Frank Carini: Front groups for polluters belch out fake news

From ecoRI News (ecori.org)

The fact that the planet has a fever isn’t debatable. The millions of dollars lackeys for the fossil-fuel industry spend to discredit climate science doesn’t change reality.

Nearly 100 percent of climate scientists agree that human activity, most notably the burning of fossil fuels, is changing life on Earth — and not for the better, especially for humans.

It’s been more than five decades since scientists first expressed concern to a U.S. president about the dangers of a changing climate. Last year’s Fourth National Climate Assessment — the work of 13 federal agencies and 350 scientists — is crystal clear: The planet is warming faster than at any time in human history, and humans are causing it.

Seventeen of the 18 warmest years in the 136-year climate record have occurred since 2001, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

At least 18 scientific societies in the United States, including the Union of Concerned Scientists, have issued official statements about manmade climate change.

Despite this scientific consensus, climate-change deniers are still given airtime by the same media outlets that nightly report on floods, tornadoes, wildfires, and other extreme weather. Many of the same people being left homeless by a feverish Mother Nature vote for politicians who deride climate solutions.

Deniers ignore a public that is increasingly concerned about the impacts of climate change. A recent survey conducted by Yale University’s Program on Climate Change Communications found that 53 percent of Americans believe global warming is harming their local community and 57 percent believe fossil-fuel companies have either “a great deal” or “a moderate amount” of responsibility for the damages caused by climate change.

Deniers also ignore the fact that internal research by fossil-fuel companies supports the scientific consensus on climate change. But they plow ahead anyway with their campaign of misinformation, even as lawsuits are filed to hold the industry accountable for the climate impacts it knew would occur. Like the tobacco industry, the fossil-fuel industry minimized the negative health impacts of its products so it could operate unchecked. Some of the same shills, such as Steve Milloy, who protected tobacco profits at the expense of public health are using the same playbook to protect hydrocarbons.

“Scientific misinformation undermines public understanding of science, erodes basic trust in research findings and stalls evidenced-based policymaking,” according to a paper published in March in the science journal Nature.

The paper’s three authors noted that in April 2018 then-Environmental Protection Agency administrator Scott Pruitt signed a rule that would sharply reduce the number of scientific studies the federal agency can take into account, “effectively limiting the agency’s ability to regulate toxic chemicals, air pollution, carbon emissions and industries that science has already shown to have lethal impacts on human and environmental health.”

Milloy, a member of President Trump’s EPA transition team, said the rule to end “secret science” by “taxpayer-funded university researchers” is “one of my proudest achievements.”

In an interview with The New Yorker, Milloy defended his achievement by saying, “I do have a bias. I’m all for the coal industry, the fossil-fuel industry. Wealth is what makes people happy, not pristine air, which you’ll never get.”

Fossil-fuel front groups are paid to lie and misrepresent facts, all in the name of protecting polluting billionaires. (istock)

A dark place

Six years ago, Drexel University environmental sociologist Robert Brulle, now a visiting professor of environment and society at Brown University, published an analysis that found conservative foundations, such as the Howard Charitable Foundation, the John William Pope Foundation, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, and Searle Freedom Trust, provided the largest and most-consistent money stream to the denial movement. Much of that secret funding is now commonly referred to as “dark money.”

Here in Rhode Island, denial propaganda is spread by the Rhode Island Center for Freedom and Prosperity, with such headlines as “LAWSUIT: Center calls on RI Attorney General to release ‘secrecy pact’ documents re. cabal’s climate change inquisition” and “Center Plays Role in Lawsuit Against RI Attorney General for Climate Change Conspiracy Documents.”

The organization’s efforts are likely supported, at least in part, with money from special interests, but finding information on its website about how the center is funded is no easy task.

SourceWatch outlines the Center for Freedom and Prosperity’s strong ties to Koch-funded organizations such as the State Policy Network — a group that touts the free market as the panacea to all ills and rails against government regulation — and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a corporate bill mill.

The Center for Freedom and Prosperity, the foundations mentioned above, and other front groups all have one thing in common: they discredit science and attack knowledge to undermine government intervention and muddy the warming waters when it comes to climate change.

