Writing Climate Change (37)
The Fight for the Climate – Climate Obstruction
This is part of a series on writing climate change for fiction.
Last time we looked at the climate movement. This time we are looking at the other side. These are the people actively blocking climate action.
This story has the same four phases as with climate activism. As before this is a story of increasing scale, scope, and aggression. As before this is reaching a point where it raises serious questions about where this is all going. We may soon hit a point where what has gone before is unable to continue as it once did.
Again, this will be a rough sketch - just enough to orient yourself in a world made deliberately confusing. The same caveats apply as last time. We’re not interested in polemics or advocacy. This is a very rough sketch, more a set of examples than a comprehensive history (and taken from the most easily accessed material - dive deeper if you need to!).
If you want to understand climate change as an issue, you must know about these guys. This is a big heavy subject. You might not like the people we are here to talk about. Take your time.
PHASE ZERO - Setting the Scene
Climate obstruction is the outgrowth of pre-existing forces, principally the fossil fuel industry and right-wing politics. To put this in perspective we need to zoom out a bit.
When Did the Fight Really Begin?
The era of climate change begins in the 1980s, or at least that’s how we normally think about it. People look at the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s and lament what could’ve been, if only. However, to truly understand a planetary threat like climate change we need to think bigger.
Forget the 1980s. Our failure began in the 1900s.
The 1900s was when climate change was scientifically established as a potential planetary risk. The core science hasn’t changed much since then. The 1900s was also early in the point of technological decision. Budget airlines and car dependent suburbia lay in the distant future. We could’ve have made a different decision.
In a perfect world climate action would have begun in the 1900s. The scientific basis for necessary change would’ve been established by the 1930s. The transition would’ve been complete by the 1980s.
Instead, we ignored the risks. We had a major failure to think. We built an entire global civilisation on a technology with known planetary risks. We did nothing to prepare for those risks. Instead the serious scientific work only began in the 1950s. Our story only begins in the 1980s because this is the point at which Could Happen was finally proven to be Has Happened. The world had been warming for one hundred years.
We always knew.
Having waited a century to act, the actions now required would inevitably pit extreme social forces against each other. Yes, things might’ve been better if neoliberalism never happened and action had begun in the 1980s. But this was always going to be pushing towards revolution and counter-revolution.
We’ve already met the revolutionaries. Time to meet the counter-revolutionaries.
The Players
These are the people driving things. Many of the following groups overlap, or are in fact the same people. This is a world of shadows and lies, power and paranoia, money and ideology.
I was tempted to include many examples and quotes for flavour. But there’s just so much. For more check out:
Many of the groups we’ll mention also have public websites and publications. Sometimes they are very careful to obscure their true intentions behind fine sounding rhetoric. Other times they’re fairly blunt. The mask tends to slip whenever they have a chance for raw power.
Industry and Corporations
Fossil fuels are a commercial product. That product is linked to many other products (e.g. cars, steel pipes, gas station cigarettes, etc). Collectively these industries can function as a block with shared interests and personnel. Sometimes they all collude. Sometimes they ruthlessly attempt to destroy each other. At the core they all want to keep the game going. That game runs on fossil fuels.
A key industry organisation here is the American Petroleum Institute.
Petro-states
Much of what we’ll be looking at is centered on the United States. The USA has been the core driver of climate obstruction. At the same time we also have other states playing a major role. Russia. Saudi Arabia. Any place where the economic and political structure has fused with fossil fuel industries.
These countries have been able to interfere directly with the United Nations negotiations. They also have spy agencies, militaries, large budgets, and the ability to run propaganda campaigns. They have the added motivation of wanting stir up chaos in their geopolitical rivals.
Rich People
Fossil fuels make specific people very wealthy. That wealth forms inherited dynasties. They invest their wealth beyond the original industry that created them, merging all rich people into a social class with shared interests. This also tends to merge with political power, to form a general class of powerful people.
Not all rich people are climate deniers, far from it. However they do all benefit from pro-business laws. Because most of these people gained power during the twentieth century, their greatest fear tends to be Soviet Communism.
