WORLDFIRE - Chapter 9, Part VII
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.
Distraction as Denial
This brings us to the UN’s official body for assessing climate science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which works in close cooperation with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. I am in no way denigrating the incredible work done by the dedicated researchers from nearly 200 member states who volunteer their time to assess the results of thousands of scientific papers to produce the IPCC’s reports. These scientists are making an invaluable contribution to society and deserve our deep thanks. Nor am I questioning the sincerity of UN Secretary-Generals like António Guterres whose pleas for urgent climate action consistently fall on deaf ears. My critique is of the United Nations process itself, for that political process is failing. Miserably. Most people don’t know that the IPCC operates on a unanimous consensus basis, meaning every member government–including major fossil fuel exporters like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Russia, Australia, and the United States–must approve every line of its summaries to policymakers, a politicized process that encourages projections that are inherently conservative and that dangerously understate the real risks to humanity. By relying on studies that tend toward scholarly reticence and understatement of risk, with not enough focus on the dangers of irreversible tipping points, the UN body is encouraging climate complacency. Speaking more broadly to this tendency, James Hansen calls it an “affliction” that is “widespread” in the scientific community, warning in a piece titled, “Dangerous Scientific Reticence,” that “it may severely diminish our chances of averting dangerous climate change.” Fewer still know that the IPCC lowballs emissions due to national military emissions reporting being voluntary. The world’s military emissions are huge. Even with all that, the findings of the IPCC’s 2021 report were scary enough to prompt the UN Secretary-General to declare a “code red for humanity” and to warn that we “must sound a death knell for coal and fossil fuels, before they destroy our planet."
In a 2017 interview with Democracy Now!, climate scientist Kevin Anderson honestly called out the lack of progress since the IPCC first began reporting on changes to the climate, saying “it’s basically all of the world’s science brought together and assimilated in really very detailed, carefully produced reports. The first one came out in 1990, two years before the Rio Earth Summit. It was a quarter of a century ago… since then, we have known everything we need to know about climate change to do something about it. And yet… emissions are 60 percent higher and going up again by another 2 percent this year… So when I say litany of scams, during that period, during that 27 years, there is nothing we have put in place that’s made any absolute, meaningful difference to our emissions. Our emissions have just got higher every single year.” In other words, the UN process has been an utter failure.
Every year, the world’s governments gather at what the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) calls a Conference of the Parties (COP) to talk about lowering carbon emissions while they just watch emissions continue to rise. They distract us with the pomp and circumstance of these intergovernmental conferences to make it appear they are accomplishing something meaningful. But these COPs are actually COP-OUTs. The UN climate negotiations are failing so miserably I have been thinking for years these COP-OUTs should be boycotted by civil society with the UNFCCC excoriated for its failure to adhere to its stated mission to “stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that will prevent dangerous human interference with the climate system.” Earth to UN: We are already experiencing dangerous climate interference at current levels of carbon pollution. Negotiations that allow even more lethal pollution are in direct contravention of the UNFCCC’s publicly declared goal.
A boycott of climate negotiations may seem counterintuitive to those wanting to affect climate policy, but civil society is largely relegated to the sidelines at COP conferences anyway, so why lend the political facade the veneer of legitimacy with our presence? Why not instead use our power to withdraw their social license to speak in our name? I don’t know about you, but my government is not truly representing me at these climate negotiations. Chasing after 30 years of failure is not a recipe for success. We have lost too many precious decades playing the game the UN’s way. To keep pretending, year after year, decade after decade, that the UN process is working when everyone can see that it is failing, is its own kind of denial. When the world is on fire, you don’t invite the arsonists to the negotiating table to argue for their right to toss on more fuel. You arrest the arsonists and mobilize firefighters to contain the worldfire.
Taking the dressed up climate facade to a new level of absurdity, the COP28 conference held in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, in 2023 was chaired by-yes-an oil baron. The President of the 28th COP-OUT was Sultan Al Jaber, CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. There should have been a worldwide outcry demanding that Al Jaber step down over this blatant conflict of interest.
