The big question around these back-to-back hurricanes in the southeast U.S. is not why they are happening (that’s easy enough to answer), but why so many people find it easier to believe they were artificially generated by the U.S. government, the “deep state,” FEMA, industry, or some euphemistic “they” (and we know who “they” are) for some nefarious purpose, such as harming Republicans before the election, seizing people’s land to access lithium deposits, testing out their space lasers, falsely convincing us that climate change is real, and so on — than it is to believe in the science of anthropogenic climate change.
Conspiracy theories have flourished in the last few weeks, and they follow in the grooves of longerstanding theories about chemtrails, geoengineering, the deep state, the climate change “hoax,” and so on (see here, here, here, here, and in my earlier series of posts for some background on this).
The question, then, is why some people fall for theories that are so much less congruent with known facts than the more obvious, empirically parsimonious answer — that climate change is real and getting worse, and that scientists have known and demonstrated that for years. But this isn’t just about knowledge versus ignorance. It reflects a deep failure of trust in public institutions.
What are the causes of that failure? In the U.S. (and in what we could call “Greater America,” which like a “long twentieth [or any] century,” is the world beyond the U.S. that is most influenced by U.S. media discourses), I would suggest that there are three main causes, all of them quite real.
Continue Reading »
