E-mail a friendChris Mooney
airdate October 26, 2007
Named one of Wired magazine's 10 'sexiest geeks,' Chris Mooney is Seed magazine's Washington correspondent. His blog won Scientific American's Science and Technology Web award, and his first book, The Republican War on Science, was called a 'landmark in contemporary political reporting." His latest, Storm World, addresses hurricanes, politics and global warming. A Yale grad, Mooney grew up in New Orleans and has worked for The American Prospect and contributed to a variety of other publications.
Chris Mooney
Tavis: Chris Mooney is the Washington correspondent for "Seed" magazine where he's written extensively about the intersection of science and politics in American life. His latest work on the science of hurricanes has a very personal slant. His family was in New Orleans when Katrina struck, destroying his mother's house and displacing several family members.
His acclaimed new book is called "Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics and the Battle Over Global Warming." Chris, nice to have you back on the program.
Chris Mooney: It's great to be back.
Tavis: Let me start by asking the obvious question. How is your momma and your family?
Mooney: Doing better, you know. Two years have passed now and people adjust, but my mom definitely had a hard time. She lost her home. It's now a vacant lot and she hasn't been able to sell it, so she's actually staying at our family house in Flagstaff, Arizona for the time being.
Tavis: What are her plans? Does she want to go back?
Mooney: Well, yeah. There's a lot of uncertainty right now. It's unclear how long she's going to stay. She can't sort of sell what was the nest egg, you know. It's not entirely clear, but my brother is in New Orleans. He had to flee, but he eventually got back. He's a jazz musician, so that's something of a pull in terms of coming back.
Tavis: What does your mother and what do you make of the fact that, to your point, it has been now over two years and this great American city still, at the federal level at least, has not been supporting in its recovery in the way that many think it should be?
Mooney: Well, I do go back something like every three or four months. The city does look a little better every time, but on the policy level, you're absolutely right. I mean, we're not doing the kind of things we should be doing to give people the confidence they need to come back.
The Corps of Engineers is slowly, slowly building something like a hundred-year hurricane protection. It's supposed to be completed by 2010, I believe, but that's not enough. That's not the worst case scenario. That's not Katrina protections. Why would someone want to go back and start their life again in a place that isn't protected?
Tavis: Does your mother have an answer to that question? Does your brother have an answer to that question?
Mooney: (Laughter) Well, my brother's got to be there, you know. I mean, they're thinking about it. They read my book, so maybe they have more of an answer than some.
Tavis: (Laughter) I'm laughing, but what you have in this book is really no joking matter, so I better turn serious real fast. Before I get into the particulars found in the text, let me start by asking, since it's all the news, of course, of late.
Al Gore, we all know, won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on global warming, won an Academy Award for that, so he with others helped put this issue kind of front and center, to his credit. That said, what is it about this subject matter that makes it the political football right about now, this issue of global warming, this issue of science?
Because you got Al Gore and others making their case honored with the Nobel Prize, but on the other hand, a lot of folk who are really, really taking on the science that suggests that we humans have anything to do with this. What's making this issue such a political football?
Mooney: Well, because if Al Gore is right - and I think he is right and I congratulate him. I think he deserved that prize. If he's right, then what it essentially means is we've got to rethink the entire way in which we power our global society because it's an energy problem. We've been burning fossil fuels willy-nilly for a long time and now this is the bill. This is what the consequence is going to be.
It means we have to find a completely different way of getting energy. Transportation is going to have to be powered differently. Your home is going to have to be powered eventually or else we're going to keep burning fossil fuels and we're going to keep warming the planet. There's so many entrenched interests that don't want to change the way they do things. It's across the whole economy.
Tavis: The politics of the entrenched interest, I get. I want to come back to that in a second. What I don't get is how we fight over the science. Tell me more about the fight over the science part of it. I mean, either we as humans do have something to do with it or we don't. What's the fight about over the science?
Mooney: Absolutely. Well, the science is increasingly clear. Humans are causing it. We're driving a global warming trend. But it's a really good strategy. If you want to create inaction, you sow doubt about the scientific information and you create the semblance of uncertainly, a fog of uncertainty, which is what the tobacco companies did for smoking and health.
It's the same basic strategy. Then you can convince politicians that they don't need to do anything right away. It's called paralysis by analysis and it's a tried and true technique that's been used across a wide variety of issues and global warming is just the latest one.
Tavis: Tell me more then, to your earlier point, about these interests that are entrenched that don't want to see this conversation change.
Mooney: Well, to some extent, that is changing, but certainly fossil fuel companies like the ExxonMobils have been fighting over the science and questioning it for a long time. You have other companies like Shell-BP that have been more accepting.
I think generally fossil fuel companies are moving more towards the position that they've got to do something and they've got to get ready for the new economy that's coming in which we're going to regulate greenhouse gases. They'd better be ready or else they're not going to be economically successful.
Tavis: To your point now, if I'm ExxonMobil, since you mentioned them as a company, or any other company, to your point again, is fighting the science on this, tell me how they could remain - not that ExxonMobil needs extra money with the price of gasoline (laughter) - but tell me how they could stay in business with this new paradigm shift, with a new formulation about how we look at global warming.
How could a company like that, if they accepted this and get with it in the way you're suggesting that they should deal with it, still make money?
Mooney: Well, BP wants to be called "Beyond Petroleum." The idea is that you got a massive company. It's able to invest in research and development in terms of bringing online different ways of getting energy, so they're going to be selling fossil fuels for a long time to come, of course.
