The science is clear, the severity understood at the highest levels everywhere, and serious debates about what to do are turning into action. The deniers have nothing to contribute to this.
However infuriating they are, arguing with them or debunking their theories is likely only to generate publicity or money for them. It also helps to generate a fake air of controversy over climate action that provides cover for the vested interests seeking to delay the end of the fossil fuel age.
But the deniers are not all the same. They tend to fit into one of four different categories: the shill, the grifter, the egomaniac and the ideological fool.
The shill is the easiest to understand. He, and it almost always is he, is paid by vested interests to emit clouds of confusion about the science or economics of climate action. This uncertainty creates a smokescreen behind which polluters can lobby against measures that cut their profits.
A sadder case is that of the grifters. They have found themselves earning a living by grinding out contrarian articles for rightwing media outlets. Do they actually believe the guff they write? It doesn’t matter: they just warm their hands on the outrage, count the clicks and wait for the pay cheque.
The egomaniacs are also tragic figures. They are disappointed, frustrated people whose careers have stalled and who can’t understand why the world refuses to give full reverence to their brilliance. They are desperate for recognition, and, when it stubbornly refuses to arrive, they are drawn to make increasingly extreme pronouncements, in the hope of finally being proved a dogma-busting, 21st-century Galileo.
The ideological fool is the fourth type of climate denier, and they can be intelligent. But they are utterly blinded by their inane, no-limits version of the free-market creed. The climate emergency requires coordinated global action, they observe, and that looks horribly like communism in disguise.
I think climate denial should at this point be either laughed at (as one would flat earthers) or ignored. — Xtrix
It also helps to generate a fake air of controversy over climate action that provides cover for the vested interests seeking to delay the end of the fossil fuel age.
What to do about it not easy to answer, but at least we can start calling it what it is, rather than trying to reason with the unreasonable and the anti-reasonable. — tim wood
That's true for almost every conservative.She feels like people who disagree with her are attacking her. — Bitter Crank
There is this elderly woman I have known for a long time who refuses to get vaccinated for Covid-19. — Bitter Crank
Status quo über alles – Cui bono? Follow the money, Fool? — 180 Proof
There isn't such a thing as "climate denial". No one denies the climate exists, and most people do not deny that it changes either. — Tzeentch
They also read Ayn Rand. — Wheatley
I'm satisfied that deniers of truth, climate-change, science; that is, deniers of the being of things that are, are influenced by mental illness or personality disorder. — tim wood
It's very difficult for me to refrain from giving oxygen to these people. — James Riley
The simple fact is climate change, suppose it's true, hasn't produced the desired effect at the level of society - governments, the powers that be - where it could be dealt with in the right way. Why? — TheMadFool
For me too— but it’s never productive, because the arguments are so irrational and so damaging that it’s hard to keep my temper, and then I’m not communicating well enough to have an effect anyway. — Xtrix
There are some obvious reasons— mostly money. The fossil fuel industry is massive, and they lobby, bribe, and propagandize very well. — Xtrix
None-the-less, were we capable of doing it, we should bite the bullet and get on with the transition--whatever the difficulties. — Bitter Crank
You haven't been around enough crazy people. Pretty much any communicating you do isn't going to have the effect you want.and then I’m not communicating well enough to have an effect anyway. — Xtrix
"His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold
anything else. It seems to him there are
a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.
"As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.
"Only at times, the curtain of the pupils
lifts, quietly--. An image enters in,
rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,
plunges into the heart and is gone."
---Rainer Maria Rilke — tim wood
Status quo über alles – Cui bono? Follow the money. — 180 Proof
There are some obvious reasons— mostly money. The fossil fuel industry is massive, and they lobby, bribe, and propagandize very well. — Xtrix
Greed seems to stick out like a sore thumb but then that's how mother nature - evolution - made us over millions of years with good results (we're what evolutionary biologists might call a successful species). Doesn't the whole issue look like mother nature's plan backfired? Climate change then is not man-made, life/mother nature is to blame. Why make us greedy? — TheMadFool
Did not Mother Nature endow us with care and concern for others as well? Why is greed given primacy? Especially when you see generosity all around. So why make us generous and loving? — Xtrix
It’s not Mother Nature, and it’s not human nature. It’s not genes. It’s about a society that elevates some aspects of human behavior and suppresses others. The dominant system today is called capitalism. — Xtrix
It’s not Mother Nature, and it’s not human nature. It’s not genes. It’s about a society that elevates some aspects of human behavior and suppresses others. The dominant system today is called capitalism. — Xtrix
industrial society was only possible because our species briefly had access to an immense supply of cheap, highly concentrated fuel with a very high net energy—that is, the amount of energy needed to extract the fuel was only a very small fraction of the energy the fuel itself provided. Starting in the 18th century, fossil fuels—first coal, then coal and petroleum, then coal, petroleum and natural gas—gave us that energy source. All three of these fossil fuels represent millions of years of stored sunlight, captured by the everyday miracle of photosynthesis and concentrated within the earth by geological processes that took place long before our species evolved. They are nonrenewable over any time scale that matters to human beings, and we are using them up at astonishing rates.
...No other energy source available to our species combines the high net energy, high concentration, and great abundance that a replacement for fossil fuel would need. Those energy sources that are abundant (for example, solar energy) are diffuse and yield little net energy, while those that are highly concentrated (for example, fissionable uranium) are not abundant, and also have serious problems with net energy. Abundant fossil fuels currently provide an “energy subsidy” to alternative energy sources that make them look more efficient than they are—there would be far fewer wind turbines, for example, if they had to be manufactured, installed, and maintained using wind energy. Furthermore, our entire energy infrastructure is geared to use fossil fuels and would have to be replaced, at a cost of countless trillions of dollars, in order to replace fossil fuels with something else.
Third, these problems leave only one viable alternative, which is to decrease our energy use, per capita and absolutely, to get our energy needs down to levels that could be maintained over the long term on renewable sources. — John Michael Greer - Collapse Now, and Avoid the Rush
I don't think it's predominately greed that is the problem at all. Most of us are not that greedy; what we are is addicted to our present prosperous, comfortable lifestyles (at least most of us who have such lifestyles and are the major contributors to greenhouse gas emissions are it seems).
It seems the majority just won't vote for any government that would seek to diminish comfort, convenience and prosperity; it's inertia, not greed, that is the major problem, as I see it. And as Bitter Crank mentioned the transition from a fossil fuel based economy to an economy based on sustainable energy is an enormous, seemingly almost insurmountable problem, just as are reduction of the human population, making the transition to an economics of de-qrowth, and giving up the multiple evils of industrial farming practices which are destroying soils everywhere and fish-farming and general over-fishing which is degrading the oceans. — Janus
what could've been achieved in, say, a decade took over a coupla centuries, in the process delaying the transition from mere civilizations to good civilizations. — TheMadFool
They are desperate for recognition, and, when it stubbornly refuses to arrive, they are drawn to make increasingly extreme pronouncements, in the hope of finally being proved a dogma-busting, 21st-century Galileo.
I often feel guilty about being a supermarket shopper but the alternative seems daunting (plucking and cleaning a chicken for instance :yikes: — Wayfarer
Not sure what you mean by "good civilizations" as opposed to "mere civilizations". If you have in mind our present state of "uber-civilization", this was achieved as quickly as it has been due to, as Wayfarer mentioned, the "boon' of fossil fuels. I don't think inertia has been all that much of a problem when, as circumstances have allowed, it comes to transitioning to greater prosperity, comfort and convenience; I'm not convinced that many of us resist that kind of change. It's change in the other direction that causes us to dig our heels in, I would say. — Janus
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