Spinning the world: making visible the genealogies of environmental policy.

In the contemporary United States, a host of political and commercial entities are challenging academically produced knowledge and, in particular, scientific discourse. At the heart of these attacks are struggles to shape public opinion in a manner favorable to various elite, government, and commercial interests. In this context, radical scholars and teachers may well return to the roots of the rhetorical tradition. We should teach students to examine public debates and analyze the methods and motives that interlocutors use to persuade and to shape belief, to examine the sources for such information and to inquire into the social, political, and economic contexts in which these efforts occur. Scholars and teachers of rhetoric, literacy, and others involved in environmental education can turn to the foundation of rhetorical study, as Donald Lazere urges in "Postmodern Pluralism and the Retreat from Political Literacy," and foreground the fundamentals of political literacy in the classroom and the various forums available to us.

What is alternatively termed "critical," "civic," and "information" literacy requires that students and all citizens educate themselves in order to engage issues of public policy in an informed manner. This process usually occurs in two stages. Students first need to learn about the environment by evaluating scientific evidence on a topic: that is, recognizing the main points of agreement and dissent on the issues. Then they can identify the steps needed to address environmental problems. This process provides a firm foundation for environmental education. It is equally important in the contemporary U.S. context, however, that environmental education include a third stage, one that examines political and corporate efforts in the United States to shape public opinion on environmental issues.

Students can progress to this third stage of education by learning and generating what I term "genealogies" of the environment that lay out the political debates over environmental issues and that illustrate how popular beliefs are manipulated and factual discourse is suppressed in the formation of public policy. Constructing these genealogies would make the struggles over public discourses and policies visible in the classroom and in other venues to demonstrate who is shaping these discourses, particularly as they are played out in cultural politics, and policies, and for what ends. Knowledge of the political and commercial efforts to suppress or reframe environmental research that is unfavorable to political and industry concerns--whether this research regards vocational hazards, air and water pollution, habitat alteration, or global warming--allows students to critically evaluate the sources of these messages. By making visible in these genealogies corporate and political attempts to frame public debates on environmental policy, students can learn about campaigns to shape public opinion, identify the language and arguments used to frame environmental issues, and resist this political and commercial rhetoric.

In this essay, I examine political and corporate efforts to shape public opinion on global warming and offer some suggestions for both teaching students about these efforts and helping students to create their own environmental genealogies. Global warming is a particularly telling example to illustrate how popular beliefs are manipulated and factual discourse is suppressed in the formation of contemporary U.S. public policy and opinion. Climate change science, the interdisciplinary area of study responsible for assessing changes in the complex systems that comprise the Earth's atmosphere, has encountered challenges to its authority and expertise for decades, but it has been literally under siege by governmental officials and the energy industry as it has produced increasingly alarming evidence of global warming over the past decade.

Moving genealogies into the classroom requires that we both assemble genealogies as demonstration for our students and teach students how to construct genealogies themselves. In each case, compiling a genealogy relies on rhetorical analysis and information literacy. Rhetorical analysis involves considering the methods and motives that interlocutors use to persuade and to shape belief, examining the sources for bias and authority, and inquiring into the social, political, and economic contexts that shape particular texts, speeches, and discourses. Information literacy is broadly defined as the ability to recognize when information is needed and to locate, evaluate, and use the needed information effectively. (1) Rhetorical analysis and information literacy overlap in terms of locating and evaluating knowledge, distinguishing between different communicative purposes and thus kinds of information, and considering the social, political, and economic contexts in which information circulates.

To assemble a genealogy, and to teach students to create their own genealogies, researchers need to learn how to find information, critically evaluate the sources of information, distinguish knowledge from opinion, and compose arguments that draw on multiple sources to make lucid the genealogy of an environmental issue. Any effort to generate a genealogy of the public debates on the environment requires tracing the multiple and simultaneous efforts to shape public policy in a manner favorable to corporate and political interests and relies on a variety of sources, including professional journal articles, scientific research reports, print and broadcast news reports, muckraking texts, investigative journalism, governmental reports, letters, and speeches.

Many online news sources announce the publication of a new scientific report on the environment in venues such as Science or Nature, and students can use databases such as Lexis/Nexis or America's newspapers--both usually available from the Gated Web of the university library--to find past reports of these scientific reports, as well as accounts of whistle blower efforts, investigative reports on the political struggle, and debates about the environmental issue. Teachers can work with librarians to teach students how to search for these sources across the relevant databases and to design assignments that develop students' abilities to find relevant information.

