Read Don't Even Think About It Online
Authors: George Marshall
Don't Even Think About It (6 page)
The effect of this on environmental attitudes was shown in a clever experiment in Britain. When participants compared themselves with people in Sweden—who are generally considered to be highly environmentally aware—they showed
less
interest in energy conservation. In contrast, when they compared themselves with Americans, who they regarded as energy wasters (sorry about this—we are talking here about cultural stereotypes), they suddenly found a zeal for all things green. In other words, people in the in-group sought to move in the opposite direction to the out-group. As well as keeping up with the Joneses, they wanted to keep well away from those clean living Olafsons and those gas-guzzling Yanks.
This in-group and out-group behavior is apparent in all attitudes to the climate change issue. It leads both sides to underestimate the diversity of views within both their own ranks and those of their opponents, creating false stereotypes around liberal environmentalists and conservative deniers. And it leads them to exaggerate their own worthiness and denigrate their opponents.
The Internet has produced entirely new areas for the formation, expression, and enforcement of social norms and in-group, out-group dynamics. Facebook enables people to broadcast their views far more widely and brazenly than would happen in typical social interactions.
An aggressively contested social norm is at work in the swarms of comments that follow every article on climate change. Experiments have shown that the insertion of aggressive comments into descriptions of controversial issues does nothing to change people’s views but greatly increases their in-group identification with the view they already hold.
When scientists post a research paper on the Internet about climate change deniers, the angry responses generate even more data about climate change deniers—like a fast breeder reactor. The psychologist Stephan Lewandowsky received enough aggressive responses to his first research paper on climate denial conspiracy theories to provide the basis for yet another study. It bears the enticing title “Conspiracist Ideation in the Blogosphere in Response to Research on Conspiracist Ideation.”
While the bystander effect emerges from a sense of shared powerlessness, and a sense of shared power enables a range of abuses and violence, the anonymity of the new electronic norm enables outright bullying—abusive and violent e-mails received by high-profile scientists and activists calling them “Nazi climate murderers” and telling them to “go gargle razor blades.”
The late Stephen Schneider, one of the highest-profile climate scientists in the United States, found his name on a “death list” with other Jewish climate scientists on a neo-Nazi website. He had his address unlisted and had extra alarms put on his house. “What else could I do?” he asked. “Wear a bulletproof jacket? Learn to shoot a Magnum?”
Things came to a head around unfounded allegations in late 2009 that climate scientists had been distorting data. Glenn Beck on Fox TV called on scientists to commit suicide; the late Andrew Breitbart, a right-wing provocateur, tweeted, “Capital punishment for Dr. James Hansen”; and the blogger Marc Morano called for climate scientists to be publically flogged.
Bill McKibben, America’s most prominent climate change activist and the founder of 350.org, is characteristically phlegmatic: “I think my working theory is that if someone really wanted to shoot you, they probably wouldn’t send you an e-mail first.” I am not sure how much comfort one can find in that thought.
Something is at work here that is far more powerful, and more toxic, than the usual antagonism between different groups. Scientists are not an oppositional culture, and they work exceptionally hard to stay outside political divisions. They are, according to every opinion poll, by far the most respected and trusted of all the professions. The way that climate scientists have been treated is exceptional, and unparalleled in the recent history of science. Louis Pasteur never considered learning how to use firearms; Jonas Salk did not need to fortify his house. Scientists are not enemies and have never sought to be. They have been set up to play that role in a climate story line that, it would seem, cannot refute climate change without demonizing the people who warn us about it.
8
The Strange Mirror World of Climate Deniers
Few people have been more
influential in writing the story of climate change as a struggle between good and evil than Myron Ebell, the director of global warming at the libertarian think tank The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). Ebell is up for the fight, and his biography on the CEI website happily includes a string of accolades from his critics. Greenpeace calls him a “climate criminal,”
Rolling Stone
calls him “a leading misleader,” and
Business Insider
anoints him as “enemy #1 to the climate change community.”
Meeting him, I am struck once again by how closely the opponents of action on climate change mirror the advocates. Just as the Texan Tea Partiers reminded me of other grassroots campaigners, Ebell reminds me of other smart-suited policy wonks in the environmental organizations he despises—all of them fighting over the same narrative battleground with their reports, press releases, strategic lawsuits, conferences, slogans, and videos.
While waiting for our meeting, I get a glance inside Ebell’s office—a very brief peek, as he moves me on rapidly. It is possibly the messiest office I have ever seen, looking as if a hurricane (most assuredly
not
caused by climate change) had blasted through an entire floor and dropped everything in one room. Ebell is meticulously turned out in a smart suit, but his office speaks of pure campaigner.
Ebell is keen to stress that his principles are pure and uncorrupted by vested interests. Yes, he freely admits, he has received funding from ExxonMobil for his climate change work, but he was pursuing the same issues before it funded him and after it stopped funding him. Environmentalists, on the other hand, are hypocrites who denounce fossil fuels while taking money from oil and gas companies when they choose to.
He cites the story that the Baptists and the bootleggers worked together out of mutual interest to demand alcohol prohibition laws. It is a myth (deliberately concocted by the free market economist Bruce Yandle) that is much used by libertarian organizations because it suggests that anyone demanding regulation is morally corrupt.
