In review: Michael E. Mann’s “The New Climate War”
Given that much of climate science has been bogged down with timidity in the face of bad faith opponents and climate journalism has — until recently — been captive to false equivalence between the supporters and the deniers, it is refreshing to have Michael E. Mann open his book with precise intent in his framing. “I have colleagues who have expressed discomfort in framing our predicament as a ‘war,’” he writes, “But, as I tell them, the surest way to lose a war is to refuse to recognize you’re in one in the first place.”
As someone who has been in the crosshairs of climate deniers for over two decades, Mann knows intimately the ways in which tactics of denial and deflection have shifted since the debut of his (in)famous “hockey-stick graph.” His new book, The New Climate War, is a useful — if blinkered—depiction of the paths forward for climate change activism and how it can defeat “an array of powerful Ds: disinformation, deceit, divisiveness, deflection, delay, despair-mongering, and doomism.”
There are many useful insights here, starting with Mann’s tracing of the ways in which the fossil fuel industries have coordinated their anti-climate science campaigns over the last fifty years since ExxonMobil’s own scientist — James F. Black — confirmed almost to the degree the amount of warming we would be experiencing today as a result of fossil fuel emissions; namely, by adopting the previous successes of the NRA gun lobby, tobacco companies and beverage manufacturers’ “Crying Indian” anti-littering campaign.
Mann also takes issue with perceived climate opponents outside the fossil fuel industry, devoting the longest chapter of his book to extolling “climate doom porn” and those who peddle alarmist narratives of a crisis where, in his own words, “the truth is bad enough.” Social media ratfucking from Russian troll farms, political apathy from the (mistaken) belief that it is too late to do anything and progressive unwillingness for compromise on anything resembling market economics all earn the ire of Mann at one point or another.
It’s in his frustration to progressive (or leftist) resistance to market-based climate mechanisms that Mann’s argument feels least convincing — in part because progressive resistance to carbon pricing due to their suspicion that it is merely a way to absolve fossil fuel companies of their criminal and civil liability in the crisis has precedent. “The belief that a carbon tax would somehow end legal liability on the part of fossil fuel interests is premised on mistaking what fossil fuel interests might want for what they’re actually going to get,” Mann writes, apparently unaware that fossil fuel interests have already secured a pretty big get in the Paris Climate Accords, which states in its text that “the Agreement does not involve or provide a basis for any liability or compensation.” While nation state signatories of the world’s most important climate treaty are not exactly fossil fuel companies, there’s hardly enough daylight between the two to paint the supposed-progressive uncompromisers as overreacting.
Rather than acknowledge these uneasy precedents for continued neoliberal approaches to mitigating and adapting to climate change, Mann all but handwaves them away by describing the International Monetary Fund’s endorsement of carbon pricing as having come from a “objective, moderate, nonpartisan [institution], with no particular axe to grind.” This would be news to much of the developing or post-Soviet world, where the legacy of the IMF can hardly be described in such sanguine terms.
Later, when he describes meetings with a consortium of Australian superfund managers as leaving him convinced “it may be banking & finance, rather than national governments, that precipitate a climate action tipping point” it can’t help but leave a less-convinced reader concerned that — while Mann is obviously invested in tearing down the carbon economy — he’s not so interested in thinking about what should come next, leaving a gap that seems all too easily filled-in by David Wallace-Wells’ summary of Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright’s conclusion in Climate Leviathan is that, “the planetary sovereign the world is likeliest to turn to, they say with regret, is the one that sold us climate change in the first place — that is, neoliberalism.”
Ultimately, Mann’s greatest contributions in his newest book are in his intimate awareness of the forces of denial that we are up against and his sober-headedness in understanding exactly how bad (and no more) the climate crisis is at the moment. His impassioned plea for anti-carbon climate policies come backed with reasonable arguments and real-world data, they just can’t help but occasionally also feel tethered to a reluctance to admonish the carbon industry’s chief enablers out of a hope they will soon become part of the solution.
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