Naomi Klein has a solid article in The Nation on how Climate Change Deniers think. I'm going to be unpacking some issues I discovered in the article, so give it a read and see below the squiggle for my analysis.
You see, Climate Change is my #1 issue because climate & energy encompass so many other issues that it serves as a "linchpin" to many of the things that my progressive sensibilities incline me to care about. Klein delves into the fact that Climate touches so many Progressive issues from the mindset of the Wing-nut Denialsphere and anybody who has debated a hard-core denier will already be familiar with what she found. For the most part, the Deniers see Climate Change as a red herring used by "leftists" to build support for many of their long-standing goals from reparations for Colonialism to destroying religion. It seems convenient to them that every single solution to climate change involves Lefties, Progressives, etc. getting what they have been asking for over the last few decades.
In my experience, the wingnut stormtroopers that crash town hall meetings and wear teabags from their hats really only believe Climate Change is a hoax because Al Gore, hippies, and all the other misfits that they don't like think it isn't a hoax and we need to do something about it. In their mind, things are simple, black & white, with us or against us. The people they don't like just HAVE to be wrong, ergo Climate Change is bogus and a ploy to grab power. This must be a GIANT Freudian Slip, because the red herring ploys the Right in this country has used over the years range from McCarthyism to fears of racial integration, abortion, Welfare Queens, Iraq's WMD stockpiles and they continue on today. I guess since most of them think they, along with the Republican Party, have saved the nation from all of the non-issues mentioned above and many others, the Climate Change hoax is just another threat to beat down in a similar manner.
Klein delves into this thought pattern even more by finding the root of this denialist mindset. The denial machine gets almost ALL of its fuel from corporately-funded think tanks. These guys tend not to use their "reptile brain" nearly as much as the stormtroopers, but they are experts at crafting emotional messages that bypass the rational processing of the human brain and triggering lizard-like responses in minds of their troops. They actually know a lot about climate science and how geopolitics work. The problem is that the "brains" of the denial operation are actually opposed to the SOLUTIONS that dealing with Climate Change entails. These are all the policy prescriptions on Progressives' wish-lists that I mentioned earlier and Klein groups these solutions into 6 broad categories, summing them up rather well.
To the think-tank operative, every single solution is a threat to their worldview, their life-long "academic" and professional body of work, AND each one makes it harder for their large corporate paymasters to show continued profit growth into the future. Of course they would panic and use the kitchen sink method to try and stop action to prevent Climate Change. The fact that Megacorporations can get 100 to 1 returns (or more) on the money they invest in funding these think-tanks and lobbying government simply means that the denial machine has a much larger megaphone.
If looked at from their perspective, the drastic changes that Klein proposes to deal with Climate Change are probably akin to how many of us see the dangerous witches' brew of (thrice-tried and thrice-failed!) right-wing policy porn contained in Rep. Paul Ryan's budget! However, since their policy prescriptions have been tried time and time again with repeated failure, I believe Einstein's definition of insanity should be invoked to describe the Right's devotion to these ideas. In the reality-based world however, Climate Change is just one of the MANY symptoms associated with the failure of Free Market Fundamentalism (FMF) to solve any problems. It may not be a stated tenet of FMF, but anything that is inconvenient for the top 1% gets swept under the rug or paid for by the 99%. These problems don't go away, but get worse as time goes on and drain the 99% of their productivity. Everything from pollution to crime, crumbling education systems and even healthcare have been treated in this manner and the results are apparent to anyone who really looks at the issues. To top it all off, people who get rich by creating these problems (free license to use the atmosphere as an open sewer for example) will fight with every bit of leverage they can get their hands on against ANY solutions.
My only complaint with Klein's article is that she may have delved a little too deeply into the right-wing denier mindset and grabbed on to some of their ideas. For example, she dredges up the "Jevons Paradox" which postulates that efficiency gains will always be drowned out by consumption growth. I understand that she is arguing against the mindset of endless growth and I absolutely agree with the FACT that perpetual economic growth in the traditional sense is impossible to accomplish on our little, finite planet. However, energy efficiency has had a tremendous impact on our energy consumption from cars to refrigerators and even the homes we live in. Joe Romm of Climate Progress put together a comprehensive debunking of the Jevons Paradox on his site a while ago and is worth the read.
