Facing Down Denial: Ideas Towards a Climate Pragmatism
There are lessons to be learned from the methods and language of denial.
The desire to ignore climate denialism is tempting. There seems little value to be had in its unwillingness to engage with details, its conspiracy theories, and so-called scientific modeling of its own, all directed towards the downfall of the climate movement. But as change gives way to emergency, the case for building a broad consensus in favor of climate action marks a new imperative, while its alternative threatens efforts to construct a solution adequate to meet our current crisis. It is no longer sufficient to write off climate deniers—as either the unavoidable product of corporate propaganda, or as irredeemable antagonists to the climate cause. Recent setbacks across the US and the UK demonstrate the need to engage with denialism on its own terms if we want to have any success in building a bigger, broader movement. By paying closer attention to its methods and its language, there are lessons to be learned—not only about denialism itself—that can help both to refine the current rhetoric around climate change, and to direct the actions we take to alleviate its effects. It is an approach that involves divorcing the fraught proximity between the climate movement and the left, and it will be a bitter pill to swallow. The reward, however, will be a newfound pragmatism capable of delivering the drastic, radical action our planet demands.
For us to understand precisely how this might be the case, it is worth turning briefly to denialism itself. Though the arguments employed by climate skeptics are numerous and varied, they broadly boil down to a single underlying theme: the propagation of the false notion that significant scientific uncertainties continue to plague our understanding of climate change. In this, climate denialism is an early precursor of what we might now understand to be a post-truth age. The preference amongst the left is often to mobilize entrenched support, drawing attention to the facts of a warming climate – but such tactics flounder when faced with a collective mentality that remains stubborn in its refusal to recognize reality. Consider the address delivered by United States President Donald Trump to the Davos conference in January of 2020. “This is not a time for pessimism,” the President declared, “this is a time for optimism. To embrace the possibilities of tomorrow, we must reject the perennial prophets of doom and their predictions of the apocalypse.”
Trump’s language tracks a familiar path, diminishing climate activists to mere “fortune tellers” and at once belittling the science upon which that activism is founded. So the climate emergency, which demands urgent action, becomes the product not of observation or experiment, but of unfounded and even dangerous intuition. Trump continues: “We will never let radical socialists destroy our economy, wreck our country or eradicate our liberty.” Here we see the President recycle a claim, made eight years prior, that climate change has been “created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive”. The subject is different, but his point remains the same; Trump is weaponizing the climate movement itself, or perhaps weaponizing-in-reverse, as not only misguided, but malicious. “They want to see us do badly,” he says, “but we don’t let that happen [emphasis added].” It is an appeal to a common enemy, inspiring his base against a unified cause. As for the identity of that enemy, in the case of Davos, the object of the attack is clear: Trump is offering a direct rebuke to the Swedish activist and current harbinger of the climate movement, Greta Thunberg, who later that day, and at the very same conference, would go on to deliver an impassioned call for action. But the ease (or indifference) with which Trump is able to dismiss Thunberg’s plea speaks volumes about the inability of a movement that seeks to stress the urgency of our current crisis to cut across ideological divides.
The President is by no means alone in his disregard for the climate crisis. Throughout its history, climate denialism has generally sung from the same hymn sheet – a reality that rings true on both sides of the Atlantic. So, against Trump’s speech we might compare the words of Lord Nigel Lawson – a former British Chancellor, and one of the United Kingdom’s principal proponents of climate denial over the last twenty years. In a lecture given at the Centre for Policy Studies in 2006, Lawson speaks disparagingly of what he terms “spurious statistics based on theoretical models”, insisting on the contrary, in response to his own question about our ability to calculate the trajectory of global temperatures, “the only honest answer is that we don't know.” Fourteen years prior to Trump’s speech, Lawson’s words bear a striking resemblance. They establish a foundational caveat, or a principle of doubt, upon which misinformation can proliferate – while his appeal to honesty bestows his denialism with the façade of a rational and reasonable interpretation of science. Lawson is sacrificing an all-out disavowal of evidence, in favor of a seemingly nuanced stance on what, we are assured, drawing us yet deeper, is a “highly complex subject.”
But this transoceanic consensus at once marks the limit of our ability to draw substantial comparisons between the US and the rest of the world. There is no shortage of deniers across the west, the vast majority of whom lack any scientific credentials whatsoever, who take a willing issue with the findings of research into climate change, and whose views and statements can be said to provide a comprehensive survey of those in regular usage amongst deniers as a whole. But in the UK, as in Europe, to discuss those deniers is, by necessity, to discuss them as individuals – a fact that betrays their relatively minimal power to influence the views and the opinions of the general public. Lawson is a case in point. Despite past prominence, he remains a broadly inconspicuous name amid the annals of British politics. Likewise, though a set of personality traits capable of predicting climate denial has already been identified (the biggest predictor is political affiliation: conservative voters are more likely to discount climate change, less so those committed to liberal values), this fails to account for why the US is the country most divided in this regard: 30 percent of Republicans doubt the science, compared with just 4 percent of Democrats.
