Climate denial in American politics

Climate denial is a sinister movement that denies the science of climate change that has infiltrated deep within American politics and is still thriving today. The widespread oppression of science in America is a rarity in modern history — with the exceptions of Germany and Russia during the 1930s — and has never been seen before in a democracy to this extent.

The tragic outcome of political climate denial in the United States was that greenhouse gas emissions were never properly addressed by Congress even though the U.S. is the largest economy in the world, allowing the climate crisis to develop in the first place. If the U.S. couldn’t manage to do its fair share, how can other countries?

The climate crisis is a global crisis and the world is running out of time to stay within the global warming limits of the Paris Agreement. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has warned of the extreme weather consequences of global warming in the Paris targets. Also, every several years, the latest scientific consensus on climate change is summarized by the IPCC, written by the world’s leading climate scientists for governments to develop climate policies.

The section “Summary for Policymakers” (SPM) of the Synthesis Report is especially scrutinized and approved by government appointees to ensure all nations accept the report’s conclusions. The latest SPM (AR6) from the IPCC leads off with: “Human activities, principally through emissions of greenhouse gases, have unequivocally caused global warming…”

Surely then, most American politicians must agree with the IPCC conclusions since their own government approved the SPM. Wrong. Republicans in the United States brazenly attack the IPCC reports, including the SPM, contradicting their national government even when the American representative to the IPCC was chosen by a Republican administration.

Republicans don’t like climate science for non-scientific reasons and have become a dangerous party of climate deniers — dangerous because they are out of touch with reality and make policy decisions based on propaganda of the energy-industrial complex (fossil fuel and related industries), rather than evidence-based science.

Too many elected officials in the U.S. live in another world where human-made global warming does not exist. They also question, without basis, the scientific consensus on climate change or they just ignore the science. This alternate reality is built on alternate facts and alternate science (i.e., fake). We have been too tolerant for too long of this deviant behaviour by elected officials; the time to vote these politicians out of office is long overdue.

The Republican Party, also known as the GOP (officially, the “Grand Old Party,” but in parody, the “Grand Oil Party” or “Gas and Oil Party”), has been an organization of climate denial since President George H.W. Bush. During the new millennium, under President George W. Bush, there was a literal reign of terror by the GOP political elite against climate science at congressional hearings, where scientists were persecuted and prosecuted.

Climate denial reached new heights in Washington under the administration of Donald Trump, who was criticized by world leaders for withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris Agreement. (President Joe Biden reversed this decision.) The environment and energy portfolios of Trump’s administration appeared to be puppets under the control of the “oiligarchs” — the powerful among the energy-industrial complex. As an American election looms later this year, the thought of another Trump presidency sends shivers down the spines of many in the scientific community.

How did this happen in the most powerful democracy in the world? The root cause of climate denial will not be found with the politicians, who were themselves duped by gaslighting. An anti-climate science infodemic easily spread through conservative ranks where climate legislation was regarded as an attack on their ideology, including their belief in the sanctity of free markets and small governments.

The source of the disinformation was the energy-industrial complex, which had launched one of the largest propaganda campaigns in history against the science of climate change. This corporate juggernaut chose shareholders over society, profits over people, and propaganda over science, and Republicans were duped more than most.

Was this massive campaign to gaslight Americans successful for the energy-industrial complex? You can judge for yourself. The number of climate deniers in the U.S. was more than 100 million, in my recent estimation. This group of anti-science supporters, mainly Republicans, does not acknowledge the scientific consensus on climate change and does not accept the SPM statement of the IPCC: “Human activities, principally through emissions of greenhouse gases, have unequivocally caused global warming…”

So long as their alternate reality remains unchallenged (and, so far, too few have dared), Republican politicians will continue to obstruct climate legislation in Congress. The job of Congress is to legislate how best to tackle the climate crisis — not to deny the science or the scientific consensus. Until Republicans can at least accept the science of climate change, there is no political will to act on their part and climate change hearings are nothing but a political circus.

More scientific evidence will not change hard-core climate deniers, who loudly promote propaganda in service of the energy-industrial complex, as well as allegedly protecting those conservative values intertwined with it. Instead, hard-core climate deniers with high profiles must be marginalized — by discrediting them, their messages and their sources — before there can be any chance of bipartisan climate policy development.

Gerald Kutney has recently written a critically acclaimed, peer-reviewed book, Climate Denial in American Politics: #ClimateBrawl, published by Routledge, which was a major source for this column.