The Profits of Global Warming

Script by Mark Hertsgaard
Marketplace, May 4, 2006

Denial can get expensive. Just think back to the oil shock of 1973. Despite soaring gas prices, auto executives insisted that American consumers would never drive smaller cars. So, the Japanese got busy and eventually grabbed half of the US market.

Today, its denial of global warming thats threatening US jobs and profits. Global warming is transforming the business risks and opportunities facing every company in the world.

Toyota and Honda are far ahead in hybrid car sales. And US firms are losing out in other sectors too. Our solar and wind power manufacturers once led the world. Now, we trail the Germans, Danes, and even the Spanish.

In February, the E-U, not the U-S, signed a memorandum of understanding with China that could lead to billions of dollars in trade deals for a new generation of carbon-neutral power plants.

Most American business leaders still don't get what's hit them. But its not entirely their fault.

For fifteen years, Exxon Mobil and other companies spent millions to promote scientific uncertainty about global warming. They did it by funding contrarian scientists, lobbyists and PR outfits. Media outlets like the Wall Street Journal did the rest.

The deniers borrowed their tactics, and even their scientists, from the tobacco industry. In the 1980s former National Academy of Sciences president Frederick Seitz directed a $45 million research program for R. J. Reynolds that deliberately ignored the health effects of smoking. In the 1990s, Seitz became a leading global warming denier, a stance he says reflected his scientific judgment.

Exxon's PR campaign ended up hurting not only the environment but other US companies and their global competitiveness.

Foreign firms are winning the green technology race in large part because their governments, unlike Washington, take global warming seriously.

The US can do the same. But first it must reject the denials pedaled by defenders of a status quo that cannot last.

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Mark Hertsgaard is the environmental correspondent for The Nation. His article on global warming, While Washington Slept, appeared in Vanity Fair's May 2006 "green issue".