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Easterbrook, Gregg

Gregg E. Easterbrook, proto lomborg

MERRI OK

revelle lancaster singer fail

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bro frank HOOVER e, u chic? nom by RR and b2

don hack no relation?

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WIKI 3 26 180

Following people who have changed their position

Some climate change skeptics have changed their positions regarding global warming. Ronald Bailey, author of Global Warming and Other Eco-Myths (published in 2002), stated in 2005, "Anyone still holding onto the idea that there is no global warming ought to hang it up."[331] By 2007, he wrote "Details like sea level rise will continue to be debated by researchers, but if the debate over whether or not humanity is contributing to global warming wasn't over before, it is now.... as the new IPCC Summary makes clear, climate change Pollyannaism is no longer looking very tenable."[332]

Jerry Taylor promoted climate denialism for 20 years as former staff director for the energy and environment task force at the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and former vice president of the Cato Institute. Taylor began to change his mind after climate scientist James Hansen challenged him to reread some Senate testimony. He became President of the Niskanen Center in 2014, where he is involved in turning climate skeptics into climate activists, and making the business case for climate action.[333][334][335]

Michael Shermer, the publisher of Skeptic magazine, reached a tipping point in 2006 as a result of his increasing familiarity with scientific evidence, and decided there was "overwhelming evidence for anthropogenic global warming". Journalist Gregg Easterbrook, an early skeptic of climate change who authored the influential book A Moment on the Earth, also changed his mind in 2006, and wrote an essay titled "Case Closed: The Debate About Global Warming is Over".[336] In 2006, he stated, "based on the data I'm now switching sides regarding global warming, from skeptic to convert."[337]

In 2009, Russian president Dmitri Medvedev expressed his opinion that climate change was "some kind of tricky campaign made up by some commercial structures to promote their business projects". After the devastating 2010 Russian wildfires damaged agriculture and left Moscow choking in smoke, Medvedev commented, "Unfortunately, what is happening now in our central regions is evidence of this global climate change."[336]

Bob Inglis, a former US representative for South Carolina, changed his mind in around 2010 after appeals from his son on his environmental positions, and after spending time with climate scientist Scott Heron studying coral bleaching in the Great Barrier Reef.[338]

Richard A. Muller, professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and the co-founder of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, funded by Charles Koch Charitable Foundation, had been a prominent critic of prevailing climate science. In 2011, he stated that "following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I'm now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause."[339]

"I used to be a climate-change skeptic", conservative columnist Max Boot admitted in 2018, one who believed that "the science was inconclusive" and that worry was "overblown". Now, he says, referencing the Fourth National Climate Assessment, "the scientific consensus is so clear and convincing."[340]

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https://www.desmog.com/2023/02/21/oreskes-conway-the-big-myth-free-market-capitalism-climate-change-mont-pelerin-society/

science historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, authors of the classic 2010 book Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, have released a new book placing that doubt machine into a longer arc of U.S. business and political history.

The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market explores an even more ambitious history dating from the dawn of the 20th century to the present day.

The book documents how today’s prevailing anti-regulatory and anti-government postures that deride Big Government and cheer for Big Business did not arise simply from grassroots demands. Instead, they arose from well-funded industry campaigns creating what Oreskes and Conway have called a manufactured consensus “quasi-religious belief” in deregulated markets and an accompanying diehard opposition to governmental solutions to public policy problems.

Fighting Public Utilities, Child Labor Laws

One of the first campaigns in that spirit occurred within the electricity utility industry via an organization which eventually became known as the Edison Electric Institute.

What is now colloquially calledEEI, was launched in 1885 as the National Electric Light Association, or NELA. At the time, it “represented more than five hundred of the largest privately owned electrical utilities, accounting for more than 90 percent of U.S. kilowatt output,” according to the book.

In the 1920s, according to Oreskes and Conway, “electricity industry leaders organized one of the largest propaganda campaigns in the history of the United States.” The campaign aimed to persuade the public thatmunicipal-owned electricity was a bad thing, advocating instead for investor-owned utilities. In the end, though, it resulted in higher rates for homeowners and small businesses and bigger profits for company owners and their bankrollers.

The initially unpopular campaign framed its activities under the guise of freedom and market efficiency. NELA’s influence operation — involving rewriting K-12 and university textbooks, courting and funding industry-friendly professors, utilizing astroturf campaigns, deploying sophisticated lobbying techniques to facilitate regulatory and legislative capture, and other deceptive practices — resembles much of the fossil fuel industry’s political pressure that DeSmog has covered and uncovered week-in and week-out for over a decade and a half.

At the time, it was the first of its kind industrial-scale full-court press, and it provided a roadmap for other corporate hegemons in subsequent decades. And NELA’s goal went far beyond merely winning a PR campaign, Oreskes and Conway conclude; it had much deeper ideological underpinnings.

“[U]nlike conventional PR, the aim was not simply to create a positive impression of a particular business or even of the whole industry,” they write. “Rather, the goal—expressed outright in numerous documents—was to change the way Americans thought about private property, capitalism, and regulation” altogether.

Core to NELA’s campaign, Oreskes and Conway wrote, was the idea “that free-market capitalism was the embodiment of freedom, writ large, and that any restriction on the freedom of any business would put us on a slippery slope to tyranny.”

Private ownership of the electricity industry was, up until then, relatively rare in the United States and even more so throughout the industrializing world. But as of 2017, 72 percentof U.S. electricity customers got their power from investor-owned utilities. NELA’s campaign, in other words, changed history as we know it.