I am not denying that vital strategic initiatives get hammered out at these UN conferences. The governments of the Global North, for instance, have a moral obligation to support serious climate financing for the Global South, which despite having done the least to contribute to climate breakdown is bearing the brunt of some of its most lethal impacts. The U.S. alone has racked up a huge historic carbon debt since the advent of the Industrial Revolution. But let’s not pretend the incremental UNFCCC approach has a snowball’s chance in hell of actually saving civilization and the living world from collapse. We need to stop thinking things will get better with the next COP-OUT, when things just keep getting worse. The hostile takeover of the international climate negotiations by fossil fuel industry arsonists is an unconscionable betrayal of our children’s trust and of all generations to come. It is why I joined climate leader Naomi Klein in publicly calling for a boycott of COP28.
I don’t have a ready answer to what is the best alternative to the UN process, but when what you’re doing isn’t working, it’s time to try something else. What if real COPs (Conferences of the People) were held prior to the annual COP-OUTs, only convened by Indigenous wisdom keepers and the world’s youth–those with the most to lose–with delegates representing every participating nation, for the expressed purpose of formulating a global climate emergency response plan, releasing it the media, and demanding its enaction by the governments of the world? A related concept growing in popularity is Citizens’ Assemblies on climate and ecological justice. People from all walks of life are randomly selected by lottery to ensure participants are truly representative of the population. They come together for a pre-determined period of time to learn, deliberate, and develop greenprints to deliver to government leaders. The purpose of these bottom-up assemblies is to empower citizens and to embolden politicians. A Global Citizens’ Assembly is another possible vehicle to provide a check on the ever-failing COP-OUTs.
Recent history shows that international agreements can produce results if done right. Take the Montreal Protocol. Adopted in 1987, the agreement is committed to protecting the Earth’s ozone layer–humanity’s protective shield against deadly ultraviolet solar radiation–by phasing out ozone depleting chemicals. Unlike the Paris accord, the Montreal accord has teeth. It is a legally binding agreement with penalties for non-compliance. One of the biggest climate stories that didn’t make the news in 2016 was how the Montreal Protocol reached agreement on a global phasedown of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) not to protect the ozone layer, but to protect the climate (again, HFCs have 1,000-9,000 times the heat trapping potential of carbon dioxide). One of the biggest climate stories that didn’t make the news in 2022 was how the United States Senate actually ratified this HCF phaseout in a vote that transcended political party (2 Independents, 21 Republicans, and 46 Democrats supported the agreement). Interesting how protecting life on Earth from climate breakdown because it was part of an international agreement about protecting life on Earth from deadly solar radiation became a transpartisan issue. This single action of phasing out HFCs has the potential to avoid 0.5°C of global heating by the end of the century. But that’s not all. Researchers in 2021 determined that because ultraviolet radiation negatively effects plant growth, absent the Montreal Protocol, there might be an additional 115-235 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which could have led to an additional 0.5°-1.0°C of global heating, due a lot less carbon having been stored in plants and soils. Maybe we should be looking to the Montreal Protocol for more climate protection. We should definitely be studying it as a model for success.
Something else that must change is how often the IPCC issues its climate updates. Right now, their assessment reports are issued every 5-8 years, as if we had all the time in the world to respond. Acknowledging the IPCC’s vital contribution to our understanding of climate science does not change the fact that the last three assessment reports were issued in 2007, 2014, and 2021 (the final part of the 2021 report was released in early 2023), with the next assessment report not expected until around 2030. Too many changes to the climate to name are outpacing projections in the multi-year gaps between these reports. Can you imagine any other global security threat relying on findings that are outdated by seven years? This is beyond reckless. It’s insane. Effectively protecting humanity demands annual assessment reports on the state of climate breakdown so we can effectively calibrate our response. We need quarterly reports. We need monthly reports. We need weekly reports. The president should be receiving daily presidential climate briefs.