Ebell is principally concerned with describing climate change as a battle of political principles. “The environment movement,” Ebell tells me, “is not an objective, well-intentioned movement that cares about saving the planet.” It emerges from the New Left, and regardless of the issue, it always proposes the same solutions: more government control, more power for the technocratic elite, and less material standards of living for people. He and his colleagues are, he says, involved in “a David versus Goliath struggle” against big government and corrupt environmentalism.
David and Goliath? I must look a bit taken aback to hear him use the favorite biblical metaphor of progressive social rights organizations. So Ebell repeats himself—yes, he says, David and Goliath.
What is more, notes Ebell, who is now on a roll, his side plays a “decent game.” A decent game, apparently, includes persistent personal attacks on the integrity of climate scientists. The latest tactic, championed by his CEI colleague Christopher Horner, is bombarding high-profile climate scientists with aggressive lawsuits demanding access to their private correspondence.
Ebell is convinced of his virtue. He insists his side is just being critical but would never stoop so low as to smear individuals—unlike environmentalists. And as he says this, he produces with a flourish a printout of a blog I had written that is moderately rude about him and his colleagues. He then takes great pleasure in reading it back to me line by line. Now I see why Ebell agreed to this interview.
Our discussion is marked by a banter in which every criticism that might be made by climate change campaigners is repeated and returned with interest. Greens are corrupt. Greens are political extremists. Greens distort the science for their own ends. Skeptics—because Ebell certainly would not consider himself a denier—are the underdog in a corrupt world fighting for a just cause.
These stories are dominated by enemies—the titanic struggle of good versus evil. The issue comes alive through the battle, and the characters and information, it would seem, attach themselves as convenient background for the story line that already exists.
For conservatives, climate change appeared as an issue at just the right time to replace the Red Menace bogeyman that had so long been their mobilizing enemy. Scarcely one year after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the 1992 Earth Summit provided a replacement threat—a shift of cast members in the longstanding opera of international ideological menace. As Rush Limbaugh says, climate science “has become a home for displaced socialists and communists.”
Those on the far right have a particular attachment to demonizing their political opponents. In 2011 the website Right Wing News surveyed forty-three popular conservative bloggers to determine the “worst figures in American history.” Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama, and Franklin D. Roosevelt led the tally, all well ahead of Benedict Arnold, Timothy McVeigh, and John Wilkes Booth.
The inability to differentiate between psychopathic killers and ideological opponents is perfectly exemplified in a notorious billboard erected by the Heartland Institute in Chicago with the photograph of the murderer Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber) and the caption “I still believe in global warming, do you?” This ludicrous advertisement has inspired numerous Internet parodies, such as a photo of Adolf Hitler with the quote “I still believe kittens are cute, do you?” So much for the decent game.
As our meeting closes, Ebell offers me a bowl containing four small round chocolates. The foil around them is printed with a map of the world to make them look like little globes. I look at them sitting there and recall all those infographics in green publications of the four planets’ worth of resources that we consume each year. He smiles at me—is this a test, I wonder, an initiation rite? Then again, a chocolate is still a chocolate, so I scoff the lot. After all, there is only so much metaphor that a man can bear.
9
Why We Keep Searching for Enemies
Climate change—the real climate
change based on scientific facts—lacks any readily identifiable external enemy or motive and has dispersed responsibility and diffused impacts. Issues of this kind are notoriously hard to motivate and mobilize people around. For example, one of the biggest killers in the world is the smoke from indoor cooking stoves. It kills 1.6 million people every year. But it has no enemy, no one is to blame, no one has responsibility—and very little is done to prevent it.
The lack of a clear enemy poses a problem for the news media trying to report on climate change. Mark Brayne, a former senior BBC correspondent, explains that journalism needs events, clear causes, and “a narrative of baddies and goodies.” However, climate change has none of these. “It is slow moving, complex, and what’s more, we ourselves are the baddies. That’s not something listeners and viewers want or wanted to be told,” Brayne says.
In a polarized battle, each side constantly measures itself against its opponent, learning from each other and then adopting the same narratives. This pattern of mirroring, sometimes called inversionism, is familiar from other polarized debates such anti-smoking, gun control, and abortion. Reading through my own transcripts and dozens of other interviews, I can identify a template that could be equally used by either side when it talks about the other side:
They (the other side) needed a new enemy after the end of the cold war and needed a political cause that would enable them to exercise political influence. So they created a story around their political worldview designed to play to people’s fears and weaknesses with us as the enemy. They try to play the moral high ground but their real motives are money and political influence. They claim that they are weak, but actually they are much more powerful than us because they have the support of large funders with overt political interests and because they are promoted by a lazy and biased media. We get abused and sometimes even get hate mail and death threats, but it’s our duty to expose these lies in the interest of the world’s poorest people and to save civilization from the greatest threat it has ever faced.
And everyone defends the science—or rather their own science. The language used by Rex Tillerson, CEO of ExxonMobil, could be equally well adopted by any number of climate scientists or activists. The public, he complains, is illiterate in the areas of science, math, and engineering. Interested parties take advantage of this ignorance to “manufacture fear” supported by “a lazy and unhelpful media who are unwilling to do the homework.”
Scientists and mainstream environmentalists share this belief that pure and accurate information is the wellspring of public attitudes and government policy; they regard those who pollute that information or prevent its flow as the enemy. When I asked James Hansen, then a NASA climate scientist, why people did not yet accept climate change, he said, “The answer is very simple—it’s money. The fossil fuel industry is making so much money that they control our governments, the media, and everything they tell us.”