Where, why, and how the climate-change
denial movement is most entrenched
Environmental
writer Glenn Scherer has pointed out that over the last two years, the lion's
share of the damage from extreme weather, floods, tornadoes, droughts, thunder
storms, wind storms, heat waves, wildfires, has occurred in Republican-leaning
red states. And yet, quite
paradoxically, those states have sent a whole new crop of climate-change
deniers to Congress.
Explanation:
If you are deeply invested in free-market ideology, if you really
believe with your heart and soul that everything
public and anything the government does is evil, and that our liberation must
and will come from liberating corporations,
. . then climate change
fundamentally challenges your worldview, precisely because the truth is that the
big corporations (which have the biggest hand in creating the problem) must
be regulated!
Climate change is the greatest single
free-market failure.
It is what happens when you don't regulate
corporations and you allow them to treat the atmosphere as an open sewer. So it isn't just "Okay, the fossil fuel
companies want to protect their profits." It's that climate-change science threatens the
free-market worldview. And when you
drill deeper into the drop-off in belief in climate change, what you see is
that the large majority of Democrats
still believe in climate change -- in fact their rate of belief in it is up in
the 70th percentile. This means that the
whole drop off in belief has happened on the right side of the political
spectrum. So it turns out that the most
reliable predictor of whether or not somebody believes that climate change is
real is what their views are on a
range of other political subjects -- things like abortion and taxes. What you find is that people who have very
strong conservative political beliefs simply cannot face the science behind climate change. Why not?
Because it threatens the ideological structure within which everything
else they believe is anchored.
Yes the market can play a role.
There are
things that government can do to incentivize the free market to do a better
job. Could that ever be a replacement for preventing the fossil
fuel industry from destroying our chances of a future on a livable planet? No, of course not. But it could help our efforts to stop carbon-induced (CO 2 -induced) climate
change.
So yes, we
need these market incentives on the one hand, to encourage renewable
energy. But we also need a government
that's willing and able to say no to big corporations: "No, you can't mine the
Alberta tar sands and thereby promote the burning of enough carbon that you
will destroy the human future of the planet!"
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