Climate Change and the Battle To Control Your Mind

Here’s a wonderful article that lays out the history of climate change denial, while discussing the current state of affairs, i.e., how huge economic and political forces seek to obfuscate the truth.

Outside of how comprehensive and well-written the piece is, there’s really nothing surprising here.  Through the funding of libertarian/conservative think tanks like the Heartland Institute and the Heritage Foundation, the oil companies sought to sow doubt in the public mind when the truth about global warming became clear in the late 1970s and early 1980s, so as to delay regulations on the consumption of fossil fuels or avoid them altogether.  (See the Heartland Institute’s powerful 2012 ad above.)

The last 10 years has seen the oil giants ceasing to participate in sham research organizations whose purpose is to crank out bogus publications suggesting that climate change is a hoax, or at least that the science surrounding it is still unclear.

Yet the battle wages on.  The only real change has been the oil companies dropping out; all the other entities continue the fight full-bore, and certainly seem to be winning, when one considers that the all the basic knowledge about the long-term effects of greenhouse gas emissions was in place almost 40 years later.  We’re in essentially the same place that we were then.  The horsepower that was lost in the battle to muddy the waters re: climate change when the oil companies flew the coop has more than been made up for by the executive and legislative branches of the U.S. federal government.  Through cabinet appointments, speeches, and executive orders, the White House has done everything in its considerable power to pull the U.S. out of any and all efforts to acknowledge climate science and yank the nation’s participation in mitigating the effects of climate change.

Now, one might wonder how this is possible, considering that the propaganda coming from the White House and the think tanks is increasingly ignored.  The percentage of Americans who believe that we’re experience the real effects of global warming right now (62%) and who say they “very concerned” about the subject (45%) is at a three-decade high.

Could it be that the American democracy has eroded to the point that public opinion has ceased to matter?  Only 26% of Americans supported the tax bill that passed this week.  Over 90% of Americans want (but can’t get) stricter background checks for prospective gun owners.  Public support for President Trump’s pick to chair the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality, Kathleen Hartnett White (“climate science is the dark side of a kind of paganism”) is far under 10%.

Strangely, none of this matters.  At least not now.

Republican strategists are slightly concerned that flipping the bird to the vast majority of the American electorate may not be a sustainable practice, i.e., that it’s possible that there’s a limit to voters’ stupidity.  They see that Trump’s support from Fox News viewers has fallen from 90% in June to 58% last week.  It’s easy to see the reason for their worries; where do you take your horsecrap story when you’ve lost Fox News devotees? You’re pretty much out of room.

We’ll see where this goes.  Sure is an interesting time to be alive.