This Changes Everything (7 page)

This kind of defensive reasoning helps explain the rise of emotional intensity that surrounds the climate issue today. As recently as
2007, climate change was something most everyone acknowledged was happening—they just didn’t seem to care very much. (When Americans are asked to rank their political concerns in order of priority, climate change still consistently comes in last.)
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But today there is a significant cohort of voters in many countries who care passionately, even obsessively, about climate change. What they care
about, however, is exposing it as a “hoax” being perpetrated by liberals to force them to change their light bulbs, live in Soviet-style tenements, and surrender their SUVs. For these right-wingers, opposition to climate change has become as central to their belief system as low taxes, gun ownership, and opposition to abortion. Which is why some climate scientists report receiving the kind of harassment
that used to be reserved for doctors who
perform abortions. In the Bay Area of California, local Tea Party activists have disrupted municipal meetings when minor sustainability strategies are being discussed, claiming they are part of a U.N.-sponsored plot to usher in world government. As Heather Gass of the East Bay Tea Party put it in an open letter after one such gathering: “One day (in 2035)
you will wake up in subsidized government housing, eating government subsidized food, your kids will be whisked off by government buses to indoctrination training centers while you are working at your government assigned job on the bottom floor of your urban transit center village because you have no car and who knows where your aging parents will be but by then it will be too late! WAKE UP!!!!”
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Clearly there is something about climate change that has some people feeling very threatened indeed.

Walking past the lineup of tables set up by the Heartland conference’s sponsors, it’s not terribly hard to see what’s going on. The Heritage Foundation is hawking reports, as are the Cato Institute and the Ayn Rand Institute. The climate change denial movement—far from an organic
convergence of “skeptical” scientists—is entirely a creature of the ideological network on display here, the very one that deserves the bulk of the credit for redrawing the global ideological map over the last four decades. A 2013 study by Riley Dunlap and political scientist Peter Jacques found that a striking 72 percent of climate denial books, mostly published since the 1990s, were linked
to right-wing think tanks, a figure that rises to 87 percent if self-published books (increasingly common) are excluded.
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Many of these institutions were created in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when U.S. business elites feared that public opinion was turning dangerously against capitalism and toward, if not socialism, then an aggressive Keynesianism. In response, they launched a counterrevolution,
a richly funded intellectual movement that argued that greed and the limitless pursuit of profit were nothing to apologize for and offered the greatest hope for human emancipation that the world had ever known. Under this libera
tionist banner, they fought for such policies as tax cuts, free trade deals, for the auctioning off of core state assets from phones to energy to water—the package known
in most of the world as “neoliberalism.”

At the end of the 1980s, after a decade of Margaret Thatcher at the helm in the U.K. and Ronald Reagan in the United States, and with communism collapsing, these ideological warriors were ready to declare victory: history was officially over and there was, in Thatcher’s often repeated words, “no alternative” to their market fundamentalism. Filled with
confidence, the next task was to systematically lock in the corporate liberation project in every country that had previously held out, which was usually best accomplished in the midst of political turmoil and large-scale economic crises, and further entrenched through free trade agreements and membership in the World Trade Organization.

It had all been going so well. The project had even managed
to survive, more or less, the 2008 financial collapse directly caused by a banking sector that had been liberated of so much burdensome regulation and oversight. But to those gathered here at the Heartland conference, climate change is a threat of a different sort. It isn’t about the political preferences of Republicans versus Democrats; it’s about the physical boundaries of the atmosphere and
ocean. If the dire projections coming out of the IPCC are left unchallenged, and business as usual is indeed driving us straight toward civilization-threatening tipping points, then the implications are obvious: the ideological crusade incubated in think tanks like Heartland, Cato, and Heritage will have to come to a screeching halt. Nor have the various attempts to soft-pedal climate action as
compatible with market logic (carbon trading, carbon offsets, monetizing nature’s “services”) fooled these true believers one bit. They know very well that ours is a global economy created by, and fully reliant upon, the burning of fossil fuels and that a dependency that foundational cannot be changed with a few gentle market mechanisms. It requires heavy-duty interventions: sweeping bans on polluting
activities, deep subsidies for green alternatives, pricey penalties for violations, new taxes, new public works programs, reversals of privatizations—the list of ideological outrages goes on and on. Everything, in short, that these think tanks—which have always been public proxies for far more powerful corporate interests—have been busily attacking for decades.

And there is also the matter of
“global equity” that keeps coming up in the climate negotiations. The equity debate is based on the simple scientific fact that global warming is caused by the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere over two centuries. That means that the countries that got a large head start on industrialization have done a great deal more emitting than most others. And yet many of the countries that
have emitted least are getting hit by the impacts of climate change first and worst (the result of geographical bad luck as well as the particular vulnerabilities created by poverty). To address this structural inequity sufficiently to persuade fast-growing countries like China and India not to destabilize the global climate system, earlier emitters, like North America and Europe, will have to take
a greater share of the burden at first. And there will obviously need to be substantial transfers of resources and technology to help battle poverty using low carbon tools. This is what Bolivia’s climate negotiator Angélica Navarro Llanos meant when she called for a Marshall Plan for the Earth. And it is this sort of wealth redistribution that represents the direst of thought crimes at a place
like the Heartland Institute.

Even climate action at home looks suspiciously like socialism to them; all the calls for high-density affordable housing and brand-new public transit are obviously just ways to give backdoor subsidies to the undeserving poor. Never mind what this war on carbon means to the very premise of global free trade, with its insistence that geographical distance is a mere
fiction to be collapsed by Walmart’s diesel trucks and Maersk’s container ships.