But insofar as they're looking forward to new energy alternatives, if they get into that market realizing that there's going to be a lot of money to be made in that market because society is going to have to change, then they're going to be ahead of the game.
Tavis: Okay, to the book specifically "Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics and the Battle Over Global Warming." We live, do we, in a storm world?
Mooney: Oh, absolutely. Something like eighty globally tropical storms per year and that's tropical storms up to hurricanes the most intense.
Tavis: And what's driving that?
Mooney: Well, essentially you got to get a lot of heat out of the tropical oceans. You know, heat from the sun accumulates near the equator, which is what gets the most sunlight. So you have a storm disturbance come along and hurricanes are known to be a great way of pumping all that energy in the ocean up in the atmosphere where it can move northward.
Tavis: So a foregone conclusion, then, that we're going to be seeing more of these hurricanes, more forceful hurricanes, as a result of this?
Mooney: Well, it's tricky there because you could actually have a tradeoff between numbers and intensities. You could have more intense ones, but less in total. What scientists think is that it's likely the storms are going to increase in intensity and ferocity. The maximum wind speed on average should increase and that's really scary. The reason is that global warming is going to trap more heat in the oceans and, if you got more heat there, then you can have a more powerful hurricane.
Tavis: What are the politics on this particular issue and are they different politics than on the issue of global warming overall, generally speaking?
Mooney: They overlap. It's interesting. The hurricane issue became kind of the poster child for global warming as a whole after Katrina because we saw this massive disaster and the American public wanted to know what's going on with the atmosphere and the oceans.
How can we have such a dramatic, devastating hurricane season as we did in 2005? So suddenly, the people who were attacking the science of global warming started attacking the signs of hurricanes and global warming. So in that sense, it's consistent.
But on the other hand, the hurricane issue has a lot of local implications for exposed coastal areas and perhaps not as many for states that don't have coastlines. In that sense, the politics are different. You got to look at Florida politics, you got to look at Louisiana politics and you got to go state by state.
Tavis: Let me ask you two questions about Republicans. One about the current occupant of the White House, President Bush, and the other about the Republicans running to take his place in the Oval Office in 2008. The latter first. I just read an article the other day that suggested that amongst those running now for the GOP presidential nomination, there is a divide on the issue of global warming.
There isn't this uniformity like there was some time ago, uniformity opposed to the science on global warming. Now there's a divide about global warming and what our responsibility is as humans to do something about it. What's your read on that divide amongst some of these candidates running for the GOP nomination?
Mooney: I think that's accurate. There is a divide. This is the triumph of Al Gore. The issue is shifting and it's becoming harder and harder to be a denier, to be questioning the science. It's becoming kind of embarrassing to be a denier at this point.
So you have some Republicans, the more conservative ones, the kind of Tom Tancredos who are still out there still questioning the science. But if you look at the whole field, you find you have some of the more moderates, the McCains, the Giulianis, they accept human causation.
They realize that we got to do something about it. Even somebody like Sam Brownback. Mike Huckabee is talking about how we have to find different energy solutions for powering our societies because we can't stick with fossil fuels into the indefinite future. I think the issue is turning. I think we're going to get the policy solutions we need in the next presidency.
Tavis: Am I missing something here? Can you be in support of finding alternative fuel sources and still be at the same time opposed to this notion of global warming and our role in it?
Mooney: Well, you might sort of try to weave a complicated argument for a while. Even though we're not sure about the science, it's probably a good idea to be changing the way we get energy anyway. I think you need to really accept the science. I think increasingly these Republicans do. I think there's a lot of holdouts.
There's been so much politicization, so much fighting over this. A lot of people have made up their minds that there's no global warming and they may really take that to the grave in some cases.
Tavis: So finally to President Bush. Depending on one's perspective, either he won the election or stole it from Al Gore, but his presidency is in the doldrums right about now. We have no idea. We can make a pretty good guess, though, about how history is going to regard his presidency.
Meanwhile, the guy who he beat or stole the election from, depending again on your point of view, Al Gore, Academy Award winner, Nobel Laureate, worth a hundred millions now when he had no money back in the day, Al Gore's doing okay. No pity party for Al Gore.
But it does paint up an interesting juxtaposition between, you know, where one guy is ending up, where the other guy ends up. Talk to me about the irony in that and its connection to this issue of global warming that's put Al Gore front and center.
Mooney: Well, you don't want to position yourself against reality. I think that that's what it shows. You know, the Bush administration, one administration official is quoted in "The New York Times" denouncing the reality-based community. It was the famous phrase and it sort of circulated.
In some sense, that was true. The Bush administration didn't take science seriously across a wide variety of issues. This was what my first book was about. It wasn't just global warming, but stem cell research, absence education, Plan B emergency contraception. Global warming is in some ways the biggest.
Well, Al Gore did. Al Gore sort of put his stakes in the science and look who's being vindicated now? Because the science kept getting stronger and Al Gore was the one who had the answers.
Tavis: Not that it matters, but I just happen to know that Chris Mooney just celebrated his thirtieth birthday. So it just goes to underscore that, even as a young person, you can start to wrestle with these very weighty issues and have something to add to the dialog.
His first book, "The Republican War on Science," his new book, "Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics and the Battle Over Global Warming." Chris Mooney, nice to have you on the program. Good to have you here.
Mooney: It's been great to be here.
Back to October 26, 2007