Short answer:
Because mighty polluters industries has spent billions on disinformation campaigns attacking science which comes into conflict with their self interests. The polluters has always hid their self interests into politics and ideology.
For the professional deniers it’s called Denial for Profit, and for the amateur deniers its about self interest, regulation fobia, ideology/politics, religion, tribalism and cognitive biases.
Lets explain how climate science became a political and ideological issue.
The goal of the fossil fuel industry is to keep its profits rolling in without interference by government or by new, competing energy sources. The polluters know they dont have any science to back up their arguments. So instead they use the best defence method they can. Which is to polarize and politizise the science.
To do this they need the public embroiled in doubt and suspicion; they need to degrade public confidence in science and scientists; they need to harm America’s future—and the world’s future—so that one of the wealthiest industries on Earth can engorge itself in even more wealth.
https://cleantechnica.com/2016/0...
Tobacco and Oil Industries Used Same Researchers to Sway Public
The Dake Page :
"Denialists know that they have no valid scientific argument; if they did they would present it in scientific journals, conferences, and debates. Their goal isn’t to demonstrate science, it is to manipulate public opinion. That is what lobbyists do, and they do it well. Their goal is to create the illusion of debate, the façade of uncertainty. By continuing the “discussion,” such as it is, in the media, they win. They know that a majority of the public won't understand the intricacies of the science, either by choice or by its complexity. Denialists know that the public will get an overall sense of whether the science is settled or not, and that it is on this vague feeling the public will make judgments as to whether immediate action is needed. Perception is more important than fact, and illusion of reality is much more powerful than actual reality. [...] What is critical in this game is not what the science tells us, it’s the fact that to the public it appears as if there are two sides arguing with each other. Two sides + arguing = not settled.”
To pander their gullible “people on the streets” its often enough to label environmental laws for “tax scams”. This will trigger their tribe into believing its about them. Thats how they have kept america polluted for 100 years.
Thats why cynical industries and free marked fundamentalists which are dependant on polluting the environment in order to make their profit - will accuse anyone and anything and everyone, including governments, of using "politics" to try and "stop" them polluting.
The Oil and coal Industry does not want to give up it’s cash cow.
The polluter industries are accusing the climate science of being so "political", but they themselves have deliberately worked to make it appear as political. Because they have no science to defend themselves, this is their only defense against those who try to stop their pollution. To get a focus away from the fact that basic physics alone is 100% clear on that our CO2 causes climate change.
It's much easier for them to defend themselves when their own interests are wrapped up in ideology and politics.
The science was not politicized until the implications of doing something about it were realized by those who saw a harmful side of doing so to their particular concern. That usually involves big money but also becomes a threat to ideologies which abhor government interference into free market capitalism. Effective global warming intervention necessarily requires that the governing bodies of the world unite in the effort in a comprehensive and coordinated way.(Russel Swan)
When think tanks and fossil fuel front groups started to lobby for the fossil fuel self interests 30 years ago, the first thing they did was to camouflage those interests as an anti government anti regulation anti tax ideological anti socialist "struggle".
“They connected their audience’s underlying ideologies to climate change: Because cutting GHG emissions requires intervention regulation or increased taxation of carbon emissions—that curtail free market economics, people whose identity and worldview centers around free markets became particularly likely to reject the findings from climate science when the logic was laid bare.”
How Is Climate Change Denial Still a Thing?
Non-science free market lobbying groups have a long history of setting up fake front organizations and now blogger networks to saturate the public domain with intentional misinformation.
“Back in the late 1980s, when it became pretty clear that there was no persistent Soviet threat, conservatives needed a new bogeyman, and they found it in the environmental movement. “Green is the new Red,” became a common phrase in the conservative magazines of that era. Rather than suggesting that America strip away protections designed to keep air and water clean, commentators and pols railed against controls on less visible threats, like pesticides, ozone holes, and global warming. Cries for environmental regulation were twisted into calls for socialism and the end of economic progress.
Conservative think tanks and politicians took up the mantle of climate change denial and, for more than 25 years, they’ve kept at it. Just like tobacco industry did before them.
Accepting that climate change is real and bad is fundamentally harder to do for those who have benefited from industrial capitalism, which runs on cheap fossil fuels. It’s doubly hard for conservatives, who by definition tend to resist change more than liberals.”
You recognize them when they start to attack environmental laws. They always attack environmental laws.
These laws are made so that you and I can enjoy clean air and waters. These same laws are called “tax scams” by the polluters. The term “tax scam” will very likely be embraced by anyone who doesn’t like “the government” in the first place.
Climate change denial strongly linked to right-wing nationalism
Donald Trump has announced a replacement for the Clean Power Plan, one that would create hundreds of millions more tons of carbon pollution
Trump's New Power Plan Comes With a Deadly Price
76 Environmental Rules on the Way Out Under Trump
https://www.facebook.com/yearswa...