More fundamentally than any of this, though, is their deep fear that if the free market system really has set in motion physical and chemical processes that, if allowed to continue unchecked, threaten large parts of humanity at an existential level, then their entire crusade to morally redeem capitalism has been
for naught. With stakes like these, clearly greed is not so very good after all. And that is what is behind the abrupt rise in climate change denial among hardcore conservatives: they have come to understand that as soon as they admit that climate change is real, they will lose the central ideological battle of our time—whether we need to plan and manage our societies to reflect our goals and values,
or whether that task can be left to the magic of the market.

Imagine, for a moment, how all of this looks to a guy like Heartland president Joseph Bast, a genial bearded fellow who studied economics at the University of Chicago and who told me in a sit-down interview that his personal calling is “freeing people from the tyranny of other people.”
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To Bast, climate action looks like the end of
the world. It’s not, or at least it doesn’t have to be, but, for all intents and purposes, robust, science-based emission reduction is the end of
his
world. Climate change detonates the ideological scaffolding on which contemporary conservatism rests. A belief system that vilifies collective action and declares war on all corporate regulation and all things public simply cannot be reconciled with
a problem that demands collective action on an unprecedented scale and a dramatic reining in of the market forces that are largely responsible for creating and deepening the crisis.

And for many conservatives, particularly religious ones, the challenge goes deeper still, threatening not just faith in markets but core cultural narratives about what humans are doing here on earth. Are we masters,
here to subdue and dominate, or are we one species among many, at the mercy of powers more complex and unpredictable than even our most powerful computers can model? As Robert Manne, a professor of politics at La Trobe University in Melbourne, puts it, climate science is for many conservatives “an affront to their deepest and most cherished basic faith: the capacity and indeed the right of ‘mankind’
to subdue the Earth and all its fruits and to establish a ‘mastery’ over Nature.” For these conservatives, he notes, “such a thought is not merely mistaken. It is intolerable and deeply offensive. Those preaching this doctrine have to be resisted and indeed denounced.”
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And denounce they do, the more personal, the better—whether it’s former Vice President Al Gore for his mansions, or famed climate
scientist James Hansen for his speaking fees. Then there is “Climategate,” a manufactured scandal in which climate scientists’ emails were hacked and their contents distorted by the Heartlanders and their allies, who claimed to find evidence of manipulated data (the scientists were repeatedly vindicated of wrongdoing). In 2012, the Heartland Institute even landed itself in hot water by running
a billboard campaign that compared people who believe in climate change (“warmists” in denialist lingo) to murderous cult leader Charles Manson and Unabomber Ted Kaczynski. “I still believe in Global
Warming. Do you?” the first ad demanded in bold red letters under a picture of Kaczynski. For Heartlanders, denying climate science is part of a war, and they act like it.
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Many deniers are quite
open about the fact that their distrust of the science grew out of a powerful fear that if climate change is real, the political implications would be catastrophic. As British blogger and regular Heartland speaker James Delingpole has pointed out, “Modern environmentalism successfully advances many of the causes dear to the left: redistribution of wealth, higher taxes, greater government intervention,
regulation.” Heartland president Joseph Bast puts it even more bluntly. For the left, “Climate change is the perfect thing. . . . It’s the reason why we should do everything [the left] wanted to do anyway.”
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Bast, who has little of the swagger common to so many denialists, is equally honest about the fact he and his colleagues did not become engaged with climate issues because they found flaws
in the scientific facts. Rather, they became alarmed about the economic and political implications of those facts and set out to disprove them. “When we look at this issue, we say, This is a recipe for massive increase in government,” Bast told me, concluding that, “Before we take this step, let’s take another look at the science. So conservative and libertarian groups, I think, stopped and said,
Let’s not simply accept this as an article of faith; let’s actually do our own research.”
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Nigel Lawson, Margaret Thatcher’s former chancellor of the exchequer who has taken to declaring that “green is the new red,” has followed a similar intellectual trajectory. Lawson takes great pride in having privatized key British assets, lowered taxes on the wealthy, and broken the power of large unions.
But climate change creates, in his words, “a new license to intrude, to interfere and to regulate.” It must, he concludes, be a conspiracy—the classic teleological reversal of cause and effect.
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The climate change denial movement is littered with characters who are twisting themselves in similar intellectual knots. There are the old-timer physicists like S. Fred Singer, who used to develop rocket
technologies for the U.S. military and who hears in emissions regulation a distorted echo of the communism he fought during the Cold War (as documented compellingly by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway in
Merchants of Doubt
). In a similar vein, there is former Czech president Václav Klaus, who spoke
at a Heartland climate conference while still head of state. For Klaus, whose career began under communist
rule, climate change appears to have induced a full-fledged Cold War flashback. He compares attempts to prevent global warming to “the ambitions of communist central planners to control the entire society” and says, “For someone who spent most of his life in the ‘noble’ era of communism this is impossible to accept.”
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And you can understand that, from their perspective, the scientific reality
of climate change must seem spectacularly unfair. After all, the people at the Heartland conference thought they had won these ideological wars—if not fairly, then certainly squarely. Now climate science is changing everything: how can you win an argument against government intervention if the very habitability of the planet depends on intervening? In the short term, you might be able to argue that
the economic costs of taking action are greater than allowing climate change to play out for a few more decades (and some neoliberal economists, using cost-benefit calculations and future “discounting,” are busily making those arguments). But most people don’t actually like it when their children’s lives are “discounted” in someone else’s Excel sheet, and they tend to have a moral aversion to
the idea of allowing countries to disappear because saving them would be too expensive.