This Changes Everything (6 page)

—Report by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2014
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“There is no way this can be done without fundamentally changing the American way of life, choking off economic development, and putting large segments of
our economy out of business.”

—Thomas J. Donohue, President of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, on ambitious carbon reduction
²

There is a question from a gentleman in the fourth row.

He introduces himself as Richard Rothschild. He tells the crowd that he ran for county commissioner in Maryland’s Carroll County because he had come to the conclusion that policies to combat global warming were actually
“an attack on middle-class American capitalism.” His question for the panelists, gathered in a Washington, D.C., Marriott, is: “To what extent is this entire movement simply a green Trojan horse, whose belly is full with red Marxist socioeconomic doctrine?”
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At the Heartland Institute’s Sixth International Conference on Climate Change, held in late June 2011, the premier gathering for those dedicated
to denying the overwhelming scientific consensus that human activity is warming the planet, this qualifies as a rhetorical question. Like asking a meeting of German central bankers if Greeks are untrustworthy. Still, the panelists aren’t going to pass up an opportunity to tell the questioner just how right he is.

First up is Marc Morano, editor of the denialists’ go-to news site Climate Depot.
“In America today we are regulated down to our shower heads, to our light bulbs, to our washing machines,” he says. And “we’re allowing the American SUV to die right before our eyes.” If the greens have their way, Morano warns, we will be looking at “a CO
₂
budget for every man, woman, and child on the planet, monitored by an international body.”
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Next is Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive
Enterprise Institute who specializes in harassing climate scientists with burdensome lawsuits and Freedom of Information Act fishing expeditions. He angles the table mic over to his mouth. “You can believe this is about the climate,” he says darkly, “and many people do, but it’s not a reasonable belief.” Horner, whose prematurely silver hair makes him look like Anderson Cooper’s frat boy
doppelgänger, likes to invoke 1960s counterculture icon Saul Alinsky: “The issue isn’t the issue.” The issue, apparently, is that “no free society would do to itself what this agenda requires. . . . The first step to [doing] that is to remove these nagging freedoms that keep getting in the way.”
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Claiming that climate change is a plot to steal American freedom is rather tame by Heartland standards.
Over the course of this two-day conference, I will hear modern environmentalism compared to virtually every mass-murderous chapter in human history, from the Catholic Inquisition to Nazi Germany to Stalin’s Russia. I will learn that Barack Obama’s campaign promise to support locally owned biofuels refineries was akin to Chairman Mao’s scheme to put “a pig iron furnace in everybody’s backyard”
(the Cato Institute’s Patrick Michaels). That climate change is “a stalking horse for National Socialism” (former Republican senator and retired astronaut Harrison Schmitt, referencing the Nazis). And that environmentalists are like Aztec priests, sacrificing countless people to appease the gods and change the weather (Marc Morano again).
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But most of all, I will hear versions of the opinion
expressed by the county commissioner in the fourth row: that climate change is a Trojan horse designed to abolish capitalism and replace it with some kind of “green communitarianism.” As conference speaker Larry Bell succinctly puts it in his book
Climate of Corruption
, climate change “has little to do with the state of the environment and much to do with shackling capitalism and transforming
the American way of life in the interests of global wealth redistribution.”
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Yes, there is a pretense that the delegates’ rejection of climate science is rooted in serious disagreement about the data. And the organizers go to some lengths to mimic credible scientific conferences, calling the gathering “Restoring the Scientific Method” and even choosing a name, the International Conference on
Climate Change, that produces an organizational acronym, ICCC, just one letter off from that of the world’s leading authority on climate change, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a collaboration of thousands of scientists and 195 governments. But the various contrarian theses presented at the Heartland conference—tree rings, sunspots, the Medieval Warm Period—are
old news and were thoroughly debunked long ago. And most of the speakers are not even scientists but rather hobbyists: engineers, economists, and lawyers, mixed in with a weatherman, an astronaut, and a “space architect”—all convinced they have outsmarted 97 percent of the world’s climate scientists with their back-of-the-envelope calculations.
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Australian geologist Bob Carter questions whether
warming is happening at all, while astrophysicist Willie Soon acknowledges some warming has occurred, but says it has nothing to do with greenhouse emissions and is instead the result of natural fluctuations in the activity of the sun. Cato’s Patrick Michaels contradicts them both by conceding that CO
₂
is indeed increasing temperatures, but insists the impacts are so minor we should “do nothing”
about it. Disagreement is the lifeblood of any intellectual gathering, but at the Heartland conference, this wildly contradictory material sparks absolutely no debate among the deniers—no one attempts to defend one position over another, or to sort out who is actually correct. Indeed as the temperature graphs are presented, several members of the mostly elderly audience seem to doze off.
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The
entire room comes to life, however, when the rock stars of the movement take the stage—not the C-team scientists but the A-team ideological warriors like Morano and Horner. This is the true purpose of the gathering: providing a forum for die-hard denialists to collect the rhetorical cudgels with which they will attempt to club environmentalists and climate scientists in the weeks and months to come.
The talking points tested here will jam the comment sections beneath every article and YouTube video that contains the phrase “climate change” or “global warming.” They will also fly from the mouths of hundreds of right-wing commentators and politicians—from Republican presidential hopefuls all the way down to county commissioners like Richard Rothschild. In an interview outside the sessions,
Joseph Bast, president of the Heartland Institute, takes credit for “thousands of articles and op-eds and speeches . . . that were informed by or motivated by somebody attending one of these conferences.”
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More impressive, though left unspoken, are all the news stories that were never published and never aired. The years leading up to the gathering had seen a precipitous collapse of media coverage
of climate change, despite a rise in extreme weather: in 2007, the three major U.S. networks—CBS, NBC, and ABC—ran 147 stories on climate change; in 2011 the networks ran just fourteen stories on the subject. That too is the denier strategy at work, because the goal was never just to spread doubt but also to spread fear—to send a clear message that saying anything at all about climate change
was a surefire way to find your inbox and comment threads jammed with a toxic strain of vitriol.
¹¹

The Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based think tank devoted to “promoting free-market solutions,” has been holding these confabs since 2008, sometimes twice a year. And at the time of the gathering, the strategy appeared to be working. In his address, Morano—whose claim to fame is having broken
the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth story that helped sink John Kerry’s 2004 presidential bid—led the audience through a series of victory laps. Climate legislation in the U.S. Senate: dead! The U.N. summit on climate change in Copenhagen: failure! The climate movement: suicidal! He even projected on a screen a couple of quotes from climate activists beating up on themselves (as progressives do so well)
and exhorted the audience to “celebrate!”
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The only things missing were balloons and confetti descending from the rafters.

When public opinion on the big social and political issues changes, the trends tend to be relatively gradual. Abrupt shifts, when they come, are usually precipitated by dramatic events. Which is why pollsters were so surprised by what had happened to perceptions about
climate change in just four years. A 2007 Harris poll found that 71 percent of Americans believed that the continued burning of fossil fuels would alter the climate. By 2009 the figure had dropped to 51 percent. In June 2011 the number was down to 44 percent—well under half the population. Similar trends have been tracked in the U.K. and Australia. Scott Keeter, director of survey research at the
Pew Research Center for People & the Press, described the statistics in the United States as “among the largest shifts over a short period of time seen in recent public opinion history.”
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The overall belief in climate change has rebounded somewhat since its 2010–11 low in the United States. (Some have hypothesized that experience with extreme weather events could be contributing, though “the
evidence is at best very sketchy at this point,” says Riley Dunlap, a sociologist at Oklahoma State University who specializes in the politics of climate change.) But what remains striking is that on the right-wing side of the political spectrum, the numbers are still way down.
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It seems hard to believe today, but as recently as 2008, tackling climate change still had a veneer of bipartisan
support, even in the United States. That year, Republican stalwart Newt Gingrich did a TV spot with Democratic congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, then Speaker of the House, in which they pledged to join forces and fight climate change together. And in 2007, Rupert Murdoch—whose Fox News channel relentlessly amplifies the climate change denial movement—launched an incentive program at Fox to encourage employees
to buy hybrid cars (Murdoch announced he had purchased one himself).

Those days of bipartisanship are decidedly over. Today, more than 75 percent of self-identified Democrats and liberals believe humans are
changing the climate—a level that, despite yearly fluctuations, has risen only slightly since 2001. In sharp contrast, Republicans have overwhelmingly chosen to reject the scientific consensus.
In some regions, only about 20 percent of self-identified Republicans accept the science. This political rift can also be found in Canada. According to an October 2013 poll conducted by Environics, only 41 percent of respondents who identify with the ruling Conservative Party believe that climate change is real and human-caused, while 76 percent of supporters of the left-leaning New Democratic
Party and 69 percent of supporters of the centrist Liberal Party believe it is real. And the same phenomenon has once again been documented in Australia and the U.K., as well as Western Europe.
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Ever since this political divide opened up over climate change, a great deal of social science research has been devoted to pinpointing precisely how and why political beliefs are shaping attitudes toward
global warming. According to Yale’s Cultural Cognition Project, for example, one’s “cultural worldview”—that would be political leanings or ideological outlook to the rest of us—explains “individuals’ beliefs about global warming more powerfully than any other individual characteristic.”
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More powerfully, that is, than age, ethnicity, education, or party affiliation.

The Yale researchers explain
that people with strong “egalitarian” and “communitarian” worldviews (marked by an inclination toward collective action and social justice, concern about inequality, and suspicion of corporate power) overwhelmingly accept the scientific consensus on climate change. Conversely, those with strong “hierarchical” and “individualistic” worldviews (marked by opposition to government assistance for
the poor and minorities, strong support for industry, and a belief that we all pretty much get what we deserve) overwhelmingly reject the scientific consensus.
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The evidence is striking. Among the segment of the U.S. population that displays the strongest “hierarchical” views, only 11 percent rate climate change as a “high risk,” compared with 69 percent of the segment displaying the strongest
“egalitarian” views.
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Yale law professor Dan Kahan, the lead author on this study, attributes the tight correlation between “worldview” and acceptance of climate science to “cultural cognition,” the process by which all of us—regardless of political leanings—filter new information in ways that will protect our
“preferred vision of the good society.” If new information seems to confirm that vision,
we welcome it and integrate it easily. If it poses a threat to our belief system, then our brain immediately gets to work producing intellectual antibodies designed to repel the unwelcome invasion.
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As Kahan explained in
Nature
, “People find it disconcerting to believe that behavior that they find noble is nevertheless detrimental to society, and behavior that they find base is beneficial to
it. Because accepting such a claim could drive a wedge between them and their peers, they have a strong emotional predisposition to reject it.” In other words, it is always easier to deny reality than to allow our worldview to be shattered, a fact that was as true of die-hard Stalinists at the height of the purges as it is of libertarian climate change deniers today. Furthermore, leftists are equally
capable of denying inconvenient scientific evidence. If conservatives are inherent system justifiers, and therefore bridle before facts that call the dominant economic system into question, then most leftists are inherent system questioners, and therefore prone to skepticism about facts that come from corporations and government. This can lapse into the kind of fact resistance we see among those
who are convinced that multinational drug companies have covered up the link between childhood vaccines and autism. No matter what evidence is marshaled to disprove their theories, it doesn’t matter to these crusaders—it’s just the system covering up for itself.