by Naomi Klein
This kind of talk is often equated with support for strong action to prevent warming. It shouldn’t be. Just because companies are willing to acknowledge the probable effects of climate change does not mean they support the kinds of aggressive measures that would significantly reduce those risks by keeping warming below 2 degrees. In the U.S., for instance, the insurance lobby has been, by far, the corporate sector most vocal about the mounting impacts, with the largest companies employing teams of climate scientists to help them prepare for the disasters to come. And yet the industry hasn’t done much to push more aggressive climate policy—on the contrary, many companies and trade groups have provided substantial funding to the think tanks that created the climate change denial movement.44
For some time, this seemingly contradictory dynamic played out within different divisions of the Heartland Institute itself. The world’s premier climate denial institution houses something called the Center on Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate. Up until May 2012, it was pretty much a mouthpiece for the insurance industry, headed by conservative Washington insider Eli Lehrer. What made Lehrer different from his Heartland colleagues, however, is that he is willing to state matter-of-factly, “Climate change is obviously real and obviously caused to a significant extent by people. I don’t really think there’s room for serious debate on either of those points.”45
So even as his Heartland colleagues were organizing global conferences designed specifically to manufacture the illusion of a serious scientific debate, Lehrer’s division was working with the insurance lobby to protect their bottom lines in a future of climate chaos. According to Lehrer, “In general there was no enormous conflict, day-to-day” between his work and that of his climate-change-denying colleagues.46 That’s because what many of the insurance companies wanted from Heartland’s advocacy was not action to prevent climate chaos but rather policies that would safeguard or even increase their profits no matter the weather. That means pushing government out of the subsidized insurance business, giving companies greater freedom to raise rates and deductibles and to drop customers in high-risk areas, as well as other “free market” measures.
Eventually, Lehrer split away from the Heartland Institute after the think tank launched its billboard comparing people who believe in climate change to mass murderers. Since climate change believers include the insurance companies that were generously funding the Heartland Institute, that stunt didn’t sit at all well. Still, in an interview, Eli Lehrer was quick to stress that the differences were over public relations, not policy. “The public policies that Heartland supported are generally ones I still favor,” he said.47 In truth the work was more or less compatible. Heartland’s denier division did its best to cast so much doubt on the science that it helped to paralyze all serious attempts to regulate greenhouse emissions, while the insurance arm pushed policies that would allow corporations to stay profitable regardless of the real-world results of those emissions.
And this points to what really lies behind the casual attitude about climate change, whether it is being expressed as disaster denialism or disaster capitalism. Those involved feel free to engage in these high-stakes gambles because they believe that they and theirs will be protected from the ravages in question, at least for another generation or so.
On a large scale, many regional climate models do predict that wealthy countries—most of which are located at higher latitudes—may experience some economic benefits from a slightly warmer climate, from longer growing seasons to access to shorter trade routes through the melting Arctic ice. At the same time, the wealthy in these regions are already finding ever more elaborate ways to protect themselves from the coming weather extremes. Sparked by events like Superstorm Sandy, new luxury real estate developments are marketing their gold-plated private disaster infrastructure to would-be residents—everything from emergency lighting to natural-gas-powered pumps and generators to thirteen-foot floodgates and watertight rooms sealed “submarine-style,” in the case of a new Manhattan condominium. As Stephen G. Kliegerman, the executive director of development marketing for Halstead Property, told The New York Times: “I think buyers would happily pay to be relatively reassured they wouldn’t be terribly inconvenienced in case of a natural disaster.”48
Many large corporations, meanwhile, have their own backup generators to keep their lights on through mass blackouts (as Goldman Sachs did during Sandy, despite the fact that its power never actually went out); the capacity to fortify themselves with their own sandbags (which Goldman also did ahead of Sandy); and their own special teams of meteorologists (FedEx). Insurance companies in the United States have even begun dispatching teams of private firefighters to their high-end customers when their mansions in California and Colorado are threatened by wildfires, a “concierge” service pioneered by AIG.49
Meanwhile, the public sector continues to crumble, thanks in large part to the hard work of the warriors here at the Heartland conference. These, after all, are the fervent dismantlers of the state, whose ideology has eroded so many parts of the public sphere, including disaster preparedness. These are the voices that have been happy to pass on the federal budget crisis to the states and municipalities, which in turn are coping with it by not repairing bridges or replacing fire trucks. The “freedom” agenda that they are desperately trying to protect from scientific evidence is one of the reasons that societies will be distinctly less prepared for disasters when they come.
