Stanley Lewandowski, general manager of the Intermountain Rural Electric Association, seems an impressive writer.
On July 17, he penned a memo to utility operators, debunking global-warming “alarmists” and raising money for Virginia state climatologist Patrick Michaels, a global-warming critic for hire.
Lewandowski runs a coal-burning utility cooperative that some would consider a global-warming culprit, but when I read his fine prose, I was nearly persuaded that global warming was a sham theory.
Never mind that the National Academy of Sciences, the government’s arbitrator of scientific disputes, recently concluded that, yes, there is global warming and that, yes, it is caused by humans burning fossil fuels. Never mind that the Climate Change Science Program, founded by the Bush administration in 2002, concurs.
I’m not a scientist. So when science becomes a political and economic battle, I get confused. Particularly when the prose is so convincing:
“Trendy global warming theory suffers from the great conceit that human activity has a significant impact on climate change,” Lewandowski wrote.
The elegance of this line, and its dim view of humanity, make me quiver with envy. But Lewandowski also wielded numbers: “Global temperatures increased about a half-degree Celsius between 1850 and 1940 and another 0.3 degrees since then.” See, it’s not so bad.
Lewandowski also referenced scientists who still dispute that global warming is caused by human activity.
“Disputing this contention are climatologists, meteorologists and astrophysicists like Richard Lindzen, William Gray, Fred Singer, Roy Spencer, Patrick Michaels, Robert Balling, and Craig Idso and the 17,000 signatories to Dr. Arthur Robinson’s Petition Project, who said of the Kyoto Accord: ‘There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.”
So where does a utility executive learn to write like that? From conservative talk-radio host Mike Rosen of KOA-850 AM. The portions of Lewandowski’s memo cited above, as well as others, are virtually identical to passages from Rosen’s June 9 column in the Rocky Mountain News.
This was first discovered by a scientific Web log, www.realclimate.org. Colorado Media Matters, a liberal media critic, put passages of Rosen’s column and Lewandowski’s memo side-by-side on its website, colorado.mediamatters.org, showing that they are virtually verbatim.
“This is the kind of conservative misinformation that we look for and try and alert the public about,” said the group’s executive director, Bill Menezes (who, in the interest of disclosure, once worked with me as assistant business editor).
“Oh, yeah, it came from Rosen,” Lewandowski told me.
I asked why he didn’t mention this in the memo since he took these well-crafted sentences from Rosen.
“I looked at his column, and then I found out who these people were (that Rosen cited) and what they were doing and everything else,” Lewandowski said.
Rosen is not the least bit concerned.
“My primary interest is in informing and influencing public opinion in this area and offering some much needed counterbalance to global warming hysteria and alarmism trumpeted by political grandstanders like Al Gore and the liberal media,” Rosen wrote me in an e-mail. “My column cited the work of others. If Stan Lewandowski of IREA was able to disseminate this to a wider audience, leveraging my column, I’m delighted.”
Some of Lewandowski’s customers are not delighted. One of them is Pat Healey, 55, a commercial airline captain, who lives in a passive-solar house in Conifer.
“He plagiarized,” Healey said. “It’s ethically wrong. It’s offensive. And he’s making a mockery of his own position.”
Said Jake Meffley, who is associated with advocacy group Environment Colorado and is an IREA customer: “It smacks of being in league with those who simply want to create a different story about global warming for their own self-interest.”
Al Lewis’ column appears Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Respond to Lewis at denverpostbloghouse.com/lewis, 303-820-1967 or alewis@denverpost.com.