A small number of billionaires have funneled billions of dollars into the efforts we will be discussing.
Conservative Think Tanks
The intellectual wing of industry is organized in think tanks. They do the research, the policy analysis, pursue legal action, draft the pre-written laws to give to the politicians, assist with the propaganda campaigns, allow for networking and training. That sort of thing.
A lot of right-wing think tanks play a role in our story. Many of these were established during the beginning of neoliberalism. They are typically libertarian, with varying amounts of nationalism and fundamentalist Christianity.
Here’s a few examples: The George C. Marshall Institute (now the CO2 Coalition), Competitive Enterprise Institute, The Heartland Institute, The Heritage Foundation, The Cato Institute, National Center for Public Policy Research. There’s more.
Many groups out there also blur into mere front groups and Astroturf campaigns. There’s a lot. So many. Some of them are very subtle in their public presentation. When you’re aware of the strategies and talking points you can learn to spot them.
Conservative Politics
The right-wing is where all the above finds its political home. The right-wing is fairly vast and nebulous, combining everything from literal Nazis, to moderate conservatives, to libertarians, and more. Because the United States (like many democracies) is a two party system all of these groups get smooshed together in one party. Therefore climate obstruction has ended up allied by default to the entire right-wing. To aid this alliance climate change has been deliberately politicized along the Left-Right divide. Climate change has become an issue of big vs small government, nationalism vs globalism, Christianity vs secularism, etc. There’s also a revolving door between industry and politics here.
For many on the right, anti-communism was a big part of their identity. The fall of the Soviet Union seems to have given many of them a kind of phantom-limb syndrome. All their anti-communism latched onto the next big issue, which just happened to be climate change. When you look at their rhetoric, they’re not fighting climate action so much as they’re fighting an hallucination of Communism.
Conservative Religion
The modern alliance between conservatism and Christianity was deliberately created. Like much of this stuff, it got going during the turn to neoliberalism. Oil men and oil money is mixed up all this stuff. Oil men can be Christians, and Christian politicians can get bankrolled with oil money.
Some fun moments include: the takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention, the Moral Majority (with Jerry Falwell), and the Council for National Policy (with Tim LaHaye who’s apocalypse fiction scarred my youth).
American Evangelicalism has global reach. While plenty of Christians dislike this stuff, in my experience, this is mainstream Christianity. Fundamentalism also damages people’s ability to think. Many anti-climate conspiracy theories smell like they came straight from LaHaye’s Left Behind Series. At the more extreme end we get the religious Far Right and Christian Nationalism. Like, imagine if the Taliban were libertarians.
Public Relations Firms and The Corporate Propaganda Machine
From the very beginning of the fossil fuel industry, the rich and corporations have understood that maintaining their power requires propaganda. Accountability, regulation, and democracy have always been an existential threat. Turns out people get upset if you machine gun striking workers to death.
The function of the Propaganda Machine is to carry out psychological warfare. The objective is to shape the collective unconscious of society, to make themselves into the Invisible Government of the world, and to create an entire culture bent to serve their will.
That’s not paranoid hyperbole. They literally say that.
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.
...
If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it?
...
Under the old salesmanship the manufacturer said to prospective purchaser, ‘Please buy a piano.’ The new salesmanship has reversed the process and caused the prospective purchaser to say to the manufacturer, ‘Please sell me a piano.’
The Machine is Machiavellian, data driven, focus grouped, targeted, omnipresent, and bankrolled with oil. The Machine has been at work so long they have become background noise. The atmosphere of our media environment is propaganda warfare. Everything we looked at under psychology is the target. Social norms. Identity. Your innermost feelings.
Media and The Shock-Jocks
The propaganda machine needs an outlet. These outlets are independent (or potentially semi-independent) of the Machine itself. But they are useful to the Machine.
These are the people who allow the propaganda to reach a mass audience. At the polite end we have reputable establishments getting maneuvered into publishing articles crafted by propagandists. We also have places where the editor is themselves a climate denier. In the background we also get bloggers playing a critical role incubating material before it hits the mainstream. At the extreme end we have Shock Jocks running free with the propaganda lines, letting their muse take them where they will. The Shock Jocks have played a big role in whipping the whole thing into a culture war frenzy.
