Climate denial ads to air on US national television 19 May 06

Many readers will no doubt have received emails today about a new advertising campaign by the far-right American thinktank the Competitive Enterprise Institute on global warming. Several of mine came with the subject line ‘watch this – it’s not a spoof!’, and indeed the ads were so far-out that it seemed to me at first that they must be an elaborate joke. “Carbon dioxide: they call it pollution,” announces the soft voiceover, “we call it life”.

Stunned, I showed the video to people here in Germany, where I’m attending a symposium on climate change and oil issues (yes, I came by train!). No-one else could quite believe their eyes either. The ads look like a throwback to the pre-Kyoto scaremongering campaign by the infamous Global Climate Coalition, which – like the CEI – was partly funded by Exxon-Mobil. A second ad claims that ‘the glaciers are not melting’ by picking a couple of studies on Greenland and Antarctica and highlighting them in a misleading way.

At first I laughed. Then I thought about it for a while, and finally I got angry. The ads are airing in 14 US cities on mainstream television. Millions of people will potentially be misled and confused about the reality of the climatic situation that confronts us. The thought of innocent Americans – who are not necessarily educated about the scientific consensus on global warming, to say the least – being subjected to lies and distortion through the mass media on this scale appalls me.

I wonder how future juries might view the actions of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, who, in full knowledge of the realities of climate change, continue to preach their gospel of denial in the service of Big Oil dollars. I wonder what sentences judges might hand down at future international criminal tribunals on those who will be partially but directly responsible for millions of deaths from starvation, famine and disease in decades ahead. I put this in a similar moral category to Holocaust denial – except that this time the Holocaust is yet to come, and we still have time to avoid it. Those who try to ensure we don’t will one day have to answer for their crimes.