by Naomi Klein
With so much at stake, it should come as little surprise that climate deniers are, on the whole, those most invested in our highly unequal and dysfunctional economic status quo. One of the most interesting findings in 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 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 Aaron McCright and Riley Dunlap (memorably titled “Cool Dudes”) found that confident conservative white men, as a group, were almost six times as likely to believe climate change “will never happen” than the rest of the adults surveyed. McCright 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.”
But deniers’ relative economic and social privilege doesn’t just give them more to lose from a new economic order; it gives them reason to be more sanguine about the risks of climate change in the first place. 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 disruption. Larry Bell, whose bio describes him as a “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 the state’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 a devastating 2003 heat wave killed fourteen thousand of their people: “they discovered Walmart and air-conditioning.”
Listening to these zingers as an estimated thirteen million people in the Horn of Africa faced starvation on parched land was deeply unsettling. What makes this callousness possible is the firm belief that if the deniers are wrong about climate change, a few degrees of warming isn’t something wealthy people in industrialized countries have to worry about. (“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.)
As for everyone else, well, they should stop looking for handouts and busy themselves getting unpoor. When I asked Michaels if rich countries had a responsibility to help poor ones pay for costly adaptations to a warmer climate, he scoffed at the idea, saying that there was no reason to give money to poor 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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This is where the intersection between hard-right 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 in the developing world. Recognizing the threat posed by this empathy-exterminating mind-set is a matter of great urgency, because climate change will test our moral character like little before. The US 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.” These adaptations are what I worry about most.
How will we 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? Will we open our borders, recognizing that we created the crisis from which they are fleeing? Or will we build ever more high-tech fortresses and adopt ever more draconian anti-immigration laws? How will we deal with resource scarcity?
We know the answers already. The corporate quest for scarce resources will become more rapacious, more violent. Arable land in Africa will continue to be grabbed to provide food and fuel to wealthier nations. Drought and famine will continue to be used as a pretext to push genetically modified seeds, driving farmers further into debt. We will attempt to transcend peak oil and gas by using increasingly risky technologies to extract the last drops, turning ever-larger swaths of our globe into sacrifice zones. We will fortress our borders and intervene in foreign conflicts over resources, or start those conflicts ourselves. “Free-market climate solutions,” as they are called, will be a magnet for speculation, fraud, and crony capitalism, as we are already seeing with carbon trading and the use of forests as carbon offsets. And as climate change begins to affect not just the poor but the wealthy as well, we will increasingly look for techno fixes to turn down the temperature, with massive and unknowable risks.
As the world warms, the reigning ideology that tells us it’s everyone for themselves, that victims deserve their fate, that we can master nature, will take us to a very cold place indeed. And it will only get colder, as theories of racial superiority, barely under the surface in parts of the denial movement, make a raging comeback. These theories are not optional: they are necessary to justify the hardening of hearts to the largely blameless victims of climate change in the Global South and in predominately African American cities like New Orleans.
In The Shock Doctrine (2007), I explore how the right has systematically used crises, real and trumped up, to push through a brutal ideological agenda designed not to solve the problems that created the crises but, rather, to enrich elites. As the climate crisis begins to bite, it will be no exception. This is entirely predictable. Finding new ways to privatize the commons and to profit from disaster are what our current system is built to do.
The only wild card is whether some countervailing popular movement will step up to provide a viable alternative to this grim future. That means not just an alternative set of policy proposals but an alternative worldview to rival the one at the heart of the ecological crisis—this time, one embedded in interdependence rather than hyperindividualism, reciprocity rather than dominance, and cooperation rather than hierarchy.
Shifting cultural values is, admittedly, a tall order. It calls for the kind of ambitious vision that movements used to fight for a century ago, before everything was broken into single “issues” to be tackled by the appropriate sector of business-minded nongovernmental organizations. Climate change is, in the words of the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, “the greatest example of market failure we have ever seen.” By all rights, this reality should be filling progressive sails with conviction, breathing new life and urgency into long-standing fights against everything from pro-corporate free trade to financial speculation to industrial agriculture to Third World debt, while elegantly weaving all these struggles into a coherent narrative about how to protect life on earth.