The are paid to consistently lie and misrepresent facts — all in the name of protecting polluting billionaires. They routinely claim, without evidence, that climate initiatives will hurt the economy, increase cost for ratepayers, and slow job creation. They argue that climate mitigation is a hidden tax, some violation of the free market, or unconstitutional overreach.

All of this fossil-fuel-powered propaganda is, to borrow a favorite denial-group phrase, fake news, but this dark-money campaign does corrupt politics, both locally and nationally, by pressuring politicians and policymakers to protect private wealth interests at the expensive of, well, everything. This clandestine operation makes having honest and open discussions about how to mitigate the very-real impacts of climate change nearly impossible. And that’s the point.

Brulle’s 2013 study was among the first academic efforts to probe the web of funding supporting the denial movement. It found that the amount of money flowing through third-party foundations, whose funding can’t easily be traced, had risen dramatically since 2008.

Brulle found that from 2003 to 2010, for example, 140 foundations funneled $558 million to nearly 100 climate-denial organizations. He also found that the traceable cash flow from more traditional sources, such as Koch Industries and ExxonMobil, had dried up.

From 2003 to 2007, Koch Affiliated Foundations and the ExxonMobil Foundation were “heavily involved” in funding denial efforts, according to Brulle’s research. He found, however, that ExxonMobil hadn’t made a publicly traceable contribution since 2008, and that the Koch brothers’ public contributions had been dramatically reduced.

There is evidence of a trend toward concealing the sources of climate-denial funding through the use of donor-directed philanthropies, according to the study.

The study concluded public records identify only a fraction of the hundreds of millions of dollars supporting climate-denial efforts. An examination of various metrics, including Internal Revenue Service data, Brulle’s research found that 91 “climate change counter-movement” organizations have an annual income of some $900 million, with an annual average of $64 million in identifiable foundation support.

“The climate change countermovement has had a real political and ecological impact on the failure of the world to act on global warming,” Brulle wrote in a statement when his study was released. “Like a play on Broadway, the countermovement has stars in the spotlight — often prominent contrarian scientists or conservative politicians — but behind the stars is an organizational structure of directors, script writers and producers.

“If you want to understand what's driving this movement, you have to look at what’s going on behind the scenes. Without a free flow of accurate information, democratic politics and government accountability become impossible. Money amplifies certain voices above others and, in effect, gives them a megaphone in the public square.”

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse says the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, along with the National Association of Manufacturers, are the two biggest front groups for the fossil-fuel industry.

Front-group follies

It’s difficult to comprehend what climate change is delivering, and those who do understand are disparaged, threatened, and called greedy — apparently, federal grants are making them rich.

Much of this noise is mass-produced by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, the American Petroleum Institute, and other front groups for the fossil-fuel industry. They all have well-funded lobbying arms and links to dark-money sources. They use both to block climate-mitigation efforts at every level.

In 2009, for instance, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce submitted written comment to the EPA after the agency said greenhouse-gas emissions are a threat to public health. The business organization, which two years later would urge lawmakers to focus on expanding fossil-fuel energy production and not “high-cost energy sources” such as wind and solar, was appalled by reality.

The chamber’s written response read, in part: “The Administrator has thus ignored analyses that show that a warming of even 3 [degrees] C[elsius] in the next 100 years would, on balance, be beneficial to humans because the reduction of wintertime mortality/morbidity would be several times larger than the increase in summertime heat stress-related mortality/morbidity.”

A year later, the chamber sued the EPA, seeking to overturn its finding that climate emissions endanger public health and welfare.

That’s the kind of stupidity front groups are using to assail science, endanger public health, and put future generations at risk. The fact we’re still being governed and represented by people who spew such nonsense — last year Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., a member of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, blamed sea-level rise on erosion and rocks falling into the ocean, saying, “Every time you have that soil or rock or whatever it is that is deposited into the seas, that forces the sea levels to rise, because now you have less space in those oceans, because the bottom is moving up.” — speaks to the power special interests wield.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has gone to great lengths to protect the unrelenting burning of fossil fuels. In both 2005 and ’07, the chamber opposed bipartisan cap-and trade-legislation.