Perhaps the popularity of Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth will result in more students who are informed about global warming. When I have introduced global warming as a key politically inflected controversy in the contemporary U.S., however, the majority of my students say one of two things: either that they do not know much about global warming or that no one does. For this reason, a reasonable place to begin discussion of global warming is by examining the scientific evidence on climate change and identifying the main points of agreement and disagreement on the issues. While considerable debate remains among climate change scientists about how much the Earth's temperature will change, and how change will happen, there is a wide consensus on the two central facts of climate change: the Earth is warming and this warming trend can be attributed in large part to human activity in the form of industrial, domestic, and vehicular emissions. (2)

To learn about the consensus and key points of remaining uncertainty, students can read summaries of primary reports on global warming such as Climate Change Science: An Analysis of Some Key Questions, produced by the National Research Council's Committee on the Science of Climate Change, (3) or the Summary for Policy Makers: Aviation and the Global Atmosphere, produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Control Working Group I and III. (4) Both of these reports should be introduced with a discussion of the history, mission, and membership of the scientific organizations that produced them, information which is easily accessible on the Free Web via Google or another search engine. Students can also turn to a secondary but significant source, a summary of the consensus on global warming that historian of science Naomi Oreskes presents in "Beyond the Ivory Tower: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change."

Because scientific reports--even policy summaries--involve more extensive and careful qualification than popular sources and many text books, it would be useful to spend some time discussing the genre of scientific writing, analyzing the significance of the qualifiers that are used in the reports to assign certainty, and considering how and why these qualifiers are relevant to policy debates. Without this discussion, some students will likely view the scientific use of qualifiers as equivocating. Class time should also be devoted in discussing the methods used to determine global warming, the types of evidence on which the report relies, and the basis of authority and credibility that students can attribute to the reports. This discussion dovetails nicely with a discussion of the history, mission, and membership of the scientific organizations and can be used to introduce the criteria that students can use to determine the authority of a source, including competence, trustworthiness, sphere of expertise, bias, and conflicts of interest. In these discussions, teachers can introduce the concept of and reasons for the anonymous peer review process to which research and scholarship is submitted; the distinctions between opinion and knowledge; the ideas of domains or spheres of expertise and their relation to credibility; and the criteria for credibility, including how a conflict of interest can undermine the authority of a source. These areas for discussion--the methods on which a source relies to offer information, the evidence presented, a source's apparent purpose and motives, the kind of communication that a source provides; and the credibility, expertise, and authority of a source--all comprise the primary elements of rhetorical analysis.

Once students under stand the scientific consensus and debates about global warming, they should be presented with a genealogy that the teacher has compiled of the struggles over the definitions of global warming and climate change. The abbreviated genealogy I present below demonstrates that, despite the wide scientific consensus on the two primary conclusions about global warming, many congressional, administrative, and Party Republicans, Republican political strategists, and energy industry officials labor to represent research on global warming as uncertain or even, as in the case of Senator James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, "'the greatest hoax ever perpetuated on the American people.'" (5)

Commercial and political challenges to climate change science on global warming are multiple and include efforts to: 1) amplify uncertainty and manufacture it where it does not exist, 2) change the language and discourse in which global warming is discussed and reported, 3) manipulate, edit and suppress politically unfavorable scientific and policy reports, 4) generate flak in the form of funding reports that oppose scientific research results, 5) manipulate the appointees in key environmental policy positions, and 6) intimidate climate change scientists producing unwanted results. Efforts to amplify the uncertainty of research on global warming are evident in various speeches made by representatives of the White House. Even before he became president, for example, in the second presidential debate with Al Gore, George W. Bush stated, "I don't think we know the solution to global warming yet, and I don't think we've got all the facts." (6) After he became president, Bush continued to frame global warming as uncertain, stating in reference to a 2000 National Academy of Sciences (NAS) climate change report, for example, that while the report "indicate(s) that the increase is due in large part to human activity,"

   The report tells us that we do not
   know how much effect natural fluctuations
   in climate may have had on
   warming. We do not know how
   much our climate could, or will
   change in the future. We
   fast
   do not know how
   change will occur, or
   even how some of
   our actions
   could impact it
   (emphasis
   added). (7)

He repeats this emphasis on uncertainty during his announcement of the Clear Skies Legislation that endorses voluntary efforts by the energy industry to control emissions. (8) These efforts of White House efforts to assign uncertainty to climate change science research are strategic, coordinated, and can be traced to a 2002 memo that Republican political consultant Frank Luntz (9) wrote for the Republican Party. (10)