Today, its successor EEI and its member companies continue to wage deceptive PR campaigns to fight renewable energy and bolster the continued consumption of fossil fuels.

The NELA campaign’s legacy, however, goes far beyond its sector alone, according to Oreskes and Conway. “Perhaps most importantly, NELA pioneered a strategy of insisting that these claims were true, regardless of the facts,” they wrote.

Broadening their view beyond the fossil fuel industry, Oreskes and Conway also detail how the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) propelled similar efforts across other industries during the same era. Like EEI, fast-forwarding to the present-day, NAM has served as a key node of climate denialism. 

But in its earliest days,NAM maintained a different sinister focus, according to The Big Myth: advocating against child labor laws amid what the authors described as a “pandemic” of workplace deaths both among young workers and the adult workforce.The sheer volume of such deaths served as one of the first major wakeup calls in the need for a more active regulatory state, the book maps out.

In making its case for child labor and against regulations protecting children, NAM espoused “that the federal government had no business interfering in business” and called such a notion “socialistic in its origin, philosophy and associations.”

Libertarian Fringe to (Neo)Liberal Mainstream

While both NELA and NAM laid the groundwork for a paradigm that’s alive and well today, their ideas were not adopted globally until the formation of theMont Pelerin Society,a group created in 1947 that like EEI and NAM has received close scrutiny from DeSmog for years. Oreskes and Conway devote a whole chapter of The Big Myth to Mont Pelerin.

Like NELA and NAM, Mont Pelerin’s roots lay in anti-regulatory and business-funded ideology. But unlike them, Mont Pelerin came out of academia and via professors committed to the now globally pervasive neoliberal ideology they created. Mont Pelerin inspired similar groups that are, like it, still active today, such as the Koch Industries-funded Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University and the University of Chicago’s free market-oriented Economics Department.

Oreskes and Conway point to a legion of like-minded groups arising by the 1970s, riding the momentum of an academic community devoted to neoliberal ideology, and reacting to the gains made in environmental protection and other areas. Formation of these groups accelerated after the metaphorical call-to-arms made in a memo written to theU.S. Chamber of Commerce by the then-tobacco industry attorney and soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell.

Known today as the Powell Memo, the 1972 letter called for Big Business to undergo “careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations.”

The Powell Memo, Oreskes and Conway concluded, spearheaded free market fundamentalist groups such as the Cato Institute, Koch Family Foundations, Scaife Family Foundations, Olin Foundation, Heritage Foundation, and the Federalist Society, among others. All of these entities, and the groups they fund or work alongside in coalitions, remain powerful forces within U.S. and global politics.

The Big Myth further highlights how those think tanks and companies also played a key role in defeating the 2009 and 2010 congressional push, led by then-President Barack Obama, to pass a federal, market-oriented climate bill known as the American Clean Energy and Security Act.[waxman markey]  Critics would charge that the policy approach taken in the bill, emblematically, embodies the very “market fundamentalist” ethos reigning over U.S. politics for the past 100-plus years.

During the congressional debate over a bill that would haveenshrined the policy lever of cap-and-trade, the Koch-funded Tea Party network also ascended[vid]

previous congressional pushes in the 2000s for what was ultimately a business-friendly climate policy, had enjoyed bipartisan support. But The Big Myth explains how as the Tea Party network took flight, Republican Party support for the climate bill — and broader climate action — eroded to a near-zero level. It has mostly remained there since.

At the same time, the reality of climate change had and has continued to become all the more clear. That reality though, Oreskes and Conway wrote, clashes with the religion of market fundamentalism.

“[H]ad the market fundamentalists spent so much time defending the magic of the market-place that they simply couldn’t accept market failure on a global scale?” the authors asked of the legion of climate-change deniers who helped to kill the bill. “To accept the enormity of what climate change portended for civilization was to accept that capitalism, as practiced, was undermining the very prosperity it was supposed to deliver. And not just in some distant future, but now.”

Although this “quasi-religious belief” in the power of the market holds the greatest sway with conservatives, Oreskes and Conway argue that belief in the “magic of the marketplace” has become an intoxicating ideology withinliberal circles too, including within climate policy debates.

“Even in supposedly liberal enclaves like Cambridge, Massachusetts,” where Oreskes teaches at Harvard, “many people think climate change will be best addressed by technological innovation in the marketplace,” the co-authors surmise, perhaps in alluding to the prototypical industry-friendly policies pushed by former Obama Administration U.S. Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz — a professor at the nearby Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“The rise of right-wing think tanks helped spread the pro-market, antigovernment gospel across the country and insert what had been decidedly niche views into the mainstream,” the authors explained of the ideology’s spread. Other scholars have referred to this as the “force field” effect, moving the gravitational pull of what’s possible within U.S. politics further and further toward right-wing, corporate-created policy solutions.

The ideological roots of anti-democracy, anti-environmental, and anti-regulatory campaigning explored in The Big Myth also serve as the heart and soul of the book Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming, written by DeSmog co-founders James Hoggan and Richard Littlemore.

If you have learned from DeSmog’s reporting shedding light on the climate change denial machine, you’ll love The Big Myth, an excerpt from which follows below. The book is a must-read for all students of the sordid history of public relations and governmental capture.

Go grab a copy and checkout some recent interviews on the book, as well, for further background. A video of Professor Oreskes discussing the book can also be seen below.

Excerpt from The Big Myth

In the 1990s, as capitalism was being declared triumphant in many quarters, scientists had proved that man-made climate change was under way.1 Climate change was textbook market failure. It arose from everyday economic activity— using fossil fuels—but was about to impose a huge external cost, inundating major coastal cities around the globe, making hurricanes and cyclones even more deadly than they already were, and dislocating tens or even hundreds of millions of people. It was also textbook environmental injustice, as poor people would almost certainly bear the brunt of a problem created by the rich.

