Ross Gelbspan, who exposed the roots of climate change deniers, dies at 84

Ross Gelbspan, an investigative journalist whose reporting on climate change exposed a disinformation campaign by oil and gas lobbyists to sow doubt about global warming — a denial embraced by Republican officials and, in some case, by gullible news media – died on January 27 at his home in Boston. He was 84 years old.

The cause was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, said his wife, Anne Gelbspan.

Mr. Gelbspan’s career included reporting on dissidents in the Soviet Union and the FBI’s harassment of domestic critics, and his interest in the climate crisis, like those other topics, came from a sense of outrage at the fact that powerful interests were suppressing information necessary for democracy.

“I didn’t address the climate issue because I love trees – I tolerate them,” he said. said on YouTube last year. “I looked into this because I learned that the coal industry was paying a handful of scientists behind the scenes to say that nothing was happening to the climate.”

In a 1995 Harper’s Magazine cover story titled “The Heat Is On,” which he expanded into a 1997 book with the same title, Mr. Gelbspan highlighted a group of scientists as the coal and oil companies had paid to inform lawmakers and journalists that global warming was not a serious threat. He dug up a 1991 memo from the fossil fuel lobby calling for a strategy to “reposition global warming as a theory rather than a fact.” At a news conference, President Bill Clinton held up the book and said he was reading it.

“In ‘The Heat Is On,’ Ross was the first to seriously debunk the campaign by oil and coal companies to promote and finance a pseudo-scientific narrative of denial,” Robert Kuttner, co-editor of The American Prospect magazine . , to which Mr. Gelbspan contributed, said in an email. “I combined a deep concern for our shared future with the passion and skills of a relentless investigative journalist. »

Mr. Gelbspan wrote In Harper’s, one of the leading climate skeptics, Richard S. Lindzen of MIT, speaking on behalf of a coal lobby group, told a 1994 government hearing that a doubling of coal emissions carbon over the next century would prevent temperatures from rising. only a negligible 0.3 degrees Celsius. Since this testimony, the planet has already warmed by 0.86 degrees Celsius, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

In a second book, “Boiling Point” (2004), Mr. Gelbspan was harsh on his own profession, accusing journalists of laziness by allowing themselves to be trapped in the fossil fuel industry’s “manufactured denialism.”

Many journalists, he said, have been undermined by their ethic of impartiality, which adds a false balance to reporting that reflexively includes climate skeptics.

“For many years, the press gave the same weight to ‘skeptics’ as to mainstream scientists,” he writes. “The question of balance is irrelevant when the subject of a story is factual. In this case, what we know about climate comes from the largest and most rigorous scientific collaboration in history.

In his review of “Boiling Point” in the New York Times, Al Gore, the 2000 Democratic presidential candidate, wrote: “Part of what makes this book important is its indictment of American media coverage of global warming. climate over the last two decades. »

But Mr. Gelbspan’s main targets remained companies like Exxon Mobil, which financed climate science denial, and officials supporting the industry, mostly Republicans, like President George W. Bush, who presented to the White House promising to limit carbon emissions from energy. factories, then reneged under industry pressure months into his term. That same month, his administration took inspiration from the Kyoto Protocol, an agreement reached by industrialized countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

(Last year, the Wall Street Journal revealed that newly discovered documents showed that Exxon sought to obfuscate scientific findings that could harm its business, even after the company publicly said it would stop funding think tanks and scientists who downplayed threats to the climate.)

“It is an excruciating experience,” Mr. Gelbspan wrote, “to watch the planet collapse piece by piece in the face of persistent and pathological denial. »

Mr. Gelbspan, a journalist and editor for 31 years before leaving daily journalism to concentrate on books, worked for the Philadelphia Bulletin, the Washington Post, The Village Voice and the Boston Globe.

In 1971, he spent three weeks in the Soviet Union for a four-part series broadcast on The Voice. “It was a very wonderful trip” I called back later, describing interviewing political dissidents in bugged apartments, memorizing his notes before destroying them so they wouldn’t be confiscated, and being interrogated for six hours by the KGB before being allowed to leave Moscow. The experience was a wake-up call “to the brutal realities of life in a totalitarian state,” he said.

Mr. Gelbspan joined the Globe in 1979. As special projects editor, he oversaw a series on job discrimination against African-Americans in the Boston area, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for its reporting. local specialist investigation. Although Pulitzers are awarded to journalists and newspapers, the Globe named Mr. Gelbspan as a “co-recipient” of the award for designing and editing the series.

In 1991, he published another book, “Break-ins, Death Threats and the FBI,” an investigation into what he called covert federal harassment of critics of Reagan administration policies in Central America.

Ross Gelbspan was born June 1, 1939, in Chicago to Eugene Gelbspan, who ran a kitchen supply company, and Ruth (Ross) Gelbspan. He received a bachelor’s degree in political philosophy from Kenyon College in Ohio in 1960.

While covering the first United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in 1972 in Stockholm, he met Anne Charlotte Broström, a native of Sweden. They married the following year. She spent 25 years as a nonprofit developer of low-cost housing for homeless families in Massachusetts.

Besides his wife, he is survived by his daughters, Thea and Johanna Gelbspan, and a sister, Jill Gelbspan.

Early in his reporting on global warming, Mr. Gelbspan read the work of some climate skeptics and, for a time, was convinced that there was no crisis. He then met with Harvard oceanography professor and leading climate expert James J. McCarthy, co-chair of the UN panel on climate change. I convinced Mr. Gelbspan that the skeptics were wrong.

“When I asked McCarthy if climate change posed a really serious threat,” Mr. Gelbspan recalled on YouTube last year, “he responded as slowly and clearly as possible: ‘If this unstable climate that we’re starting now to see started 100 years ago, the planet would never be able to support its current population.

Reflection on his reports Regarding the environment, Mr. Gelbspan added that he felt “both the wonder of a young man and the despair of an old man.”

“I was a journalist,” he continued, “and faced with my sadness at our collective human failure, my only response was to face reality and write about it. »