In the memo, Luntz advises the Party to change the language in which they speak about global warming, noting that voters currently believe that there is no consensus on global warming, but writes that should "the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly." Therefore, he adds, "You need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate." He also suggests that Republicans refer to global warming as "climate change" to moderate its impact on voters. (11) As a result, while the phrase "global warming" appeared frequently in Bush's speeches in 2001, it decreased markedly after the 2002 memo. (12)

Whistle blowers, journalists, and non-profit advocacy groups have revealed efforts to alter, manipulate, and suppress the results of climate change. In 2003, for example, The New York Times revealed that White House officials had demanded that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) remove from a report references to a study showing sharp increases in global temperatures and replace them with references to a study partially financed by the American Petroleum Institute. The EPA ultimately removed the entire section on global warming from its report rather than make the changes, which effectively suppressed the research results. (13) In September 2006, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) also blocked the release of an entire report that suggested that global warming contributes to the frequency and strength of hurricanes. (14)

The former chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, Philip Cooney, edited government reports on climate change in 2005 to introduce doubt about its findings, adding phrases such as "significant and fundamental" before the word "uncertainties," and deleted a paragraph from an earlier 2002 report discussing impact of that global warming on glaciers, the polar ice cap, flooding and water availability. (15) Prior to his White House assignment, Cooney headed the American Petroleum Institute's climate program, the trade group for the largest U.S. oil companies. He resigned two days after the whistle blower revealed that he altered the documents, (16) and, shortly afterwards, the White House announced that he would join Exxon Mobil while defending his actions as being "part of the normal, wide-ranging review process." (17)

Similarly, Cooney's replacement, James Connaughton, did not deny reports that administration officials toned down negative language on global warming in reports to be presented at the 2005 G-8 meeting, but instead he redirected attention to the economy. (18) Instead of relying on the array of primary and proxy evidence that climate change science has marshaled--melting glaciers, ice caps, and tundra; rising sea levels; extended growing seasons; or tree rings, ice cores and changes in the distribution of plant and migration of animal species--White House officials have reframed discussion of global warming using the language and logic of the economy. Within this framework, global warming is measured and regulated by greenhouse gas intensity.

Greenhouse gas intensity measures greenhouse gas emission intensity relative to economic activity, with greenhouse gas intensity defined as the ratio of carbon dioxide to a measure of economic output. (19) The policy gives transferable credits to companies that voluntarily participate in the program and that can demonstrate they have reduced emissions. If the economy grows more quickly than the rate at which emission intensity improves, then overall emissions will continue to increase. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported in March 2006 that this is exactly what is occurring; in 2004, the U.S. emitted more greenhouse gases than at any time in history. (20) Within this framework offered by greenhouse gas intensity, the language and logic of the economy determines whether or not steps will be taken to curb global warming, not the language, logic, or research of climate change scientists.

Flak comes in the form of research that is funded to oppose climate change scientific reports, the removal of climate change scientists from key policy positions, and the intimidation of scientists who produce evidence of global warming. Beginning in the late 1980s, for instance, Exxon Mobil has funded approximately forty organizations dedicated to debunking global warming. (21) In September of 2006, the Senior Manager of Policy Communication for the Royal Society, Britain's top scientific academy, wrote to Exxon Mobil expressing the Society's concern about Exxon Mobil's support for groups that have "misrepresented the science of climate change by outright denial of the evidence" and questioned whether Exxon Mobil "will be continuing to express views that are inconsistent with the findings of [climate researchers who are Fellows of the Royal Society]." (22) A leaked memo revealed that in 2001 Exxon Mobil asked the White House to get the current chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Robert Watson, replaced at its request because he repeatedly had called for urgent action on global warming, and the White House subsequently lobbied successfully for his replacement. (23) Chair of the House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce, Joe Barton, launched an investigation in 2005 of three climate change scientists whose research demonstrated that global temperatures have risen rapidly in recent decades. Barton asked the scientists to submit everything that they had ever published and all of their baseline data to his committee so that it could "check its validity" to intimidate the scientists. (24) Barton is known to be closely associated with the fossil-fuel lobby and has spent over a decade opposing legislation designed to address global warming. (25) All of these efforts--to generate uncertainty, manipulate and edit scientific reports, manufacture opposing research, and remove or intimidate climate change scientists--comprise an abbreviated genealogy of the political struggle over global warming.

