Meet the Money Behind The Climate Denial Movement.
"Nearly a billion dollars a year is flowing into the organized climate change counter change counter-movement.
There's a very obvious reason. There is a very well-funded, well-orchestrated climate change-denial movement, one funded by powerful people with very deep pockets."
In a new and incredibly thorough study, Drexel University sociologist Robert Brulle took a deep dive into the financial structure of the climate deniers, to see who is holding the purse strings.
Thoughts, examples and experiences with social media, your own friends and family members and what you already can see and predict for our world and the future of civilization.
Michele, thanks for starting this topic.
In 2014 I read Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, which was on the NY Times best seller list and won the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction.
It was a brilliant book which was later made into a documentary.
Klein contended that the climate crisis cannot be addressed in the current era of neoliberal market fundamentalism, which encourages profligate consumption and has resulted in mega-mergers and trade agreements hostile to the health of the environment.
At that time, I already knew the science on climate change was robust and that the denial movement was vast and well funded. The book showed how difficult, albeit nearly impossible, it would be to stop fossil fuel burning. It was 2014. We've only burned more each year since.
Another big eye opener in the book was a chapter on climate denial conferences where high paid spin masters fed the latest climate denial sound bites to GOP politicians and their aides. These meetings are where the latest spin gets distributed throughout the climate denial world.
Today they are no longer denying that climate change is happening. They know that it's obvious to everyone that the climate is rapidly changing. So they now have a new spin that these changes are part of natural geologic changes combined with some man caused climate change. But this is another vicious lie and it boggles the mind that people will lie like this when their own children will suffer because of the lies. The true is that there is nothing natural about the crisis we are in.
It's human-caused from fossil fuel burning. It's happening at such a fast rate in geologic time that on a timeline it looks like we have exploded a bomb on ourselves. If anyone is around 200 years from now they will see the viciousness of these lies and the evidence of what greed caused. They will see the bomb we exploded on ourselves.
With the exception of catastrophic events such as the meteor that hit the Gulf of Mexico and killed all the dinosaurs, nearly all climate change occurred over tens of thousands, even millions, of years. Our current situation has occurred in 250 years which is a blip in geologic time. On any timeline graph that measures fossil fuel burning, and the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the surface temperature of the planet, the melting of the glaciers and poles, the warming and acidity of the seas, the number of extinct animals and plants, the slowing down of the Gulf Stream and any other destructive effect of global warming,-- the horizontal line on the graph over the decades shoots upwards from about 1985 onwards into a straight up peak, a sharp pointed sky high needle, like a bomb exploded on our planet.
The climate denial network also funded a ludicrous book written by someone with no background in climate science who claimed that sun spots were causing the planet to actually cool. He was so well funded that he got to speak at big media outlets. Only when his handlers tried to arrange a conference with professors at Yale, the Yale scientists would not meet with him because he had no qualifications. I knew about him because a Republican friend sent me the book to straighten me out. It read as if it had been written by a high school kid.
Other rabbit holes to fall down when you have time that are related to this are:
Accelerationism (that Capitalism is being accelerated to its final endgame)
Dominionism (that the most desired endgame is apocalypse and/or putting God's laws above laws of men and creating a Kingdom of Heaven on Earth - aka Gilead)
This is an emotional subject for me. I work with people who believe climate change is imaginary. There is nothing I can say to change their minds. From the beginning of this administration I've had the same questions. What is it that causes people to become right wing? I mean not so much conservative but what causes people to support trump, to ignore evidence against him and to ignore anything that they don't like (like climate change) and to believe what to me is obvious spin? What also causes these people to be so belligerent, threaten violence, throw out insults (libtard, commie, etc...) for anyone who even slightly deviates from their views. What causes these same people to advocate for banning abortion, but have 0 problems with the death penalty or with keeping children in cages?
What in short causes the hate? I've read accounts of interviews done with average German citizens right after the war, and what's striking is how almost everyone either feigns ignorance at the crimes committed by their government, or finds way's of justifying it. What is it about humanity that allows us to commit evil, whether through direct or indirect complicity?
Living through these last few years has given me little hope in humanity, in all honesty I've lost hope.
I have problems with the evil in this world as well. I look at people wondering, how can you be so evil? Or how can you not recognize evil when it stares you right in the face, looks you in the eyes and tell you untruths for their benefits.
I don't want to seem Polyanna-ish, but my faith lies with people like us. We have to keep the faith going, work relentlessly in combatting this evil surrounding us. Otherwise, we let them win. I have faith in God/Spirit/Universe, the angels and arcangels leading the way for us to come out of this on top. I have to have hope.
Everytime the climate change subjet comes up in a conversation around me, it is in derision, in criticizing the environmentalists wanting to stop or slow our evolutions. Since it's always been like that my whole life, I was taking the subject with a grain of salt. Being a pragmatic, I understood the scientists' "claims" were the unbiaised data they were shouting from the roof tops to be heard in a croud of undisciplined people laughing, denying the reality. But I wasn't really listening.
It's only when coming to this site that I got more exposure to the reality of the situation. I was curious about psychics and their predictions in this crazy world. I am now trying to inform my famiily and friends in this urgent state of affair. But my efforts are being ridiculed. One morning I went to my brother's to look after the girls. I got there early, my brother was eating the last muffin that was in one of those thin plastic containers. He threw it away in the recycling box. I took it out, turned to my nieces and asked them how we could upcycle this container. I had to explained what upcycling is. As we were working on it, my brother was happy the girls were doing crafts instead of watching TV. When asking what we were doing, I told him we were saving the world one tiny piece at a time. Response: "yeah and we wasting fresh water for house cleaning." (?)
