Category: anti-reflexivity

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anti-reflexivity Denial Predatory delay Propaganda United States of America

March 4, 2003 – Republicans urged to question the scientific consensus…

On this day in March 4 2003, the Luntz memo was exposed. Frank Luntz was a Republican communications PR guru, and his memo advocated continued casting of doubt.

In the words of the Guardian’s reporter

The memo, by the leading Republican consultant Frank Luntz, concedes the party has “lost the environmental communications battle” and urges its politicians to encourage the public in the view that there is no scientific consensus on the dangers of greenhouse gases. 

“The scientific debate is closing [against us] but not yet closed. There is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science,” Mr Luntz writes in the memo, obtained by the Environmental Working Group, a Washington-based campaigning organisation.”

The broader context is that the Bush administration having already reneged on promises to reduce carbon dioxide and pulled the US out of Kyoto needed to continue its perception management, and that’s what Luntz was proposing, as part of the broader war, to keep people in the dark, ignorant, confused, demoralised and it’s been a very successful effort. So here we are.

Why this matters. 

We need to see how “common sense” (in the Gramscian sense) is endlessly confected and defended…

And here’s the memo, btw

LuntzResearch.Memo.pdf (sourcewatch.org)

What happened next?

Luntz changed his tune, but the damage was done. And the emissions continue to climb. 

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anti-reflexivity Predatory delay Scientists United Kingdom

March 1st 2010 – scientist grilled over nothing burger…

On this day in 2010, Professor Phil Jones of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, gave testimony to a parliamentary committee (the Science and Technology Select Committee since you ask) on the subject of the so-called Climategate hack (or the “Climatic Research Unit email controversy”).

In late 2009, in the run up to Copenhagen, the servers of the University of East Anglia had been infiltrated, a vast archive of emails downloaded, and then selected releases to make it look as if climate scientists were colluding to keep critics out of peer review. And this was designed to make the negotiations at Copenhagen COP more problematic. Whether it mattered or not is impossible, perhaps to say, but no single bullet ever wins a war… 

The broader context is that climate scientists had been coming under fierce public attack since at least 1989. (Never mind James Hansen’s funding being pulled in 1981 because of a New York Times front page article displeasing the Republican Administration). 

But the kind of personal, bitter ad hominem attacks really took off 1995-96 around the second IPCC assessment report. Michael Mann, who became the subject of attacks himself, calls this the Serengeti Strategy.

Why this matters. 

The narrative of “there is doubt about how severe climate change will be/the climate scientists may be – if not lying – exaggerating” is an immensely powerful narrative. Because it allows middle class professional people to continue not to pay attention to the issue. And that’s why the predatory delayers have played the card for so long. 

What happened next?

The “climategate” emails were found, after multiple investigations, to be – in the words of the right wingers –  a “nothing burger.” Jones continued his career, having admitted that he had contemplated suicide at the time. Meanwhile, the atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide have continued to climb

Atmospheric C02 concentration at that time: 390.1ppm

Atmospheric C02 concentration at time of publication: 416.71ppm

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Agnotology anti-reflexivity Coal Fossil fuels Greenwash Predatory delay Propaganda

February 26, 2014 – Advanced Propaganda for Morons

On this day, eight years ago, Peabody Coal started an advertising campaign called “Advanced Energy for Life.” Because as the dirtiest fossil fuel, coal had a serious image problem, and therefore needed to conflate itself with notions of energy poverty.

Why this matters

What they’re trying to do when they do this is insinuate that anyone who is opposed to the burning of ever more coal somehow wants people in Africa to die young, after a miserable impoverished life.

What you’ll find, of course, is that the many of same people who are protesting about environment also would like debt relief (cancellation), democratisation technology transfer and all the rest of it.

But Peabody would rather have you believe that all environmentalists are racist Malthusian assholes all the time. Now, it is indisputable that some environmentalists historically and down into this present day, racist assholes, and explicitly and unashamedly others, confused or ignorant, and of course, most buy into the myths of it being possible to have everything for everyone and there being no trade offs.

What happened next

One of Australia’s briefer Prime Ministers, Tony Abbott, used the “coal is good for humanity” line when opening a coal-fired power station later that year.

Peabody is making money at the mo’, because gas prices have spiked and so coal is competitive. For now.

Further reading.

The truth behind Peabody’s campaign to rebrand coal as a poverty cure | Coal | The Guardian

I’d recommend an article by James Meek in the London Review of Books about Scottish offshore wind energy and who is building the towers and the kits and under what conditions. But I digress. 

What happened next

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s later that year when opening a coal mine, use one of the Peabody talking points. Coal is good for humanity. So that’s When for pee buddies, PR people, 

Peabody has, of course, entered bankruptcy proceedings chapter 11, I think. But that doesn’t mean that they’re not that some people aren’t making money. It just means that times are tough for call my heart’s bleeding.

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anti-reflexivity IPCC United States of America

Feb 19, 2011 – defunding the IPCC

On this day, 19th of February 2011, House Republicans in the United States Congress pushed through a symbolic statement throwing shade and threats of defunding at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Blaine Luetkemeyer, (still) a Missouri Republican, called the UN panel “nefarious.” [coverage here.]

