“This is how wealthy individuals or corporations translate their economic power into political and cultural power. They have their profits, so they hire people to write books that say climate change is not real. They hear people to go on TV and say climate change is not real. People without economic power don’t have the same size voice as people who do have economic power, and so it ends up distorting democracy.”
I came across the group Climate Realists by accident. Twitter has a way of doing that to one: You follow a long list of environmental awareness groups, scientific organizations, climate activists, field biologists, palaeontologists and ecologists of all stripes, and it’s only a matter of time before social media algorithms point you in the direction of any group that has “climate” and “reality” in the same name field.
Only, in this case, I quickly learned that Climate Realists are in fact climate deniers.
Or, rather, they agree that something is wrong with the climate; they just don’t agree that it’s man-made, or even influenced by human activity. The Earth’s climate is cyclical they say, and is forever going through tectonic shifts. Humankind’s presence on Earth can be measured in the blink of an eye, time-wise. The climate has been misbehaving — or behaving erratically — for millions if not billions of years.
Here, though, some of their arguments get harder to follow. Science is on their side, they say. Furthermore, most scientists agree with them. When a news story makes headlines, as one did just 24 hours ago, that says 11,000 scientists from across the world have united to declare a global climate emergency that is already causing “untold human suffering,” climate deniers dismiss that as exaggerated alarmism at best and fake news at worst.
There is a scientific consensus on climate change, they insist, but that consensus is that all this talk of a climate emergency is bogus.
But wait, there’s more. One of Climate Realist’s most startling argument — to me, anyway — is that there’s big money to be made in climate activism. Those Tesla-driving millionaires who swan around the high seas in their solar-powered racing yachts are gulling gullible donors into giving more and more money to climate studies that show the polar ice caps are melting at an alarming rate, and that polar bears won’t be with us for much longer. Pity Big Oil and the fossil fuel industry: If only they had the money to match those granola-crunching hippies with their ponytails and 4Ocean bracelets.
This idea that climate activists have deep pockets, deeper than anyone else’s, won’t go away, though.
That’s what prompted Smithsonian magazine to do a exposé a number of year back headed, helpfully, “Meet the Money Behind the Climate Denial Movement.”
Just in case one didn’t get the message at first glance, it was accompanied by an equally
helpful subhead: “Nearly a billion dollars a year is flowing into the organized climate change counter-movement.”
Shocker! It turns out money is not with the granola hippie crowd after all, but rather with those very same climate deniers — backed by Big Oil — who accuse granola-crunching hippies of having cash to burn. When they aren’t chaining themselves to old-growth trees, that is.
“The overwhelming majority of climate scientists, international governmental bodies, relevant research institutes and scientific societies are in unison in saying that climate change is real, that it's a problem, and that we should probably do something about it now, not later,” Colin Schultz wrote in Smithsonian. “And yet, for some reason, the idea persists in some peoples' minds that climate change is up for debate, or that climate change is no big deal.
“Actually, it's not ‘for some reason’ that people are confused. 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 detailed and thorough study, Drexel University (Philadelphia) sociologist Robert Brulle took a deep dive into the financial structure of the climate deniers, to see who’s controlling the purse strings.
According to Brulle's research, the nearly 100 think-tanks, advocacy groups and trade associations that make up the North American climate denial industry pull down just shy of a billion dollars a year to lobby and sway public opinion on climate change and other environmental issues.
“The tactics that this movement uses were developed and tested in the tobacco industry first,” Brulle explained, “and now theyʼre being applied to the climate change movement, and in fact, some of the same people and some of the same organizations that were involved in the tobacco issue are also involved in climate change.”
Imagine that.
Mind you, when you think about it, it’s only natural that the climate denial movement would have roots in the tobacco industry. Plausibility is deniability. Tobacco is a plant, after all. A tree by any other name.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/11/google-contributions-climate-change-deniers
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