A growing number of climate scientists share my concern about the IPCC’s glacial pace. As reported by Inside Climate News, “That seven-year schedule is simply unacceptable for a document that is ‘relied on by countless decision makers around the world every day,’" said Katharine Hayhoe, Co-Director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University. The National Center for Atmospheric Research’s Kevin Trenberth, who you may recall I sat down and talked with before departing Boulder, has long called on “the IPCC to transition toward a ‘climate service’ that provides ‘a continuous stream of information on how the climate is changing, why it is changing, what the expectations are on various time horizons, and how best to plan for the future climate,’" reports Inside Climate News. Elaborating on his vision, Trenberth wrote: “The proposed Climate Information System will provide data and services not only for understanding, attributing, and predicting climate changes, but also for… transitioning from the current fossil-fuel based energy system to one based on renewable sources, such as wind and solar power.” He advocated for “climate services akin to the weather enterprise of the past 50 years.” We have a National Weather Service. We can certainly have a National Climate Service.
Storm clouds of another form of distraction are gathering on the horizon that pose more danger to humanity still. The climate emergency has grown so dire that some people–including some climate deniers–are now pushing for a new form of reckless climate manipulation on top of the climate manipulation we have already done. It is commonly referred to as “geoengineering.” This is where we get all mad scientist and start experimenting with radical, high-risk schemes like artificially injecting sulfate aerosols (fine, reflective sulfur particles) into the stratosphere, launching billions of mirrors into space, or fertilizing the ocean with iron. It is revealing to see so many erstwhile climate deniers go from outright denying climate reality to suddenly saying the climate crisis is so severe it requires even more climate manipulation. Others continue to deny the reality of climate breakdown while cynically pushing for climate manipulation research. Disingenuous politicians are promoting this Frankenstein research as an excuse to delay phasing out fossil fuels. It is a dangerous distraction cynically being used by polluters to undermine international climate negotiations so they can keep on polluting, endangering us all.
Embracing the same techno-mindset that got us into this mess will not get us out of it. As we already learned the hard way with nuclear power (think Chernobyl and Fukushima), there are such things as unintended consequences. So-called “geoengineering” raises a whole slew of ethical and moral issues. No one knows what the negative side effects of these climate manipulation schemes might be. We already have our hands full with climate breakdown as it is. The last thing we need at this late hour is a new set of complex problems to have to try to fix. This makes it critical that we adopt the precautionary principle as our guiding light going forward. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) defines this ethical, no-regrets principle as “when human activities may lead to morally unacceptable harm that is scientifically plausible but uncertain, actions shall be taken to avoid or diminish that harm.” UNESCO defines morally unacceptable harm as “harm to humans or the environment that is threatening to human life or health, or serious and effectively irreversible, or inequitable to present or future generations, or imposed without adequate consideration of the human rights of those affected.” In 2010, the UN-sponsored Convention on Biological Diversity wisely established a moratorium on climate “geoengineering.” But the U.S., as the only country not a party to that convention, is already allowing such dangerous experiments to be developed or deployed in Arizona, California, and Alaska, according to the watchdog group Geoengineering Monitor. If your alarm bells aren’t going off, they should be.
In early 2015, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) released a report on the climate manipulation scheme of reflecting sunlight to cool the climate. As reported in Truthout: “In preparing and discussing the report, its authors declined to use the term ‘geoengineering,’ opting instead for ‘climate intervention.’” As explained by one of its authors, Marcia McNutt, “We… felt that ‘engineering’ implied a level of control that is illusory.’” I prefer the term “manipulation” to “intervention,” since interventions can be viewed as helpful and there is nothing remotely helpful about the idea of humans blindly manipulating the climate even more than we already have. Declaring that it would be “irrational and irresponsible” to pursue such climate manipulations without reducing carbon emissions, the committee nevertheless tentatively recommended researching such schemes. In 2021, a NAS committee went further by recommending a federal investment of $100-$200 million over five years to research solar “geoengineering.”