How did I know global warming is a hoax? 'Cause of who's behind pushing it. Liberals. They lie.
...
If there ever is scientific proof -- and see, I don't need scientific proof because to me the people who are promoting manmade global warming are a bunch of frauds. They are liberals, they lie. It's not a generalization. It is an undeniable truth of life.
- Rush Limbaugh, Premiere Radio Networks, The Rush Limbaugh Show, 2011
Populism, Conspiracy Theorists, and The Far Right
The neoliberal world has made many people very angry. The oil industry is fighting against mass protests with millions of people. Climate denial is ultimately a fight against reality – doomed to lose.
Which raises the question? How do you still win?
Various forms of extreme politics have continued to exist at a low level since the days of Hitler and Mussolini. Some are explicitly Neo-Nazi. Some are fixated on nationalism and traditional values. Some want to replace society with libertarian micro-monarchies (yes, that’s a thing). The John Birch Society includes oil tycoons, religious conservatives, and conspiracy theorists. They’re all fairly extreme by centrist standards. The Far Right (and the Far Left too) has been riding popular discontent at the status quo. So far the Far Right has largely run with the oil company propaganda lines (perhaps because they too hallucinate about Reds under the beds).
Populism and/or Far Right authoritarianism is therefore a tempting ally for the oil industry – a social movement of their own which will fight climate activism, capable of inspiring fanatical loyalty. All the oil industry’s own propaganda is here finally metastasizing into the very culture required to deny reality: a conspiracy fueled movement, buzzing with rage at the Elites threatening their way of life, awash with cynicism and paranoia, actively hostile to the science, bubbling over into violence against enemies real and imagined.
Those are our players.
Side Note: Propaganda Tactics
Climate obstruction has largely been a propaganda war. To aid your understanding, here’s a quick primer. While this stuff can be chilling, remember, it doesn’t always work, and can even backfire.
White, Grey, Black: Propaganda can be classed into three types depending on how much you hide what you’re doing. An advert by Exxon saying “Exxon supports renewables!” is White propaganda. Sponsored content where an influencer says the same line is Grey. Creating a fake grassroots environmental group to say the line is Black. They do all three.
Targeting Opinion Leaders: As Bernay’s explains, if I can get your doctor to tell you to eat bacon then you’ll probably do it. Efforts are focused at the top, at the influencers.
Targeted Lobbying: Sometimes they just need to target one person. A key legislator, advisor, judge. Now, if you can make friends with the girlfriend of his brother, and get invited to a dinner party, and then....
Targeting Demographics: Messages are shaped to match specific groups. The most easily persuadable demographics will be hit hard (in this case it’s poorly educated older men).
Targeting Values and Identity: Why are all their astroturfed front groups given names like “Liberty Eagles for Patriot Freedom”? Because they know what works for American’s sense of identity.
Targeting Useful Emotions and Desires: The arguments are seldom logical. They’re emotional. It’s Freudian logic.
Association with the Good: The oil industry has spent a century working in deep connections between oil and prosperity, patriotism, and more. The idea is to create an entire culture that demands oil at an unconscious emotional level – the kind of people willing to burn the world down if you ever take their oil away.
Weaponizing Your Virtues Against You: Journalistic impartiality was weaponized to present propaganda as a legitimate other side to the science. Science’s commitment to rigor was weaponized to make science look frail and uncertain.
Weaponizing Culture: Individualism is used to make systemic issues unsolvable. Religion is used to promote science denial. Whatever people value, we can find a way to spin it.
Attack the Messenger: Scientific findings are discredited by associating an entire field with a single person. That person is then attacked (with insinuations of conspiracy), to allow dismissing the entire field. You can also just waste their time with harassment and legal cases. Imprisonment or murder are also options in some places.
Cultivating Confusion: Saying things that are true, good, and beautiful mixed in with lies, evil, and ugliness helps the cause when your aim is just to screw with people. The oil industry wins by delay, not by needing to have an actual vision.
