Climate Facts Are Both Stubborn and Stupid Things

A scrupulous study leads one prominent climate change skeptic completely to reverse his stance. No doubt in the year it took to change his mind thousands more have become virulent climate change denialists who were not before and thousands of others have embraced a complacency on the question that yields the effect of denialism without requiring the assumption of an explicit position on the question at all.

By turning the climate debate from an adjudicable dispute about facts to a way of aggressively signaling a defensive subcultural identity on yet another culture war front, Republicans have rendered yet another policy dispute fatally dysfunctional politically. In so doing, they have won it without actually having to win it at all.

From a debate about a literal, and literally shared, threat of environmental destruction on which we must struggle to a consensus to be equal to its challenge, Republicans have displaced the debate onto a psychic and symbolic terrain, yet another contest over the fragile and threatened reactionary ego in a time of demographic diversification and socioeconomic distress. Of course, that socioeconomic distress is itself mostly the consequence of plutocratic Republican policies, implemented with the support of majorities against their own best interest by means of the prior displacement of the politics of shared class interests into a divisive and disavowed politics of racial animus of gendered anxiety -- so the Republicans know this is a game they can win on these terms (so long as we pay no attention to the fact that everybody loses when you destroy the world on which you depend not only for flourishing but even survival).

Meanwhile, ever more and more of the indulgent and ignorant and even some well-meaning and concerned folks, are hypnotized into a kind of consumerist gizmo-fetishizing haze that distracts the majorities indispensable to educated organized democratic change in the direction of sustainability away from the palpable facts of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change even as this distraction also functionally exacerbates the very catastrophe it hides away.

And now even many committed environmentalist intellectuals, in fact more and more with every passing day, are buying into a "geo-engineering" rhetoric in which the worst corporate military actors in our climate catastrophe are peddled as though they are our only saviors from the catastrophe they wrought, saviors who will save us by deploying the very brute-force mega-industrial earth-alienated for profit boondoggles through and for which they caused and maintained and refused to stop the catastrophe in the first place, all peddled with rosy computer renderings of science fiction fantasies of a war against the earth for the earth that is nothing but a crazily amplified variation of the same marketing and PR discourse that hypnotizes the rest of the consumers sleepwalking into apocalypse while tossing their toxic slave-made gizmo-of-the-month into landfill as the planet howls unheeded in Greenhouse storms... but all promulgated oh so confidently by people who think they are better than that and are not and by people who should indeed know better but, apparently, do not.