Don't Even Think About It (7 page)

Few scientists, not even Hansen, have been so publicly abused as Michael Mann, the director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, whose iconic “hockey stick chart” mapped temperature changes over the past thousand years. He has been pilloried on Fox News and in the Senate, portrayed as a dancing puppet on YouTube videos, and received, by his own reckoning, thousands of abusive e-mails, including demands that he commit suicide or be “shot, quartered and fed to the pigs, along with your family.” When I invited him to find a metaphor for this struggle, he settled, without any hesitation, on
The Lord of the Rings
. “It’s a classic tale of the struggle between good and evil, but the stakes are the earth itself. The CEOs of fossil fuel companies who fund a disinformation campaign to confuse the public are the forces of Mordor. The scientists are Gandalf.” I would add that, with his goatee beard and twinkling eyes, Mann could also find a place in that battle—a climatological faun, maybe.

This disinformation campaign, often referred to as the “denial machine,” contains a wide network of think tanks such as CEI, media outlets, and politicians. But of late, campaigners have consistently set their sights on its most prominent and nefarious funders: David and Charles Koch, sibling inheritors of the second largest privately owned company in the United States.

The Kochs like to spend a small amount of their eighty-billion-dollar wealth on their favored political causes, including the Tea Party, political action committee advertising, and the libertarian think tanks opposing action on climate change, into which they have poured some sixty-seven million dollars since 1997. Not surprisingly, the Kochs are the number-one hate figures of the progressive left and environmentalists alike, and the grinning brothers are often portrayed in activist literature as the twin heads of the “Kochtopus,” surrounded by the spreading tentacles of their gas, oil, and chemical interests. This is the latest in a long cartoon history of rampaging corporate cephalopods, which have included railroad monopolies, ice monopolies, Tammany Hall crooks, Standard Oil, and—campaigners would be horrified to realize—the international Jewish “conspiracy.”

Certainly I would never claim that the Kochs are not major political operators or that the “denial machine” they help fund has not played a significant role in shaping public opinion, as has been superbly documented in recent books such as
The Merchants of Doubt
,
Heads in the Sand
, and
Climate Cover-Up
.
And
oil companies
are
blocking action. There
is
a well-funded politically motivated campaign that distorts and pollutes the science.

But I would argue that the constant goading of the aggressive deniers over the past twenty years has led campaigners and scientists alike to invest too much of their emotional energy into this single struggle and to forget that there is an infinite number of different stories that have yet to be told, and that the vast majority of people are being entirely ignored during their punch-up.

All of these enemy narratives seem entirely natural to the people who hold them. They merge seamlessly with their existing values and belief systems, build on the metaphors of previous struggles and their own reading of history. I share many of these values and this sense of history. I have spent much of my working life in the environmental movement, leading campaigns against governments, corporations, and international finance. Many issues do come down, in the end, to a struggle against distinct and identifiable vested interests.

But climate change
is
different. The missing truth, deliberately avoided in these enemy narratives, is that in high-carbon societies, everyone contributes to the emissions that cause the problem and everyone has a strong reason to ignore the problem or to write their own alibi. As Joe Friday used to say on the start of the
Dragnet
TV crime shows:

For every crime that’s committed, you’ve got three million suspects to choose from. People who saw it happen—but really didn’t. People who don’t remember—those who try to forget. Those who tell the truth—those who lie.

This is why I have become convinced that the real battle for mass action will not be won through enemy narratives and that we need to find narratives based on cooperation, mutual interests, and our common humanity.

This is not, of course, to ever suggest that those who obstruct political action or deliberately distort the science should be let off lightly or left unchallenged. Oil companies are not just passive energy providers, whatever they like to say. They actively interfere in the political process to protect their interests. However, neither are we blameless dupes. We willingly avail ourselves of their products and the extraordinary lifestyles they enable.

This poses a challenge for generating political change. Change requires social movements. Social movements require physical targets or a product that can be boycotted, blockaded, or occupied. And a narrative of opposition requires an opponent. As Bill McKibben argues, “Movements require enemies,” and in his view, this is the fossil fuel industry, which he describes as “Public Enemy Number One to the survival of our planetary civilization.”

Rabbi Arthur Waskow converts the same conflict into a biblical context. Citing the biblical plagues that fell on the Egyptians, he says that “today the Pharaohs are giant corporations: big coal, big oil, and big natural gas.” He adds, “The only way to deal with a modern-day Pharaoh is to organize the people.”

But these targets are not
the enemy
and the struggle against them is not the place where climate change will be decided. They are
an obstacle
, and this is an important distinction. It is a delicate balance—one that mature campaigners like McKibben fully recognize.

Other struggles also need to be recognized. Gill Ereaut, founder of the communications consultancy Linguistic Landscapes, argues that narratives do not have to have an enemy—in fact many mythological tales are constructed around a quest, a challenge, even overcoming an argument, an idea, a weakness, or a way of thought.

