In the wake of the kid’s climate strike, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists ran a piece from 2016 by Dana Nuccitelli describing how “climate denial caters to a small and dwindling population of old, white, conservative, American men.”
In response, old white man Eric Worrall at WUWT tried to explain that curious correlation away by suggesting that older folks aren’t into climate change because they remember the (fake) ice age scare in the ‘70s.
Now if this were true, one would expect to see similar levels of skepticism among older people of color--or that other tiny minority of humans, the one that makes up over half the population, women.
It turns out old white man climate denial is not actually about exposure to a few magazine articles in the ‘70s, but instead a willingness to buy into a status-quo-hardening conservative ideological position that has been expressed ad nauseam in talk radio and on Fox News for the past few decades, which results in the pale-male-stale deniers vs. the rest of the world gap.
And it’s certainly not hard to find the numbers to support this. In fact, the paid denial community has more or less done this themselves for us in the promotion of a new letter.
On Monday, more than 140 groups and individuals in the Koch network sent President Trump a letter supporting the administration’s efforts to cast doubt on peer-reviewed climate science through an ad-hoc panel. Nearly all the organizational signers, and a large number of the individual ones are part of groups funded by the Kochs (like CEI), Mercers (like EELI), ExxonMobil (like Heartland), the tobacco industry (like Steve Milloy) and other polluters (like those who fund TPPF). Other signers include FreedomWorks, Science and Environmental Policy Project, and the newly-created Energy 45 Fund.
Of the two dozen organizations whose leaders are listed, only four are women. And of the hundred individual signers, five appear to be women.
The only thing rarer than a climate denier who’s not an old conservative white guy? One who’s never gotten Koch funding.
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