wright talks about the false argument that people can only support the environment or the economy, and not both. He also explains why he hasn’t given up hope that society can change to stop runaway climate change.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

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This interview is a part of the DeSmog Dialogues. Be sure to read Part 1 of this conversation: Canada's Radical Prime Minister Harper.

“I don’t think we’re in 1984, but I certainly do see a lot of the very, very same signs that create fertile ground for despotism.”

These are the chilling words of pollster and political sage Allan Gregg, who was speaking to me recently about what he called the “nefarious” state of affairs in Canada when the government is “vilifying” environmentalists and anyone else who might oppose the direction they are heading in.

He said it’s evident in other areas too, such as cutting the long form census. No one ever lodged a privacy complaint about it, he said, “but they don’t want the long form census because it is what informs progressive, rational decision makers about the policy direction they want to go in. They don’t need data to get in the way, or more importantly, to contradict where they want to go. Vilifying critics is part of that tactic of getting the ship on the course they believe the nation needs and wants.”

When I asked if he worries that we are heading towards the kind of gridlock that we have been seeing in American political discourse, Gregg said he is.

“Although in America, when you have gridlock, nothing happens because the checks and balances are so structurally pronounced in that country. In this country, when you have gridlock, you basically have the potential for tyranny because so much of the power is vested in the centre. In our system the Prime Minister — especially one with this Prime Minister's abilities and a majority government — can to do pretty much anything he wants. I do worry about that.”[view:in_this_series=block_1]

He pointed out the Harper government employs the kind of doublespeak and newspeak that Orwell wrote about in his satirical novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Gregg calls this willful dissemination of misinformation — “War is Peace … Freedom is Slavery” — a highly misleading tactic.

It was used symbolically in Nineteen Eighty-Four, but today is being used very practically, not only by this government but others around the world.

A few examples of this style of Orwellian misdirection are seen in recent Canadian legislation including Bill C-18, the Marketing Freedom for Grain Farmers Act, which dismantled the Canadian Wheat Board; Bill C-5, called the Continuing Air Service for Passengers Act which unilaterally extended the contract of the National Automobile, Aerospace, Transport and General Workers Union of Canada removing any prospect of a lockout or strike; and Bill C-10, entitled an Act to Enact the Justice for Victims of Terrorism (sub-titled The Safe Streets and Communities Act) which stiffens penalties for possession of pot and builds more prisons.

Why would governments want to disguise the substance of such Bills? Because they know at the end of the day reason will always trump ideology. “It will always win if applied and if used. So, they employ this misdirection or obfuscation in order to ensure that reasonable, rational, thinking people won't look more closely at what is being done.” By shrouding the truth, legislators are admitting that their intentions likely lack both support and respect.

“If you see a bill to keep communities safe, who's going to argue against that?” asked Gregg.

He adds, the fact that government is building more prisons when all criminologists tell us crime is going down and that incarceration is not the most effective way of having safe communities — doesn't matter. What they're doing is appealing to a sentiment that doesn't require reason and that ends up polarizing people. It avoids reason because reason runs contrary to the emotional base and what replaces it is the allure of the simplistic, unreasoned solution.

I told Gregg, when I see the Harper Conservatives’ attacks on environmentalists, it defies normal communications thinking. Why would they put themselves in that situation where it could backfire? The fact is, they're actually not thinking normally, because what they are basically trying to do is polarize people. They don't care if you trust them, they just don't want you to trust anybody else.

Gregg agreed and said another development that allows this to happen “uniquely in this particular point in time” is what’s called the Zero Sum Society — a term that refers to a game or economic theory where advancement, or upward progress, always comes at the expense of others who must move down.

In short: One man’s gain is another man’s loss.

Gregg explained, for as long as we can remember in modern times, the predominant ethos was that progress was normal, everything was going to be better. My next house would be bigger, my next paycheck would be fatter, and my next car would be faster. And as long as everyone believed that, and they did, whatever success one person had wouldn't take away from anyone else’s, because opportunity was limitless.

