climate change denial

How to Talk to a Science Denier: Conversations With Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason
by Lee McIntyre
Published 14 Sep 2021

See also Strategies for changing minds backfire effect and, xii, 62–64, 67–68 belief formation and, 49, 66, 71, 120, 204n9 circle of concern and, 118, 119, 120, 180, 185–186 cognitive dissonance and, 17, 47, 61, 67, 129, 194n34, 204n4 corrective information and, 63–67 debunking and, xiii, 8–9, 36, 38, 39, 91, 207n31 evidence and, 55–56, 72, 80, 140, 148 face-to-face engagement, xv, 62, 67, 70, 72–73, 79–80, 120, 171, 173 identity and, 50–56 identity-preventive reasoning, 52 influencing audiences and, 73–77 information deficit model and, 50, 56–57, 64, 71, 73–74, 78, 79, 179 misinformation research, 59–62, 63 moral framing and, 119 partisanship and, 62–64 persistence and follow through, 78–80 pre-bunking vs. debunking, xiii, 71, 206n30, 207n31 social media amplification and, 77–78 spectrum of persudability, 77 Cherry-picking evidence climate change deniers and, 35, 91 confirmation bias and, 35–36 COVID-19 and, 163–164 Flat Earthers and, 35, 36, 199n28 GMO resistance and, 132–133 reliance on fake experts and, 41 science denial and, 33, 35–36, 199n28, 200n37 use of term, 35–36 China, 86, 88–89, 92, 116 Christianity, 192n9 Cigarette companies, 36, 40, 43, 46, 90, 179, 232n75 Circle of concern, 118, 119, 120, 180, 185–186 “Climate Change Conspiracy Theories” (Uscinski, Douglas, and Lewandowsky), 228n34 Climate change denial. See also Global warming belief conversion and, 75–76, 78–79, 106–115, 118–119 cherry-picking evidence and, 35, 91 China and, 105–106, 115 climate skepticism, 50–51, 92, 129 coal miners and, 106–115 conspiracy theories and, 38–39, 91 corporate influence on, 86–88 COVID-19 and, 116–117, 169–171 disinformation campaigns and, 86, 88–89, 92, 116 economic self-interest and, 86–88, 103–106 illogical reasoning and, 91 insistence that science must be perfect and, 44–45, 92 media campaign and, 216n42 misinformation and, 90–91, 116 NASA and, xv, 75, 83 , 86 overview of, 84–89 Paris Agreement and, 81, 83, 85, 118, 183, 211n3 partisanship and, 49, 87, 118–119, 123, 157 reliance on fake experts and, 91 technique rebuttal strategy, 106–115 Trump and, xv, 38, 83–84 Coal miner conversations, 106–115 Cognitive dissonance, 17, 47, 61, 67, 129, 194n34, 204n4 Confirmation bias, 13, 35, 49, 122, 204n7, 206n27 “Conservative and Liberal Views of Science” (Hamilton), 154–156, 235n15, 236n20 Conspiracy theories belief conversion and, 207n39 cafeteria skepticism and, 38, 44, 50 climate change denial and, 38–39, 91 COVID-19 and, 163–164 disinformation and, 77 Flat Earthers and, 38, 194n31 GMO resistance and, 128–131, 133, 228n34 great fire of Rome and, 37 hidden knowledge and, 39–40 partisanship and, 49 “real” conspiracies vs. false conspiracies, 197n10, 198n11 reliance on fake experts and, 41–42 science denial and, 33, 36–40, 198n20 scientific reasoning and, 37–38, 198n14 skepticism and, 38, 44, 50 use of term, 35, 36–40 warrant concept and, 13 Conspiracy Theory Handbook, The (Lewandowsky and Cook), 78, 199n23, 207n39 Content rebuttal, xii–xiii, xv, 30–31, 68, 71, 73, 174, 181 Conway, Erik, 46, 90, 216n42 Cook, John, 33, 78, 85, 172, 207n39 Corporate influence cigarette companies and, 36, 40, 43, 46, 54, 86, 90, 179, 232n75 on climate change denial, 54, 86–88, 118 Flat Earthers and, 130 GMOs and, 126, 128, 132, 133–134, 143–144, 159, 228n34 Corrective information, 63–67 COVID-19 denial anti-maskers, 167–168, 175–176 anti-vaxxers and, 166–167 belief conversion and, 169–174 cherry-picking evidence and, 163–164 climate change denial and, 116–117, 169–171 conspiracy theories and, 163–164 disinformation campaigns, 116, 165–169, 174 economic self-interest and, 170 face-to-face engagement and, 171 foreign influence and, 168 illogical reasoning and, 165 insistence that science must be perfect and, 165 partisanship and, 165–166, 167–169, 172–173, 174–175, 177 reliance on fake experts and, 164–165 social media and, 168–169 Trump administration and, 164, 165–166 vaccination and, 166–167 Creationism, 44, 54, 121, 122, 224n14 Dark Money (Mayer), 87 Darwin, Charles, 44, 54, 118, 121, 215n34 Davidson, Robbie, 2–3, 24, 196n52 Day After, The (Meyer, dir.), 113 Death of Expertise, The (Nichols), 40–41, 48–49 “Democrats Have a Problem with Science, Too” (Haelle), 161, 224n15 Dhillon, Ranu, 176–177 Diethelm, Pascal, 33 Disinformation anti-vaxxers and, 77 Chinese disinformation campaigns, 116 cigarette companies and, 46, 54 climate change campaigns and, 86, 88–89, 92, 116 conspiracy theories and, 77 COVID-19 denial campaigns and, 116, 165–169, 174 disinformation campaigns, 68–72, 73, 84, 86, 106, 174, 181, 205n20 identity and, 54–55, 71–72 identity-preventive reasoning, 52 liberal science denial, 145 partisanship and, 165–168, 183–185 responding to, 54–55, 71–72, 77–78 Russian propaganda campaigns, 161–162, 165–169 social media and, 77–78, 168–169 use of term, 46 Dobzhansky, Theodosius, 44 Doran, Peter, 85 Doubt, 46, 90, 216n42 Douglas, Heather, 207n35 Dumb and Dumber (Farrelly, dir.), 45 “Earth Is Round, The” (McIntyre), 30 Economic self-interest.

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Yet they are experts in their practical use. When the climate change denier says that “carbon dioxide is not the only driver of climate change,” that is a perfect example of the straw-man fallacy, where one imagines the weakest version of an opponent’s argument because it is easiest to knock over. Virtually no responsible climate scientist would deny that there are many possible drivers of climate change, including natural ones. But that is not the point. Right now human-caused carbon dioxide emissions are by far the largest and fastest-growing cause of global warming. But the climate change denier doesn’t want to talk about this.30 So instead they invent a straw man, even though nobody said that human activity was the only cause of global warming.

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Patrick Kingsley, “Trump Says California Can Learn from Finland on Fires. Is He Right?” New York Times, November 18, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/18/world/europe/finland-california-wildfires-trump-raking.html. 21. Jennifer Rubin, “Trump Shows the Rank Dishonesty of Climate-Change Deniers,” Washington Post, October 15, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/opinions/wp/2018/10/15/trump-shows-the-rank-dishonesty-of-climate-change-deniers/. 22. Josh Dawsey et al, “Trump on Climate Change: ‘People Like Myself, We Have Very High Levels of Intelligence but We’re Not Necessarily Such Believers,’” Washington Post, November 27, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-on-climate-change-people-like-myself-we-have-very-high-levels-of-intelligence-but-were-not-necessarily-such-believers/2018/11/27/722f0184-f27e-11e8-aeea-b85fd44449f5_story.html; Matt Viser, “‘Just a Lot of Alarmism’: Trump’s Skepticism of Climate Science Is Echoed across GOP,” Washington Post, December 2, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/just-a-lot-of-alarmism-trumps-skepticism-of-climate-science-is-echoed-across-gop/2018/12/02/f6ee9ca6-f4de-11e8-bc79-68604ed88993_story.html. 23.

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate
by Naomi Klein
Published 15 Sep 2014

Mark Dowie, Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 25. 65. Yotam Marom, “Confessions of a Climate Change Denier,” Waging Nonviolence, July 30, 2013. 66. “Paxman vs. Brand—Full Interview” (video), BBC Newsnight, October 23, 2013. 67. “System Change—Not Climate Change,” A People’s Declaration from Klimaforum09, December 2009. 68. Miya Yoshitani, “Confessions of a Climate Denier in Tunisia,” Asian Pacific Environment Network, May 8, 2013. 69. Nick Cohen, “The Climate Change Deniers Have Won,” The Observer, March 22, 2014. 70. Philip Radford, “The Environmental Case for a Path to Citizenship,” Huffington Post, March 14, 2013; Anna Palmer and Darren Samuelsohn, “Sierra Club Backs Immigration Reform,” Politico, April 24, 2013; “Statement on Immigration Reform,” BlueGreen Alliance, http://www .bluegreenalliance.org; May Boeve, “Solidarity with the Immigration Reform Movement,” 350 .org, March 22, 2013, http://350.org. 71.

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For more on the conservative movement’s role in climate change denial, see: Riley E. Dunlap and Aaron M. McCright, “Organized Climate Change Denial,” in The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society, ed. John S. Dryzek, Richard B. Norgaard, and David Schlosberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 144–160; and Aaron M. McCright and Riley E. Dunlap, “Anti-Reflexivity: The American Conservative Movement’s Success in Undermining Climate Science and Policy,” Theory, Culture, and Society 27 (2010): 100–133. DENIAL BOOKS STUDY: Riley E. Dunlap and Peter J. Jacques, “Climate Change Denial Books and Conservative Think Tanks: Exploring the Connection,” American Behavioral Scientist 57 (2013): 705–706. 24.

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Because accepting such a claim could drive a wedge between them and their peers, they have a strong emotional predisposition to reject it.” In other words, it is always easier to deny reality than to allow our worldview to be shattered, a fact that was as true of die-hard Stalinists at the height of the purges as it is of libertarian climate change deniers today. Furthermore, leftists are equally capable of denying inconvenient scientific evidence. If conservatives are inherent system justifiers, and therefore bridle before facts that call the dominant economic system into question, then most leftists are inherent system questioners, and therefore prone to skepticism about facts that come from corporations and government.

Arguing With Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future
by Paul Krugman
Published 28 Jan 2020

And it’s worth trying to understand both how that happened and the sheer depravity involved in being a denialist at this point. Wait, isn’t depravity too strong a term? Aren’t people allowed to disagree with conventional wisdom, even if that wisdom is supported by overwhelming scientific consensus? Yes, they are—as long as their arguments are made in good faith. But there are almost no good-faith climate-change deniers. And denying science for profit, political advantage, or ego satisfaction is not O.K.; when failure to act on the science may have terrible consequences, denial is, as I said, depraved. The best recent book I’ve read on all this is The Madhouse Effect by Michael E. Mann, a leading climate scientist, with cartoons by Tom Toles.

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Talking about “structural” sounds serious, or maybe Serious, so that’s what they say, even though the evidence is all the other way. And it’s not even “views differ on the shape of the planet” territory: PBS viewers weren’t even given a hint that the professional consensus exists. It’s as if you had a program on climate and only climate-change deniers were represented. And maybe we should put this in the context of another debate, the big one over austerity. Here too there has been a rather decisive turn in professional opinion; there are a lot of dead-enders even within the economics profession, but the fact remains that both pillars of the pro-austerity position—claims of expansionary austerity, and claims that terrible things happen when debt crosses some rather low threshold—have collapsed, spectacularly.

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.: on income gains, 279–81 Office of Tax Analysis, 278 partisan functions of, 26 and Social Security, 16 Trichet, Jean-Claude, 161 “Triumph of Macroeconomics, The” (Krugman), 103–5 Trotsky, Leon, 324 trucking industry, 290 Trump, Donald: attacks on media by, 347 attitude toward truth, 364–66 belligerent ignorance of, 246, 307, 337, 345, 346–47, 352 campaigning, 309, 370 contempt for rule of law, 252, 256, 347 corruption of, 335–37, 338, 343, 349, 350, 368, 389 and cronyism, 256, 343 as deal-maker, 348–50 election of (2016), 13, 343, 372, 375, 387–89 family history of, 348–49 foreign dictators admired by, 346–47, 365, 371 humiliating others, 352–53 and inequality, 260, 291 and international trade, 245, 246, 247–48, 249, 252–53, 254–56, 353, 361 laziness of, 352 as liar, 348, 353, 364, 365 on manhood, 370, 371, 372 on neo-Nazis as “very fine people,” 365 and populism, 351–53 and racism, 246, 310, 360 and Republican Party, 335–37, 359, 372 scandals about, 388–89 and socialism, 322–23 State of the Union address (2019), 207–9, 322 supporters scammed by, 353, 372, 389 and taxes, 216, 221–23, 224–26, 227–29, 230–33, 306–7, 308, 350, 361, 371 tax returns of, 359 tough-guy posturing by, 334, 346–47, 370–72 and 2020 election, 227, 347, 361 and the wall, 370, 371 Trump, Fred (father), 348 Trump administration: anti-science views of, 332 as anti-worker, 351–53 appointments to, 352 bad faith of, 151, 332, 365 charlatans and cranks in, 149, 151, 329, 331, 333 climate change deniers in, 329–31, 332–34, 335–37 and collapse of freedom, 187 compared to that of G. W. Bush, 9, 13 and conspiracy theories, 150, 337, 343, 345, 365 corruption of, 70, 246, 331, 338, 343, 349, 350 depravity of, 332–33, 334 and “fake news,” 375–76 and health care, 70, 71, 75, 77–78, 308, 351–52 and immigration, 387 investigations of, 347, 359 labor policy of, 352 lying by, 225 political disaster, 158 and tax scam, 221–23, 224–26 trade war of, 353, 361, 371–72 the worst and the dimmest in, 151 Trump family, investments of, 371 Trumpism, 335–37, 343, 345–46, 347, 359–60, 370–72 Trumpocracy, (Frum), 369 Trump Organization, contributions to, 371 Trump University, 388, 389 trust: collapse of, 90, 145 in economic theory, 132, 134 truth, 364–66 Turkey, Erdogan regime in, 346 Twinkie Era, 218–20 “Ultimate Zombie, The” (Krugman), 215–17 unemployment: and austerity, 164, 203 causes of, 81, 96, 133, 139, 144, 158–59 and consumer spending cuts, 107 cyclical, 170–71, 170, 383 and deficit reduction, 208 and education, 166–67 and the Fed, 150 and “full” employment rate, 96, 114, 153, 205, 383, 408 and government stimulus, 113, 115, 144 and Great Depression, 131, 215 and income levels, 275 and inflation, 124, 383 and interest rates, 153, 208 long-term, 167 NAIRU, 114 “natural” level of, 133 by occupation, 170–71, 170 and Okun’s Law, 113 rates of, 106, 108 and recessions, 133, 157, 215 and “skills gap,” 159, 166–68, 290 structural, 169–71, 383–84, 385 and wages, 179 in winter of debt, 203 unemployment insurance, 106 unfair practices, and tariffs, 251–52, 255 unions: bargaining power of, 218–19, 220, 289 decline of, 289–90 vs. monopsony power, 317 United Nations (U.N.), 244 United States: central bank of, see Federal Reserve democracy in danger in, 366, 367–69 unnecessary misery in, 321 Urban Institute, 57, 279, 280 values, 3 Venezuela: economic disaster in, 313, 317, 319, 323, 324 nationalization of industry in, 323 “Very Serious People” (Krugman), 157–59, 160, 189, 375 Veterans Health Administration (V.H.A.), lean and efficient system of, 40, 41–43 Victorian Era, virtues of, 286 Vishny, Robert, 146 Voltaire, on the best of all possible worlds, 135 Voting Rights Act, 300 wage gap, 286 wage-price spiral, 126, 127 wage stagnation, 92, 168, 288, 289 Wallace, George, 310 Wall Street Journal, The, 271, 273, 279–80 Warren, Elizabeth, 210, 211–12, 238–40, 309 Washington Post, The, 303 wealth distribution: historical estimates of, 270 and income inequality, 274–75, 282, 284 Wealth of Nations, The (Smith), 132 wealthy: and capital gains, 273 concentration of, 238, 349 conservatives, 149 cutting taxes on, 4, 7, 20, 30, 51, 69, 196, 199, 200, 201, 215–17, 218–20, 221–23, 224, 227, 229, 236–37, 308, 309, 351, 355, 370, 371 donors to Republican Party, 370 exploding incomes of, 92, 283 health coverage for, 36, 39 idolizing of, 94 incentive effects on, 235 and income distribution, 265–66, 266, 267, 269–70, 273; see also income inequality income from assets, 221, 233 income from earnings, 349 increasing taxes on, 66, 211–12, 220, 238–40, 307, 309, 310, 324, 380 as Masters of the Universe, 270 and monopoly power, 236 optimal tax rates on, 235–37, 236 “stealth politics” of, 240 tax avoidance vs. evasion by, 349–50 as too rich, 274–75 and Trumpism, 343 Weigel, Dave, 28 welfare, 126 West Virginia, Republican Party in, 359 What’s the Matter with Kansas?

Everything Under the Sun: Toward a Brighter Future on a Small Blue Planet
by Ian Hanington
Published 13 May 2012

The difference now is that climate change is a far more serious threat than smoking tobacco or putting CFCs into the atmosphere. Here we look at the science of climate change, the possible solutions, and the attempts by industry to delay or prevent action by sowing confusion. Science is clear about the threat of climate change WHY DOES THE public often pay more attention to climate-change deniers than climate scientists? Why do denial arguments that have been thoroughly debunked still show up regularly in the media? Some researchers from New York’s Fordham University may have found some answers. David Budescu and his colleagues asked 223 volunteers to read sentences from reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

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We may never reach 100 per cent certainty about climate change and its causes—that’s not what science is about—but one thing is certain: if we don’t get together to work on solutions now, we’ll have a much tougher time dealing with the consequences later. Investigation hits at scientist’s research IN THEIR DESPERATION to find even a tiny shred of peer-reviewed science to challenge the volumes of research from around the world about human-caused climate change, deniers have often held up Willie Soon’s work. Soon, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, is known for studies that purportedly show that the sun, and not CO2 emissions from human activity, is the main factor in climate change and that climate change in the twentieth century wasn’t that unusual to begin with.

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It takes only a bit of investigating to poke holes in the scant bits of research that have attempted to discredit real climate science. Let’s stop wasting our time on deniers. It would be better spent trying to resolve the serious problems we have created. Science delivers repeated blows to deniers IT MUST BE difficult, if not downright embarrassing, to be a climate-change denier these days. The scientists they’ve attacked have been exonerated, and more and more denier “experts” are being exposed as shills for industry or just disingenuous clowns. I use the term denier deliberately. People who deny overwhelming scientific evidence without providing any compelling evidence of their own and who remain steadfast in their beliefs even as every argument they propose gets shot down do not demonstrate the intellectual rigour needed to be called skeptics.

Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World
by Naomi Klein
Published 11 Sep 2023

Then, referring to a tweet in which Wolf said she regretted voting for Joe Biden, he added, “I was struck by the bravery it must have taken you to write it—I’m sure you lost friends over it, and for doing this [show].” Wolf smiled wistfully and nodded, accepting the hero’s welcome. When she appeared on the podcast hosted by one of Britain’s most vocal climate change deniers and far-right provocateurs, James Delingpole, he began by saying, “This is so unlikely … five years ago, the idea that you and I would be breaking bread … I sort of bracketed you with the other Naomi—you know, Naomi Klein, Naomi Wolf, what’s the difference?” (Insert silent scream from me.)

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Wolf is an impresario of the technique: repeatedly, she claims to have found a “smoking gun” or to have a “blockbuster scoop”; she makes references to tens of thousands of pages of scientific documents, as well as metadata, that no one is going to check to see if they say what she says they say (usually that “a genocide” has taken place through Covid vaccines—and no, the documents she cites that I’ve looked at most certainly do not show that). Like the clutch of professional climate-change deniers who claim to “debunk” the avalanche of scientific evidence that the planet is warming by deploying entirely decontextualized temperature charts, along with outdated data and a steady flow of complex scientific terms, Wolf also engages in what we might think of as a pipiking of the science.

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“media darling”: Naomi Wolf, “The Last Stage of a Tyrannical Takeover—Interview with Naomi Wolf,” interview by Joseph Mercola, June 1, 2022. “I never thought I would be talking to you”: Tucker Carlson, “Naomi Wolf Sounds Alarm at Growing Power of ‘Autocratic Tyrants.’” one of Britain’s most vocal climate change deniers: James Delingpole, “‘Climategate Was Fake News,’ Lies the BBC…,” Breitbart, July 11, 2019, posted on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. “This is so unlikely”: James Delingpole, “Naomi Wolf,” The James Delingpole Podcast, May 3, 2021, 0:25–1:04. “I spent years thinking you were the devil”: Steve Bannon, host, “Not Science Fiction … Dr.

Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America
by Shawn Lawrence Otto
Published 10 Oct 2011

THE NEW MCCARTHYISM Recognizing what was happening, Mann took the bull by the horns and embarked on an aggressive publicity campaign, appearing on CNN and other news outlets to try to counter the massive propaganda attack by doing brilliantly what scientists should have been doing for decades: breaking it down and talking process. In response, climate change deniers renewed their criticism of the hockey stick graph, which they argued was an inaccurate depiction based on faulty science (prong one). The graph had a self-evident power of the sort scientists often dream of but rarely achieve. Invalidating it was the holy grail of climate change denial, the mortal blow they badly wanted to inflict upon the public image of climate science. With a climate change bill finally taking shape in Congress, the attacks escalated.

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In keeping with the idea that politics is narrative, they needed a bad guy to tar and feather. Having appeared on the news programs, Mann fit the bill. In February 2010, Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, the ranking Republican on the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works and a longtime climate change denier, attacked under prong four. Following Rush Limbaugh’s on-air suggestion of November 24, 2009, Inhofe went after Mann personally in a Senate minority report. The CRU controversy is about far more than just scientists who lack interpersonal skills, or a little email squabble. It’s about unethical and potentially illegal behavior by some of the world’s leading climate scientists.

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The paper cited 101 sources and so appeared to be scientific. Willie Soon had authored other scientifically discredited, energy-industry-funded climate change denial papers in the past, including with Legates.28 He is not a climate scientist or a polar bear expert. He is an astrophysicist. He is educated enough to understand that what he is doing is not science, but rather the opinion-based rhetoric of “vulgar Induction,” or pseudoscience, and that he is using the credibility of his position at Harvard to fool people. Soon is a frequent speaker at climate change denial conferences, such as those sponsored by the Heartland Institute. Ecological Complexity has ethical rules about disclosure of conflicts of interest.29 Because of this, Soon acknowledged receiving funding from Exxon-Mobil, as well as the Charles G.

News and How to Use It: What to Believe in a Fake News World
by Alan Rusbridger
Published 26 Nov 2020

<https://www.cjr.org/tow_center_reports/local-news-deserts.php/> Randall, Mike. The Funny Side of the Street. First edition. London: Bloomsbury, 1988. Readfearn, Graham. ‘Rupert Murdoch says “there are no climate change deniers around” News Corp’. The Guardian, 21 November 2019. <https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/nov/21/news-corps-rupert-murdoch-says-there-are-no-climate-change-deniers-around-here> Rheingold, Howard. ‘Crap Detection 101’. San Francisco Chronicle, 30 June 2009. <http://blog.sfgate.com/rheingold/2009/06/30/crap-detection-101/> ‘Robert Fisk Makes Things Up’. Harry’s Place blog, 23 March 2012.

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Press Gazette, 7 January 2019 <https://www.pressgazette.co.uk/ministry-of-justice-staff-called-buzzfeed-uk-reporter-bitch-and-crazy-in-internal-messages-after-leaked-report-story/> Ward, Bob. ‘Fundamental flaw in Press watchdog’s complaints process helps newspapers to promote climate change denial’. LSE Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment blog, 24 January 2019. <http://www.lse.ac.uk/GranthamInstitute/news/fundamental-flaw-in-press-watchdogs-complaints-process-helps-newspapers-to-promote-climate-change-denial/> Ward, Bob. ‘“The Mail on Sunday” admits publishing more fake news about climate change’. LSE Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment blog, 22 April 2018.

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‘Israel and the Palestinians’. BBC Academy, 19 September 2017. <https://www.bbc.co.uk/academy/en/articles/art20130702112133696> Ivanova, Irina. ‘As Australia burns, it’s Murdoch versus Murdoch on climate change’. 17 January 2020. <https://www.cbsnews.com/news/james-murdoch-accuses-father-rupert-of-climate-change-denial-as-australia-burns/> ‘Jamelle Bouie’. The New York Times, n.d. <https://www.nytimes.com/column/jamelle-bouie> ‘James Poniewozik’. The New York Times, n.d. <https://www.nytimes.com/by/james-poniewozik> ‘Jane Mayer’. The New Yorker, n.d. <https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/jane-mayer> Janeway, Michael.

The God Species: Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans
by Mark Lynas
Published 3 Oct 2011

We are phenomenally, stupendously, ignorant. As if God were blind, deaf, and dumb, we blunder on without any apparent understanding of either our power or our potential. Even most Greens—ever hopeful that vanished wild nature can one day be restored—still recoil from the real truth about our role. Climate change deniers are successful not just because of the moneyed vested interests they serve, but because they tap into a powerful cultural undercurrent that insists we are small and the planet is big, ergo nothing we do—not even in our collective billions —can have a planet-scale impact. The world’s major religions, founded as they were in an earlier, more innocent age, share this insistence, as if the Book of Genesis could still be anything more than a historical metaphor in an era of Earth science and biochemistry.

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I suspect there is a reason why most of us cannot bear to let go of it, however, for admitting that we hold the levers of power over the Earth’s major cycles would mean having to make conscious decisions about how the planet should be managed. This is an idea so difficult to contemplate that most people simply prefer denial, relieving themselves of any inconvenient burden of responsibility. What you don’t know can’t hurt you, right? This see-no-evil approach is particularly convenient for politically motivated climate-change deniers. Take Newt Gingrich, the U.S. Republican firebrand who almost single-handedly destroyed the Clinton Presidency and is now taking aim at Obama too. He told the American environment website Grist.org in June 2010: “It’s an act of egotism for humans to think we’re a primary source of climate change.

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But the distribution of Earthly chemicals is equally critical: Our greenhouse effect is strong enough to raise the planet’s temperature by more than 30 degrees from what it would otherwise be, from -18°C to about 15°C today on average—perfect for abundant life—while keeping enough carbon locked up underground to avoid a Venusian-style runaway greenhouse. Ideologically motivated climate-change deniers may rant and obfuscate, but geology (not to mention physics) leaves no room for doubt: Greenhouse gases, principally carbon dioxide (with water vapor as a reinforcing feedback), are unquestionably a planet’s main thermostat, determining the energy balance of the whole planetary system. This astounding four-billion-year track record of self-regulating success makes the Earth unique certainly in the solar system and possibly the entire universe.

Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All
by Michael Shellenberger
Published 28 Jun 2020

Starting in 2008, seven separate authors with Center for American Progress (CAP), the large progressive think tank, had published more than 150 blog posts attacking Pielke as “the uber-denier” and a “trickster and a careerist.”31 “Roger Pielke is the single most disputed and debunked person in the entire realm of people who publish regularly on disasters and climate change,” claimed a CAP spokesperson.32 Center for American Progress was able to persuade many in the news media that Pielke was a climate skeptic. In 2010, the magazine Foreign Policy included Pielke in an article titled, “The FP Guide to Climate Skeptics,” and wrote, “For his work questioning certain graphs presented in IPCC reports, Pielke has been accused by some of being a climate change ‘denier.’ ”33 After learning of the investigation, Pielke responded with a blog post on his website: “I am under ‘investigation,’ ” reads the headline. “Before continuing, let me make one point abundantly clear: I have no funding, declared or undeclared, with any fossil fuel company or interest.

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Priyanka Boghani, “Meet Myron Ebell, the Climate Contrarian Leading Trump’s EPA Transition,” Frontline, PBS, November 14, 2016, https://www.pbs.org. 3. Tik Root, Lisa Friedman, and Hiroko Tabuchi, “Following the Money That Undermines Climate Science,” New York Times, July 10, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com. 4. Ibid. 5. “ExxonMobil Foundation & Corporate Giving to Climate Change Denier & Obstructionist Organizations,” Greenpeace and Union of Concerned Scientists, 2014, https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/attach/2015/07/ExxonMobil-Climate-Denial-Funding-1998-2014.pdf. 6. Lee Wasserman, “Did Exxon Deceive Its Investors on Climate Change?,” New York Times, October 21, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com. 7.

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Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010). Claudia Dreyfus, “Naomi Oreskes Imagines the Future History of Climate Change,” New York Times, October 12, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com. Melissa Block, “ ‘Merchants of Doubt’ Explores Work of Climate Change Deniers,” NPR, March 6, 2014, https://www.npr.org. Justin Gillis, “Naomi Oreskes, a Lightning Rod in a Changing Climate,” New York Times, June 15, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com. Timothy P. Scanlon, “A Climate Change ‘Critic’ with Ties to the Fossil Fuel Industry,” Washington Post, December 24, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com. 5.

The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable
by Amitav Ghosh
Published 16 Jan 2018

George Marshall, Don’t Even Think about It, 37: ‘As Rush Limbaugh says, climate science “has become a home for displaced socialists and communists.”’ 184 the Cold War: Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010), 214. 184 intimidation: Michael Mann describes his battles with climate change deniers at length in his book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). See also Raymond S. Bradley, Global Warming and Political Intimidation, 125 and 145–48. 184 energy billionaires: Oreskes and Conway, Merchants of Doubt. 184 within the electorate: Elizabeth Kolbert in chap. 8 of Field Notes from a Catastrophe names some of the lobbying groups, such as the ‘Global Climate Coalition, a group that was sponsored by, among others, Chevron, Exxon, Ford, General Motors, Mobil, Shell, and Texaco’.

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The net result is a deadlocked public sphere, with the actual exercise of power being relegated to the interlocking complex of corporations and institutions of governance that has come to be known as the ‘deep state’. From the point of view of corporations and other establishment entities, a deadlocked public is, of course, the best possible outcome, which, no doubt, is why they frequently strive to produce it: the funding of climate change ‘denial’ in the United States and elsewhere, by corporations like Exxon—which have long known about the consequences of carbon emissions—is a perfect example of this. In effect, the countries of the West are now in many senses ‘post-political spaces’ that are managed by apparatuses of various kinds.

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In that global warming poses a powerful challenge to the idea that the free pursuit of individual interests always leads to the general good, it also challenges a set of beliefs that underlies a deeply rooted cultural identity, one that has enjoyed unparalleled success over the last two centuries. Much of the resistance to climate science comes exactly from this, which is probably why the rates of climate change denial tend to be unusually high throughout the Anglosphere. Yet it is also true that the Anglosphere, the United States in particular, has produced the overwhelming bulk of climate science, as well as some of the earliest warnings of global warming. Moreover, many, if not most, of those who have taken the lead on the issue politically, whether it be as thinkers, theorists, or activists, are from these five countries, which together possess some of the most vigorous environmental movements in the world.

The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay
by Guy Standing
Published 13 Jul 2016

They include the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institution, the American Enterprise Institute and the Cato Institute in the USA, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Centre for Policy Studies, the Adam Smith Institute and Civitas in the UK and the Australian Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney, set up by climate-change denier Maurice Newman. The names give the impression they are politically neutral and ‘scientific’. The most successful umbrella for such institutes has been the Atlas Network, founded in 1981 by Sir Antony Fisher, an ardent Hayek disciple. He had set up the Institute of Economic Affairs in 1955 and helped establish the Fraser Institute, the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and the Pacific Research Institute in the 1970s, all promoting the MPS line.

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Even though there is a consensus among climate scientists that human activities are changing the climate to a dangerous degree, the Mail, Express, Times, Sun and Telegraph titles all continue to run opinion columns and leaders by sceptics, who are mainly on the political right. US media are worse culprits; even liberal newspapers interpret ‘balanced’ coverage as requiring reporting of, thus giving respectability to, the views of climate change deniers. Similarly, for years, the right-wing media have given prominence to stories about migrants, using terms like ‘invasion’, ‘flood’ and ‘hordes’. This has led to people vastly overestimating the share of the migrant population in Britain, which feeds a right-wing political agenda, further exacerbated by highlighting examples (often exaggerated for effect) of migrant involvement in crime, welfare abuse or bad behaviour.

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Atlas helped to finance many of the subsequent generation of think tanks, providing training and guidance. Its network now embraces more than 400 think tanks in eighty countries. One revealing aspect of the MPS, and the think tanks funded by its members, is their role in promoting denial of human-induced climate change. Four out of five climate-change denial books have been linked to free-market think tanks through their authors or publishers.7 Many of those think tanks are known to receive funding from fossil fuel interests; others probably have too, but refuse to reveal their donors. Another feature of the MPS is the contradiction between its advocacy of free markets, verging on religious faith, and its defence of property rights, however acquired, which is not the same thing at all.

Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis
by Scott Patterson
Published 5 Jun 2023

The GMO cheerleaders, they said, need to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt there is nearly zero existential risk—a very tough challenge indeed. Taking on the pro-GMO crowd had its risks. GMO critics are often tarred as anti-science conspiracy nuts, lumped in with the anti-vaccination crowd or climate-change deniers—a deep irony for Read, who’d spent years battling climate-change deniers. Read argued there was nothing “anti-science” about being against the mass implementation of a novel engineering method on the crops that fed much of the planet, nothing anti-science about asking logical, philosophical, ethical, political, and statistical questions about the proposed rollout, for profit, of a technology that could carry big hidden risks.

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CHAPTER 21 THE TIPPING POINT AND BEYOND In October 2021, Rupert Read stood to face a panel of magistrates in a London courtroom. He knew they’d find him guilty as charged. The previous year, he and two other activists had approached a building in Westminster that housed the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a policy group that UK newspaper the Independent said was Great Britain’s “most prominent source of climate-change denial.” Benny Peiser, Read’s debate adversary at the 2013 Hay-on-Wye festival, ran the group. The activists spray-painted “Lies Lies Lies” on the foundation’s entrance. Then Read picked up a can of red paint and poured it down the steps. Read and his activist cohort that day were part of a group called Writers Rebel, formed to support the goals of Extinction Rebellion.

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right
by Jane Mayer
Published 19 Jan 2016

Language that “worked,” he advised, included phrases like “we must not rush to judgment” and “we should not commit America to any international document that handcuffs us.” Later, Luntz would switch sides and publicly admit that global warming was a real peril. But in the view of Michael Mann, whose scientific work soon became the target of climate change deniers, Luntz’s 2002 memo served as a virtual hunting license. “It basically said you have to discredit the scientists and create fake groups. It doesn’t say ‘engage in character assassination,’ but it was leaning in that direction.” — On cue, organizations funded and directed by the Kochs tore into global warming science and the experts behind it.

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There was a point where I had the hotline number for the chief of police on our fridge, in case my wife saw anything unusual. It felt like there was a very calibrated campaign of vilification to the extent where the crazies might go after us.” It was particularly disturbing to Mann that there appeared to be overlap between hard-core climate change deniers and Second Amendment enthusiasts, whipped up, he came to believe, by “cynical special interests.” Mann says, “The disaffected, the people who have trouble putting dinner on the table, were being misled into believing that action on climate change meant that ‘They’ want to take away your freedom and probably your guns, too.

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Cumulatively, this private network waged a permanent campaign to undermine Americans’ faith in climate science and to defeat any effort to regulate carbon emissions. The cast of conservative organizations identified by Brulle was familiar to anyone who had followed the funding of the modern conservative movement. Among those he pinpointed as the largest bankrollers of climate change denial were foundations affiliated with the Koch and Scaife families, both of whose fortunes derived partly from oil. Also heavily involved were the Bradley Foundation and several others associated with hugely wealthy families participating in the Koch donor summits, such as foundations run by the DeVos family, Art Pope, the retail magnate from North Carolina, and John Templeton Jr., a doctor and heir to the fortune of his father, John Templeton Sr., an American mutual fund pioneer who eventually renounced his U.S. citizenship in favor of living in the Bahamas, reportedly saving $100 million on taxes.

The Ones We've Been Waiting For: How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America
by Charlotte Alter
Published 18 Feb 2020

The GOP was still firmly the party of climate change deniers, and boomer Republicans either didn’t believe the science or didn’t want to. It didn’t help that many were accepting massive donations from fossil fuel companies or else afraid of a primary challenger who would. The year the Climate Solutions Caucus was founded, 53 percent of House Republicans and 70 percent of Senate Republicans denied or questioned the science behind climate change. Ten of the eleven Republicans on the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee (chaired by top climate change denier Sen. James Inhofe, b. 1934) had said that climate change was not happening or humans hadn’t caused it.

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Beyond values, the GOP seemed hopelessly out of touch with most young people’s policy priorities. Republicans plunged the United States into two disastrous foreign wars: millennials resisted military intervention abroad. Republicans opposed same-sex marriage: millennials overwhelmingly supported it. Republicans blocked environmental legislation and dabbled in climate change denial: most millennials acknowledge climate change as an existential threat. Young conservatives could be found on every college campus in every state, but they were quickly learning what it felt like to be a member of a minority group. Conservative pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson, one of the nation’s smartest interpreters of young Republican behavior, argues that the GOP’s problem with young people dates back to the George W.

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James Inhofe, b. 1934) had said that climate change was not happening or humans hadn’t caused it. Inhofe, who represents oil-and-gas-friendly Oklahoma, himself had taken almost $2 million in campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry and wrote a climate change denial book called The Greatest Hoax. In 2015, the eighty-year-old senator brought a snowball onto the Senate floor to stick it to the “eggheads.” So even if the Climate Solutions Caucus and Elise’s climate resolution didn’t do much, at least they established that young Republicans actually understood the science. This was one issue, they thought, where they could build common ground with the next generation of Democrats

Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future
by Paul Mason
Published 29 Jul 2015

Either we react in time and confront it in a relatively orderly way, or we don’t – and disaster follows. It has become common to laugh at the absurdities of the climate-change deniers, but there is a rationality to their response. They know that climate science destroys their authority, their power and their economic world. In a way, they have grasped that if climate change is real, capitalism is finished. The real absurdists are not the climate-change deniers, but the politicians and economists who believe that the existing market mechanisms can stop climate change, that the market must set the limits of climate action and that the market can be structured to deliver the biggest re-engineering project humanity has ever tried.

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‘World Energy Outlook 2012’, IEA, http://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/WEO2013_Executive_Summary_English.pdf 5. http://carbontracker.live.kiln.it/Unburnable-Carbon-2-Web-Version.pdf 6. http://priceofoil.org/2014/10/28/insurers-warned-climate-change-affects-viability-business-model/ 7. http://sams.scientificamerican.com/article/dark-money-funds-climate-change-denial-effort/ 8. http://mobile.bloomberg.com/news/2014-11-02/fossil-fuel-budgets-suggested-to-curb-climate-change.html?hootPostID=1bdb3b7bbbbb619db600e477f2c6a152 9. http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21587782-europes-electricity-providers-face-existential-threat-how-lose-half-trillion-euros 10. http://www.iea.org/techno/etp/etp10/English.pdf 11. http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/campaigns/climate-change/energyrevolution/ 12.

May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases—And What We Can Do About It
by Alex Edmans
Published 13 May 2024

It’s not us against them ‘97% of scientists . . . have now put that to rest. They’ve acknowledged the planet is warming and human activity is contributing to it.’ Barack Obama booms these words at the start of a video titled ‘Senator Ted Cruz is a climate change denier’. If that wasn’t convincing enough, ‘97% OF SCIENTISTS AGREE’ takes up the whole screen eighteen seconds in. Senator Cruz is labelled a ‘CLIMATE CHANGE DENIER’ and ‘RADICAL AND DANGEROUS’. The video couldn’t make its point any more powerfully. Actually, it could. And the reasons why apply not only to this video, but also to similar messages given in other forms. At least six high-profile studies were published between 2004 and 2012 highlighting the scientific consensus on global warming;6 the 2006 Academy Award-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth paints a similar picture.

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If our goal is to maximize our likes or reposts, we’ll craft black-and-white posts that prey on confirmation bias, claim to have found proof and end with ‘period’ to imply the case is closed. Or we’ll chase Likes by cancelling someone who shares an unpopular viewpoint, labelling them Taliban, Flat Earthers or climate-change deniers. We can do better. Our criterion for writing a post or sharing a study shouldn’t be to gain popularity but to inform. Then, what matters is whether the statement is backed up by fact, the facts are reinforced by large-scale data, and the data addresses alternative explanations and so counts as evidence . . . but the authors stop short of claiming proof.

