People are able to hold two contradictory ideas in their head comfortably. Thus for eg., you have the spectacle of Hillary Clinton saying that the climate crisis is “the chief threat of the 21st century,” while at the same time negotiating U.S. access to the Arctic oil reserves. In Britain, energy and climate change are combined into one government department leading to simultaneous action to reduce emissions and to boost oil production.
The U.S. state of California, and the Canadian province of British Columbia have all declared a long-term target of reducing emissions by 80 percent within forty years. So far, they have managed to achieve all of half a percent reduction per year. Norwegians pride themselves on being honest and conscientious global citizens and their government speaks often of being a world leader on climate change. But it is the eighth largest exporter of crude oil in the world, and its emissions grew five times faster than its already generous allowances under the Kyoto Protocol.
There is a tussle between individual rationality and institutional rationality. In their individual capacities, energy and oil company presidents agree that climate change was happening. They all say that as soon as governments regulate climate change, they would become “energy companies.” But in their official capacity, they will say that the competitive environment forced them to suppress the truth about climate change and ensure that those regulations do not happen. They are good at compartmentalising different areas of their lives and preventing any connections from jumping across those boundaries in their brains.
Those who accept the conclusions of climate scientists indulge in Greenwashing - giving false, misleading or untrue action about the positive impact that an action has on the environment. There will be use of terms like sustainable, green or eco-friendly -- or just claiming to be "good for the planet" or "better for the environment" -- to make them appear to be greener. Shell says that that they are good guys who produce energy, find positive environmental solutions, and help solve the climate crisis.
The world’s governments have been talking about preventing climate change for more than two decades but in that time they have been fudging numbers and arguing over start dates, constantly trying to get extensions. The unfortunate result of all this mystification and procrastination is that global carbon dioxide emissions keep rising faster. As Naomi Klien said 'the only thing rising faster than our emissions is the output of words pledging to lower them.' The annual UN climate summit seems like a slanging match between early polluters and late polluters.
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) produces reports outlining options for reducing the rate at which climate change is taking place. The text of these articles and their clauses had been fought over sentence by sentence, phrase by phrase, word by word. They are politically acceptable statements without any mechanisms for enforcement of these carefully worded injunctions. It depends on nations volunteering to do things. Countries can ignore the existence of their own promises without any fear of punishment.
In Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math, BILL MCKIBBEN says that we have five times as much oil and coal and gas on the books of oil companies as climate scientists think is safe to burn. We’d have to keep 80 percent of those reserves locked away underground which is unlikely to happen. Although this coal and gas and oil is still technically in the soil, it’s already economically aboveground – it’s figured into share prices, companies are borrowing money against it. If you told Exxon or Lukoil that, in order to avoid wrecking the climate, they couldn’t pump out their reserves, the value of their companies would plummet.
In Don't Even Think About It, George Marshall writes about the Near Earth Objects Information Centre in Wales which tracks extraterrestrial objects that might collide with Earth. It does not receive much funding which is not surprising since it monitors a threat that is so distant, so uncertain, and to many people so unlikely, that very few people take it seriously. Yet, the ones who take it seriously are climate change deniers who warn constantly about the exaggerated risk of climate change. There are even weirder climate change deniers.
In 2012 David Icke, a new age guru, managed to fill the largest football stadium in the UK for an eleven-hour talk on the takeover of shape-shifting reptilians from the constellation Draco. Apparently these “Reptoids,” who now rule the world, have taken human form and include the late Queen, Al Gore, and the entire Bush family. Icke describes climate change as a “monumental scam,” showing, once again, that people can believe just about anything if it lines up with their worldview. Peter Ward says in A new History of Life:
The history of life provides an early warning system that tells us we must reduce human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, but it is human history that tells us that we probably will not heed the warnings and reverse the damage until a succession of climate induced mass human mortalities gives us no choice.
