Saving Us

by Katharine Hayhoe

  The concept that much of the resistance to climate change is really a rejection of what people perceive to be unpleasant or unpalatable solutions is known as solution aversion. This counterintuitive term was first applied to climate change by social science researchers Troy Campbell and Aaron Kay. They noted, as had others, that the big differences in opinion on climate change between Republicans and Democrats in the U.S. were motivated by their political affiliations. Through experimenting with people’s reactions, they found that “the source of this motivation [i.e., the negative attitudes of more conservative voters] is not necessarily an aversion to the problem, per se, but an aversion to the solutions associated with the problem.” In other words, Republicans didn’t have a problem with climate science (though they might think they did); they had a problem with climate solutions.

  After one of my talks at a local college, an instructor followed me out to the parking lot. I had another meeting to get to, so I couldn’t stop. But he didn’t either. As I pulled out my keys and put my bag in the back, he continued to voice his scientific-sounding objections: I hadn’t addressed how the Sun affects climate. Everyone knew that was the dominant cause of climate change, so why wasn’t I being honest about it?

  In my talk, I had been clear that the Sun’s energy has been decreasing over the last forty years, so it can’t be the Sun causing us to warm. “And you can’t say it’s cosmic rays, either,” I said, “because they’re heading in the opposite direction from climate as well.”

  “That’s not true,” he retorted, and, without even taking a breath, continued, “and I know the EPA is just making all of this up to take away my wood-burning stove.”

  What do changes in solar energy and cosmic rays have to do with wood-burning stoves? Factually, very little; but to his brain, everything. Metaphorically speaking, the circuits in our brain that register fear of what we might lose as a result of climate solutions build a direct connection to the circuits that say it isn’t real. Why? Because saying “it’s not real” is our defense mechanism. Admitting that climate change is real and harmful but you don’t want to do anything to address it makes you the “bad guy,” and who wants that? As I’ve said before, most of us want to believe we’re a good person.

  So instead, someone might say, “the climate has always changed,” or “the Sun’s at fault, and humans have nothing to do with it,” or, my personal favorite, “those climate scientists only say this because it’s making them rich.” With that last one, they’re not just rejecting the label of bad guy themselves, they’re pinning it firmly on the scientists. We’re the real villains, alarming everyone for no reason other than our personal gain!

  All too often, if we view climate solutions as harmful, we throw up scientific-sounding smoke screens to obscure our real objections. In reality, they have nothing to do with science, and everything to do with ideology and identity. It’s our (often subconscious) defense mechanisms compelling us to prove to ourselves that what we believe is true. That in turn makes us the good person and those venal scientists, corrupt leftist politicians, and greedy green energy tycoons the baddies.

  This defense mechanism stems from our very basic human need to feel justified in what we believe and who we are. And it also explains why people are so willing to go out of their way to attack climate scientists they’ve never met before. Again, this is yet another harmful zero-sum game: if you can convince yourself it’s someone else’s fault, you imagine this will somehow make you feel okay about it at their expense. It may, short-term—but the effect doesn’t last long. That’s why many Dismissives are so combative; they’re constantly in search of confirmation. Arguing, perversely, supplies it.

  FINGERPRINTING THE BIGGEST CULPRITS

  When it comes to sharing the responsibility for climate change, it’s true that we are all part of the problem to some degree. Carbon emissions didn’t just magically appear out of nowhere—and those of us in rich countries produce far more than our fair share. At the same time, however, climate change can’t be solved by individual action alone. We need collective action, and that means changing the system. Getting hung up on our personal guilt—or resorting to denial to deal with it—is unproductive. Both approaches discourage those who have little power to effect change and ignore those who do.

  Some of this solution aversion is naturally occurring, like the water manager who said so perceptively that he didn’t want the government setting his thermostat. But there is evidence much of it is deliberately manufactured by people and industries who, though in a small minority in terms of the number of people they represent, are disproportionately influential due to their wealth and power. They have good reason to fear solutions that may significantly impact their bottom line and even their long-term viability.

  Who are those who bear greater responsibility and therefore have the ability to effect great change? According to the Carbon Majors Report produced by the Colorado-based Climate Accountability Institute, one hundred fossil fuel companies have been responsible for emitting 70 percent of the world’s heat-trapping gases since 1988. And even more tellingly, the top eight of them—in order: Saudi Aramco, Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP, Gazprom, Royal Dutch Shell, National Iranian Oil Co., and Petroleos Mexicanos—have accounted for almost 20 percent of global carbon emissions from fossil fuels and cement production since the Industrial Revolution. Not only that, but most of the eight top the list of the world’s richest corporations as well. They’ve gotten rich at the expense of everyone who’s being impacted by climate change—and at least some of them want to keep it that way.

