Let me start off by saying that I have nothing against WORMs (White, Old, Rich Men) per se. I myself am fairly pale, I hope to grow old one day, I have no objection to becoming wealthy, and I am male, so I could be in this category one day.
I am also writing this from an Australian point of view in 2011. In other countries where the majority is non-white (or perhaps Australia in the next few decades), then the class of status quo supporters who've got the game sewn up, so to speak, will likely not be white. They will, however, likely be Old, Rich and Male, so more generically it would just be ORMs, but I like the above acronym better.
In another post I spoke of politicians all singing from the same song sheet on another topic. Today I would like to relate a few instances of business people pushing the same line so identically that you would have to assume it has been fed to them. I'm not talking about a conspiracy theory here, just that perhaps some business representative groups have made press releases with a bunch of incorrect facts on them. However, a quick glance at the Business Council of Australia shows that they're not pushing a climate change denialist line, even if they are, as you would expecting, protecting their own interests.
So why have I seen or heard stories lately of these "Captains of Industry" quoting lines that sound, essentially, as though they come straight from the Gallileo Movement's website, or straight from the parrot's mouth himself (Alan Jones). Some months ago I heard the CEO of some Australian country respond to a question about how his business would handle a carbon tax by spouting off the usual nonsense about what percentage of global emissions humans represent, and then what percentage of the human contribution is down to Australia. I mean, this is basic, basic stuff that has been gone over and over, and the counter-responses to this are easily available from a variety of sources. Just for the sake of completeness, I will repeat them here.
Firstly, the whole world system emits and absorbs carbon, but humans have increased the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. What we are concerned with is net emissions, because these contribute to the growth in atmospheric CO2 concentration. In fact, the oceans have absorbed half of all the CO2 we've emitted since the beginning of the industrial age. The significant contributors to net emissions are humans and volcanos, and volcanoes emit about 1% as much as we do. Basically, the increase in CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is all down to us.
The second part of the argument, that Australia represents only a tiny percentage of the world's CO2 emissions - usually quoted as 1% - listed as 1.32% on the wiki page on the subject. Take a look at that list. The most emissions from a sovereign nation come from China - 23.33% of global emissions. Think about that - China, which is a massive exporter, and has over 1.3 BILLION people, emits 23.33%. We emit roughly 5% of that, but we are only 23 million people - ie., we are roughly 1.7% of their population. Any argument about our contribution being too small is a furphy. We are amongst the world's worst per capita emitters, and when it comes to solving a global problem caused by the emissions that each little human being makes being added together, the worst individual emitters shoulder the greatest personal responsibility for fixing the problem.
Another story of these glorious Captains of Industry comes to me from a friend at a medical devices company in Sydney where the CEO recently held court at an annual meeting for staff. It was meant to be just an update on how the company was going and future changes, etc. Boring stuff, but it happened just one day after the Australian Prime Minister announced the details of the carbon tax package. Now, this particular CEO is Australian, but he lives now in the US. He is a well educated man in the field of chemical engineering, and much of his career life has been spent in the health sciences. You would think he knows how to read a scientific paper, and how to understand simple logic. He has been running a successful company for over 20 years. Not your average bonehead, by any stretch of the imagination. Well, apparently he started with a tirade about the "marxist" government in the US. I guess that's what Barack Obama gets for trying to get semi-decent universal healthcare for his country, even though he inherited a massive screwup as a result of financial deregulation and bailed out the top-end of town with taxpayer money. Notwithstanding that the GFC started while George Bush Jr. was asleep behind the wheel, this certain CEO chose to blame the whole mess on the man who inherited the problem.
At this stage, you might start to doubt his objectivity somewhat...
This marxist topic apparently led him to begin a rant on how marxist the Australian government is, and how they are such a bunch of buffoons. The main focus of his attack was on how ridiculous it was to tax CO2 when CO2 is a crop nutrient. How ridiculous indeed! He gave the chemical formula for photosynthesis and how CO2 was involved. This received a warm response from the audience. He apparently also repeated the above claim about human's contribution to any possible problem, which doesn't exist anyway, as far as he was concerned.
When I heard this from my friend, it was what made me think they were all being fed their information from the same source. This CEO is a seemingly well educated man, and he spouts this sort of nonsense as though it's absolute fact. There's nothing to even disbunk in his statements about photosynthesis, etc. It is just completely illogical and irrelevant. I can't believe that an intelligent person would even think to speak such nonsense in private, let alone in front of his entire company. His entire line of argumentation was: CO2 is involved in photosynthesis. Fact. Therefore, CO2 can't be causing any problems and therefore all this global warming stuff is nonsense too. These two things just aren't linked.
Oxygen is vital for life, but if you have too much of it you will die. That is also a fact. So what? Plants will die if the CO2 concentration is too high. Does that mean it's bad? Only in the wrong concentrations, in the wrong places or at the wrong times. Ozone is vital for all life on earth when it's in the upper atmosphere as it protects us from UV radiation, but down at our level it's a main component of smog.
None of which means anything either way for anthropogenic climate change.
These guys are supposedly well educated, they tell us they're brilliant - that's why they deserve to get paid thousands of times more than their company's average salary, isn't it? They're the Big Thinkers, solving all the hard problems that mere mortals couldn't handle. And yet, on a topic of literally earth shattering importance, they haven't even bothered to do the most meagre of research, or perhaps they even lack the ability to understand it. The next time I hear an Australian businessman complaining about this or that problem that the government should solve for them, I'll continue to believe that they probably could do a lot better in their businesses without needing handouts or preferential treatment, or whatever else they demand from the taxpayers.
I guess I should remember that these WORMs grew up in the post war years. They never had to really struggle - all the machinery of war was turned to helping humanity do less and less actual labour, and fossil fuel slaves and wide-open spaces made it seem like anything was possible. They all made their wealth in a society that based it's very existence upon those classic great lies which modern industry with its capability to reshape the earth, and humanity with its massive population growth, has proven to be false - nature is limitless, we can't make a difference, GDP growth reflects real growth in jobs and prosperity for all, etc. Whether or not they ever fought against the status quo in their youths is irrelevant. Now it is their very lifeblood - it supports their wealth and power. Anything that attacks that is likely to be met with fierce resistance. Add to that the fact that this particular problem that could change our earth for all life in devastating ways, and that the responsibility for this reckless growth in consumption and population lies with them and the policies of governments that support them, and you will realise that it would be basically impossible to convince a WORM of something like climate change.
Should we even waste our breath on trying?