In 2009, the chamber was one of the leading front groups lobbying against the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill. Since the failure of that bill, the chamber’s allies in Congress have refused to hold hearings, debate, or vote on any legislation proposing reductions in carbon pollution.

The chamber has convened fossil-fuel lobbyists, lawyers, and political strategists to plot legal strategies for opposing future regulatory actions to limit carbon pollution. It led a coalition of trade groups suing to block an EPA plan to reduce carbon emissions in the electric power sector. It funded a study critical of the Paris Agreement. It spearheaded a lobbying campaign in support of a Congressional Review Act resolution to repeal a Department of Interior rule limiting methane emissions from oil and gas facilities on public lands.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers have softened their stance on climate change somewhat in the past year or so, mainly because of increasing corporate pressure. However, the leadership of these trade/front groups is still dominated by fossil-fuel money and is loyal to a political party that has branded coal as clean.

The foundation upon which these organizations rest — the businesses they supposedly represent — is beginning to crack, as some corporations, most notably Apple, have left the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over its climate-change position, and others are following them out the denial door.

The public’s growing concern about climate change has exposed a rift between the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s corporate members and the organization itself, according to Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., and some other D.C. lawmakers are applying pressure to this mounting relationship tension by making sure the corporate world and the public understand the negative impact fossil-fuel front groups are having on delaying solutions to a serious problem.

ecoRI News recently spoke with Whitehouse in a downtown Providence cafe. He said now that the climate-change issue has reached a level of public priority it has forced corporate America to get serious about the problem. This corporate seriousness, he added, has exposed a rift between the chamber’s members and the organization itself.

Whitehouse believes that widening this rift and exposing the front groups that are laundering denial money are the keys to addressing climate change. “All of this nonsense is funded by fossil-fuel money,” he said.

Now that House committees have subpoena power, Whitehouse said they will start digging into the “dark-money stuff.”

“There’s nothing about dark money that enjoys a legal privilege,” Rhode Island’s former attorney general said. “You just don’t have to disclose it, so they don’t. But it’s not like you can take a subpoena and say, ‘No, I don’t have to respond to that subpoena.’ All we have to do is start digging and we’ll find some very interesting stuff.”

Front groups are paid to create the appearance of public support for deregulation and to remind politicians that they may lose an election if they oppose corporate priorities, such as the burning of fossil fuels. (istock)

Follow the money

Prof. Timmons Roberts are continuing the work Brulle started nearly a decade ago.

The Climate and Development Lab at Brown University is working to shine a light on the individuals and organizations behind the climate-denial movement. The lab’s research aims to make known the vast sums spent on public-relations firms by ExxonMobil and other energy corporations to obscure what they have known for decades: that fossil-fuel emissions are destructive.

“This really is a failure to warn us that (fossil-fuel companies) know their products are going to cause all of these problems but they are not warning the public about it,” Brulle told ecoRI News earlier this year. “They are selling us the idea of oil, prosperity, and fossil fuels are all the same thing … a very, very subtle manipulation that runs into the billions of dollars over decades.”

The project has already untangled a web of denial money from oil and gas companies such as Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, and Texaco, and from automakers such as Ford and General Motors. These corporations fund groups such as the National Mining Association and the American Petroleum Institute, and denial groups with ambiguous names such as the Global Climate Coalition and the Cooler Heads Coalition.

The initiative profiles these groups and explains how they create the appearance of public support for deregulation, while also reminding politicians that they may lose election/re-election by opposing corporate priorities — i.e., the burning of fossil fuels.

In Rhode Island, National Grid has been one of the top opponents to legislation that would address climate emissions. The British multinational opposed seven bills that supported renewable energy and action on climate change in the General Assembly between 2012 and 2017, according to the Climate and Development Lab.

Rhode Island’s primary electric and gas utility has also donated to the front group Edison Electric Institute (EEI). The organization has opposed, or funded groups that oppose, net metering, one of the core renewable-energy policies that allow homes and businesses to sell excess solar energy to the power grid.

