The axis of climate evil
Three groups deny climate change for selfish reasons
Arecent headline in The New York Times: “It’s Not Your Imagination: Summers Are Getting Hotter,” highlighted a decade-by-decade statistical analysis by climate expert James Hansen. “Most summers,” the analysis concluded, “are now either hot or extremely hot compared with the mid-20th century.”
The evidence for humancaused global warming just keeps getting more overwhelming, and scenarios for the future — extreme weather events, rising sea levels, drought and more — just keep getting scarier.
In a rational world, urgent action to limit climate change would be the highest priority for governments everywhere. But the U.S. government is controlled by a party in which, despite all evidence and lived experience, climate-change denial remains a defining marker of tribal identity.
Republicans can’t seem to repeal Obamacare and recriminations among Senate leaders and the tweeter in chief are making headlines. But the GOP is completely united behind its project of destroying civilization.
Where does climate denial come from?
Just to be clear, experts aren’t always right; even an overwhelming scientific consensus sometimes turns out to have been wrong. But what becomes clear to anyone following the climate debate is that virtually no climate skeptics are really trying to get at the truth.
I’m not a climate scientist, but I know what bogus arguments look like — and I can’t think of a single climate skeptic who isn’t obviously arguing in bad faith.
Take, for example, the people who seized on the fact that 1998 was an unusually warm year to claim that global warming stopped 20 years ago — as if one unseasonably hot day in May proves that summer is a myth. Or all the people who cite out-of-context quotes from climate researchers as evidence of a vast scientific conspiracy. Or anyone who cites “uncertainty” as a reason to do nothing — when it’s obvious that the risks of faster-than-expected climate change if we do too little dwarf the risks of doing too much if change is slower thanexpected.
What’s driving this epidemic of bad faith? Three groups are involved — a sort of axis of climate evil.
First,there’s the fossil-fuel industry — think the Koch brothers — which has an obvious financial stake in continuing to sell dirty energy. The industry — following the well-worn path industry groups used to create doubt about the dangers of tobacco, acid rain, the ozone hole and more — has showered money on think tanks and scientists willing to express skepticism about climate change. Many — perhaps most — authors purporting to cast doubt on global warming turn out, on investigation, to have received financial support from the fossil-fuel sector.
Then there’s ideology. An influential part of the political spectrum — think The Wall Street Journal editorial page — opposes all forms of government economic regulation; it follows Reagan’s doctrine that government is always the problem, never the solution.
These people have always had a problem with pollution: When unregulated individual actions impose costs on others, it’s hard to see how you avoid supporting some form of government intervention. And climate change is the mother of all pollution issues.
Some conservatives face this reality, supporting market-friendly intervention to limit greenhouse-gas emissions, but all too many prefer simply to deny the problem — if facts conflict with their ideology,they deny the facts.
Finally, a few public intellectuals — less important than the plutocrats and ideologues, but even more shameful — who adopt a pose of climate skepticism out of sheer ego. In effect, they say: “Look at me! I’m smart! I’m contrarian! I’ll show you how clever I am by denying the scientific consensus!” For the sake of posturing, they’re willing to nudge us further down the road to catastrophe.
Which brings me back to the political situation. Progressives now are feeling better than they expected to a few months ago: Donald Trump and his frenemies in Congress are accomplishing less than they had feared. But that doesn’t change the reality that the axis of climate evil is now firmly in control of U.S. policy, and the world may never recover.