Should we really be spending precious taxpayer dollars on researching climate manipulation schemes that pose such a high risk of making things worse when we have so many natural carbon drawdown solutions to invest in that we know can make things better? We will explore some of these natural drawdown solutions later in this book. Yet that is what we are doing thanks to politicians from both political parties pushing such schemes. It began with a line item President Trump added to the 2020 budget providing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration with $4 million to study the stratosphere, including the impact of “proposals to inject material to affect climate, and the assessment of solar climate interventions.” It continued with President Biden backing a five-year research program into climate manipulation.
Reasonable people can disagree about climate manipulation. I get why some people go there. Things are dire and we have been conditioned to believe that we can engineer our way out of anything. There are scientists of goodwill who believe climate manipulation research, including small field experiments, should be pursued. Others, like geophysicist Raymond T. Pierrehumbert, take a more nuanced approach, but there is nothing nuanced about the scientist’s opposition to it ever being deployed. Calling the hypothetical technology a “terrifying and destabilizing thing” that has “no real, good justification for deployment ever,” Oxford University’s Pierrehumbert and his NAS colleagues support researching the “economic, political, ethical, and other dimensions” of what he calls “albedo hacking.” But he believes “the idea of ‘fixing’ the climate by hacking the Earth’s reflection of sunlight is wildly, utterly, howlingly barking mad.” Pointing out a glaring defect of the climate hacking scheme, he warns “if the CO2 we have emitted at some time heats the Earth to the point where something intolerably bad starts to happen, active albedo modification would need to be continually maintained basically forever.” He then asks: “When has humanity ever managed to sustain a concerted complex technological enterprise for centuries, let alone millennia?” The answer, of course, is never. Imposing such an impossible burden on our children and future generations would be an unspeakable act of intergenerational injustice.
Beyond the moral question of who would govern the global thermostat, what would happen if we started such an experiment and then for whatever reason stopped? Termination shock would blast us with a burst of pent-up heating. What if the hacking were to go haywire? Then we’re doubly screwed. Identified perils posed by albedo hacking include possible reductions in rainfall, worsening acid rain, interfering with plant photosynthesis, risking the food supply of billions of people, depleting the Earth’s already compromised protective ozone layer, and worst of all, risking further destabilizing an already dangerously destabilized climate. Oh, and you could say goodbye to our bright blue sky. It would be a dreary milky white.
Adding another layer of danger is the prospect of misguided billionaires like Bill Gates and Richard Branson wanting to privatize climate hacking to boost their wealth. We cannot allow private interests to control the skies. Being a billionaire gives you no special insights into how Gaia functions. Take Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. He wants us to believe we can somehow jettison all of our polluting industries into space. No, our planetary geniuses are not wealthy white men hypnotized by technology. They are Indigenous Peoples who have a symbiotic relationship with the living Earth. Gaia’s intelligence is far beyond the ability of technocrats to grasp. Let’s get over our worshiping of the wealthy and start honoring Native wisdom and the Earth.
Other climate manipulation schemes are similarly rife with problems. As reported by The Guardian in 2014, a team of scientists at the Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel, Germany modeled “five potential methods and concluded that geoengineering could add chaos to complex and not fully understood weather systems.” You think? Comparing “the effectiveness and side effects of afforestation, artificial ocean upwelling, ocean iron fertilization, ocean alkalinization and solar radiation management during a high carbon dioxide-emission scenario,” the researchers found “that even when applied continuously and at scales as large as currently deemed possible, all methods are, individually, either relatively ineffective with limited (<8%) warming reductions, or they have potentially severe side effects and cannot be stopped without causing rapid climate change.” This prompted Dr. Matt Watson, Senior Lecturer in Natural Hazards at the University of Bristol to warn of “the abject stupidity on relying upon climate engineering solutions when reducing our reliance on carbon-based energy systems is the only sensible option.” In other words, we need to focus on job number one.