Climate Change: Most Americans Don’t Know About the Scientific Consensus
THE CONSENSUS GAP CREATED BY 30 YEARS OF DISINFORMATION
A widespread consensus among climate scientists exists on the reality of substantial human-caused climate change. Unfortunately, fewer than 20 percent of Americans are aware of this consensus, despite extensive communication about this consensus by scientists.
Why? Research shows this low level of awareness comes from economically and politically motivated challenges to the reality of climate change from groups with substantial access to resources that influence public opinions. Most notably, the fossil fuel industry has funded the research of a tiny minority of scientists in order to cast doubt on human-caused global climate change.
Why do people believe this tiny minority of scientists? Because the fossil fuel industry then used its enormous financial and political resources to spread this paid-for “research” widely.
People who are not experts in climate change are thus exposed extensively to false information due to the huge megaphone of the fossil fuel industry.
Such exposure triggers the “illusory truth effect,” a psychological phenomenon where the more we are exposed to a lie, the more likely we are to believe in. Indeed, research on climate denialist messaging demonstrates that exposure to such information substantially reduces both people’s belief in human-caused climate change and the truthfulness of climate science.
A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that over the last 20 years, private funding has had an important influence on the overall polarization of climate change as a topic in the United States.
Corporate funding and ideological polarization about climate change
Truth is these interests are spending billions on lobbying officials:
"Lobbying is conducted away from the public eye," explained Brulle. "There is no open debate or refutation of viewpoints offered by professional lobbyists meeting in private with government officials. Control over the nature and flow of information to government decision-makers can be significantly altered by the lobbying process and creates a situation of systematically distorted communication. This process may limit the communication of accurate scientific information in the decision-making process."
As the study concludes, “the environmental organization and the renewable energy sectors were outspent by the corporate sectors involved in the production or use of fossil fuels by a ratio of approximately 10 to 1.”
How lobbyists buy climate change legislation
Climate change is a side effect of industrial capitalism. Industrialized nations were built with energy from cheap fossil fuels, and this released enormous amounts of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.
This is what economists call an externality — a consequence that is not built into the cost. There are market solutions to externality problems, like carbon taxes or carbon trading schemes, which incentivise industries that don’t pollute as much. These are the sort of solutions that conservatives tend to like, but implementing any solution means acknowledging the problem in the first place.
"It’s not surprising that high-profile deniers are almost exclusively conservative white men, since they have most benefited from the industrial capitalist system, and therefore have the most skin in the game when it comes to protecting the powers that be — even if they aren’t those powers."
[...] “conservative white males are likely to favour protection of the current industrial capitalist order which has historically served them well”. It added that “heightened emotional and psychic investment in defending in-group claims may translate into misperceived understanding about problems like climate change that threaten the continued order of the system.”
Cool dudes: The denial of climate change among conservative white males in the United States
How Is Climate Change Denial Still a Thing?
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0075637
Smearing scientists and undermining "unwanted" science which comes into conflict with self interests and ideology, is all part of the denial propaganda machine:
"Cynicism about the motives of public servants, including government-backed climate scientists, can be traced to a group of neoliberals and their ‘toxic’ ideas".
On the origins of environmental bullshit
"The concerted effort to discredit the scientific consensus over man-made global warming has been continuing for two decades in the United States, and shows no sign of weakening. It is very often described as an attempt on the part of corporate America, most notably the fossil fuel industries, to hinder governmental regulations on their activities. While emphasising this dimension of the US climate denial movement, this article also aims to show the complexity of the movement, rather than the mere defence of the narrowly-defined and short-term economic interests of the oil and gas industries, by shedding light on two additional factors which have been instrumental in blocking strong climate action. First, climate denial stems from the strong ideological commitment of small-government conservatives and libertarians to laisser-faire and their strong opposition to regulation. Second, in order to disarm their opponents, US climate deniers often rest their case on the defence of the American way of life, defined by high consumption and ever-expanding material prosperity. It is the contention of this article, therefore, that the US climate denial movement is best understood as a combination of these three trends."
https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/10305
"The AEI was one of dozens of the new think tanks bankrolled by hundreds of millions from the Kochs and their allies. Sold to the public as quasi-scholarly organizations, their real function was to legitimize the right to pollute for oil, gas and coal companies, and to argue for ever more tax cuts for the people who created them.
The amount of spent money has been staggering. Between 2005 and 2008, the Kochs alone spent nearly $25m on organizations fighting climate reform. One study by a Drexel University professor found 140 conservative foundations had spent $558m over seven years for the same purpose.[...] The genius of this strategy was to “turn corporate self-interest into a movement among people on the streets”.
