The Smoke of Climate War

Merchants of Doubt is a new documentary by Robert Kenner that explores the climate crisis denial industry.  As the Washington Post describes it: "The germ of Kenner’s latest project, a simultaneously entertaining and inciting exposé of professional charlatanism — practiced, most saliently, by those hired to make the case that global warming isn’t real, or at least that there is no scientific consensus on it..."

Kenner sees his film as arriving as the tide may be turning against the deniers, at least in the mainstream:

 “I think your paper is far less inclined to show deniers on the op-ed page these days,” he says. “That’s a big change, because they were being published continually. The fact is, that confused people, and that was a big part of the problem.”

According to Kenner, change will come, but not from those shouting at the edges of the argument. Rather, it will grow out of the confused middle, where films such as “Food, Inc.” and “Merchants of Doubt” shine light on hidden, and uncomfortable, truths.

“You’re never going to convert a third of the people right away,” he says. “But as with the civil rights movement, you don’t go to Bull Connor and say, ‘Oh, you’ve got to change your mind.’ You change the people around Bull Connor, and then Bull Connor has to change. You change the culture.”

Polls are showing the reality is sinking in, which makes going after deniers directly more plausible, especially if you are trying to reinforce existing political support and expand it through changing cultural norms of acceptance.  The Obama-inspired organization OFA is currently concentrating on "exposing" deniers.

We may be where we were maybe 20 years ago in the smoking wars.  Big Tobacco had its highly paid flacks, their agents of confusion, and they were becoming identified as such as laws were being passed to limit and then end smoking in public places.  When the cultural change came, it was in terms of absence.  The tobacco promoters went more or less underground, off the grid, and mostly international.  They were on the other side of the mainstream consensus.

But such change in the climate crisis won't come without heavily funded opposition. The film apparently focuses especially on one such agent of doubt and chaos, named Marc Morano.  Somehow I got on his emailing list when he was working for James Inhofe, the fully paid-for chief denier in the US Senate leadership.  His emails go directly to the spam bucket, but I did notice his latest one.  He quoted characterizations of himself in reviews of this film, all very negative: that he was despicable, satanic etc.  Clearly he was very proud of this.

So ego helps make him a happy warrior.  In this era when a unique brand virtually guarantees employment and power, especially with the monied rabid right, he's delighted to have this niche pretty much to himself.  Plus he doesn't have to do anything directly threatening to his life, like smoking cigarettes for show.  He may well live out his life dodging any inconvenient disasters caused by the climate crisis.  But not even money is likely to fully protect his children (if any.)

Morano refers to his opponents as "warmists."  That's really the key to what he does.  Sounding  like communist or fascist, it's a bit undone by the warmth of it, but it still makes the basic rabid right point: Accepting the realities of the climate crisis is an ideology--a political ideology--allied with other non-"conservative" ideologies and partisan politics.

The rabid right sees everything through its ideology, and any purported fact that doesn't fit within its ideology is false for just that reason.  And if the rabid right takes that attitude towards their own worldview, then they assume that everyone else does, too.  Everything is ideology, plain and simple.

Those kind of deniers will never give in to reality.  They will remain dangerous because they are deep within the infrastructure of one of two major political parties, and because they are funded by extremely wealthy ideologues and those whose fortunes depend on fossil fuel industries for their insane increase.

Eventually they will be undermined by cultural consensus.  How long that takes, and what's done in the meantime anyway to address the causes and consequences of the climate crisis, will likely determine the fate of contemporary civilization.