In her book, This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein soberly cautions that “by trying to fix the crud in our lower atmosphere by pumping a different kind of crud into the stratosphere… geoengineering might do something far more dangerous than tame the last vestiges of ‘wild’ nature. It may cause the earth to go wild in ways we cannot imagine, making geoengineering not the final engineering frontier, another triumph to commemorate on the walls of the Royal Society, but the last tragic act in this centuries-long fairy tale of control.” Klein darkly warns of “even small amounts of geoengineering unleashing a new age of weather-related geopolitical recrimination, paranoia, and possibly retaliation, with every future natural disaster being blamed–rightly or wrongly–on the people in faraway labs playing god.” The terrifying prospect of climate hacking unleashing unimaginable climate chaos and of nations weaponizing the weather is all too real.
In 2018, more than 100 Indigenous and civil society organizations from around the world released a “Manifesto Against Geoengineering,” describing “geoengineering as an attempt to uphold a failed status quo and divert attention from emissions reductions and the real solutions to the climate.” It warned: “Deploying Solar Radiation Management in particular may depend on military infrastructure and could create a new geopolitical imbalance of winners and losers in the race to control the Earth’s thermostat.” The manifesto also condemned climate manipulation testing: “To know if geoengineering proposals would have an effect on climate change, it would need to be deployed at such a large spatial and temporal scale (to differentiate it from other ongoing climate phenomena) that it wouldn’t be an experiment - it would be outright deployment, with all its potential intended and unintended impacts.” Think about it. National research projects that are field-tested almost always end up being deployed.
In 2022, hundreds of alarmed scientists from around the world, including the aforementioned Pierrehumbert, signed an open letter calling for “immediate political action from governments, the United Nations, and other actors to prevent the normalization of solar geoengineering as a climate policy option.” Describing the hypothetical technology as unnecessary, undesirable, unethical, and politically ungovernable, the scientists issued the call for an International Non-Use Agreement on Solar Geoengineering, declaring that governments and the UN must immediately “assert effective political control and restrict the development of solar geoengineering technologies at planetary scale.” Their three primary concerns: 1) “The risks of solar geoengineering are poorly understood and can never be fully known”; 2) “Speculative hopes about the future availability of solar geoengineering technologies… can disincentivize governments, businesses, and societies to do their utmost to achieve decarbonization or carbon neutrality as soon as possible”; and 3) “The current global governance system is unfit to develop and implement the far-reaching agreements needed to maintain fair, inclusive, and effective political control over solar geoengineering deployment.” The International Non-Use Agreement “would not prohibit atmospheric or climate research as such, and it would not place broad limitations on academic freedom. The agreement would instead focus solely on a specific set of measures targeted purely at restricting the development of solar geoengineering technologies under the jurisdiction of the parties to the agreement.” I fully support this Non-Use Agreement.
The climate beast we know is scary enough. The last thing we want to do is mutate that monster into an unrecognizable form. It would be madness to blindly manipulate the climate even further while ignoring the real solution staring us in the face: keep the fossil fuels in the ground. Thinking we are smarter than Gaia is what got us into this mess in the first place. Working with her is what will get us out of it. Human engineering cannot techno-fix Mother Nature. She doesn’t need fixing. She needs respect. And we need humility. We have only begun to scratch the surface of understanding how our 4.5 billion-year-old living planet functions. So let’s not compound one crisis with another by arrogantly tinkering with a dynamic system far too complex for our human minds to ever fully wrap our heads around.
Climate hacking, Big Oil, and politicians aside, most Americans today acknowledge that humans are wrecking the planet. The evidence is everywhere. You wouldn’t know it by watching the fear-based negative news networks, but poll after poll shows that most Americans actually want climate action. Most Americans put an extremely high value on clean air, fresh water, healthy food, and a planet that supports life. Millions of Americans are becoming increasingly panicked by the state of our world and want their children to survive the unfolding climate crash.
