The polite face of climate change denial
Reasonable-sounding letter is emblematic of conspiracy theory crowd
Canadian journalist Arno Kopecky navigates minefields in his new book of essays, “The Environmentalist’s Dilemma: Promise and Peril in an Age of Climate Crisis.”
“I was interested in your article today,” the email began. “As an environmental supporter with a science background, it left me thinking about a couple questions.”
So began a typical email I received in response to a story I once wrote, comparing the denial of climate change by certain world leaders to those same leaders’ denial of COVID-19. The person emailing me was a retired engineer from Calgary. (I looked him up.) He understood science, and as far as I could tell he didn’t deny that COVID-19 was real and posed a genuine threat; all he denied was that the Earth’s climate is warming due to the buildup of greenhouse gases.
“How will rational environmentalists deal with the emerging science that shows warming isn’t as bad as portrayed by the extreme activists?” he wanted to know. “Assuming you’re rational and not an extremist? Even the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) scientists disagree with the alarmist position. I hope for Canada’s sake we can be realists and not blindly follow emotional extremism.”
The first thing to say about an email like this is that it was fairly polite. Being a white man spares me the abusive filth and death threats that others who write about climate change routinely receive. This never happens to me. What I get is thinly veiled contempt (“assuming you’re rational”).
But the thing that made this letter emblematic, the reason I quote it here, is the way it mixes absolute cynicism with total credulity. That’s a defining characteristic of the conspiracy theory crowd. Huge swaths of the public now reflexively distrust genuine experts in every field, only to place their faith in transparent bulls--artists.
Not that there’s no cause for distrust. It was experts, after all, who ushered in the nuclear policy of mutually assured destruction. It was experts who promised for decades that smoking didn’t cause cancer. It was experts who said we should eat meat and cheese and bread every day, and experts who reassured us that opioids were not addictive.
There have been so many abuses of trust in this bewildering world that no one can be surprised the public has grown suspicious; it’s where they choose to place their trust instead that consistently amazes, the equivalent of taking your savings out of a dodgy bank and handing them to a thief for safekeeping.
Now here we are, in an informational landscape crowded with inane conspiracy theories, believed or at least entertained in many cases by people who are genuine experts in other fields — that is, people who have demonstrated their capacity for critical thinking, yet believe that vaccines cause autism, or that Bill Gates created this novel coronavirus, or that the Democratic Party is a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles.
For sheer outlandishness and murderous intent, QAnon sits at the top of this pile. But in terms of size, global reach, political saturation, and pseudo-intellectual pedigree, QAnon remains an upstart in comparison to the grand poohbah of all conspiracy theories, which is climate change denial.
I don’t just mean in terms of the number of people who believe climate change is a hoax, or pretend to out of vested interest. I mean the number of people who would have to be in on the conspiracy itself for it to be true. Even QAnon, for all its baroque imagination, limits the number of people involved in the conspiracy to approximately onehalf of the American elite. That’s penny-ante stuff.
For climate change to be a hoax, all those baby-blooddrinking Democrats would have to be in cahoots with tens of thousands of climate scientists from all over the planet, whose university department heads would have to be orchestrating the incubation of this hoax.
They, in turn, would have to be recruiting an even greater number of journalists and politicians. This incredibly co-ordinated international coalition of conspirators would have to be cooking the books on temperature records from every corner of the planet, a project which would further require the participation of meteorologists from most of the countries in the world.
The conspirators would also have to tamper with government-owned satellite imagery to make it look as though all the world’s glaciers and both polar ice caps are melting, while thousands of biologists would have to pretend that the world’s coral reefs are dying of heat. The Pentagon and NASA would have to be involved at the highest level. The National Science Academies of at least 17 countries, and the global insurance industry, too. Just for starters.
The sheer scale of credulity required to believe climate change is a lie, combined with the scale of evidence that it is real, has lately forced many deniers to backpedal slightly.
Canada’s Conservative Party has written the playbook on this new form of climate denial. Instead of calling climate change a hoax, Conservatives here and abroad downplay its severity and emphasize unknowns. Climate change may be real, they nod, but it’s nowhere near as urgent as people say. Much remains unknown. Economic collapse, on the other hand, is a clear and present danger that we understand very well. The cure can’t be worse than the disease. So let’s be rational.
That kind of talk acts as a shield for inaction. It also provides cover for the outright deniers, who still constitute a majority of Canada’s Official Opposition — at their national convention in March 2021, the Conservative Party rejected a proposal to include the phrase “climate change is real” in their policy book. And that’s what makes my Calgarian pen pal’s email worth highlighting.
Here was an intelligent, science-literate man who truly believes that climate change is an unmitigated hoax. He knows who he’s voting for. If he was an isolated crank, I could ignore him, but he’s not. There are millions of people like him, throughout North America and beyond.
One thing they all do is project their own errors onto us. When I read “I hope we can be realists and not blindly follow emotional extremism,” I think of the emotional extremes that enable a grown man to hold on to the fantasy that there are no consequences to burning fossil fuel.
I think of the term “fake news” and the people who deploy it. I think of the expression that preceded fake news — “junk science” — which was coined by Big Tobacco to describe studies that found a link between smoking and cancer. I think of a recent Fox News headline that screeched, “Democrats are living in a fantasy world of denial concocted by a complicit media.” I think of Donald Trump accusing Democrats of stealing the election.