The Climate Deniers We Still Listen To
We have made little progress because most of us are still denying the actual situation in one way or another
This is not a “doomer” article. Climate doomer-ism is a symptom of alienation and relative privilege. We can win a better future, and our “odds” are impossible to determine. However, what we’ve been doing is not working. Not even close. We need to take a hard look at what’s gone wrong before it’s too late.
One is by now familiar with the climate deniers. Their influence, at first glance, seems to be waining. More people than before acknowledge that the climate is endangered by human activity. However, there are other, perhaps even more dangerous, deniers in our midst, and at least one of them has a Nobel Prize in Economics.
The Denial of the Educated Elite
Meet Professor William Nordhaus. He is a professor at Yale. In 2018, some Swedish bankers gave him a Nobel prize in economics for putting an academic varnish on the unfounded idea that this climate business won’t be such a disaster after all. In fact, according to Nordhaus, it will barely even slow down the world’s economic growth. 4°C of warming, he says, would only cut global GDP by 3.6 percent. Still, he recommends that we be prudent and aim to keep warming to a mere 3.5°C, a full 2°C higher than the UN target of 1.5°C maximum, which we are rapidly approaching.
The year before Nordhaus received his award, The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells was published. It paints a much more realistic and science-informed picture of what climate damage will look like. If we fail to do enough to prevent it, climate breakdown will result in so much damage to both lives and physical infrastructure that we may enter a multi-century period of non-stop catastrophe where we are unable to scrape together the resources to rebuild from increasingly destructive “natural” disasters. It seems Nordhaus and the committee that gave him his prize didn’t bother to read this book.
If Nordhaus had bothered to work some actual climate science into his rosy economic forecasts, he might have discovered that there are such things as feedback loops, which are cycles that will spur warming far beyond what humans have caused directly. Nordhaus also, almost unbelievably, claims that climate damage will have no impact on industries that take place indoors.
Nordhaus is not alone. Like much of his class, he’s in the grips of a softer, comfier form of climate denial. In this chosen version of reality, climate change is real, but all we really need is a carbon tax and some good old capitalist innovation to save ourselves.
Feedback loops? LA-LA-LA CAN’T HEAR YOU.
The Denial of the Corporate and Political Class
The reality is this: investment in renewable energy is still far too low. Meanwhile, major banks continue to fund climate-wrecking projects like Enbridge Line 3 while solar struggles to gain market share despite having a lower cost and a higher return on investment.
How much could be invested in renewable energy? Trillions, and that’s before we even consider state action. No seriously, the international capitalist class control literally tens of trillions that they could invest in anything, and they are choosing every day to not invest it in renewable energy. Or end world hunger. Or grant free access to life-saving medicine.
Why, we might ask, do governments continue to measure their carbon emission goals in time (i.e., the new net-zero emissions by 2050 goal), rather than in… carbon? Why do we never see goals like, “we are going to reduce our emissions from X gigatons to Y gigatons this year.” The reason is simple, they are stringing us along. Most countries are failing to live up to the goals set at the COP15 Paris summit, but we are expected to believe this new 2050 goal means anything? They are kicking the can down the road, even as there is almost no Arctic ice left in the summer. They aren’t idiots. They know climate change is real, but they are in denial.
Most of the power-holders are in denial about how urgent and dire the climate situation really is. Even if they are not in denial about that, what they are almost certainly in denial about is that we can save a livable planet while leaving our inhumane world economy fundamentally unchanged. Or, maybe they know. Maybe they know they are dooming us all while claiming to save us. Maybe some of them are just that despicable.
The Biggest Denial — Our Own
Here is the harsh truth that most of us, even those of us active on the climate “issue,” are still in denial about. Are you ready?
Our existing institutions have failed to solve this crisis.
They are not currently failing. They are not continuing to fail. They have failed. They could have made some relatively minor changes in the 90s and 2000s and the climate could have been stabilized.
Now it is far too late for minor changes, yet that is what they’re proposing.
Our institutions are constantly showing us what they are — murderous, manipulative, uncaring — but we still believe we can change them. It’s time to realize that our institutions (governments, banks, police, even schools) are abusing us, and they are not going to change. Even if some people change, the institutions and systems will not. They were built to oppress. They are not “broken.” They are working as intended. But we keep giving them another chance. And another, and another and another.
We are truly like a battered partner who loves their abuser. How many chances do these failed institutions get? How much do we all have to lose before we realize we are being conned right out of our collective future?
When will we stop believing that these colonial-age institutions can change and suddenly be good to us?
Hope Follows Action
We need to take action. This phrase has been watered down. Asking others to take action on your behalf, as they string you along, isn’t really taking action. We need to take actual action.
We need to interrupt fossil fuel production while harming as few people as possible. We need to cost banks money by any means necessary until they stop funding fossil fuels and start seriously funding renewable energy. Ultimately, we should put energy, finance, healthcare, education, agriculture, recycling, and telecommunications under the control of worker and community councils. We need to take back land and use it to feed and house our communities. We need to learn how to put our workplaces under worker control, and this will allow us to implement climate solutions throughout the economy without relying on anyone to (mis)represent us. We need to learn how to hold traumatized people who cause harm accountable, instead of just continuing cycles of harm, and believing that two wrongs make a right when the state does the second wrong.
Learning is also a form of action. If you want to learn more about the struggle to save our climate, how it intersects with other social struggles, how victories have been won, and how to cope with the losses we are already suffering, the recent book All We Can Save is a great place to start. We need to destroy racism and sexism, not just externally but in our own hearts too. When people go to prison for protecting land and water, or just themselves, we need to support them throughout their sentence. We need to stop turning to sources of information controlled by our tormentors. We need to learn about the genocide(s) that baptized American capitalism. We need to learn how we got here, and about all the brave people who sacrificed so much to get as free as they could. Once we truly learn, we will see that there are no single issues. As Audre Lorde said, we do not live single-issue lives. Oppression is not just interpersonal, it is primarily systemic, aka institutional. It may have many faces but it only has one body, and together we must kill it, or it will keep killing us.
This is all going to be really challenging, but that’s good. We each have what it takes to live up to the challenges of the future, even if we don’t know it yet. These challenges, that feeling of desperation we sometimes get struggling directly for a better world can bind us together and make us unbreakable. Being cooperative and caring is a solid foundation we can build from, but to win we still need to carefully consider tactics, strategy, and logistics. We must always look after one another despite all the attempts to rip us and our movements apart. We can be vulnerable and kind and still face the enemy with all our strength.
Sources and Inspiration
The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells
All We Can Save ed. by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson & Kathrine K. Wilkinson, also on Libro
Article: Nordhaus can have his Nobel, but we shouldn’t let him gamble with humanity’s future
Article: Nobel prize-winning economics of climate change is misleading and dangerous — here’s why