Cultivating Cynicism: If people give up, you’ve won. They’ll often accuse their targets of being in it for the money, or a conspiracy. Everyone is the same.
Cultivating Anti-science: They are at war with reality. Anything that undermines reality is their friend. Conspiracy theories and Biblical literalism are useful allies. Undermining universities, or abolishing government science agencies also works.
Controlling Knowledge Upstream: If you control what research gets done in the first place then you get to control what evidence will be available. God bless economists. Buy some. The aim is to create a knowledge environment where uncomfortable facts don’t exist, and the “Truth” is always on your side.
Coordinated Pseudo-events: The aim is to manufacture events which apply media and political pressure at just the right time. Climategate is a good example (more later). The simplest pseudo-event of all is the press release. Much of our news is in fact just pseudo-events.
System Creation: If you can get your stuff into the legal and educational systems then it will constrain and influence everything. Attacking one issue can involve reaching it via distant points in the social structure. Everything is connected.
Cooptation or Harassment: If something rises up as a threat, then you buy it, infect it, or steal it. If you can’t do that, then you beat them into the dirt.
Contrarian Academics: Because opinion leaders are critical, they have manufactured their own. More later.
And we could go on. Phase Zero gave us the raw material. In Phase One, the war begins.
PHASE ONE – The Propaganda Machine Is Turned On
In the 1980s the threat of climate change had been scientifically established. In 1988 the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was created by the United Nations to establish the evidence base for climate action. In 1990 the first IPCC report was released. In 1992 the Rio Earth summit set up the United Nations structures for the coming climate change negotiations. Everyone could see that global regulation was coming. This would ultimately come in the form of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997.
The oil industry’s objective was to ensure any regulation would be dead on arrival. They switched on the propaganda machine. They used every tactic available from the start.
By the end of this period climate change had shifted from a scientific question, to a partisan political belief. A question of identity. Do you believe in climate change? All the climate denial talking points had been established, from claims about sun spots, to pitting the economy versus the environment. Climate change was now an uncertain problem for the distant future. Public understanding had been successfully damaged. The political options had been railroaded into a narrow set of technological and market-based solutions. International agreements were soft. US politics entered the George W Bush years, and the USA pulled out of Kyoto.
Mission Accomplished.
Example: Industry Lobbying - The Global Climate Coalition
The coalition was formed in 1989 by the National Association of Manufacturers (the USA’s big industrial trade group). The sectors involved were utilities, fossil fuels, steel, rail, chemicals, transportation, and more. It was a corporate group with an executive, a board, various committees, and a budget of a few million dollars.
The GCC was created in response to James Hansen’s 1988 testimony. The idea was to pool resources and coordinate action to avoid climate regulation. This was the first and biggest anti-climate industry group. Their work developed the playbook.
They engaged in four main actions:
Undermining the science by focusing on uncertainty. This included misinformation, elevating fringe academics, and character assassinating climate scientists.
Highlighting the economic costs of action. This included sponsoring economic reports that exaggerated the costs of climate actions and minimized the benefits.
Cultural propaganda campaigns. They paid people to write editorials. They hired PR firms such as E. Bruce Harrison Inc, Goddard Claussen/First Tuesday, Shandwick PA, and Ruder Finn. They built relationships with newspaper editors and journalists. Anything to get their message out.
Lobbying of political elites. The UN negotiations, Congress, and Executive were targeted. The focus was on ensuring actions would be voluntary, not mandatory, and focused on technology innovation.
The main objective was to kill Kyoto. They succeeded in pushing action away from unilateral domestic action up to the international stage. Up at the international level they pitted rich and poor nations against each other to sink any chances of agreement. What little that did come back down from the international level then got fed through the domestic meat-grinder and killed with arguments about national sovereignty.
Over time the GCC lost members as they pushed climate denial in the face of growing evidence. The GCC ended in 2001. The Kyoto protocol was dead, and industry was losing interest.
Phase One was coming to a close.
Example: Spin Doctors - E Bruce Harrison
Harrison was born in 1932 in Alabama. He went to university. He done a bit of journalism. He helped on the campaign for JFK. He fell in love with the chemical industry lobbyists (as you do). His first battle was to beat Rachel Carson. He lost.
