by Naomi Klein
And denounce they do, the more personal, the better—whether it’s former Vice President Al Gore for his mansions, or famed climate scientist James Hansen for his speaking fees. Then there is “Climategate,” a manufactured scandal in which climate scientists’ emails were hacked and their contents distorted by the Heartlanders and their allies, who claimed to find evidence of manipulated data (the scientists were repeatedly vindicated of wrongdoing). In 2012, the Heartland Institute even landed itself in hot water by running a billboard campaign that compared people who believe in climate change (“warmists” in denialist lingo) to murderous cult leader Charles Manson and Unabomber Ted Kaczynski. “I still believe in Global Warming. Do you?” the first ad demanded in bold red letters under a picture of Kaczynski. For Heartlanders, denying climate science is part of a war, and they act like it.26
Many deniers are quite open about the fact that their distrust of the science grew out of a powerful fear that if climate change is real, the political implications would be catastrophic. As British blogger and regular Heartland speaker James Delingpole has pointed out, “Modern environmentalism successfully advances many of the causes dear to the left: redistribution of wealth, higher taxes, greater government intervention, regulation.” Heartland president Joseph Bast puts it even more bluntly. For the left, “Climate change is the perfect thing. . . . It’s the reason why we should do everything [the left] wanted to do anyway.”27
Bast, who has little of the swagger common to so many denialists, is equally honest about the fact he and his colleagues did not become engaged with climate issues because they found flaws in the scientific facts. Rather, they became alarmed about the economic and political implications of those facts and set out to disprove them. “When we look at this issue, we say, This is a recipe for massive increase in government,” Bast told me, concluding that, “Before we take this step, let’s take another look at the science. So conservative and libertarian groups, I think, stopped and said, Let’s not simply accept this as an article of faith; let’s actually do our own research.”28
Nigel Lawson, Margaret Thatcher’s former chancellor of the exchequer who has taken to declaring that “green is the new red,” has followed a similar intellectual trajectory. Lawson takes great pride in having privatized key British assets, lowered taxes on the wealthy, and broken the power of large unions. But climate change creates, in his words, “a new license to intrude, to interfere and to regulate.” It must, he concludes, be a conspiracy—the classic teleological reversal of cause and effect.29
The climate change denial movement is littered with characters who are twisting themselves in similar intellectual knots. There are the old-timer physicists like S. Fred Singer, who used to develop rocket technologies for the U.S. military and who hears in emissions regulation a distorted echo of the communism he fought during the Cold War (as documented compellingly by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway in Merchants of Doubt). In a similar vein, there is former Czech president Václav Klaus, who spoke at a Heartland climate conference while still head of state. For Klaus, whose career began under communist rule, climate change appears to have induced a full-fledged Cold War flashback. He compares attempts to prevent global warming to “the ambitions of communist central planners to control the entire society” and says, “For someone who spent most of his life in the ‘noble’ era of communism this is impossible to accept.”30
And you can understand that, from their perspective, the scientific reality of climate change must seem spectacularly unfair. After all, the people at the Heartland conference thought they had won these ideological wars—if not fairly, then certainly squarely. Now climate science is changing everything: how can you win an argument against government intervention if the very habitability of the planet depends on intervening? In the short term, you might be able to argue that the economic costs of taking action are greater than allowing climate change to play out for a few more decades (and some neoliberal economists, using cost-benefit calculations and future “discounting,” are busily making those arguments). But most people don’t actually like it when their children’s lives are “discounted” in someone else’s Excel sheet, and they tend to have a moral aversion to the idea of allowing countries to disappear because saving them would be too expensive.
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.
About That 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.31
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. Heartland 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 doc
uments 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.32
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.33
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.”34
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 dependent 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.35
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!”36
Plan B: Get Rich off a Warming World
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. 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.”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.”38
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.)39
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.40
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.”41
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 pr
ocess 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.42
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.
In recent years, quite a number of major multinational corporations have begun to speak openly about how climate change might impact their businesses, and insurance companies closely track and discuss the increased frequency of major disasters. The CEO of Swiss Re Americas admitted, for instance, that “What keeps us up at night is climate change,” while companies like Starbucks and Chipotle have raised the alarm about how extreme weather may impact the availability of key ingredients. In June 2014, the Risky Business project, led by billionaire and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, as well as former U.S. treasury secretary Henry Paulson and hedge fund founder and environmental philanthropist Tom Steyer, warned that climate change would cost the U.S. economy billions of dollars each year as a result of rising sea levels alone, and that the corporate world must take such climate costs seriously.43