But it also had a textbook answer: putting a price on carbon. Economists called this solution a “Pigouvian tax”—after the Cambridge economist Arthur Pigou, who in the early twentieth century had helped develop the concept of negative externalities. (Pigou also suggested it would be reasonable for governments to subsidize activities that had “positive externalities,” such as education.) The idea of pricing social and environmental costs of carbon was hardly radical; Pigou was firmly mainstream, a respected scholar at Cambridge University, a leading figure in what came to be known as the Cambridge school of economics.2 The obvious benefit of the Pigouvian approach was that it remedied the market failure directly by embedding information—in this case scientific information—into the price of fossil fuels. Then consumers could decide for themselves whether or not to buy more expensive fossil fuels, and producers of alternatives could compete on a level playing field.

The Clinton administration proposed to address climate change through a Pigouvian tax, the so-called “BTU” tax (referring to the heat content of fuels as measured in British Thermal Units).3 But it was opposed—indeed, ridiculed—by a broad coalition of conservatives, including, the Chamber of Commerce, the American Petroleum Institute, and virtually every right-wing think tank in America.4 

The notorious Global Climate Coalition, a network of fossil fuel producers and users that in the 1990s successfully prevented the U.S. Congress from ratifying the Kyoto protocol to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, was originally established as a committee of the National Association of Manufacturers. Even though the idea of putting a price on carbon was a mainstream economic approach to market failure, Republicans framed it as just another example of Democrats’ penchant to “tax and spend.” The Wall Street Journal mocked it as Al Gore’s “favorite tax.”5

In his 1979 paper on nonmarket failure, economist Charles Wolf had slipped into his conclusion the idea that one cause of nonmarket failure was “premature but politically effective demands for government action.”6 In the 1990s, many Republicans picked up on this theme, arguing that it was premature to act on climate change. Even at the time, that was wrong: scientists already had a consensus that man-made climate change was under way and likely to be very costly.7 To act in the 1990s would have been appropriate. It would have been timely. But Clinton was unable to generate congressional support for action; Republican opposition made it clear that any proposal to put a price on carbon would be dead on arrival. In 1999, when Vice President Al Gore ran for president on a platform prioritizing climate change, journalist Gregg Easterbrook (brother of Judge Frank Easterbrook) embarrassed him on the campaign trail with a false story that his mentor—climate champion Roger Revelle—had experienced a deathbed conversion and died thinking climate change was not a serious problem.8 (He had not.)

As the 1990s became the 2000s—and scientists declared the evidence “unequivocal”—market fundamentalist did not adjust their views. To the contrary, their opposition hardened.9

In 2006, Lord Nicholas Stern, former chief economist of the World Bank, concluded on behalf of the UK government that, yes, fixing climate change would be expensive—perhaps as much as 1 percent of global GDP per annum—but not fixing it would cost much more: at least 5 percent and perhaps as much as 20 percent.10 Here was a solid argument from a man who could scarcely be accused of being any kind of -ist other than an economist. In response, conservatives dug in deeper. Senator Ted Cruz promoted the canard that global warming had stopped; Senator James Inhofe called it a liberal conspiracy to bring down capitalism.11 No matter what solutions were proposed—market-friendly or not—the right wing found reasons to oppose them. The science wasn’t settled (they claimed). It would be too expensive to fix. We could just adapt. It was all a hoax. Often these claims were couched in libertarian terms, as when in 2011 former House Speaker Newt Gingrich deemed the push to address climate change “the newest excuse to take control of lives.”12

The singular exception to climate denial in Republican Party leadership was Senator John McCain. He and conservative Democrat Joe Lieberman introduced Climate Stewardship acts in 2003, 2005, and 2007 to address the carbon dioxide emissionsthat drive climate change by creating an emissions trading system—a proven mechanism, albeit more complicated than a Pigouvian tax. But when given the chance to use it to address climate change, Republicans refused.13 The 2003 bill failed on mostly party lines, with a few Democrats and nearly all Republicans in opposition. But it was a closer call than many expected, and soon Congress faced intense lobbying pressure against climate legislation, particularly from NAM and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The 2005 version came to a vote and failed 60–38, with only a handful of Republicans voting yea.14 Two years after that, McCain could not even persuade Republican leaders to bring a climate bill to the Senate floor.15

In 2009, Congress tried once more, with the American Clean Energy and Security Act (better known as Waxman-Markey, for its primary sponsors, Massachusetts representative Ed Markey and California representative Henry Waxman). For the fourth time in a decade, Congress had the opportunity to address climate change using a market mechanism, and for the fourth time rejected it.The bill barely passed the Democratic-led House; nearly all Republicans voted against, as did Democrats from fossil-fuel-producing states (and a few Democrats who found the bill too weak). The Senate never brought it to a vote. Democrats concluded they could not overcome the “wall of opposition” they faced from their Republican colleagues, opposition fortified by fierce lobbying.16 One analysis concluded that, in the eighteen months between January 2009 and June 2010, electric utilities, oil and gas companies, trade associations, and think tanks spent at least $500 million against climate change legislation.17 Another study tracinganti-climate lobbying back to 2003 places the figure at closer to $1 billion.18

The fossil fuel industry’s economic interests in preventing climate action have always been obvious; less understood is how it has camouflaged those interests. No one ever said, “I am denying climate change to protect corporate profits.” They said they were protecting jobs, protecting the economy, and protecting free markets from government “encroachment.” They said they were fighting for capitalism and freedom.

