Subdividing the Denial Camp

The video Mark posted divides the American people into six camps on climate change. One of the camps, however, needs to be broken up into two distinct subgroups: those who deny climate change but know it is happening and want it to happen, and the suckers who believe them.

The first subgroup is lying about it because they stand to rake in trillions of dollars in oil and gas revenues. This group includes oil company executives like the Koch brothers, people like Sarah Palin and anyone in Congress who gets money from oil companies.

The Koch brothers aren't stupid. They understand and appreciate science (David Koch is a major funder of the PBS program Nova), including climate science. They know that the ice is retreating from the arctic more and more each year. They know because arctic warming is melting the permafrost under their roads, oil rigs and pipelines, raising havoc with the foundations of their drilling operations.

But in the long run, they see global warming as a good thing: the warmer Alaska and Canada get, the easier it will be to extract the oil from the Arctic. Right now extracting oil up there a real bitch: they only have a couple of months a year for exploration because the seas get so rough and the weather gets so bad. But they know that the deposits elsewhere in the world will quickly run dry, what with countries like China and India increasing demand, and they want to get in on the ground floor in the Arctic regions. Gotta beat the Russians!

And an ice-free Northwest Passage would be great for commerce: it'll be so much easier to send Canadian oil to China!

Sarah Palin lives in Alaska, so she should know as well as anyone that Alaska is getting a lot warmer fast. But living in such a cold place is not a lot of fun, despite what she says on her TV shows, so she'd really prefer it 20 degrees warmer.

Other mining concerns stand to benefit hugely if the ice sheet on Greenland melts: there are massive deposits of minerals, including aluminum and uranium, in Greenland, and potentially a great deal of oil. The people of Greenland, all 50,000 of them, would like to get money from that mining, be able to grow their own food, and be independent of Denmark.

How can these guys reconcile the fact that they know they're trashing the climate, hurting billions of people in the next several decades? First and foremost, they just don't care. This is the typical reaction you get from a lot of people — but especially conservatives — when you point out terrible injustice or serious consequences of what they're doing.

Tell them that voter ID will prevent minorities, the elderly and students from voting: they don't care. Tell them that polar bears will go extinct: they don't care. Tell them that Kiribati will be drowned: they don't care. Tell them that Florida will lose all those beaches: they don't care. Tell them that higher sea levels will cause storm surges on the Atlantic coast to drastically increase storm damage: they don't care. Tell them that Manhattan will be inundated: they don't care, and would love it if all of New York disappeared.

They may say they don't believe that the ill effects you speak of are happening, and they may rationalize it away by saying "we need to increase confidence in the integrity of the voting process," or "species of animals go extinct all the time: just look at the dinosaurs,"  but the reality is that they just don't care, or they want it to happen.

They should care in the case of global warming, because it will hurt this country in the pocketbook with increased insurance rates, decreased crop yields, higher food prices, more tropical diseases, more powerful storms, bigger defense budgets trying to deal with the warfare that droughts, floods and famines in other countries will produce.

But climate deniers are like smokers. "Yeah, I know smoking will kill me eventually. But since I like smoking and I don't want to make the effort to quit, I'll just take my chances. Maybe I'll get hit by a bus before lung cancer kills me. So why bother to quit smoking, or get daily exercise, or eat right?"

Replace "smoking " with "climate change," "lung cancer" with "drought, famine, floods, and war" and "quitting, exercise and eating right" with "developing renewable energy sources" and you have encapsulated the mindset of the climate change deniers.

Another coping mechanism is rationalizing that we'll just adapt. "People can just move. We'll find a way to stop if it does happen. Human ingenuity trumps all." They just don't seem to get that using ingenuity sooner rather than later would save a whole lot of trouble, money and lives.

Perhaps the most foolish rationalization possible is that "God won't let it happen. He promised." Yeah, and every football team that huddles in prayer before the big game wins, right?

Then there are the "we can't be the first" and "it's not all our fault" rationalizations. This argument goes: since China is emitting the most CO2 now, we don't have to do anything -- even though in 2009 we burned four times more fossil fuel per capita than China.

Then there's uncertainty: some climate change deniers like the Koch brothers are well-versed in science. They know that climate change predictions are difficult, and any number of things could cause the planet to cool if they happened. There is natural variation in climate, and maybe we'll luck out and it'll kick when we need it most. If a giant volcano blows up, the planet would be cooled down. If a sizable asteroid hit the planet, we'd have a nuclear winter. If solar output mysteriously drops, the temperature could plummet.

But doing nothing because such unpredictable -- and terribly destructive -- things might happen is the worst kind of wishful thinking. It's like speeding toward an intersection and closing your eyes when the light turns yellow.

The last refuge of these scoundrels is not patriotism, but money. "Even if everything you say is true, it'll cost too much to do anything about climate change." This is essentially what the few reputable climate scientists that the Koch brothers' claim as their own have said. They admit it's happening, but there's just too much political and economic inertia to do anything about it. "We'll just have to make the best of it."

The climate change deniers of today are like the smokers of the Sixties. They know what they're doing is bad, but can't kick the habit. But as the scientific evidence that smoking caused disease kept piling up, and more people got tired of breathing second-hand smoke, smoking started to be banned most everywhere: planes, restaurants, bars, even outside public buildings.

The problem is that climate change deniers can't smoke in the privacy of their own homes: their CO2 winds up in the same atmosphere that shapes the climate that we all live in.