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But that isn’t happening, at least not so far. It is a painful irony that while the Heartlanders are busily calling climate change a left-wing plot, most leftists have yet to realize that climate science has handed them the most powerful argument against capitalism since William Blake’s “dark Satanic Mills” (and, of course, those mills were the beginning of climate change). When demonstrators are cursing out the corruption of their governments and corporate elites in Athens, Madrid, Cairo, Madison, and New York, climate change is often little more than a flesh wound, when it should be the coup de grâce.
Half the problem is that progressives, their hands full with battling systemic economic and racial exclusions, not to mention multiple
wars, tend to assume that the big green groups have the climate issue covered. The other half is that many of the biggest big green groups have avoided, with phobic precision, any serious debate on the blindingly obvious roots of the climate crisis: globalization, deregulation, and contemporary capitalism’s quest for perpetual growth (the same forces that are responsible for so much destruction in the rest of the economy). The result is that those taking on the failures of capitalism and those fighting for climate action remain two solitudes, with the small but valiant climate justice movement (drawing the connections between racism, inequality, and environmental vulnerability) stringing up a few swaying bridges between them.
The right, meanwhile, has had a free hand to exploit the global economic crisis that began in 2008 to cast climate action as a recipe for economic Armageddon, a surefire way to spike household costs and to block new, much-needed jobs drilling for oil and laying new pipelines. With virtually no loud voices offering a competing vision of how a new economic paradigm could provide a way out of both the economic and ecological crises, this fearmongering has had a ready audience.
Far from learning from past mistakes, a powerful faction in the environmental movement is pushing to go even further down the same disastrous road, arguing that the way to win on climate is to make the cause more palatable to conservative values. This can be heard from the studiously centrist Breakthrough Institute, which is calling for the movement to embrace industrial agriculture and nuclear power instead of agroecological farming and decentralized renewables. It can also be heard from several of the researchers studying the rise in climate denial. Some, like Yale’s Kahan, point out that while those who poll as highly “hierarchical” and “individualist” bridle at any mention of regulation, they tend to like big, centralized technologies that confirm their belief that humans can dominate nature. So, he and others argue, environmentalists should start emphasizing responses such as nuclear power and geoengineering (i.e., deliberately intervening in the climate system to counteract global warming) and play up concerns about national security.
The first problem with this strategy is that it doesn’t work. For years, big green groups have framed climate action as a way to assert “energy security,” while “free-market solutions” are virtually the only ones on the table in the United States. Meanwhile, denialism has soared. The more troubling problem with this approach, however, is that rather than challenging the warped values motivating denialism, it reinforces them. Nuclear power and geoengineering are not solutions to the ecological crisis; they are a doubling down on exactly the kind of short-term hubristic thinking that got us into this mess.
It is not the job of a transformative social movement to reassure members of a panicked, megalomaniacal elite that they are still masters of the universe; nor is it necessary. True, this demographic is massively overrepresented in positions of power, but the solution to that problem is not for the majority of people to change their ideas and values. It is to attempt to change the culture so that this small but disproportionately influential minority, and the reckless worldview it represents, wields significantly less power.
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Some in the climate camp are pushing back hard against the appeasement strategy. Tim DeChristopher, who served a two-year jail sentence in Utah for disrupting a compromised auction of oil and gas leases, commented on the right-wing claim that climate action will upend the economy. “I believe we should embrace the charges,” he told an interviewer. “No, we are not trying to disrupt the economy, but yes, we do want to turn it upside down. We should not try and hide our vision about what we want to change—of the healthy, just world that we wish to create. We are not looking for small shifts: we want a radical overhaul of our economy and society.” He added, “I think once we start talking about it, we will find more allies than we expect.”
When DeChristopher articulated this vision for a climate movement fused with one demanding deep economic transformation, it surely sounded to most like a pipe dream. Today, it sounds prophetic. It turns out that a great many people have been hungering for this kind of transformation on many fronts, from the practical to the spiritual.