Believe it or not, that is a mild reaction compared to what I sometimes get from my entourage. I'm not giving up. I can only do it, leading by exemple, using people's achiles's heel to get through to them. I know one of the way to get through to my brother is his wallet. He looks for anyways he can save money since he is a single father of two beautiful girls, working part time. Now, he seldom uses saran wrap since he got some ideas how to do without.
Our society is made up of people with different cultures. But it seems we have a common set of values base on materialism: comfort sometimes to the point of lazyness, looking "cool", material gains, the almighty dollar. So it is up to us, believers and lightworkers, to figure out a way to get through these people, coaxing them on doing what is right for the Earth using these values.
I don't believe people are truly 'evil'. The potential for kindness and cruelty lives side-by-side in everyone's heart, and some people are more cruel than others but I don't think the people thought of as being 'evil' by the rest of the world ever thought of themselves that way.
People can be led to do horrible things, but they are also capable of doing wonderful things.
I don't believe people are truly 'evil'. The potential for kindness and cruelty lives side-by-side in everyone's heart, and some people are more cruel than others but I don't think the people thought of as being 'evil' by the rest of the world ever thought of themselves that way.
People can be led to do horrible things, but they are also capable of doing wonderful things.
@Grayson, what you wrote here is breath-taking.
@Natalie I so understand you're despair. And I have asked myself repeatedly the same question -- what is going on in people who choose Donald Trump? I feel there are many reasons:
One, they feel threatened by increasing liberalization of culture and by diversity and tolerance of groups that were formerly marginalized. They were trained to feel this way either by larger culture or their families or communities and there's an inner nature in some that doesn't want to share with people they don't know. So much of it is fear based.
Also they watch Fox News and read conservative media that literally brain washes them. If they are wealthy, then they may live in bubble of privilege that needs to preserve it for themselves and their children. There is also so much fear of outsiders. Trump exploits those fears, as did Hitler. Fox News focuses on how dangerous our world is -- all day long they show murders and thefts and car crashes and crimes on the news to the point where you just feel it's really dangerous outside. And the people they show committing the crimes are usually people of color.
As for whether there is inherent evil in people, perhaps a few rare cases, but I feel Grayson nailed it in his statement.
And I don't know if it helps but here are some words that the Nobel prize winning novelist John Steinbeck wrote to a friend as the Nazi's swept over Europe, how sick he was feeling about humanity. If you've read his novels, you will know that he was a great humanitarian, a friend of the disenfranchised and the poor.
Steinbeck wrote on New Year's Day 1941 (selected and reviewed here by the amazing Maria Popova in her incredible blog Brainpickings.org):
Speaking of the happy new year, I wonder if any year ever had less chance of being happy. It’s as though the whole race were indulging in a kind of species introversion — as though we looked inward on our neuroses. And the thing we see isn’t very pretty… So we go into this happy new year, knowing that our species has learned nothing, can, as a race, learn nothing — that the experience of ten thousand years has made no impression on the instincts of the million years that preceded.
From Popova: "But Steinbeck, who devoted his life to defending the disenfranchised and celebrating the highest potentiality of the human spirit, refuses to succumb to what Rebecca Solnit has so aptly termed the “despair, defeatism, cynicism[,] amnesia and assumptions” to which we reflexively resort in maladaptive self-defense against overwhelming evil. Instead, fifteen centuries after Plato’s brilliant charioteer metaphor for good and evil, Steinbeck quickly adds a perceptive note on the indelible duality of human nature and the cyclical character of the civilizational continuity we call history:"
Not that I have lost any hope. All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up. It isn’t that the evil thing wins — it never will — but that it doesn’t die. I don’t know why we should expect it to. It seems fairly obvious that two sides of a mirror are required before one has a mirror, that two forces are necessary in man before he is man. I asked [the influential microbiologist] Paul de Kruif once if he would like to cure all disease and he said yes. Then I suggested that the man he loved and wanted to cure was a product of all his filth and disease and meanness, his hunger and cruelty. Cure those and you would have not man but an entirely new species you wouldn’t recognize and probably wouldn’t like.--John Steinbeck
You can read the whole thing here.
I hope it helps.
This is both off-topic and yet tangential.
My husband has, in the past two years, gotten heavily involved in health and exercise, and watches videos and reads articles about maximizing strength and energy. The other night, he wanted to watch a documentary called "Game Changer," about professional athletes and fitness experts who live a plant-based eating lifestyle, and how much it has affected their physical wellness and level of performance.
During the documentary, the effect of ranching and raising livestock on climate was briefly explored, and it was astonishing. Even my husband, who doesn't believe a word I tell him (and I've tried a number of times to make the case for vegetarianism) and always has to learn for himself, was finally convinced about the huge drain on resources a meat-based diet is. He is now ready to explore vegetarianism and occasional veganism, purely from the standpoint of health and fitness, but secondarily from a climate change perspective.
However, it occurred to me that more people need to get this message, and if it starts by sharing documentaries and findings such as this ... something that appeals to vanity more than conscientiousness ... maybe it will start to sink in and spread.