by Paul D. Hoffman
The headlines tell the story, and it’s not a pretty one. Climate realists, like me, are losing the climate change debate. Not because we are wrong. Factually, we win every time! But, we are losing the hearts and minds of the people because we have failed to tap into their emotions.
The climate alarmists don’t care about the facts. They beat us down with children, like Greta Thunberg, and lecture us about self-interest and our cowardice in the face of a “mass extinction event.” They play to our natural emotions and worst fears by linking climate change to those uncontrollable things we are most afraid to face—hurricanes (lions), wildfires (tigers), and tornadoes (and bears, oh my!).
Despite these facts:
- Climate change models have failed to accurately predict the future global average temperature change.
- There is no ideal average temperature for a world where on any given day the temperature could be -50 degrees F in one place and 120 F above zero somewhere else. (Remember, if you live by averages, you would be comfortable standing with one foot on a block of ice and the other in a fire.)
- Global average temperatures have fluctuated much more and have changed much faster in the geologic past and well before humans started burning carbon-based fuels in significant quantities.
- Weather patterns are much more attributable to cyclical changes in ocean currents than to climate change.
- The use of oil, gas, and coal creates a significantly higher quality of life for billions of people, reduces poverty, provides abundant food supplies, and means cleaner air and water.
- There is overwhelming evidence that climate change is neither caused primarily by humans nor an existential threat to mankind or any other species.
Despite all this and more, we are gradually losing the battle for the minds of the people when it comes to the climate change debate. And we are not just losing the debate at the political level. We are losing in the board rooms, and not just the woke corporations like Amazon, Nike, Apple, or Google, but in the corporate board rooms of the utility companies, the oil & gas industry, and the manufacturers.
Why?
We tend to make our case using wonky science that even scientists don’t fully understand. People can’t get their heads around our rational explanations, but they darn sure understand fear of events that may affect them directly and personally.
We tend to argue about the adverse macro-economic effects of climate change policy—the loss of millions of jobs, green energy costing trillions of dollars, and the failed goals of wealth redistribution. These effects are real and catastrophic.
However, have you ever wondered why the voters do not support Social Security or Medicare reforms, despite the overwhelming macro-economic evidence that both systems will likely be bankrupt within the next decade? The answer is fairly simple. People make decisions based on micro-economics, not macro-economics. People will choose to protect their personal benefits over the solvency of the system—every time.
Consider these examples of the micro-economic impacts of climate-change policies. Here in Virginia, Dominion Energy is closing coal-fired power plants in favor of solar and wind farms, and this move toward renewable energy sources will lead to a $1,000 per person per year increase in electric bills by 2030.
Ask anybody if they are willing to pay a thousand dollars a year when it is not likely to change the average global temperature at all? This question brings the issue home, and the answer will much more often be a resounding “No!” Ask the same person if they think climate change is a threat and whether we should do something about it, and you will get many more affirmative responses.
The Transportation & Climate Initiative, a regional collaboration of 12 Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states plus DC, is proposing a 20-25% reduction of carbon dioxide emissions for the region. Their policy of choice is a “carbon [dioxide] tax.” Recently, Virginia enacted a carbon dioxide tax on utility generation, and the General Assembly will be considering one on transportation fuels that may include a 28 cent per gallon gasoline tax and a 26 cent per gallon diesel tax. Based on current mileage rates and miles driven per capita, these tax increases could cost each driver more than $1,000 per year! Once again, I can fairly easily predict the response from most people to the question of whether they are willing to pay another $1,000 per year for no material effect on the climate.
People expect their lights and their computer to work when they flip the power switch. Talk about the potential for rolling brown-outs, or planned black-outs, so that someone else can charge their electric vehicle at the charging station built with tax dollars (ever seen a government-built gas station?), and I think you will get a predictable negative response.
I am certain that we can come up with many more examples, but my point is this: let’s take the case against climate change down to the personal, micro-economic level. Remember the charge against George H. W. Bush: “It’s the economy stupid!” It wasn’t that Bush didn’t understand that there was a recession; it was that he failed to recognize how that recession affected people at the personal level.
To put it another way, everything in life is political, except politics, that’s personal. When you explain how a policy threatens someone’s pocket book, you’ll get their attention.
