rigorousintuition.ca

And then there is the issue of Turkey Point nuclear plant, which lies 24 miles south of Miami.

Perelandra » Tue Mar 17, 2015 12:16 pm wrote:I remember this from the old GW thread last year. Is it time for a new one?

Most of Florida's senior politicians – in particular, Senator Marco Rubio, former governor Jeb Bush and current governor Rick Scott, all Republican climate-change deniers – have refused to act or respond to warnings of people like Wanless or Harlem or to give media interviews to explain their stance, though Rubio, a Republican party star and a possible 2016 presidential contender, has made his views clear in speeches. "I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it. I do not believe that the laws that they propose we pass will do anything about it, except it will destroy our economy," he said recently.

KUAN » Tue Mar 17, 2015 3:32 pm wrote:^^^ Perhaps we are taking the long view by accepting our own demise with equanimity.
It could be in our nature to be incapable of getting too excited about the shit which seems to be about to hit the fan from many directions.

The Psychology of Denial:
our failure to act against climate change

Author: George Marshall
Date Published: 22/09/2001

...

Firstly, we can expect widespread denial when the enormity and nature of the problem are so unprecedented that people have no cultural mechanisms for accepting them. In Beyond Judgement, Primo Levi, seeking to explain the refusal of many European Jews to recognise their impending extermination, quotes an old German adage: ‘Things whose existence is not morally possible cannot exist.’

In the case of climate change, then, we can intellectually accept the evidence of climate change, but we find it extremely hard to accept our responsibility for a crime of such enormity. Indeed, the most powerful evidence of our denial is the failure to even recognise that there is a moral dimension with identifiable perpetrators and victims. The language of ‘climate change’, ‘global warming’, ‘human impacts’, and ‘adaptation’ are themselves a form of denial familiar from other forms of human rights abuse; they are scientific euphemisms that suggest that climate change originates in immutable natural forces rather than in a direct causal relationship with moral implications for the perpetrator.

Secondly, we diffuse our responsibility. Cohen writes at length of the ‘passive bystander effect’ whereby violent crimes can be committed in a crowded street without anyone intervening. Individuals wait for someone else to act and subsume their personal responsibility in the collective responsibility of the group. One notable feature of the bystander effect is that the larger the number of actors the lower the likelihood that any individual person feels capable of taking unilateral action. In times of war and repression, entire communities can become incapacitated. In the case of climate change we are both bystanders and perpetrators, an internal conflict that can only intensify our denial.

Psychoanalytic theory contains valuable pointers to the ways that people may try to resolve these internal conflicts; angrily denying the problem outright (psychotic denial), seeking scapegoats (acting out), indulging in deliberately wasteful behaviour (reaction formation), projecting their anxiety onto some unrelated but containable problem (displacement), or trying to shut out all information (suppression). As the impacts of climate change intensify we can therefore anticipate that people will willingly collude in creating collective mechanisms of denial along these lines.

It seems likely, however, that suppression will dominate. In South Africa, many white bystanders who intellectually opposed apartheid adopted a passive opposition. They retreated into private life, cut themselves off from the news media, refused to talk politics with friends, and adopted an intense immersion in private diversions such as sport, holidays and families. In Brazil in the 1970s a special term, ‘innerism’, was coined for the disavowal of the political.

We can also draw on historical experience to anticipate which defenses we will adopt when, as will surely happen, we are confronted by our grandchildren demanding to know why we did so little when we knew so much. We can expect to see denial of knowledge (‘I didn’t know’), denial of our agency (‘I didn’t do it’), denial of personal power (‘I couldn’t do anything’, ‘no one else did anything’), and blaming of others (‘it was the people with the big cars, the Americans, the corporations’). For activists everywhere, it would appear crucial that an understanding of denial informs campaign strategy. As Cohen says, ‘the distinctions [between different forms of denial] may be irrelevant to the hapless victim, but they do make a difference to educational or political attempts to overcome bystander passivity’.

One conclusion is that denial cannot simply be countered with information. Indeed, there is plentiful historical evidence that increased information may even intensify the denial. The significance of this cannot be over emphasised. Environmental campaign organisations are living relics of Enlightenment faith in the power of knowledge: ‘If only people knew, they would act.’ To this end they dedicate most of their resources to the production of reports or the placement of articles and opinions in the media. As a strategy it is not working. Opinion polls reveal a high level of awareness with virtually no signs of any change in behaviour. Indeed there are plentiful signs of reactive denial in the demands for cheaper fuel and more energy.

...

http://www.ecoglobe.ch/motivation/e/clim2922.htm

Ted Cruz Compares Himself to Galileo, Calls Those Who Believe In Climate Change ‘Flat-Earthers’

by Ari Phillips Posted on March 25, 2015



A few days after accusing “global warming alarmists” like California Governor Jerry Brown (D) of ridiculing and insulting “anyone who actually looks at the real data” around climate change, newly-declared presidential candidate Ted Cruz (R-TX) upped his rhetoric against those who care about the issue.

Speaking to the Texas Tribune on Tuesday, Cruz said that contemporary “global warming alarmists are the equivalent of the flat-Earthers.”

“You know it used to be it is accepted scientific wisdom the Earth is flat, and this heretic named Galileo was branded a denier,” he said.