And new political connections are already being made. The Rainforest Action Network, which has been targeting Bank of America for financing the coal industry, has made common cause with Occupy activists taking aim at the bank over foreclosures. Antifracking activists have pointed out that the same economic model that is blasting the bedrock of the earth to keep the gas flowing is blasting the social bedrock to keep the profits flowing. And then there is the historic movement against the Keystone XL Pipeline, which this fall has decisively yanked the climate movement out of the lobbyists’ offices and into the streets (and jail cells). Anti-Keystone campaigners have noted that anyone concerned about the corporate takeover of democracy need look no further than the corrupt process that led the State Department to conclude that a pipeline carrying dirty tar sands oil across some of the most sensitive land in the country would have “limited adverse environmental impacts.” As 350.org’s Phil Aroneanu put it, “If Wall Street is occupying President Obama’s State Department and the halls of Congress, it’s time for the people to occupy Wall Street.”
But these connections go beyond a shared critique of corporate power. As Occupiers ask themselves what kind of economy should be built to displace the one crashing all around us, many are finding inspiration in the network of green economic alternatives that has taken root over the past decade—in community-controlled renewable energy projects, in community-supported agriculture and farmers’ markets, in economic localization initiatives that have brought main streets back to life, and in the co-op sector.
Not only do these economic models create jobs and revive communities while reducing emissions, but they do so in a way that systematically disperses power—the antithesis of an economy by and for the 1 percent. Omar Freilla, one of the founders of Green Worker Cooperatives in the South Bronx, told me that the experience in direct democracy that thousands are having in plazas and parks as part of movements against economic austerity has been, for many, “like flexing a muscle you didn’t know you had.” And, he says, now they want more democracy—not just at a meeting but also in their community planning and in their workplaces.
In other words, cultural values are beginning to shift. Today’s young organizers are setting out to change policy, but they understand that before that can happen, we have to confront the underlying values of rampant greed and individualism that created the economic crisis. And that begins with embodying, in highly visible ways, radically different ways of treating one another and relating to the natural world.
This deliberate attempt to shift cultural values is not about lifestyle politics; nor is it a distraction from the “real” struggles. Because in the rocky future we have already made inevitable, an unshakable belief in the equal rights of all people and a capacity for deep empathy will be the only things standing between humanity and barbarism. Climate change, by putting us on a firm deadline, can serve as the catalyst for precisely this profound social and ecological transformation.
Culture, after all, is fluid. It can change. It has happened many times in our history. The delegates at the Heartland conference know this, which is why they are so determined to suppress the mountain of evidence proving that their worldview is a threat to life on Earth. The task for the rest of us is to believe, based on that same evidence, that a very different worldview can be our salvation.
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I. The numbers have rebounded since and were shifting rapidly in early 2019. A January 2019 study from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication found that 72 percent of Americans described climate change as “personally important” to them—a nine-point increase since March 2018. A clear majority also understood climate change to be caused mainly by human activity. The study also found that “Nearly half of Americans (46%) say they have personally experienced the effects of global warming, an increase of 15 perc
entage points since March 2015.” Also significant, 2017 polling from Pew Research found that 65 percent of Americans support expanding non-fossil fuel energy sources, while only 27 percent support doubling down on fossil fuels.
II. The partisan divide remains stark, with only 26 percent of conservative Republicans believing the scientific consensus on climate change. However, among self-identified liberal/moderate Republicans, there has been a significant drop in denial, with 55 percent now acknowledging humanity’s role in global warming, according to a Yale study.
III. This may be the biggest recent shift of all: an early 2019 poll from the Pew Research Center indicated that 44 percent of US voters think climate change should be a top priority, up from 26 percent in 2011. Most remarkably, a CNN poll conducted in April 2019 suggests that climate change is now the top issue of importance for registered Democratic Party voters ahead of the presidential primaries, rating even higher than health care.
IV. Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy reports some encouraging recent trends: China is now the world leader in wind, solar, and hydro power. Coal consumption, which had been increasing steadily, dropped by 3–4 percent in 2017. However, though public anger at toxic air pollution has succeeded in shutting down many coal-fired power plants inside China and blocking the construction of many new ones, a reported one hundred new plants are being constructed in other countries with Chinese involvement. In other words, just as North America and Europe outsourced much of their emissions to China along with their manufacturing, now China is outsourcing a portion of its emissions to poorer parts of the world.