As far back as 2014, a Washington Post/ABC News poll found “a lopsided and bipartisan majority of Americans support federal limits on greenhouse gas emissions.” Mirroring what I myself found in the so-called political “red” states of Kansas, Missouri, Indiana, and Ohio, it found that “even in red states, support for federal curbs on greenhouse gas emissions is almost as widespread as among Americans overall.” A 2015 study conducted by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication found a majority of Republicans “think global warming is happening” and “support regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant.” A Yale poll commissioned in 2017 found 69% of Americans support restricting carbon emissions from coal plants, including a majority in every congressional district in the country. This finding from a 2018 Yale survey may surprise you: 70% of Americans believe “environmental protection is more important than economic growth.”
Let’s look at how many Americans are worried about climate breakdown. Yale and George Mason universities reported in 2018 nearly six in ten Americans being “alarmed” or “concerned” about the global climate threat. A 2019 American Psychological Association poll found 68% of U.S. adults worried about climate impacts. Another 2019 poll conducted by Yale found 61% of registered voters “worried about global warming,” with “large majorities of registered voters across the political spectrum” supporting: “Investing in renewable energy research and infrastructure” (87%); “Regulating pollution” (82%); and “Taxing pollution” (72%). A 2019 CBS News poll found 64% of Americans believe the changing climate is a “crisis” or a “serious problem,” with more than half saying it needs to be addressed “right now.” A 2021 Pew survey found 60% of Americans concerned that climate impacts will harm them personally, with 74% willing to change how they live to reduce those impacts. A 2023 Yale poll found “57% of registered voters support a U.S. president declaring global warming a national emergency if Congress does not take further action.” Another 2023 CNN poll found that roughly 3 in 4 Americans want to see the U.S. cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030.
Skeptics can easily dismiss one such survey or poll, but it requires some serious mental gymnastics to dismiss so many polls and surveys that reach the same basic conclusion. Here’s the truth climate deniers can’t handle: the American people are much more united on this threat than the political establishment would have us believe. Every day it gets harder to hide the fact that more than four billion people have already “been injured, left homeless or in need of emergency assistance as a result of weather-related disasters,” as reported by the UN, since the first UN-sponsored Conference of the Parties (COP1) in 1995. One in three Americans were impacted by weather weirding in 2021 alone. Too much weirding of the weather is too obvious to too many for the lie to stay alive. After an agonizingly long decline, we are seeing the last gasps of the climate denial phenomenon. This is cause for hope, for once we accept the reality of the climate emergency, we can face it with the kind of courage one would expect from the land of the free and the home of the brave. Once we dispense with denial, we can focus our energies on tapping into that deep reservoir of American ingenuity, resilience, and drive, and turn this crisis into opportunity.
In The Book of Joy, Archbishop Desmond Tutu–someone who knew a thing or two about courage–shared some sage words about accepting reality that lights a way out of our current climate conundrum. Reminding us that we “are meant to live in joy,” Tutu shared: “This does not mean that life will be easy or painless. It means that we can turn our faces to the wind and accept that this is the storm that we must pass through. We cannot succeed by denying what exists. The acceptance of reality is the only place from which change can begin.”
The climate storms are coming. Only by accepting this reality can we hope to survive them and live for a better day. I speak from experience when I say facing the wrath of these tempests will not be painless or easy, but what greater honor for our generation than to selflessly shield the innocents in our charge from the ferocity of their force? To step up and willingly absorb whatever those winds have to throw at us is a fierce act of love, one that provides an unshakable foundation for living our lives joyously. Feet firmly planted, our job is to stand our ground, and face down the fear, and whatever else may come.
NOTE: The written form of WORLDFIRE is the authoritative version. Any inadvertent errors in transcribing the recordings are mine and mine alone.