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• The cultural cognition hypothesis argues that people respond to a message based on the identity it portrays, not the evidence behind it. Public messaging should be disentangled from politics. For example, information on climate change could: ◦ Be given by neutral parties, such as scientists, or by conservatives. ◦ Refrain from ridiculing conservatives as climate-change deniers. ◦ Emphasize that the solution requires conservative values, such as innovation. • Books are rarely vetted by experts or even endorsers. Potential remedies are: ◦ Centralized fact-checking websites for books, just as we have for quotes. ◦ Frequent book endorsers publicly listing all books they have endorsed

The New Nomads: How the Migration Revolution Is Making the World a Better Place
by Felix Marquardt
Published 7 Jul 2021

The most mobile people on the planet are the richest, and the richest people are the most energy-intensive and polluting. All of these things are connected. Purporting to address climate change without tackling inequality, in a world where 70 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions are produced by the 20 per cent richest people, simply doesn’t make any sense. Meanwhile, most climate change deniers in the world today are not very mobile, and most of them hardly ever fly (though until recently of course, the most influential of them were in the Trump administration and the US Congress, and as such were extremely mobile). The staggering irony of our time is that the carbon footprint of most climate sceptics is insignificant compared to that of the average environmentally conscious privileged liberal, Brilliant Mind or not.

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I simply couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that a Mexican immigrant, who had been the occasional witness and victim of racism in the Midwest, as Annie told me she had, could be raving about what I dismissively thought of as ‘Trumpland’. It was so convenient to blame the people in that part of the country, the ones who had voted for Trump and seemed to hold dear everything that made me cringe about his America: ingrained misogyny, anti-immigration rhetoric, climate change denial, lack of gun control and staggering levels of inequality. But the truth is that I was just as ignorant as those I looked down on. I carry an American passport, and I identify as an American, but it took a loving, open-minded Mexican immigrant who refused to put labels on those who stay to make me realise how wrong I had been about the Midwest.

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The staggering irony of our time is that the carbon footprint of most climate sceptics is insignificant compared to that of the average environmentally conscious privileged liberal, Brilliant Mind or not. The significant difference is that unlike the latter, the climate sceptics aren’t prone to believing that they are part of the solution simply by virtue of their opinion. What if our biggest problem these days wasn’t climate change denial as much as a denial of the laws of physics? It’s time for the ultra-mobile to realise just how much of a luxury and rarity flying actually is. The most serious guesstimates (from professional pilots) suggest that only 5–7 per cent of the world’s population have ever flown.6 According to the International Council on Clean Transportation, the 12 per cent of Americans who make more than six round trips by air annually are responsible for two thirds of global air travel.7 In Britain, 70 per cent of all flights are taken by 15 per cent of the population.8 Meanwhile, those who fly and pollute the least are also the most vulnerable to the effects of climate breakdown.

The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump
by Michiko Kakutani
Published 17 Jul 2018

The term “truth decay” (used by the Rand Corporation to describe the “diminishing role of facts and analysis” in American public life) has joined the post-truth lexicon that includes such now familiar phrases as “fake news” and “alternative facts.” And it’s not just fake news either: it’s also fake science (manufactured by climate change deniers and anti-vaxxers), fake history (promoted by Holocaust revisionists and white supremacists), fake Americans on Facebook (created by Russian trolls), and fake followers and “likes” on social media (generated by bots). Trump, the forty-fifth president of the United States, lies so prolifically and with such velocity that The Washington Post calculated that he’d made 2,140 false or misleading claims during his first year in office—an average of nearly 5.9 a day.

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Back then, it was embraced by the New Left, eager to expose the biases of Western, bourgeois, male-dominated thinking; and by academics promoting the gospel of postmodernism, which argued that there are no universal truths, only smaller personal truths—perceptions shaped by the cultural and social forces of one’s day. Since then, relativistic arguments have been hijacked by the populist Right, including creationists and climate change deniers who insist that their views be taught alongside “science-based” theories. Relativism, of course, synced perfectly with the narcissism and subjectivity that had been on the rise, from Tom Wolfe’s “Me Decade,” on through the selfie age of self-esteem. No surprise then that the Rashomon effect—the point of view that everything depends on your point of view—has permeated our culture, from popular novels like Fates and Furies, to the television series The Affair, which hinge upon the idea of competing realities or unreliable narrators.

The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America's Institutions Against Dissent
by Ben Shapiro
Published 26 Jul 2021

Thus the media trot out Greta Thunberg, a scientifically unqualified teenaged climate activist who travels the world obnoxiously lecturing adults about their lack of commitment to curbing climate change, as an expert; they ignore actual scientific voices on climate change. After all, as Paul Krugman of The New York Times writes, “there are almost no good-faith climate-change deniers . . . when failure to act on the science may have terrible consequences, denial is, as I said, depraved.” He then lumps together those who deny outright the reality of global warming with those who “insist that nothing can be done about it without destroying the economy.”23 But here’s the thing: very little can be done about climate change in terms of regulation without seriously harming the economy.

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“Economics Nobel goes to inventor of models used in UN 1.5C report,” ClimateChangeNews.com, October 8, 2018, https://www.climatechangenews.com/2018/10/08/economics-nobel-goes-inventor-models-used-un-1-5c-report/. 23. Paul Krugman, “The Depravity of Climate-Change Denial,” NYTimes.com, November 26, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/26/opinion/climate-change-denial-republican.html. 24. Nicolas Loris, “Staying in Paris Agreement Would Have Cost Families $20K,” Heritage.org, November 5, 2019, https://www.heritage.org/environment/commentary/staying-paris-agreement-would-have-cost-families-20k. 25. Michael Greshko, “Current Climate Pledges Aren’t Enough to Stop Severe Warming,” NationalGeographic.com, October 31, 2017, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2017/10/paris-agreement-climate-change-usa-nicaragua-policy-environment/#close. 26.

The End of Growth
by Jeff Rubin
Published 2 Sep 2013

On the other side, climate change skeptics, most of whom don’t want costly new environmental policies to upset the financial status quo, are working to sway public opinion against the idea of global warming. Big Oil, for one, still isn’t shy about casting doubt on the notion that humans are responsible for increases in global temperatures. Among other things, climate change deniers argue that global warming is a naturally occurring phenomenon, perhaps linked to an increase in solar flare activity from the sun. Skeptics also contend that naturally occurring emissions have an underappreciated influence on atmospheric carbon levels. When the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull erupted in the spring of 2010, global warming skeptics said it released more carbon into the atmosphere than all of the emissions savings mandated by world governments in the previous five years.

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The evidence of global warming since the IPCC’s last report is even more compelling. The United States’ National Snow and Ice Data Center says the last ten years have seen the ten lowest readings for the Arctic’s winter ice pack since satellites began tracking the data. With the exception of hardcore climate change deniers, most folks find it hard to ignore the mounting evidence that human activity is warming the planet. Personally, I’m willing to accept the link between rising global temperatures and human-made carbon emissions. Think of all the smoke that’s been belched out by factories from Victorian-era London to modern-day Beijing.

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By ending our dogged pursuit of economic growth, we can also simultaneously stop carbon emissions from increasing to even more dangerous levels. Still, no matter how closely our emissions profile—not to mention the rest of our environmental footprint—is tied to the pace of economic activity, it’s not a connection that’s easily accepted. As a society, we’re not climate change deniers, per se. After all, it’s become incredibly difficult to ignore the empirical evidence of global warming. That said, we remain unwilling to make the economy accountable for its environmental impact—even when it’s abundantly clear that our carbon trail is the flip side of economic growth. We find it much more convenient to believe that a reinvention of our economies is right around the corner.

A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence
by Jeff Hawkins
Published 15 Nov 2021

Their model of the world says that the climate is not changing—or, even if it is changing, there is nothing to be concerned about. How do climate-change deniers maintain their false belief in the face of substantial physical evidence? They are like flat-Earth believers: they don’t trust most other people, and they rely only on what they personally observe or what other similarly minded people tell them. If they can’t see the climate changing, then they don’t believe it is happening. Evidence suggests that climate-change deniers are likely to become climate-change believers if they personally experience an extreme weather event or flooding due to rising seas.

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Ignore contrary evidence: Policies to fight climate change harm the near-term interests of some people and their businesses. Multiple rationales are used to protect these interests, such as that climate scientists are making up data and creating scary scenarios just to get more funding, or that scientific studies are flawed. 3. Viral spread: Climate-change deniers claim that policies to mitigate climate change are an attempt to take away personal freedoms, perhaps to form a global government or benefit a political party. Therefore, to protect freedom and liberty, you have a moral obligation to convince others that climate change is not a threat. Hopefully it is obvious why climate change represents an existential risk to humanity.

Dinosaurs Rediscovered
by Michael J. Benton
Published 14 Sep 2019

Philosophers have long debated the definition of science. One thing for sure is that there is more to science than simply mathematics, where proof is possible. In all other science, proof is never possible, merely disproof. This leads to massive misunderstanding, especially by flat-earthers, climate-change deniers, creationists and others – they like to argue that science is about facts, and think that if they can dislodge a fact, the whole science fails. In reality, natural science is about hypotheses and theories. I can have many hypotheses about why the dinosaurs died out (see Appendix) or why sauropods were so large, and some of these modify into theories when there is a sufficient body of coherent evidence.

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In science, a theory is a model of how the world works, such as gravity or evolution (big theories) or the end-Cretaceous impact or the replacement of dinosaurs by mammals through competitive release (smaller theories). The evidence lines up, they have been repeatedly tested, they are robust, and there is no better theory around. As for the sausages or the dog, who knows? There could be a million alternative outcomes or explanations. So, climate-change deniers and creationists and, in their time, the smoking-as-killer deniers, play with the word ‘theory’. ‘Oh, it’s just a guess’, they say. Their alternative perspectives, however, do not stand up to the evidence. That dinosaurs existed is a theory. So is gravity, and so is the germ theory of disease, and we’re prepared to risk our lives by flying in an aeroplane or going under the surgeon’s knife based on those theories – because they are real theories that have been stress-tested.

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What remains to be discovered. The Free Press, New York; Macmillan, London Oreskes, N., and Conway, E. M. 2010. Merchants of doubt. Bloomsbury, London and New York The misuse of science by scientists to make political points, especially by the former pro-smoking lobby, and currently by the climate-change deniers. General books about dinosaurs Benton, M. J. 2015. Vertebrate palaeontology, 4th edition. Wiley, New York and Oxford The standard textbook on the subject, putting dinosaurs in context of all other vertebrates. Brett-Surman, M., Holtz, T., Jr., and Farlow, J. O. (eds). 2012. The complete dinosaur, 2nd edition.

The Numbers Game: The Commonsense Guide to Understanding Numbers in the News,in Politics, and inLife
by Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot
Published 26 Dec 2008

In January 2007, this time in association with the BBC, climateprediction. net ran a new series of numbers through various models and reported the results as follows: “The UK should expect a 4°C [7°F] rise in temperature by 2080 according to the most likely results of the experiment.” That is more like it: “The most likely results” still may be wrong, as all predictions may be wrong, but at least they represent the balance of the evidence from the experiment, not the most outlying part of it. None of this, incidentally, implies comfort to climate-change deniers: 7°F, even 5°F, still would bring dramatic consequences, though the case arguably would be strengthened—if more modest—by using this overwhelmingly likely result (according to this experiment), rather than one that could be dismissed as scaremongering. It is always worth asking if the number we are presented with is a realistic possibility, or the papal one.

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They put these facts together and confidently assumed they had added two and two to make four and produce what they called compelling evidence, but we might prefer to call them classic cases of logical hop-scotch, fit for, if not derision, at least serious skepticism. All these claims have been vigorously and credibly challenged, as we shall see. It is worth saying here and now that this chapter is no exercise in climate change denial. We need to beware of another fallacy, namely that because campaigners sometimes make false claims about the effects that therefore no effects exist. That doesn’t follow either. We can note in passing that some critics of global warming have been equally guilty of spectacular numerical sophistry.

Experience on Demand: What Virtual Reality Is, How It Works, and What It Can Do
by Jeremy Bailenson
Published 30 Jan 2018

On this tour of the site, she was accompanied by a local politician, a fervent climate change denier. But as they both took in the material damage and spoke to the survivors of the storm, the politician, without prompting, suddenly wanted to talk to her about climate change. “He was very eloquent in saying ‘this is now real to me. I’m getting this. I’m going to do what I can to help you all get the resources you need to help keep us safe. I’ve seen the light.’” That last quote is worth repeating. A climate change denier, a lawmaker, who “has seen the light.”* Lubchenco’s anecdote reinforced my concern that unless an individual has a strong ability or inclination to imagine environmental damage, or has been directly affected by issues like climate change, he or she will likely be unwilling to make the hard choices needed to address this major challenge.

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Entertainment Merchants Association and, 64–65 Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, 65 Cameron, James, Avatar, 217–18 Campanian Volcanic Arc, 124 Capshaw, Kate, 219 car accidents, 177 Cardboard, 8, 9 Carnegie Mellon University, 38–39 Carol P, 162–64 Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services, 173 cerebral palsy, VR therapy for, 162–64 “chameleon effect,” 192, 244 Chaplin, Charlie, 215 Chartrand, Tanya, 192 chess players, 36 children. See also VR education outreach to, 132–33 television programming for, 229–32 virtual reality (VR) and, 71–73 Children’s Television Workshop (CTW), 229–32 chronic pain, 153 Cisco, 99 claustrophobia, 212 climate change, 108–30, 176, 178 climate change deniers, 121–22, 128 climate science, 118–22 Clouds over Sidra, 76–78 CO2, 125, 126–29 coal, 116–19 cognition, embodied, 38–39 cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), 138–44 colorblindness, 90–91, 92 combat veterans, 144, 147–49 communications infrastructure, 197 community, 174–202 commuting, 176, 177 “compassion fatigue,” 81 complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS), 169–70 Condon, William, 180–84 consumer behavior, 133–35 consumers as producers, 259–60 consumer VR, 7–12, 28–29, 42–43, 61–62, 172, 204, 247–49 consumption, virtual, 133–35 control, vs. exploration, 220–21 Cooney, Joan, 229 coral reefs, 126–30 Cornell University, 172 Weill Medical College, 137 corporate diversity training, 99–100 corporate training software, 100 correlational evidence, 58 cow simulator, 104–7 Crawford, Matthew, The World Beyond, 73–74 Cyberball, 94–95 dancers, 38 Davis, Mark, 82 the Daydream, 8 Dede, Chris, 232–34, 238 De la Peña, Nonny, 208–10, 211–12 Kiya, 210 “desktop” VR, 236 Difede, JoAnn, 137–44, 147–48, 248 “digital chamelons,” 192 “digital footprints,” 240–41, 242 digital recording technology, 26 digital virtual reality technology, 24–25 discomfort, 67–68.

The Intelligence Trap: Revolutionise Your Thinking and Make Wiser Decisions
by David Robson
Published 7 Mar 2019

The vice president of the Tobacco Institute, Fred Panzer, admitted as much in an internal memo, describing the industry’s ‘brilliantly conceived strategy’ to create ‘doubt about the health charge without actually denying it’, by recruiting scientists to regularly question overwhelming medical opinion.16 The same strategies will almost certainly have been at play for many other myths. It is extremely common for media outlets to feature prominent climate change deniers (such as Nigel Lawson in the UK) who have no background in the science but who regularly question the link between human activity and rising sea temperatures. With repetition, their message begins to sound more trustworthy – even though it is only the same small minority repeating the same message.

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Moreover, their warnings about toxic side effects and runaway plagues of Frankenstein plants were cognitively fluent and chimed with my intuitive environmental views – but a closer look at the evidence showed that the risks are tiny (and mostly based on anecdotal data), while the potential benefits of building insect-resistant crops and reducing the use of pesticides are incalculable. Even the former leader of Greenpeace has recently attacked the scaremongering of his ex-colleagues, describing it as ‘morally unacceptable . . . putting ideology before humanitarian action’.40 I had always felt scornful of climate change deniers and anti-vaccination campaigners, yet I had been just as blinkered concerning another cause. For one final lesson in the art of bullshit detection, I met the writer Michael Shermer in his home town of Santa Barbara, California. For the past three decades, Shermer has been one of the leading voices of the sceptical movement, which aims to encourage the use of rational reasoning and critical thinking to public life.

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With the Holocaust, for instance, it’s important to accept that there will be some revising of the original accounts as more evidence comes to light, without discounting the vast substance of the accepted events. He also advises us all to step outside of our echo chamber and to use the opportunity to probe someone’s broader worldviews; when talking to a climate change denier, for instance, he thinks it can be useful to explore their economic concerns about regulating fossil fuel consumption – teasing out the assumptions that are shaping their interpretation of the science. ‘Because the facts about global warming are not political – they are what they are.’ These are the same principles we are hearing again and again: to explore, listen and learn, to look for alternative explanations and viewpoints rather than the one that comes most easily to mind, and to accept you do not have all the answers.

Why We Can't Afford the Rich
by Andrew Sayer
Published 6 Nov 2014

Meanwhile Barack Obama got $700,000 from each of Microsoft and Google and just over $1 million from Goldman Sachs.21 Small hope, then, of getting any serious regulation of banks or of information technology monopolies.22 Obama is reported also to have got $884,000 from oil and gas companies in the run-up to the 2008 election. The leading climate change denier in Senate, James Inhofe, was funded to the tune of half a million dollars over five years by fossil fuel energy companies, particularly Koch Industries, involved in oil, gas, minerals, timber and chemicals.23 The Koch brothers also fund the lunatic fringe of the Republicans, the Tea Party.

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It reassures anyone interested that American Friends of Policy Exchange has full tax exemption status under 501(c)3 of the Internal Revenue Code and is able to receive tax-deductible donations.45 Although such think-tanks are secretive about funding you can get an impression of the revolving-door phenomenon and their class position by looking up the profiles of their key staff on their websites and what they have done previously – often working for politicians, and having an Oxford degree. Above all, think-tanks seek access to power by presenting themselves as supposedly independent seekers of truth. In the US, the billionaire Koch brothers – climate change deniers and owners of many polluting industries – are among the funders of the ‘State Policy Network’ with an $83 million network of right-wing think-tanks across every US state. Their spokespeople get presented as neutral ‘experts’ in the media. In the UK, the BBC’s Newsnight often introduces representatives of right-wing think-tanks like the neoliberal Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) as ‘economists’, while any members of left-wing think-tanks who get in are introduced as coming from ‘left-leaning’ organisations.46 British American Tobacco paid the IEA £30,000 for opposing plain packaging of cigarettes.

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, London Review of Books, 35(10) 23 May, pp 3–7. 60 Berners-Lee, M. and Clark, D. (2013) The burning question, London: Profile Books, p 43. 61 See, for example, Goldenberg, S. (2013) ‘Secret funding helped build vast network of climate denial thinktanks’, Guardian, 14 February, http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/feb/14/funding-climate-change-denial-thinktanks-network. 62 Mirowski, P. (2013) Never let a serious crisis go to waste, London: Verso. 63 In effect, this is Will Hutton’s solution in his 2010 book, Them and us, London: Little, Brown, ch 9. 64 Cited in Mirowski et al (2009), and with a telling response by David Roberts, ‘Why Branson and SuperFreakonomics are wrong, in pictures’, 17 October, http://grist.org/article/2009-10-16-why-richard-branson-and-superfreakonomics-are-wrong-in-pictures/.

The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels
by Alex Epstein
Published 13 Nov 2014

A huge source of confusion in our public discussion is the separation of people (including scientists) into “climate change believers” and “climate change deniers”—the latter a not-so-subtle comparison to Holocaust deniers. “Deniers” are ridiculed for denying the existence of the greenhouse effect, an effect by which certain molecules, including CO2, take infrared light waves that the Earth reflects back toward space and then reflect them back toward the Earth, creating a warming effect. But this is a straw man. Every “climate change denier” I know of recognizes the existence of the greenhouse effect, and many if not most think man has had some noticeable impact on climate.

Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room
by David Weinberger
Published 14 Jul 2011

Unfortunately, the sorts of conversations we often have in mind when we think about civility are precisely ones in which people who strongly disagree need to come to agreement about some practical matter of policy. But diversity works best when there are shared goals, as Scott Page points out. That’s why Beth Noveck doesn’t want to invite climate change deniers into the discussion of practical steps to slow down climate change. It’s not because she’s close-minded. It’s because the goal of that discussion is to slow the warming of the earth. Among people who share that goal, there is plenty of room for diversity of perspectives and heuristics. A diverse group of people who share a goal are likely to be more effective than a homogeneous group of people.

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The Nature editorial is evidence of the discomfort this is causing. The old response was embodied in Al Gore’s strategy. An Inconvenient Truth is a masterful argument for Gore’s point that not only is the Earth’s climate warming, the change is mainly due to human behavior. But Gore has with a fair bit of success marginalized “climate change deniers.” They are entitled to their beliefs but cannot claim that those beliefs are scientific, according to those who follow Gore’s strategy. They are not even engaging in wrong science. They’re outside the walls of science, though their howling can be heard within. No one says this is an easy situation.