"Dark Money" Funds Climate Change Denial Effort
Exclusive: Billionaires secretly fund attacks on climate science
Dark Money review: Nazi oil, the Koch brothers and a right wing revolution
America the polluted
Tobacco and Oil Industries Used Same Researchers to Sway Public
“They did everything that becomes known as the signature of the tobacco industry,” said David Rosner, who has helped anti-lead lawsuits and co-wrote the 2013 book “Lead Wars.” “In fact, they were really pioneered by the lead industries. … The (Lead Industries Association) can take credit for creating this giant doubt industry.”
While evidence about the harmful effects of asbestos continued to grow, so did the influence of the asbestos companies. Between 1940 and 1980, the business expanded into a multibillion dollar industry that employed more than 200,000 people.
The success of these companies hinged on keeping the health risks of asbestos a secret — but it was asbestos workers and consumers who paid the price. In order to keep the industry alive and prosperous, many companies took steps to ensure miners, factory workers and the public knew nothing about the true dangers of asbestos.
http://theweek.com/captured/730701/america-polluted
Jeremy Grantham, the longtime investor famous for calling the last two major bubbles in the market, is urging capitalists and "mainstream economists" to recognize the looming threat of climate change.
"Capitalism and mainstream economics simply cannot deal with these problems. Mainstream economics largely ignore [them]," Grantham, who co-founded GMO in 1977, said Tuesday in an impassioned speech at the Morningstar Investment Conference in Chicago. "We deforest the land, we degrade our soils, we pollute and overuse our water and we treat air like an open sewer, and we do it all off the balance sheet."
This negligence is due in large part to how short-sighted corporations can be, Grantham said. "Anything that happens to a corporation over 25 years out doesn't exist for them, therefore, as I like to say, grandchildren have no value" to them, he said.
- Fred Imbert, CNBC, June 13, 2018
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/13/gmos-grantham-capitalists-need-to-wake-up-to-climate-change-reality.html
Targeted industry funding has created a cottage industry of rogue scientists and fake experts who have manipulated public opinion and confused the issue.
The polluters industry - a timeline:
1900-2000: LEAD
Lead is good for us and not dangerous to children and if you dont bend over and enjoy it youre attacking our industry and our desire to make shitloads of money by ruining public health and your campaign to demonize LEAD is based on junk science and you are probably a leftist government communist out to tax and regulate us out of business
OIL COMPANY DUPONT AND GENERAL MOTORS KNEW LEAD GAS WAS A KNOWN POISON WHEN THEY PUT IT IN GASOLINE AS AN ANTI-KNOCK AGENT.
(Ethanol couldn’t be patented and offered no viable profit for GM, so they were on the lookout for new additives to use. Marketing tetraethyl lead or TEL under the name “Ethyl” (because lead was already known to be poisonous), GM expected to rake in massive amounts of money.)
For decades auto and oil companies denied that lead posed any health risks.
1930s-1990s ASBESTOS
Asbestos is good for us and if you dont bend over and enjoy it youre attacking our industry and our desire to make shitloads of money by ruining public health and your campaign to demonize asbestos is based on junk science and you are probably a leftist government communist out to tax and regulate us out of business.
"As is often the case with environmental scares, the asbestos “cure” was pushed well ahead of a complete diagnosis. Research has confirmed that asbestos workers who do not use protective breathing apparatus suffer increased health risks. For the remaining 99+ percent of the U.S. population, however, asbestos health risks are virtually nil."
https://www.heartland.org/news-opinion/news/testimony-on-asbestos-litigation-1
Massive Asbestos Cover-Up by World's Industrial Giants
1940s-1960s: DDT
DDT is good for us and if you dont bend over and enjoy it youre attacking our industry and our desire to make shitloads of money by ruining public health and your campaign to demonize DDT is based on junk science and you are probably a leftist government communist out to tax and regulate us out of business.
Ruthless Power and Deleterious Politics: From DDT to Roundup
1950s-1980s: NICOTINE
Nicotine is good for us and is not addictive nor related to lung cancer and if you dont bend over and enjoy it you're attacking our industry and our desire to make shitloads of money by ruining public health and your campaign to demonize smokers and all forms of tobacco is based on junk science and you are probably a leftist government communist out to tax and regulate us out of business
Tobacco industry intentionally manipulates cigarettes to make them more addictive.
"A federal court has ordered Altria, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, Lorillard and Philip Morris USA to make this statement about the health effects of smoking."
Then the bad news begins to flow.
"Smoking causes heart disease, emphysema, acute myeloid leukemia and cancer of the mouth, esophagus, larynx, lung, stomach, kidney, bladder and pancreas."
Heartland Institute 2018:
"The public health community's campaign to demonize smokers and all forms of tobacco is based on junk science".
1990s-2018: C02
C02 is good for us and not related to pollution and climate change and if you dont bend over and enjoy it you're attacking our industry and our desire to make shitloads of money by ruining public health and your campaign to demonize fossil fuels is based on junk science and you are probably a leftist government communist out to tax and regulate us out of business.
