In March 1969 Senator Henry M. Jackson of Washington State received a letter from an incensed constituent. The letter writer had watched an episode of a television talk show where the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg claimed that “the current rate of air pollution brought about by the proliferation of automobiles” could cause “the rapid buildup of heat on the earth.” This would melt the polar ice caps and eventually flood “the greater part of the globe.
The constituent wanted the powerful senator to stop Ginsberg—one of America’s “premier kooks,” in his opinion—from spouting such nonsense, but the senator soon learned that it wasn’t nonsense. Jackson reached out to presidential science adviser Lee DuBridge, who affirmed that Americans were “filling the atmosphere with a great many gases and in very large quantities from our automobiles” and that these gases could indeed melt the ice caps and radically change the climate.
This is flat-out false. For one thing, renewable energy is now cheaper than fossil fuels in most places Moreover, poll after poll has shown that most Americans are worried about climate change and are willing to pay to do something about it. In a Gallup poll conducted earlier this year, 74 percent of respondents ranked climate change as either “critical” or “important” to the “vital interests of the United States.
In 1959 Esso debuted the slogan “Put a tiger in your tank,” and for decades the industry never changed its stripes. Now it evidently has: from denying that climate change is a problem to admitting that it is a problem but blaming the public for it. The industry that gave us gas for lighting is gaslighting us.
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