Rick Piltz interview
I spoke to Rick Piltz in regard to his appearance in the film “Everything’s Cool,” which chronicled the efforts to get information on global warming out to the public and past the Republican propaganda machine. Piltz was a senior associate in the Climate Change Science Program Office under Bush — he started under Clinton — a science policy expert who soon became so disgusted with the censorship and altering of data that he went public, an insider who came out.
The film chronicled Piltz’s process of blowing the whistle — I spoke with co-director Judith Helfland about the film — in 2005. Soon after Piltz’s resignation, Philip Cooney was revealed to have been editing government reports on climate change to reflect not the scientific data that was originally in the reports, but the Bush administration’s policies.
Piltz created Climate Science Watch following his life as a civil servant for the purpose of monitoring climate science news and the workings of the government in that regard.
JM: “Everything Cool” manages to be funny and sad at the same time.
RP: They have such a unique filmmaking style, it was so interesting to work with them, I’ve never done anything quite like that before, but I never found myself in a situation quite like that before. I take it as fundamentally being a piece about citizenship, citizen activism, through these personal stories. They get certain things really right, like the focus on this orchestrated disinformation campaign to stall action on global warming, I think they have a really important point, essentially right, in the movie. There’s a very non-cynical take on the value of speaking up, speaking out, and taking action, a very unjaundiced view of that. I appreciate that in them.
JM: When you talk about this disinformation campaign, it is a wider thing other than just global warming — it’s very much a game plan on all fronts.
RP: Sometimes I think, particularly how I’ve criticized and watch dogged the Bush Administration in particular, it seems to me that I have focused on the global warming climate disruption issue because it’s the thing that I’ve been both engaged with here and where I’ve bumped up against the politicization of science directly, so I speak from that direct experience and expertise. It seems to me that I’ve been covering the global warming beat of a more general pattern and the administration has had a pretty cavalier attitude in regard to misrepresenting the intelligence in different areas in order to suit their political purposes. I think that really until a bit into Bush’s second term, people really tended to think “Well, what’s going on here is just a debate about policy.” If that’s all it were, there would be plenty to debate, but these guys were willing to misrepresent, in a variety of ways, the scientific conclusions about climate change in order to conform the message to what they wanted to make happen politically, and that sort of interference introduces a whole different level of problems around integrity and censorship and accountability that I thought really went over the line.
Global warming is not the only area where the evidence is one thing and the politics is something else and it leaves the nation in a tough position, because if you don’t understand the problem and you don’t have a political leadership that is willing to talk about it straightforwardly with people — what the risk is, how we’re going to manage it — then you have a breakdown of the country’s preparedness to deal with problems. Then you have the aftermath in Iraq, then you have the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina — failure of preparedness, failure of preparedness — and we’re doing the same thing on climate change, it’s just a more slow-rolling disaster, so you don’t see it happen quite so fast.
The Salton Sea is a man-made body of water created in 1901 after developers diverted water from the Colorado River and created a prosperous farming community in the Imperial Valley. Silt created by run-off from the farms blocked water entries to the canals, so engineers made cuts to allow the water to flow through, which caused flooding in the valley. Because of the silt, the Salton Sea was a salt water body that did not evaporate. In the 1950s, it was stocked with water in an effort to turn it into a beach resort with fishing opportunities and a high-priced retirement community, but tragedy kept striking — floods returned, followed by two tropical storms, decimating the property, while an over-abundence of algae have caused massive fish die-offs and the 1990s saw thousands of birds die in a plague of avian botulism.
