Yesterday we offered Charles Koch no quarter for his supposed dropping of denial, and we’ve been similarly skeptical of other fossil fuel industry and GOP attempts to shift how the party talks about climate while maintaining a pro-fossil fuel and therefore anti-climate policy stance.
But, credit where it’s due, there does seem to be a real source of resistance to denial coming from within the GOP at the lowest level. As Scott Waldman reported in E&E yesterday, it seems the CO2 Coalition is running into trouble getting meetings with congressional Republicans, because they’re being blocked by young Republican staffers.
On the other hand, the conservative, youth-oriented carbon-tax-supporting Alliance for Market Solutions has apparently been getting plenty of meetings, and told Waldman they’ve briefed dozens of Republican House members and only ran into one denier. The group’s executive director Alex Flint said that groups like the CO2 Coalition should recognize that the “era of climate denialism has passed.”
Why? Because, Flint explained, “the college students that end up working in Congress are generally pretty smart, so you’re going to have a hard time trying to fool them with climate denialism.”
Unfortunately, deniers likely recognize this fact. That’s why they’ve also been targeting colleges and universities as a place to spread their false gospel, teaming up with pro-Trump college propaganda group Turning Points USA (known for its diaper-wearing stunts and racism) and CFACT, which has long been a funnel for getting fossil fuel money into campuses.
And this is where CO2 Coalition’s Caleb Rossiter reveals that they’re not even trying to convince students that denial offers an intellectually coherent counter-argument. Rather, they say they’re just asking questions, the well-known strategy for conspiracy-mongering. “That’s a victory for us, if young people say, ‘Oh I never knew there was another way to look at these data or conclusions about the IPCC’s data on hurricanes or what CO2 does to plants.’ For us, that’s just the opening to a conversation.”
As always, denial is not about an honest argument, but about selling just a sliver of doubt, just planting a seed of deception that can then be nurtured by the larger big oil denial ecosystem.
In the meantime, there are still plenty of Congressional deniers. Waldman identifies Reps. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) and James Comer (R-KY) as having taken meetings with the CO2 Coalition, and then “repeat[ing] the group’s talking points in public committee meetings.”
Still, if the CO2 Coalition is willing to complain to a reporter about being shut out of Congressional meetings by young staffers, they must really be struggling to be seen as relevant.
And that struggle will only continue as more younger conservatives who have grown up in this changed climate rise in the ranks and replace their older and more denial-friendly counterparts.
So we can only hope that CO2 Coalition’s attempts to get past smart young conservatives continue to be met with little more than: Ok, Boomer.
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