Rather, denialism in the US stems from a strong and deep-rooted opposition to regulation amongst conservatives and libertarians, and rests too on a consumerism integral to a specifically American way of life. This is itself a consequence of the active efforts of the US climate lobby, whose members – Shell and Exxon in particular – have not only been aware of, and have conducted their own research into the environmental implications of high levels of carbon emissions since as far back as the 1980s, but took active steps to delay and obscure the formation of a political consensus on the issue. Through the coordinated efforts of the now-disbanded Global Climate Coalition, or more subtly, through public disinformation campaigns that sought to draw attention to the draconian and financially ruinous nature of proposed climate policy, this has amounted collectively to the practically subliminal influence of climate denialism on the attitudes of the American public, and on the policy-making of top-level government officials. In consequence, to consider Trump’s latest speech, or tweet – whether it be outlining displeasure at the latest IPCC report, or promoting a fresh attack on the groups he holds responsible for so-called fake news – is to consider the words of a man who is at once the product of, and a cog within, a far broader, all-pervasive system. By nature, this system is self-affirming, with denialism breeding denialism: Trump’s own views, along with millions of his fellow Americans’, are fed and nurtured, their inherent pre-constructed liabilities towards denialism tapped and exploited to the benefit of interested conglomerates and corporations. That the US is an outlier in this regard is a point that cannot be understated enough. It is wholly inconceivable that climate denial in the UK, or elsewhere, could ever conduct itself on the scale, and with the organization, as has been seen in the US ever since James Hansen testified before Congress in 1988.
Such is the size of the challenge that the climate movement now faces – a challenge comparable to that facing the climate itself, when we consider that people pointed towards evidence inconsistent with their ideological beliefs are less likely to act, not more. Thus in the US, the success of the Green New Deal movement in aligning the climate emergency with left-wing political action has also been its downfall, having failed to recruit right-wing activists at the rate it has encouraged their disassociation from the climate cause. Likewise in the UK, where the scattergun tactics of the decentralized environmental group Extinction Rebellion (XR) have resulted in activists digging up the lawn of a prestigious Cambridge University college, and the occupation of public transport. It is a question of tactics and messaging. Such actions, along with concerns over XR’s elitism and lack of diversity, advance the cause of environmentalism to a lesser degree than they succeed in dragging the broader movement, its aims included, into disrepute. And yet more telling, in a direct echo of efforts in the US, the proposition in December of last year of a much-anticipated and long called-for ‘Green Industrial Revolution’ by the left-wing Labour Party resulted in its biggest political loss in decades, provoking claims that its campaign failed to address more tangible or pressing issues, and alienated the voting public in the process.
Whether the call for the Green New Deal should be held responsible or not, the divisive nature of the issue in the US suggests that its political climate is not best placed to welcome a radical climate policy without significant steps taken to mediate the reception of its message. This is not, or should not be, a novel idea – such methods exist on the fringes of left-wing environmental activism, but they are already common knowledge among Republicans. “We must have the courage to embrace real free-market solutions to combat the undeniable realities of climate change,” says Joseph Pinion, a Republican political consultant, writing in The Hill. “Otherwise, the decisions that shape tomorrow’s energy and environmental landscape will be bereft of conservative influence, and we will have nobody to blame but ourselves.” These words have been re-iterated by Bob Inglis, former South Carolina Rep. and founder of RepublicEN, a Republican climate group working to persuade the GOP to act on climate. Speaking to Vox last year, Inglis said: “it’s vital conservatives hear the message of climate action in their own language, rather than the language of the left, because it’s a totally different language … we talk about energy abundance and the power of the free enterprise system to deliver innovation.”
This idea of a “different language” is one outlined in a study, published in Nature as far back as 2012, that in order to broaden its base, the climate movement must ‘identify outcomes of mitigation efforts that deniers find important’ – principally, ‘a society where people are more considerate and caring, and where there is greater economic and technological development.’ With that in mind, we might return to Trump’s Davos speech, in which the President expressed his pride “to report the United States has among the cleanest air and drinking water on Earth — and we’re going to keep it that way. And we just came out with a report that, at this moment, it’s the cleanest it’s been in the last 40 years. We’re committed to conserving the majesty of God’s creation and the natural beauty of our world.” Typically off-the-cuff, there is nevertheless buried within Trump’s language the evidence of precisely this outcome-orientated rhetoric. It is an approach similar to, but broader than, the kind of environmentalism that the Sunrise Movement calls ‘selfish’ – the suggestion that news about ice caps melting is less potent than information about air and water pollution, issues which exert a manifest influence on our daily lives. The irony, however, is that the climate movement is already well-placed in this regard; when polled in 2018, a substantial 64 percent of Republican voters supported a package of climate and green jobs policies. But as their familiarity with ‘Green New Deal’ label increased, that support subsided – evidence that Republicans are more wary of a perceived radicalism than of climate activism itself, and underlining the need to distinguish climate policy from its ostensibly left-wing association.
That said, progress is being made amongst climate deniers. In 2015, only 49 percent of all Republicans believed that climate change was real, a number that has today jumped to around 64 percent. But the remainder is a number far too large to ignore. The continued ideological opposition of the GOP to climate action necessitates that for the moment, and indeed for the foreseeable future, the vanguard of the climate movement will remain with the left. Yet, just as some Republicans are learning that the future of their party necessitates a change of attitude, so too must climate activists adopt a more calculated, pragmatic stance, and a mentality that values the breadth of its support base as highly as the depth of its passion. To do so requires us not to avoid denialism, but to first recognize that it is an obstacle to be maneuvered around, and then to adjust our approach accordingly. The future of the planet depends on it.
Bio: Daniel Baksi is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in publications including Literary Review and The Arts Desk. He tweets at @danielbaksi.
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