The New Class Conflict
by Joel Kotkin
Published 31 Aug 2014

Scott Armstrong, “Los Angeles Times Endorses Censorship with Ban on Letters from Climate Skeptics,” Fox News, October 18, 2013, http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/10/18/los-angeles-times-endorses-censorship-with-ban-on-letters-from-climate-skeptics; Brendan O’Neill, “Reddit Has Banned Climate Change Deniers, and Ripped Its Own Reputation to Shreds,” Telegraph (UK), December 18, 2013, http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/brendanoneill2/100250918/reddit-has-banned-climate-change-deniers-and-ripped-its-own-reputation-to-shreds; Julia A. Seymour, “Networks Do 92 Climate Change Stories; Fail to Mention ‘Lull’ in Warming All 92 Times,” Media Research Center, Business and Media Institute, June 25, 2013, http://www.mrc.org/bias-numbers/networks-do-92-climate-change-stories-fail-mention-lull-warming-all-92-times. 69.

The Liberal Moment
by Nick Clegg and Demos (organization : London, England)
Published 12 Nov 2009

The dilemma is particularly acute for people who consider themselves to be progressive. There is self evidently little progressive hope in a Conservative party which talks about ‘broken Britain’ but wants to give tax breaks to the very rich, that claims it cares about the environment but clubs together with climate change deniers in Europe, that professes an interest in political reform but will not alter the warped way money and votes are distributed to parties. Crucially, there is no hope either in hoping that Labour will rediscover its progressive purpose any time soon. Labour has been hollowed out by twelve years in government, and will need years to recover, if it recovers at all.

We Need New Stories: Challenging the Toxic Myths Behind Our Age of Discontent
by Nesrine Malik
Published 4 Sep 2019

I would be called upon by more neutral outlets, such as the BBC, to discuss increasingly more absurd arguments with other journalists or political activists with extreme views. Conversations around race, immigration, Islam and climate change became increasingly binary and polarised when there were no binaries to be contemplated. Climate change deniers were allowed to broadcast falsehoods about a reversal in climate change. Racial minorities were called upon to counter thinly veiled racist or xenophobic views. I found myself, along with other journalists in the media industry, regularly ambushed. Appearing on BBC’s Newsnight to discuss an incident where a far-right racist had mounted a mosque pavement with his car and killed one of the congregation, and after I tried to make the point that there was insufficient focus on a growing far-right terror threat, the presenter asked me: ‘Have you had abuse?

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In 2018, in keeping with the fashion, a group of academics created a journal that allows for anonymous publication and called it The Journal of Controversial Ideas. On a large scale, these emissions can pollute the environment, poisoning the atmosphere for everyone, sometimes literally, where climate change deniers are invited to push ‘facts’ that are nothing but opinions, but are lent a veneer of legitimacy by being allowed on to a platform in the first place. Regulation in this case is a far cry from censorship, it is simply a responsibility. The same way it is a responsibility when it comes to other matters such as false advertising, or not declaring an interest in a product one is selling.

That Used to Be Us
by Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum
Published 1 Sep 2011

As Lizza noted, “Newt Gingrich’s group, American Solutions, whose largest donors include coal and electric-utility interests, began targeting Graham with a flurry of online articles about the ‘Kerry-Graham-Lieberman gas tax bill.’” In the middle of all this, President Obama decided that he would not spend any significant political capital to press for the clean-energy legislation, to set a price on carbon, or to refute aggressively the climate-change deniers. His political advisers told him it would not be good politics heading into the 2012 election. Rather than change the polls, the president chose to read the polls. So 2010 turned out to be a microcosm of all the forces undermining our ability to get something big, or even something small, done to deal with our energy and climate challenges.

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They prevented the passage of an energy bill in the 111th Congress and blocked comprehensive deficit reduction. No matter what we Americans say, we are what we do. And this is what we as a country have been doing: waging war on math and physics. We’ve been simultaneously engaged in deficit denial and climate change denial. There is no other way to say this: Somewhere in the last twenty years of baby boomer rule, Americans decided to act as if we had a divine right to everything—low energy prices and big cars, higher spending and lower taxes, home ownership and health care, booms without ceilings and busts without massive unemployment—all at a time when the country was waging wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and then Libya.

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Cheney, Dick Chernow, Ron Chiampo, Matteo Chicago, University of; Booth School of Business Chicago Cubs baseball team Chicago Tribune Children’s Health Insurance Program Chile China; agricultural reforms in; applicants to U.S. colleges and universities from; climate change policy in; education in; immigrants in U.S. from; information technology in; Maoist; outsourcing to; productivity in U.S. versus; recycling in; renewable energy in; research and development in; suppression of dissent in; theft of intellectual property in; U.S. debt held by; water shortages in; work ethic in; World Economic Forum in China Syndrome, The (movie) Chosin, USS (guided-missile cruiser) Christians Chronicle of Higher Education, The Chua, Amy Churchill, Winston Cisco Systems Citigroup Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2009) Civic Federation civil rights Civil Rights Act (1964) Civil Service Commission Civil War Clabo, Howard Clark, General Wesley Clean Air Act (1970) Clean Air Act (1990) climate change; denial of; energy policy and mitigation of ClimateProgress.org ClimateWorks Foundation Clinton, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clooney, George cloud computing CNN Coast Guard, U.S. Code of Federal Regulations Cohen, Alan Cold War; end of; national unity during; structural advantages during; upgrading formula for success during collaboration; in education College Board Colorado Columbia University Comeback America (Walker) Comerford, Nicholas communism; collapse of; refugees from; struggle against, see Cold War Computer Systems Policy Project (CSPP) Congress, U.S.; campaign financing for candidates for; climate and energy legislation in; economic and fiscal policy and; education legislation in; financial industry and; immigration legislation in; lobbying; partisan polarization in; stimulus package approved by; see also House of Representatives, U.S.; Senate, U.S.

Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet
by Mark Lynas
Published 1 Apr 2008

A recent aerial photo of the crater, with little more than a few ice fragments encrusting its dark sides, was the centrepiece for a touring global warming photography exhibition sponsored by the British Council in 2005. During the 2001 UN climate change conference in Marrakech, Morocco, Greenpeace sent a team to Kilimanjaro to hold a press conference by video link from beside one of the mountain's disappearing glaciers. Kilimanjaro's international celebrity status has also attracted the attention of climate change deniers, who suggest that deforestation on the mountain's lower slopes is more to blame for glacial retreat than global warming. None of the contrarian rhetoric cuts any ice, so to speak, with Lonnie Thompson, a glaciologist at Ohio State University and a man who is deservedly one of America's most celebrated natural scientists.

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This discovery made Thompson's ice cores even more valuable, for the simple reason that within as little as ten years the sawn-up circular cores in Ohio State University's walk-in freezer will be the only Kilimanjaro ice left anywhere in the world. With this in mind, Thompson and his team have already decided that some of the ice will be kept intact for future generations of scientists to dissect with new technologies, possibly unlocking climatic secrets still undreamt of today. The efforts of climate change deniers to suggest that there is something special about the disappearance of Kilimanjaro's glaciers are undermined by similar changes taking place in mountain ranges right across the world, not least in the Rwenzori Mountains of Uganda, nearly a thousand kilometres to the north-west. In this remote region, where Uganda borders the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the fabled ‘Mountains of the Moon’ generate such heavy rainfall (about 5 metres per year) that the cloud-shrouded peaks are only visible on a few days out of every year, and form the main headwaters of the river Nile.

Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?
by Bill McKibben
Published 15 Apr 2019

His successor, Rex Tillerson, was slightly less confrontational, and willing at least to grant that climate change might be real, though, at shareholder meetings, he continued to downplay the threat. (“What if it turns out our models are lousy and we don’t get the effects we predict?” he asked in 2015.)13 And the company continued to fund climate change deniers and front groups. One, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, put out a TV commercial titled “Carbon Dioxide: They Call It Pollution, We Call It Life.” Another, the Heartland Institute, which Exxon had helped found back in the 1990s, erected billboards comparing climate scientists to famous serial killers such as the Unabomber and Charles Manson.

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See also atmospheric temperature, rise in; oceans; and specific energy sources; and impacts advanced nature of antigovernment ideology and difficulty of solving global rally of 2009 and Hansen on heat trapping gases and human nature and impact of Koch brothers and leverage and nonviolence and oil industry and politics and scientific consensus on slowing down Thatcher on Trump and climate change deniers climate scientists Clinton, Bill cloning coal coastal communities Collapse (Diamond) colonialism Columbus, Christopher Comfort, Nathaniel Common Cause commons, theory of communism community. See also solidarity Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) computers COMTY gene ConocoPhillips Consumer Reports continental flood basalt Cooler Heads Coalition cooperative ownership Copenhagen climate conference coral reefs Corinth corn Corporation Commission Côte d’Ivoire Council of Economic Advisers Cowen, Tyler Crack in Creation, A (Doudna) Craigslist Credit Suisse Cretaceous extinction Crick, Francis CRISPR cryogenics Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly cyanobacteria Cyberselfish (Borsook) cystic fibrosis Dakota Access Pipeline Dalio, Ray Dankert, Don Dante Alighieri Dark Money (Mayer) Darnovsky, Marcy Davison, Richard Day, Dorothy dead zones Death Valley Deaton, Angus Deccan Traps DeepMind Defense of the Ancients (video game) Delhi DeMille, Cecil B.

The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?
by Michael J. Sandel
Published 9 Sep 2020

But you can’t say it’s an elephant. 81 Of course, the factual disputes that figure in political debate are not as simple as describing a piece of furniture. But the “elephant” in the room was climate change. What Obama meant is that it is hard to have a reasoned debate about climate change with people who deny its existence, or the human role in bringing it about. Obama surely had in mind that his successor, abetted by climate change deniers, had withdrawn the United States from the Paris climate accord that he, Obama, had signed. He attributed this not only to ideological disagreement but to a rejection of science by Trump and his Republican supporters. In fact, the slogan “I believe in science” has become a rallying cry for Democrats.

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I’ll come back and say, “well no, it turns out if we just invest in some smart technology and we create a smart regulatory framework that incentivizes investment in clean energy, we can actually solve this problem now, and if we don’t it’s going to be catastrophic.” 87 Obama wished we could have a wholesome debate such as this, and he lamented that the climate change deniers had made it impossible. 88 But such a debate, even if possible, would be an impoverished mode of political argument. It assumes that our only choice is between resignation and imprudence on the one hand, and a value-neutral technocratic fix on the other. But this misses the deeper moral and political considerations that underlie the climate change controversy.

Reset
by Ronald J. Deibert
Published 14 Aug 2020

Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/11/world/americas/youtube-brazil.html An opportunity for climate change denialists to propagate disinformation: Ryan, H., & Wilson, C. (2020, January 22). As Australia burned, climate change denialism got a boost on Facebook. Retrieved from https://www.buzzfeed.com/hannahryan/facebook-australia-bushfires-climate-change-deniers-facebook Conspiracy theories circulated across social media: Knaus, C. (2020, January 11). Disinformation and lies are spreading faster than Australia’s bushfires. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jan/12/disinformation-and-lies-are-spreading-faster-than-australias-bushfires At least one prominent politician bought into it: Capstick, S., Dyke, J., Lewandowsky, S., Pancost, R., & Steinberger, J. (2020, January 14).

The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics
by Tim Harford
Published 2 Feb 2021

A lobby group seeking to deny the statistical evidence will always be able to point to some aspect of the current science that is not settled, note that the matter is terribly complicated, and call for more research. And these claims will sound scientific, even rather wise. Yet they give a false and dangerous impression: that nobody really knows anything. The techniques of the tobacco industry have been widely embraced.14 They are used today most obviously by climate change deniers, but they have spread beyond scientific questions and into politics. Robert Proctor, a historian who has spent decades studying the tobacco industry, calls modern politics “a golden age of ignorance.” Much as many smokers would like to keep smoking, many of us are fondly attached to our gut instincts on political questions.

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I have political principles; you’re politically biased; he’s a fringe conspiracy theorist. But we’d be wiser to acknowledge that we all think with our hearts rather than our heads sometimes. Kris De Meyer, a neuroscientist at King’s College London, shows his students a message describing an environmental activist’s problem with climate change denialism: To summarize the climate deniers’ activities I think we can say that: (1) Their efforts have been aggressive while ours have been defensive. (2) The deniers’ activities are rather orderly—almost as if they had a plan working for them. I think the denialist forces can be characterized as dedicated opportunists.

Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics
by Peter Geoghegan
Published 2 Jan 2020

May’s agreement would have bound Britain to continental standards that many in the ERG wanted to see loosened. Johnson’s kept alive the ERG’s vision of a deregulated “Global Britain”. Daniel Hannan frequently talked of post-Brexit Britain imitating Singapore’s low-tax, low-regulation economy. “The ERG is Singapore on steroids,” says Guto Bebb, adding that many in the group were “climate change deniers” who “were quite happy to see Trump win”. Another Tory MP, Tom Tugendhat, said that the ERG represented a corruption of British Conservativism: “It is rampant libertarianism. It’s the very opposite of what it means to be a Conservative.” Tugendhat’s point is a crucial one. The ERG did not just provide a home for fervent Brexiters; it was also the first really cohesive pressure group inside the Commons since Thatcher that strongly identified with American libertarianism.

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Acton’s founder publicly distanced himself from Bannon, saying that the Rome office had acted without his knowledge in supporting the project.28 But much of the coverage of the controversy surrounding Bannon’s scheme missed a significant point about Acton’s work. The think tank has an explicit mission to fuse support for free market capitalism with social conservatism. Its funders have included a foundation belonging to the Kochs, the oil magnates who have spent billions pushing libertarian causes and climate change denial in the US. The unholy alliance of fundamentalist Christianity and pro-corporate lobbying has been part of American political life for decades.29 Steve Bannon wanted to set himself up as the key broker in the transatlantic conservative network. After his meeting with Matteo Salvini in Washington in April 2016, Bannon and his acolytes stayed in contact with the rising star of the Italian far right.

The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President
by Bandy X. Lee
Published 2 Oct 2017

Extinction anxiety exists both in the personal and group psyche and is based on the fear of the loss of supremacy by white Americans of the United States, the loss of America’s place in the world as we have known it, and ultimately the destruction of the environment and the world itself. One might think of extinction anxiety as the cultural psyche’s equivalent of death anxiety in the individual. For instance, climate change deniers on the right may be seen as denying the very real possibility of the planet’s destruction as a way of defending themselves against the fear of extinction. Aligning himself with this attitude, Trump offers to dispel extinction anxiety by denying it is real and appointing a well-known climate change denier as head of the EPA. Denial, whether at the individual or group level, is the most primitive defense the mind employs to protect itself from psychic pain.

Maths on the Back of an Envelope: Clever Ways to (Roughly) Calculate Anything
by Rob Eastaway
Published 18 Sep 2019

If I repeatedly toss 10 coins and get four heads the first time, five heads the second time and six heads the third, it might look like an upward trend, but the stats say that the most likely outcome next time is going to be five. Finally, buried within a long-term trend, there might well be short periods where the data moves in the opposite direction. Some climate-change deniers liked to cherry-pick the period 2001–13 to ‘prove’ that global warming had stopped. Over that time-frame, the average global temperatures moved up and down with no obvious trend. Zoom out to look at the data over a century, however, and the evidence of an upward trend is compelling. That in itself is not proof, of course.

The Burning Answer: The Solar Revolution: A Quest for Sustainable Power
by Keith Barnham
Published 7 May 2015

My concerns about the Royal Society, for example, began when I read the opinion pieces in the national press written by Lord May of Oxford when he was President of the Royal Society in 2005. I accept these were his personal views rather than those of the society. His articles seemed very well focused when he drew attention to the activities of climate change deniers funded by the US oil industry. However, in his final speech as president he also accused NGOs opposed to nuclear power of the same fault of ‘fundamentalism’ and the mis-representation of scientific facts. Given that the Greenpeace Trust were the first funding body to support my solar cell research, you can see why I disagree with his opinion.

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The UK National Nuclear Laboratory 550 research staff according to Chapter 2 of a recent House of Lords report [17]. Quantasol’s briefly held world record for a single junction concentrator cell of 28.3 per cent at 534 times solar concentration is described in reference 18. Lord May criticised the climate change deniers in the Guardian [19]. He also criticised NGOs opposed to nuclear power in his final speech as president of the Royal Society [20]. His opinion that wind and solar supplying our energy needs was ‘wishful thinking’ appeared in the Daily Telegraph [21]. The two Royal Society reports that I criticise can be downloaded from the society website [22, 23].

The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It
by Robert B. Reich
Published 24 Mar 2020

Schmidt communicated his displeasure to the think tank’s president, who accused the researcher of “imperiling the institution as a whole” and shut down the Open Markets initiative. New America isn’t the only recipient of Google’s largesse. Despite its avowed concern about climate change, Google has made large donations to some of the most notorious climate change deniers in Washington, including the Heartland Institute, an anti-science group that has attacked teenage activist Greta Thunberg for “climate delusion hysterics,” and Heritage Action, which has alleged that the Paris climate accord is supported by “cosmopolitan elites.” Presumably, Google has made these donations because such groups don’t want government intruding on corporate America, especially Google.

Letters From an Astrophysicist
by Neil Degrasse Tyson
Published 7 Oct 2019

This position is neither politically Liberal nor Conservative. It’s factual. Although one could argue that all those who want to preserve the environment are the real conservatives in this discussion. 4.You use “Liberal” as a tag to characterize my politics. Since I have no active public political position, that’s a hard task to accomplish. Climate change deniers are misinformed. But so are people who think vaccines gives you autism. And so are people who think genetically modified foods are bad for you. These science-denying postures cross political boundaries. 5.I am 3x appointed by President George W. Bush, serving on commissions to advise him on the future of the American aerospace industry, on NASA, and on the annual Presidential Medal of Science winners.

The World According to Physics
by Jim Al-Khalili
Published 10 Mar 2020

One thing scientists can do is to tackle the issue of false balance. Thus, when almost every climatologist in the world acknowledges that the Earth’s climate is changing rapidly due to humankind’s activities and that something needs to be done urgently if we are to prevent its catastrophic consequences, the news media does not need to have a climate change denier provide ‘the other side of the argument’. Because when this happens, the public is left with the impression that both points of view are equally valid. Apart from the weight of scientific evidence in their favour, the difference between someone arguing that anthropogenic climate change is real and another denying it is that the former really hopes that he or she is wrong.

Twilight of Abundance: Why the 21st Century Will Be Nasty, Brutish, and Short
by David Archibald
Published 24 Mar 2014

Once having awakened our interest in the undeniably real existential threats, he argues that policymakers ought to take prudent steps to transition into new technologies and arrangements necessary to ensure global security and sufficient food and energy for the world’s population—instead of living in the dream that these goods are givens, or falling into an ideological obsession with returning to some sylvan eco-paradise that never existed. For his troubles David Archibald will probably be dismissed as an extremist—a “climate change denier” or some such—although it is hard to see what he is extreme about. Perhaps the strangeness is really just his departure from the talking points that are endlessly prescribed by the media, a kind of disorienting looping around to the place where we began. That is precisely the value of his book.

Robots Will Steal Your Job, But That's OK: How to Survive the Economic Collapse and Be Happy
by Pistono, Federico
Published 14 Oct 2012

The refusal to explain is probably because they feel like this is basic economic theory, things that I should have learned in academia, and there is no point in wasting time explaining it. But whenever I hear this kind of reasoning, I am reminded of what the great Albert Einstein said118: “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” With years of experience in spreading scientific education and debunking climate change deniers, creationists, and all sorts of nonsense, I can see how Einstein’s quote could not be truer. If mainstream economists see me as I see proponents of “intelligent design”, it should be pretty easy to refute what I say. In fact, it should be quick to dismiss my claims with a few simple examples.

The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning
by James E. Lovelock
Published 1 Jan 2009

Moreover, 2008 was turning out to be a cool wet summer in northwestern Europe and parts of the US, not at all what was expected of global heating. This apparent remission of the Earth’s illness was reflected in Nigel Lawson’s thoughtful brief An Appeal to Reason. His book reads like a breath of fresh air coming from an open window in an overheated conference room. Most climate‐change deniers fail to hide a vested interest in the status quo and are unconvincing or even boring. But here is a book denying global heating written with passion but still a proper detachment, as if the author were the defence counsel for the deniers of climate change. I think that he is right to criticize the hype that goes with the public response to global heating.

