Climate Change Denialism Versus the 99%

Amy Goodman reported live from the UN Climate Summit at Durban, South Africa for Up with Chris Hayes Saturday morning. (I realize I haven't talked about Hayes' show here yet, well, apart from this rather shameful bit, but I do watch every weekend and always to my benefit and I warmly recommend it whatever my occasional quibbles.) At one point Goodman offered up what I thought was an interesting and indicative little quip that we might as well settle on for a second or two longer than they did on the show itself.

Goodman was commenting on the Republican Presidential candidates' near universal denial or even derision of the scientific consensus that human behavior (extractive-petrochemical industry, pollution, waste, conspicuous consumption) is causing or at any rate severely exacerbating climate change in ways that demand address else we face the catastrophic impacts of heavy weather which are already in evidence, mass deaths and massive damage from unprecedented storms, extreme temperatures, droughts, floods, migrating insects devastating food crops and multiplying pandemic disease vectors, literal loss of inhabited lands to ocean level rise, geopolitical instability, climate refugees, failed states, wars over failing resources, and so on. As an aside, it is notable that even Jon Huntsman, who is widely given credit for bucking this climate change denialism, offers up no policy differences from his fellows to reflect this supposed difference, which makes his difference from them a difference that makes no difference.

Presumably climate change denialism is just one more bit of ugly zealotry demanded by the GOP base these days along with their appalling celebrations at the prospect of killing more prison inmates, killing more uninsured people, killing more pregnant women, killing more civilians in war, many of them after we have tortured them, killing more citizens in random gun violence and unregulated commerce, killing more foreign workers at the border all the while depending on them as a cheap non-union workforce, bullying gay kids into suicide, and so on -- but Goodman was pointing out that climate change denialism amounts to the denial of a consensus of 99% of the scientists in relevant fields, the espousal of a kind of marginality even more flabbergasting than their eager espousal of murderousness in so many other areas of public life. One is always struck by the fact that few climate change denialists would act on comparable denials of scientific consensus in matters of, say, the choice of a heart surgeon or when pondering the advisability of jumping off a cliff.

But of course it was Goodman's seizing on that "99%" description of the scientific consensus pointing to anthropogenic climate change that yielded knowing chuckles around the table. Although the specificity of that "99%" was not elaborated then and there, I do think it is worth a moment to point out that the organized fraud of the media misinformation campaigns on the part of right-wing think-tanks and Hate Radio and Fox News through which doubt is sown about the overwhelming scientific consensus about anthropogenic climate change or even charges that this scientific consensus is some kind of a "scam" or "junk science" is a fraud from which only the 1% benefit, very much to the catastrophic cost of the 99%.

When you discover corporate-military elites publishing policy papers and making investments in military infrastructure rather than renewable energy infrastructure you have an even clearer window on the extent to which climate change denialism in public conjoined with corporate-military investment and planning in secret reflect priorities that directly connect to those that have arrayed the 99% against the 1% across a range of political issues brought glaringly into the light by the Occupy movement among others. When resource descent (peak oil, freshwater and topsoil depletion, petrochemical-irrigated industrial-Ag failure, chronic air pollution, overused antibiotic resistance) meets incumbent elite hoarding at gunpoint the confrontation of the 99% and the 1% crystallizes in the form of futurological fantasies of dystopian bubble-domes filled with photogenic slaves on a planet transformed into an unearthly toxic soup or of utopian mega-scale geo-engineering fantasies in which corporate-industrials unleash imaginary robot armies and science fiction pseudo-science to make yet another killing cleaning up the mess they made a killing making in the first place. And what must be emphasized here is that whether dystopian or utopian or opportunistic oscillations between, these are all indeed fantasies, utterly delusive reductios ad absurdum of the rationalizations already underwriting a generation of disastrous neoliberal developmentalism peddled with the same sort of ecstatic techno-fetishistic handwaving about frictionless capital traversing digital networks igniting a so-called "Long Boom" of innovation, investment, and prosperity presiding over the death of nation-states all the while ignoring the corpses and debts ballooning before their very eyes.

Climate change denialism is more than just another fraud perpetrated on the 99% for the benefit of 1%, though it is that, too. Make no mistake about it: this is the last, culminating, consummating fraud. Either we stop them together now, or we all go down together next.