Climate Inside: Varieties of Denalists

Before I get to the reasonable concerns behind some Climate Crisis denial, a few other reasons why some people are Climate Crisis denialists.

The word "denial" in this context is a bit tricky, since it denotes a psychological response but also a position on the issue by people who deny that global heating is happening, etc.--but not because they are "in denial."  They've got other reasons, though in the end, those reasons are "inside."

The first group of denialists are those who maintain their position (global heating isn't happening, or it isn't all that bad, or it's not caused by humans and we can't do anything about it, at least not without wrecking the economy etc.) because it is in their economic self-interest to do so.  These range from the fossil fuel industrialists to those they hire to doggedly and often viciously promote this line, to others who simply work for these companies and others related to them, who more distantly and more modestly depend on them economically.  They are in the situation famously described by Upton Sinclair, who said "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."  

Though they adapt to the latest media, the propaganda approach driven by these corporate zealots and their hired p.r. guns is time-tested, and yet both the public and the media seem always to fall for the same program.  It is most familiar in its present form from the massive campaigns run by the tobacco companies just a decade or two ago to convince us that scientists were biased in claiming that smoking is bad for your health, and anyway the economy and America's freedoms couldn't survive regulation of smoking.

 But as Paul Gilding reminds us in The Great Disruption, their basic attacks on Climate Crisis science were on view in the 1960s attacks sponsored by big chemical companies against Rachel Carson and Silent Spring, her landmark book on the dangers of DDT and other pesticides: she was hysterical and not acting as a scientist, and if her warnings on pesticides were heeded it would mean economic ruin and "the end of all human progress."  There were even snide observations that her warnings about extinctions were disproven when there seemed to be plenty of birds still around.  Recall of course the snide observations that the globe can't be heating with all these snowstorms.  (Here's an interesting blog post on the war against Rachel Carson and its similarity to the tobacco company strategy.)


The second group, related to the first, are those who are dependent on an ideology and political affiliation--often financially supported by fossil fuel and related corporate interests--that has made Climate Crisis denialism an article of their faith.  They tend towards the most virulent and mendacious forms of "it's all a hoax," that is, an insidious, deliberate and systematic deception by their political opponents: one more way of demonizing their enemies and making their supporters afraid so they'll close ranks.

  They are nourished by what has become a powerful network of institutions and relationships.  Their roots are in the late 60s and 70s, as chronicled recently by Eric Alterman in The Nation (March 28, 2011), as "a series of right-wing institutions to undermine the bipartisan establishment and recast its view of reality"  Along with far right "think tanks" there were political organizations that found and fostered young talent, and nurtured several generations of right wing activists from the 1980s forward.  Then came right wing talk radio, and Rupert Murdoch's newspapers and FOX news.

The Climate Crisis became a political issue for a variety of reasons, I suspect: mostly at the behest of corporate financiers of the right, but the political label became easier when Al Gore, the Democratic candidate for President, became the foremost voice on the Climate Crisis.

In any case, it has become a very political issue for the right, and the insulated world of right wing ideology has stepped up its rigidity and discipline on this issue as well as others.  The virulence of all of this, I am convinced, has been further strengthened by the Internet.  Right wing blog sites were early adopters, and in many ways set the tone for current Internet behavior: a tone of fanaticism, of bullying and attack with no boundaries.  They were also early in instituting a hive mind on their sites, a Borg-like sense of  membership and self-absorption, a contagion that some lefty sites have caught.

I've mentioned before the propensity of right wingers to stick with the media that always reflects their views: the Limbaughs of radio and Fox News primarily.  (The difference is that non-wingers might gravitate towards advocacy sources on the left but also read or watch other sources, especially for news and other content.  But then, the pure right winger believes that everything from the New York Times to Scientific American  is intently spewing left wing propaganda.)  But according to Eli Pariser in his book The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You,  as reviewed by Sue Halpern in the New York Review, another feature of the Internet may mean that variety of information sources is less accessible for everyone than we might believe.