Paul D. Hoffman has been involved in environmental policy making and communications throughout his career. He has served as State Director for then-Congressman Dick Cheney, Executive Director of the Cody Country Chamber of Commerce just outside Yellowstone National Park, and Deputy Assistant Secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks at the US Department of the Interior. He is currently the publicist for Hope Springs Media and a consultant for Resource Management Strategies. He has a Bachelor’s degree in Economics and Biology from the University of California at San Diego, Revelle College. He wrote this article for The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation.
Most of us here seem to think that the problem with the climate change guys is pessimism (The world is about to end), but actually it is optimism. It is wildly optimistic to believe, for example, that wind and solar could supply scalable electric power. The climate changers use doom and gloom to start the conversation, but it quickly becomes a lovely fantasy of a pollution free future. Few human follies are more dangerous than unfounded optimism. It is the optimists who start all the wars. The bedrock of communism was always optimism.
What we need to do is just say, look, this won’t work. Explain that wind turbines are a fraud. How hard could that be?
I really don’t know what to do about the pessimists, who are having too much fun imagining catastrophe. Check out the Extinction Rebellion folks, and they tend to people who are have failed at life, and want everybody else to be miserable too. Greta Thunberg actually admits to being a depressive misanthrope. These people will not relinquish the pleasure they take in their pessimism.
In this case, isn’t optimism essentially the promise of Something for Nothing?
“Just accept at face value what we tell you and your guilt (which you didn’t have until we told you that you were guilty) will end.”
In any of the sales pitches for “renewables” has anyone truthfully addressed costs?
I’ve seen many articles here where the Unicorns & Fairy Dust peddlers always seem to leave off huge slices of the cost of renewables. (e.g. R&D, degradation, disposal, learning to live with blackouts, etc.) and lying about the alleged increase of costs of the semi-delivered product.
Its always the residents here that seem to recall that there are actual costs both now and in the future.
You can’t win. If you think you can win then you haven’t fully appreciated the adversary or the problem.
The only recourse is to laugh at them and make fun of them, while you still can.
It has been clear to me for a while that the establishment position is aligned with the climate alarmists; the political establishment and increasingly, the business establishment, is singing from the same hymn book as the environmentalists. Yet, the alarmists do not claim any victory because they still need to claim that the needed climate change policies are being thwarted by the “deniers.” The reality is that the reason their climate change policy goals are unfulfilled is that the means to fulfill them does not even exist. The technological and economic realities are what’s really leaving us continuing to use fossil fuels. Another reason the alarmists continue claim the “deniers” are standing in the way of needed progress is that some of their policy goals are not just about managing climate change; they are about shuttering the fossil fuel industry first and foremost because they hate it more than they love protecting the environment, and they are about creating social and economic justice. It’s about political control and a new world order.
There is a parallel between the campaign for enlightened climate change policies, and the Black Lives Matter movement. It is also about social and economic justice, but more evidently so. The premise for this fight is that ill social and economic ills of black people everywhere are due to oppression by whites. This is despite the obvious fact that all institutional forms of racism have been eliminated and outlawed. The door of opportunity is wide open for black people to walk through it and has been for some time, yet we still see that they are not closing the gap with whites anywhere one cares to look, at least in the United States. Despite all the success at eliminating discrimination, the racism alarmists continue to claim that insidious racism in the form of white privilege, implicit bias, white fragility, and other subtle forms of racism are preventing progress by blacks. The occasional instance of police violence against a black person serves as a flash point for illuminating the hatred for the prevailing social and economic order. So, as with climate change policies, even though the establishment is totally committed to ending racism, the problem persists, as it must, since without it, the raison d’etre of all alarmists everywhere would be extinguished, which they cannot allow. They need an undefeatable cause in order to continue their fight for social and economic justice. They make impossible demands such as abolishing the police, which is a little like demanding all renewable energy, as both are impossible. Making impossible demands allows their fight to go on. As with climate deniers, the racism alarmists argue that racism continues to exist because many, many white people (racism deniers) have not got their minds right, and getting people’s minds right is part of establishing a new world order- political control.
We see that both in the case of climate change alarmism and racism alarmism, the establishment has caved in; the establish fears for its life. They don’t know how to resists and they think that giving lip service to the alarmists will mollify them; it won’t. We see this in the absurdities of profession sports teams promoting social justice messaging, which is similar to an oil company like BP touting it efforts to remove itself from the fossil fuel business. I could go on, but I think you get the point by now.