But historically, capitalism has never been just one thing: Adam Smith’s eighteenth-century vision of a democratic, distributed marketplace populated by small bankers and businessmen was a far cry from the industrial capitalism that developed in early nineteenth-century England and Germany—with its cruel “Satanic mills”—or the monopolies and managerial capitalism that came to dominate America in the late nineteenth century, much less the globally financed capitalism that emerged at the end of the twentieth century. China has liberalized its markets while continuing to oppress and even murder its ethnic and religious minorities. There are many capitalisms. American market fundamentalists fight for a form of capitalism that is both brutal and ignorant: that brushes aside market failure, anticompetitive practices, and external costs, in part by denying the facts of science, the facts of history, and the necessary role of government in making capitalism work.19

The question is not whether government should set limits that prevent individual autonomy from producing collective harm, the question is where we draw the lines. That is not an economic question, it is a political one. Market fundamentalists have managed to distract from the political aspects of these decisions and frame them as questions of “economic freedom.” Thus, a reasonable response to climate change is rejected as unreasonable “government encroachment.”

All this may make one wonder: was this ever reallyabout capitalism? Or freedom? Or was it all just one long, semi-continuous, shape-shifting defense of the prerogatives of big business? Of freedom for capital and capitalists? Or had the market fundamentalists spent so much time defending the magic of the market- place that they simply couldn’t accept market failure on a global scale? To accept the enormity of what climate change portended for civilization was to accept that capitalism, as practiced, was undermining the very prosperity it was supposed to deliver. And not just in some distant future, butnow.

ref bib...

“Letter from the Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission in Response to Senate

Resolutions Nos. 83 and 112, Exhibit 1432 to 2575,” 70th Congress, 1st session (Washington,

D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office,1930), 797.

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The Cosmos article was reprinted, and then used by Gregg Easterbrook in his book to discredit Al Gore, who had been a student of Revelle, which was something of an origin story in An Inconvenient Truth [later?]; this was picked up almost verbatim by George Will

in 2003, Singer published a book chapter, entitled The Revelle-Gore Story: Attempted Political Suppression of Science that misrepresented both Lancaster and Revelle

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wiki 3 23

gregg Edmund Easterbrook (born March 3, 1953) is an American writer and a contributing editor of both The New Republic and The Atlantic Monthly. He has authored ten books (six nonfiction, one of humor, and three literary novels), and writes for op-ed pages, magazines, and journals.

Early life and education

Gregg Easterbrook was born in Buffalo, New York, the son of George Easterbrook, a dentist, and Vimy Hoover Easterbrook, a teacher. Easterbrook attended Kenmore West High School in Tonawanda, New York. He has a bachelor's degree in political science from Colorado College and amaster's in journalism from Northwestern University.

Career

In 1979, Easterbrook became an editor of The Washington Monthly.[1] In 1981, he joined The Atlantic as a staff writer, later becoming national correspondent; since 1988, he has been a contributing editor.

Easterbrook has been a political columnist for Reuters, a senior editor and then contributing editor to The New Republic, and a fellow in economic studies and then in governance studies at the Brookings Institution (that fellowship lasted for nine years up until 2011). He has lectured at the Aspen Institute and Chautauqua Institution, and spoken at many colleges.

Easterbrook's journalistic style has been characterized as "hyper-logical" and he himself as "a thoughtful, deliberate, and precise journalist ... a polymath and a quick study."[2] His areas of interest include environmental policy, global warming, space policy, social science research, Christian theology, and sports — especially professional football. In 2017, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.[3]

Football column

Easterbrook wrote the eclectic football column "Tuesday Morning Quarterback" (TMQ), originally published by Slate in 2000, and then on ESPN.com starting in 2002. TMQ was published for two weeks on the independent website Football Outsiders, and then by NFL.com, moving back to ESPN.com prior to the 2006 season. The column relocated to the New York Times in 2015,[4] then to The Weekly Standard in 2017.[5] The column is on hiatus for the 2019 season.

Fans of the TMQ column include journalist Chuck Todd who has described it as "the best and most compelling sports column anywhere".[6] Detractors include Drew Magary (an editor at the website Deadspin) who said of one Easterbrook column that his thesis lacks "any basis in reality".[7]

Environment, climate change, and A Moment on the Earth

Easterbrook wrote the book A Moment on the Earth (1995), subtitled "the coming age of environmental optimism," which presaged Bjørn Lomborg's book The Skeptical Environmentalist, first published in Danish three years later; Easterbrook argued that many environmental indicators, with the notable exception of greenhouse gas production, are positive.[8] He called the environmental movement "among the most welcome social developments of the twentieth century," but criticized environmentalists who promoted what he saw as overly pessimistic views that did not accept signs of improvement and progress.[9]

A Moment on the Earth proved to be very controversial, especially among environmentalists. Easterbrook was accused of mischaracterizing data concerning environmental health, using faulty logic, and being overly optimistic.[10][11] Other reviewers, like Michael Specter in The New York Times, had praise for the book's efforts to raise positive points in the debate over environmental policy.[12]

Norman Borlaug, one of the most important figures in the Green Revolution, was the subject of an admiring Easterbrook article in 1997,[13] and again in 2009 marking Borlaug's passing.[14] Both articles said that Borlaug had disproved the earlier dire predictions of Paul R. Ehrlich, author of the 1968 book The Population Bomb.[14] Ehrlich has severely criticized Easterbrook's 1995 book A Moment on the Earth.[15]