A 2017 report by the Energy and Policy Institute explores how regulated investor-owned utility companies are including their EEI annual membership dues in their general operating expenses. This widespread practice results in ratepayers subsidizing the political activities of EEI, which works closely with ALEC.

The Energy Council of Rhode Island also opposed seven climate and renewable-energy bills proposed at the Statehouse between 2012 and 2017, according to the Climate and Development Lab.

For 20 years, from 1997-2017, the network of players spreading misinformation about climate change has been increasingly integrated into political philanthropy, according to a study published in March by a Yale University professor.

“The study introduces a new and broader pathway through which climate change misinformation travels, beyond the tendency of research to narrowly focus on the activities of think-tanks and fossil-fuel interests, often in isolation from mainstream American institutions like philanthropy,” Justin Farrell wrote. “Yet, as this study also shows, the impact of funding from fossil-fuel sources still plays an important role, revealing that the strength of the relationship between the misinformation network and philanthropy is strongest for people and organizations directly tied to such funding.”

Farrell’s research revealed new knowledge about large-scale efforts to distort public understanding of science and sow polarization. This influence has grown in recent years with the rapid expansion of untraceable donor-directed philanthropy that enables anonymous funding to pass-through organizations such as DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund, according to the study titled “The growth of climate change misinformation in US philanthropy.”

Frank Carini is editor of ecoRI News.

Tim Faulkner: Opposition mounts to seismic blasting off East Coast to find oil and gas

From ecoRI News (ecori.org)

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., and environmental groups intend to resist the recent announcement of plans to commence seismic blasting for offshore oil and gas drilling. But time may be running out to prevent it.

Seismic blasting uses underwater airguns to search for fossil fuels deep beneath the seafloor, a process that endangers marine mammals such as whales and dolphins.

On Nov. 30, the National Marine Fisheries Service issued what is known as incidental harassment authorizations (IHA) to five companies for conducting seismic testing in an area from Delaware to Florida, a region twice the size of California.

The companies are ION GeoVentures, based in Houston; Spectrum Geo Inc. of England; TGS-NOPEC Geophysical Company of Norway; WesternGeco of England, and CGG, based in Paris.

Whitehouse called their approval “a statement” and “just an idea” that could be stalled by Congress. But according to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), the five authorizations are under final review and seismic surveys could begin as early as January.

The IHA allows the the companies to perform deep-penetration seismic surveys that search thousands of meters below the seafloor for oil, natural gas, and minerals. The federal “incidental take authorization” provision allows the activity to kill, harass, hunt, or capture marine mammals. Harassment is defined as “any act of pursuit, torment, or annoyance which has the potential to injure a marine mammal or marine mammal stock in the wild; or has the potential to disturb a marine mammal or marine mammal stock in the wild by causing disruption of behavioral patterns, including, but not limited to, migration, breathing, nursing, breeding, feeding, or sheltering.”

The federal National Marine Fisheries Service, a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, says the potential to displace or harm marine life is minimal because of brief and limited exposure to survey noise.

According to the environmental advocacy group Oceana, the surveys deliver seismic blasts every 10 seconds, 24 hours a day over days or even weeks. Survey boats use dozens of airguns simultaneously to produce a constant blast that can travel thousand of miles.

The impact on sea life is significant. Airgun blasts cause temporary and permanent hearing loss, abandonment of habitat, disruption of mating and feeding, beach strandings and even death, according to Oceana. Airgun blasts also kill fish eggs and larvae.

“For whales and dolphins, which rely on their hearing to find food, communicate, and reproduce, being able to hear is a life or death matter,” according to Oceana.

According to a 2013 report, catch rates of Atlantic cod, haddock, rockfish, herring, sand eel and blue whiting declined by 40 percent to 80 percent because of seismic testing.

Seismic airgun testing in the Atlantic Ocean could injure 138,000 whales, according to BOEM. The noise is particularly threatening to the endangered North Atlantic right whale.

BOEM offers a list of protective measures to reduce harm to sea life, such as halting airgun use when animals get too close to vessels.