Now the tables have turned. People now believe that opportunity is finite, and that whatever you gain means there will be less available for me. So people are at loggerheads, we have a growing situation of polarization, conflict and dispute.

“What’s more, if I vilify you as a bad person who is not to be believed, then my friend over here becomes even more attached to me as a consequence of the attack on you,” said Gregg.

It’s what I have recently started calling the “Why bother?” syndrome and it’s something that came to light in our sustainability research initiative, which observed a growing hopelessness regarding environment challenges like climate change: “I can't make a difference, the system is rigged, everyone is so argumentative. Why would I engage in this?"

Gregg, who is an expert in Canadian public opinion, a progressive conservative pollster and founder of Decima Research, agreed saying this despondency applies particularly to the environment. If you probe public opinion you find Canadians are very sensitive to the environment and find it insulting that Canada is viewed as a laggard internationally. They throw up their hands and do nothing because they feel so diminished, that the problems are so insurmountable, and that people who should provide solutions are unreliable.

It’s not about apathy; it’s about impotence and inefficacy.

He noted many environmental leaders are partly responsible for this attitude because they make the consequences of doing nothing appear so dire and apocalyptic that it literally exhausts people who might otherwise be their friends and supporters.

Gregg was quick to add we needn’t despair. Ask a Canadian their political outlook and, two to one, they will say they are progressive rather than conservative. Canadians are by nature reasonable people who seek compromise. That's been our history.

And we now have a distribution system in social media that is nothing short of remarkable. He said it’s incumbent upon those who care about the public square, who care about public policy, who care about making better public policy using science and reason, to learn how to use these tools more effectively. It’s the same way our generation had to learn how to use television as an advertising tool to persuade consumers. We now have far more effective, far more targeted distribution systems, and we should look at them as a gift.

Image Credit: 1984 Anniversary Edition, Penguin Books.

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Pollster, political advisor and pundit provocateur Allan Gregg believes Canadians have yet to grasp just how radical Harper and his Conservatives really are. In a recent interview he told me the Prime Minister should be thought of as a “revolutionary realist.”

Radicalism might not be the first thing we associate with the Harper government, especially when the administration has been known to throw around the label ‘radical’ like a scarlet letter, using the term to blacklist environmental groups and First Nations across the country.

Yet, despite how jarring the description, Gregg says Harper Conservatives are “radical to the extent that [they] aren’t incrementalists.”

“Harper is a realist and knows he can't get to where he wants to go in one fell swoop, and so he’ll try to get there by tacking,” said Gregg.

This is Conservatism of a whole new kind, Gregg adds, and Canadians don’t really seem to know what they’re dealing with.

The Elites

Harper, says Gregg, “has a clear agenda” and at its core is a strong “anti-elite bias. “He and many other Conservatives believe that public discourse in this country has been dominated by elites: largely urban, small “L” liberal elites. University professors, symphony conductors, environmentalists and even bank presidents fall into this group. [The Harper Conservatives] believe this group does not reflect the views of the people, their constituency, that they want to represent.”[view:in_this_series=block_1]

The ‘people’ of Harper are the average Canadians taking their kids to hockey on a Saturday morning, says Gregg, They shop at Canadian Tire and drink Tim Horton’s coffee.

Harper’s efforts to find strong support with his constituency have a worrisome downside for those who don’t fall into that target audience, according to Gregg.  As a consequence of Harper’s fidelity to his chosen people, his government “mean[s] to basically silence those traditional elites.”

The Worldview

What is difficult, when dealing with this particular brand of conservatives, is trying to understand their motivation.

“A lot of their actions,” Gregg says, “seem incomprehensible against a template or a yardstick that we’d normally use to judge our government.”

Gregg uses the Harper government’s recent cuts to science positions to illustrate his point:

“Why would they make such massive cuts to Parks Canada? And then within Parks Canada, why would 70 percent of all employees cut be … social scientists, and natural scientists?

