Surely People Who Deny Climate Change are Lying

There are roughly 4 ways of blocking climiate change mitigation, and people slide around on this scale. And this sliding is why it’s hard to believe that they don’t believe in climate change.

• (A) I don’t think that the Earth is getting warmer
• (B) I don’t think that people are doing it
• (C) I don’t think that it’s that big of a deal
• (D) I don’t think that it’s worth the costs

My subconscious is telling me, climate denial isn’t that important. Because it is already very hard to believe the things that are clearly wrong, and it’s just going to get harder every year.

(A) and (B) just plain not tenable beliefs, and if you encounter people who are that disengaged with facts, chances are decent that they’re a flat-earther or some other flavor of contrarian or rogue.

The r/wallstreetbets gamestop (WSB GME) short squeeze of 2021 is a rare case of contrarian rogues winning.

Like, and the rogue story is the good story. And I understand wanting to be part of the rogue story. And I write for the internet, I know how, how like, capturing attention works. You need things that are counterintuitive, and you need people to feel like they know stuff that other people don’t know. All that’s great. Content marketing!

[5:00]

Once you move away from denialism into (C), well, okay, it’s starting to be reasonable.

We don’t know how big of a problem it will be without going into the future, but we know there will be problems and some of the hypothetical problems are huge, setting quality of life back by a lot.

When you look at history there are always people who sit back there and are wrong and just stay wrong the whole time. But we as a species move forward, like eventually they get left behind, but really only when they die.

I am sick–I have been sick since the ’90s–of having this argument. I’m like, I don’t, I don’t care any more, like, you can believe the wrong thing that you think. I’m not here to convince you. I’m here to move forward. And the more we move forward the more people will be convinced. Especially of the last thing.

[7:10]

The last thing actually gets fixed by taking on the problem.

I’m tired of pretending there are no costs to the transition.

There are costs to the transition. Like, we built trillions of dollars of fossil fuel infrastructure to provide people things that they love, and they don’t want to give up.

So, if you increase the cost of gasoline, yes it will disincentivize using it, but this measure on its own is a regressive tax, a tax on people who replace their cars less frequently.

There are also costs for just whiny upperclass people who decide who to vote for. And we live in a democracy, and people need to get votes. Like, that’s their job, is to represent people. Their job is to lead us toward a better future. And their job is to get elected. It is. It just is. I, like, I don’t know. And I want it to be that way, I want politicians jobs to be “get elected”, because otherwise it’s not a democracy. So, uhhh, and I’m in favor of democracy still.

[9:30]

But by taking it on, the costs get lower.

It’s legitimately true that if you turned off the fossil fuel tap today, it would be very bad for humanity in the short-term. Lots of starvation, lots of violence–maybe the instability would halt progress on the R&D we need to decarbonize energy. So nobody serious thinks that’s a viable approach.

Every cent a solar panel, battery, or wind turbine gets cheaper, the weaker the argument gets.

I just don’t see the punditry working. I don’t see the arguments working. Now, there are ways for arguments to work, but they’re not the ways that we’re having them. Like, I think that most of the data show that in order to convince people of something that is contrary to their worldview or to their political parity, you need to have really long, thoughtful, careful, drawn-out conversations, especially with people who they trust and love. And, like, that’s not happening on the internet, that’s not the work that we’re doing online.

And I don’t feel like putting that effort in, because only point (D) is credible. Heck, even some scientists are on point D, depending on who you talk to. Because some group of scientists will say, let’s put sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere to reduce warming, and then you’ll hear other scientists saying “whoa nelly, let’s not run wild experiments on the only world we have”

I’m done. And I’ve been done for a long time. Like, this has been like how I sort of philsophically engage with it, is like I’m not here to convince. Like I’m done, like: it’s so clear, the reality is so clear. You have to be really motivated to not believe that climate change is caused by people and it’s a huge deal and that it’s dramatically worth much more than we are currently spending to mitigate it. So I yeah, I just, I don’t believe it.

These positions don’t get convinced away, they just go away eventually.

I’ve seen it in people who once denied climate change and don’t anymore, and talk to them about it, and they don’t think that they disagreed before. They don’t even think they changed their mind. And the data proves this out as well.

I just don’t think that people get convinced, I think that like we change, like our old selves die and we don’t even notice it happened.

[15:00]

It’s a problem for me, because sometimes I’ll talk like everybody agrees about climate change–deny the existence of the deniers. But it’s almost a rhetorical device.

Because it is a fringe belief. It’s just not held by a tiny percentage of people, it’s just a fringe belief held by a surprisingly large percentage of people.

But I’m done having the argument. If you haven’t been convinced so far, then I will let the future convince you. Because the future’s going to convince you, or your kids. Like, maybe it won’t get you because you won’t be around long enough.