When a similar proposal was advanced under President Obama, more than 90 percent of the coastal communities in the Mid- and South Atlantic passed resolutions opposing the practice. The dissent was known as the Resolution Revolution, organized by Oceana. Shortly before Turmp took office in 2017, the Obama administration denied the applications for seismic testing in the Mid and South Atlantic, citing impacts on marine life. President Trump and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke reversed that decision in May 2017, with the America-First Offshore Energy Strategy.

In January, Zinke announced plans to open the entire East and West coasts to offshore fossil-fuel exploration, prompting broad public opposition and efforts by coastal governors to meet with Zinke to convince him to halt the initiative.

In February, Gov. Gina Raimondo and Rhode Island’s congressional delegation held a press conference to announce their opposition to offshore drilling. Block Island, Charlestown, Jamestown and Tiverton all passed resolutions opposing offshore drilling and seismic blasting.

During a 45-day comment period on the proposed seismic airgun testing, the National Marine Fisheries Service received 15 petitions with a total of 99,423 signatures. Only one petition, with 595 signatures, supported the seismic surveys. The 14 other petitions with nearly 99,000 signatures opposed seismic blasting, as well as oil and gas drilling in the Atlantic Ocean.

After the recent news of forthcoming seismic testing, Whitehouse said South Atlantic Republicans “would do well to remember the job Oceana did with the Obama administration trying for offside drilling.”

Whitehouse intends to work with the Commerce Committee and Appropriations Committee “to align our folks” to halt the seismic surveys and offshore oil and gas extraction.

On Dec. 11, Whitehouse, Sen. Edward J. Markey, D-MA, and six other senators asked the Department of Commerce to rescind IHA’s and the Department of Interior to deny the seismic survey permits. In a letter, the senators cite environmental threats and economic harm to tourism and fishing. They also noted that the results of the surveys would be kept private by the survey companies and not available for government or public use.

BOEM, however, is already reviewing the survey applications and could approve them by January.

“If they try to move up to the Northeast, they’ll find that the opposition is bipartisan,“ Whitehouse said. “So, I think we have a real prospect of stopping it, but it’s hard to stop something that’s at this point is just an idea, a statement. Once it hits the administrative steps, we’ll figure out what the best way to counterattack is.”

The counterattack is also going through the courts, primarily in the South. On Dec. 11, Oceana and eight other environmental groups filed in U.S. District Court in South Carolina a lawsuit that claims that by issuing the IHA, the National Marine Fisheries Service ignored science and violated the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act. The lawsuit wants the authorizations suspended until environmental assessments are performed.

If and when the seismic blasting get underway, Oceana will track the activity with a real-time map.

Tim Faulkner is a reporter and writer for ecoRI News.

Tim Faulkner: Localities stepping in to address ocean plastic crisis

Plastic pollution, especially in the ocean and along the coast, such as these plastic jugs found on the Portsmouth, R.I., shoreline, is a significant global problem.

Photo by Frank Carini of ecoRI News.

Via ecoRI News (ecori.org)

U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse’s Save Our Seas Act has big goals for addressing plastic in the oceans. The bipartisan bill that passed out of the Senate last year seeks to tackle marine debris and the ballooning problem of plastic waste by authorizing $10 million annually for cleanups of severe debris events in waters across the country. It also restarts federal research to determine the source of marine trash and the steps needed to prevent it.

What is already known is that much of the 8 million tons of plastic waste dumped in the world’s oceans each year happens outside the United States. In fact, five countries — China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam — are responsible for 60 percent of the plastic garbage that makes it into our waters every year, according to the Ocean Conservancy. 

That’s a problem, because most of those five countries receive plastic from U.S. recycling centers. The recycling industry, however, is lightly regulated, so it's hard to know the fate of the millions of bales of plastic recyclables shipped overseas annually.

The Save Our Seas Act addresses this problem by encouraging the president and the State Department to address the marine debris problem with these high-polluting nations. It also encourages international research into biodegradable plastics and establishes prevention strategies.