In Cruz’s opinion, when it comes to climate change, his denier position places him alongside 17th Century scientist Galileo Galilei, who was also considered to be denying the mainstream knowledge of his day. According to Cruz’s logic, he is taking the minority view that human-caused climate change is not happening, just as Galileo took the minority view that the scientific method should be trusted over the Catholic Church.

Galileo, who helped perpetuate the notion that the Earth rotates around the sun, was eventually excommunicated from the Church for his views. In the centuries since he has come to be known as the “father of modern physics” and “the father of modern science.”

Cruz mentioned in the interview that his parents were mathematicians; however he himself studied public policy before going to law school.

Cruz also said he had read a 1970s Newsweek article that morning about “global cooling.” He explained how all the people who believed in global cooling suddenly switched over to global warming when the evidence on cooling didn’t line up.

The solutions to both warming and cooling, Cruz said, involved “government control of the energy sector and every aspect of our lives.”

Either Cruz is suddenly interested in minor 1970s scientific theories or he is scrambling to find ways to push back against the overwhelming evidence that human-caused climate change is happening.

Cruz is not the first to compare Galileo to those who speak out against the accepted science of climate change. In 2011, former presidential candidate and Texas governor Rick Perry dropped Galileo’s name as justification for his anti-climate position.

As the website Skeptical Science points out, “the comparison is exactly backwards.”

“Modern scientists follow the evidence-based scientific method that Galileo pioneered,” the website reads. “Skeptics who oppose scientific findings that threaten their world view are far closer to Galileo’s belief-based critics in the Catholic Church.”

President Obama seems to have gotten the analogy correct when he said in 2013 that “we don’t have time for a meeting of the flat-Earth society” when it comes to doing something about climate change.

“The planet is warming. Human activity is contributing to it,” Obama said at the time. “We know that the costs of these events can be measured in lost lives and lost livelihoods.”

IRS responds to Greenpeace call to investigate Koch brothers' tax-deductible climate denial

Why do the oil and gas billionaire Koch brothers get a tax break for funding climate change science denial? The IRS is finally investigating a Greenpeace complaint on the matter.

Earlier this year, the New York Times exposed the secret relationships between a well known climate change denier and the fossil fuel industry. The Times revealed that Dr. Willie Soon had been paid over 1.6 million dollars to create scientifically dubious studies absolving the fossil fuel industry of any responsibility for climate change. His funders included ExxonMobil, the Koch brothers, and Southern Company, a large coal-fired utility.

Willie Soon is a rare and valuable tool for the fossil fuel industry because he is one of the very few climate deniers with an actual background in science. Billed as a regular academic who just happened to disagree with 97% of actual climate scientists, Soon's work is omnipresent in Congress and state legislatures, and wherever there else there is a "debate" on climate change.

While Soon had long been known to be on the payroll of major polluters, new documents discovered through investigations by Greenpeace showed that Soon's work to obscure the facts on climate change were promised as "deliverables" to his corporate funders.

The documents also revealed a potential bombshell - the tax exempt "charity" Charles G Koch Foundation was paying for Dr. Soon's lobbying against renewable energy and climate change solutions. This means that the Kochs, heirs to an oil and gas fortune that tops $80 billion, could write the funding of Willie Soon off on their taxes. This potentially violates of the IRS rule that prohibits tax-exempt organizations like the Charles G Koch Foundation from attempting to influence legislation.

Last week, the IRS responded to a letter from Greenpeace that pointed out this potentially illegal lobbying by the Koch brothers. The IRS letter declined to confirm whether the agency would take action on our complaint, but the letter did encourage Greenpeace to submit additional information to the IRS Dallas office. An IRS staff member also confirmed they were reviewing the complaint.

The complaint, sent in February, is based on documents obtained from a Greenpeace records request, which contained details of Soon's interactions with the Koch brothers. These included evidence that Soon received $230,000 in funding from the Charles G Koch Foundation to create papers that question the existence of climate change.

In his proposals to the Kochs, Soon claimed his work to obscure the cause and existence of climate change would be used for "informing public policy," a euphemism for lobbying.

True to his word, Soon used his Koch-funded papers denying climate change while testifying in Kansas against renewable energy legislation. Soon showed slides of his Koch funded research to Kansas legislators in an attempt to get them to vote down renewable energy standards.

Soon's research was also used in Congressional testimony to "question the belief that greenhouse gases are the dominant cause of observed climate change." Soon quickly sent a letter bragging about this Congressional testimony to the Charles G Koch Foundation. The letter, which asked for a funding extension, touted the testimony as "progress" towards the Charles Koch Foundation's project. In the Congressional testimony based on Soon's research, there is no mention of Koch or any fossil funding.

Interestingly, The Charles G Koch Foundation knew that funding Dr. Soon's work was a legally risky move. In letters to the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, Dr. Soon's employer, the Koch Foundation was very careful to stress that the Koch grant "will not be used to influence legislation." The Koch brothers have contributed 79 million dollars to climate change science denial organizations since 1997.

The Charles G Koch Foundation is named for the co-owner and chief executive of Koch Industries. Charles Koch and his brother David, known as the Koch brothers, have used their vast fortunes ($40 billion a piece) to gain huge and disproportionate political influence in the US. The Koch's, through their network of front groups, have pledged to spend nearly $1 billion dollars on the upcoming presidential election.