Molly Ivins October 7

AUSTIN — Lungs have been on my mind lately, partly because I'm in the midst of my 2,917th attempt to quit smoking.

I just spent a week in the crystalline air of the high desert of Northern Mexico — well, crystalline except for the cloud of black gunk that rose every day from a small nearby city and crept toward the mountains. Beloved Mexico is not a country where the muffler gets a lot of respect.

I returned to the Hill Country of Central Texas — land of blue skies and swift, green rivers — only to find the joint covered with gray smaze and under a steady ozone alert. Ozone alert is what makes your lungs labor like bellows and your head ache when you go out in it.

I bring this up because it is part of the backdrop for a curious "debate" now going on. "It's only in America that there is a debate over what's happening to the global climate," observed a German journalist quoted in Ross Gelbspan's new book, "The Heat Is On." In Europe, "the only debates are how fast and with what impacts the changes will happen."

Actually, there's not a debate — in the sense of opposing arguments each backed up with facts — in this country, either. What we have is scientific opinion, which is clear and close to unanimous, and a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign sponsored by corporate interests afraid that the scientists' findings will cost them money.

It's as though your doctor found a suspicious lump on you and did a biopsy and the test proved it malignant. But then your insurance agent, worried that his company would have to foot the bills, said confidently: "Oh, no, that's not cancer — that lump is just a spider bite." Would you listen to the insurance agent? Of course not. But the media in this country treat both arguments as though they were of equal weight and soundness because, you see, we have been trained to assume there are two sides to every story.

What you want to keep in mind as you listen to the escalating "debate" about global warming is that the scientists have no financial stake in their findings. There's nothing in it for them; they're just reporting what they find. Nor do the environmentalists, who would prefer to spend their time saving whales, baby critters and the remaining wilderness if they weren't convinced that global warming is going to get us all first.

The book by Gelbspan, who has already won a Pulitzer for his journalism, details the propaganda campaign sponsored by oil and coal companies and OPEC governments, all with a vested interest in the continued burning of fossil fuels. In this country, the National Association of Manufacturers, automobile manufacturers and the Farm Bureau, always a foe of environmentalists, have joined to fund a $13 million advertising campaign to pooh-pooh the notion of global warming and/or wildly exaggerate the economic consequences of doing anything about it.

Until last week, when Ted Turner put the kibosh on it, their ads were blanketing CNN.

The 2,600 scientists worldwide who signed the report of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1995 agree on what is happening to the global climate, but their predictions as to the consequences vary with the computer models they use, ranging from quite serious to absolutely disastrous. The prospect of island nations sinking under the waves and coastal cities being inundated by the middle of the next century if nothing is done about global warming is the sort of nightmare scenario that seems like apocalyptic science fiction, and so lends itself beautifully to that standard human response, denial: Let's not think about it — let's watch the football game instead. But the insurance industry, which has its own obvious stake in the effects of global warming, along with a few progressive industry leaders such as the CEO of British Petroleum, are taking the effects of global warming quite seriously indeed.

The media, with our eternal tendency toward on-the-one-hand-this/on-the-other-hand-that, equal-time, fair-play doctrines, are doing a real disservice to the public. What we need is the kind of reporting that Gelbspan has done, showing the collusion of special interests against the public interest in perhaps the brassiest display of greed, lying and self-interest since the time all those tobacco executives solemnly swore to Congress that there was nothing addictive about nicotine. The depth of their irresponsibility, of their chutzpah, is just astounding — how dare they put their own short-term profits ahead of the lives of millions of people? Talk about no shame.

As if the battle of scientists against propagandists weren't bad enough, the whole issue now moves into the political realm, where you can be assured that big campaign contributions will have their effect. President Clinton, in an almost comically Clintonesque fashion, is waging a campaign to raise public consciousness on the issue while simultaneously dithering about how to negotiate the binding emissions caps at the December meeting in Kyoto, Japan.

The big problem there is the developed-vs.-developing nations, or the North-South dilemma. The industrialized countries contribute by far the most greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, but the developing nations are afraid that their fragile economies will be crushed if they are put under the same constraints as the big guys.

One optimistic school of thought on all this is that technology will cure the problems technology has created — that we can go to solar-powered cars, renewable energy sources, etc. But such new technologies depend on whether huge amounts of investment capital are put into them, and as we see, the big money is already sticking with the status quo. This reminds me of the great game plan: "Stupidity got us into this mess, and stupidity will get us out of it."

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Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

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