For a long time, environmentalists spoke of climate change as a great equalizer, the one issue that affected everyone, rich or poor. It was supposed to bring us together. Yet all signs are that it is doing precisely the opposite, stratifying us further into a society of haves and have-nots, divided between those whose wealth offers them a not insignificant measure of protection from ferocious weather, at least for now, and those left to the mercy of increasingly dysfunctional states.
The Meaner Side of Denial
As the effects of climate change become impossible to ignore, the crueler side of the denial project—now lurking as subtext—will become explicit. It has already begun. At the end of August 2011, with large parts of the world still suffering under record high temperatures, the conservative blogger Jim Geraghty published a piece in The Philadelphia Inquirer arguing that climate change “will help the U.S. economy in several ways and enhance, not diminish, the United States’ geopolitical power.” He explained that since climate change will be hardest on developing countries, “many potentially threatening states will find themselves in much more dire circumstances.” And this, he stressed, was a good thing: “Rather than our doom, climate change could be the centerpiece of ensuring a second consecutive American Century.” Got that? Since people who scare Americans are unlucky enough to live in poor, hot places, climate change will cook them, leaving the United States to rise like a phoenix from the flames of global warming.II50
Expect more of this monstrousness. As the world warms, the ideology so threatened by climate science—the one 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.III51 In the grossly unequal world this ideology has done so much to intensify and lock in, 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 to the predominantly African American cities like New Orleans that are most vulnerable in the Global North.
In a 2007 report on the security implications of climate change, copublished by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, former CIA director R. James Woolsey predicted that on a much warmer planet “altruism and generosity would likely be blunted.”52 We can already see that emotional blunting on display from Arizona to Italy. Already, climate change is changing us, coarsening us. Each massive disaster seems to inspire less horror
, fewer telethons. Media commentators speak of “compassion fatigue,” as if empathy, and not fossil fuels, was the finite resource.
As if to prove the point, after Hurricane Sandy devastated large parts of New York and New Jersey, the Koch-backed organization Americans for Prosperity (AFP) launched a campaign to block the federal aid package going to these states. “We need to suck it up and be responsible for taking care of ourselves,” said Steve Lonegan, then director of AFP’s New Jersey chapter.53
And then there is Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper. In the midst of the extraordinary 2014 winter floods, the tabloid ran a front-page headline asking its readers to sign a petition calling on the government “to divert some of the £11 billion a year spent on overseas aid to ease the suffering of British flood victims.”54 Within days, more than 200,000 people had signed onto the demand to cut foreign aid in favor of local disaster relief. Of course Britain—the nation that invented the coal-fired steam engine—has been emitting industrial levels of carbon for longer than any nation on earth and therefore bears a particularly great responsibility to increase, as opposed to claw back, foreign aid. But never mind that. Screw the poor. Suck it up. Everyone for themselves.
Unless we radically change course, these are the values that will rule our stormy future, even more than they already rule our present.
Coddling Conservatives
Some climate activists have attempted to sway deniers away from their hardened positions, arguing that delaying climate action will only make the government interventions required more extreme. The popular climate blogger Joe Romm, for instance, writes that “if you hate government intrusion into people’s lives, you’d better stop catastrophic global warming, because nothing drives a country more towards activist government than scarcity and deprivation. . . . Only Big Government—which conservatives say they don’t want—can relocate millions of citizens, build massive levees, ration crucial resources like water and arable land, mandate harsh and rapid reductions in certain kinds of energy—all of which will be inevitable if we don’t act now.”55
It’s true that catastrophic climate change would inflate the role of government to levels that would likely disturb most thinking people, whether left or right. And there are legitimate fears too of what some call “green fascism”—an environmental crisis so severe that it becomes the pretext for authoritarian forces to seize control in the name of restoring some kind of climate order. But it’s also the case that there is no way to get cuts in emissions steep or rapid enough to avoid those catastrophic scenarios without levels of government intervention that will never be acceptable to right-wing ideologues.
This was not always so. If governments, including in the U.S., had started cutting emissions back when the scientific consensus first solidified, the measures for avoiding catastrophic warming would not have been nearly so jarring to the reigning economic model. For instance, the first major international gathering to set specific targets for emission reductions was the World Conference on the Changing Atmosphere, held in Toronto in 1988, with more than three hundred scientists and policymakers from forty-six countries represented. The conference, which set the groundwork for the Rio Earth Summit, was a breakthrough, recommending that governments cut emissions by 20 percent below 1988 levels by 2005. “If we choose to take on this challenge,” remarked one scientist in attendance, “it appears that we can slow the rate of change substantially, giving us time to develop mechanisms so that the cost to society and the damage to ecosystems can be minimized. We could alternatively close our eyes, hope for the best, and pay the cost when the bill comes due.”56
If we had heeded this advice and got serious about meeting that goal immediately after the 1992 signing of the U.N. climate convention in Rio, the world would have needed to reduce its carbon emissions by about 2 percent per year until 2005.57 At that rate, wealthy countries could have much more comfortably started rolling out the technologies to replace fossil fuels, cutting carbon at home while helping to launch an ambitious green transition throughout the world. Since this was before the globalization juggernaut took hold, it would have created an opportunity for China and India and other fast-growing economies to battle poverty on low-carbon pathways. (Which was the stated goal of “sustainable development” as championed in Rio.)
