Perhaps the most depressing—and important—story you should read this month is John H. Richardson's account in the print edition of this here magazine about the numerous American climate scientists who simply have given up trying to convince this country to ignore the oil-sodden yahoos in our public discourse—not to mention the various species of ignorami in our national legislature—and do something about the fact that the planet is slip-sliding toward oblivion. One guy got so harassed for telling the truth about the situation that he moved his family all the way to Denmark, and his assessment of the direness of the problem got him in trouble even there.

Among climate activists, gloom is building. Jim Driscoll of the National Institute for Peer Support just finished a study of a group of longtime activists whose most frequently reported feeling was sadness, followed by fear and anger. Dr. Lise Van Susteren, a practicing psychiatrist and graduate of Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth slide-show training, calls this "pretraumatic" stress. "So many of us are exhibiting all the signs and symptoms of posttraumatic disorder—the anger, the panic, the obsessive intrusive thoughts." Leading activist Gillian Caldwell went public with her "climate trauma," as she called it, quitting the group she helped build and posting an article called "16 Tips for Avoiding Climate Burnout," in which she suggests compartmentalization: "Reinforce boundaries between professional work and personal life. It is very hard to switch from the riveting force of apocalyptic predictions at work to home, where the problems are petty by comparison."

And how was your morning?

Seriously, if the people who really know what they're talking about are shamed or frightened into silence, or run out of the avenues of power, bad policy choices are allowed to run free (See also: Iraq, Invasion and Occupation Of). This is the very bad end of the process of eliminating reason and learning from our public life. Somebody should write a book, I swear.

Anyway, this comes on the heels of the remarkable revelation that scientists in the employ of Exxon Mobil were fully aware in 1981 of how carbon dioxide could be the ruination of the planet—so much so that the company refused to tap a huge natural-gas field in Southeast Asia.

The email from Exxon's in-house climate expert provides evidence the company was aware of the connection between fossil fuels and climate change, and the potential for carbon-cutting regulations that could hurt its bottom line, over a generation ago – factoring that knowledge into its decision about an enormous gas field in south-east Asia. The field, off the coast of Indonesia, would have been the single largest source of global warming pollution at the time. "Exxon first got interested in climate change in 1981 because it was seeking to develop the Natuna gas field off Indonesia," Lenny Bernstein, a 30-year industry veteran and Exxon's former in-house climate expert, wrote in the email. "This is an immense reserve of natural gas, but it is 70% CO2," or carbon dioxide, the main driver of climate change.

Yet the company kept funding climate-change denialists for nearly three more decades. Please tell me how doing something like this—and there are plenty of people like the Koch Brothers who still are doing it—won't one day be counted as a crime against humanity? And it's not as though we didn't have lengthy previous experience with the damage that can result when scientists whore themselves out to industry.

Analysis of public statements issued by the tobacco industry sources over the past five decades shows that the companies maintained the stance that smoking had not been proven to be injurious to health through 1999. The public statements of the tobacco industry are in sharp contrast to the private views expressed by many of their own scientists. The tobacco documents reveal that many scientists within the tobacco industry acknowledged as early as the 1950s that cigarette smoking was unsafe.

This really should be the only issue in 2016—that the planet is dying and half of our political process is being paid to pretend that it's not happening at all.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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