Until 2006, Easterbrook was skeptical about whether global warming was a serious manmade problem, pointing out several times that even the National Academy of Sciences had expressed doubt about whether global warming was caused by humans.[16] He publicly modified his position in 2006 as a result of scientific developments.[16][17][18][19][20] Easterbrook wrote:

[T]he science has changed from ambiguous to near-unanimous. As an environmental commentator, I have a long record of opposing alarmism. But based on the data I'm now switching sides regarding global warming, from skeptic to convert. Once global-warming science was too uncertain to form the basis of policy decisions — and this was hardly just the contention of oil executives. ... Clearly, the question called for more research. That research is now in, and it shows a strong scientific consensus that an artificially warming world is a real phenomenon posing real danger. ...[16]

He says that greenhouse gas emissions must be curbed in order to win the fight against climate change.[16][21] Easterbrook anticipates that climate change could benefit some regions, even while causing drastic problems elsewhere.[22]

Other books

Easterbrook has written three novels: This Magic Moment (1986), The Here and Now (2002) and The Leading Indicators (2012). This Magic Moment is a love story as well as a philosophical work about the meaning of life.[23] The second novel (The Here and Now) was called "moving" by both the New York Times Book Review and the Los Angeles Times,[24] and tells a "satisfying tale of disillusionment and redemption" in the opinion of the San Francisco Chronicle.[25] According to Kirkus Reviews, The Leading Indicators provides social commentary in the form of literary fiction, filtering "leveraged buyouts, derivatives marketing and multimillion-dollar CEO bonuses through the lens of one ... family."[26]

Among his nonfiction books, Beside Still Waters (1998) is a work of Christian theology, discussing whether religion matters as much as it did before we gained so much knowledge about ourselves and the world.[27] The book Tuesday Morning Quarterback (2001) — not to be confused with his similar column of the same name — uses haiku and humor to analyze pro football.

Another of Easterbrook's books, focusing on social science, is The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse (2003), which explores people's perception of their own well-being. The book cites statistical data indicating that Americans are better off in terms of material goods and amount of free time but are not happier than before. Easterbrook argues that this has occurred due to choice anxiety (too many decisions to make) and abundance denial (not realizing how well we are doing).[28] His proposed remedy is to make our lives more meaningful by doing good while living well.[29]

His book Sonic Boom: Globalization at Mach Speed (2009) asserts that globalization has only just begun and is a good thing to look forward to.[30] Another book, The King of Sports: Football's Impact on America (2013) says that American football in many ways reflects the cultural contradictions of the United States.[31]

Other activities and areas of interest

Easterbrook was a longtime critic of the Space Shuttle program.[32][33] After the Challenger disaster in 1986, his prescience made him a frequent commentator on space issues.[32] He has also been critical of the International Space Station, because of its expense and the feasibility of conducting the same experiments on Earth instead of in orbit.[34] Easterbrook has called a proposed crewed mission to Mars "ridiculously impractical",[35] and has written that the rationale for a proposed permanent base on the Moon is closely tied to pork barrel politics.[36][37][38] He has supported other NASA projects such as using uncrewed space probes and protecting Earth from asteroids.[38][39]

Easterbrook had a blog[40] at The New Republic Online, until mid-2004. In October 2003, he wrote a blog post critical of what he considered to be the senseless violence in the Quentin Tarantino film Kill Bill, saying that, "Recent European history alone ought to cause Jewish [movie] executives to experience second thoughts about glorifying the killing of the helpless as a fun lifestyle choice."[41] This caused an uproar, and Easterbrook wrote that he "mangled" his own ideas by his choice of words, and apologized.[42] The New Republic accepted blame for the piece in a further apology, and denied that his comments were intentionally anti-semitic.[43] Disney, the parent of the film's distributor Miramax Films and ESPN, fired Easterbrook in October 2003.[41]

Besides writing for many magazines, journals, and op-ed pages on a wide variety of subjects, and producing books of his own, Easterbook has also written various book chapters. An example is a book chapter about the 9-11 terrorist attacks.[44]

Personal

Easterbrook is married to Nan Kennelly, an American diplomat.[45][46] He is the brother of Judge Frank H. Easterbrook and Neil Easterbrook, English professor at Texas Christian University. Gregg Easterbrook lives in Bethesda, Maryland.

List of his books

Awards and honors

Reference

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http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Gregg_Easterbrook

Gregg Easterbrook's biographical note states that he is "a senior editor of The New Republic, a contributing editor of The Atlantic Monthly, a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly, and a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution.[1]

In a blog entry, Easterbook, railing against violent Hollywood films, invoked anti-Semitic sterotypes to complain about the involvement of Disney with the film 'Kill Bill': "Disney's CEO, Michael Eisner, is Jewish; the chief of Miramax, Harvey Weinstein, is Jewish. ... Does that make it right for Jewish executives to worship money above all else, by promoting for profit the adulation of violence?," he wrote. [2]

In Toxic Sludge is Good For You, John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton wrote:

...the Earth Day 1995 release of A Moment On The Earth: The Coming Age of Environmental Optimism, a 745-page exercise in sophistry by Gregg Easterbrook, seemed like dirt in the face of the losing green lobbyists. "Cancel your plans for doomsday, planet earth is alive and well," screamed the book's full page New York Times advertisement. Easterbrook's one-sided and factually deformed tract promoted his pollyannish doctrine of "ecorealism." While defensively proclaiming himself a liberal and an environmentalist, he provided the PR greenwashers with their best manifesto to date, written by an "objective" journalist.

