This Changes Everything (8 page)

Which is why the ideological warriors gathered at the Marriott have concluded that there is really only one way to beat a threat this big: by claiming that thousands upon thousands of scientists are lying and that climate change is an elaborate hoax. That the storms aren’t really getting bigger, it’s just
our imagination. And if they are, it’s not because of anything humans are doing—or could stop doing. They deny reality, in other words, because the implications of that reality are, quite simply, unthinkable.

So here’s my inconvenient truth: I think these hard-core ideologues understand the real significance of climate change better than most of the “warmists” in the political center, the ones
who are still insisting that the response can be gradual and painless and that we don’t need to go to war with anybody, including the fossil fuel companies. Before I go any further, let me be absolutely clear: as 97 percent of the world’s climate scientists attest, the Heartlanders are completely wrong about the science. But when it comes to the political and economic
consequences
of those scientific
findings, specifically the kind of deep changes required not just to our energy consumption but to the underlying logic of our liberalized and profit-seeking
economy, they have their eyes wide open. The deniers get plenty of the details wrong (no, it’s not a communist plot; authoritarian state socialism, as we will see, was terrible for the environment and brutally extractivist), but when it comes
to the scope and depth of change required to avert catastrophe, they are right on the money.

When powerful ideologies are challenged by hard evidence from the real world, they rarely die off completely. Rather, they become cultlike and marginal. A few of the faithful always remain to tell one another that the problem wasn’t with the ideology; it was the weakness of leaders
who did not apply the rules with sufficient rigor. (Lord knows there is still a smattering of such grouplets on the neo-Stalinist far left.) By this point in history—after the 2008 collapse of Wall Street and in the midst of layers of ecological crises—free market fundamentalists should, by all rights, be exiled to a similarly irrelevant status, left to fondle their copies of Milton Friedman’s
Free to Choose
and Ayn Rand’s
Atlas Shrugged
in obscurity. They are saved from this ignominious fate only because their ideas about corporate liberation, no matter how demonstrably at war with reality, remain so profitable to the world’s billionaires that they are kept fed and clothed in think tanks by the likes of Charles and David Koch, owners of the diversified dirty energy giant Koch Industries,
and ExxonMobil.

According to one recent study, for instance, the denial-espousing think tanks and other advocacy groups making up what sociologist Robert Brulle calls the “climate change counter-movement” are collectively pulling in more than $900 million per year for their work on a variety of right-wing causes, most of it in the form of “dark money”—funds from conservative foundations that
cannot be fully traced.
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This points to the limits of theories like cultural cognition that focus exclusively on individual psychology. The deniers are doing more than protecting their personal worldviews—they are protecting powerful political and economic interests that have gained tremendously from the way Heartland and others have clouded the climate debate. The ties between the deniers and
those interests are well known and well documented. Heart
land has received more than $1 million from ExxonMobil together with foundations linked to the Koch brothers and the late conservative funder Richard Mellon Scaife. Just how much money the think tank receives from companies, foundations, and individuals linked to the fossil fuel industry remains unclear because Heartland does not publish
the names of its donors, claiming the information would distract from the “merits of our positions.” Indeed, leaked internal documents revealed that one of Heartland’s largest donors is anonymous—a shadowy individual who has given more than $8.6 million specifically to support the think tank’s attacks on climate science.
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Meanwhile, scientists who present at Heartland climate conferences are
almost all so steeped in fossil fuel dollars that you can practically smell the fumes. To cite just two examples, the Cato Institute’s Patrick Michaels, who gave the 2011 conference keynote, once told CNN that 40 percent of his consulting company’s income comes from oil companies (Cato itself has received funding from ExxonMobil and Koch family foundations). A Greenpeace investigation into another
conference speaker, astrophysicist Willie Soon, found that between 2002 and 2010, 100 percent of his new research grants had come from fossil fuel interests.
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The people paid to amplify the views of these scientists—in blogs, op-eds, and television appearances—are bankrolled by many of the same sources. Money from big oil funds the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, which houses Marc Morano’s
website, just as it funds the Competitive Enterprise Institute, one of Chris Horner’s intellectual homes. A February 2013 report in
The Guardian
revealed that between 2002 and 2010, a network of anonymous U.S. billionaires had donated nearly $120 million to “groups casting doubt about the science behind climate change . . . the ready stream of cash set off a conservative backlash against Barack
Obama’s environmental agenda that wrecked any chance of Congress taking action on climate change.”
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There is no way of knowing exactly how this money shapes the views of those who receive it or whether it does at all. We do know that having a significant economic stake in the fossil fuel economy makes one more prone to deny the reality of climate change, regardless of political affiliation.
For example, the only parts of the U.S. where opinions about climate change are slightly less split along political lines are regions that are highly depen
dent on fossil fuel extraction—such as Appalachian coal country and the Gulf Coast. There, Republicans still overwhelmingly deny climate change, as they do across the country, but many of their Democratic neighbors do as well (in parts of Appalachia,
just 49 percent of Democrats believe in human-created climate change, compared with 72–77 percent in other parts of the country). Canada has the same kinds of regional splits: in Alberta, where incomes are soaring thanks to the tar sands, only 41 percent of residents told pollsters that humans are contributing to climate change. In Atlantic Canada, which has seen far less extravagant benefits
from fossil fuel extraction, 68 percent of respondents say that humans are warming the planet.
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A similar bias can be observed among scientists. While 97 percent of active climate scientists believe humans are a major cause of climate change, the numbers are radically different among “economic geologists”—scientists who study natural formations so that they can be commercially exploited by the
extractive industries. Only 47 percent of these scientists believe in human-caused climate change. The bottom line is that we are all inclined to denial when the truth is too costly—whether emotionally, intellectually, or financially. As Upton Sinclair famously observed: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”
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One of the most interesting findings of the many recent studies on climate perceptions is the clear connection between a refusal to accept the science of climate change and social and economic privilege. Overwhelmingly, climate change deniers are not only conservative but also white and male, a group with higher than average incomes. And they are more likely than other
adults to be highly confident in their views, no matter how demonstrably false. A much discussed paper on this topic by sociologists Aaron McCright and Riley Dunlap (memorably titled “Cool Dudes”) found that as a group, conservative white men who expressed strong confidence in their understanding of global warming were almost six times as likely to believe climate change “will never happen” as the
rest of the adults surveyed. Mc
Cright and Dunlap offer a simple explanation for this discrepancy: “Conservative white males have disproportionately occupied positions of power within our economic system. Given the expansive challenge that climate change poses to the industrial capitalist economic system, it should not be surprising that conservative white males’ strong system-justifying attitudes
would be triggered to deny climate change.”
³⁷