Excellent comment Tom!
Thanks MattSt. Having just now reread it, I can see I should have spent a little more time editing.
I admire your innocence on the subject of race, Tom. My views on race are so bleak that I won’t try to post them here, except in a censored form, as the site moderator might be compelled to deny their publication.
I’ll give you the short and tactful version, which is that mitigations of institutional racism are well-meaning and in fact morally noble, but limited in their capacity to bring social and economic equality to Black people, because personal racism is pervasive and inevitable. (Scream here.)
There really is a standard deviation-size gap in mean IQ scores between Black and whites. It doesn’t matter why it is so-whether it exists because of genetic or environmental causes, because no one knows how to eradicate it. Even intelligent and accomplished Black people shun people with low IQ scores. Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram X. Kendi do not live among people with IQs of 85 or lower and avoid them whenever possible.
Having a low IQ is a terrible handicap, although probably all of the well-educated posters on this website are so insulated from people with low IQs that they don’t even consider the great mass of people with low IQs as a problem. Most of us on this site can barely tolerate people with IQs of 115, which is well above the mean. Poverty and social incompetence are irreducibly bound to IQ score, and the gap between Black and white test scores may be immutable.
Consider the case of O.J. Simpson. Simpson was handsome, rich, supremely gifted and widely admired. Unfortunately he had a low IQ. (He wrote a letter to his trial judge which was written at about the level of a child in the third grade. The University of Southern California had to fake his academic record to get him on the football team.) Well, O.J. Simpson killed two people (although this was never proved in criminal court), and then thought that he could get away with it. And then he did, because his defense team salted his jury panel with people with low IQs. (Read the book, “Madam Foreman,” which is written by three of O.J.’s jurors, in which they explain their reasoning for acquitting Simpson. ) The Simpson acquittal is one of the few examples of a pubic event where the intractability of the IQ problem is obvious.
Well, you get my point. I just want to (possibly) mitigate its harshness by saying that we should treat all citizens, regardless of IQ score, as kindly and justly as possible.
Ian, I agree and understand. I’m not sure we’ll ever become sufficiently enlightened to just recognize things for what they are and let it be. One thing I am sure of; blaming the problems on racism is not helping anyone, except politicians who make their livelihood from it.
The conspiracy of ignorance masquerades as common sense. There are more conspirators than there are of US and they are younger. It is good to be old. Soon it will be a good day to die.
Merry Christmas. Share the Kiss of Peace
I ask anthropological climate believers,
if they believe in Magic?
They almost all ways say NO!
I then remark, that for us to control the climate must be Magic.
That if Magic does exist, then this is the only power that can.
Need I say this for the 4,000,000th time? Sales 101. You don’t sell the steak, you sell the sizzle. Most people make decisions on emotion. This article simply says it in a more detailed way. The alarmists have been selling the emotional side for years.
If we are to win the battle it has to be not that they are wrong but on the emotion that warmer is better.
But some emotions are more stimulating to action than others.
Fear and Hate are major motivators, as much so as Hunger.
I can’t see myself trying to manipulate a population by piling on more Fear and Hate, because I do have morals. Those who we compete with are amoral and are not constrained by any fear in who the oppress.
You may have noticed events in the recent decade where politicians have awaken to the fact that there are no consequences at all if you belong to the right Party.
No need to resort to “Fear and Hate” when you can clobber AGW true believers with one irrefutable fact that will elicit an emotional response from them concerning where their sincerely-given donations to the AGW cause end up: in the pockets of their dear AGW leaders who are enriching themselves while actually contributing next to nothing stop AGW.
One of the emotional responses might arise when AGW true believers ask themselves why a particularly influential Greenpeace Director (who might have had a barely six-figure income at the time) left his job with no explanation when he could have continued to do the work they love, and is now revealed to be running a tiny LLC company which nobody knows what it does, while literally millions of dollars have been flowing into that company from dark money sources. Yet this year, for some strange reason, the company seemingly needed a Coronavirus loan …. and still NOBODY knows what the company does.
