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I woke up this morning to hear the end of a seemingly pleasant tete-a-tete between Mark Zandi (of Moody's Economy) and Robert Reich (currently at Berkeley). The statement that stuck in my mind came from the mouth of Zandi; he said "I don't think there's any other issue that policymakers face that is as difficult as the current housing foreclosure crisis."
Ummm ... wrong.
The foreclosure crisis, while difficult to solve, is a piece of cake compared to the global climate disruption crisis. Foreclosure causes are known and relatively transparent, the players involved all want the thing solved, the only questions remaining are what the best course of action is and who's going to get rich along the way. (Sure, all the press is about how people are going broke. But it's just not possible to throw around hundreds of billions of dollars without creating some real wealth in the process. General Electric has figured that out. I'm sure others have, as well.)
But GE is at least up front about what it's doing. They lobbied for the money fair and square, and they're going to keep it. The corporate players on the climate disruption front aren't nearly so honest about their roles; they're more interested in maintaining plausible deniability.
As if trying to understand the [I'm sorry, I'm at a loss for an adjective -- "labyrinthine" doesn't begin to cover it] complexities of the climate system so that we can estimate sensitivities and identify points of leverage weren't hard enough, scientists have to address climate disruption in a social milieu that's not only full of disinformation, it's full of disinformation about the disinformation (meta-disinformation?). ExxonMobil has been funding originators and purveyors of climatological falsehoods for over a decade. In recent years, it's claimed to have stopped. That claim is a lie. Who says so? Bob Ward of the Grantham Institute of the London School of Economics. A couple of years back, when he was at the Royal Society, Ward was fundamental in outing ExxonMobil's disinformation tactics and causing them to become one step more subtle in their approach.
See, there are difficult problems and potentially insoluble problems. Enemy action, whether it's physical interference or information warfare, is an attempt to turn the former into the latter.