To the average bystander, Harper’s dramatic cuts to science positions and programs look like overreach.

And yet, says Gregg, to understand it you’ve got to get into Harper’s worldview. For Harper and his constituency parks are meant for human recreation, for camping and hunting. To the “natural scientists and those traditional elites,” however “parks are part of our natural ecosystem that is connected to everything, that is part of the planet, and that we must do everything in order to preserve.”

In this sense, scientists and elites represent an obstacle to the average person’s ability to enjoy parks. “You have to get rid of the scientists who might otherwise stand in their way and say this kind of camping, this kind of hunting is bad.”

But for Gregg, dismissing the Conservatives as “ crazy, right wing ideologues” is a mistake.

“They are very, very revolutionary. They are radicals … but their agenda is actually rooted in thinking that makes sense – at least to them – and if you don't understand that as a starting point, it's very, very hard to deal with them,” he noted.

The Attack



When I interviewed Gregg I explained one of the things that really surprised me was that this government seems to be attacking environmental and First Nations groups in the very areas that they are vulnerable.

We hear the Prime Minister, the Minister of Natural Resources, senators and representatives of industry talking about “foreign funded radicals” who oppose the Northern Gateway Pipeline, yet many of the companies involved in the pipeline are foreign owned.

Another example is the government’s praise of Canada’s “ethical oil,” when Chinese oil companies – that have some of the worst human rights records on the planet — are part of Canada’s oil production and export.

As someone with years of public relations experience, it seems very strange for one party to attack in an area were they are vulnerable. Is the government simply not aware of how this might backfire on them? 


According to Gregg, who is an expert in public opinion and the founder of Decima Research, the Harper government is not concerned with these kinds of inconsistencies and how they might play out publicly.

“Quite frankly, these guys do not care what the media says because they start from the impression that the media are part of those elites. So, they don't care if that very fact is thrown back against them.”

They believe that “Political discourse in this country, public policy discourse in this country, is at such a low level that they can get away with [it].”

“First of all, says Gregg, “they want to go over the heads of the elites.” Secondly, “they believe the average person isn't tuned-in anyway, doesn't care, and isn't going to react in any kind of negative way.”

The Cynicism


Harper’s attitude towards environmentalists and First Nations is akin to his apparent disdain for Parliament.

Just consider Harper’s willingness to prorogue Parliament when under pressure, Gregg says.

“That's something that Robert Mugabe does, Gregg laughs, “not something that Canadian Prime Ministers have done. We prorogue Parliament as an administrative procedure, not as a means of avoiding getting defeated in the House of Commons.”

Gregg sees Harper’s behavior in Parliament as part of this government’s pattern of “assumption that the Canadian population is unthinking and ignorant.”

He added this “the friend of tyranny is ignorance, and the enemy of tyranny is reason and thinking” and said the government is working on the assumption that the Canadian population is unthinking and ignorant, and that gives them full license. “

I suggested that the public has come to expect this kind of behavior from politicians, so they let it pass.

He agreed, saying, “The byproduct of partisanship and attack ads and everything else is that you have this cascading kind of cynicism among the population. If you believe that all politicians are crooks, what difference does it make if you find one stealing?”

And so, he concluded, when it comes to public cynicism there are two things working in tandem. On the one hand we have “a political class” – the Conservatives – “that is systematically destroying” the character of politics. On the other we have “a general electorate that is so cynical that they aren’t holding [the government] to account.”

The Divide

Though the Harper government is losing face with a portion of the population, this matters little their constituency, which still, by and large, supports the Prime Minister.

“These guys don't care about that. They are quite happy to be in the minority of public opinion. As long as they've got 35%, they can split the other 65% between more than two alternatives. That leaves them in a position of plurality support.”