He bounced back. He and his wife started a PR firm. Direct attack had failed, so he focused on the framing: the three E’s. Environment, Energy, and Economy. Each deserved equal treatment.
As long as people were stuck in this framing they would necessarily give his clients equal weight to any environmental objections. Emotionally the three Es were tied to the good life, so that abundant oil becomes a psychological necessity, equal to clean air and water. With the GCC in the 1990s, Harrison applied this framing to climate change.
After that, Harrison sold the firm to Ruder Finn when his wife became co-chair the Republican National Committee. George W Bush came to power. Mrs Harrison got a job in the State Department. Mr Harrison went off to have fun with greenwashing. Eventually he became a professor at Georgetown, and she became President of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, putting her in charge of the USA’s public media.
E. Bruce Harrison died in 2021. His legacy lives on.
Example: Contrarian Academics - Fred Singer
Fred Singer was born to a Jewish family in Vienna in 1924. His family fled the Nazis and young Fred ended up England, before making it the USA where he trained as an engineer, eventually getting a PhD. He was very big into space stuff, like cosmic rays, rockets, and satellites. He seems to have had a fairly distinguished career in this field. By the 1960s satellites had led him to weather, which had led him to the environment, and therefore to climate change.
I’m unsure how much Singer was just a congenital contrarian on everything (a kind of eccentric uncle to the planet), how much he was getting paid to do propaganda, and how much he just believed in the cause. Either way he was taking contrarian positions for a long time. He seems to have been a believer in free-markets, making him a natural ally of business.
By the 1990s Singer was increasingly trashing his own scientific standing by appearing to be the mouthpiece of business on issues such as tobacco and climate change. He set up the The Science & Environmental Policy Project, which pushed climate denial. He also set up the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, as an anti-IPCC. He wrote a lot of books. He published opinion pieces in newspapers. He would show up at the climate conferences. Whenever anyone wanted a scientist to push misinformation they would bring him in. Several people like Singer were around. The same people would get brought out again, and again, and again. Their scientific credentials gave authority to the propaganda lines when it hit the media. Guys like Fred Singer were an important tool in undermining the science. He died in 2020.
I once met a guy like Fred. He was a jolly old man who dressed in a white suit, looked like Colonel Sanders, joked that he’s looking forward to better weather with climate change, then said DDT is probably fine. I never asked his name. I have a creeping suspicion about just who that might’ve been.
PHASE TWO – Attack, Attack, Attack!
The problem with climate change is that it doesn’t just go away because you won a single round of political nonsense. Momentum towards climate action continued.
In 2005 the Kyoto Protocol entered into force. In 2006 Al Gore released An Inconvenient Truth, reaching a broad audience with a call to climate action. In 2007 the fourth IPCC report was released. Meaningful scientific uncertainty had been laid to rest. Climate activism was turning to mass protest. The Global Financial crash hit, throwing the business world into panic. In 2009 the Copenhagen summit was aiming to produce the successor to the Kyoto Protocol. The threat of regulation was growing again.
Climate obstruction started to use more aggressive methods. Some authoritarian petro-states also started to become more aggressive. Climate denial beliefs were also now out in the world, free to evolve spontaneously, re-combining with other forces.
Example: Putin and the Arctic Thirty
The BBC has a good documentary on this incident, called On Thin Ice. A book was written by one of the campaigners involved called, Don't Trust, Don't Fear, Don't Beg. The incident shows how climate change was now getting mixed up in geopolitical struggles with authoritarian petro-states. This is the quick summary.
As the Arctic melts it is becoming a point of geo-political rivalry over its resources, principally oil. In 2013 Greenpeace launched a direct action against Russian oil drilling in the hopes of preventing a future rush for Arctic oil. The activists attempted to do their classic move of occupying, creating a scene, and getting media attention. What actually happened was far more scary.