However, the likelihood of an environmental bill passing in the current Congress, much less President Trump endorsing it, is low. Trump wants to cut $1 billion from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which overseas the marine-debris program.

For now, much of the action on marine garbage is happening at state and local levels. Those steps include greater enforcement of recycling rules, bans on certain plastics, and improvement by product manufactures to make their packaging more environmentally friendly, reusable and include take-back programs for hard-to-recycle and bulky items.

At a recent Earth Day event in Middletown, R.I., aimed at drawing attention to the Save Our Seas Act, Johnathan Berard of the Rhode Island chapter of Clean Water Action said, “We cannot recycle our way out of this problem. We will only be able to solve it through policies that stop plastic pollution at its source.”

Recycling is necessary but is vulnerable to economic and market pressures, which cause revenues for waste prevention and education to fluctuate. There is little enforcement of rules, such as requirements in Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Connecticut that all business collect recyclables and offer collection for their customers. There is even less oversight of what happens to recyclables once they leave sorting centers and are shipped around the world. And with the exception of metals and glass, plastics eventually lose their durability and are down-cycled to trash.

Depending on the item, recycling rates hover between 20 percent and 30 percent nationally. Requiring a deposit on glass and plastic bottles, so-called “bottle bills,” boost the recycling rate to nearly 90 percent. But the political will for bottle bills is poor. For example, legislation is introduced in the Rhode Island General Assembly each year but rarely makes it out of committee.

The 2018 bill has yet to be scheduled a hearing. Massachusetts has had a successful 5-cent bottle-deposit program since 1983, but voters defeated a referendum in 2014 to expand the collection to include non-carbonate beverage bottles.

Take-back programs for bulky and hard-to-recycle items such as mattresses, paint cans and electronic waste have also made a difference, but expanding programs to other items like light bulbs, syringes and medications have stalled, as manufactures and retailers resist raising prices to fund collection or improvement of packaging.

This resistance puts the cost of waste management and recycling on consumers and local governments who pay for clean up and transportation. Budget limitations have led to the most cost-effective solution: bans. Prohibitions and fees on plastic bags, in particular, have proven effective at reducing land and marine debris. Dozens of communities in Massachusetts have banned plastic bags and a handful have enacted bans on polystyrene cups and to-go containers.

Seven Rhode Island communities have passed bag bans and more are considering them. Block Island even added a ban on balloons, and the “skip the straw” movement is growing among consumers and restaurants.

While bag bans and beach cleanups are helping clean southern New England, there is still the problem of global waste. Global plastic production is expected to double within 10 years and by 2050 there will be more plastic waste by weight in ocean waters than fish.

The Ocean Conservancy says a combination of education, waste collection and recycling infrastructure, and better managed and properly cited landfills are needed to tackle the plastic ocean debris epidemic.

“While we have made enormous progress cleaning up Narragansett Bay, the millions of tons of trash that are dumped into the oceans around the world can wind up on American shores and in the nets of Rhode Island fishermen,” Whitehouse said.
 

Tim Faulkner reports and writes for ecoRI News.

Seaside social trauma

Bailey's Beach after Superstorm Sandy in 2012, with "Rejects' Beach'' in the foreground.

From Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com:

U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse is a Democrat, and Democrats pride themselves on representing a wider range of ethnic and socio-economic groups than Republicans, who, whatever their populist rhetoric, in practice display a special affection for the rich. Democrats present themselves as particularly sensitive to the needs and aspirations of low-and-middle-income people and ethnic minorities.

The senator is gearing up for his re-election campaign in 2018.

So the senator may feel himself in a quandary about the all-white, all-rich Bailey’s Beach club, in Newport. (The official name is the Spouting Rock Beach Association.)

He has a  very close association with the club as a former member and through his wife’s continuing membership.  He has many friends there. Furthermore, the club is  very conveniently close to their Newport house.

Freedom of association is a wonderful thing and a cousin of the First Amendment, but for practical political reasons – i.e., “the optics’’ – Mr. Whitehouse, who is very much part of the old WASP aristocracy, will presumably face considerable political pressure to separate himself from such a symbol of exclusion as the campaign heats up. It’s his business of course. And his capacity to be agood senator would seem little affected one way or the other. But Bailey’s will come upnext year, though he’ll almost certainly be re-elected.