They noted that "Easterbrook's own mother died of breast cancer after working in the notorious Hooker Chemical plant that produced the toxic wastes buried at Love canal, yet A moment on the Earth claims that all major environmental crises are virtually solved or never really existed in the first place."

"Easterbrook's naïveté showed," they wrote, "as he publicly pleaded with industry to call off its lobbyists' assault on environmental regulations. 'Has all the apparent progress in the chemical industry been merely a public relations ploy?' Easterbook wondered with apparently genuine consternation."

Gregg Easterbrook, the author of A Moment on the Earth, concludes that the acts of individuals are the root of many environmental problems. He wrote in the New York Times magazine, "Though environmental orthodoxy holds that Third World deforestation is caused by rapacious clear-cutters and ruthless cattle barons, penniless peasants seeking fuel wood may be the greatest threat to our forests." He conveniently fails to mention that "penniless peasants" are forcedto colonize rainforests and cut down trees for firewood after being driven from their traditional lands by "rapacious clear-cutters and ruthless cattle barons."

(Toxic Sludge is Good For You, 132f)

In January 2001 the Smith Richardson Foundation made a grant of $67,500 to the Brookings Institution for Easterbrook to research and write a book Is Life Getting Better?. Media Transparency noted that the foundation describes the project as for a book "that will assess whether the quality of life in America is improving. He will analyze data on social and economic indicators, such as crime rates, living standards, health outcomes, and environmental quality, and consider some of the normative questions of how quality of life is defined." [3]

Books SCHTICK?

Contact details

Website: http://www.greggeasterbrook.com/

External links

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Credentials  

Background

Gregg Easterbrook is a writer, lecturer, and a senior editor of The New Republic.  He was a fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C. think tank. Gregg Easterbrook is no longer a skeptic of man-made climate change.

Easterbrook has recently changed his views regarding global warming. He believes that "though there could be benefits to a warming world, the bad is likely to outweigh the good."[3]

Gregg Easterbrook's biographical note states that he is "a senior editor of The New Republic, a contributing editor of The Atlantic Monthly, a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly, and a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. [4]

Stance on Climate Change

"Yes: the science has changed from ambiguous to near-unanimous. As an environmental commentator, I have a long record of opposing alarmism. But based on the data I'm now switching sides regarding global warming, from skeptic to convert. . . .

"Many greenhouse uncertainties remain, including whether rising temperatures would necessarily be bad. A warming world might moderate global energy demand: the rise in temperature so far has mostly expressed itself as milder winters, not hotter summers. Warming might open vast areas of Alaska, Canada and Russia to development. . . .

"Scientific substantiation of a warming world is not necessarily reason for gloom. Greenhouse gases are an air pollution problem, and all air pollution problems of the past have cost significantly less to fix than critics projected, and the solutions have worked faster than expected." [5]

Key Quotes

"... the consensus of the scientific community has shifted from skepticism to near-unanimous acceptance of the evidence of an artificial greenhouse effect. Second, while artificial climate change may have some beneficial effects, the odds are we’re not going to like it. Third, reducing emissions of greenhouse gases may turn out to be much more practical and affordable than currently assumed." [3]

"Though environmental orthodoxy holds that Third World deforestation is caused by rapacious clear-cutters and ruthless cattle barons, penniless peasants seeking fuel wood may be the greatest threat to our forests." [6]

"If our goal in legislating against carbon releases is not simply punishing the West and its power companies but truly trying to reduce the accumulation of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, the main event will be in the developing world. We must use the smartest possible economics, and that means investing in China and India." [7]

Key Deeds

January, 2001

The Smith Richardson Foundation made a grant of $67,500 to the Brookings Institution for Easterbrook to research and write a book Is Life Getting Better?.

Media Transparency noted that the book "will assess whether the quality of life in America is improving. He will analyze data on social and economic indicators, such as crime rates, living standards, health outcomes, and environmental quality, and consider some of the normative questions of how quality of life is defined."

April, 1995

Easterbrook published the book A Moment on the Earth on Earth Day, 1995. The book is described on Easterbrook's homepage:

"Subtitled 'the coming age of environmental optimism,' this book anticipated by nearly a decade the current evidence that in the Western nations, all forms of pollution except greenhouse gases are declining."

Some reviews accused Easterbrook's book of mischaracterizing data concerning environmental health, using faulty logic, and being overly optimistic. [8]

Affiliations  

Publications

According to a search of Google Scholar, Gregg Easterbrook has not published any articles in peer reviewed journals on the subject of climate. He has published numerous newspaper articles and books on the subject:

Books

Articles

Resources

  1. "Gregg Easterbrook: Contributor Profile," The Atlantic Online. Accessed December 7, 2011.
  2. "Author Gregg Easterbrook to speak at BYU forum," Deseret News, September 16, 2011.
  3. Gregg Easterbrook. "Case Closed: The Debate about Global Warming is Over" (PDF),Issues in Governance Studies, Number 3 (June 2006).
  4. "BIO," GreggEasterbrook.com. Accessed March, 2012.
  5. Gregg Easterbrook. "Finally Feeling the Heat," The New York Times, May 24, 2006.
  6. Joel Bleifuss. "Covering The Earth With 'Green PR,' Mendocino Environmental Center.
  7. "The Greenness of Al Gore." The New York Times, March 16, 2007.
  8. Watkins, T.H. "In the company of scolds,"Issues in Science & Technology, Vol. 11 Issue 4 (Summer, 1995), p80.
  9. Greenpeace Investigations on Gregg Easterbrook.
  10. "Gregg Easterbrook." SourceWatch Profile.
  11. Search for "Gregg Easterbrook," Media Transparency.
  12. John C. Stauber and Sheldon Rampton.Toxic Sludge Is Good for You!: Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry. Consortium Book Sales & Distribution (September 01, 1995).
  13. T. H. Watkins. "In the company of scolds," Issues in Science and Technology, Summer 1995.
  14. Brookings Institution, Media Matters.
  15. "Case Closed: The Debate about Global Warming Is Over" (PDF) The Brookings Institute, May 2006.
  16. Sarah Gambles, "Author Gregg Easterbrook to speak at BYU forum," Deseret News, September 16, 2011.
  17. Joel Bleifuss. "Covering The Earth With 'Green PR,' Mendocino Environmental Center.
  18. "Gregg Easterbrook," Contributor Profile at The Atlantic Online.
  19. "Blogosmear," Slate, Oct 20, 2003.