The genealogy I provide here draws on my research on the contemporary state of public discourse and deliberation in the U.S., but students can learn how to trace and compile genealogies themselves with the help of teachers and consulting librarians. As the genealogy I present here demonstrates, a key task in composing genealogies is finding enough evidence to demonstrate what efforts exist to shape environmental debates and then marshalling this evidence to demonstrate what links exist between these disparate efforts. Students will need to compile evidence from a variety of sources, including speeches, letters, memos and governmental reports; they will need to read scientific reports, muckraking texts, and professional journals. Students will need to familiarize themselves with a range of print and broadcast news sources and locate the political biases of these sources. They should learn how to collect relevant documents, determine how these documents are connected, and develop arguments for the links between the evidence. All of these processes are at the heart of critical and rhetorical analysis and reasoned evidential discourse. All of the processes involve the use of interpretation and evaluation to assess the meaning, effect, or social function of a text or discourse. This kind of work can result in the response given by one of my students after examining Climate Change Science: An Analysis of Some Key Questions. The student argued that the National Research Council needed to include a key to the qualifiers used in their reports for policy makers and offer more guidelines so that policy makers do not simply dismiss these reports as "waffling" or equivocating too much.

While there is a dearth of reasoned discourse in a national arena defined by sound bites and spectacles, this is not, Noam Chomsky argues, because "there is any shortage of opportunities or interest" in reasoned discourse amongst U.S. publics and those of us dismissed by opponents of global warming as "the reality-based community." (26) At the same time, not all of the students who show up in environmental studies classrooms will share its outlooks, will welcome the agendas of the course, or even be swayed by the evidential arguments that genealogies present. Any one who has moved a contemporary controversy into the classroom for discussion knows that students' responses--like all of our responses--will vary widely and will not be limited to only reasoned or rational reactions. Thus, when we move discussions of these struggles over the environment in the form of genealogies into the classroom, we also will have to consider students' reception of them.

A number of the students that I teach in Northeast Ohio, for example, may view the genealogy that I present here on global warming as Bush bashing and as violating their primary commitments. Simply laying out the facts will not necessarily persuade or reassure these students; students and all people regularly reject facts that do not fit their prior understandings, commitments, and worldviews, as Marshall Alcorn elaborates in Changing the Subject in English Class. What any one of us believes to be true will significantly shape our emotional responses to what we perceive. When students committed to the authority of President Bush or the Republican Party are presented with a genealogy such as the one I have offered for global warming, they are likely to react with a sense of betrayal, anger, resentment, disbelief, or disavowal. A growing body of work in English Studies and rhetoric and composition address the role of emotions in education and present emergent pedagogies of emotion. (27) What is clear from this body of work is that there are no obvious pedagogical solutions that address the emotional attachment to political beliefs. Acknowledging the validity of students' anger, resentment, disappointment and disavow al, however, may be one opening to discuss the implications of these genealogies for students' lives. Any attempt to represent "both sides" of the debates on global warming in an effort to be objective ("fair and balanced") would be futile, as I hope the genealogy I present here demonstrates.

The debates over global warming have high stakes for all life on Earth, and high stakes in the form of profit and power for critics of global warming. Certainly the profits reaped by the energy industry in recent years are extraordinary: in early 2006, for instance, Exxon Mobil posted the largest annual profit ever for a U.S. company. (28) In 2005, Exxon Mobil's third quarter revenue was greater than the annual gross domestic product of the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait. (29) A small proportion of these profits are passed on to politicians to support their political campaigns for election and, in turn, these politicians ensure that energy industry-friendly legislation is enacted. Promising changes in the U.S. political system are campaign-funding regulations such as proposed in California Proposition 89 to use public funds to support candidates for state offices and restrict the amount of contributions candidates that do not receive public funding can receive. (30) Whether these structural changes will take place or not remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, what radical teachers can do, I argue, is both radical and very traditional--we can teach towards critical, civic, and information literary and contribute to the possibilities of informed public debates on environmental issues. Radical pedagogy is traditional because it implies going back to the root, tradition, or foundation of something, such as democracy, and "revolutionary" because it favors a fundamental change in unjust social structures or status quos. Both of these radical aims are involved in the criticism of national public discourse and accomplished in part through the basic practices of rhetorical analysis.

I have suggested that one key instructional move in environmental education is to make the public debates over the environmental visible: to teach students genealogies of commercial, political, and scientific struggles to define environmental policy. If students learn to trace and analyze political and commercial efforts to shape national debates and public opinion on environmental issues, they are better prepared to resist efforts to manipulate their opinion and hopefully can move the environmental genealogies that they have created into the various public and educational venues in which they participate.

