The changing face of climate change denialism

[billvon 3,131]

Years ago I made a list of the ways climate change deniers were denying the issue of climate change.  It had four main types:

1) There's no such thing as climate change!
2) OK maybe the climate is changing but it's not us doing it.
3) OK maybe we are warming the planet but all the changes will be good.
4) OK maybe some of the changes will be bad but it's too late to stop it.

I also made a prediction that 1) and maybe 2) would rapidly become impossible to maintain.  Sure, deniers could still say those things, but when you have just lost your entire town to a record-breaking wildfire season, no one's going to believe any denier who claims the climate isn't changing.  They can see it with their own eyes, and experience warming in a very real sense.

And that's been happening.  Almost no one today is claiming that the climate isn't changing; they realize they are no longer credible as soon as they say it.  Deniers are even starting to abandon the type 2 denial, since there is a mountain of evidence that our own gases are what's causing the warming.

So they've moved on to 3) and 4.)  We see 3) in action here with BH claiming how green and lovely the planet is with all that CO2, and I see 4) regularly on line with people asking "well it's too hard to stop burning oil and coal, right?  We have no other option.  All our electrical power comes from coal."

And those denials are getting more nuanced as well.  Oil and coal companies are using well-understood marketing strategies to claim that they are really the good guys in all this, and that it's someone else's fault.  That's deflection.  The first most famous deployment of this strategy was the crying indian commercials of the 1970's, funded by bottle and can manufacturers.  They saw bottle and can deposits coming in new legislation, and they sought to deflect those new laws by blaming people for litter rather than a lack of action on their part.  The guy responsible for the ads said that "the objective of the advertising, therefore, would be to show that polluters are people" and not the companies making the products.

To do this, they hired some Italian guy to pose as a native American and cry over the litter he saw by the side of the road, along with narration to the effect of "you start pollution, you can stop it."  And it worked.  It was popular and it delayed deposit laws by a few years.

Today deflection is used by oil companies both directly and indirectly.  BP, for example, published a "personal CO2 calculator" to show people that it was them, not the oil companies or power companies, that cause CO2 emissions.  Astroturf campaigns financed by oil companies post things like "Al Gore takes a JET to a climate change conference and tells you that you have to turn off your air conditioner!"  This does two things.  One, it makes Al Gore, a popular bogeyman for climate change deniers, the real villain.  Two, it reframes the emissions problems as a problem for individual people (who have to turn off their air conditioners) and not a problem for the companies that generate the power to run that air conditioner.

There's also the simple strategy of delay.  Delay allows an oil company executive to admit that CO2 emissions are changing the climate (so he's not seen as a fool) - but also allows him to say that they will fix the problem later, long after he's gone.  Rex Tillerson, former CEO of ExxonMobil, was quoted as saying that climate change was just an "engineering problem" and once we start blasting sulfates into the stratosphere, or seeding the oceans, or building CO2 absorbing plants, the problem will go away.

Division is another strategy that deniers are using nowadays.  By turning (say) the EV drivers against other environmentalists by saying "all your EVs are charged with COAL!  You must hate the planet!" they hope to sow division and discord within the environmental movement and thus weaken it.  Deniers are using such tactics to attack EV drivers, vegans, organic farmers, social justice advocates, solar power advocates etc to try to weaken them and dilute their perceived benefits.

And of course there's plain old option 4, which is "nothing we can do anyway, pointless to try."  Guy McPherson, a former ecologist and now a climate change "doomer" has been posting things like "I can’t imagine that there will be a human left on the Earth in 10 years . . .[I am] no fan of extinction . . . but the so called ‘green energy’ based on PV solar panels and wind turbines offers no way out of the ongoing climate emergency."  This strategy states that since it's hard to make any changes, best to do nothing and just accept our fate.  Live it up while you can!

Of course the fact that this is the diametric opposite of what early deniers said matters not one bit, and they are hoping no one thinks about that too much.

So nowadays when we talk about climate change deniers who oppose climate solutions that's not really the right term any more (although there are some people who absolutely still deny that it's happening at all, as we've seen on this very forum.)  They would be much better described by a term like solution deniers - people who use a whole array of tactics and strategies to try to derail any approach to reduce our carbon emissions.  Some of them are funded by oil, some are organized by a political party for political reasons, still others who simply found a cause and glommed onto it for fun.  But education (and the growing reality of climate change) helped reduce simple denialism - hopefully it will do the same for the anti-solution people.

[Phil1111 1,192]

14 hours ago, billvon said:

Years ago I made a list ..... denialism - hopefully it will do the same for the anti-solution people.

The self interests of deniers will always drive some percentage of the population into wanting the status quo. For example when they own coal and oil stocks. Or when they just don't give a f**k about anyone else. They will always be present in the population. There are those who think that the armed forces can keep hundreds of millions of people from the borders when climate change forces their migrations.

[gowlerk 2,283]

Maybe the deniers are right. Climate change is inevitable no matter what we do. So let's just keep the party going. 

https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/26/world/supercontinent-earth-intl-scli-climate-scn/index.html