“Joke: ‘Why did the Greenpeace USA Executive Director cross the Road?’ ” http://gelbspanfiles.com/?p=9687
“Has the ‘Our Next Economy LLC’ company fallen on hard times?” http://gelbspanfiles.com/?p=11211
Having to choose between heat and food, as many poor people in Britain are already having to do is quite fearful.
Should we not tell the people what lies ahead for them if the climate alarmists win?
And that’s why I and millions of others have and are moving to Florida and other southern states — because we like global warming. It sure beats global cooling — which surely will someday come.
The vast majority of the population are ignorant and a very large number of them are happy to be ignorant and it is all but impossible to increase their knowledge. They would rather spend 30 minutes watching some reality TV drivel than read a site such as this where they could become better informed. Politicians are like ordinary people only even more ignorant. The only way that lessons can be taught is by experience these days. We will have to progress down the road of destroying lives and jobs in order to save the planet from a non-existent threat before the reality will sink in.
Most polls show that “Climate and Energy Policy” is dead last or close to it on a list of concerns if they address it at all. This link
https://www.pollingreport.com/prioriti.htm
covers 137 polls and just 8 of them mention Climate change or environment showing that only 1% to 8% of people regard Climate change as their top issue.
Contrast that with Democrat politicians that say Climate Change is their #1 issue.
Global Warming – Climate Change – The Climate Crisis: They (who’s they?) have changed the name of the issue over the years because it doesn’t resonate with people. You’d think that at least in the Texas Panhandle there would be some outrage over the miles and miles and miles of wind mills. There are thousands of them and at a $Million plus per unit, that’s $Billions of wasted money. I guess people really don’t believe Joe Biden when he says Climate Change is his #1 issue, and he does say that.
Totally agree, there’s a massive disconnect between what our rulers think we think, and what the majority do actually think.
This disconnect is amplified by the media, who are always rocked to the core when “the prols” don’t react as prescribed, Brexit and Trump being recent examples but there are many.
Its fun being a politician; there are no tradeoffs in decision making. If you are a Fed, just print more money. At the State level, just force private companies to do what you want. Easy peasy.
So, you’re saying the PLM is the controlling factor. (Reference to Michael Crichton-politico-legal-media complex.) One can certainly see that now.
Similarly, where’s the outrage when a US presidential election is brazenly, colossally, and grotesquely corrupted to allow an obviously mentally diminished, truth-challenged extortionist to become president (and his similarly truth-challenged, I’m-a-racial-discrimination-victim running mate to be in position to succeed), despite videos of ballot fraud (as it occurs), hundreds of affidavits from eye witnesses and participants (from multiple States), statistical analysis, other forensic evidence of ballot fraud and tampering, and of software and hardware tampering of the voting system used by most of the States, yet the agencies (the courts) that are supposed to adjudicate the claims of plaintiffs (including ~ 20 States), refuse to even hear the complaints?
We’re not talking Venezuela-level consequences of this corruption. Given that we’re talking about the US (and the putative-next president’s politics regarding climate, China, and Iran), the consequences of this corruption are very likely to have major global consequences.
Our Republic will survive this latest assault on reason, as it has survived past assaults: The War of 1812 and other external wars, the War Between the States, Woodrow Wilson, Prohibition, Jim Crow, McCarthyism, forced busing, 9/11, Obama and etc. And, always remember, the U.S. Supreme Court has affirmed that our 2nd Amendment of the Constitution (one of the original 10 Amendments that keeps government out of our individual, pre-Constitutional rights) protects our natural right to self defense and the individual ownership of all types of arms currently in common use by citizens, independent of any State militia. Chew on that, would-be authoritarians.
this isn’t about what the average person thinks. No one gives a crap about climate change. It’s about politicians who are driving this because of one thing..money. check out the donations made to democrats vs Republicans by the called green Movement. Almost 100 % to democrats. Follow the money.
It doesn’t matter how ignorant the people are. They *will* get slapped in the face when the rolling blackouts affect their lifestyles. Just like Californians are finding out today including such far-left politicians as Gavin Newsome. East coast liberals like AOC haven’t yet had to answer poor constituents freezing to death in 30degF weather. But that will happen if the course of action people like AOC and Biden are advocating for happens.
I am one of the lucky ones. I live in rural America with a 40 acre wooded lot that I can use for truly renewable energy. When the electricity goes out I can fire up the wood stove. My main issue will be protecting against poachers!