But deniers’ relative economic and social privilege doesn’t just give them more to lose from deep social and economic change; it gives them reason to be more sanguine about the risks of climate change should their contrarian views turn out to be false. This occurred to me as I listened to yet another speaker at the Heartland conference display what
can only be described as an utter absence of empathy for the victims of climate change. Larry Bell (the space architect) drew plenty of laughs when he told the crowd that a little heat isn’t so bad: “I moved to Houston intentionally!” (Houston was, at that time, in the midst of what would turn out to be Texas’s worst single-year drought on record.) Australian geologist Bob Carter offered that “the
world actually does better from our human perspective in warmer times.” And Patrick Michaels said people worried about climate change should do what the French did after the devastating 2003 heat wave across Europe killed nearly fifteen thousand people in France alone: “they discovered Walmart and air-conditioning.”
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I listened to these zingers as an estimated thirteen million people in the
Horn of Africa faced starvation on parched land. What makes this callousness among deniers possible is their firm belief that if they’re wrong about climate science, a few degrees of warming isn’t something wealthy people in industrialized countries have to worry much about.
^I
(“When it rains, we find shelter. When it’s hot, we find shade,” Texas congressman Joe Barton explained at an energy and
environment subcommittee hearing.)
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As for everyone else, well, they should stop looking for handouts and get busy making money. (Never mind that the World Bank warned in a 2012
report that for poor countries, the increased cost of storms, droughts, and flooding is already so high that it “threatens to roll back decades of sustainable development.”) When I asked Patrick Michaels whether rich
countries have a responsibility to help poor ones pay for costly adaptations to a warmer climate, he scoffed: There is no reason to give resources to countries “because, for some reason, their political system is incapable of adapting.” The real solution, he claimed, was more free trade.
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Michaels surely knows that free trade is hardly going to help islanders whose countries are disappearing,
just as he is doubtlessly aware that most people on the planet who are hit hardest by heat and drought can’t solve their problems by putting a new AC system on their credit cards. And this is where the intersection between extreme ideology and climate denial gets truly dangerous. It’s not simply that these “cool dudes” deny climate science because it threatens to upend their dominance-based worldview.
It is that their dominance-based worldview provides them with the intellectual tools to write off huge swaths of humanity, and indeed, to rationalize profiting from the meltdown.

Recognizing the threat posed by this empathy-exterminating mind-set—which the cultural theorists describe as “hierarchical” and “individualistic”—is a matter of great urgency because climate change will test our moral
character like little before. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, in its bid to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating carbon emissions, argued in a petition that in the event of global warming, “populations can acclimatize to warmer climates via a range of behavioral, physiological, and technological adaptations.”
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It is these adaptations that worry me most of all. Unless our
culture goes through some sort of fundamental shift in its governing values, how do we honestly think we will “adapt” to the people made homeless and jobless by increasingly intense and frequent natural disasters? How will we treat the climate refugees who arrive on our shores in leaky boats? How will we cope as freshwater and food become ever more scarce?

We know the answers because the process
is already under way. The corporate quest for natural resources will become more rapacious, more violent. Arable land in Africa will continue to be seized to provide food and fuel to wealthier nations, unleashing a new stage of neocolonial plunder layered on
top of the most plundered places on earth (as journalist Christian Parenti documents so well in
Tropic of Chaos
). When heat stress and vicious
storms wipe out small farms and fishing villages, the land will be handed over to large developers for mega-ports, luxury resorts, and industrial farms. Once self-sufficient rural residents will lose their lands and be urged to move into increasingly crowded urban slums—for their own protection, they will be told. Drought and famine will continue to be used as pretexts to push genetically modified
seeds, driving farmers further into debt.
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In the wealthier nations, we will protect our major cities with costly seawalls and storm barriers while leaving vast areas of coastline that are inhabited by poor and Indigenous people to the ravages of storms and rising seas. We may well do the same on the planetary scale, deploying techno-fixes to lower global temperatures that will pose far greater
risks to those living in the tropics than in the Global North (more on this later). And rather than recognizing that we owe a debt to migrants forced to flee their lands as a result of our actions (and inactions), our governments will build ever more high-tech fortresses and adopt even more draconian anti-immigration laws. And, in the name of “national security,” we will intervene in foreign conflicts
over water, oil, and arable land, or start those conflicts ourselves. In short our culture will do what it is already doing, only with more brutality and barbarism, because that is what our system is built to do.