Surprise!! You’re probably a climate change denier.
Recognizing these ‘soft’ forms of denial enables us to move past them, and to begin implementing real climate solutions.
Over the past few decades, climate change denial has come to mean an overt refusal to accept the robust scientific knowledge that humans are disrupting Earth’s climate, with potentially catastrophic consequences for humanity. We’ll call this “Bonehead Denial,” and its origins have been studied exhaustively. Emerging from a toxic stew of ideology, cynicism, greed, and intense propaganda, the Bonehead flavor of denial has been an obstacle in the past but, today, it is an obstacle we can step around.
For all its frustrations, Bonehead Denial is not preventing a meaningful response to climate change. Nevertheless, meaningful response is absent. And “soft” climate change denial, practiced daily by the rest of us, is the cause.
We are VIP Deniers — Very Important People — and the things we do are so important that the carbon pollution is justified, in our opinion. The problem is we have a small, fixed, non-negotiable budget of fossil carbon we can put in the air before we reach critical climate thresholds, and what we VIP Deniers burn in self-importance is lost to those who need it for survival. When every molecule counts, equity matters.
We are Tech-will-fix-it Deniers, whose burn-it-now-we’ll-fix-it-later mindset assumes the next big breakthrough is just around the corner. No doubt breakthroughs will emerge, but unicorns and silver bullets are not risk management and reality often falls far short of the hype. Fantasies of fusion, next-generation nuclear, and mass carbon removal are decades away at best. Reducing emissions now is imperative to buy time for viable technologies to be developed and implemented at scale.
We are Offset Deniers who, like sinners buying indulgences, seek both sin and absolution. We burn fossil fuels and pay for forgiveness in the form of a tree. Planting trees, protecting blue carbon environments and improving soil organic matter are all wonderful, and we should do them all. But carbon offset accounting is essentially a Ponzi scheme in which the fossil fuels keep flowing. As soon as we take fossil carbon out of the ground it becomes part of the global carbon cycle that we have to manage. It could be locked up in a tree, wetland, or salmon one minute, and back in the atmosphere the next. Carbon offsetting isn’t carbon reduction, it’s guilt-reduction.
We are Doomsday Deniers, who absolve ourselves of response because we believe the game is lost. It’s a mindset of despair. The problem with despair is not that it’s wrong morally, but that it’s wrong factually. We don’t know for sure if humanity can meet the challenges ahead ― but there is no compelling reason to suggest we can’t. Despair is one side of a hope/despair framework that is irrelevant in emergencies. When the house is on fire, we don’t hope to get out or despair that we can’t. We do what is needed to get out, identifying next steps and taking them until we’re out or we’re dead. Resolve is the framework for an emergency.
And we are Optimism Deniers: “Things will work out; they always have.” Optimism Deniers have faith, but skip the good works to back it up. It’s the same flawed hope/despair framework: two sides of the same counterfeit coin, both exuding inaction and absolving responsibility. And inaction is highly contagious.
In 2021, climate change denial is not about denying the science outright. It’s about denying it is an emergency; denying our own roles in responding; and denying clear, necessary steps: keeping fossil fuels in the ground and radically reducing our consumption. If believing something means behaving as though it were true, most of us remain deniers, and the result is the same: preventing genuine response. Recognizing our denial is not about shame, but generating response. We are all culpable and we all have different capacities, different talents, different means. None us can do everything. But each of us can do something. It’s the power of community. We must work on it together. And we must work on it daily.
Transitioning from soft denial to resolve and response looks different for each of us, but fundamentally requires both inward and outward changes. Inward, we begin with a commitment to decarbonize our personal lives — reducing our driving, flying, and consumption emissions 15 percent every year for the next five years. We can’t solve this problem as individuals, but reducing personal emissions buys critical time to implement the bigger systemic changes needed, and behavior modeling has ripple effects.
Outwardly, we have massive energy, transportation, food, manufacturing, and social systems that must be transformed. Vote for progress. Normalize talking about climate concerns and solutions. And dig deeper. Whether you are a chef or a server, a janitor, a teacher, a business owner, health care worker, truck driver, artist, or whether you’re unemployed or retired — whatever your talents, your capacities, your means, there is a role for you to move us toward systemic change. Ask yourself: How can I apply my talents, my power, my profession, my occupation? What is the first thing I can do? And start today as a climate realist.
This piece was written by Patrick Belmont, Professor and Head, Department of Watershed Sciences, Utah State University and Rob Davies, (@robsmast) Associate Professor of Professional Practice, Department of Physics, Utah State University.
Copyright © 2021, Patrick Belmont and Robert Davies. All rights reserved.
