The New Climate Denial Is Based on These Six Terms

1. 2024-06-24 at 10:26 PM UTC

   #1
   

   Obbe Alan What? [annoy my right-angled speediness]
   The New Climate Denial Is Based on These Six Terms
   
   

   It’s absurd, at this point, to claim that climate change isn’t real: Every summer a ghastly parade of stories about deadly extreme weather marches across the news, and climate scientists can now explicitly attribute this weather to climate change. Even 70 percent of young Republicans now connect climate change to human activity. So now Republicans in swing states, titans of finance and tech, as well as coal, oil, and gas executives themselves, have started spreading a new, more subtle form of climate denial. This new denial acknowledges that climate change is real but still seeks to justify continuing the fossil fuel system.
   
   This propaganda is spun out of six key terms that dominate the language of climate politics: alarmist, cost, growth, “India and China,” innovation, and resilience. Together these terms weave a narrative that goes something like this: “Yes, climate change is real, but calling it an existential threat is just alarmist. And, anyway, phasing out coal, oil, and gas would cost us too much. Human flourishing relies on the economic growth enabled by fossil fuels, so we need to keep using them and deal with climate change by fostering technological innovation and increasing our resilience. Besides, America should not act unilaterally on the climate crisis while emissions are rising in India and China.” This narrative is designed to encourage the incorrect and dangerous belief that the world does not need essentially to stop using fossil fuels—either because climate change won’t be that destructive or, in some versions of the story, because the world can keep using coal, oil, and gas and still halt global heating anyway.

2. 2024-06-24 at 10:49 PM UTC

   #2
   

   harriettubman20 Yung Blood
   The Democratic approach is to shift responsibility to you, and make you switch to paper straws or other bullshit to do your part. Then they're "doing something" while they fail to meet every single goal set for them by climate scientists, mainly because they let their buddies continue to generate the emissions of a billion people.
   
   Really makes the Republican approach of "do nothing" pretty appealing when the end goal of both these things (profit without solving the issue) doesn't change.