WORLDFIRE - Chapter 9, Part II
Climate of Denial
In Chapter 9, “Climate of Denial,” we will be exploring various expressions of climate denial: 1) Fossil Fuel Industry Denial, 2) Republican Party Denial, 3) Democratic Party Denial, 4) Barack Obama’s Denial (included because he was president during my 2010 ride), 5) Donald Trump’s Denial, 6) Joe Biden’s Denial, and 7) Distraction as Denial. I have made every effort to be nonpartisan in my analysis. I hope you’ll stick with me through all seven parts - irrespective of your political views - as we objectively explore how best to dismantle these forms of destructive denial. Thank you.
Republican Party Denial
This brings us to the political form of climate denial and how Big Oil pulled off the coup of the century by managing to capture a major U.S. political party. Did you know a majority of Republicans serving in the U.S. Senate and U.S. House currently deny or question the fact that humans are changing the climate? A 2021 tally conducted by the Center for American Progress Action Fund unearthed 139 climate deniers in Congress: 30 in the Senate and 109 in the House, all members of the Republican Party. That’s a whopping 60 percent of Senate Republicans and 52 percent of House Republicans outright denying reality. I don’t care if you’re a Republican, a Democrat or an Independent (like me). This is ideological idiocy.
Ignoring settled science no more changes the fact that the burning of fossil fuels threatens life on Earth than insisting the Earth is flat changes the fact that the Earth is round. Scientifically settled facts are scientifically settled facts. Politicians have every right to believe the Moon is made out of cheese, but they do not have the right to pass Moon cheese policies that put our children’s lives in mortal danger.
It is almost as if someone performed mass hypnosis on the GOP. In a way, I guess they did. Just follow the money. Nothing else can possibly explain why so many politicians obtusely ignore what the scientific community at large keeps telling them. The aforementioned 139 climate-denying members of Congress received in excess of $61 million in lifetime campaign contributions from dirty energy industries. If you take that $61 million and divide it up among those 139 congressional deniers, it comes out to a little less than $440,000 per member. The only surprise to me is how cheaply a member of Congress can be bought.
A 2015 article in The Guardian explains how ExxonMobil convinced so many members of Congress (mostly Republicans) to carry their dirty water in the nation’s capital: “[E]ight years after pledging to stop its funding of climate denial,” a pledge made in 2007 under pressure from shareholder activists, “ExxonMobil gave more than $2.3m to members of Congress and a corporate lobbying group that deny climate change and block efforts to fight climate change.” The infamous oil barons, the Koch Brothers, gave even more. Koch-affiliated organizations have raised hundreds of millions of dollars every election cycle to muzzle the Republican Party on the climate crisis. They are a big reason why so many Republican members of Congress have become such compliant merchants of climate doubt.
CNN senior political analyst Ronald Brownstein crunched his own numbers in a 2017 piece he wrote for CNN politics: “Financially, the GOP hesitates to act [on climate change] because it receives the vast majority of the campaign contributions from oil, gas, coal and other energy industries. (In the past three elections, the oil and gas industry has directed nearly 90% of its campaign contributions to Republicans, and the coal industry channeled at least 96% of its contributions toward them in 2014 and 2016.)” In other words, the GOP has become a wholly owned subsidiary of the fossil fuel industry. In a 2015 no-holds-barred interview with The Guardian, the world’s most widely-known climate scientist, James Hansen, took aim at the GOP’s assault on science: “It’s all embarrassing really… Many of the conservatives know climate change is not a hoax. But those running for president are hamstrung by the fact [that] they think they can’t get the nomination if they say this is an issue. They wouldn’t get money from the fossil fuel industry.”
None of those congressional climate deniers probably bothered to even read the American Meteorological Society (AMS) 2015 report, “Explaining Extreme Events From A Climate Perspective,” which concluded: “Without exception, all the heat-related events studied in this year’s report were found to have been made more intense or likely due to human-induced climate change.” You will be hard pressed to find a source for weather-related information more mainstream than the AMS. Even The Weather Channel felt compelled to weigh in on all the climate denial nonsense in 2018 by blaring “THERE IS NO CLIMATE CHANGE DEBATE” on its Weather.com website. The site profiled a remarkable in-depth series called “United States of Climate Change: 50 STATES, 50 STORIES: CLIMATE CHANGE IS ALREADY HERE.”
If there was a poster child for the climate cranks in Congress, it would have to be U.S. Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), who acts in such deep denial about climate science he probably would have flacked for the Flat Earth Society back in the day. That or he knows exactly what he is doing, which is even more chilling. Senator Inhofe once went so far as to clownishly throw a snowball in the well of the Senate as if that somehow disproved global weirding. It was February. There was snow on the ground. No one said weather weirding means it stops snowing in the wintertime. Before retiring in 2023, Inhofe was still beating his sad “climate fantasy” drum.
