This week, Koch Congressman turned Secretary of State Mike Pompeo did his job and denied the reality of the impacts of climate change. In reference to the melting Arctic, Pompeo recognized that old fashioned “nu uh!” denial wasn’t going to cut it. Instead, he suggested that the melt would be beneficial because it would open up new trade routes and cut down on shipping times.
Given that this happened concurrently with a new UN report warning that human activity puts a million species at risk of extinction, the comments were an easy target for late night comedy. Seth Meyers, for example, spent a few minutes ridiculing Pompeo’s position, saying it’s like “being excited your house burned down, because now you can see your pool from the driveway” and that making money off of a disaster is literally the plot of The Producers. (“It’s spring time, for everyone, all of the time!”)
Jimmy Kimmel, meanwhile, went a little more risque, using the extinction report and Pompeo’s comments to set up a mock-PSA featuring George Clooney fundraising for a new organization: United to Defeat Untruthful Misinformation and Support Science, or, UDUMASS. Showing clips of Trump’s “windmills cause cancer” nonsense and James Inhofe’s snowball stunt, Clooney warns of how “rampant dumbfuckery now threatens our health, our security, and our planet.”
In the Twittersphere, Dr. Michael Mann pointed out that Pompeo’s suggestion that maybe there’s an upside to climate change is just one of the many permutations of denial. And it’s hardly unique to climate change.
A paper on denial back in 1993 lays out a sort of spectrum of denial. Though focused on cancer patients who refuse to accept their diagnosis, the parallels are straightforward. There’s complete denial, where a patient simply refuses to accept the cancer diagnosis, akin to deniers who refuse to accept that scientists have diagnosed the cause of climate change as human activity. Then there’s the denial of the implications of the diagnosis, where they accept that they have cancer but reject the idea that it’s serious and life-threatening. We see this in arguments that admit the climate is changing, but reject calls to reduce fossil fuel use.
The next step, one closer to reality, is denial of the effects, where patients “minimize the extent to which they are distressed” by the knowledge of their diagnosis. Patients in this stage of denial mostly avoid the issue, and are “focused on suppressing anxieties.” In other words, this is representative of folks who recognize that climate change is a problem, but consider it too daunting to deal with. Finally, there’s acceptance, when patients finally reckon with the reality, and “might see cancer as a problem that has to be dealt with.”
For decades, fossil fuel defenders have been able to stay in the “complete denial” phase because symptoms of climate change were hard to see. But now, with the Arctic actively melting, denial is becoming untenable.
Obviously, the Kochs aren’t going to just up and allow their network to embrace calls to transition off of fossil fuels. Deniers are instead turning to arguments like Pompeo’s, embracing a term Naomi Klein popularized: “disaster capitalism.”
This is really where the comparison between psychological denial, like in cancer patients, and professional denial, like Pompeo’s, ends. While cancer patients’ denial is an emotional defense, those who rely on the fossil fuel industry are motivated by money, and therefore are capable of accepting that fossil fuels cause climate change without also accepting the implication that we should eliminate fossil fuel use.
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