The US supreme court ruled that carbon dioxide IS a pollutant is 2007.
Exxon Knew about Climate Change Almost 40 Years Ago
Shell Knew Fossil Fuels Created Climate Change Risks Back in 1980s, Internal Documents Show
"As early as the 1950s, the groups shared scientists and publicists to downplay dangers of smoking and climate change".
Tobacco and Oil Industries Used Same Researchers to Sway Public
Anthony Watts - SourceWatch
Deniers favorite fossil fuel think tank front group, the Heartland Institutes view on tobacco and tobacco smoking. Sound familiar?
Heartland Institute 2018:
"The public health community's campaign to demonize smokers and all forms of tobacco is based on junk science".
Heartland Institute 2018:
"The anti-smoking movement is hardly a grassroots phenomenon: It is largely funded by taxpayers and a few major foundations with left-liberal agendas."
Heartland Institute 2018:
“The association between (second hand) tobacco smoke and coronary heart disease and lung cancer may be considerably weaker than generally believed.
Heartland Institute 2018:
"There are many reasons to be skeptical about what professional anti-smoking advocates say. They personally profit by exaggerating the health threats of smoking and winning passage of higher taxes and bans on smoking in public places."
More:
Anti-smoking activists give smokers a stark choice: Stop smoking or die! In fact, there is a third path: reduce the harm by shifting to less-hazardous products that provide similar enjoyment
Litigation against the tobacco industry is an example of lawsuit abuse, and has “loaded the gun” for lawsuits against other industries.
Smoking bans hurt small businesses and violate private property rights.
Appeals to “protect the children” don’t justify the war being waged against adult smokers.
Smoker's Lounge | Heartland Institute
What the oil giants knew:
http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa815f/pdf
Shell Knew Fossil Fuels Created Climate Change Risks Back in 1980s, Internal Documents Show
ALL SUMMED UP IN THIS MY RANT:
The hysterical, polemic, paranoid conspiratorial and desperate feigned "us against them" conservative alt-right wingnut ideological free marked fundamentalist libertarian Ayn Rand anti-government anti-regulation tax alarmism demagogy junk with its mandatory and predictable attacks on unwanted (climate) science and smear against scientists and competing green energy, filtered through think tanks and astroturf orgs by their wolf pack attackers, Opinion Piece writers, fake experts and their media-accomplices, all recycled by echo chamber denier blogs and You-Tube-videos by amateur deniers and boys room conspiracy drivlers and web-trolls,
-are really only a
sewer stream of cynical polluters industry self interests,
camouflaged as a political right / left struggle -drag queened in a convulsively socialist witch hunt, posing like its about the "people on the street", the workers (their gullible sheeple) and "the poor people of the world",
but the real agenda is
to legitimize the right to pollute for oil, gas and coal companies, and to argue for ever more tax cuts for the free marked fundamentalists who created them so they can continue to make shitloads of money by ruining public health and add to the damages of CC.
Private corporations take the profit while the environment and public health takes the bill.
Roger Fjellstad Olsen's answer to What are climate change deniers not admitting? Is it the truth that global warming is human caused, or are they denying that they know it is real but won't admit it?
THE END RESULT
IS AMERICA NOW HAVE HALF A POPULATION WHO ARE IN DISTRUST OF SCIENCE AND SCIENTISTS
Journalist Charles P. Pierce, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free :"
Everything about the claim, “global warming (climate change) is a scam”, can be directly linked to fossil fuel front groups, think tanks and their echo chamber denier blogs.
Every singe time you follow the trail back, this is where you gonna end up. EVERY SINGLE TIME.
To some nonsense about how C02, their monetary crane and Holy Grail, is “good for us”. Everything the professional climate deniers have ever written about this matter, has this one purpose; to protect C02. To portrait C02 as “ a gift from God”.
They duped us with lead
They duped us with asbestos
They duped us with DDT
They duped us with nicotine
Are we gonna let the mighty polluters run us all over..AGAIN?
Roger Fjellstad Olsen's answer to Why is opposition to climate science more common in the United States than other countries?
Roger Fjellstad Olsen's answer to How do the Koch brothers feel about global warming and pollution?
Because mighty polluters industries has spent billions on disinformation campaigns attacking science which comes into conflict with their self interests. The polluters has always hid their self interests into politics and ideology.
For the professional deniers it’s called Denial for Profit, and for the amateur deniers its about self interest, regulation fobia, ideology/politics, religion, tribalism and cognitive biases.
Lets explain how climate science became a political and ideological issue.
The goal of the fossil fuel industry is to keep its profits rolling in without interference by government or by new, competing energy sources. The polluters know they dont have any science to back up their arguments. So instead they use the best defence method they can. Which is to polarize and politizise the science.