I have been to Bailey’s Beach and found the members I metthere cool,  cordial and quiet. But as a reminder of the fragility of all human institutions, an overly fragrant mass of seaweed covered much of the lower beach that day.

Llewellyn King: Our destruction of life in the oceans

Memo to environmental activists: It’s the oceans, stupids.

This summer, hundreds of millions of people in the Northern Hemisphere will flock to beaches to swim, surf, wade, boat, fish, sunbathe, or even fall in love. To these revelers, the oceans are eternal -- as certain as the rising and setting of the sun, and a permanent bounty in an impermanent world.

But there is a rub: The oceans are living entities and they are in trouble. Much more trouble than the sun-seekers of summer can imagine.

Mark Spalding, president of The Ocean Foundation, says, “We are putting too much into the oceans and taking too much out.”

In short, that is what is happening. Whether deliberately or not, we are dumping stuff into the oceans at a horrifying rate and, in places, we are overfishing them.

But the No. 1 enemy of oceans is invisible: carbon.

Carbon is a huge threat, according to ocean champion Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I. The oceans are a great carbon sink, he explains, but they are reaching a carbon saturation point, and as so-called “deep carbon” resurfaces, it limits the oxygen in the water and destroys fish and marine life.

There is a 6,474-square-mile “dead zone” -- an area about the size of Connecticut with low to no oxygen -- in the northern Gulf of Mexico. Dead zones are appearing in oceans around the world because of excessive nutrient pollution (especially nitrogen and phosphorous) from agribusiness and sewage. Two great U.S. estuaries are in trouble: the Chesapeake Bay and Long Island Sound.

Warming in the North Atlantic is disturbing fish populations: Maine lobsters are migrating to Canada's cooler waters. Whitehouse and other Atlantic Coast legislators are concerned as they see fish resources disappearing, and other marine life threatened.

Colin Woodard, a reporter at The Portland  (Maine) Press Herald, has detailed the pressures from climate change on fish stocks in the once bountiful Gulf of Maine. He first sounded the alarm 16 years ago in his book, Oceans End: Travels Through Endangered Seas, and now he says that things are worse.

The shallow seas,  such as the Baltic and the Adriatic, are subject to “red tides” -- harmful algal booms, due to nutrient over-enrichment, that kill fish and make shellfish dangerous to consume.

Polluted waterways are a concern for Rio de Janeiro Olympic rowers and other athletes. Apparently, the word is: Don’t follow the girl from Ipanema into the water. The culprit is raw sewage, and the swelling Olympic crowds will only worsen the situation.

My appeal to the environmental community is this: If you are worried about the air, concentrate on the oceans. It is hard to explain greenhouse gases to a public that is distrustful, or fears the economic impact of reducing fossil-fuel consumption. If I lived in a West Virginia hollow, and the only work was coal mining, you bet I would be a climate denier.

The oceans are easier to understand. You can explain that the sea levels are rising; that it is possible for life-sustaining currents, such as the Gulf Stream, to stop or reverse course; and you can point to the ways seemingly innocent actions, or those thought of as virtuous (like hefting around spring water in plastic bottles) have harmful effects.

Plastic is a big problem. Great gyres of plastic, hundreds of miles long, are floating in the Pacific. Flip-flops washed into the ocean in Asia are piling up on beaches in Africa. Fish are ingesting microplastic particles – and you will ingest this plastic when you tuck into your fish and chips. Sea birds and dolphins get tangled in the plastic harnesses we put on six-packs of beer and soft drinks. They die horrible deaths. Sunscreen is lethal to coral.

It is hard to explain how carbon, methane and ozone in the atmosphere cause the Earth to heat up. It is easier, I am telling my environmentalist friends, to understand that we will not be able to swim in the oceans.

I have met climate deniers, but I have never run into an ocean denier. Enjoy the beach this summer. 

Llewellyn King, executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS, is a longtime publisher, editor, columnist and international business consultant. This piece first ran on InsideSources.