The urban poor? They will be clamoring for global warming I guess!
America and Europe are immersed Challenger Deep in far left propaganda — wall to wall, front to back, floor to ceiling. It runs 24/7/365 on every major media network. Social media barons silence dissent. Politicians yak about it. Government hands over billions to anybody who has an angle on climate change. Corporations, even more than government, are leg-breakers for enforcing the climate scam. And all of it is clothed in sayings of inexorable, creeping doom.
We’re not going to overcome all that simply by being right.
Getting closer to the time to take up arms, like has unfortunately been required many times in the past.
In California, the state with the least reliable electrical power system in the nation, between 2008 and 2017, the Golden State experienced far more individual outages with almost 4,297 individual outages in the ten-year period, more than 2.5 times as many as its closest rival, Texas. The state continues shuttering most of the in-state natural gas and nuclear power plants that have been providing continuous uninterruptible electricity, in favor of intermittent electricity from wind and solar while adding EV charging loads onto the grid. Power outages are now commonplace in California with more to follow for the Golden state.
Funny how the irrational Belief in “manmade climate change” so closely mirrors the Belief in “election fraud”. It all comes down to emotion, really. Even though I voted for TraitorTrump (formerly just Trump), I am an Election Realist. TraitorTrump lost, despite all the tantrums and cries of TraitorTrump and his Faithful Followers to the contrary. His post-election antics threaten our democracy and the country itself. This is a fact, no matter what people think of Biden, because Biden too, is dangerous, although in a different way. He too will be a traitor, due to his “climate change” policies.
@Bruce Cobb the Obama Lackey Holdover who still can’t get over Hillary’s loss. Please show where President Trump is a Traitor, when congress could not. President Trump has every right to contest the election as did your Savior Al Gore, or your favorite girl Stacy Abrams who still hasn’t conceded. You are the loser with your “Traitor” rant.
Aksurveyor, you’re way off base thinking Bruce is an Obama lackey.
Not liking Trump doesn’t automatically make you a lefty.
Though I do agree that Trump is within his rights to contest election results. It’s just too bad the evidence has been very meager.
I don’t know Bruce. Did you watch any of the hearings in PA, MI, or WI? There was a lot of very compelling testimony coming from people with sworn affidavits. While I doubt Trump will succeed, I think it is vitally important to continue to expose the corruption that clearly exists – particularly in cities like Philly, Detroit, Milwaukee, and likely many other dem controlled urban centers. After watching several hours of hearings, and listening to similar testimony of poll watcher intimidation, ballot dumping, repeated counting of the same ballots, etc., it is clear to me that this has been going on for multiple elections and is likely fare more widespread than the media would have you believe. A full forensic audit needs to be done, which will take time and won’t affect this election, but would either provide assurance or reveal real corruption.
One of the justices in the Wisconsin supreme court that recently voted against Trump, declared in open court that Trump’s case was based on racism.
Does anyone expect Trump to get a fair hearing in such a court?
Opposing election fraud threatens the existence of our democracy.
very blustery day today here in the UK and renewables are providing nearly half the UK power supply – @ur momisugly43%. This is as big as I have seen it.
So – a “good” day for renewables.
Another way to say this is to Mrs Smith at No.56….” You can have your lights on for slightly over half the day today, because the other half Mr Jones @ur momisugly No 78 want to charge his car up.”
The more you can move the debate to what it means to the individual, the more reality will sink in.
The alarmists are steeling the future from the young, they are thieves of the worst kind. A lot of youngsters today have lost hope because they do not see a good future. Challenge the alarmists buy saying: “think if you are wrong – what will you say to the young who do not believe they have a future?”
Is that emotional enough?
It’s the same case regarding socialism/communism. The communists give an emotional argument about how government should “care” about people. And the way to do this is to take money from people the communists claim haven’t earned it and don’t need it, so that it can be given to people who just need a little help.
The reality is the communists take money from people who work, keep a little bit for themselves, and use the rest to buy votes from people who don’t want to work.
Every country that has ever tried communism has been ruined by it. Mass poverty and misery. However the number of people who are convinced that this time they will be able to make it work continues to grow.
Paul Hoffman writes in the above article: “Climate realists, like me, are losing the climate change debate . . . we are losing the hearts and minds of the people because we have failed to tap into their emotions.”
