Based on this research, Kahan and others argue, environmentalists should sell
climate action by playing up concerns about national security and emphasizing
responses such as nuclear power and "geoengineering" — global-scale
technological interventions that would attempt to reverse rapid warming by, for
instance, blocking a portion of the sun's rays, or by "fertilizing" the oceans so that
they trap more carbon, among other untested, extraordinarily high-risk schemes.
Kahan reasons that since climate change is perceived by many on the right as a
gateway to dreaded anti-industry policies, the solution is "to remove what makes
it threatening." In a similar vein, Irina Feygina and John T. Jost, who have
conducted parallel research at NYU, advise policymakers to package
environmental action as being about protecting "our way of life" and a form of
patriotism, something they revealingly call "system-sanctioned change."
This kind of advice has been enormously influential. For instance, the
Breakthrough Institute — a think tank that specialized in attacking grassroots
environmentalism for its supposed lack of "modernity" — is forever charting this
self-styled middle path, pushing nuclear power, fracked natural gas, and
genetically modified crops as climate solutions, while attacking renewable energy
programs. And as we will see later on, some greens are even warming up to
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geoengineering. Moreover, in the name of reaching across the aisle, green groups
are constantly "refraining" climate action so that it is about pretty much anything
other than preventing catastrophic warming to protect life on earth. Instead climate
action is about all the things conservatives are supposed to care about more than
that, from cutting off revenues to Arab states to reasserting American economic
dominance over China.
The first problem with this strategy is that it doesn't work: this has been the core
messaging for many large U.S. green groups for five years ("Forget about climate
change," counsels Jonathan Foley, director of the Institute on the Environment at
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the University of Minnesota. "Do you love America?" ) And as we have seen,
conservative opposition to climate action has only hardened in this period.
The far more troubling problem with this approach is that rather than challenging
the warped values fueling both disaster denialism and disaster capitalism, it
actively reinforces those values. Nuclear power and geoengineering are not
solutions to the ecological crisis; they are a doubling down on exactly the kind of
reckless, short-term thinking that got us into this mess. Just as we spewed
greenhouse gases into the atmosphere thinking that tomorrow would never come,
both of these hugely high-risk technologies would create even more dangerous
forms of waste, and neither has a discernible exit strategy (subjects that I will be
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