Pariser notes that Google searches are now personalized, so that your searches yield results ranked in part according to searches you've previously made, similar to how Netflix and Amazon come up with titles they think you will like. As Halpern writes "In other words, there is no standard Google anymore.” It’s as if we looked up the same topic in an encyclopedia and each found different entries—but of course we would not assume they were different since we’d be consulting what we thought to be a standard reference....Among the many insidious consequences of this individualization is that by tailoring the information you receive to the algorithm’s perception of who you are, a perception that it constructs out of fifty-seven variables, Google directs you to material that is most likely to reinforce your own worldview, ideology, and assumptions.

Pariser specifically relates this to climate change.  "Pariser suggests, for example, that a search for proof about climate change will turn up different results for an environmental activist than it would for an oil company executive and, one assumes, a different result for a person whom the algorithm understands to be a Democrat than for one it supposes to be a Republican."

But Helpern makes a larger connection, covering the entire phenomenon of information by means of ideology, whether deliberate or as a byproduct of  Internet algorithms or social networks:   "Why this matters is captured in a study in the spring issue of Sociological Quarterly, which echoes Pariser’s concern that when ideology drives the dissemination of information, knowledge is compromised. The study, which examined attitudes toward global warming among Republicans and Democrats in the years between 2001 and 2010, found that in those nine years, as the scientific consensus on climate change coalesced and became nearly universal, the percentage of Republicans who said that the planet was beginning to warm dropped precipitously, from 49 percent to 29 percent. For Democrats, the percentage went up, from 60 percent to 70 percent. It was as if the groups were getting different messages about the science, and most likely they were. The consequence, as the study’s authors point out, was to stymie any real debate on public policy. This is Pariser’s point exactly, and his concern: that by having our own ideas bounce back at us, we inadvertently indoctrinate ourselves with our own ideas. “Democracy requires citizens to see things from one another’s point of view, but instead we’re more and more enclosed in our own bubbles,” he writes. “Democracy requires a reliance on shared facts; instead we’re being offered parallel but separate universes.”



There is another category of denialists, both political and ideologically related to both the self-interested industrialists and right wing political ideologues.  That's at least one politicized wing of Evangelical Christians.

Perhaps all of us are guilty of not consciously understanding where our assumptions come from.  But I know that I need to be reminded of how differently some people think about public policy issues--and in this case, how stringently dogmatic their views are, regardless of how they seem in the public arena.

Michelle Golberg's piece on Michele Bachmann in the Daily Beast is the latest reminder of this mindset.  Just how an anti-gay convinction is justified from the contradictory record of the Bible, let alone what the Bible has to say about climate change, is really beside the point.  The point is that these issues have incorporated as dogma, often due to the influence of particular charismatic clergy-- in Bachmann's case, of Francis Schaeffer:

  A key moment in her [Bachmann's] political evolution, as for many of her generation, a was the film series "How Should We Then Live" by the theologian Francis Schaeffer, who is widely credited for mobilizing evangelicals against abortion, an issue most had previously ignored. A Presbyterian minister, Schaeffer argued that our entire perception of reality depends on our worldview, and that only those with the right one can understand the true nature of things. Christianity, he argued, is "a whole system of truth, and this system is the only system that will stand up to all the questions that are presented to us as we face the reality of existence." Theories or assertions from outside this system—evolution, for example—can be dismissed as the product of mistaken premises.

This accounts for some of the bafflement that occasionally greets Bachmann's statements. "Michele Bachmann says certain things that sound crazy to the general public," says author Frank Schaeffer, Francis Schaeffer's son and former collaborator. "But to anybody raised in the environment of the evangelical right wing, what she says makes perfect sense."

The dogmatism of the true believers, most obvious when linked to religion but also part of the glue for  the hordes of social networking ideologues, seems as impervious to factual information and ethical arguments as do the perhaps cynical but self-interested positions of fossil fuel corporatists and their propagandists.  Probably most of them will never change, and it's fruitless to think they can be reached with fact and argument.

 But some among all these groups may be reached,especially when some of their legitimate concerns--the concerns as well of denialists outside these categories-- are explored.  Now for sure that's next time.