People often wonder what it is that motivates climate change denial. Our response is always that it depends on the person. But it tends to boil down to two very simple answers: deniers are either stupid, or evil.
Though that may seem like an overly reductive or cynical answer, it’s hard to find examples of deniers that don’t fit one of the two.
For the trolls on Twitter, and indeed most of the everyday people who believe the various Koch-funded voices peddling denial, it’s clear they’re simply not well-versed enough in the science to evaluate it themselves. (And why should they be?)
AGU’s Eos ran an op-ed on Monday describing just such a scenario. The op-ed was from Lucas Vargas Zeppetello, whose first peer-reviewed paper was misrepresented by deniers on Twitter.
He describes how the denier response made him feel “demoralized, embarrassed, and frustrated,” but that he felt better after talking with colleagues who had their own stories about their work being misrepresented by deniers. He also offers some lessons learned about how scholars should think about this potential for misrepresentation while writing papers and include explicit statements to make the findings harder to distort, and how journal editors should be better about responding to misinformation when it happens.
Response to Zeppetello’s work clearly falls in the “stupid” camp, as it’s clear that those who picked up the study likely didn’t understand what it said. To address that sort of failing, we need better science education generally, and more climate science education in particular. On the latter front, we’re delighted to hear that John Cook’s new book, Cranky Uncle vs. Climate Change, is coming out in a couple weeks, with an excerpt on deniers and the consensus gap available as a teaser.
While the Cranky Uncle approach is great for showing friends and family how denial is built on lies, it’s obviously not going to stop anyone whose paycheck relies on spreading denial. That’s where evil comes in.
A new paper in Energy Research & Social Science by Cambridge’s Ray Galvin seeks to reinvigorate the social science of climate and energy as the general assumption that humans tackle political issues in good faith creates a hole in our understanding of behavior, which means “the notion of human evil needs to be better theorized.” Galvin’s work is steeped in sociology references and theory, but here’s an attempt to present it in plain language that we’re hoping doesn’t stupidly misrepresent it like deniers did to Zeppetello.
After the abstract, the first line is: “We find ourselves in a climate emergency.” Why is that? Galvin proposes that sociology “might help explain” why we’re “bent on wrecking earth’s Holocene climate” and what “daring, obstinate actions would be needed to halt this rush to destruction.”
At the core of the framework Galvin presents is that “powerful people who know their actions are harming millions” and “whose actions are shaping social structure in their own interests and against the interests of humanity are not likely to be persuaded to give up their destructive power by the force of moral argument.”
“Evil (whatever it is ontologically),” Galvin writes, “is not only in their actions, it is also in their tenacious clinging to these actions despite good moral argument.” These “people who behave selfishly, maliciously, or with other ‘evil’ intent often know very well that these behaviours contravene basic moral codes of conduct, not only within their own culture but even universally.”
So while each of us can individually choose more climate-friendly options, like electric vehicles, that can only go so far to mitigate the problem in the absence of larger, structural changes. And those changes will only come with the exercising of political force, because “we are not dealing only with kind-hearted, well-intentioned people of goodwill, but also with ‘evil’” in the selfish preservation of vast fortunes or use of political power to benefit only one’s self.
This kind of evil “can only be neutralised by force of power, by citizens’ determined and carefully crafted resistance.” Ultimately, “people of goodwill need to increase their power so as to work actively to wrest power from those who control social structure for their own gain at the expense of others and the climate.”
There are a lot of different names and words used to describe various shapes of denial. But really two words will suffice. For those who are innocently deceived by those who promote denial, the nicest descriptor would be that they are merely “misled” deniers.
As for those doing the misleading, that greed, that indifference to human suffering, that willingness to deceive others and distort social structures to suit one’s personal aims at the expense of the public?
That can only truly be described as evil.
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