immanence

For many, President Trump’s babbling and incoherent responses to last week’s National Climate Assessment (“I’m too smart to believe it, just look at our air and water and what those other countries are doing…”), following on from his even less coherent responses to California’s wildfire tragedies (“They should rake more, like the Finns”), merely reconfirm that Americans elected a huckster and a clown to the highest office in the land.¹

But for careful watchers of right-wing responses to climate science, Trump’s comments show something else as well. Instead of the carefully prepared propaganda campaign we’ve seen in previous years (crafted at places like the Heartland Institute or the moderately more reasonable, but ideologically libertarian, Cato Institute), Trump appears to have been caught scrambling for talking points. In part, I think this is due to the fragmentation and chaos of the socially and economically hard-right coalition he’s struggled to sustain. So much of that coalition has either been alienated by his behavior and interpersonal strategies or has jumped ship altogether (many of them landing in the water for now, until another ship appears).

The old talking points are still there, but they feel rehashed and carelessly applied. (Even the Epoch Times — the Falun Gong supported and vehemently anti-Chinese government rag that appears for free on the streets of several North American cities — managed to come up with a better headline than anything Trump et al were able to initially muster.)

That’s the incompetence argument. The denial of course is still there at the center of everything Trump’s Republican Party seems to stand for.

The problem for Republicans is that finding a climate scientist willing to go against the scientific consensus has become increasingly difficult, because most of the ones that are out there stopped carrying out research a while ago and sold their services to the obfuscationist think tanks. As for the claims that climate scientists are doing it “for the money” (stated most shamelessly perhaps by CNN commentator Rick Santorum, whose work for the Republican message machine is of course not at all for the money), or that there can be no “consensus” as long as the “facts” aren’t all in, these have become pretty see-through by now as well.

The more substantive claim that climate science is unreliable because it’s “all based on modeling” ignores the fact that the only scientific approach to predicting climate change and its impacts is through modeling. The alternatives are tea leaves and crystal balls.

The mass media, unfortunately, plays along by mostly covering the topic in a half-baked, half-cocked way — focusing, for instance, on a minor detail in the report about the impact on the US economy, when that detail is poorly contextualized and in effect understates the case. But in amidst the credential-free talking heads that are always called upon to testify to the “debate” — from former congressmen and senators like Santorum to the other residential bards of “public opinion” — the fact that a handful of climate scientists have been appearing is a good sign. Katharine Hayhoe, for instance, is a good communicator (she’s been perhaps the most cited of the report’s co-authors in the last few days). She’s also notable for the other reason that she happens to be an “out” evangelical Christian among climate scientists.

If we solved the media problem — for instance, by insisting from each and every respectable media source, and especially from the cable networks, that they interview actual scientists and climate scholars instead of the over-opinionated commentariat — we’d still have the denialist machine to contend with. How the Republican Party got wedded to the argument against climate science is a long story that has been told in many places (see, for instance, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here).

That’s where we get the depravity case — at least as Paul Krugman argues it. It’s still possible to dispute the details, the levels of certainty, or the politics of how we should engage with the high likelihood that global climate change will lead to serious challenges in the coming decades. But to dispute it “for profit, political advantage or ego satisfaction,” Krugman argues, “is not o.k.,” and to oppose action “for those reasons,” he writes, “is a sin.” “Businesses with a financial interest in confusing the public” are a large part of the problem, and money, for Krugman, is a large part of the explanation.

That’s a little oversimplified, but the implication is broader than Krugman suggests. Businesses always have a financial interest in confusing the public to the extent that that confusion can help them sell their products. When those products are harmless, then there is no cost to society, so it’s arguably not immoral, or at least not hugely immoral. But we live at a time when almost everything that is made carries ecological (and frequently social) costs that are not factored into the cost of production. Until we transform our economy to a “circular” one that accounts for the entire production cycle, from mining and manufacturing to waste and disposal — until it becomes an economy in which “waste,” as McDonough and Braungart put it, “equals food” — the business of making things will continue to be a form of largely unacknowledged depravity.

Environmentalists are on to this secret — which is why environmentalist guilt is something to be noted and not merely to be sneezed at. It’s a historical marker of our time. The point is to turn this guilty awareness into productive action. That’s a point that requires something like a religious conversion, and new religions always encounter resistance. Their spread, however, is due to the kinds of conversion processes that change people from the inside out and the bottom up. That may be our only real hope.

^{1. In turn, explaining how that happened has become pretty easy: from the skewing of the electoral maps (electoral college on down) in favor of Republican leaning districts and states, to the flaws of the country’s educational system (when a country so underfunds public education, that system is bound to produce a lot of ignorance, which is easily manipulable), its sensation-mongering media (publicly unfunded and scrambling to survive in a bottom-falling-out market), its liability to manipulation by foreign and internal agents, and so on.↩}