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why we should do everything [the left] wanted to do anyway."^
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Bast, who has little of the swagger common to so many denialists, is equally
honest about the fact he and his colleagues did not become engaged with climate
issues because they found flaws in the scientific facts. Rather, they became
alarmed about the economic and political implications of those facts and set out to
disprove them. "When we look at this issue, we say, This is a recipe for massive
increase in government," Bast told me, concluding that, "Before we take this step,
let's take another look at the science. So conservative and libertarian groups, I
think, stopped and said, Let's not simply accept this as an article of faith; let's
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actually do our own research."
Nigel Lawson, Margaret Thatcher's former chancellor of the exchequer who has
taken to declaring that "green is the new red," has followed a similar intellectual
trajectory. Lawson takes great pride in having privatized key British assets,
lowered taxes on the wealthy, and broken the power of large unions. But climate
change creates, in his words, "a new license to intrude, to interfere and to regulate."
It must, he concludes, be a conspiracy — the classic teleological reversal of cause
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and effect.
The climate change denial movement is littered with characters who are twisting
themselves in similar intellectual knots. There are the old-timer physicists like S.
Fred Singer, who used to develop rocket technologies for the U.S. military and
who hears in emissions regulation a distorted echo of the communism he fought
during the Cold War (as documented compellingly by Naomi Oreskes and Erik
Conway in Merchants of Doubt). In a similar vein, there is former Czech president
Vaclav Klaus, who spoke at a Heartland climate conference while still head of
state. For Klaus, whose career began under communist rule, climate change
appears to have induced a full-fledged Cold War flashback. He compares attempts
to prevent global warming to "the ambitions of communist central planners to
control the entire society" and says, "For someone who spent most of his life in
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the 'noble' era of communism this is impossible to accept."
And you can understand that, from their perspective, the scientific reality of
climate change must seem spectacularly unfair. After all, the people at the
Heartland conference thought they had won these ideological wars — if not fairly,
then certainly squarely. Now climate science is changing everything: how can you
win an argument against government intervention if the very habitability of the
planet depends on intervening? In the short term, you might be able to argue that
the economic costs of taking action are greater than allowing climate change to
play out for a few more decades (and some neoliberal economists, using cost-
benefit calculations and future "discounting," are busily making those arguments).
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But most people don't actually like it when their children's lives are "discounted"
in someone else's Excel sheet, and they tend to have a moral aversion to the idea
of allowing countries to disappear because saving them would be too expensive.
Which is why the ideological warriors gathered at the Marriott have concluded
that there is really only one way to beat a threat this big: by claiming that thousands
upon thousands of scientists are lying and that climate change is an elaborate hoax.
That the storms aren't really getting bigger, it's just our imagination. And if they
are, it's not because of anything humans are doing — or could stop doing. They
deny reality, in other words, because the implications of that reality are, quite
simply, unthinkable. So here's my inconvenient truth: I think these hard-core
ideologues understand the real significance of climate change better than most of
the "warmists" in the political center, the ones who are still insisting that the
response can be gradual and painless and that we don't need to go to war with
anybody, including the fossil fuel companies. Before I go any further, let me be
absolutely clear: as 97 percent of the world's climate scientists attest, the
Heartlanders are completely wrong about the science. But when it comes to the
political and economicconsequences of those scientific findings, specifically the
kind of deep changes required not just to our energy consumption but to the
underlying logic of our liberalized and profit- seekingeconomy, they have their
eyes wide open. The deniers get plenty of the details wrong (no, it's not a
communist plot; authoritarian state socialism, as we will see, was terrible for the
environment and brutally extractivist), but when it comes to the scope and depth
of change required to avert catastrophe, they are right on the money.
About That Money ...
When powerful ideologies are challenged by hard evidence from the real world,
they rarely die off completely. Rather, they become cultlike and marginal. A few
of the faithful always remain to tell one another that the problem wasn't with the
ideology; it was the weakness of leaders who did not apply the rules with sufficient
rigor. (Lord knows there is still a smattering of such grouplets on the neo-Stalinist
far left.) By this point in history — after the 2008 collapse of Wall Street and in the
midst of layers of ecological crises — free market fundamentalists should, by all
rights, be exiled to a similarly irrelevant status, left to fondle their copies of Milton
Friedman's Free to Chooseand Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged in obscurity. They are
saved from this ignominious fate only because their ideas about corporate
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liberation, no matter how demonstrably at war with reality, remain so profitable to
the world' s billionaires that they are kept fed and clothed in think tanks by the likes
of Charles and David Koch, owners of the diversified dirty energy giant Koch
Industries, and ExxonMobil.
According to one recent study, for instance, the denial-espousing think tanks and
other advocacy groups making up what sociologist Robert Brulle calls the "climate
change counter-movement" are collectively pulling in more than $900 million per
year for their work on a variety of right-wing causes, most of it in the form of "dark