The activists were intercepted by armed Russian security forces. Shots were fired. People were grabbed. A helicopter dropped commandos to seize their ship. All of this in the frigid Arctic ocean. The Greenpeace activists were held in a Russian prison. The whole thing turned into a diplomatic incident. Greenpeace mobilized globally to put pressure on Russia. Eventually, just prior to the Winter Olympics in Russia, amnesty was granted.
This incident took place around the time when Putin’s Russia was turning more explicitly towards authoritarianism and war. He was not fighting climate activists, so much as phantom shadows of the Cold War, battling against the West.
Example: Climategate
In the age of pseudo-events it is less the artificial simplification than the artificial complication of experience that confuses us.
- Daniel Boorstin, The Image
The sorry incident of “climategate” is a prime example of a pseudo-event. To paraphrase from Daniel Boorstin’s The Image, a pseudo-event has the following characteristics:
It is planned rather than spontaneous
It is intended to be “newsworthy”
It is interesting precisely because it’s unclear if it’s even real
It is intended to be a self-fulfilling prophecy
Pseudo-events overshadow real events in the media because:
It has been engineered to maximize drama
It has been engineered for maximum media coverage
It can be repeated at will, to keep the story going
It has been engineered to be easy to understand
It has been engineered to occur when everyone is watching
It costs money, so someone is squeezing it to get maximum return
It snowballs attention because people find it necessary to pay attention simply to be “informed”
It spins-off ever more pseudo-events, until media consists largely of pseudo-events.
Climategate ticks most of these boxes. This happened just prior to the Copenhagen talks, presumably with the aim to disrupt any potential successor to Kyoto.
In 2009 someone hacked the emails of the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University (I’ve heard speculation is was the Russians). This cache was then uploaded to the internet and copied about. Various climate denier blogs brought attention to the subject. The emails were cherry picked to create the impression that climate scientists were deliberately deceiving the world. This then hit the mainstream media just as the climate talks began.
A few scientists were targeted. They had contributed to the IPCC. They were put under enormous pressure. They were bombarded with weaponized copy-paste Freedom of Information requests. They were hounded in the media. Legal inquiries were launched. Rhetorically the pseudo-scandal was used to undermine the IPCC, and therefore to undermine the entire evidence basis for action on climate change.
Eventually the inquiries came back with the obvious answer. The scientists’ names were cleared. By that point the Copenhagen talks were old news, having failed. Because of climategate some scientists withdrew from media engagement out of fear. Others became radicalized.
Example: Air Con
What happens when all the bullshit hits mainstream?
The book Air Con is not particularly important, but the following quote gives a sense of what climate denial was evolving into. I once had the pleasure of discussing this book with an otherwise lovely old man. He appeared to think this book might have a point.
So if the climate science is wrong, what’s the real motivation here? Why are so many people prepared to spend so much money convincing the public there’s a secular Armageddon awaiting them?
You don’t have to look past the usual suspects, Greed and Power. The battle to convince you of the reality of “climate change” is intricately entwined with the collapse of the world financial markets and the growing push for a de-facto world government.
- Ian Wishart, Air Con 2010 Climategate Edition
What follows is a discussion of the New World Order, the Clintons, Enron, Al Gore, Obama, George Soros and more. Ian’s other books cover topics such as protecting Western Christian Civilization from political correctness, socialists, liberals, Islam, atheists, and gays. Do you see where this is going?
PHASE THREE – The Slide Towards Madness
The problem with climate change is that it doesn’t just go away because you harassed people.
In 2013-14 the IPCC released the 5th assessment report, now with even stronger language. The Paris Agreement soon followed. By now even the Pope was calling for climate action. In 2018 the IPCC released the famous 1.5°C report. Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion had exploded onto the scene. Climate disasters were recognized as happening now.
A decade of austerity after the financial crash had given rise to populism. The Far Right was gaining attention. The first Trump presidency began. Trump was immediately urged by our players to pull out of the Paris Agreement. The UN conferences were also becoming farcically bought out by petro-states and oil lobbyists. Mass protest was being met with moves to criminalize protest. Anti-climate conspiracy theories were going viral. The world was getting messy.
Example: Criminalizing Non-violent Civil Disobedience
Extinction Rebellion used a variety of tactics to cause disruption to ordinary life, gain media attention, and tie up government resources in the hopes they would be forced to negotiate. The UK’s conservative government’s response was to try and make those tactics illegal.