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CLIFFSNOTES SHORTFORM EXCERPT:

What was Roger Revelle’s impact on the climate change debate? How did doubt-mongering threaten to discredit him?

In their book Merchants of Doubt, Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway take on individuals or groups who seek to discredit science that they perceive to be a threat to their agenda. One of the targets of a doubt-mongering campaign was Al Gore’s mentor—Roger Revelle.

Read more to learn about Roger Revelle and the merchants of doubt.

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Roger Revelle Enters the Climate Change Debate

In 1965, Roger Revelle summarized the possible impacts of the warming caused by CO2. There were still a lot of unknowns, so he focused on the sea-level rise because it seemed the most certain. He estimated that by 2000, there could be notable changes in climate because there would be 25% more atmospheric CO2. As the planet warmed, sea ice would increase in size due to thermal expansion (volume increases when material warms up), and this would push water farther inland.

Lyndon Johnson read the report but had bigger problems (such as the Vietnam War) and didn’t do anything about it. The next president, Nixon, did consider atmospheric changes, but he was focused on the greenhouse gas effects of water (from supersonic transports (SSTs)), not CO2.

Discrediting Roger Revelle

Roger Revelle was an important voice in the climate change discussion. He was also Al Gore’s mentor, so if the merchants of doubt (MODs) could make it look like Revelle had changed his opinion on global warming, it would not only sow doubt, it would hurt Gore’s 1992 presidential campaign, which focused on the environment.

Fred Singer attended one of Revelle’s talks and approached him about writing an article together that would be called “What To Do about Greenhouse Warming: Look Before You Leap.” Revelle agreed but shortly after, he had a heart attack. An operation saved him, but there were further complications and his health deteriorated. He and Singer continued working on the article (though Revelle appeared to have lost enthusiasm), and Revelle may not have been able to look closely or check changes due to his health.

While still working with Revelle, Singer wrote his own article with almost the same title (“What To Do about Greenhouse Warming”). This article reused the Marshall Institute’s work and focused on uncertainty.

In February 1991, Singer and Revelle met to discuss their paper. They argued about how sensitive the climate was to CO2. The current draft of the paper claimed that the warming would be “well below the normal year to year variation” and less than 1 degree Celsius. Revelle corrected the numbers in the margin. Singer ultimately cut the numbers, so the next draft read that a “modest average warming” and still contained the phrase about the warming being below the normal variation. The historical record doesn’t show whether Revelle ultimately agreed to this wording, but everyone who knew him expected he hadn’t. Revelle was well aware of natural variability because he was a geologist (natural variability is determined from paleoclimate data).

The article appeared in Cosmos (a non-scientific journal with low circulation) and because Revelle was listed as the second author, it looked like he had agreed that the warming wasn’t significant or outside of normal. One of Revelle’s colleagues stated that Revelle was embarrassed by the paper (Revelle died shortly after it came out).

While few scientists read Cosmos, the article made its way into public consciousness. In 1992, Al Gore’s critic Gregg Easterbrook attacked him for failing to mention that Revelle had ultimately concluded that there was too much uncertainty to act. The quote Easterbrook used to support this was from Singer’s solo1990 paper with a similar title to the co-authored one. Other critics repeated the attacks.

Setting the Record Straight

Several people tried to set the record straight about Roger Revelle.

1. Revelle’s daughter published an op-ed.

2. Two of Revelle’s colleagues wrote to Cosmos. They wrote that Singer had written the paper, not Revelle, and that Singer had probably only included his name as a thank-you for advising and reviewing. Cosmoswouldn’t publish their letter, so they sent it to Oceanography(a scientific journal mainly read by scientists).

3. Justin Lancaster, a colleague and close friend of Revelle:

Revelle probably didn’t actually change his mind about global warming. In November 1990, he wrote an unpublished introduction to a meeting (Oreskes and Conway found it in his papers), which states that he thought that climate was serious and we should act.

...

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singer BS 15 pp

https://www.hoover.org/sites/default/files/uploads/documents/0817939326_283.pdf

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no cut paste, looks good

https://yalereview.org/article/weaponizing-reputation

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apr 2020

w Much Of A Lying Asshole Was The Now-Dead Denier Fred Singer? This Much Of A Lying Asshole

EDIT

By this time, climate scientists were also in Singer’s sights. In early 1991, just a few years before inventing the whaling controversy, Singer had shown up at the office of oceanographer Roger Revelle, a pioneering and widely respected climate researcher with the University of California, San Diego. Singer wanted to discuss a draft paper that he’d written, and which Revelle had received months earlier and ignored. Singer argued in the paper that climate change wasn’t real, even though by 1991 this position was already contrary to the growing body of scientific evidence that it was, which included Revelle’s own climate research and findings.

