Category: anti-reflexivity

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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/