She draws on the psychoanalytic theory of Carl Jung to suggest that if there is an enemy, it is really our “shadow”—our greedy internal child whom we don’t wish to acknowledge or recognize and who compels us to project our own unacceptable attributes onto others. While climate change develops some lukewarm narratives of guilt, there are none, as I argue later, that really invite us to accept our personal responsibility.

The veteran ABC journalist Bill Blakemore, who has done more than anyone to get climate change onto American television screens, is also convinced that the real story lies in our flawed psychology. There has, he tells me, been “a grave failure of professional imagination about how to advance this great and transformative story” which should never have been “shoveled into the environmental slot.”

Blakemore spent most of his working life as a war correspondent, which, one might think, would dispose him to see it in terms of competing sides or national interests. But, he points out, there “are no borders in the constantly swirling air or in the oceans” and for Blakemore the real story is about our fear, denial, and struggle to accept our own responsibility. As he says, “Climate change isn’t the elephant in the room; it’s the elephant we’re all inside of.”

Every campaign defines the language and battle lines that will determine our future thinking. If our founding narratives are based around enemies, there is no reason to suppose that, as climate impacts build in intensity, new and far more vicious enemy narratives will not readily replace them, drawing on religious, generational, political, class, and nationalistic divides—especially in the Middle East, where water scarcity could catalyze bitter conflict along religious lines. History has shown us too many times that enemy narratives soften us up for the violence, scapegoating, or genocide that follows.

Coda 1

This is a good time
to pause and sum up the book so far.

I have already found that we interpret the world in the light of our recent experience and our attitudes. Our confirmation bias then leads us to seek out further information to confirm those existing views, or to reject information that challenges them. I found that Tea Party activists, who prided themselves on their independence, had become so distrustful of outside views that all of their information sources reinforced their existing positions.

I found that we feel compelled, by our desire to fit into our social group, to take our cues for what we should think or do from the people around us. In communities recovering from weather-related disasters I found that their understanding of the event was mediated through the cues contained in shared stories. They were entirely capable of ignoring the role of climate change because it did not fit with the stories they chose to tell.

I also found that our desire to conform leads us to exaggerate the differences between ourselves and people in other social groups. If an attitude toward climate change becomes strongly associated with a group that we actively distrust, then the science can become “polluted” by this conflict. I suggested that campaigners for and against action on climate change were equally bound by this mechanism, and even used the same language and metaphors when describing the other side.

It is already clear that the way we relate to climate change cannot be readily condensed into a simple formula of cause and effect. Our views are constantly being shaped through the negotiation between our own identity, our group loyalty, and our relationship with wider society. We are active participants, at every stage, influencing those around us as much as we are influenced by them.

The best metaphor I can find for this lies in the way that climate scientists chart the flows within the global energy and carbon systems. In their models each part of the flow is interlinked with the other parts, such that a change in one part may spread and then amplify its impacts through what scientists call positive feedbacks. There are many such social feedbacks operating in our attitudes to climate change—such as the bystander effect or false consensus effect—that exaggerate small differences and widen the divides between people.

But this can only be a partial answer to the question of why we find it so hard to act. Those who passionately accept or passionately deny climate change have one key thing in common: They all regard it as a major threat that they need to mobilize around. But, in between these two conflicting groups, the vast majority of people find it hard to accept the importance of this issue at all. When asked, they will happily tell pollsters that they are concerned about this issue, but, as I will show, they give it little other consideration and rarely if ever talk about it.

So this returns us to the original question: Is there something
innate
in this issue that enables people to disregard it in this way? How else would it be possible for people to know that climate change is a threat but not
feel
that it is a threat?

10

The Two Brains

Why We Are So Poorly Evolved to Deal with Climate Change

The idea that our evolutionary
psychology makes it hard for us to deal with climate change is widespread. Paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall in the coda to his book
The Masters of the Planet: The Search for Our Human Origins
reflects that “we are notably bad at assessing risk. Inside our skulls are fish, reptile and shrew brains.” This, he says, is why we can ignore climate change and think that we won’t have to face its consequences. Professor Paul Ehrlich, the outspoken population biologist at Stanford University, argues that we cannot deal with climate change because “the forces of genetic and cultural selection were not creating brains capable of looking generations ahead.”

Evolutionary psychology is much contested, debated, and fought over on political and ideological grounds. Climate deniers argue that it underestimates the speed of evolution and that constant environmental and climate changes during evolutionary history have actually left us remarkably well adapted and prepared for the changes of the modern world.

Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard, disagrees. He tells me that climate change is “a threat that our evolved brains are uniquely unsuited to do a damned thing about.” Gilbert has given this some thought: He is an expert, and now a bestselling author, on the psychology of happiness, and he has the kind of free-roving hyperactive mind that is fascinated by everything.

Gilbert argues that our long psychological evolution has prepared us to respond strongly to four key triggers that he neatly summarizes with the acronym PAIN:

Personal
: Our brains are most highly attuned to identifying friends, enemies, defectors, and human agency.

Abrupt
: We are most sensitive to sudden relative changes and tend to ignore slow-moving threats.