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Climate Change and Social Inequality

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Climate Change and Social Inequality 3 MAINTAINING INEQUALITY The ideology of denial and the creation of climate change uncertainty Distribution The state of the scientific knowledge about the extent and nature of climate for change, as well as its causes and already mounting adverse consequences, would seem to make it untenable now to deny the reality of a warming planet, and yet denial continues to have a noticeable and influential presence in the social land- Not scape, particularly in the U.S. In fact, with the election of Donald Trump and Republican control of both the Senate and House of Representatives in 2016, it has gained vast ground and the full power of the American government behind it. With regard to the issue of social inequality, climate change denial and its goal of obfuscation of the facts known to science is of importance because it is very much a product of the elite effort to maintain the existence of the reigning system for the Francis: production and massively unequal distribution of wealth to the detriment of the world generally and the most vulnerable in particular. This is why what has been & called the climate change denial machine—the interlocked network of organiza- tions and individuals committed to bashing climate science and its findings on cli- mate change—has been bought and paid for by very wealthy people who overwhelmingly benefit not only from enormous wealth inequality but also from the increasingly growing gap between the super-rich and everyone else. Main- Taylor taining such social inequality in a world of mass access to information requires considerable ideological work, and climate change denial is part of that profitable conceptual and political labor. One victim of this heavily financed crusade is the credibility of science in the eyes of a sector of the public, a loss that holds grave potential costs. In the assessment of famed astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, science is a fundamental part of the country that we are. But in this the 21st century, when it comes time to make decisions about science, it seems to me that people have lost the ability to judge what is true and what is not … . And when you have people who do not know much about science standing in 66 Maintaining inequality denial of it, and rising to power, that is a recipe for the complete dismantling of our informed democracy. (Quoted in Chow 2017) It has become evident from studying climate science denial the astonishing lengths that extremely wealthy corporations and individuals are willing to go to ensure a maximization of profits and income. Climate change denial is not a tangential issue in the calculation of the relationship between climate change and social inequality, it is a foundational component of the ideological and instrumental machinery that has allowed the continuation of the growing climate crisis that now most threatens the global poor but ultimately all people and life forms. Knowing in some detail how climate change denial emerged, its political allies and their motivations, its key players individually and organizationally, its ideological assertions, and the threat it presents provides an illuminating window on the ways that both climate change and inequality are driven by the ultra-wealthy as by-products of their unceasing Distribution effort to maintain and expand their vast fortunes. These are the issues, set against the backdrop of the election of Donald Trump as president, addressed in this chapter. for Science at risk Not Writing in 1999, Adger, an environmental scientist, could assert: “At present there is agreement, in principle, by the world’s governments that the human impacts on the global climate system are significant.” Eighteen years later, however, despite the voluminous growth in climate change knowledge and the accumulation of over- whelming scientific evidence, Adger could no longer conclude that there is agreement in the world’s governments about the threat of climate change. Francis: Throughout this period, while the leading scientific associations in the U.S., like the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the & Advancement of Science, could comfortably use the word “consensus” when describing the views of climate scientists on the existence and human cause of cli- mate change, some (primarily) non-climate scientists disputed this claim and their words found a receptive audience among conservative politicians. In other words, while there has developed an overwhelming scientific agreement on climate Taylor change, with disagreements emerging primarily about the details not the primary patterns of what is happening on the planet, there has not developed a social consensus on this issue. More importantly, with the election of Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States, agreement among world governments on climate change has been shattered. Instead, in 2017, we have people like Earth scientist Peter Kalmus (2017) of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech writing about the reality of climate change: “I’m afraid to publish this article. Why? Because I’m a climate scientist who speaks out about climate change, and in speaking out I may be risking my career.” Kalmus underlined the contradictions of the current moment by citing the comments of Kim Cobb, a paleoclimatologist Maintaining inequality 67 from Georgia Tech given at a rally against climate change denial that 2016 was a tough year for him personally. As a scuba diver on a coral reef in the tropical Pacific Ocean, he had watched 85 percent of that reef die between one of my trips and the next in six months … . We have for too long, as scientists, rested on the assumption that by providing indisputable facts and great data that we are providing enough … and obviously that strategy has failed miserably. (Quoted in Kalmus 2017) Cobb is not alone. The frustration of having their carefully collected data indicat- ing that the consequences of climate change is alarming be ignored or being per- sonally vilified by people in positions of political power has been part of the past experience of many climate scientists. Camille Parmesan, a Nobel Prize winning professor in the School of Biological & Marine Sciences at Plymouth University, Distribution reports: I felt like here was this huge signal I was finding and no one was paying for attention to it … . I was really thinking, ‘Why am I doing this?’ In the U.S., [climate change] isn’t well-supported by the funding system, and when I give public talks in the U.S., I have to devote the first half of the talk to [affirming] Not that climate change is really happening. (Quoted in Thomas 2014) While it was not a central issue during the campaign generally and rarely a news topic on the major U.S. television news programs during the entire year of 2016, both of which are remarkable given the climate urgency at hand, Donald Trump’s Francis: election to the U.S. presidency was undeniably a triumph of climate change denial. Climate was not of much concern to Trump voters, and his election was a clear & sign that, for many Americans, failing to acknowledge that climate change is occurring or denying the warnings of multiple scientists about the severe con- sequences of ignoring this fact do not disqualify a presidential candidate in the early years of the twenty-first century. In an affirmation of an old adage, if 2016 were given a motto a leading candidate would be “ignorance is bliss.” That bliss, how- Taylor ever, will melt away as we move deeper into the century and global warming and its punishing effects continue to mount, especially for the poor. As early as 2014, Donald Trump made his evolving thoughts on the issue of climate change clear in a bluntly worded Tweet: “This very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop. Our planet is freezing, record low temps, and our GW scientists are stuck in ice” (cited in D’Angelo 2017). In November of 2012, he remarked: “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive” (quoted in Schulman 2017). The following year he embraced the denial mantra that climate change science is a hoax: “Ice storm rolls from Texas to Tennessee - I’m in Los 68 Maintaining inequality Angeles and its freezing. Global warming is a total, and very expensive, hoax!,” an assertion he repeated many times afterward (quoted in Schulman 2017). Upon assuming the office of president, Trump translated these views into his selection of climate change deniers to fill open positions in his administration. He selected Myron Ebell, a climate contrarian who directs environmental and energy policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian advocacy group in Washington, DC. supported by the coal and oil industries, to lead the transition at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The Competitive Enterprise Institute does not openly disclose the sources of its $7 million annual budget, but the Washington Post (Eilperin 2013) was able reveal some of the contributors to the organization by examining a list of donors to its annual dinner in 2013. Donors included the energy companies Marathon Petroleum, Koch Industries, Devon Energy, American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, and American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers. Reflecting the interests of this funding base, Ebell has said about the EPA: Distribution There are still some local problems, but the EPA’s mission has been basically been accomplished. The fact is, you say that oil, coal, and gas are polluting, for but no. All of those pollutants have been cleaned up… By and large, the air is clean, the water is pure … . (Quoted in E&E TV 2017) Not Calling himself an enemy of environmentalism, as far back as 1998, Ebell was a member of the American Petroleum Institute’s Global Climate Science Commu- nications Team, which worked on a plan to create doubt in the public about cli- mate science and the consensus about the reality of global warming.
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