Sixteen years ago, on this day, August 13, 2007, the US publication Newsweek, which had been reporting on carbon dioxide build-up since 1953, had a very good report on the tactics of the denialists, under the clever title “The Truth about Denial.”
“Organisations and companies such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute and ExxonMobil emphasise conservative climate change scenarios and highlight the potential economic costs of stricter controls” (Sharon Begley, “The Truth about Denial”, Newsweek, August 13, 2007)
Vale Sharon Begley – https://www.statnews.com/2021/01/17/sharon-begley-path-breaking-science-journalist-dies/
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 384ppm. As of 2023 it is 423ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that climate change was absolutely back on the agenda with Al Gore’s film “An Inconvenient Truth” and the fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC. There was renewed vigour in the international process with lots of talk about what would replace the Kyoto Protocol. And therefore, the denialists were up to their old tricks. Sharon Begley’s article is a good summation of how and why they do what they do.
What I think we can learn from this
Mainstream press articles can often give you the facts you need. You may need to bolt on a decent theoretical framework, but serious mainstream media (often the business press is best) can give you a bunch of worthwhile facts to be going on with.
Btw, from reading this article, it is a tolerably accurate picture of incumbents’ behaviour. In any democratic society (a) these tactics would be taughtf in school so people could defend their minds against the onslaught and (b) of course, you would not need to be taught it because there would laws and structures that prevented the ownership of the government by concentrated economic interests.
What happened next
The denial kept going, becoming a hydra and a T1000 at the same time.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.