At the time, Revelle was a frail 82-year-old recovering from recent triple-bypass heart surgery, and just months from the grave. But that didn’t deter Singer, who over the course of many hours talked Revelle into making some minor modifications to Singer’s draft. Singer then published the paper with Revelle listed as a co-author, not in a peer-reviewed and reputable science journal, but in an obscure magazine called Cosmos, put out by an equally obscure Washington-based social organization called the Cosmos Club. But because the article had Revelle’s name on it, it helped to keep the public doubting climate science, instead of debating what the nation needed to do to stop climate change.

Further, as Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway recount in their book Merchants of Doubt, the article served as a weapon the following year against one of Revelle's most famous protégés, then-Vice President and presidential candidate Al Gore. In a 1992 article in The New Republic, climate contrarian Gregg Easterbrook cited the Cosmos article, observing that Gore hadn't mentioned in his recent climate change book, Earth in the Balance, that “before his death last year, Revelle published a paper that concludes: ‘The scientific base for a greenhouse warming is too uncertain to justify drastic action at this time.'" Singer then managed to quash an effort by another scientist to clear Revelle’s name. A Harvard post-doc named Justin Lancaster challenged Singer’s unethical behavior and the dishonest article. Singer responded in typical Singer fashion: He forced Lancaster to shut up by filing a libel lawsuit against him, and coerced Lancaster into signing a retraction.

The full details of this especially enraging chapter in Singer’s career only came to light in 2006, when Lancaster broke his silence and published documents online that fully backed up his denunciations of Singer. Calling the retraction he’d been forced to sign “the worst decision I ever made in my life,” Lancaster stated that he’d been confident that he would have won the lawsuit, but backed down because of its effect on his wife. “She was terrorized by this lawsuit,” he wrote, “scared we could lose our house and all our assets.” More than any other, this series of actions in the early 1990s exemplified the Singer method: bullying and falsely discrediting the work of a dying scientist, and then protecting himself from the consequences by terrorizing the family of another scientist who called out his wicked behavior.

EDIT

https://www.drillednews.com/post/fred-singer-obituary-climate-denier

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Roger Revelle's Impact on the Climate Change Debate

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Shortform

https://www.shortform.com › ... › People

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Jul 19, 2021 — In 1992, Al Gore's critic Gregg Easterbrook attacked him for failing to mention that Revelle had ultimately concluded that there was too ...

The Revelle-Gore Story

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Hoover Institution

https://www.hoover.org › uploads › documents

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S. F. Singer, C. Starr, and R. Revelle, “What To Do About Greenhouse ... Gregg Easterbrook, a contributing editor to Newsweek, referred to.

15 pages

Roger Revelle – the backstory of the father of Atmospheric ...

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CO2 Coalition

https://co2coalition.org › News Posts

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Oct 31, 2020 — Lancaster harassed Singer in 1992, accusing him of putting Revelle's name on the article over his objections and demanding that Singer have it ...

S. FRED SINGER, Ph.D.

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DeSmog

https://www.desmog.com › Lancaster_affidavit

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Program of the Society for Risk Analysis. I earned my Ph.D. in Oceanography in 1990 from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and my M.S. in Oceanography ...

14 pages

Weaponizing Reputation

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The Yale Review

https://yalereview.org › article › weaponizing-reputation

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Oct 1, 2018 — (Singer sued Revelle's research assistant, Justin Lancaster, ... In July 1992, New Republic journalist Gregg Easterbrook cited the Cosmos ...

Roger Revelle – the backstory of the father of Atmospheric ...

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Watts Up With That?

https://wattsupwiththat.com › 2020 › October › 31

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Oct 31, 2020 — They first met in 1957 and were more than professional colleagues, they were personal friends (Singer, 2003). Unfortunately, Revelle passed away ...

How Much Of A Lying Asshole Was The Now-Dead Denier Fred ...

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Democratic Underground

https://www.democraticunderground.com › ...

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Singer then published the paper with Revelle listed as a co-author, ... climate contrarian Gregg Easterbrook cited the Cosmos article, observing that Gore ...

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Chapter 6: The Denial of Global Warming

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University of Colorado Boulder

https://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu › envs_4800

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In 1965, the President's Science Advisory Committee asked Roger Revelle, ... have fired by Gregg Easterbrook in the July issue of the New Republic, and.

31 pages

Gore’s Grave New World - Political Arena

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Smoaky.com

https://www.smoaky.com › ... › Political Arena

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You see, when Dr. Revelle co-authored an article entitled “What to Do About ... Dr. Singer recalls a phone call he received from Dr. Justin Lancaster, ...

Let Roger Revelle Speak for Himself

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The Oceanography Society

https://tos.org › oceanography › article › let-roger-rev...

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Oct 2, 2015 — One year later, in a discussion of Senator Gore's book Earth In Balance, Gregg Easterbrook notes that Senator Gore failed to mention that ...

Missing: lancaster ‎| Must include: lancaster

Should Government Control Scientific Research?

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Climate- Science.press

https://climate-science.press › 2022/01/22 › should-go...

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Al Gore was humiliated by Easterbrook's article and follow up articles by ... Lancaster claimed that Revelle was “hoodwinked” by Singer into adding his name ...

Merchants of Doubt

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Amazon AWS

http://s3.amazonaws.com › arena-attachments

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Singer was a physicist—in fact, the proverbial rocket scientist—who ... Stone, and Gregg Easterbrook, a frequent writer for the New Republic.

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