The Failings of the Green Lobby

At this terminally late stage of the climate change debate it is easy to lament those politicians and vested interests who have all but condemned the world to dangerous climate change. Yet more time should be spent reflecting on why it is that the public have not been galvanized and driven into action by the scientific reports and geopolitical studies that spell doom for many communities across the globe. It cannot be denied that the environmental lobbies have to an extent failed to adequately educate the public and articulate the consequences of continuing business as usual. It is easy for politicians to ignore environmental concerns because millions of worried people are not campaigning and banging on the doors of parliament. The defining success of the energy lobbies in the years since Al Gore’s “Inconveniant Truth” has been their ability to create the impression that while climate change is “true”, it has been “exaggerated.” This is confirmed by a recent Gallup poll in the US which showed that 41% of people thought that the threat was being exaggerated. There is no doubt that there is a similar sentiment in Australia. The politically savvy Kevin Rudd would not attempt to position himself between “extreme environmentalists” and “climate change deniers” if a focus group had not told him that some scientific reports are regarded by large sections of the community as evidence of “environmental extremism”. In the free marketplace of ideas that is the 24 hour news cycle, there is no objective truth and therefore deniers have, through the mass propagation of memes (the most prominent one currently being that the earth is cooling) been able to sow the seeds of confusion among the broader public. 

Australia’s Climate Institute and other environmental lobbies have failed to successfully counter-attack these distortions. The problem is, that after all these years, the climate change debate in the newspapers and on the TV is still largely defined as between deniers and believers. The debate simply refuses to progress as the dwindling numbers of deniers are given ever greater prominence. The failures of the green lobbies fall into three main areas; their failure to adequately educate the public on the science of climate change so as to lessen the confusion, the narrow mindedness of the approaches to galvanize the public which fail to spell out what the geopolitical and agricultural ramifications of these temperature increases are. To put it succinctly, if the constant stream of scientific reports warning of dire consequences are continuously met with broad public apathy then it is clear that the problem is in the communication. 

The problem of educating the public on the actual science of climate change is admittably difficult and it lends itself to the larger problem that scientists are generally regarded either with apathy or suspicion; sort of a b grade 1950s horror film perception wherein scientists are amoral somewhat maniacal nerds who dig up bodies to create frankensteins or kill babies to further their twisted experiments. It is also true that one can be considered an intellectual commentator without having any grasp of science or understanding of the scientific method. These factors probably explain the suspicion with which journalists regard the evidence for climate change. Yet even in the context of the broad cultural apathy towards science, the extent to which the accusations of prominent climate deniers go unanswered is debilitating. The perfect example of this is Senator Fielding’s recent demand that someone explain the reasons why carbon pollution is increasing in the atmosphere without the temperature increasing. There have been responses from scientists and some commentators in explaining the discrepancy but not nearly enough. A better organized coalition of scientists, letters-to-the-editor writers, concerned politicians and environmental lobbyists need to respond rapidly to these denialist memes; a coordinated effort in every newspaper, on news radio, on TV to drive the media agenda and effectively debunk the denialist arguments before they have a chance to grow and entrench themselves in public opinion.

Another key problem is the narrow perspective within which climate change stories are argued and reported. When the media do articulate the dangers of climate change, it is almost always through the threat of sea level rises or ice caps melting or polar bears dying at some distant point in the future. There is almost always a failure to extrapolate from these sea level rises the agricultural disasters and likely military confrontations that will inevitably result. Energy lobbies can always extrapolate the rising energy prices and probable job losses that will result from carbon mitigation schemes, but environmental lobbies never extrapolate just what a sea level rise means. The media often extrapolate sea level rises to mean higher insurance premiums for beach house owners which is ridiculous because in reality by the time the sea is lapping at your front porch it would be the least of your concerns. Severe water shortages and the forced relocation of many communities away from the increasingly uninhabitable equatorial regions will almost certainly result in mass migrations of refugees and military confrontations, particularly in regard to China and India who both want to secure the dwindling water supplies from the Himalayas. At a local level, rural communities will require heavy subsidies and cities like Canberra will find themselves paying huge bills for water. Yet these rather obvious extrapolations are rarely mentioned despite the increasing volume of military geopolitical studies that reinforce these obvious conclusions. The fact is that in a “business as usual” environment energy prices will increase dramatically anyway as demand out-strips supply.

Environmental lobbies need to make a larger more coordinated effort to dismantle denialist arguments before they gain prominence in the media, and they need to broaden the scope of their arguments and articulate both the economic and geo political ramifications of unmitigated climate change. They need to recognize that most people over the age of thirty don’t give a shit about polar bears, and shift their arguments accordingly to focus on the inevitably of energy price increases in a business-as-usual environment.