A false debate has been created by the GOP to confuse and immobilize the American public. In 2002, during the George W. Bush administration, top Republican pollster Frank Luntz wrote an infamous memo advising his party to spout doubt about the scientific consensus on global heating. In it, he wrote: "Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community. Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate… The scientific debate is closing [against us] but not yet closed. There is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science." It concluded: “It’s time for us to start talking about ‘climate change’ instead of global warming… ‘Climate change’ is less frightening than ‘global warming.’ As one focus group participant noted, climate change ‘sounds like you’re going from Pittsburgh to Fort Lauderdale.’ While global warming has catastrophic connotations attached to it, climate change suggests a more controllable and less emotional challenge.”
Luntz is right that the tame-sounding phrase “climate change” makes the phenomenon sound less threatening, but his cynical advice that it be embraced over “global warming” has unfortunately been followed by more than just the GOP. It’s in popular use pretty much everywhere, from scientists to governments to climate activists to the mainstream media. This drives me up the wall, and has for many years, as anyone who has ever heard me sound off on it will attest. Say it out loud: climate change. It sounds pathetically weak. We’re not in a climate change, folks. We’re in a climate emergency. Call it a climate crisis. Call it climate calamity. Call it climate chaos. Call it climate breakdown. Call it “climate ruin.” Call it climate strange. But let’s stop calling it climate change. Words matter. It is self-defeating on its face for climate communicators to use such limp language to describe a phenomenon that has the potential to extinguish life on Earth. The world is on fire. Call it a worldfire. We need to speak clearly about the existential threat we face.
Another hopelessly outdated phrase in common use is “global warming.” For starters, it’s not accurate. The word “warming” does not begin to capture the hell on Earth our carbon pollution is unleashing. People don’t die from getting warm. They die from overheating. Worse yet, the word evokes positive connotations. Who doesn’t enjoy being outside on a warm spring day, or warming oneself by the fire in the wintertime? We are not warming the atmosphere. We are heating it. We are overheating it, and if we don’t stop, we are going to fry ourselves right off the face of the planet. It’s not global warming. It’s a global warning. Call it global heating. Call it global overheating. The result is global meltdown.
I was heartened to see two prominent scientists publicly echo my thinking in 2018. Dr. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, founding director of Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, declared, "Global warming doesn't capture the scale of destruction. Speaking of hothouse Earth is legitimate." Dr. Richard Betts, head of the Climate Impacts area of Britain’s Met Office, agreed that "global heating" is more accurate than "global warming" in describing the atmospheric impacts of carbon pollution. I was further heartened by news in early 2019 that editor-in-chief of The Guardian, Katharine Viner, had instituted a policy encouraging the use of the phrases “climate crisis,” “climate emergency,” and “climate breakdown” over “climate change,” and the phrase “global heating” over “global warming.” As logically explained by Viner: “The phrase ‘climate change’, for example, sounds rather passive and gentle when what scientists are talking about is a catastrophe for humanity.” Every major news outlet everywhere needs to make this shift. It is my hope that by the time this book is released, the phrase “climate change” will be out of vogue and “global heating” will have replaced “global warming” in the popular lexicon.
Getting back to the issue of denial, the GOP’s climate disinformation campaign–aided and abetted by conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and the Heartland Institute, along with the powerful U.S. Chamber of Commerce–receives support from a compliant corporate media that defends the status quo with slanted climate reporting and a non-stop onslaught of industry-sponsored television ads. If you watch TV, you’ve seen the ads. You’ve also no doubt seen the biased reporting. We need to be clear-eyed about the corrupting influence such advertising revenue has on the corporate media. For decades, the largest television networks have bent over backwards to give equal weight to climate experts and climate cranks, as if there was actually something to debate. There isn’t. Again, follow the money. In a 2012 piece titled, “Cowards in our Democracies,” scientist James Hansen explains how it works: “Today most media, even publicly-supported media, are pressured to balance every climate story with opinions of contrarians, climate change deniers, as if they had equal scientific credibility. Media are dependent on advertising revenue of the fossil fuel industry, and in some cases are owned by people with an interest in continuing business as usual. Fossil fuel profiteers can readily find a few percent of the scientific community to serve as mouthpieces – all scientists practice skepticism, and it is not hard to find some who are out of their area of expertise, who may enjoy being in the public eye, and who are limited in scientific insight and analytic ability.”
The end result is that one of the most important stories in the history of humanity is not being honestly covered by the mainstream media. In fact, it is hardly being covered at all. The corporate media covers what advertisers funding it–oil companies, car companies, drug companies, insurance companies, investment firms, big banks, big agriculture, and the defense industry–want it to cover to manufacture consent. Media producers are not oblivious. They see just as well as the rest of us how global heating is supercharging the hurricanes, wildfires, floods, and droughts that are ravaging the planet, but they choose not to prioritize the raging worldfire. In a rational world, the climate crisis would be the lead news story every day.
