Don't Even Think About It (14 page)

It was in this spirit of opening climate change to new perspectives and challenges—what is sometimes called
post-normal science
—that one of the largest British science research funding agencies invited me in 2012 to join its peer review board. I assumed it would be a chance to learn something about the scientific process. It turned out to be a far more interesting object lesson in socially negotiated silence.

The proposals we considered were mostly concerned with the impacts of climate change. Mostly. But interspersed throughout the backbreaking stack of photocopies were cuckoos: elegantly worded funding requests from oil companies asking for geologists and earth scientists to assist in the development of new oil and gas fields.

When I raised a question about the guidelines for funding oil companies, it was met with utter silence. No one said anything. It all felt very uncomfortable, but I took a gulp and pushed on regardless—because, I said, “if we were in the Medical Research Council and had received a research proposal from a tobacco company, I think we would at least discuss it.”

None of the imposing senior professors on the panel could answer the question. The proposal, they said, was well prepared. That was all. At this, the chairman brought down his guillotine. “We're not going to close down oil companies, are we?” he said, sighing. The proposal went through. As did every subsequent oil proposal for which the chair, with increasing grumpiness, repeated that “Mr. Marshall's objections are noted,” without noting anything.

Eviatar Zerubavel laughs when I tell him this story—this was a textbook meta-silence. It was as if I had said nothing at all. It was all polite enough. We made empty small talk over the lunchtime sandwiches, again over the tea and biscuits, said our farewells. I have not been invited back.

Politicians and the media also have internal cultures that establish what can or cannot be recognized. The policy specialist Joseph P. Overton argued that there is a “window” that swings from left to right and defines what is politically possible to say or do. Overton argued that if politicians favor a policy that lies outside that window, they need to ensure that the window shifts to accommodate it—for example, by encouraging outside pressure or, as Naomi Klein argues in her book
The
Shock Doctrine
, by enabling the emergence of social and economic crises that can then be used to justify radical measures.

Similar things happen in the climate change discourse. Extreme events, such as Hurricane Sandy, Hurricane Katrina, and Typhoon Haiyan, can shift the window to favor a political response, just as, the climate scientist Michael Mann argues, the leaking of scientific e-mails in 2009 combined with a cold winter swung the window in the direction of denial arguments and then silence.

The result was that politicians and campaigners increasingly stopped talking about climate change at all. Barack Obama made no major policy speech on climate change during his first term and, for the first time in twenty-four years, it was not mentioned once in the debates for the 2012 presidential election. John Kerry, to his credit, made an impassioned floor speech in the U.S. Senate denouncing the “conspiracy of silence . . . a silence that empowers misinformation and mythology to grow where science and truth should prevail.”

At a state level, Republican legislatures then began to systematically remove all mention of climate change from policy. In North Carolina, state lawmakers passed a bill that forbade the use of any climate models for predicting future sea levels. In Texas, scientists had to mount a vocal revolt when officials attempted to purge all mention of climate change from their report on the environment of Galveston Bay. In 2013 nine states failed to mention climate change at all in their State Hazard Plans.

In other Republican states, planners have been allowed to develop long-term measures to
impacts on the understanding that
itself is never actually recognized or mentioned. And so the bizarre situation has arisen that Florida's and Arizona's populist leaders, who denounce
science (Arizona governor Jan Brewer once punched a reporter for having the temerity to ask her whether she “believed in
”), are mandating their state, city, and county authorities to incorporate the latest
models of drought and sea level rise into their long-term planning. Like Harry Potter, they have been actively preparing for a threat that cannot be named.

In March 2009, as momentum was building for a national climate bill, the White House distributed a memo to the leaders of U.S. environmental organizations demanding that they should not use the phrase “climate change” in regard to the bill and instead focus on “green jobs” and “energy independence.” The bill itself was called the American Clean Energy and Security Act. Bill McKibben, alone among those present, stood up and protested. “This is going to come back and haunt us,” he said.

Many environmental organizations concluded that their best chance of getting any political movement at all was by expunging all mention of climate change. Betsy Taylor, a specialist in environmental communications, complained that 2010 was the year when “it became a mantra inside big environmental groups. Talking about climate change is toxic. Some still don't use the ‘C' word.”

The C-word, indeed! In the year that the biggest-selling music hit, lauded at the Grammys, was rapper Cee Lo's bouncy ditty “Fuck You,”  climate change could only be referred to as
the C-Word
.

The removal of climate change from the political discourse in turn influenced the media, or more precisely, the editorial policy defining what areas may or may not be explored by journalists. David Fogarty, the former Reuters climate change correspondent in Asia, said that getting a climate story published became “a lottery” with editors “agonizing, asking a million questions, and too frightened to take a decision.” In developing countries, journalists reported similar frustration in getting climate change stories past their editors.

In 2010 the
New York Times
, the so-called newspaper of record that sets the editorial agenda for much of the U.S. news media, did not run a single lead item on climate change. Two years later only 10 percent of U.S. television coverage of the unprecedented heat waves made any mention of the issue. The media silence is, apparently, a matter of policy rather than circumstance.

There is no simple model for socially constructed silence but rather another circulation system of complex feedbacks. Climate change finds no foothold in the conversations between workmates, neighbors, or even friends and family. It is not mentioned in the focus groups that define electoral messaging. It is polluted with cultural values. It becomes a toxic C-word for politicians and communicators. It is largely ignored by the media.

Each silence appears to be built on the other silences, but they have a common basis in the need to avoid anxiety and defend ourselves. From a psychoanalytic perspective, denial and anxiety are closely linked. Things that cannot be assimilated are repressed. As Stanley Cohen wrote about human rights abuses, “Without being told what to think about (or what not to think about), and without being punished for ‘knowing' the wrong things, societies arrive at unwritten agreements about what can be publically remembered and acknowledged.”

Of course this may yet change. The Overton window appears to be swinging back, pushed along by highly salient weather events. Action against climate change may not yet be a safe topic for a barroom conversation in Tulsa, but it is appearing again in the jokes of the late-night talk shows. The processes that define the norms of attention contain powerful feedbacks that can amplify change as well as suppress it. Over my lifetime, there have been remarkable (and hopefully unstoppable) shifts in public attitudes to race, homosexuality, child abuse, and disability. However, none of these occurred without a prolonged struggle by dedicated social movements, often with a central tactic of confronting a socially constructed silence. The lessons of history show that this is winnable, but it could be a long struggle.

18

The Non-Perfect Non-Storm

Why We Think That Climate Change Is Impossibly Difficult

Psychologists working in the field
of decision making often describe climate change as the perfect problem—so perfect, in fact, that one could easily conclude that we don’t stand a chance in hell.

Tony Leiserowitz, of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, says, “You almost couldn’t design a problem that is a worse fit with our underlying psychology.” Daniel Gilbert says that “it really has everything going against it. A psychologist could barely dream up a better scenario for paralysis.” And Daniel Kahneman is, of course, “deeply pessimistic.”