Indeed this vision could have been built into the global trade architecture that would rise up in the early to mid-1990s. If we had continued to reduce our emissions at that pace we would have been on track for a completely de-carbonized global economy by mid-century.
But we didn’t do any of those things. And as the famed climate scientist Michael Mann, director of the Penn State Earth System Science Center, puts it, “There’s a huge procrastination penalty when it comes to emitting carbon into the atmosphere”: the longer we wait, the more it builds up, the more dramatically we must change to reduce the risks of catastrophic warming. Kevin Anderson, deputy director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, further explains: “Perhaps at the time of the 1992 Earth Summit, or even at the turn of the millennium, 2°C levels of mitigation could have been achieved through significant evolutionary changes within the political and economic hegemony. But climate change is a cumulative issue! Now, in 2013, we in high-emitting (post)industrial nations face a very different prospect. Our ongoing and collective carbon profligacy has squandered any opportunity for the ‘evolutionary change’ afforded by our earlier (and larger) 2°C carbon budget. Today, after two decades of bluff and lies, the remaining 2°C budget demands revolutionary change to the political and economic hegemony.”58
Put a little more simply: for more than two decades, we kicked the can down the road. During that time, we also expanded the road from a two-lane carbon-spewing highway to a six-lane superhighway. That feat was accomplished in large part thanks to the radical and aggressive vision that called for the creation of a single global economy based on the rules of free market fundamentalism, the very rules incubated in the right-wing think tanks now at the forefront of climate change denial. There is a certain irony at work: it is the success of their own revolution that makes revolutionary levels of transformation to the market system now our best hope of avoiding climate chaos.
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Some are advancing a different strategy to bring right-wingers back into the climate fold. Rather than trying to scare them with scenarios of interventionist governments if we procrastinate further, this camp argues that we need approaches to emission reduction that are less offensive to conservative values.
Yale’s Dan Kahan points 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 do not challenge their belief that humans can dominate nature. In one of his studies, Kahan and his colleagues polled subjects on their views about climate change after showing some of them fake news stories. Some of the subjects were given a story about how global warming could be solved through “anti-pollution” measures. Others were given a story that held up nuclear power as the solution. Some were shown no story at all. The scientific facts about global warming were identical in all news stories. The researchers discovered that hard-core conservatives who received the nuclear solution story were more open to the scientific facts proving that humans are changing the climate. However, those who received the story about fighting pollution “were even more skeptical about these facts than were hierarchs and individualists in a control group that received no newspaper story.”59
It’s not hard to figure out why. Nuclear is a heavy industrial technology, based on extraction, run in a corporatist manner, with long ties to the military-industrial complex. And as renowned psychiatrist and author Robert Jay Lifton has noted, no technology does more to confirm the notion that man has tamed nature than the ability to split the atom.60
Based on this research, Kahan and others argue, environmentalists should sell climate action by playing up concerns about national security and emphasizi
ng responses such as nuclear power and “geoengineering”—global-scale technological interventions that would attempt to reverse rapid warming by, for instance, blocking a portion of the sun’s rays, or by “fertilizing” the oceans so that they trap more carbon, among other untested, extraordinarily high-risk schemes. Kahan reasons that since climate change is perceived by many on the right as a gateway to dreaded anti-industry policies, the solution is “to remove what makes it threatening.” In a similar vein, Irina Feygina and John T. Jost, who have conducted parallel research at NYU, advise policymakers to package environmental action as being about protecting “our way of life” and a form of patriotism, something they revealingly call “system-sanctioned change.”61
This kind of advice has been enormously influential. For instance, the Breakthrough Institute—a think tank that specialized in attacking grassroots environmentalism for its supposed lack of “modernity”—is forever charting this self-styled middle path, pushing nuclear power, fracked natural gas, and genetically modified crops as climate solutions, while attacking renewable energy programs. And as we will see later on, some greens are even warming up to geoengineering.62 Moreover, in the name of reaching across the aisle, green groups are constantly “reframing” climate action so that it is about pretty much anything other than preventing catastrophic warming to protect life on earth. Instead climate action is about all the things conservatives are supposed to care about more than that, from cutting off revenues to Arab states to reasserting American economic dominance over China.