The Jevons Paradox may sound intuitive, but you also have to consider what our energy consumption would be like if we still drove cars that get 12 MPG or our houses were still as drafty and wasteful as they were in the 60s. Additionally, there comes a saturation point where you don't want to turn the thermostat down any lower in the summer because the temperature is fine or you don't want to drive any more miles in your car because there's only so much time in the day. Energy has been so cheap for so long in the U.S. that many people were at or exceeding these saturation points and didn't even care. Efficiency improvements work hand-in-hand with changing our culture away from endless and mindless consumption to sustainability.
In short, past data show that Jevons was mostly wrong and the rebound effect is rather small. But looking to the future, there's no way Klein, Dr Romm, Amory Lovins, or anybody else knows EXACTLY the size and scope of efficiency improvements that will happen between now and 2050. We have a rather good idea and from the information I've seen, we throw away about HALF of the energy we use in the U.S. for no good reason. If you can save a significant chunk of those energy expenditures, then that money can be channeled into more productive uses. In the world that Jevons lived in when he drafted his ideas, these energy savings had very few places to go and, due to the tremendous GDP growth rates of ANY industrializing country, were mostly plowed into burning more fuel or building more factories. Nowadays, our primary problem is that too much capital is locked up in too few hands, especially Exxon, Koch, etc., and the savings from efficiency measures can go directly from their pockets into education, healthcare or infrastructure improvements that actually save MORE energy.
But let me back this light-rail train up just a bit before I let everybody off. To the stormtroopers and the think-tank operatives, efficiency and renewable energy (and demand management, decreasing consumerism and all the other things we need to do) will NEVER WORK. They present vague references to bogus studies commissioned by fossil fuel companies that supposedly show renewable energy is a scam. Then there's the zombie myths of the Jevons Paradox, Climategate, and the repeated emphasis that Al Gore is a hypocrite because he lives in a mansion. But to the core of their being, the denialists believe that we have NO CHOICE but to keep exploiting the Earth's resources FOREVER and even if we do hit some bumps in the road, some magical, fairy-dust technology is going to save us, or a John Gault-type is going to swoop in and make everything alright once more (and get uber-rich doing it too...). Everyone must know that this wishful thinking is the policy choice with the HIGHEST RISK.
However, since the denialists are openly hostile to renewables, efficiency and a sustainable economy, it's no wonder they think the policy prescriptions required to keep dangerous climate disruption at bay are unthinkable. Because if you think about it, they are! If we need to cut our emissions 80% below 1990 levels by 2050 (basically 38 years away, mind you!) and we CAN'T use renewables and efficiency measures (because, remember, since hippies and Democrats like these things, they HAVE to be ineffective), then there's very few choices that don't involve moving into huts and reducing the OECD countries' living standards to 3rd World conditions. I know this sounds silly, but this is how they probably operate, so stay with me on this. The denialists of the world think through this issue as described above and most come to the conclusion that Climate Change has to be a hoax. The religious-right wingnuts have an easier time of this because all those god-hating scientists are wrong on everything anyway, but the more secular climate change denialists either come to this conclusion as I have stated, choose not to think about it entirely, or they stop being denialists altogether.
In summary, Naomi Klein's article was 99% correct and she only off the mark on a few things. We will still have to curtail what she calls the "Cult of Shopping", but with the pace of energy technology development right now, things will be a little less traumatic than she envisions. Climate Change affects many issues that progressives care about, but not in the way that conservatives would like. Since the realization of their Free Market Fundamentalist creed creates so many problems and externalities, Climate Change is just one of the many shortcomings of their ideology that they either ignore or wear as a badge of honor (just like executing mentally handicapped people, cheering on the death of people without health insurance or making the U.S. the country with the most people in prison). Since the issue of Climate Change is either connected with or affects almost every issue that progressives are involved with, it is up to us to change the terms of the debate, get the denialists on the defensive while building broad and deep support to enact the change that Climate Science demands.