The context is amusing, because it was actually their hero, Ronald Reagan, who signed off on the birth of the IPCC as an intergovernmental rather than international panel. 

This theatre, this throwing of red meat to the base, chipped away at the legitimacy of the IPCC.  So, while the resolution had no particular impact at the time (that I am aware of), it had a cultural one. It is also deeply uncomfortable for the scientists to be on the receiving end. And this is all part of more general “flak” as per Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model of media.

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anti-reflexivity United Kingdom

Feb 9, 2014 –  A Farage-o of nonsense about climate change

On this day in 2014. Nigel Farage, then of the UK Independence Party, rubbished links between floods in Somerset, and climate change, and the need to do anything. Farage, that well-credentialed climate scientist, is fairly typical of a strand of what some sociologists call anti-reflexive thinking.

Most families have that uncle who refuses to accept what the science is clearly stating. Because it’s a “bunch of leftists complaining about industrialization.” Physics is apparently “woke.”  And if you look at Risk Society, by Ulrich Beck, this sort of thing is predicted. 

Why It Matters 

We need to have understanding if not necessarily compassion for these people, and where they come from and why they think like they do. I guess.

What happened next? 

Well, the emissions that contribute to the sorts of 1 in 100 year weather events happening every five years or so, have continued to climb. The total amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has continued to climb. Mr. Farage was able to intimidate David Cameron into a referendum on UK membership of the European Union. And I don’t need to tell you how that turned out. Rip Joe Cox.


Categories: Anti-reflexivity, United Kingdom

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Agnotology anti-reflexivity Greenwash Predatory delay Propaganda United States of America

Jan 15 1971: greenwash before it was called greenwash #propaganda

On this day in 1971, at the conference of the “Economic Council of the Forest Products Industry” in  Phoenix Arizona some chap called Richard W. Darrow gave a speech “Communication in an Environmental Age”

“We will do those things that earn us attention and gain us understanding, or we will live out the remainder of our professional lives in the creeping, frustrating, stultifying, stifling grasp of unrealistic legislative restraints and crippling administrative restriction. A public that ought to understand us – and thank us for what we are and what we do – will instead clamor for our scalps.”

There was, as you can see, a real panic in business circles. The fear was that previously quiescent ‘citizens’, at first cowed by so-called “McCarthyism”[it pre-dated that drunk] and then stupefied by consumerism – might actually get up on their hind legs. If they demanded real regulation, real control, so the planet didn’t get turned into an uninhabitable slagheap, then the fun times (for business) would be over. In 1971, before neoliberalism, before pervasive computing, before all the other wonders that the last 51 years have brought us, such fears were legit.

What has happened since? The kinds of “public relations” “professionals” Darrow represented have honed their game. Seven months later, the Powell Memorandum and the rise of the neoliberal think tanks. The crushing of labour unions, the spectacularisation of everything (to go all Debord for a minute). Greenwash, the constraining of imagination, the destruction of hope. Yeah, it’s not looking good for our species, is it?

“Source: Conley, J. (2006) , ENVIRONMENTALISM CONTAINED: A HISTORY OF CORPORATE RESPONSES

TO THE NEW ENVIRONMENTALISM. PhD thesis   

Conley, 2006: p69-70.  

Conley continues – “Having established a special unit to provide services on environmental health issues in 1966, Hill & Knowlton became a leading advocate and provider of environmental PR in the 1970s and beyond.”

See also

Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies by Noam Chomsky

Taking the Risk out of Democracy by Alex Carey

Global Spin by Sharon Beder

This isn’t just a battle of “ideas”: this gets very ‘kinetic’

The War against the Greens: The Wise-Use Movement, the New Right, and Anti-Environmental Violence by David Helvarg

FT 12th January 2022  Activists target public relations groups for greenwashing fossil fuels

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anti-reflexivity

2014, Jan 2: “This very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop”

Jan 2, 2014 

On this day, eight years ago, Donald Trump tweeted that global warming was a hoax. Specifically –

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— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 2, 2014

This was neither Trump’s first or last tweet on the subject. There’s this corker from a couple of years previously:

[see this Vox collation of all the tweets].  Of course, as President, he withdrew the US from the Paris Agreement and tore up environmental regulations, rendering the already weak Environmental Protection Agency even more toothless. 

We can see this as a morality tale of a wicked man or we can take an historical and sociological view. Historically, we could look at the 1991 campaign especially aimed at older white men. Under the name or  Information Council on the Environment (“ICE” – geddit?), as described in Ross Gelbspan’s book “The Heat is On” and elsewhere (see the climatefiles too!)

Sociologically, we could use anti-reflexivity, the concept of McCright and Dunlap developed, to explain not just Trump, but Trump’s enduring popularity with people who pine for an imagined 1950s where straight, white men. were in charge. Women were in the kitchen, people of color were “colored” people who knew the place and Mother Nature was under the thumb.

I don’t need to tell you what happened next – you’re watching it.

Further Reading

Dunlap, R. and McCright, A. (2010) “Climate change denial: Sources, actors and strategies” 

1991 Information Council on the Environment Test Denial Campaign Plan and Survey https://www.climatefiles.com/denial-groups/ice-campaign-plan/