To do this they need the public embroiled in doubt and suspicion; they need to degrade public confidence in science and scientists; they need to harm America’s future—and the world’s future—so that one of the wealthiest industries on Earth can engorge itself in even more wealth.
https://cleantechnica.com/2016/0...
Tobacco and Oil Industries Used Same Researchers to Sway Public
The Dake Page :
"Denialists know that they have no valid scientific argument; if they did they would present it in scientific journals, conferences, and debates. Their goal isn’t to demonstrate science, it is to manipulate public opinion. That is what lobbyists do, and they do it well. Their goal is to create the illusion of debate, the façade of uncertainty. By continuing the “discussion,” such as it is, in the media, they win. They know that a majority of the public won't understand the intricacies of the science, either by choice or by its complexity. Denialists know that the public will get an overall sense of whether the science is settled or not, and that it is on this vague feeling the public will make judgments as to whether immediate action is needed. Perception is more important than fact, and illusion of reality is much more powerful than actual reality. [...] What is critical in this game is not what the science tells us, it’s the fact that to the public it appears as if there are two sides arguing with each other. Two sides + arguing = not settled.”
To pander their gullible “people on the streets” its often enough to label environmental laws for “tax scams”. This will trigger their tribe into believing its about them. Thats how they have kept america polluted for 100 years.
Thats why cynical industries and free marked fundamentalists which are dependant on polluting the environment in order to make their profit - will accuse anyone and anything and everyone, including governments, of using "politics" to try and "stop" them polluting.
The Oil and coal Industry does not want to give up it’s cash cow.
The polluter industries are accusing the climate science of being so "political", but they themselves have deliberately worked to make it appear as political. Because they have no science to defend themselves, this is their only defense against those who try to stop their pollution. To get a focus away from the fact that basic physics alone is 100% clear on that our CO2 causes climate change.
It's much easier for them to defend themselves when their own interests are wrapped up in ideology and politics.
The science was not politicized until the implications of doing something about it were realized by those who saw a harmful side of doing so to their particular concern. That usually involves big money but also becomes a threat to ideologies which abhor government interference into free market capitalism. Effective global warming intervention necessarily requires that the governing bodies of the world unite in the effort in a comprehensive and coordinated way.(Russel Swan)
When think tanks and fossil fuel front groups started to lobby for the fossil fuel self interests 30 years ago, the first thing they did was to camouflage those interests as an anti government anti regulation anti tax ideological anti socialist "struggle".
“They connected their audience’s underlying ideologies to climate change: Because cutting GHG emissions requires intervention regulation or increased taxation of carbon emissions—that curtail free market economics, people whose identity and worldview centers around free markets became particularly likely to reject the findings from climate science when the logic was laid bare.”
How Is Climate Change Denial Still a Thing?
Non-science free market lobbying groups have a long history of setting up fake front organizations and now blogger networks to saturate the public domain with intentional misinformation.
“Back in the late 1980s, when it became pretty clear that there was no persistent Soviet threat, conservatives needed a new bogeyman, and they found it in the environmental movement. “Green is the new Red,” became a common phrase in the conservative magazines of that era. Rather than suggesting that America strip away protections designed to keep air and water clean, commentators and pols railed against controls on less visible threats, like pesticides, ozone holes, and global warming. Cries for environmental regulation were twisted into calls for socialism and the end of economic progress.
Conservative think tanks and politicians took up the mantle of climate change denial and, for more than 25 years, they’ve kept at it. Just like tobacco industry did before them.
Accepting that climate change is real and bad is fundamentally harder to do for those who have benefited from industrial capitalism, which runs on cheap fossil fuels. It’s doubly hard for conservatives, who by definition tend to resist change more than liberals.”
You recognize them when they start to attack environmental laws. They always attack environmental laws.
These laws are made so that you and I can enjoy clean air and waters. These same laws are called “tax scams” by the polluters. The term “tax scam” will very likely be embraced by anyone who doesn’t like “the government” in the first place.
Climate change denial strongly linked to right-wing nationalism
Donald Trump has announced a replacement for the Clean Power Plan, one that would create hundreds of millions more tons of carbon pollution
Trump's New Power Plan Comes With a Deadly Price
76 Environmental Rules on the Way Out Under Trump
https://www.facebook.com/yearswa...
Climate Change: Most Americans Don’t Know About the Scientific Consensus
THE CONSENSUS GAP CREATED BY 30 YEARS OF DISINFORMATION
A widespread consensus among climate scientists exists on the reality of substantial human-caused climate change. Unfortunately, fewer than 20 percent of Americans are aware of this consensus, despite extensive communication about this consensus by scientists.
Why? Research shows this low level of awareness comes from economically and politically motivated challenges to the reality of climate change from groups with substantial access to resources that influence public opinions. Most notably, the fossil fuel industry has funded the research of a tiny minority of scientists in order to cast doubt on human-caused global climate change.
