The politics of distraction has been particularly successful on the climate crisis. While it was something that was happening but would manifest its damaging effects on humanity in the future, the necessary debate on what to do about it was sidelined by the raging and outrageous phony debate on whether it was real.
But now the effects are showing up in the present, and denialists are beginning to sound like those tobacco companies hacks and stooges who were still claiming in the 1990s that the science was uncertain about the harmful effects of tobacco smoking.
It may be that the virilence of their denials is in inverse proportion to the weaknesses of their arguments. In any case, the political efforts to deny the climate crisis--and especially deny responsibility for changes necessary to forestall it getting worse in the future that the present can still affect--is massive.
These efforts seem to be centered on creating a political atmosphere that enables corporations to protect their current activities and profits. The political windbags and the relentless denialists on the Internet are the stormtroopers. Their job is to distract and keep the debate as crazy as possible, and stuck on the fundamental denialist issues. The actual battles are being waged in legislatures. The Republicans in the US Congress effectively hold Congress hostage. But there are pitched battles in state legislatures.
Take a very recent effect of the climate crisis out of the many in the news this month: the half a million people in Ohio who couldn't drink their water because of algae building up in Lake Erie. The causes form a perfect storm we're going to see again and again--environmental malfeasance by big corporations (principally agribusinesses using high phosphate fertilizers) with consequences also caused by the climate crisis (principally more rain and heat in the affected area.) It was, salon said, a manmade disaster.
Moreover, Scientific American said in its headlines:Lake Erie Algae Bloom Matches Climate Change Projections/ The bloom that poisoned Toledo's waters may become more common as the waters of the Great Lakes warm.
Connections to big corporate efforts to bully state legislatures are made in this brilliant Guardian column by Ana Marie Cox. Although the Republican governor of Ohio signed fairly weak legislation that at least recognized the problem of phosphates in fertilizer runoff, Cox notes:
In Wisconsin, Governor Scott Walker “eased” the deadlines for polluters in the state to meet the previous administration’s numerical standards for the amount of phosphorous allowed in public waters (he tried to replace the numeric standards with a “narrative description” of reduction efforts, but wasn’t successful). In Tea Partying Florida, the Republican state legislature sought to overturn locally-enacted bans on phosphorus fertilizer – an effort pushed by a Scotts Miracle-Gro lobbyist who texted a representative, “I am begging for your help here.”
Cox also found counterexamples: "purple" and "red" states that are addressing the phosphate issue, because their citizens don't take kindly to the prospect of not having water to drink. She suggests that Republicans have the opportunity now to change their current extreme opposition to anything that smacks of doing the environment any good.
But this change into extreme anti-environmentalism (the EPA after all was established in the Nixon administration) took some years and will resist, at least until very powerful corporations start turning themselves around. Agribusiness may be the last except for the fossil fuel behemoths, that are busy buying up state governments all over the country to enable fracking and other extreme measures that keep them rolling in the megabucks in the fossil fuel business.
For the American citizenry as a whole, which polls show is already alarmed by the climate crisis, the political effects will likely come in the form of demanding that government deals with the effects of the climate crisis on their lives. So far there hasn't been the division between dealing with causes and dealing with effects that I've feared, but it's always possible. For now, it seems that support for dealing with effects (including banning phosphate fertilizers) may well translate into support for dealing with causes (reducing greenhouse gases.)
So we're doing it the hard way, by suffering the effects that cannot be forestalled because we didn't deal with causes earlier. But it's getting harder to be distracted. The climate crisis is all around us.
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