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy
by Jonathan Taplin
Published 17 Apr 2017

But the Kochs press on with their agenda. 3. So what have the Kochs accomplished with their thirty-five-year assault on our democratic process? Well, to begin with, they have delayed any serious attempt to halt climate change. Their money—more than that of ExxonMobil or any other oil company—has paid for the climate-change-denier propaganda machine. And this machine is very sophisticated. Investigators uncovered documents from the tech security firm HBGary Federal that describe an elaborate operation to unleash “denier bots” that would comment on any article supporting the notion that climate change exists. The software developed was called Persona Management, and it allowed a single operator to pretend to be hundreds of different people posting negative comments.

Minimal: How to Simplify Your Life and Live Sustainably
by Madeleine Olivia
Published 9 Jan 2020

Unfortunately we’ve got ourselves into a situation where if we don’t change what we’re currently doing, the future isn’t looking ideal, to put it mildly. Temperatures are heating up, ice is melting, sea levels are rising, the ocean is suffering, extreme weather is occurring more frequently and animals are going extinct. Climate-change deniers need to start listening to science. These conditions aren’t normal and this drastic change in our climate is being caused by humans. We seem to have forgotten how to live at one with our Earth and instead have become lost in our own greed. Indigenous people and those living in low-income countries are on the frontlines of climate change, and they’re already experiencing its effects.

Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History
by Kurt Andersen
Published 4 Sep 2017

But more generally they helped make popular and respectable the idea that much of science is a sinister scheme concocted by a despotic conspiracy to oppress the people. Mental illness, both Szasz and Laing said, is “a theory not a fact”—now the universal bottom-line argument for anyone, from creationists to climate change deniers to antivaccine hysterics, who prefer to disregard science in favor of their own beliefs. The Esalen elder who called it the center of the youth rebellion cyclone has also said that its founders “gave refuge to the craziest characters in the Sixties,” and during the 1970s “in rushed a bunch of charlatans promoting messianic cult visions.”

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But once the intellectual mainstream thoroughly accepted the notion that there are many equally valid realities and truths, once the idea of gates and gatekeeping was discredited not just on campuses but throughout the culture, all the barbarians could have their claims taken seriously. Conservatives are correct in pointing out that the anything-goes relativism of the campuses wasn’t sequestered there, but when it flowed out across America, it helped enable extreme Christianities and consequential lunacies on the right—gun rights hysteria, black helicopter conspiracism, climate change denial, and more. The term useful idiot was originally used to accuse liberals of serving the interests of true believers further left. In this instance, however, postmodern intellectuals—postpositivists, poststructuralists, social constructivists, postempiricists, epistemic relativists, cognitive relativists, descriptive relativists—turned out to be useful idiots for the American right.

Fantasyland
by Kurt Andersen
Published 5 Sep 2017

But more generally they helped make popular and respectable the idea that much of science is a sinister scheme concocted by a despotic conspiracy to oppress the people. Mental illness, both Szasz and Laing said, is “a theory not a fact”—now the universal bottom-line argument for anyone, from creationists to climate change deniers to antivaccine hysterics, who prefer to disregard science in favor of their own beliefs. The Esalen elder who called it the center of the youth rebellion cyclone has also said that its founders “gave refuge to the craziest characters in the Sixties,” and during the 1970s “in rushed a bunch of charlatans promoting messianic cult visions.”

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But once the intellectual mainstream thoroughly accepted the notion that there are many equally valid realities and truths, once the idea of gates and gatekeeping was discredited not just on campuses but throughout the culture, all the barbarians could have their claims taken seriously. Conservatives are correct in pointing out that the anything-goes relativism of the campuses wasn’t sequestered there, but when it flowed out across America, it helped enable extreme Christianities and consequential lunacies on the right—gun rights hysteria, black helicopter conspiracism, climate change denial, and more. The term useful idiot was originally used to accuse liberals of serving the interests of true believers further left. In this instance, however, postmodern intellectuals—postpositivists, poststructuralists, social constructivists, postempiricists, epistemic relativists, cognitive relativists, descriptive relativists—turned out to be useful idiots for the American right.

The End of Money: Counterfeiters, Preachers, Techies, Dreamers--And the Coming Cashless Society
by David Wolman
Published 14 Feb 2012

I suddenly have $87 that I didn’t have a minute ago, and per the dealer’s suggestion I may just have to earmark it for a fun dinner out with my wife. Either that, or perhaps something a little less enjoyable, like my cellphone bill. But cash is fungible! As long as I go to dinner someday, this $87 will contribute to that outing, right? Minutes later I find myself in a round of friendly banter with Rick Hennessey, a gun enthusiast, climate change denier, and coin dealer who generously helps me part with what eventually amounts to $300 worth of coins. I sell him quarters and half dollars mostly, all of them between fifty and 150 years old. All are in rather poor condition and appraise in the range of $5 and $18 apiece. Their value stems almost exclusively from their silver content.

How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need
by Bill Gates
Published 16 Feb 2021

But the federal government can help—as part of an overall plan for getting to zero—by providing funding and technical advice and by connecting communities around the country that are experiencing similar problems so they can share what’s working. Finally, in communities where extracting coal or natural gas is a big part of the local economy, it’s understandable that people worry about how the transition might make it harder for them to make ends meet. The fact that they voice those worries doesn’t make them climate change deniers. You don’t have to be a political scientist to think that national leaders who champion getting to zero will find more support for their ideas if they understand the concerns of families and communities whose livelihoods will be hit hard and if they take those concerns seriously. 6. Do the Hard Stuff Too A lot of climate change work focuses on the relatively easy ways to reduce emissions—things like driving electric cars and getting more power from solar and wind.

How Much Is Enough?: Money and the Good Life
by Robert Skidelsky and Edward Skidelsky
Published 18 Jun 2012

It is only on the additional assumption, usually unacknowledged, that beyond a certain point growth is inherently undesirable that the inference becomes compelling. An ethical ideal has been smuggled in under the cloak of a pragmatic necessity, a familiar ruse in our utilitarian political culture. The term “climate change denier”—modelled on “Holocaust denier,” and with similar overtones—is often applied to those who dispute the scientific consensus on global warming. We are not deniers. Our doubts concern the economic implications, not the science of global warming. That said, the science is not as settled as is often claimed.

Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists
by Julia Ebner
Published 20 Feb 2020

Their sources of information and inspiration are cryptic poems shared by Q, so-called ‘breadcrumbs’. Q, who claims to be a US military intelligence official with access to classified information about the Deep State’s agenda, attracts a weird blend of far-right activists, Trump-supporting evangelicals, climate-change deniers and bored teenagers. They self-identify as ‘bakers’ who collect Q’s breadcrumbs to prepare the ‘dough’ – a synthesis of (mis)information. ‘We are here to find truth,’ one of them announces. THE PAINFUL TRUTH - THE GMOS IN YOUR FOOD IS KILLING YOU - YOUR WATER IS BEING POISONED - VACCINES HAVE TOXIC FILLERS - BANKERS ARE ORCHESTRATING WARS - THE MEDIA IS BRAINWASHING YOU - THE GOVERNMENT IS A CORPORATION - PEDOPHILIA IS REAL AMONGST POLITICIANS - THEY ARE SPYING ON EVERYONE - GOVERNMENT IS DESTROYING THE PLANET - THEY KEEP YOU SICK TO PROFIT OFF YOU - THEY FUND BOTH SIDES OF THE WAR - THEY SPLIT THE LANDS AND CREATED CONFLICT - TERRORIST GROUPS ARE ELITIST GROUPS - THEY CREATE FAKE TERROR ATTACKS - THE ONLY TERROR IS FROM THE ELITE THAT MOST PEOPLE IGNORE Since Q started posting in October 2017, solving enigmas has taken over the life of many committed anons, sometimes consuming all of their spare time.9 ‘Do we know when we expect the Storm?’

Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think
by Hans Rosling , Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund
Published 2 Apr 2018

My guess is you feel that me saying that the world is getting better is like me telling you that everything is fine, or that you should look away from these problems and pretend they don’t exist: and that feels ridiculous, and stressful. I agree. Everything is not fine. We should still be very concerned. As long as there are plane crashes, preventable child deaths, endangered species, climate change deniers, male chauvinists, crazy dictators, toxic waste, journalists in prison, and girls not getting an education because of their gender, as long as any such terrible things exist, we cannot relax. But it is just as ridiculous, and just as stressful, to look away from the progress that has been made.

The Doomsday Calculation: How an Equation That Predicts the Future Is Transforming Everything We Know About Life and the Universe
by William Poundstone
Published 3 Jun 2019

We must not ignore the data and invoke indifference for a new roll of the dice. This is not just a theoretical problem. It confronts real-world deciders who have never heard of the principle of indifference. In his famous wager Pascal said that no one can be sure whether God exists or doesn’t exist. Ergo, both possibilities deserve to be taken seriously. Climate change deniers sometimes take the tack that the evidence is not conclusive, so public policy ought to assume that climate change is equally likely to be real or not. By the mid-twentieth century, John Maynard Keynes could write (sarcastically) of the principle of indifference: “No other formula in the alchemy of logic has exerted more astonishing powers.

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 1 Mar 2016

By elevating human activity to the point where it could be blamed for global catastrophe, the pope had pulled the rug out from under the religious argument against climate change. “I think religion ought to be about making us better as people, less about things [that] end up getting into the political realm,” responded climate change denier Jeb Bush. “I don’t think we should politicize our faith.”2 Even more infuriating to his critics than his warnings about climate change, I suspect, was the pope’s critique of the industrial economy driving it. It sounded like the progressive, back-to-nature rhetoric of a co-op farmer or seed commons member: It is imperative to promote an economy which favours productive diversity and business creativity.

The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril
by Satyajit Das
Published 9 Feb 2016

Summer Arctic sea ice was at record lows in 2002, 2005, 2007, and 2012. In 2007, the sea ice was 39 percent below the 1979–2000 average, resulting in the Northwest Passage being navigable for the first time in recorded history. Summer Arctic sea ice may cease to exist sometime during the twenty-first century. Climate change deniers challenge the evidence, lobbying to prevent action to reduce greenhouse gases. They argue that the evidence is unclear, computer models are flawed, forecasts are inconsistent with actual experience, and that there's a lack of sufficient long-term data to formulate definitive conclusions. They claim that the earth's temperature has been higher in the past, with the current rise merely part of a long-term cycle, and that increases in CO2 levels follow rather than precede temperature increases.

American Marxism
by Mark R. Levin
Published 12 Jul 2021

The little truth that is urged, is usually urged coarsely, weakened and rendered vicious, by personalities; while those who live by falsehoods, fallacies, enmities, partialities and the schemes of the designing, find the press the very instrument that the devils would invent to effect their designs.’ ”9 Weaver and Cooper were highlighting what would become the media’s use of targeted, personal attacks on individuals and subjects that defy or resist the trajectory of events and movements for which journalists have become committed and open advocates. This is seen every day with, for example, the relentless polemical characterizations of individuals and groups as climate change deniers, Trump deplorables, white supremacists, etc. Weaver observes, “The constant stream of sensation, eulogized as lively propagation of what the public wants to hear, discourages the pulling-together of events from past time into a whole for contemplation. Thus, absence of reflection keeps the individual from being aware of his former selves, and it is highly questionable whether anyone can be a member of a metaphysical community who does not preserve such memory.

The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World
by Jeff Goodell
Published 23 Oct 2017

During the Paris talks, the whole issue of refugees was so politically explosive that it was hardly discussed. It was a chilly November day almost a year after the Paris talks ended. The world had changed: the United States had just elected a president who believed climate change was a hoax and would soon fill his cabinet with climate change deniers of every stripe. Benetick Kabua Maddison, a twenty-one-year-old Marshallese, was not happy about this. He stood on a busy street corner in Springdale, Arkansas, with a crowd of college students—some Marshallese, some hillbilly white—who were waving signs that said LOYAL TO THE SOIL—WE NEED WATER NOT OIL and IF WE DESTROY CREATION, CREATION WILL DESTROY US.

Everything's Trash, but It's Okay
by Phoebe Robinson
Published 15 Oct 2018

Women’s reproductive rights are still a contentious battle, as documented by that 2017 viral pic of Vice President Mike Pence and a sea of dusty-ass, evil-ass, and old-ass white dudes discussing whether maternity care should be covered by insurance companies. Jobs for blue-collar workers are drying up and have been for a long time, and some of us (myself included) have unfairly ignored this problem for far too long. According to the Center for American Progress Action Fund, one-third of Congress (182 politicians, to be exact) are climate change deniers, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senator Marco Rubio; meanwhile, the Honey Nut Cheerios bee is like, “Every day, I’m legit buzzing the Bone Thugs-N-Harmony ‘Tha Crossroads’ melody because my family is dying thanks to humans, but a’ight, keep pretending Earth isn’t on life support.”

Climate Change
by Joseph Romm
Published 3 Dec 2015

The scientists and journalists were motivated by a November 2014, New York Times article, “Republicans Vow to Fight EPA and Approve Keystone Pipeline” that referred to Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) as “a prominent skeptic of climate change.” They note that in the same week, National Public Radio’s Morning Edition called Inhofe “one of the leading climate change deniers in Congress.” The signatories note, “These are not equivalent statements” and the two terms should not be conflated. “Proper skepticism promotes scientific inquiry, critical investigation, and the use of reason in examining controversial and extraordinary claims,” the letter reads. “It is foundational to the scientific method.

Urban Transport Without the Hot Air, Volume 1
by Steve Melia

The simple answer is obviously “Yes”, but the “How” is not so clear. I argued that researchers or anyone else advocating social change should try to behave in a consistent way, particularly within their areas of interest. As mine were transport and planning, I had given much thought to both. I once had a long discussion with a climate change denier, an intelligent man who claimed to follow scientific rationalism. There was little meeting of minds between us, except when I mentioned that I didn’t drive or fly. Reflecting on this for a moment he said: “Well I suppose if you really believed humans were changing the climate, you wouldn’t, would you?”

Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking
by Mehdi Hasan
Published 27 Feb 2023

As Skeptic magazine pointed out in 1996, “many scientists have publicly corrected Gish in his presence, but Gish has gone on to repeat the same errors in later debates and writings … He succeeds at this, because in the next city, with a new audience and a new scientist to debate, who’s to know that his argument got shot down, with evidence, by that other evolutionist last week?” It’s the same today with the climate change deniers or the antivaxxers, especially in online forums—no matter the number of fact checks and corrections, they continue to relentlessly push extraordinary amounts of misinformation and disinformation into the public consciousness. In fact, it is the deliberate repetition of “nonsense” that differentiates the Gish Gallop from similar tactics like “spreading.”

Brexit, No Exit: Why in the End Britain Won't Leave Europe
by Denis MacShane
Published 14 Jul 2017

That way the BBC could put its hand on its heart and say it was maintaining a perfect and fair equilibrium between the main parties of government. This mechanical equilibrium, however, was not appropriate for BBC reporting in the referendum. Ivor Gaber, a professor of journalism at the University of Sussex, has criticised what he calls the BBC’s ‘phoney balance’. As he points out, the BBC does not give equal space to climate change deniers whenever John Humphries or Nick Robinson interviews a scientist issuing a warning about global warming. But the BBC was prepared to broadcast complete lies about Europe without any challenge. Professor Gaber gave these examples. •Just one day before the vote, 1,280 business leaders signed a letter to The Times backing EU membership.

The Moon: A History for the Future
by Oliver Morton
Published 1 May 2019

Perhaps someone made sure that, as the person who had introduced the term “world picture” to philosophy, Heidegger should get to see it. 4 In Harriman’s search for reasons for spaceflight Heinlein had of course included energy—but rather than safe, clean energy, he had imagined space as a place to put dangerous energy, in the form of nuclear power plants permanently on the brink of explosion. 5 Anyone disturbed by this use of language is referred to xkcd.com/123. 6 The ARS had by this stage been rolled into the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, a thoroughly professionalized institution; the BIS continued in its quirky, part-time way, as it does to this day and will, I hope, continue to do for centuries to come. 7 As the science fiction author Ben Bova pointed out in his novel “Colony” (1978), a sequel to the rather better “Millennium” discussed above, the L5 movement turned its back on the Moon with its very name. If you cared about the Moon, you would put your colonies at L4, a point with all the same gravitational advantages but which also offers a particularly beautiful view of the Moon dominated by the great bull’s-eye basin of Mare Orientale. 8 Though given that Mr Schmitt also has form as a climate-change denier, I am not quite sure what he thinks the pressing need for fusion power actually is. 9 This morning aluminium costs less than $1 per pound on the London Metals Exchange. Accounting for inflation, that makes it about 140 times cheaper than it was in Barbicane’s day. 10 In his novel “The Secret of Life” (2001), Paul McAuley does manage to imagine something both Martian and economically important, but it is not the sort of thing one could reasonably set out in search of. 11 The Russians also charge their partners from NASA and ESA for these transport services. 12 There are other reasons.

New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World--And How to Make It Work for You
by Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms
Published 2 Apr 2018

In a new power world, this battle of ideas is not a standoff between bureaucrats and terrorists. It is a showdown between Scottish teenagers and Pakistani business students. * * * — The future will be won by those who can spread their ideas better, faster, and more durably. In a world of fake news, climate change deniers, Holocaust deniers, anti-vaxers, and all manner of extremists, the stakes are high. Those on the side of the angels, who want to spread compassion, promote pluralism, or defend science, must first grapple with a painful reality: that new power can supercharge hate and misinformation. In fact, those darker forces often start at an advantage because their provocations compel our attention and our clicks.

The Elements of Choice: Why the Way We Decide Matters
by Eric J. Johnson
Published 12 Oct 2021

Some media outlets suggested that global warming was over, or that this one-two snow-mageddon punch was proof that climate change was a fraud. Senator James Inhofe, a noted climate-change skeptic, built an igloo in front of the U.S. Capitol complete with a hand-lettered sign reading al gore’s new home. Climate-change deniers crowed about a conference on the climate crisis that was postponed by the storm.6 Despite the total lack of scientific evidence, something seemed understandable about Inhofe’s claim. Looking out my window at 40 inches of snow, I could see how global warming was, perhaps, a little harder to believe for some people.

#Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media
by Cass R. Sunstein
Published 7 Mar 2017

WHY THIS MATTERS: VIOLENCE, PARTYISM, AND FREEDOM Do echo chambers matter? Exactly why? Some people might not love it if their fellow citizens are living in information cocoons, but in the abstract, that is up to each of us, a reflection of our freedom to choose. If people like to spend their time with Mozart, football, climate change deniers, or Star Wars, so what? Why worry? The most obvious answer is also the narrowest: violent extremism. If like-minded people stir one another to greater levels of anger, the consequences can be literally dangerous. Terrorism is, in large part, a problem of hearts and minds, and violent extremists are entirely aware of that fact.

Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken in and What We Can Do About It
by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris
Published 10 Jul 2023

For example, in an interview with science journalist Ed Yong, the social psychologist Norbert Schwarz argued, “You can think of this as psychology’s version of the climate-change debate… the consensus of the vast majority of psychologists closely familiar with work in this area gets drowned out by claims of a few persistent priming skeptics.” In science, comparing critics to climate-change deniers is an extremely low blow.11 Six years later, John Bargh, the senior author of the influential elderly-walking study, published a book arguing that subtle factors have pervasive influences on our actions and thoughts in daily life, even proposing that these priming effects could be harnessed for a new form of psychotherapy.

Into the Raging Sea
by Rachel Slade
Published 4 Apr 2018

After all, who are its constituents? A few scientists with their satellites, Hurricane Hunters, and weather balloons seem like a colossal waste of money. What’s more, their data—which presents incontestable proof that oceans and the atmosphere are warming at alarming rates—is an affront to climate-change deniers. Perhaps, then, it should come as no surprise that a May 2017 White House budget proposed to cut NOAA’s budget by 16 percent. The Washington Post reported: “The budget ‘blue book’ for NOAA, which details the administration’s funding recommendations, specifically directs the agency to ‘reduce investment in numerical weather prediction modeling.’

Fortunes of Change: The Rise of the Liberal Rich and the Remaking of America
by David Callahan
Published 9 Aug 2010

Republican strategists can take away a simple message from my findings: the GOP needs to move to the center if it hopes to again command the loyalties of the upper class. The “to-do” list for Republicans here is long and getting longer. It includes moderating the party’s stance on social issues, creating distance from the Christian right, standing up to nut jobs like Rush Limbaugh, showing the door to climate change deniers, abandoning Calvin Coolidge–era economic ideas, squelching the GOP’s xenophobic wing, and learning to like at least some of the things that government does, such as investing in infrastructure and higher education. both.indd 280 5/11/10 6:27:57 AM conclusion 281 If the GOP takes steps in this direction and nominates a moderate technocrat such as Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty in 2012, or even Mitt Romney, it should be able to recover some of the ground it has lost among affluent voters and donors.

Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto
by Stewart Brand
Published 15 Mar 2009

And books have come along that expound some of my topics better than I; I wish I’d had them in hand before. Start, as the book does, with climate. In December 2009, the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen was undermined by a suspiciously sophisticated hack of emails among climatologists at the University of East Anglia, England. Once again, climate change deniers dominated the public discourse and prevented action on greenhouse gases. I responded with a New York Times op-ed titled “Four Sides to Every Story,” suggesting that it helps to distinguish four kinds of views about global warming according to whether they are driven mainly by ideology or by evidence.

The Fifth Domain: Defending Our Country, Our Companies, and Ourselves in the Age of Cyber Threats
by Richard A. Clarke and Robert K. Knake
Published 15 Jul 2019

A more powerful reason for inaction has been the opposition of state and local election officials, who see Washington’s help as an inconvenience, a condescending allegation of their failure to secure the vote, and an arrogation of local government powers. Many local election officials are in a state of denial rivaled only by climate-change deniers for their damaging effects on our country. Election Security Solution Sets Because the election ecosystem has numerous components, there is no single, all-encompassing solution. We see four discrete solution sets. The first solution set outlines minimum essential cybersecurity standards for federal elections set by law, combined with federal funding to achieve those standards.

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI
by Frank Pasquale
Published 14 May 2020

Rebecca Hersher, “What Happened When Dylann Roof Asked Google for Information about Race?” Houston Public Media, January 10, 2017, http://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/npr/2017/01/10/508363607/what-happened-when-dylann-roof-asked-google-for-information-about-race/. 37. Hiroko Tabuchi, “How Climate Change Deniers Rise to the Top in Google Searches,” New York Times, December 9, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/29/climate/google-search-climate-change.html. 38. Noble, Algorithms of Oppression. 39. Cadwalladr, “Google, Democracy and the Truth.” 40. Ben Guarino, “Google Faulted for Racial Bias in Image Search Results for Black Teenagers,” Washington Post, June 10, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/06/10/google-faulted-for-racial-bias-in-image-search-results-for-black-teenagers/?

Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect
by David Goodhart
Published 7 Sep 2020

This, he argues, is not just about “absent-minded intellectuals”; it is a case of “smart people, by test standards, often lacking rational judgement and common sense.”12 Indeed, people with high IQs can use their extra brainpower to rationalize erroneous beliefs and to dismiss the contradictory evidence that disagrees with their worldviews, which is why climate change deniers and conspiracy theorists are often people of higher cognitive ability. Similarly, a Google engineer wrote a fascinating blog about the very smart, successful people around him whose overconfidence gave them the dangerous “ability to convincingly rationalize nearly anything.”13 And the idea that, even for highly educated people, our emotions and intuitions take precedence over our reason has become commonplace, thanks to the work of Jonathan Haidt (The Righteous Mind: Why People Are Divided by Politics and Religion), Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow), and others.

Green Philosophy: How to Think Seriously About the Planet
by Roger Scruton
Published 30 Apr 2014

In a series of papers, and a striking book, Hansen has made the case for an ‘eleventh hour’ view of global warming, placing the blame explicitly on man-made carbon emissions, and advocating concerted international action if the world is to be saved from an irreversible disaster.43 Hansen has combined his scientific work with political advocacy of a dramatic kind, even getting himself arrested during a recent protest against a coal-mining operation in West Virginia, while his intemperate dismissal of those whom he calls ‘climate change deniers’ has not earned him universal respect in the scientific community.44 One of Hansen’s more dogged critics has been Richard Lindzen, professor of meteorology at MIT, who has been for some years trying to show that there is no scientific consensus for the belief in global warming.45 And Lindzen’s arguments have been amplified by Patrick J.

Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism
by Harsha Walia
Published 9 Feb 2021

Eugenics and immigration controls become the bedrock of Darwinian lifeboat theories, fueled by apocalyptic nihilism and race war fantasies. These are also masculinist savior ideologies, which merge saving the “pure” race with “guarding” a fragile earth. Even as far-right politicians are considered climate change deniers, they dive into the burgeoning field of “climate security,” prioritizing militarized borders and eco-apartheid in a warming world. The migration crisis is increasingly linked to the climate crisis, and shutting down climate migration has become their pressing concern. Marine Le Pen, for example, campaigns on an exclusionary ecological localism, where immigrants are compared to foreign invasive species, and her party puts forward screeds such as “Borders are the environment’s greatest ally; it is through them that we will save the planet.”36 Global warming accelerates existing inequalities created through colonialism and capitalism.

Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters With Reality and Virtual Reality
by Jaron Lanier
Published 21 Nov 2017

But you just have to get used to the way things work in this reality of ours. It’s a miracle, an amazement, a stunning blessing, that we can make progress at all. We can understand more than we used to. Even so, it sucks that we are still not omniscient. The imperfection of our understanding can make us lash out at science the way we lash out at our politicians. Climate change deniers and antivaccine people argue that if science isn’t done, then nothing has been settled. Sometimes, certain AI people can believe that just because we’ve learned a few things about how brains work, we must already understand everything crucial about how brains work. I feel the emotions behind these exaggerations, but what makes science worth trusting is that it doesn’t promise everything.

The Economics Anti-Textbook: A Critical Thinker's Guide to Microeconomics
by Rod Hill and Anthony Myatt
Published 15 Mar 2010

McCullough, B. D., K. A. McGeary and T. D. Harrison (2006) ‘Lessons from the JMCB archive’, Journal of Money Credit and Banking, 38(4): 1093–107. McGreal, C. (2009) ‘Revealed: millions spent by lobby firms fighting Obama health reforms’, Guardian, 1 October. McKnight, D. (2008) ‘Who is behind the climate change deniers?’, The Age (Melbourne), 2 August. McLean, B. and P. Elkind (2003) The Smartest Guys in the Room: The amazing rise and scandalous fall of Enron, New York: Portfolio. McNeil, J. R. (2000) Something New Under the Sun: An environmental history of the twentieth century, New York: W. W. Norton.

Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower's Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again
by Brittany Kaiser
Published 21 Oct 2019

I had also attended in 2017, right before Trump’s inauguration, where Chester had to protect me from attacks by people who were not pleased at the appointment of “The Donald”—especially in meetings with outspoken Hollywood stars such as Matt Damon, who rightly took issue with Trump’s disgusting choice of a climate-change denier to run the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Now it was 2018 and I was returning, but this time I was older, wiser; my feet were more firmly on the ground; and those feet were in boots with better treads. I had just turned thirty. I could be the captain of my own ship now, the architect of my destiny.

Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors and the Drug Company That Addicted America
by Beth Macy
Published 4 Mar 2019

Given opioid-related spikes in deaths, HIV, and hepatitis C, she added, “we should be sending helicopters!” Fury about the fundamental skepticism toward MAT is not restricted to the medical community. Don Flattery, a member of the Virginia Governor’s Task Force on Prescription Drug and Heroin Abuse, compared anti-MAT judges and police officers to climate-change deniers. He’d lost his twenty-six-year-old son, Kevin, to an opioid overdose and tortured himself for not insisting that Kevin stick with MAT. His son had been on Suboxone before but abandoned it prematurely, after feeling stigmatized for it, in favor of abstinence-only treatment, Flattery said. Art Van Zee, too, struggled with law enforcement complaints about buprenorphine, though he conceded that too many Suboxone providers in rural America had lax practices that spawned diversion and abuse.

Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration―and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives
by Danny Dorling and Kirsten McClure
Published 18 May 2020

As always with change, very shortly after it has happened we become used to it. According to the NASA data series, the last year that global temperatures dropped perceptibly was in 1969. They later fell, but only imperceptibly, in 1981 and 1990. The years after 2011 require a special mention. These years have been truly remarkable. Not long into this period, the climate change deniers began to fall quiet. Following the 2008 financial crisis, the world was still sunk into the greatest economic depression since the 1930s—in fact, it was larger even than the famous Great Depression itself—and yet this event appeared to have no impact on the rise in temperature, apparently none at all.

The Lonely Century: How Isolation Imperils Our Future
by Noreena Hertz
Published 13 May 2020

How to encourage people to eat locally? How to make green choices more affordable? Should the council require new homes to be carbon neutral? These were some of the questions the group was asked to address.31 At the beginning, the participants had different perspectives. Whilst there were no outright climate-change deniers amongst them, some were clearly more sceptical than others. Others were pretty new to the whole issue. Yet by means of a highly structured process with trained facilitators guiding the discussions, mindful of the need to ensure that everyone had equal voice and carefully drawing out the quietest, by the end of their two evenings and one full day of meetings the group had agreed upon seventeen steps to recommend.

A World on the Wing: The Global Odyssey of Migratory Birds
by Scott Weidensaul
Published 29 Mar 2021

Ian Davies’s checklist was like a gift from a lusher, richer past, reminding us of what might be possible if we can check the slide toward oblivion. News of the mega-migration at Tadoussac spread rapidly through birding circles and beyond, including the pages of the New York Times. Perhaps not surprisingly, it was held up by at least one climate change denier, who also disputes claims about declining bird populations, as proof that the bunny-hugger doomsayers of all sorts are wrong. And did he have a point? As Davies explained to me, there was nothing especially unique about their location on the Tadoussac dunes that day—they would have seen much the same thing anywhere along the 186-mile (300-km) shore of the St.

The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire
by Jeff Berwick and Charlie Robinson
Published 14 Apr 2020

The two items, pollution, and climate change have been intentionally blurred in an effort to obfuscate the truth of the matter which is that they are not the same. They have taken pollution, which is a real thing, and hijacked the negative properties of it for Climate Change to use, which is not a real thing. They then simultaneously created a push to demonize anyone who figures out this scam as “climate change deniers” as a means of discrediting by reflex action and effectively putting them in the same category as flat-earthers and Holocaust deniers. They were also forced into the same group as Big Oil pollution deniers who stand over a wrecked oil tanker or the latest offshore oil well that blew up and proudly proclaim that there is “nothing to see here”.

The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World
by Max Fisher
Published 5 Sep 2022

“I distinctly noticed a shift, suddenly new communities forming their identity around that,” he said, “around misogyny and misinformation.” By routing users into and between these factions, the algorithm seemed to be binding them all together. It was an aha moment for Kaiser, who saw a parallel with the German climate-change deniers. “It’s all very small and it’s splintered,” he said of his country’s climate-skeptic movement. “Really the only place where they could exchange their thoughts and coalesce and find allies was online.” These groups didn’t reflect real-world communities of any significant size, he realized.

Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall--And Those Fighting to Reverse It
by Steven Brill
Published 28 May 2018

Some conservatives dismissed the book as overwrought. A review published by the American Enterprise Institute argued that the authors had not accounted for the value of the food stamps or cash that the families might be receiving ad hoc from friends or from off-the-books work. The complaints had the ring of climate change deniers pointing out that it had snowed a lot last week. While those reactions might have been predictable, what was more disappointing was that the book evoked nothing like the reaction The Other America had. It was widely praised by reviewers who seemed to agree that it was another “call to action.”

If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities
by Benjamin R. Barber
Published 5 Nov 2013

And now we care more about the environment, and cities are better for the environment. But above all, talented people seek cities for fame. They can’t get famous in the fucking village.”3 It’s girls, not geopolitics, it’s wealth and choice. Fame. That’s not ideology, it’s cosmopolitanism in a Bass Ale mug. Not many climate change deniers among mayors; the consequences are too devastating and their own responsibility to protect the city with floodgates and borrowed Dutch dike technology are too pressing. Just ask Mayor Bloomberg about potential floods in lower Manhattan or Mayor Ed Lee about what rising oceans can do to San Francisco Bay.

What We Cannot Know: Explorations at the Edge of Knowledge
by Marcus Du Sautoy
Published 18 May 2016

It was the end of the Newtonian dream. When I was a graduate student it was thought that with better and better computer power we would get better and better weather predictions because we knew the equations and we could make more realistic models of the Earth.’ But May is cautious not to let the climate change deniers use chaos theory as a way to undermine the debate. ‘Not believing in climate change because you can’t trust weather reports is a bit like saying that because you can’t tell when the next wave is going to break on Bondi beach you don’t believe in tides.’ May likes to quote a passage from Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia to illustrate the strange tension that exists between the power of science to know some things with extraordinary accuracy and chaos theory, which denies us knowledge of many parts of the natural world.

Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence
by Amy B. Zegart
Published 6 Nov 2021

Senators know they have to work together to get anything done, and the Senate’s slower campaign tempo enables them to do it. “You become friends,” said Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-GA).132 When Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) was asked who his favorite Republican was, his answer was surprising: conservative Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe. “Jim is a climate change denier. He is really, really conservative, but you know what, he is a decent guy and I like him,” said Sanders, who joked that revealing their friendship might ruin Inhofe’s career.133 Committee rules both reflect and reinforce these differences. Membership is just one example. In the Senate Intelligence Committee, the majority party always has just one more member than the minority.

The Price Is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won't Save the Planet
by Brett Christophers
Published 12 Mar 2024

‘When I have constituents coming into my office and breaking down in tears in front of me because they can’t pay their electricity bill,’ Kelly, in turn, lamented, ‘it is very hard to go into parliament and vote for something that will make electricity prices higher than they would otherwise be.’17 Kelly, for his part, is a serial climate change denier, and, notoriously, the founder, in 2019, of the group of Parliamentary Friends of Australian Coal Exports. But, whoever it was – a journalist, the IEA, a renewables advocate or antagonist – and wherever in the world they happened to be considering the question of the energy transition, in the crucial period of the 1990s and 2000s during which dominant ways of understanding the drivers of that transition fell into place, essentially everyone agreed on one thing.

The Disappearing Act
by Florence de Changy
Published 24 Dec 2020

Although he declined to be specific about ‘who said what to whom’, Abbott said: ‘I want to be absolutely crystal clear – it was understood at the highest levels that this was almost certainly murder-suicide by the pilot, mass murder-suicide by the pilot.’ In other words, Malaysia knew it, but chose to protect him. As squalid as one may find this far-right climate-change denier, who seems to be desperately missing the limelight after his short two years in power in Canberra (between 2013 and 2015), I am tempted to believe that, on this occasion, he was probably telling the truth, or rather, he was accurately reporting what he had been told in 2014, most likely by the then Prime Minister Najib.

The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions
by Greta Thunberg
Published 14 Feb 2023

These are heavy conclusions for people to accept. No one wants to admit to being duped by disinformation or blinded by a myth, and people in positions of privilege rarely examine the basis for that privilege. Perhaps, most deeply, the climate crisis breaks the promise of progress. And so, even today, many people who are not necessarily climate-change ‘deniers’ resist meaningful action, refuse to acknowledge just how broken our economic systems are, and deny how much damage industry disinformation has done. / People in positions of power and privilege refused to acknowledge that climate change was a manifestation of a broken economic system. 1.8 Tipping Points and Feedback Loops Johan Rockström Scientifically, it is now well established that Earth has entered a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, where our globalized world constitutes the largest driver of change on Earth.

The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View From the Future
by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway
Published 30 Jun 2014

(In hindsight, the self-justificatory aspects of the U.S. position are obvious, but they were not apparent to many at the time.) Some countries tried but failed to force the United States into international cooperation. Other nations used inertia in the United States to excuse their own patterns of destructive development. By the end of the millennium, climate change denial had spread widely. In the United States, political leaders—including the president, members of Congress, and members of state legislatures—took denialist positions. In Europe, Australia, and Canada, the message of “uncertainty” was 6 T h e C o m i N g o f T h e P e N u m b r A l A g e promoted by industrialists, bankers, and some political leaders.

…

Fiction gives you more latitude, and here we try to use that latitude in interesting and thought-provoking ways, but always with the goal of being true to the facts: true to what science tells us could really happen if we continue with business as usual, and true to what history suggests is plausible. Nothing is invented out of whole cloth. NO: In my talks, I like to remind folks of Robinson’s wonderful line: “The invisible hand never picks up the check.” That’s market failure in a nutshell. Stan was one of the first people to get the connection between neoliberalism and climate change denial and the first to work that theme into fiction, at least as far as I know. It’s interesting to me that he is very influenced by history of science. I suppose it’s the sense I got from his work of a blend created by honoring the factual I N t e r v I e w w I t h t h e A u t h O r s 67 constraints of nature—as illuminated by science— with the creative opportunities offered by fiction— that helped to inspire this piece.

Masters of Mankind
by Noam Chomsky
Published 1 Sep 2014

One current illustration of their concern is the Environmental Literacy Improvement Act being proposed to legislatures by ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, a corporate-funded lobby that designs legislation to serve the needs of the corporate sector and extreme wealth. The ALEC act mandates “balanced” teaching of climate science in K–12 classrooms. “Balanced teaching” is a code phrase that refers to teaching climate-change denial in order to “balance” mainstream climate science. It is analogous to the “balanced teaching” advocated by creationists to enable the teaching of “creation science” in public schools.9 Legislation based on ALEC models has already been introduced in several states. The ALEC legislation is based on a project of the Heartland Institute, a corporate-funded think tank dedicated to rejecting the scientific consensus on the climate.

…

At the Republican National Committee’s winter meeting a few weeks ago, Governor Bobby Jindal warned the leadership “we must stop being the stupid party. . . . We must stop insulting the intelligence of voters.”12 ALEC and its corporate backers, in contrast, want the country to be “the stupid nation”—and for principled reasons. One of the dark-money organizations of billionaires funding climate-change denial is Donors Trust, which is also a major contributor to efforts to deny voting rights to poor Blacks. That makes sense. African-Americans tend to be Democrats, even social democrats, and might even go so far as to pay attention to science, unlike those properly trained to think critically by “balanced” teaching.

…

Kelly Sims Gallagher, “Why and How Governments Support Renewable Energy,” Daedalus 142, no. 1 (Winter 2013), pp. 59–77. 8. Jon A. Krosnick and Bo MacInnis, “Does the American Public Support Legislation to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions?” Daedalus 142, no. 1 (Winter 2013), pp. 26–39. 9. Steve Horn, “Three States Pushing ALEC Bill to Require Teaching Climate Change Denial in Schools,” DeSmogBlog, January 31, 2013. 10. Bill Dedman, “Leaked: A Plan to Teach Climate Change Skepticism in Schools,” NBC News, February 15, 2012. Brendan DeMelle, “Heartland Institute Exposed: Internal Documents Unmask Heart of Climate Denial Machine,” DeSmogBlog, February 14, 2012. 11.

Seveneves
by Neal Stephenson
Published 19 May 2015

The very reason that so many people trusted him when he went on TV was that he was a straight shooter, he said things that offended the powerful, he stirred things up, and he didn’t care. Certain of those moments had been enshrined forever in YouTube clips and Reddit memes: taking down a Republican senator who didn’t believe in evolution, destroying a climate change denier in an impromptu sidewalk confrontation, reducing a movie star to tears on the Today show by telling her that her stand against childhood vaccination made her personally responsible for the deaths of thousands of babies. So, in a way, there were two questions in his head at the same time: whether he would lie, and whether he could lie.

The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World
by Daniel Yergin
Published 14 May 2011

In what was considered one of the striking comments, the minister’s report said that the Gangotri glacier, which feeds the river Ganges, receded fastest in 1977 and today is “practically at a standstill.” The Indian government’s study stirred a storm of protest. Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the IPCC, dismissed it as “arrogant” and “voodoo science” of the ilk associated with “climate change deniers and school boy science.” But then it emerged that the 2035 date was itself not the result of careful research but rather the product of a phone interview with an Indian scientist in 1999 by an English science magazine. The assertion had then been picked up in a report by an environmental group and then was “copied straight into the IPCC impacts assessment.”

We Are Bellingcat: Global Crime, Online Sleuths, and the Bold Future of News
by Eliot Higgins
Published 2 Mar 2021

Beeley is a revealing case study, for she writes mainly for 21stCenturyWire, but also appears on RT and Sputnik, and her work has been republished at the website Global Research, whose title suggests ‘think tank’ but is actually a clearing house for conspiracy theories, from anti-vaxxers, to 9/11 truthers, to climate-change denial, while also dabbling in anti-Semitic tropes. By 2019, Beeley was making ever more outlandish assertions, claiming ‘evidence of White Helmets’ involvement in organ trafficking in Syria. The lucrative trade of human body parts, bones, blood and organs is one of the most protected and hidden harvests of war.’