All this despite the fact that the world’s leading scientific academies have all concluded that human activity is changing the climate. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s top scientific body created in 1988 to advise governments on the climate threat, has determined that humans are "unequivocally" the cause of observed increases in greenhouse gases since the start of the Industrial Revolution. In fact, 97% or more of actively publishing climate scientists endorse the consensus position that humans are the cause of recent global heating. If you are wondering about the other three percent, you’ll be interested to know what a team of researchers–prominent among them evangelical Christian climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe–turned up in examining the three percent of papers that disagreed with the mainstream scientific consensus. Hayhoe wrote this about their review of the 38 papers published in peer-reviewed journals that denied manmade global heating: “Every single one of those analyses had an error - in their assumptions, methodology, or analysis - that, when corrected, brought their results into line with the scientific consensus.” Some of the errors discovered by the researchers were “false assumptions,” “erroneous analysis,” “neglect of contextual information,” “insufficient model evaluation,” “cherry-picking,” “curve-fitting,” and just plain old ignoring physics. In 2021, researchers found the scientific consensus in the peer-reviewed scientific literature to be even higher: 99%. After reviewing in excess of 24,000 peer-reviewed papers published on the topic over a two-year span, James L. Powell, a member of the National Science Board under Presidents Reagan and Bush, Sr., determined the consensus figure to be higher still: “99.9% plus.”
The latest manipulative game being played by Republican climate deniers to manufacture doubt is to plead ignorance by saying they’re not scientists, only to then turn around and ignore the warnings of almost every climate scientist on the planet. Commenting on this cynical ploy, scientist David Shiffman incisively writes: “When politicians say ‘I’m not a scientist,’ it is an exasperating evasion. It’s a cowardly way to avoid answering basic and important policy questions. This response raises lots of other important questions about their decision-making processes. Do they have opinions on how to best maintain our nation’s highways, bridges, and tunnels – or do they not because they’re not civil engineers? Do they refuse to talk about agriculture policy on the grounds that they’re not farmers? How do they think we should be addressing the threat of ISIS? They wouldn’t know, of course; they’re not military generals. No one would ever say these things, because they’re ridiculous. Being a policymaker in a country as large and complex as the United States requires making decisions on a variety of important subjects outside of your primary area of expertise. Voters wouldn’t tolerate this ‘I’m not a scientist’ excuse if applied to any other discipline.” So let’s stop tolerating it when it comes to the discipline of atmospheric and earth science.
Of course, not all Republican officeholders deny climate reality. Some leaders of the Grand Old Party (GOP), are wisely distancing themselves from climate denial. In 2015, nearly a dozen Republican House members, prompted by Pope Francis’s scheduled address to a joint session of Congress, introduced a House Resolution on “conservative environmental stewardship.” It acknowledged that “human activity contributes to climate change” and called for “actions to respond to the threat of climate change.” One of the resolution’s sponsors, Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-FL), even went so far as to call sea level rise “a clear and present danger.” For people living along the coast, this is hardly news, but to hear it coming from a Republican member of Congress was newsworthy, indeed. While timid in scope, the Republican resolution represented the first crack in the wall of congressional climate denial. What finally forced the issue was Pope Francis’ 2015 climate encyclical, “Laudato Sí” (“Praise be to you: On Care for Our Common Home”), calling for a “bold cultural revolution” to heed “the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.” In his remarkable 184-page encyclical, the Pontiff declared: “Our goal is… to become painfully aware, to dare to turn what is happening to the world into our own personal suffering and thus to discover what each of us can do about it.” Echoing his sentiments, a 2015 Reuters poll found that “[m]ost Americans see combating climate change as a moral duty.”
In 2017, the crack in the GOP grew a little wider when 17 Republican members of Congress bucked the Trump administration’s campaign to discredit climate science by introducing a resolution calling on the U.S. House of Representatives to address climate risks through American “ingenuity” and “innovation,” citing the “conservative principle to protect, conserve, and be good stewards of our environment.” Later that year, the crack grew wider still when 46 House Republicans sided with the military by joining House Democrats in a bipartisan defense of funding for a Department of Defense study on how climate impacts threaten America’s national security. But most of the GOP remains in deep, destructive denial. Astoundingly, the party’s climate denial mirrors its election denial (147 Republican members of Congress betrayed their oath of office when they sided with an insurrectionist over the U.S. Constitution by voting to overturn a free and fair election hours after the deadly Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol). History will not be kind to those who betray democracy. It will be even less kind to those who betray posterity.
NOTE: The written form of WORLDFIRE is the authoritative version. Any inadvertent errors in transcribing the recordings are mine and mine alone.
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