Why do people believe this tiny minority of scientists? Because the fossil fuel industry then used its enormous financial and political resources to spread this paid-for “research” widely.
People who are not experts in climate change are thus exposed extensively to false information due to the huge megaphone of the fossil fuel industry.
Such exposure triggers the “illusory truth effect,” a psychological phenomenon where the more we are exposed to a lie, the more likely we are to believe in. Indeed, research on climate denialist messaging demonstrates that exposure to such information substantially reduces both people’s belief in human-caused climate change and the truthfulness of climate science.
A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that over the last 20 years, private funding has had an important influence on the overall polarization of climate change as a topic in the United States.
Corporate funding and ideological polarization about climate change
Truth is these interests are spending billions on lobbying officials:
"Lobbying is conducted away from the public eye," explained Brulle. "There is no open debate or refutation of viewpoints offered by professional lobbyists meeting in private with government officials. Control over the nature and flow of information to government decision-makers can be significantly altered by the lobbying process and creates a situation of systematically distorted communication. This process may limit the communication of accurate scientific information in the decision-making process."
As the study concludes, “the environmental organization and the renewable energy sectors were outspent by the corporate sectors involved in the production or use of fossil fuels by a ratio of approximately 10 to 1.”
How lobbyists buy climate change legislation
Climate change is a side effect of industrial capitalism. Industrialized nations were built with energy from cheap fossil fuels, and this released enormous amounts of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.
This is what economists call an externality — a consequence that is not built into the cost. There are market solutions to externality problems, like carbon taxes or carbon trading schemes, which incentivise industries that don’t pollute as much. These are the sort of solutions that conservatives tend to like, but implementing any solution means acknowledging the problem in the first place.
"It’s not surprising that high-profile deniers are almost exclusively conservative white men, since they have most benefited from the industrial capitalist system, and therefore have the most skin in the game when it comes to protecting the powers that be — even if they aren’t those powers."
[...] “conservative white males are likely to favour protection of the current industrial capitalist order which has historically served them well”. It added that “heightened emotional and psychic investment in defending in-group claims may translate into misperceived understanding about problems like climate change that threaten the continued order of the system.”
Cool dudes: The denial of climate change among conservative white males in the United States
How Is Climate Change Denial Still a Thing?
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0075637
Smearing scientists and undermining "unwanted" science which comes into conflict with self interests and ideology, is all part of the denial propaganda machine:
"Cynicism about the motives of public servants, including government-backed climate scientists, can be traced to a group of neoliberals and their ‘toxic’ ideas".
On the origins of environmental bullshit
"The concerted effort to discredit the scientific consensus over man-made global warming has been continuing for two decades in the United States, and shows no sign of weakening. It is very often described as an attempt on the part of corporate America, most notably the fossil fuel industries, to hinder governmental regulations on their activities. While emphasising this dimension of the US climate denial movement, this article also aims to show the complexity of the movement, rather than the mere defence of the narrowly-defined and short-term economic interests of the oil and gas industries, by shedding light on two additional factors which have been instrumental in blocking strong climate action. First, climate denial stems from the strong ideological commitment of small-government conservatives and libertarians to laisser-faire and their strong opposition to regulation. Second, in order to disarm their opponents, US climate deniers often rest their case on the defence of the American way of life, defined by high consumption and ever-expanding material prosperity. It is the contention of this article, therefore, that the US climate denial movement is best understood as a combination of these three trends."
https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/10305
"The AEI was one of dozens of the new think tanks bankrolled by hundreds of millions from the Kochs and their allies. Sold to the public as quasi-scholarly organizations, their real function was to legitimize the right to pollute for oil, gas and coal companies, and to argue for ever more tax cuts for the people who created them.
The amount of spent money has been staggering. Between 2005 and 2008, the Kochs alone spent nearly $25m on organizations fighting climate reform. One study by a Drexel University professor found 140 conservative foundations had spent $558m over seven years for the same purpose.[...] The genius of this strategy was to “turn corporate self-interest into a movement among people on the streets”.
"Dark Money" Funds Climate Change Denial Effort
Exclusive: Billionaires secretly fund attacks on climate science
Dark Money review: Nazi oil, the Koch brothers and a right wing revolution
America the polluted
Tobacco and Oil Industries Used Same Researchers to Sway Public
“They did everything that becomes known as the signature of the tobacco industry,” said David Rosner, who has helped anti-lead lawsuits and co-wrote the 2013 book “Lead Wars.” “In fact, they were really pioneered by the lead industries. … The (Lead Industries Association) can take credit for creating this giant doubt industry.”
While evidence about the harmful effects of asbestos continued to grow, so did the influence of the asbestos companies. Between 1940 and 1980, the business expanded into a multibillion dollar industry that employed more than 200,000 people.