That’s another thing that makes this government unique. Most political parties seek popularity, to gain more supporters. Not the Harper government, says Gregg. 
 The Harper government – knowing conservative votes will not come from the elites, is “not afraid of alienating people who they believe that, left to their own instincts, aren’t their supporters anyway,” Gregg says.

The result is an increasingly divided population: “I don’t know what you’d call it – culture wars? But it really is a much more polarized electorate than we have ever seen in the past.”


Gregg doesn’t think this necessarily has to be a permanent condition. Solutions are possible, he says, but they might not be simple. The answer lies in the middle ground, and the way you find that is by using science, facts and reason.

“That has been the cornerstone of progress” and “reason, at the end of the day, reason will march us forward.”

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What is ethical public relations? Where do you draw the line and what should your boundaries be when influencing public perceptions and opinions? As president of a Canadian public relations firm my colleagues and I face this question all the time. Some days the answer is more obvious than others, so I asked Rutgers University philosopher Jason Stanley how to maintain a principled position.

It’s a question that floats to the surface like a greasy slick these days because during the last 12 to 18 months, Canadians have been subjected to one of the most expensive and extensive PR campaigns in history, in an attempt to nudge public attention away from the environmental impacts of tankers, pipelines and oil sands mining, and redirect it towards economic benefits.

Whether it has been Enbridge ads regarding the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline — “A path to prosperity … a path to thriving communities” — or Canada’s own federal government talking about creating “more than a million jobs from coast to coast to coast,” the tactic has been relentless.

Harper’s federal government spent more than $55 million on advertising last year and conducted hundreds of polls, to not just reflect public opinion but also shape it. The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) featured greenwashing, pro oil-sands ads that showed scientists and workers standing in pristine wilderness expounding their concern for the environment.

I asked Stanley what the communication ground rules are: Should the touchstone be whether you are increasing people’s understanding, or decreasing it? Or is that too naïve a distinction?

That’s an excellent distinction, he told me, except it’s unworkable. That's an intuitive guideline that people use, but facts are difficult things to nail down. It isn't that someone wants to make obviously false statements but people are constantly negotiating with the “boundary" of truth.[view:in_this_series=block_1]

Stanley, who specializes in the philosophy of language and epistemology, believes such boundaries are disappearing because scientific objectivity is either being eroded, or left completely out of conversations in the public square.

People today express opinions, not facts.

“Everyone is under the grip of an ideology, so what we’re doing is comparing ideological frameworks now.” He adds the right-wing media adds to the turmoil by saying whenever anyone asserts something you cannot believe them because they’re just trying to manipulate you for their own interests.

“Fox News is saying you can’t believe anything you hear because everyone is just trying to get you to accept their own ideology.”

For instance, the National Academy of Science and the Royal Society, which comprise many of the world’s most distinguished scientists, agree climate change is a serious problem. The American Petroleum Institute and the Fraser Institute, however, are two non-scientific organizations that do not.

How do you participate in debates about climate change and science when you’re not a scientist? How does the public benefit from this lop-sided debate, or draw any usable and meaningful conclusions?

The issues started to come into focus for me when I was doing a book tour soon after writing Climate Cover-Up in 2009. I was invited to speak at Yale Universities’ debate society, the Yale Political Union. After a nearly three-hour debate I decided to leave students with this thought:

When I was in first year law school a lot of us asked how you justify defending a rapist or serial killer. We were told the legal system was set up to be adversarial. It is based on the prosecution arguing a case, the defence arguing a case, and then a judge or jury deciding.

Everybody has a job and everyone puts faith in the process. When I got involved in the PR business I heard a similar argument about getting a client’s information into the court of public opinion. It wasn’t up to the PR firm to pass judgment.

But I see two big flaws in that thinking. First, there are no rules of evidence in the court of public opinion. When you talk about climate change especially, the public can be misled because there are no charges for perjury, no one is held accountable for tampering with evidence. And second, there is little distinction between an expert witness and a charlatan.

So how does the public judge?