WORKS CITED

Alcorn, Marshall W. Changing the Subject in English Class: Discourse and the Constructions of Desire. Carbondale: Southern Illinois U, 2002.

Banning, Marlia. "The Politics of Resentment." JAC 26.1 (2006).

Berman, Jeffrey. Diaries to an English Professor. Amherst: U of Massachusetts, 1994. http://kentlink.kent.edu/search/ tDiaries+to+an+ENglish+Profess or/tdiaries+to+an+english+ professor/1%2C1%2C1%2CB/18 56&FF=tdiaries+to+an+ english+professor&1%2C0%2C %2C1%2C0.

Boler, Megan. Feeling Power: Emotions and Education. New York: Routledge, 1999.

Bracher, Mark. "Healing Trauma, Preventing Violence: A Radical Agenda for Literary Study." JAC 24.3 (2004): 515-561.

Brown, Wendy. "Wounded Attachments: Late Modern Oppositional Political Formations." The Identity in Question. Ed. John Rajchman. New York: Routledge, 1995. 199-227.

Crowley, Sharon. Towards a Civil Discourse: Rhetoric and Fundamentalism. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 2006.

Jacobs, Dale and Laura Michiche, ed. A Way to Move: Rhetorics of Emotion & Composition Studies. Portsmouth: Boynton/Cook, 2003.

Lazere, Donald. "Postmodern Pluralism and the Retreat from Political Literacy." JAC 25.2 (2005): 257-291.

Micciche, Laura. "When Class Equals Crass: A Working-Class Student's Ways with Anger." Blundering for a Change: Errors & Expectations in Critical Pedagogy. Ed. John Paul Tassoni and William H. Thelin. Portsmouth: Boynton/Cook, 2000.

Worsham, Lynn. "Afterword: Moving Beyond a Sentimental Education." A Way to Move: Rhetorics of Emotion & Composition Studies. Ed. Dale Jacobs and Laura Michiche. Portsmouth: Boynton/Cook, 2003. 161-163.

--. "Going Postal: Pedagogical Violence and the Schooling of Emotion." JAC 18 (1998): 213-245.

--. "Emotion and Pedagogic Violence." Discourse 15.2 (1992): 119-148.

NOTES

(1) This is the definition offered by the American Library Association's Presidential Committee on Information Literacy in their Final Report. Presidential Committee on Information Literacy: Final Report 10 January 1989. http://www. ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlpubs/white papers/presidential.htm.

(2) In order to clarify the confusion in public debates about this consensus a historian of science examined a large sample of peer-reviewed scientific journals on climate change between 1993 and 2003. She found that not a single paper refuted the consensus position that the Earth is warming and that human activities are the principal cause of the warming. See Naomi Oreskes "Beyond the Ivory Tower: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change," Science 3 December 2004 http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/3 06/5702/1686/.

(3) National Research Council. Climate Change Science: An Analysis of Some Key Issues. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 2001.

(4) Penner, Joyce E., David H. Lister, David J. Griggs, David J. Dokken, and Mack McFarland, ed. Summary for Policy Makers: Aviation and the Global Atmosphere. 1999. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Control will release its fourth report in February 2007 and the report summary should be a useful resource to consult. The U.S. Climate Change Science Program leaked the forthcoming report in May 2006 by posting it on its Web site.

(5) Doug Macdougall, "Jolting Messages on Climate Change," Chronicle of Higher Education 14 April 2006 B10.

(6) "The Second Gore-Bush Presidential Debate," Commission of Presidential Debates, 11 October 2006 http://www.debates.org/ pages/trans2000b.html.

(7) Office of the Press Secretary, "President Bush discusses Global Climate Change," 11 June 2001 http://www.whitehouse.gov/ne ws/releases/2001/06/20010611-2.html.

(8) Bush stated that the science regarding global climate change "is more complex, the answers less certain, and the technology less developed." Office of the Press Secretary, "President Announces Clear Skies & Global Climate Change Initiatives," 14 February 2002 http://www.whitehouse. gov/news/releases/2002/02/ 20020214-5.htm.

(9) Luntz is president and CEO of a political consulting, polling, and message-marketing firm and an Adjunct Fellow at the Hudson Institute, an anti-environmental and right wing think tank based in Washington, D.C. He gained national media recognition for crafting the wording of the Republican "Contract with America" for former House Speaker Newt Gingrich in 1994, and more recently, infamy amongst pollsters for having the distinction of being one of the few pollsters reprimanded for his polling practices not once, but twice by professional organizations.