The success of these companies hinged on keeping the health risks of asbestos a secret — but it was asbestos workers and consumers who paid the price. In order to keep the industry alive and prosperous, many companies took steps to ensure miners, factory workers and the public knew nothing about the true dangers of asbestos.
http://theweek.com/captured/730701/america-polluted
Jeremy Grantham, the longtime investor famous for calling the last two major bubbles in the market, is urging capitalists and "mainstream economists" to recognize the looming threat of climate change.
"Capitalism and mainstream economics simply cannot deal with these problems. Mainstream economics largely ignore [them]," Grantham, who co-founded GMO in 1977, said Tuesday in an impassioned speech at the Morningstar Investment Conference in Chicago. "We deforest the land, we degrade our soils, we pollute and overuse our water and we treat air like an open sewer, and we do it all off the balance sheet."
This negligence is due in large part to how short-sighted corporations can be, Grantham said. "Anything that happens to a corporation over 25 years out doesn't exist for them, therefore, as I like to say, grandchildren have no value" to them, he said.
- Fred Imbert, CNBC, June 13, 2018
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/13/gmos-grantham-capitalists-need-to-wake-up-to-climate-change-reality.html
Targeted industry funding has created a cottage industry of rogue scientists and fake experts who have manipulated public opinion and confused the issue.
In a review of the book The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe by Michael D. Gordin, David Morrison wrote:
In his final chapter, Gordin turns to the new phase of pseudoscience, practiced by a few rogue scientists themselves. Climate change denialism is the prime example, where a handful of scientists, allied with an effective PR machine, are publicly challenging the scientific consensus that global warming is real and is due primarily to human consumption of fossil fuels. Scientists have watched in disbelief that as the evidence for global warming has become ever more solid, the deniers have been increasingly successful in the public and political arena. … Today pseudoscience is still with us, and is as dangerous a challenge to science as it ever was in the past.
The polluters industry - a timeline:
1900-2000: LEAD
Lead is good for us and not dangerous to children and if you dont bend over and enjoy it youre attacking our industry and our desire to make shitloads of money by ruining public health and your campaign to demonize LEAD is based on junk science and you are probably a leftist government communist out to tax and regulate us out of business
OIL COMPANY DUPONT AND GENERAL MOTORS KNEW LEAD GAS WAS A KNOWN POISON WHEN THEY PUT IT IN GASOLINE AS AN ANTI-KNOCK AGENT.
(Ethanol couldn’t be patented and offered no viable profit for GM, so they were on the lookout for new additives to use. Marketing tetraethyl lead or TEL under the name “Ethyl” (because lead was already known to be poisonous), GM expected to rake in massive amounts of money.)
For decades auto and oil companies denied that lead posed any health risks.
1930s-1990s ASBESTOS
Asbestos is good for us and if you dont bend over and enjoy it youre attacking our industry and our desire to make shitloads of money by ruining public health and your campaign to demonize asbestos is based on junk science and you are probably a leftist government communist out to tax and regulate us out of business.
"As is often the case with environmental scares, the asbestos “cure” was pushed well ahead of a complete diagnosis. Research has confirmed that asbestos workers who do not use protective breathing apparatus suffer increased health risks. For the remaining 99+ percent of the U.S. population, however, asbestos health risks are virtually nil."
https://www.heartland.org/news-opinion/news/testimony-on-asbestos-litigation-1
Massive Asbestos Cover-Up by World's Industrial Giants
1940s-1960s: DDT
DDT is good for us and if you dont bend over and enjoy it youre attacking our industry and our desire to make shitloads of money by ruining public health and your campaign to demonize DDT is based on junk science and you are probably a leftist government communist out to tax and regulate us out of business.
Ruthless Power and Deleterious Politics: From DDT to Roundup
1950s-1980s: NICOTINE
Nicotine is good for us and is not addictive nor related to lung cancer and if you dont bend over and enjoy it you're attacking our industry and our desire to make shitloads of money by ruining public health and your campaign to demonize smokers and all forms of tobacco is based on junk science and you are probably a leftist government communist out to tax and regulate us out of business
Tobacco industry intentionally manipulates cigarettes to make them more addictive.
"A federal court has ordered Altria, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, Lorillard and Philip Morris USA to make this statement about the health effects of smoking."
Then the bad news begins to flow.
"Smoking causes heart disease, emphysema, acute myeloid leukemia and cancer of the mouth, esophagus, larynx, lung, stomach, kidney, bladder and pancreas."
Heartland Institute 2018:
"The public health community's campaign to demonize smokers and all forms of tobacco is based on junk science".
1990s-2018: C02
C02 is good for us and not related to pollution and climate change and if you dont bend over and enjoy it you're attacking our industry and our desire to make shitloads of money by ruining public health and your campaign to demonize fossil fuels is based on junk science and you are probably a leftist government communist out to tax and regulate us out of business.
The US supreme court ruled that carbon dioxide IS a pollutant is 2007.
