Purchasing Our Destruction

A FEW SCIENTISTS became aware of the potential for climate change precipitated by human industrial activity nearly two hundred ago, merely by watching black smoke being belched into the skies over European cities by coal burning. They knew that the smoke contained carbon, and that carbon absorbs and retains heat more readily than nitrogen and oxygen. They understood basic chemistry. In the nineteen forties Albert Einstein thought that deliberately adding CO2 to the air, warming the planet a bit, increasing agricultural production, and feeding the masses of starving people around the word in the aftermath of World War Two was a capital idea. Sometimes, even Einstein was wrong. There was a consensus among scientists by the nineteen seventies that climate change was real, notwithstanding an occasional article in an occasional magazine proclaiming the advent of a new ice age. Conservative often cite such rogue writing as proof positive that scientists have no idea what they are talking about, and that the debate over climate change is ongoing, vigorous and unresolved as ever. All this, of course, is nonsense. I first became of climate change in the nineteen eighties, when it was usually called "global warming", which it still often is, because that's what it is. Global warming is what is taking place in the Earth's atmosphere as the average global temperatures rise month after month, year after year. Climate change is the result of this warming. As incredibly stupid as it is at his late date to deny the reality of climate change, as stupid as it is to deny evolution by natural selection or the relationship between steroids and home runs, millions of people, mostly American conservatives, for a very real, if not good reason. People deny evolution and climate change for the same reason, because they are the same people: a refusal to allow facts and science to improve their primitive but deeply held and emotionally comforting religious and political beliefs. when new information impinges upon our most cherished values, we reject the information, and cling tenaciously to our outdated beliefs. Such is human nature. I have long believed this to be the only reason for denial of science, denial of reality. But it turns out there is more to it than that: money, the usual suspect. Climate change denial is a one billion dollar industry in the United States. To a certain extent, rejection of basic science is bought and paid for. The phenomenon, as one would suspects, takes place entirely within the conservative community. The money is filtered through several dozen prominent conservative "think" tanks, and is dispersed to people who are paid to spread propaganda, through books, website, and television programming, All this funding comes from the usual suspects, conservative billionaires and corporations aligned with or directly involved in the fossil fuel industry. Shoe me a scientist who denies climate change and who spew out an abundance of pseudo science to prove this false narrative, and I'll show you a paid corporate puppet, or a religious fanatic propagandist with extreme right wing political opinions trying to persuade the congregation that Christ is coming soon, the end is near, and that your contribution to the cause is not only crucial, but tax deductible. Climate change denying shepherds of mega church flocks tend, not coincidentally, to skirt about on private jets, and to drive two hundred thousand dollar Lamborghinis. that, of course, is their concern. the rest of us, those among us sufficiently sane and educated to accept reality, are concerned with the survival of future generations of plants and animals, and we tend to experience considerably disquiet when we reflect that our futures, and the future of life on Earth,might rest uneasily in the hands of pernicious people whose excessive addiction to personal wealth inspires them to pay large sums in an attempt to purchase and ensure our destruction.