Last week, there was a minor kerfuffle in the climate denier-adjacent world, when anti-pronouns crusader and climate denier Jordan Peterson tweeted, “Do I really live in a universe where Ta-Nehisi Coates has written a Captain America comic featuring a parody of my ideas as part of the philosophy of the arch villain Red Skull?”
And the answer is yes. Coates, the influential thinker and writer, did indeed make some pretty obvious allusions to Peterson’s “12 Rules” self-help guide (which attempts to teach good little boys how to be Big Strong [Fascist] Men) in his run of writing Captain America for Marvel that started back in 2018, making the replies to Peterson’s “are we the baddies?” near-epiphany pretty entertaining.
In one of the many pearl-clutching stories published in rightwing anti-getting-offended “news” outlets, the Daily Caller concludes by noting that Peterson “rose to prominence due to his positions against political correctness and referring to white privilege as a ‘Marxist lie’.” So maybe Peterson, who has warned about “the problem of too much empathy” shouldn’t be so surprised at being used as the source material for a modern Nazi.
But as it turns out, there’s another comic out that’s also aimed at the denier dufuses of the world like Peterson, though this one’s definitely more explicitly so. Illustrator Céline Keller has created a great comic book version of a study on the “discourses of climate delay.” As you may remember from its release last year, the study looks at the rhetoric opposing climate action, breaking it down into four main categories and additional subsections. Where outright denial (think James Inhofe with his snowball) is relatively obvious, the rhetorical tactics of delay are more sophisticated. For example, agreeing that action is necessary but suggesting someone else act first, or that just a few little tech tweaks will solve the problem. Then there’s an (over-)emphasis on the downsides of policies, and the outright surrender of doomism.
Keller takes that interesting but admittedly dry information and — much like how Coates very deliberately went from penning “the case for reparations” and many other influential essays in The Atlantic to a more mass-audience-friendly medium of Marvel comics — translates the dense text into something that’s an absolute treat to read.
With pop-art illustrations of oil CEOs and professional disinformers and their quotes, Keller worked with the scientists behind the study to show readers how language that sounds well-intentioned is used to delay climate action.
Starting with the CEO of Shell pulling a Ted Cruz and blaming his daughters as an example of how individualism is weaponized to oppose collective action, the comic moves through ten examples of this sophisticated new denial with a decidedly global focus, featuring global leaders and CEOs that are polluting the discourse on what to do about pollution.
Doesn’t look like Jordan Peterson makes an appearance though, which is good news for whoever’s writing this in a few years when he belatedly discovers this comic.