…

N. here Blair, Tony here Boogaloo movement here Borden, Dan here Boshirov, Ruslan, see Chepiga, Anatoliy Boston bombings here, here Brace, Chris here Braha, Sébastien here Breaking the Silence here Brega here Brennan, Fredrick here Browne, Malachy here, here Buk missile system here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Bulgarian assassination attempt here BuzzFeed News here Cameron, David here Cameroon here Carvin, Andy here, here, here, here, here Catalonian independence movement here Channel here, here, here ‘channers’ (4chan and here, here Charlottesville, Virginia here, here, here Chechnya here, here Check here, here Checkdesk here, here, here Chepiga, Anatoliy (‘Ruslan Boshirov’) here, here, here, here, here, here, here Chepur, Sergey here child sexual abuse here China here, here Chivers, C. J. here, here chlorine gas here Christchurch shootings here, here, here, here Christian Science Monitor here citizen journalism, rise of here, here, here climate-change denial here Clinton, Hillary here, here CNN here, here, here, here Columbine massacre here Colvin, Marie here, here confirmation bias here Congo here Counterfactual Community here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Covid-19 pandemic here, here, here Cracked here Crimea, Russian annexation of here, here, here, here criminal justice here CrowdStrike here cyberspace, US domination of here Czuperski, Maks here Dagestan here Daily Mail here Damascus here, here, here, here, here chemical attacks here, here, here, here, here Daraa here Dawes, Kevin here Dawson, Ryan here de Kock, Peter here De Wereld Draait Door here ‘death flights’ here Deep State here Deepfake Detection Challenge here ‘deepfakes’ here, here Democratic National Convention here Denmark here Detroit street gangs here ‘digilantism’ here DigitalGlobe here, here Discord here disinformation here, here, here, here resistance to here and Skripal poisoning here and social media here and Syrian conflict here, here, here see also Counterfactual Community diversity, and online community here Dix, Jacob here DNA profiling here Dobrokhtov, Roman here, here, here, here Donetsk here, here, here, here Douma, see Damascus, chemical attacks Dowler, Milly here doxxing here, here drones here drugs cartels here Duke, David here Dutch Safety Board here, here El Paso shooting here Ellis, Hannah here ‘elves’ here emergency-dispatch calls here Encyclopedia Dramatica here environmental damage here Escher, Federico here ethnic cleansing here European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) here Europol here Evans, Robert here, here, here, here Extreme Toxicology here fact-checking projects here Faktenfinder here ‘false triangulation’ here Falun Gong here Fancy Bear here, here Far Eastern Military Command Academy here, here Fedotov, Sergey, see Sergeev, Denis 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Financial Times here Finland here First Draft News here Firth, Sara here Fisk, Robert here Fitzpatrick, Catherine A. here Floyd, George here Flynn, General Michael here Foley, James here, here Fontanka here Foreign Policy here, here, here Forensic Architecture here, here Forensic Science Centre of Lithuania here Fox News here, here Free Syrian Army here, here, here, here, here Freeman, Lindsay here FSB here, here, here, here Full Fact here Gab here Gaddafi, Muammar here, here, here, here, here, here Galustian, Richard here Gamergate here, here geolocation here, here, here, here, here, here, here GetContact here Ghouta, see Damascus, chemical attacks Global Legal Action Network (GLAN) here GlobalResearch here Google Digital News Initiative here Gorelyh, Ilya here Grant, Hugh here Graph Search here Gray, Freddie here ‘Great Replacement, The’ here Gregory, Sam here Grozev, Christo here, here, here, here, here, here, here GRU here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Guardian here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here gun control here Hadi, Abdrabbuh Mansur here Haftar, General Khalifa here Haggard, Andrew here, here, here, here Hague, William here Hama here, here, here, here al-Hamwi, Sami here Hanham, Melissa here Hayden, General Michael here Hebron here Helsingin Sanomat here Henderson, Ian here, here Hersh, Seymour here Heyer, Heather here Hitchens, Peter here Hitler, Adolf here Holocaust here, here Homs here, here, here, here, here, here Houla massacre here, here, here Houthis here Human Rights Center here Human Rights Watch here, here, here, here Hunchly here Hussein, Saddam here Identity Evropa here Ilovaysk, Battle of here IMINT (imagery intelligence) here India here Information Wars here, here, here, here InfoWars here, here, here, here Insider, The here, here, here, here, here, here, here International Criminal Court here, here international criminal law, and technological advances here Internet Research Agency here Interpreter, The here Iran here, here, here Iraq here, here, here, here, here ISIS here, here, here, here, here, here Israel here, here Issacharoff, Dean here ITAR-TASS here Ivannikov, Oleg Vladimirovich here Jabal Shashabo here, here Jabhat al-Nusra here Jespersen, Bjørn here Joint Investigation Team here, here, here, here, here Jones, Alex here, here Jukes, Peter here, here Kahn Sheikhoun sarin attack here, here Kaszeta, Dan here KGB here, here, here Khashoggi, Jamal here, here Al Khatib, Hadi here, here, here Khrushchev, Colonel Evgeny here King, Shaun here Kivimäki, Veli-Pekka (VP) here, here, here Koenig, Alexa here Koettl, Christoph here, here Kommersant here Kovalchuk, Alexander here Krasnodon here Ku Klux Klan here, here, here Kuhotkin, Sergey here Kursk here, here Al-Laham, Mimi here Lane, David here Las Vegas shootings here Lavrov, Sergey here, here, here Lebanon here Leicestershire Police here Lens Young Homsi here Leroy, Aliaume here, here Les Décodeurs here Libya here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Al-Saiq Brigade atrocities here Libyan National Army here, here Litvinenko, Alexander here LiveJournal here London Review of Books here Loyga here Luhansk here, here, here Lyons, Josh here, here McClatchy DC Bureau here Macron, Emmanuel here Magnitsky, Sergei here Makarenko, Vladimir here Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, here Mamontov, Arkady here Martin, Ryan here mass shootings, conspiracy theories here Matrix, The here May, Theresa here Medvedev, Dmitri here Mein Kampf here Middle East Live here Military Medical Academy here Millerovo here, here MintPress News here, here ‘miserabilism’ here, here, here Mishkin, Alexander (‘Alexander Petrov’) here, here, here, here, here Misrata here, here Mnemonic here Moldova here Montenegro coup plot here, here, here Morgan, Daniel here Moussa, Jenan here Mubarak, Hosni here Münster here Murdoch, Rupert here Musk, Elon here al-Musulmani, Ahmad here Myanmar here Mystery Munitions here, here National Center for Media Forensics here NATO here, here, here Navalny, Alexey here Nayda, Vitaly here Nazi affiliations here, here, here, here New York Times here, here, here, here News Provenance Project here New Yorker here News of the World here Newsweek here Newtral here Nimmo, Ben here North Korea here, here NPR here, here Nuremberg trials here Obama, Barack here, here, here, here, here Odnoklassniki here, here Oliphant, Roland here OpenAI here Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) here, here, here OSINT (open-source intelligence) here Ostanin, Iggy here, here, here, here Owens, Candace here paedophiles here Pagella Politica here Pakistan here Pandora Intelligence here Panoramio here Paris Match here, here, here, here, here Paris terrorist attacks here Patriot Prayer here Peele, Jordan here Pelosi, Nancy here, here Pepe the Frog here, here Periscope here Peskov, Dmitry here Petrov, Alexander, see Mishkin, Alexander phone-hacking scandal here, here, here, here, here, here Pinochet, General Augusto here Pittsburgh synagogue attack here Postal, Chris here post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) here Poway synagogue attack here Press TV here Prison Planet here Professional Pilots Rumour Network here Protocol on Open Source Investigations here ProtonMail here Proud Boys here Putin, Vladimir here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty here Radio Svoboda here Rapp, Stephen here Reddit here, here ‘red-pilling’ here, here Rees, Gavin here Regular Contributor, The here Reporters’ Lab here Respekt here Reuters here, here reverse image searches here Revolution Man here rhino poaching here Roberts, Zach D. here Romein, Daniel here, here, here, here, here Rosen, Jay here Roshka, Georgy Petrovich here RosPassport database here Rostov Oblast here RTL Nieuws here Russia-1 here Russia Today (RT) here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Petrov/Boshirov interview here, here, here, here, here Russian databases, leaked here, here Russian Defence Ministry here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Russian Foreign ministry here Rwanda here St Petersburg here Saleh, Ali Abdullah here, here Saoud, Sari here sarin gas here, here, here, here satellite imagery here, here, here, here Saudi Arabia here, here, here, here, here, here, here Schiphol Airport here Schmitt, Eric here Second Life here Second World War here, here Senezh here Sergeev, Denis (‘Sergey Fedotov’) here shabiha here Shaif, Rawan here Shikhany institute here ‘shitposting’ here, here Simon, Scott here Simonyan, Margarita here Skripal poisoning here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Sky News here Slack here, here Snizhne here, here, here, here, here, here Snopes here, here social media algorithms here archiving here ISIS and here searching here Sofronov, G.

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History
by Kurt Andersen
Published 14 Sep 2020

Hayek’s final book, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism, in the 1980s. *9 Stock buybacks aren’t performance-enhancing drugs, because those actually make athletes run faster and hit baseballs farther. *10 Another epic irony: although Charles Koch is responsible for horrific damage—by promoting right-wing political economics and climate change denial, and by corrupting government with profits from his fossil fuel company—Koch Industries is a model of responsible old-fashioned corporate governance: as a private company, not beholden to Wall Street or investor hysteria, it has no public shares to buy back, so it reinvests almost all its profits in the company and holds on to the companies it acquires

…

As Senator Moynihan had started saying at the time about political discourse in general, they decided they were entitled not just to their own opinions about policies for addressing climate change, but to their own facts concerning its existence and causes and possible impacts. Four years later, in 2002, yet another influential memo about denying climate science circulated among Republicans, this one by the prominent strategist and pollster Frank Luntz. He advised them that so far their decade of climate-change-denial propaganda had been effective, but they needed to redouble it. “Voters believe there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community,” he wrote. “Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly.

…

Which is probably a reason why, at the same time, the oil and coal billionaires Charles and David Koch, together with ExxonMobil and more than a hundred right-wing foundations, were funneling hundreds of millions a year to organizations working against the mitigation of global warming. Before long, full-on climate change denialism was Republican orthodoxy. As recently as 2008, their national party platform had respectfully mentioned “climate change” thirteen times, stipulating that it was indeed caused by “human economic activity” and committing Republicans to “decreasing the long term demand for oil.” At the next convention, the platform mentioned “climate change” just once, in scare quotes, only to disparage concern about it

No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need
by Naomi Klein
Published 12 Jun 2017

In books, documentary films, and investigative reporting, I have documented a range of trends: the rise of Superbrands, the expanding power of private wealth over the political system, the global imposition of neoliberalism, often using racism and fear of the “other” as a potent tool, the damaging impacts of corporate free trade, and the deep hold that climate change denial has taken on the right side of the political spectrum. And as I began to research Trump, he started to seem to me like Frankenstein’s monster, sewn together out of the body parts of all of these and many other dangerous trends. Ten years ago, I published The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, an investigation that spanned four decades of history, from Chile after Augusto Pinochet’s coup to Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, from Baghdad under the US “Shock and Awe” attack to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

…

We were trying to hold them to their word in Paris, and we were making some progress. But now Trump is saying: Leave all that money in the ground? Are you nuts?! A Very Oily Administration On the campaign trail, Trump’s standard stump speech reliably hit all the crowd-pleasers: build the wall, bring back the jobs, law and order, Crooked Hillary. Climate change denial usually didn’t make the list (though Trump would spout off if asked). But if the issue seemed peripheral during the campaign, that changed as soon as Trump began making appointments. And since his inauguration, taking aim at any and all climate protections has been a defining feature of the Trump administration.

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century
by Rodrigo Aguilera
Published 10 Mar 2020

Likewise, peace is certainly better than war, but what does this say about peace enforced through subjugation or hegemony, or how does this guarantee that our political leaders will avoid military confrontation when national interests are put ahead of global ones? Intelligence is better than ignorance, but why has this not stopped educated people in rich, Western countries from believing and even actively promoting scientifically ludicrous ideas such as climate change denial and anti-vaccination conspiracy theories? Unlike the New Optimists, I make no presumption that the reader is not smart enough to critically engage with these issues. Indeed I would expect them to realize that on many issues, such as poverty or happiness, we are far from having a definitive understanding of them much less their requisite solutions.

…

It is also incongruent that the Schumpeterian affinity of hyper-capitalist climate deniers towards “creative destruction” applies to most other industries but not the dirty ones; typically, the absurdist defense of obsolete industries is seen as a mantra of the left, not the right. It does not help that climate change denial is a tribalist narrative held primarily by conservatives, at least in the United States. There is no real reason it should be. European right-wing parties and even the less progressive governments of the Third World are broadly committed to the issue even if in many cases such commitment does not go beyond the superficial.

Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now
by Jaron Lanier
Published 28 May 2018

I don’t know how far that goes with wolves, but it’s dramatic in people. When people are locked in a competitive, hierarchical power structure, as in a corporation, they can lose sight of the reality of what they’re doing because the immediate power struggle looms larger than reality itself. The example that looms largest today is climate change denialism. In the scientific community and among virtually all nations in the world, there’s a consensus that we must confront it, and yet a small but powerful group of businesspeople and politicians don’t buy it. They perceive the science of climate change as a plot to attack their wealth and power.

Because We Say So
by Noam Chomsky

One current illustration of their concern is the “Environmental Literacy Improvement Act” proposed to state legislatures by ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, a corporate-funded lobby that designs legislation to serve the needs of the corporate sector and extreme wealth. The ALEC Act mandates “balanced teaching” of climate science in K–12 classrooms. “Balanced teaching” is a code phrase that refers to teaching climate-change denial, to “balance” mainstream climate science. It is analogous to the “balanced teaching” advocated by creationists to enable the teaching of “creation science” in public schools. Legislation based on ALEC models has already been introduced in several states. Of course, all of this is dressed up in rhetoric about teaching critical thinking—a fine idea, no doubt, but it’s easy to think up far better examples than an issue that threatens our survival and has been selected because of its importance in terms of corporate profits.

A Line in the Tar Sands: Struggles for Environmental Justice
by Tony Weis and Joshua Kahn Russell
Published 14 Oct 2014

These systemic problems cannot be solved without substantial redistribution of power and resources globally, yet the Athabasca tar sands are also situated in a specific place, and the industry disproportionately affects local people. Merely using campaigning tools that tweak the current order will not suffice, for several reasons. First, the current political environment prioritizes climate change denialism, fossil fuel “independence,” and ever-increasing resources for the richest segment of society. These patterns do not set a good scene for making change within the system. We are not in a functioning democracy that could slow down the tar sands industry through legislative, electoral, and legal means.

…

This approach is taken from Kenrick (2013), who argues that there are in fact three prongs to combatting climate change: confronting the system, working for change within the system, and building a new system. While I refer to the third prong implicitly in this discussion, it is the first two that are most relevant to the tar sands subset of the climate change battle. See Justin Kenrick, “Emerging from the Shadow of Climate Change Denial,” ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 12,1 (2013), 102–30, www.acme-journal.org/vol12/Kenrick2013.pdf. 2. For more information on the centuries of injustice experienced by Indigenous peoples in Alberta, see Jennifer Huseman and Damien Short, “‘A slow industrial genocide’: Tar sands and the Indigenous Peoples of northern Alberta,” The International Journal of Human Rights, 16,1 (2012), 216–37. 3.

The Secret World of Oil
by Ken Silverstein
Published 30 Apr 2014

He was the key Democratic author of 1978 legislation that eliminated price ceilings on natural gas and slashed federal regulation of interstate gas sales, and also a chief advocate for a 1995 bill that greatly expanded deepwater drilling and reduced federal royalty payments on it. On his retirement, he formed Johnston & Associates with his son Hunter Johnston, and the two have lobbied for energy interests ever since. His other post-Senate affiliations include membership on the Chevron board and policy adviser to the Heartland Institute, a clearinghouse for climate change denial information heavily funded by oil companies. As of 2013 the eighty-year-old Johnston was still at it: the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by him opposing tighter regulation of natural gas in which he said, “The free market might not always lead to everyone’s definition of the sweet spot, but experience has shown that it is a better allocator and regulator than bureaucrats and politicians.” 7.

Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth
by Juliet B. Schor
Published 12 May 2010

Ross, and ran on April 2, 1972. 52 seen as prima facie evidence: Price trends cannot be assumed to simply represent the balance of supply and demand at a point in time, a point I return to in chapter 3. They also incorporate market participants’ views about the future and the state of knowledge. For example, climate-change denial affects energy prices. 53 Beckerman dismissed it as a scare story: Beckerman (1972). 5 percent improvement in world output is from Nordhaus (1982), p. 242. Even a decade later, Nordhaus (1991) concluded that “climate change is likely to produce a combination of gains and losses with no strong presumption of substantial net economic damages” (p. 993).

How to Do Nothing
by Jenny Odell
Published 8 Apr 2019

To stand apart is to look at the world (now) from the point of view of the world as it could be (the future), with all of the hope and sorrowful contemplation that this entails. Both apart from and responsible to the present, we might allow ourselves to sense the faint outline of an Epicurean good life free from “myths and superstitions” like racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, climate change denial, and other fears with no basis in reality. This is no idle exercise. As the attention economy works to keep us trapped in a frightful present, it only becomes more important not just to recognize past versions of our predicament but to retain the capacity for an imagination somehow untainted by disappointment.

Mythology of Work: How Capitalism Persists Despite Itself
by Peter Fleming
Published 14 Jun 2015

Sinha Group ref1 Becker, G. ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Benjamin, W. ref1, ref2 Berardi, F. ref1 Beynon, H. ref1 big government ref1, ref2, ref3 Bikini Kill ref1 biopolitics and biopower ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 and uses of illness at work ref1 Bloch, E. ref1 body clock ref1 bonuses ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Brabeck, Peter ref1 Branson, Richard ref1 Braverman, H. ref1 Brecht, B. ref1 Breed, L. ref1 British Journal of Psychiatry ref1 British Petroleum (BP), rebranded as ‘Beyond Petroleum’ ref1, ref2, ref3 Brown, Derren ref1 Bukowski, C. ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 bullshit jobs ref1 bureaucracy ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Buried (Cortés) ref1 Bush, George W. ref1, ref2 business ethics ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 see also corporate social responsibility capitalism ref1, ref2 and class ref1, ref2 and critical theory ref1 and debt ref1 and democracy ref1, ref2 effect on time ref1, ref2, ref3 and engagement of workers ref1, ref2 and freedom of expression ref1 global ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 and ideological structures ref1 and rationalization ref1, ref2 shareholder capitalism ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 and surplus labour ref1 see also neoliberal capitalism Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (Australia) ref1 Carr, Allen ref1 Cederström, C. ref1 Certeau, M. de ref1, ref2 Challenger Space Shuttle (1986) ref1 Chomsky, N. ref1 Cipollone, Mrs ref1 circadian rhythms ref1 Clastres, P. ref1 climate change denial ref1 co-optation ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 the common ref1, ref2, ref3 communication guerrilla groups ref1 communism ref1, ref2, ref3 construction industry, house building ref1, ref2 consumer society ref1, ref2, ref3 corporate citizenship ref1, ref2, ref3 corporate ideology ref1 and contradiction ref1 and enlightened self-interest ref1 and ‘false truth-telling’ ref1, ref2, ref3 impact of financial crisis ref1 as lie telling ref1 corporate social responsibility (CSR) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 in tobacco industry ref1 corporations ref1 ‘creating shared value’ ref1, ref2 and development of capitalist ideology ref1 and work–life balance policies ref1 Cortés, Rodrigo ref1 Crane, A. ref1 Crary, J. ref1, ref2 creditocracy ref1 Critchley, S. ref1 criticism/criticality and ‘sad truths’ ref1 usefulness of ref1 Crozier, M. ref1 The Cube (Natali) ref1 culture management ref1 Daimler ref1 Dardot, P. ref1, ref2 Dawkins, Richard ref1 deaths work-related ref1, ref2 see also suicides debt/indebtedness ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 deformalization ref1 informality and authoritarianism ref1, ref2 Deleuze, G. ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 biopower ref1, ref2, ref3 on criticism/criticality ref1, ref2 and de-subjectification ref1 and deceptive truths ref1 and illness ref1, ref2, ref3 language ref1, ref2 societies of control ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 democracy and capitalism ref1, ref2 corporations and ref1, ref2 and false truth telling ref1 post-state democratic organizations ref1 self-organized ref1 workplace ref1 desertion ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 dialogical reason autobiographical truth telling ref1 critique of ref1 dialectical reason ref1, ref2 dialogical politics at work ref1 dissenting consent ref1 humour ref1 irony ref1, ref2 post-dialogical politics at work ref1 abandonment ref1 absentification ref1 disciplinary power ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 disposability ref1, ref2, ref3 see also abandonment ideology dissent commodification of ref1 dissenting consent ref1 Edwards, R. ref1 Eggers, D. ref1 email ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 using outside working hours ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 empty labour ref1, ref2 ‘Endies’ (Employed but with No Disposable Income or Savings) ref1 Enron ref1 Erhardt, Moritz ref1 escape ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 antinomies of ref1 cinematic visions of ref1, ref2, ref3 negative optics of revolt ref1 see also alcohol consumption; desertion; post-labour strategy; suicide; totality refusal EU Time Directive ref1 exploitation ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 CSR and ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 and debt ref1, ref2 and escape ref1, ref2 and managerialism ref1, ref2 self-exploitation ref1, ref2, ref3 and self-reliance ref1, ref2, ref3 and subsidization ref1 see also working hours false truth telling ref1 semantic structure of ref1 in tobacco industry ref1, ref2 using the truth to lie ref1 see also dialogical politics; rituals of truth and reconciliation Feldman, R.S. ref1 financial crisis (2008) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 impact on corporate ideology ref1 Fisher, M. ref1 Flanagan, B. ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Fleming, P. ref1 flexible labour ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 collective self-reliance of workforce ref1, ref2, ref3 Fordism ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 and alienation ref1 end of ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Foster, J.B. ref1 Foucault, M. ref1, ref2 aphasia ref1 biopower and biopolitics ref1, ref2, ref3 disciplinary power ref1 parrhesia ref1, ref2, ref3 prison ref1 and regimes of truth ref1 technologies of the self ref1 Foxconn (China) ref1 France Telecom ref1 free time, dangers of ref1, ref2 Freud, S. ref1, ref2, ref3 Friedman, L. ref1 Friedman, M. ref1 ‘Fuck you!’