This effort bounced around the political meat-grinder for a while, finally emerging as the Public Order Bill in 2023. This law was tailor made to criminalize climate activism. The law has been widely criticized as draconian.
“This new law imposes serious and undue restrictions on these rights that are neither necessary nor proportionate to achieve a legitimate purpose as defined under international law. This law is wholly unnecessary as UK police already have the powers to act against violent and disruptive demonstrations.”
“It is especially worrying that the law expands the powers of the police to stop and search individuals, including without suspicion; defines some of the new criminal offences in a vague and overly broad manner; and imposes unnecessary and disproportionate criminal sanctions on people organizing or taking part in peaceful protests.”
- Volker Turk, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, 2023
Example: Naomi Seibt, the Manufactured Far Right Anti-Greta
The reason you’ve never heard of this German teenager is because this didn’t work very well. Opinion leaders matter for the propaganda effort. Whatever the other side has, they will manufacture their own. Therefore, the Heartland Institute tried to create an alternative to Greta Thunberg. Finding contrarian scientists turns out to be much easier than creating a viral internet teenager. For starters, where do you even find such a teenager? The Heartland Institute’s answer: alongside Germany’s Far Right Alternative für Deutschland party (AfD).
Because where else?
Naomi Seibt was born in Germany in 2000. Her mother, a lawyer, worked on cases for the AfD. Naomi made her debut on the right-wing blog Philosophia Perennis at the age of 16, with some nationalist poetry. She soon moved into being a right-wing teen Youtube influencer. She got noticed, and was recruited by the Heartland Institute to be the Anti-Greta. She regurgitates all the usual oil company misinformation, only now enveloped in the rhetoric of the German Far Right.
And they all worship Greta. A young and innocent, but also utterly immature and uneducated girl that is shamelessly being taken advantage of for a perfidious agenda of Climate Hysteria.
...
No, I am not “Anti-Greta”, and we are not “Climate Deniers”. We must not let anyone degrade us to members of the controlled opposition. Because we have our own positive ambitions... most importantly: we are Pro-Human. The true anti-attitude belongs to the enemies of reason. The proponents of Anti-Humanism.
- Naomi Seibt, 2020 speech to the AfD, reposted by the Heartland Institute
But she never did became famous like Greta. Her media moment died and she faded into the background. Her Youtube channel pulls in reasonable views for a small channel. Clips of Greta get multi-million view counts.
Eventually Seibt seems to have pivoted to QAnon. Her content is now pro-Trump, pro-authoritarian, anti-immigrant, anti-vax, with hallucinations of woke mind-virus super-spreading Communists in the USA’s Democrat party.
Example: A letter to the President
Dear Mr. President,
We, the undersigned, write in enthusiastic support of your campaign commitments to withdraw fully from the Paris Climate Treaty ....
... This commitment to reduce fossil fuel use every five years cannot be wished away by those who argue that the U. S. should keep a seat at the negotiating table in order to advocate for fossil fuels.
....
The undersigned organizations believe that withdrawing completely from Paris is a key part of your plan to protect U.S. energy producers and manufacturers from regulatory warfare not just for the next four years but also for decades to come.
- 2017 letter to Donald Trump
The signatories are a gigantic list of every think tank and more we’ve been discussing. I don’t know if they needed a letter the second time.
PHASE FOUR?
Climate change doesn’t just go away, not until you stop burning fossil fuels. This is the core problem faced by climate obstruction - you cannot overcome a growing self-caused crisis through denial alone. The more you deny, the worse the problem gets. The more extreme the required denial becomes. This is an inherently escalating process that logically must break somewhere.
So where does it go from here?
As far as I can tell, the fossil fuel interests have no long-term plan. They are simply continuing to do what they have always done, by any method available. I leave it up to you to speculate what becomes of a world that keeps getting pushed the same messages as back in 1912.
CONCLUSION
These are your tasks as a writer.
