Denying Ourselves to Death
Is human nature up to the challenges of the 21st century? I'm not sure.
1.
Climate is everywhere and nowhere.
As I’m writing this, my hometown of Tampa, Florida, is set to be inundated, maybe, by another “once in a generation” storm, the second in as many weeks. My friends in Asheville are without power and water, and unable to easily move around as countless roads have been washed out or blocked.
Is this just part of nature? No. Right now, the waters of the Gulf of Mexico are six degrees warmer than their historical average. And why is that? According to some very granular data analysis on climatecentral.org, climate change made that temperature 200 times more likely.
Hurricane Helene was also an anomaly:
So, it’s climate change that is causing what lies in store from Hurricane Milton, and what resulted from Hurricane Helene. Those are facts.
2.
Of course, try telling that to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who has forbidden state agencies from using the term “climate change” or factoring it into their work. It’s amazing, really. Florida is one of the states most threatened by rising tides and increased storm activity, and yet its own public officials can’t talk about why.
Meanwhile, at least judging by their voting patterns, a majority of its voters simply don’t believe the science. Not that that’s an anomaly: a majority doesn’t believe Covid science either (more on that in a minute), or evolution, or the scientific data on gender, sex, and sexuality.
You know who’s not denying climate change? Insurance companies, who are jacking up rates for coastal areas of Florida. As a friend of mine put it, “the words of the prophets are written in insurance premiums.”
Let me state my thesis clearly: I don’t think humanity is up to the challenges this century presents. I think our instincts to deny the unpleasant, to tailor our opinions to suit our preferences, to form our views based on social group, to squash moral qualms to serve our self-interests, and to prioritize our ‘guts’ over scientific analysis will continue to block the kinds of action necessary to avert catastrophe.
By catastrophe, I don’t mean the end of civilization. That’s not what the IPCC reports project, and, as a non-scientist, I’m guided by what they say. But they do project massive social and economic upheaval, up to a billion climate refugees, mass extinctions and the eradication of entire ecosystems, and a lot of death (at least 250,000 excess deaths per year, in fact).
And yet, climate change barely matters to voters. Yes, 39% of voters say global warming is a “very important” issue to them, but that’s mostly Democrats; only 27% of Republicans said so. Most people don’t want to hear about it. And for the five or ten swing voters left in America, caring about climate may be a negative, which is why Kamala Harris dodged the climate question at the presidential debate.
It's tragic really. The Inflation Reduction Act is the most important climate law passed in American history, but she has to run away from it. I don’t blame her for doing so; the most important thing, from a climate perspective as well as plenty of others, is for her to win. But still.
3.
The redoubtable Marjorie Taylor Greene recently opined on Xitter that that “Climate change is the new Covid.”
At first, I thought she meant that climate change is the latest thing that liberals are worried about, but which is in fact not a big deal.
But then I thought — no, I bet she means that climate change is the latest excuse liberals have for trying to control our lives.
In fact, I was wrong. In fact, quoth Greene, climate change is the new Covid because both are conspiracies, because the government is manipulating the weather. First the Plandemic, in which the deep state created the Coronavirus to bring on the global reset, and now hurricanes, which, Greene noted, seem to hit ‘red’ counties harder than ‘blue’ ones. (For the record, that is true, but it’s because red counties are generally more rural and thus larger. They’re just bigger targets.) Here’s the original Xitpost:
I love how there are so many possible modes of climate denialism that it’s impossible to choose which one is operating at a particular time.
Actually, there is an unpleasant convergence between climate denial and Covid denial. In each case, there’s a natural (or Divine, if you wish) component and a human component. Yes, storms happen, but the climate crisis is making them worse and more frequent. Yes, disease happens, but failing to take simple precautions (like getting a shot) can make it far worse.
But that’s normal denial. Greene, as usual, takes things to a weirder, space-laser place (recall, the Jewish space lasers were starting forest fires) by taking nature/God out of the equation entirely. In her world, it’s all Satanic/man-made: Covid, hurricanes, forest fires. Her denial is actually the opposite of conventional denial, which says that these storms and temperature variations are all just a natural cycle. No, says Greene, they’re all conspiracies of the deep state. Thus, in her way, she’s actually horseshoed around to the truth. She and scientists agree: these storms are the result of human activity.
How bizarre.
4.
Human beings are meaning-making creatures. It’s likely how we invented anthropomorphic religion, which tells the same stories as science but with myth, character, and plot. Remember The Life of Pi? You can hear the same facts related by psychology, or by a colorful tale with animals. Which story do you prefer? So we create myths to make sense of a reality that is either too complex or too painful to understand.