Stanley says it makes sense that a scientific debate should take place in a “scientific way” through journals and conferences. When the public is involved, we can choose to believe and listen to those who are reliable, and tune out those who are not.

We may not all be experts in climate change but we can educate ourselves to understand what they're talking about to a certain degree. To continually listen to a debate among scientific illiterates adds little to the public discourse. 


When trying to judge where the truth lies, he warns there are two important tactics to be aware of:  One is the undermining of sincerity by special interest groups who know how to exploit a strategy that throws into question the credibility of public figures, and the second is to suggest that no one has special access to the facts about any domain.

People who claim the mantle of science are trying to say: “We’re the experts, you have to believe us because we are scientists.” In certain respects this latter point is right, says Stanley. But “We don't want Milton Friedman telling us economics is a science, and he's an expert, and we're not and we have to listen to him because there's competing models.”

There's a significant difference between economics and climate science. For one thing, economics is more akin to history and is an interpretive discipline rather than a predictive one. But the critical gulf between the two is: In economics there are many different views among experts whereas in climate science there are not.

When there are “wildly” different views, he says it’s inappropriate to feature only one expert’s view and hold them up as the single person to believe, “and let them boss you around.”

That's a clearly illegitimate use of a scientific expert. There are areas of science where there is genuine controversy, and where experts disagree. When such scientific disputes are present, then no expert should be allowed to claim their view is unchallenged.


But when it comes to climate science, this is clearly not the case.

There is overwhelming agreement and that’s what must be conveyed to the public.

Among climate scientists, the debate was settled years ago after an overwhelming consensus emerged in the literature. A review of the published research by James Lawrence Powell found that out of 13,950 peer-reviewed articles, published between 1991 and 2012, only 24 reject human-caused global warming. 

So, in fact, all that remains is a political debate about what to do to address it. Of course, scientists remain involved in the discussion, so they remain targets for attack and obfuscation.

What's happening in the climate debate is similar to what's happening in the case of evolution with the Discovery Institute, an American public policy think tank. “You have a whole industry of fake science being created, to create the illusion of controversy,” Stanley told me.

He said this is exacerbated when PR firms and news media create a “din” — where the facts are unclear, there is no uniformity to facts, no one is believable and everyone has a different agenda. That’s when people stop listening.

The engine driving this din is the turbine of powerful moneyed interests, whether oil and coal companies, or the people whose livelihoods depend on those industries, whether or not the industries are good for their country, their community, or for their children and grandchildren. 

The prison industrial complex is a staggering example of this. Massively important in the United States and becoming more so in Canada, Stanley explains the system does not make sense since imprisoning huge portions of a population is not an economically sound way to run a country.

“We in the U.S. imprison 25% of the world's prisoners, and have by far the largest prison population in the world … We shouldn't have a prison industry, but there are so many prison guards and so many lawyers, so many people whose livelihood depends on a steady influx. That's their job.” 

Such policies are promoted because of financial self-interest.

People are employed in industries that are clearly bad for the country and the world, yet people align their views with whatever is going to keep their paychecks coming every month.

We live in a complicated world with confusing debates and motivations churning on all sides.

We started DeSmog Canada because we wanted to clean up the PR pollution that swirls around issues of the environment, social justice and the economy. My interview with Stanley helped me understand how we accomplish that, by not only telling the truth and increasing people’s understanding, but also by encouraging people to look at issues in a different way and rely on trustworthy experts.

Without being an expert it’s very challenging to get to the bottom of things, but we have an obligation to try. There is no way we can all become authorities on climate science —— I don’t personally know anyone who’s taken an ice core sample from Greenland lately —— but part of being a good citizen is informing ourselves, figuring out who to trust, seeking those with proper credentials and keeping the discussion healthy.

We need to ask the right questions, and encourage the media to do the same, so we can detect the difference between fake and real debate.

Post image from Enbridge's Northern Gateway "Safety & Environment" web page.

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