Mr Hoffman, I willing include myself in that “we”, but argue that perhaps you’re perhaps being too heavy with assigning responsibility mostly to us. You should not overlook the fact that there has been, over the last 50 or so years, as widespread and significant “dumbing down” of both critical reasoning skills and the desire to obtain truthful knowledge in so much of the developed world.
The reasons for such are manifold and complex . . . only the end result is clear to me.
The present world is said to be in the “Information Age”, which some assert started in 1971. That is an ironic name given that information is growing at an exponential rate facilitated by widespread use of computers, Web interconnectivity, and widespread availability of relatively cheap energy . . . but we must realize that “information” includes both truthful and untruthful components.
I do believe the growth of readily-available “information”, of both types, has contributed significantly to a decline in critical thinking due to the long-established human trait of “confirmation bias”.
I conclude that it is hard to win the hearts of people when they, themselves, have given up on half their minds.
Spent my whole adult life in universities 1969-2012. All this talk of ‘dumbing down’ fails to recognize how little 100 IQ points get you, and half are dumber than that. The media plays to that level. To the extent that universities have dumbed down has been to cope with an ever increasing segment of the population being admitted, BUT the cream of the crop do still receive a reasonable education, in science at least.
A big part of the problem of getting the point across about the climate scam is that it is hard to explain in simple memorizable bits. And, it is very hard to make natural fluctuations in the climate into an emotional issue. In contrast, predictions of disaster get people by the emotions by their very nature. They are attractive in the same way horror movies are, mostly to the young who have yet to deal with any real disasters/tragedies, and have yet to develop any sense of purpose.
Another problem is that humans trying to make sense of the world are attracted to anything that promotes a feeling of AGENCY and being able to predict cause and effect. The notion that humans control the climate plays to these very deep motivations. It is much more intrinsically attractive than climate changing without us having any control. Perhaps this is why the scam is so attractive to politicians – their whole reason d’etre is control of a city, state or country.
All good points all, well reasoned!
I will just add that the “cream of the crop”, by all accounts, appears to be an ever-decreasing percentage of the total. 🙁
I’ve been saying that the right to vote should be limited to those who are net taxpayers.
I just ask people how they think humans can have any control over the sun, earth’s orbit and axial tilt, ocean currents, winds, air pressure or temperature. Most look blank then acknowledge that they cannot. But I guess that they can still ‘believe’. Human hubris is unbounded.
Until it starts hitting them in the pocket book they will continue to go along with the virtue signalling, as long as they do not have to pay, but methinks that after 4 years of Biden they will be up in arms.
I believe this is s difficult question. Undoubtedly, the media exerts influence with the tone and topic of coverage, but there’s also a lifetime of “stay calm, nothing to be alarmed about” moments in entertainment that are almost always proven wrong or false. The opportunity to use emotion in such an argument are few and far between. Emotional content is what sets propaganda apart, less intellectual content, more emotional appeals to a far larger audience, especially as the average intelligence of the audience drops (audience gets larger).
It’s control of the media stupid. Control the media and you control the peoples’ thoughts. Basic propaganda 101. Newspapers are on their way out being replaced by digital media that blatantly skews, censors, and promote so called social awareness over governance. The chances of reading the Federalist Papers today are nil to none. As fast as we come up with new Conservative outlets they get bought out by the Marxists.
I can’t remember seeing any discussion about the insignificant size of the human contribution of CO2 into the atmosphere. If my non-scientist calculations are correct, human CO2 input would have to be increased 625 times what it is currently just to be an inconsequential one percent of the atmosphere. This is the information that must be repeatedly put before the public.
By my non-scientist calculations, the human input of CO2 into the atmosphere would have to be increased 625 times its current level in order to be an inconsequential one percent of the atmosphere. This type of information should be repeatedly placed before the public. I do not recall seeing, even once, any discussion of this type. The constant drumbeat theme should be that the human CO2 contribution is far too small to be significant.
Aztecs believed that a human had to be sacrificed to the Sun God Huitzilopochtli to make sure that the sun would rise again. And it worked! For centuries! Can you imagine a more scientific proof?
Good one. There must be suffering and sacrifice to keep the climate safe. Easy to sell and when the world does not burn up, you have your proof.