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Limbaugh Feasts on Ignorance

Professor Bruce E. Johansen

Rush Limbaugh is losing no sleep over the fate of the polar bears. The notoriously rich and obnoxiously famous radio commentator draws a weekly audience of about 14 million. With customary self-puffery, he inflates the audience to 20 million, permitting the “confiscatory” (his word) advertising rates that earn him a $40 million annual salary.

Limbaugh regularly lambastes human-caused global warming as a ruse and a hoax perpetuated by government scientists aiming to fatten themselves at the public trough. In his own life, however, Limbaugh is scarcely one for skimping. Though he lives alone (he does have a cat), he is described in the July 6, 2008 The New York Times Sunday Magazine as owning a beach-front estate at Palm Beach, Florida that includes five homes (the largest, with 24,000 square feet, is his principal residence). And he regularly flies in style on a $54 million Gulfstream G550. Anyone who might complain about Al Gore’s carbon footprint can rest assured that Limbaugh makes Gore look like a hobo.

In a sane society, Rush Limbaugh’s lifestyle would be illegal. In ours, saying such a thing might get me labeled a Commie — and no doubt would, if Limbaugh ever read the Nebraska Report.

I am not holding my breath. Limbaugh, who lost his hearing several years ago, is deaf (in more ways than one).

Drought and Deluge

In the meantime, as Limbaugh relishes his riches, the steady drumbeat of global-warming bulletins continues in the rest of the world. Distortions of the hydrological cycle became more obvious. During June 2008, large parts of California suffered its worst drought on record (since 1895), provoking a record number of wildfires. At the same time, flooding rains repeatedly doused large parts of the Midwest, including Indiana and Iowa, both of which spent part of June one-third under water. And Florida and the Gulf Coast have been repeatedly battered by a one-twothree punch of Fay, Gustav and Ike.

As daily news reports hammered home extremes of deluge and drought, a scientific report put the reports into context. The frequency of torrential rainstorms in the Midwest has jumped 20 percent since the late 1960s, according to Amanda Staudt, a climate scientist with the National Wildlife Federation. “Global warming is making tragedies like these more frequent and more intense,” Staudt said. “As climate continues to warm and we have even more moisture in the air, the trend toward increasingly intense weather events will continue. These are not random events,” she said. “We are getting a systematic pattern of floods larger and more frequent than estimated by those calculations.”

Another 500-year flood? Didn’t we have one of those in Iowa 15 years ago, in 1993? Maybe Limbaugh will get the point when his beach slips into the sea following a direct hit by a tropical storm or hurricane goosed by warming sea water. Or not. A guy like him is perfectly capable of ignoring the obvious right down to the last ice cube.

Speaking at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco during December 2007, Richard Alley, of Pennsylvania State University/State College surveyed the major — and accelerating — effects that a relatively small amount of warming (compared to what is anticipated for the rest of the century) is having on the melting of ice in the Arctic and Antarctic. “If a very small warming makes such a difference,” asked Alley, “it raises the question of what happens when more warming occurs.”

At the same meeting, Josefino Comiso of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said that “the tipping point for perennial sea ice has likely already been reached.”

Oilman Pickens Gets the Drift

Someone who is richer than Limbaugh has his ear to the ground. I’m not talking hear about Warren Buffett, although I could be. He has become an advocate of wind power. Instead, my stalking horse for environmental awareness is Texas billionaire T. Boone Pickens, who made his fortune in oil. This past summer, Pickens undertook a massive campaign in favor of alternative energy, most notably wind power, to break the United States’ dependency on petroleum. Pickens, 80, told a press conference in New York July 8, 2008: “I’ve been an oil man all my life, but this is one emergency we can’t drill our way out of. But if we create a new renewable energy network, we can break our addiction to foreign oil.”

In 1970, said Pickens, the United States imported 24 percent of its oil. In 2008, that figure was 70 percent and growing. At $135 a barrel, the United States will spend $700 billion on oil exports in one year, more than four times the annual cost of the Iraq War.

The United States, with 4 percent of the world’s population, consumes 25 percent of its oil production. Pickens started a media campaign advancing his plan to cut U.S. oil consumption one-third in 10 years. Much of the plan calls for massive development of wind energy. Pickens himself already has invested heavily in wind. He knows the future when he sees it, while Limbaugh feasts on (and encourages) ignorance.

Bikes on New York City’s Mean Streets

And there’s more. Turn off the radio, put Rush Limbaugh in the Fossil Fuel Museum and consider New York City, where bicycles are getting a boost on what used to be some of the meanest urban streets in the country. Limbaugh should invest in a bicycle. He might learn something, and lose a few pounds at the same time.

In 2008, New York City opened protected bicycle lanes in a few parts of the city to make commutes less treacherous, after an average of 23 riders died annually in collisions with cars and trucks for seven years. Despite the risky nature of riding, bicycle use in New York City has increased 75 percent since 2000, to about 130,000 commuters a day. “We’ve run out of room for driving in the city. We have to make it easier for people to get around by bikes,” said Janette Sadik-Khan, the city’s transportation commissioner, who rides a bike to work herself. Manhattan-based Vogue magazine called bicycles “the hottest accessory” and said that “two wheels and a wicker basket [has] become the perfect complement to the smart urban girl’s spring style.”

The city installed covered bike racks that look much like bus shelters, distributed free helmets and expanded a 400-mile network of bike lanes. Chicago also has created hundreds of miles of bike lanes, created a station with valet parking, showers and indoor racks, and has established penalties of as much as $500 for motorists who endanger cyclists. Both cities are emulating Paris, which by 2008 had a bicycle-sharing program with 200,000 bikes.

Frederick W. Kayser Professor of Communication at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, Johansen is the author of the three-volume “Global Warming in the Twenty-First Century” (Praeger, 2006).