Exxon Knew about Climate Change Almost 40 Years Ago
Shell Knew Fossil Fuels Created Climate Change Risks Back in 1980s, Internal Documents Show
"As early as the 1950s, the groups shared scientists and publicists to downplay dangers of smoking and climate change".
Tobacco and Oil Industries Used Same Researchers to Sway Public
Anthony Watts - SourceWatch
Deniers favorite fossil fuel think tank front group, the Heartland Institutes view on tobacco and tobacco smoking. Sound familiar?
Heartland Institute 2018:
"The public health community's campaign to demonize smokers and all forms of tobacco is based on junk science".
Heartland Institute 2018:
"The anti-smoking movement is hardly a grassroots phenomenon: It is largely funded by taxpayers and a few major foundations with left-liberal agendas."
Heartland Institute 2018:
“The association between (second hand) tobacco smoke and coronary heart disease and lung cancer may be considerably weaker than generally believed.
Heartland Institute 2018:
"There are many reasons to be skeptical about what professional anti-smoking advocates say. They personally profit by exaggerating the health threats of smoking and winning passage of higher taxes and bans on smoking in public places."
More:
Anti-smoking activists give smokers a stark choice: Stop smoking or die! In fact, there is a third path: reduce the harm by shifting to less-hazardous products that provide similar enjoyment
Litigation against the tobacco industry is an example of lawsuit abuse, and has “loaded the gun” for lawsuits against other industries.
Smoking bans hurt small businesses and violate private property rights.
Appeals to “protect the children” don’t justify the war being waged against adult smokers.
Smoker's Lounge | Heartland Institute
What the oil giants knew:
http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa815f/pdf
Shell Knew Fossil Fuels Created Climate Change Risks Back in 1980s, Internal Documents Show
ALL SUMMED UP IN THIS MY RANT:
The hysterical, polemic, paranoid conspiratorial and desperate feigned "us against them" conservative alt-right wingnut ideological free marked fundamentalist libertarian Ayn Rand anti-government anti-regulation tax alarmism demagogy junk with its mandatory and predictable attacks on unwanted (climate) science and smear against scientists and competing green energy, filtered through think tanks and astroturf orgs by their wolf pack attackers, Opinion Piece writers, fake experts and their media-accomplices, all recycled by echo chamber denier blogs and You-Tube-videos by amateur deniers and boys room conspiracy drivlers and web-trolls,
-are really only a
sewer stream of cynical polluters industry self interests,
camouflaged as a political right / left struggle -drag queened in a convulsively socialist witch hunt, posing like its about the "people on the street", the workers (their gullible sheeple) and "the poor people of the world",
but the real agenda is
to legitimize the right to pollute for oil, gas and coal companies, and to argue for ever more tax cuts for the free marked fundamentalists who created them so they can continue to make shitloads of money by ruining public health and add to the damages of CC.
Private corporations take the profit while the environment and public health takes the bill.
Roger Fjellstad Olsen's answer to What are climate change deniers not admitting? Is it the truth that global warming is human caused, or are they denying that they know it is real but won't admit it?
THE END RESULT
IS AMERICA NOW HAVE HALF A POPULATION WHO ARE IN DISTRUST OF SCIENCE AND SCIENTISTS
Journalist Charles P. Pierce, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free :"
The rise of idiot America today represents - for profit mainly, but also and more cynically, for political advantage in the pursuit of power - the breakdown of a consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people whom we should trust the least are the people who best know what they are talking about. In the new media age, everybody is an expert."Richard Hofstadter, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for his book, Anti-Intellectualism In American Life, describes
how the vast underlying foundations of anti-elite, anti-reason and anti-science have been infused into America's political and social fabric.Tom Nichols’ bok, “The Death of Expertise:
“The culture and our educational system have created a generation that has little experience being told they are objectively wrong. Everyone feels they are entitled to be right. Combine this with the illusion of knowledge provided by Google, and everyone thinks they are their own expert in anything.”Its become tribal. Often its enough for the polluters to label environmental laws for “tax scams”, and their tribe will have another reason to hate the government.
Everything about the claim, “global warming (climate change) is a scam”, can be directly linked to fossil fuel front groups, think tanks and their echo chamber denier blogs.
Every singe time you follow the trail back, this is where you gonna end up. EVERY SINGLE TIME.
To some nonsense about how C02, their monetary crane and Holy Grail, is “good for us”. Everything the professional climate deniers have ever written about this matter, has this one purpose; to protect C02. To portrait C02 as “ a gift from God”.
They duped us with lead
They duped us with asbestos
They duped us with DDT
They duped us with nicotine
Are we gonna let the mighty polluters run us all over..AGAIN?
Roger Fjellstad Olsen's answer to Why is opposition to climate science more common in the United States than other countries?
Roger Fjellstad Olsen's answer to How do the Koch brothers feel about global warming and pollution?
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