(10) The memo was obtained by the Environmental Working Group, an environmental advocacy organization, and given to the New York Times http://www.ewg.org/ briefings/luntzmemo/. See Oliver Burkeman, "Memo Exposes Bush's New Green Strategy," The Guardian 4 March 2003 http:// www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/ 0,12271,906978,00.html.

(11) This language appears on page 137, tided "Winning the Global Warming Debate," of the document Straight Talk distributed by Luntz's public relations firm from a section titled "The Environment: A Cleaner, Safer, Healthier America," ewg.org/pdf/LuntzResearch_ environment.pdf.

(12) Jennifer Lee, "A Call for Softer, Greener Language," The New York Times 2 March 2003 http://select. nytimes.com/search/restricted/a rticle?res=F3061EF73A580C71 8CDDAA0894DB404482.

(13) Daniel Smith, "Political Science," The New York Times 4 September 2005 http://www.nytimes.com/ 2005/09/04/magazine/ 04SCIENCE.html.

(14) Randolph E. Schmid, "Journal: Agency Blocked Hurricane Report," AP, 27 September 2006 http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/st ories/H/HURRICANE_REPOR T?SITE=WHAS&SECTION= HOME&TEMPLATE= DEFAULT.

(15) Lucy Sherriff, "White House Sexed-down Climate Change Reports," The Register, June 8, 2005 http://www.theregister. co.uk/2005/06/09/white_house_ climate_report/.

(16) See Andrew C. Revkin, "Editor Of Climate Reports Resigns," New York Times 11 June 2005, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D00E4DF1E38F 932A25755C0A9639C8B63, and H. Josef Hebert, "White House Official Singled Out for Editing Climate Reports to Work for Exxon Mobil," Associated Press, 15 June 2005 http://www.enn.com/ today.html?id=7964.

(17) H. Josef Hebert, "White House Official Singled Out for Editing Climate Reports to Work for Exxon Mobil," Associated Press, 15 June 2005 http://www.enn.com/ today.html?id=7964.

(18) Betty Ann Bowser, "Climate Tension," The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, 5 July 2005.

(19) The measure of economic output is usually defined as the emissions produced per dollar of gross economic product.

(20) Steve Connor, "Scientists Condemn US as Emissions of Greenhouse Gases Hit Record Level," Belfast Telegraph, 19 April 2006 http://www. belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/ story.jsp?story=687519.

(21) Andrew Gumbel, "An Immovable Obstacle to Action on Climate Change," Independent 1 June 2006 http://news.independent.co.uk/e nvironment/article622746.ece

(22) Bob Ward, Royal Society Exxon Letter Copy.pdf 4 September 2006.

(23) Geoffrey Lean, "Global Warming Approaching Point of No Return, Warns Leading Climate Expert," Independent/UK, 23 January 2005. Posted on Common Dreams http://www.commondreams.org/ cgi-bin/print.cgi?file=/headlines05/0123-0l.htm.

(24) Richard Monastersky, "Demand for Their Data on Climate Chills Scientists," Chronicle of Higher Education, 24 June 2005: A1.

(25) Paul Brown, "Republicans Accused of Witch-Hunt Against Climate Change Scientists," Guardian 30 August 2005 http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/s tory/0,12271,1558884,00.html.

(26) Noam Chomsky, email to the author, 13 February 2005.

(27) See the below citations for my work, "The Politics of Resentment" and the work of Marshall Alcom, Jeffrey Berman, Megan Boler, Mark Bracher, Wendy Brown, Sharon Crowley, Dale Jacobs and Laura Micciche, Laura Micciche, and Lynn Worsham.

(28) Josh Holusha, "Exxon Mobil Posts Largest Annual Profit for U.S. Company," New York Times 30 January 2006 http://www. nytimes.com/2006/01/30/business/30cnd-exxon.html?hp&ex =1138683600&en=ed7ac904632 44e93&ei=5094&partner= homepage.

(29) "Exxon Mobil Posts Largest Quarterly Profit Ever," Associated Press 27 October 2005 http:// www.msnbc.msn.com/id/ 9837574/.

(30) See the League of Women Voters of California Education Fund Web site for their Nonpartisan Analysis of the proposition, November 2006. http://ca.lwv.org/lwvc/ edfund/elections/2006nov/id/ prop89.html.