The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age
by Astra Taylor
Published 4 Mar 2014

All the tech giants are getting in on the lobbying game, but for one particularly controversial initiative, consider the Facebook-led lobbying group FWD.us. In 2013, Google, Facebook, and Yelp all joined ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council—a lobbying organization notorious for supporting climate change denial, undermining gun control, and busting unions—even as companies including Kraft Foods and Pepsi left due to consumer pressure. 1: A PEASANT’S KINGDOM 1. For the 450,000 jobs figure, see Sarah Lacy, Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0 (New York: Gotham, 2008), 13.

Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life
by Eric Klinenberg
Published 10 Sep 2018

But Sandy was important for other reasons: Not only did it reveal the surprisingly fragile physical and social infrastructure of one of the world’s wealthiest and best-protected metropolitan areas, but it also directly affected the political, economic, and media elite of the United States. The fossil fuel industry has had great success promoting climate change denial and policy stagnation on all variety of environmental matters, but Sandy forced many of America’s most powerful institutions to begin reckoning with global warming. A wide range of people and institutions that have the capacity to shape public opinion, social policy, and urban planning see the world differently today than they did before Sandy hit.

Street Smart: The Rise of Cities and the Fall of Cars
by Samuel I. Schwartz
Published 17 Aug 2015

In September 2014 Tim Dickinson in Rolling Stone described what the brothers’ businesses were: “Koch-owned businesses trade, transport, refine and process fossil fuels.” This book is way too short to document all the silliness and conspiracy-mongering funded by AFP. But no matter how much time they spend on climate-change denial, repealing the Affordable Care Act, or attacking Agenda 21, the nonbinding United Nations blueprint for sustainable development, AFP and the Koch brothers–funded Reason Foundation always seem to find a few idle hours each day to oppose public-transit investment. In 2014 alone, they spent hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars undermining a program of dedicated transit lines in Nashville; forbidding the city of Indianapolis from even studying a light rail system; fighting—and, happily, losing—battles opposing the Washington Metro’s expansion into Loudon County, Virginia, and Los Angeles’s Exposition Line rail system; and killing Florida’s plans for a high-speed rail system, which had been overwhelmingly approved by the state’s voters.

Power, for All: How It Really Works and Why It's Everyone's Business
by Julie Battilana and Tiziana Casciaro
Published 30 Aug 2021

A leaked memo dated 1998 set out the industry’s strategy: Working with the same public relations group big tobacco used to hide the health effects of smoking from the public, the fossil fuel industry launched a deep-pocketed, full-throttle effort to sow doubt around climate science.22 Think tanks and advocacy organizations, funded by families who had made their fortune in oil, launched ads, published reports, and trained skeptical “scientists” to become ambassadors of climate change denialism. Between 2003 and 2010, some ninety-one conservative organizations received half a billion dollars in funding to undermine Americans’ faith in climate science,23 while, in parallel, oil companies were designing rigs from the Arctic to the North Sea to account for rising sea levels and coastal erosion.24 Perfectly aware of the long-term consequences of their greed, the barons of the oil and gas industry stayed the course.

Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason
by William Davies
Published 26 Feb 2019

The sense that experts are a privileged “elite” who then instruct the rest of us what to believe is prevalent in many reactionary and populist movements such as the Tea Party and the alt-right. Dominic Cummings, campaign director of Vote Leave which campaigned for Britain to leave the European Union, is routinely dismissive of “cargo-cult science,” a charge that compares established scientific circles to religious cults, impervious to the critiques of outsiders. Climate-change denialism depends on the idea that climate scientists are an inward-looking community, who only seek evidence that reinforces what they’ve already declared true. And yet when climate scientists don’t offer consensus, they are attacked on the opposite grounds, that their facts are fraught with politics and nothing is agreed.

Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming
by Mckenzie Funk
Published 22 Jan 2014

Our message should be: Bring on the American Ingenuity. Stop the green pig.” Gingrich was a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the éminence grise of conservative thought, home over the years to everyone from Milton Friedman to Dick Cheney. Outsiders still accuse it of climate-change denial. It has received funding from ExxonMobil, lobbied against the Kyoto Protocol, and offered scientists $10,000 for papers undermining the IPCC. But climate change was real, the co-director of AEI’s geoengineering program told me in 2009. Now there were two questions: Do you want to do something?

Merchants of the Right: Gun Sellers and the Crisis of American Democracy
by Jennifer Carlson
Published 2 May 2023

sh=754ddc494a09. Russell-Brown, K. (2009). The Color of Crime. NYU Press. Rust, S. (2019). Report Details How Exxon Mobil and Fossil Fuel Firms Sowed Seeds of Doubt on Climate Change. Los Angeles Times. Accessed August 12, 2021. https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2019-10-21/oil-companies-exxon-climate-change-denial-report. Salazar, M. (2020). “I Didn’t Believe in It”: Man Who Thought Virus Was a Hoax Was Days Away from Dying. News 4 San Antonio. Accessed August 10, 2021. https://news4sanantonio.com/news/coronavirus/i-didnt-believe-in-it-man-who-thought-virus-was-a-hoax-was-days-away-from-dying. Sallaz, J.

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
by Steven Pinker
Published 13 Feb 2018

No, we should treat it as an opportunity to abolish free markets, restructure the global economy, and remake our political system.51 In one of the more surreal episodes in the history of environmental politics, Klein joined the infamous David and Charles Koch, the billionaire oil industrialists and bankrollers of climate change denial, in helping to defeat a 2016 Washington state ballot initiative that would have implemented the country’s first carbon tax, the policy measure which almost every analyst endorses as a prerequisite to dealing with climate change.52 Why? Because the measure was “right-wing friendly,” and it did not “make the polluters pay, and put their immoral profits to work repairing the damage they have knowingly created.”

…

Among the skeptics who have been convinced are the libertarian science writers Michael Shermer, Matt Ridley, and Ronald Bailey. 46. Consensus among climate scientists: Powell 2015; G. Stern, “Fifty Years After U.S. Climate Warning, Scientists Confront Communication Barriers,” Science, Nov. 27, 2015; see also the preceding note. 47. Climate change denialism: Morton 2015; Oreskes & Conway 2010; Powell 2015. 48. Bona fides on political correctness: I am on the advisory boards of the Foundation for Individual Rights on Education (https://www.thefire.org/about-us/board-of-directors-page/), the Heterodox Academy (http://heterodoxacademy.org/about-us/advisory-board/), and the Academic Engagement Network (http://www.academicengagement.org/en/about-us/leadership); see also Pinker 2002/2016, 2006.

Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World
by Adam Tooze
Published 31 Jul 2018

Chapter 3 TRANSATLANTIC FINANCE Americans liked to think of their problems as American and outsiders were only too happy to concur. As the mortgage meltdown spread like a lethal virus across urban America in 2007–2008, European commentators took up the narrative of an American national crisis. “Feral” financial capitalism, like the Iraq war and climate change denial, was part of a toxic Anglo-American variant on modernity.1 When the storm broke in 2008, the Schadenfreude among European politicians was palpable. The polite phrases at the UN only scratched the surface. On September 16, 2008, as Wall Street unraveled, Peer Steinbrück, Germany’s tough-talking SPD finance minister, went before the Bundestag to announce that the global financial system faced a crisis originating in America from which Germany had so far been spared.

…

As the Tunisian and Egyptian dictatorships toppled, conservative social media activists urged their followers to tweet “Bernanke has blood on his hands.”6 Meanwhile, the liberal press fired back: It wasn’t monetary policy that was responsible for high commodity prices and food riots, it was global warming. That riposte allowed Paul Krugman to equate conservative opposition to quantitative easing to climate change denial.7 It wasn’t so much a serious debate about the Arab Spring as indicative of the increasingly unhinged quality of American political discourse. Europe was closer to the North African drama, but its reaction was hardly more coherent. France, Britain and Germany fell out over the NATO intervention in Libya, with Germany siding, as it had done at the Seoul G20, with China and Russia.

They Don't Represent Us: Reclaiming Our Democracy
by Lawrence Lessig
Published 5 Nov 2019

See Per Capita Wealth, available at link #79. 129.Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014), chap. 34. 130.Van Reybrouck, Against Elections, xiii. 131.See the analysis by Ciara Torres-Spelliscy in “What Drives Climate Change Denial? Campaign Donations and Lobbying,” Brennan Center for Justice, September 19, 2017, available at link #80. 132.See Office of the Director of National Intelligence, “U.S. Intelligence Community Budget,” November 2, 2018, available at link #81; Amanda Macias, “Trump Gives $717 Billion Defense Bill a Green Light.

What's Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way
by Nick Cohen
Published 15 Jul 2015

Add in the despairing and reactionary turn modern leftish thinking took after the collapse of socialism, the tolerance of the intolerable inculcated by post-modernism and the doubts about democracy in the liberal mainstream, and I hope you can see why so many could not oppose totalitarian movements of the far right or even call them by their real names. However understandable the denial, it remains as pitiful a response to Islamism as climate change denial is to global warming. Both sets of deniers believe that we can carry on as before living our safe, consumerist lives as if nothing has changed. Neither understands that we have no choice other than to face the threats of our time. Reasonable men and women can disagree about how we face them, but we will not be able to see the world clearly until we have swept away the vast mounds of junk that block our view.

The Science of Hate: How Prejudice Becomes Hate and What We Can Do to Stop It
by Matthew Williams
Published 23 Mar 2021

The website Algotransparency.org, developed by an ex-Google employee, analyses YouTube’s top autoplay suggestions based on any search in order to demonstrate how the site’s recommendation algorithm works. People searching for video content on a politician, such as Donald Trump, are often guided by algorithms to more extreme information, such as climate change denial and anti-immigration content. The more they click on these links the further into the rabbit warren they go. Similarly extreme content is offered up to those searching for liberal politicians. The algorithms begin by recommending videos related to socialism, then eventually anti-establishment content and left-wing conspiracy theories.* A 2017 investigation by the Wall Street Journal and an ex-YouTube employee who worked on its recommendation algorithm confirmed that the site routinely returned far-right and far-left sources in answer to mainstream search queries.6 It did the same for non-political searches: a search for flu vaccines can lead to anti-vaccination videos, while searches for news coverage of school shootings can lead to hoax conspiracy theories.

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power
by Max Chafkin
Published 14 Sep 2021

Clarium employees read, played chess, and debated (sample topic: If you were going to design a country from scratch, what would it look like?). Everyone spent a lot of time talking politics, though it was important that those politics always be of the right-wing variety. An employee told me that it was common to hear talk about climate change denial and to see web browsers open to VDARE, a far-right website with a long record of publishing white nationalist writing. There were liberals at Clarium, but they understood that it was best to keep those views quiet. If Thiel asked you—as he often did, over dinner—what was an opinion of yours that had changed, you knew it was always best to try to think of an issue where you’d drifted right, no matter how obscure.

Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain's Battle With Coronavirus
by Jonathan Calvert and George Arbuthnott
Published 18 Mar 2021

As minister of state for energy from 2014 he managed to put his foot in it again – several times. After claiming that protection of the environment was a core principle of conservatism, he returned from a climate change conference in a hired private plane2 and accepted £18,000 in donations from a key backer of one of the UK’s leading climate-change-denial organisations. Climate campaigners rounded on him.3 In October that year he managed to retweet a poem suggesting the Labour Party was ‘full of queers’. He later apologised, insisting it had been a ‘total accident’. In 2017, as minister in the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, he made an extraordinarily bold promise.

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us
by Tim O'Reilly
Published 9 Oct 2017

For that matter, why would you provide the best goods or services if you could improve profits by cutting corners? This is the era of what business strategist Umair Haque, director of the Havas Media Lab, calls “thin value, profit extracted through harm to others.” Thin value is the value of tobacco marketed even after its purveyors knew it contributed to cancer; the value of climate change denial by oil companies, who have retained the same disinformation firms used by the tobacco industry. This is the value that we experience when food is adulterated with high-fructose corn syrup or other additives that make us sick and obese; the value we experience when we buy shoddy products that are meant to be prematurely replaced.

Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It?
by Brett Christophers
Published 17 Nov 2020

Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon, 2001 [1944]), p. 147. 92. See, for example, C. Williams, ‘Oil Giants Spend $115 Million a Year to Oppose Climate Policy’, 11 April 2016, at huffingtonpost.com. 93. See, for example, R. E. Dunlap and A. M. McCright, ‘Organized Climate Change Denial’, in J. S. Dryzek, R. B. Norgaard and D. Schlosberg, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 144–60. 94. See, for example, M. Cranny, ‘BP Rejects Concern Over Stranded Assets Amid “Slow” Energy Shift’, 20 February 2018, at bloomberg.com; D.

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations
by Thomas L. Friedman
Published 22 Nov 2016

planetary boundaries PlayStation 3 Pleistocene epoch pluralism Pluralism Project politics: bipartisanship in; compromise in; disruption in; dogmatism in; money in; polarization in; trust and; see also geopolitics politics, innovation in; adaptability and; diversity and; entrepreneurial mindset in; federal-local balance in; Mother Nature as mentor for; need for organization in; ownership in; “races to the top” in; resilience in; specific reforms in pollution Pol Pot polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) Popular Science population growth; climate change and; political instability and; poverty and; in weak states Population Institute poverty; advances in connectivity and; chickens and; global flows and; population growth and power of flows power of machines power of many; Mother Nature and; supernova and; see also population growth power of one; ethics and; supernova and Prabhu, Krish prairie, as complex ecosystem Present at the Creation (Acheson) Preston-Werner, Tom Prickett, Glenn privacy, big data and Private Photo Vault Production and Operations Management Society Conference (2014) productivity, supernova and Profil Progressive Policy Institute progressivism; economic growth and Prohibition Project Dreamcatcher Project Syndicate public spaces Putin, Vladimir Putnam, Robert Quad Qualcomm; maintenance workers at Qualcomm pdQ 1900 Quednau, Rachel Queen Rania Teacher Academy Quiz Bowl (TV show) QuoteInvestigator.com (QI) racism rain forests Rain Room ransomware Rattray, Ben ReadWrite.com Reagan, Ronald Real Time Talent Reflections on the Revolution in France (Burke) regulation, technological change and Regulatory Improvement Commission (proposed) Reilly Tar & Chemical Corporation Rejoiner.com relationships, human, connectivity and Republican Party, Republicans: climate change denial by; dogmatism of; implosion of; liberal; polycultural heritage of resilience; in Mother Nature; ownership and; political innovation and retailing: big data and; supernova and Reuters ride-sharing Rifai, Salim al- Ringwald, Alexis Rise and Fall of American Growth, The (Gordon) Rise of the West, The (McNeill) “Rising Menace from Disintegrating Yemen, The” (Henderson) Roberts, Keith robotics “Robots Are Coming, The” (Lanchester) Rockström, Johan Rodríguez, Chi Chi rogue states Rosenstein, Wendi Zelkin Royal Ontario Museum Rugby World Cup (1995) Ruh, Bill Russ, Pam Russell, Richard B.

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown
by Philip Mirowski
Published 24 Jun 2013

Here the double-truth doctrine bites hard. The major ambition of the Neoliberal Thought Collective is to sow doubt and ignorance among the populace. This is not done out of sheer cussedness; it is a political tactic, a means to a larger end. Chapter 6 makes the argument: Think of the documented existence of climate-change denial; and then simply shift it over into economics. Of course, they can’t seriously admit it in public; but years of evidence since 2007 and the esoteric theory of ignorance recounted above unite to buttress the case that this has been one of the main tactics by which the NTC has escaped all obloquy for the crisis.

Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century
by J. Bradford Delong
Published 6 Apr 2020

To the extent that the Trump administration had a worldview, it was one of suspicion, premised on the idea that internal and external enemies, especially nonwhite and non-English-speaking people, were taking advantage of America’s values of freedom and opportunity. To the extent that there were policies, they consisted of, first and most of all, tax cuts for the rich. Second, there was climate change denial. Third, there were random regulatory rollbacks, largely uninformed by technocratic calculation of benefits and costs. And, behind everything, cruelty—which often seemed to be the sole point.6 And then there were raving denunciations of the administration’s own public health officials, whom Trump nevertheless did not seek to replace: “But Fauci’s a disaster.

Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism
by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart
Published 31 Dec 2018

Contributing factors include a Democratic campaign that failed to invest sufficient resources in the ‘Blue Wall’ of Rust Belt states, the personal strengths and weaknesses of each candidate, the use of a personal email server by Hillary Clinton and the intervention of the FBI, the Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee computers, Russian trolling via social media, and other situation-­specific factors.72 But the Trump phenomenon was not an isolated event; it was rooted in enduring changes in the Republican Party and in the American electorate, as well as growing party polarization, particularly ideological shifts in cultural politics and social issues that began many years earlier. The Tea Party wing of the Republican Party advocated many of the populist themes that Trump subsequently echoed, including anti-­establishment and anti-­ government appeals, birtherism, and climate change denial.73 Using the World Values Survey and the American National Election Study, the chapter documents the attitudinal and social basis of the Trump and Clinton supporters, in both the primaries and general election, and long-­term changes in the partisan cleavages dividing generations in the American electorate.

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty
by Benjamin H. Bratton
Published 19 Feb 2016

Geodesign is hampered, however, not only by the complexity of its brief but also by the traditions of humanist politics across the spectrum. Moreover, many, if not most, of these traditions are, on more rigorous examination, less about politics than matters of faith and cultural identity, symptomatic responses that may incur catastrophe by their intransigence. Historian of science, Naomi Oreskes, often makes the point about climate change denial that the strength of belief (or disbelief) often has little to do with a conviction about the state of the science, or even necessarily the state of what the science describes. It stems rather from a distrust or fear of the policies that seem most relevant to mitigate against it, especially big, coordinated, infrastructure-level transnational governance.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
by Shoshana Zuboff
Published 15 Jan 2019

That year, Google’s grant-making operation aimed at civil society organizations took an aggressive turn. According to the Center for Media and Democracy’s investigatory research report, “The Googlization of the Far Right,” the corporation’s 2012 list of grantees featured a new group of antigovernment groups known for their opposition to regulation and taxes and their support for climate-change denial, including Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform, the Koch brothers–funded Heritage Action, and other antiregulatory groups such as the Federalist Society and the Cato Institute.114 The corporation also quietly acknowledged its membership in the corporate lobbying group ALEC, known for its opposition to gun control and emissions curbs, and for its support for voter-suppression schemes, tobacco industry tax breaks, and other far-right causes.115 Meanwhile, a list of Google Policy Fellows for 2014 included individuals from a range of nonprofit organizations whom one would expect to be leading the fight against that corporation’s concentrations of information and power, including the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Future of Privacy Forum, the National Consumers League, the Citizen Lab, and the Asociación por los Derechos Civiles.116 In July 2017 the Wall Street Journal reported that since 2009, Google had actively sought out and provided funding to university professors for research and policy papers that support Google’s positions on matters related to law, regulation, competition, patents, and so forth.117 In many cases, Google weighed in on the papers before publication, and some of the authors did not disclose Google as a source of funding.