Self Awareness
To simply mention climate change at all puts you in the middle of a propaganda war. My own preference is to aim for a certain amount of informed neutrality, given the craziness that happens on both sides. However, that craziness insists that no neutral ground exist. Everything gets weaponized. You need to be aware of how this game is played, how you have been affected, and where it might be going. You have been exposed to propaganda.
Beware the Urge Towards Caricatures
We all tend to flatten and lump together people we disagree with. We also tend to get our ideas of those people’s opinions second-hand (often in the form of polemics), rather than from their origin. The result is to seriously misunderstand who you are actually dealing with. Their worldviews may be obnoxious to you, but they make sense to them.
The involvement of the Far Right does not mean the literal return of Nazi Germany. Just as some people are stuck fighting a fantasy of Eternal Communism, others get stuck fighting an Eternal Nazi. People can be socialists or authoritarian without being literal Stalinists or Waffen-SS members. Politics has evolved since 1945. The Far Right is diverse and internally divided, sometimes aggressively so. Populism and conspiracy theories are not the same as Nazis either. These are a reflection of widespread confusion and discontent.
The overwhelming driver of climate obstruction has been business protecting itself from regulation, petro-states protecting themselves from the world, and libertarians protecting the world from the Eternal Communist.
Beware the Urge Towards Hysteria
Powerful people running propaganda campaigns does not mean the world is run by the Illuminati using mind-control. All these guys are just some of the players among many other players, all vying to influence the world. They are internally divided, they make mistakes, they get bored, they run out of money, just like anyone else.
Social change is a process of messy evolution. That means neither side in the fight ever truly gets what they want. Both sides radicalize their own opposition whenever they win. Our players above have a consistent problem with losing support due to their own craziness, while radicalizing otherwise milquetoast people against them.
The world is changing. We don’t know where it ends. A lot of the story above centers on the United States. The ultimate outcome will be shaped just as much by Europe, China, and India.
Artistic Choices
Our story here is vast, shadowy, and complicated. You’re unlikely to fit this in a single work. Here’s some ideas for how to tell the story.
Go deep and narrow. Consider focusing on one incident (like the examples given). They often overlap with the bigger picture, functioning as a microcosm of the whole. Which characters stand out to you?
Use a human scale example as a key to the big picture. A global propaganda campaign is hard to understand. Consider using a human scale subplot to run in parallel. For example, a subplot about a pedophile infiltrating a family to groom a child would involve many of the same manipulation tactics, only at an intimate scale. The world of propaganda can be made more intelligible by showing it alongside a more obvious form of the same manipulation.
If you want to capture the full multi-generational sprawl of both activism and obstruction, then you’ll be looking at Epic or Modern Epic.
Immunizing Your Audience
Propaganda becomes much less effective when people understand the tactics, the common talking points, the players, the basic facts, and critical thinking skills. Depending on the work you’re doing, you may be able to provide that education. Remember, much of the propaganda works at an emotional level. The arts are well suited to dealing with emotion.
Be Sensitive to Your Audience
They have been exposed to propaganda. Some of them believe it, some don’t. Make a judgement about where your audience is at. If they are already aware, then your task is to bring them up to date for Phase Four+ thinking. If they do believe the propaganda, then you’ll need to think about how to unpick the framings and associations they’ve absorbed. You might want to re-read the sections on psychology – that’s where the battle takes place.
In Summary
This is a war. It’s ugly. I wish it was not so. We’ve started from a world that knew about climate change but decided it didn’t matter, allowing it to industrialize with fossil fuels. Those newly born fossil fuel companies then created propaganda campaigns to inculcate fossil fuel dependence into the fabric of modern society. Eventually climate change went from a potential risk, to an active hazard happening now. The propaganda kicked into to push that knowledge out of cultural awareness and derail regulation. They succeeded. Denial made the problem worse. Therefore awareness kept growing anyway. Therefore the propaganda got more aggressive, and more concretely repressive and hostile. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. The entire culture got poisoned, being pushed to detach from reality, and we all began to spiral downwards.
If you choose to write about climate change, you become part of this history.
Next time, we’ll look at the cultural side. The world of climate fiction also follows the same four phases.
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