It’s not globalization, technology, and economic transformations causing rural whites to fall behind — it’s immigrants. It’s not fossil-fuel use, agricultural emissions, and a concentration of power in certain industries causing climate change — it’s not happening at all, or it is happening but it’ll be okay, or it’s a ‘pseudo-religion’, or it’s a sinister conspiracy.
And so on.
There’s even a “New Denial” spreading, mostly online, that is quite different from the old denial. Check out this graph from the Center for Countering Digital Hate:
Like Greene’s, this permutation of denial suggests that what is really going on is denial in the psychological sense. Some people simply cannot accept what is going on— or what would be required to stop it — and so they consciously or unconsciously deny it using whatever possible explanation is at hand.
The New Denial is catching on, especially among young people. The CCDH did a poll in January 2024 that found that 31% of US 13-17 year olds agreed that “the impacts of global warming are beneficial or harmless” and 33% of all teenagers said “Climate policies cause more harm than good.” 30% said climate science and the climate movement “can’t be trusted”, including 37% of teenage boys, and 31% said climate change is “a hoax to control and oppress people”, including 41% of teenage boys.
Worth noting is that Farris Wilks, a fracking billionaire and ultra-conservative Christian pastor, has been bankrolling this effort. He and his brother have invested at least $6.5 million to start up PragerU and $5 million to start Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire (which now employs Jordan Peterson). Chump change for them, but still a significant chunk of the startup capital for those two entities, which have now grown significantly and which are some of the leading proponents of the New Denial. This Vice article tells the sorry tale.
Wilks does his own meaning-making as well. In a 2013 sermon, he said that severe climatic events were not the result of his fossil fuel activities but human sin. “We’re going to reap what we have sown, and what we have sown has not been good,” he said. “Think of all the murder that has happened in this country… all the babies that have been murdered… sexual perversion of all kinds.” Ultimately, he continued, all is in the hands of God. “We didn’t create the Earth, so how could we ever save the Earth, or save all the animals even on the Earth, or save the polar caps…. If [God] wants the polar caps to remain in place, then He will leave them there.”
This is astoundingly bad religion. The human actions which are clearly causing climate change… have nothing to do with climate change. Rather, it is sex and abortion that is causing God to be angry, and that is causing climate change.
I would say ‘you can’t make this stuff up,’ but then again, we humans did exactly that.
5.
E.O. Wilson wrote that “the real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology.”
This seems exactly right to me. The wars in the Middle East, the nativism of Trump, the climate denial and climate delusion — all these are symptoms of a species that is simply not equipped for the 21st century. Our instincts were once evolutionarily valuable, of course, but now they are part of the problem.
And while Wilson didn’t include religion in his list (though perhaps churches are among the ‘medieval institutions’ he mentions), as Farris, Peterson, Shapiro, and Wilks demonstrate, it, too, is contributing to our species-wide seppuku. Precisely by providing so much meaning, religion makes it easy to dismiss any evidence that might undermine it. Indeed, in the wake of Hurricane Helene, antisemitic conspiracy theories are now swirling in the sewers of the Right (i.e. Xitter again).
I’ve said before that when I started writing about global warming in 1998, I assumed that when the evidence became apparent, we would take action – though it would be too late to avert some of the worst consequences. But I was wrong. Evidence alone is inadequate, because it can be assimilated into any number of different narratives.
My hometown may drown, but many of its inhabitants will still not take responsibility.
This has been quite a week, and it’s only Tuesday. (I’m sending out this newsletter this afternoon rather than tomorrow morning, since my thoughts will be with friends in Tampa and I don’t want to offer commentary at such a fraught time.)
Yesterday, I went on CNN for an hour, mostly to talk about October 7, but instead I got into a messy fight with my co-panelists on, unbelievably to me, whether talking about immigrants “poisoning the blood” of America and being genetically disposed to crime was racist or not. I’m pretty confident I was on the right side of that one. Media coverage of the panel is here and here. A more benign clip from the show is here.
has been killing it this election season, most recently by summarizing and analyzing the conspiracy theories surrounding Hurricane Helene. If you live in a blue media bubble, please check out his piece. His coverage of the new revelations about Trump and January 6 (yes, new — I know) is also excellent.Meanwhile I’m sending thoughts of consolation to those who observed the October 7 anniversary yesterday, and thoughts of resilience and strength to those in Asheville and Tampa. Thanks for reading, and please share this Substack with people you think might be interested in subscribing.