I am reading a wonderful book at present. Entitled, “the best American magazine
writing” 2011 it contains wonderful gems worth digesting indeed. Michael Hasting’s piece “The runaway
General” frightened me only because I’d already read the impressive piece
before and was for a moment horrified that the book would turn out to be all
too familiar. But no, the rest were new
to me and delightful in their range of topics and insights. Jane Mayers wrote ‘Covert Operations’ and
dealt with two wealthy brothers who have fought a furious war against climate
change science and helped to seed the tea party movement. They criticize political attempts to stop
global warming as expensive, ineffectual and unnecessary. The fact that their own company was named
one of the top ten air polluters in the US might have had something to do with
that. In 1997 when the Environmental
Protection Agency acted to reduce surface ozone, caused in part by emission from
oil refineries, one of industry’s arguments put forward against this reduction
was that smog free skies would result in more skin cancer! Unbelievably, this argument was accepted by
the Court. You, really have to just
shake your head in bewilderment at times!
Such is the funding strength of the two industrialists mentioned in the
article that they even manage to colour the Smithsonian National Museum of
Natural History exhibits. In a
multimedia exploration of mankind and climate change, the human element in
influencing such climate change is carefully whitewashed out. Obviously, linking increases in carbon
dioxide to fossil fuels would not hit the right note for these particular
funders.
It reminds me all too painfully of the new
Giants Causeway Centre in Northern Ireland where the creationist belief finds
its place in the display. Please, let
us be real! In educational
establishments that play, one hopes, a role in shaping young minds of the
future can we try to avoid fantasy land, fake science or the polluter’s
agendas. The Giant’s Causeway was
created by volcanic eruptions 60 million years ago, not by mystical giants
laying down a bridge to Scotland and clearly neither is it consistent with the
creationist’s claim that the earth is a mere 6000 years old. The fact that increasingly educational
programmes pussy foot around the truth to humour the rich or the religious is
a worrisome sign.
No comments:
Post a Comment