  The homepage of the grassroots project Exxon Knew is crystal clear: “Exxon knew about climate change half a century ago. They deceived the public, misled their shareholders, and robbed humanity of a generation’s worth of time to reverse climate change.” Each of those statements is based on an exhaustive compilation of Exxon’s internal memos, emails, reports, and publications. Some of them were even written by me: my master’s thesis looked at how reducing methane and other non-CO2 heat-trapping gases could contribute to international targets. Some of that research was supported and coauthored by Exxon scientists. They all knew what was what; so I wasn’t surprised when one 1979 Exxon Petroleum Department report the project cites reads like a summary of this book. “The CO2 concentration in the atmosphere has increased since the beginning of world industrialization,” it says. “The increase is due to fossil fuel combustion [and] the present trend… will cause dramatic environmental effects before the year 2050.”

  Science historian Naomi Oreskes has dedicated her life to researching exactly what large companies like those selling tobacco and fossil fuels knew about the risks their products posed versus what they said in public about it. In her eye-opening 2010 book, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, Oreskes and coauthor Erik Conway name the scientists and spin doctors who denied the connection between smoking and lung cancer, and show how companies like Exxon and Chevron brought them on board when the threat of climate action first appeared on their horizon.

  Using tried-and-tested strategies that Canadian public relations expert Jim Hoggan skillfully dissects in his 2009 book, Climate Cover-up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming, these organizations and their hired guns deliberately sowed doubt into the public discourse about science we’ve understood since the 1800s. Full-page ads in prominent newspapers, fake “grassroots” campaigns, dark money–funded think tanks to promote bought-and-paid-for experts, legal firms to attack climate scientists to scare and silence them, donations to politicians at every level across the political spectrum: even still, what these companies have spent to stop climate action is only a tiny fraction of what they have to lose if no one’s buying fossil fuels anymore.

  THE POWER OF MISINFORMATION

  Here’s just one example of how effective this disinformation campaign can be. In the U.S., the Yale Program on Climate Communication has been tracking people’s op
inions of the Green New Deal. This is a congressional resolution introduced by Democratic representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Democratic senator Edward Markey of Massachusetts. It lays out how to transition the U.S. off fossil fuels while ensuring a just transition for disadvantaged communities and those whose basic livelihood depends on the industry.

  That doesn’t sound like a bad thing, and when it was first proposed in December 2018, there was broad support for it across the political spectrum. This included 57 percent of conservative Republicans and 75 percent of moderate Republicans. But then the manufactured denial swung into play. Politicians and pundits began to paint it as a socialist plot to destroy America. By April 2019, just four months later, conservative Republican support had dropped to 32 percent, moderate Republican support to 64 percent, and even moderate Democrats’ support had dropped a few percentage points. Had the Green New Deal changed? No. So what had? Peoples’ exposure to a barrage of negative messaging about it, that’s what.

  Sometimes, people set up a straw man argument instead. You pretend that someone made an outlandish claim so that you can attack both the claim and the person. This is frequently employed by those who have the most to gain from stonewalling climate action. But when someone sent me a photo of a spray-painted billboard claiming that U.S. senator and known climate advocate Bernie Sanders wanted to abort all the babies to fix climate change, they’d gone too far, I thought. That’s so ridiculous, surely no one would believe that. But, as so often occurs these days, they could and they did.

  A few months after I’d seen that photo, I received an invitation to speak at a religious university so conservative—and not just theologically, but politically and culturally, too—that I was shocked they’d even let me in the door. The invitation came from a fellow scientist and colleague named Evan, whom I’d met at various conferences over the years.

  A week before the talk, Evan emailed me.

  “I just wanted to let you know what some are saying about your visit,” he said, attaching several emails he’d received from other faculty and administrators.

  As I scrolled down, my eye snagged on a quote from one professor: “This is the work of Satan, the father of lies… presenting solutions to climate change is morally equivalent to abortion.” An administrator joined in, telling Evan he had to stop advertising my talk. It was making too many people angry.

  Yup, they’d bought it.

  TURNING OPINIONS AROUND

  I needed to reconsider what to say. The stakes were high. I didn’t just have to talk about why climate change matters to us as Christians. I also had to show there were solutions that helped rather than harmed people and that had nothing to do with abortion and were compatible with our values. I wanted to do the opposite of what had been done with the Green New Deal: start from a negative opinion and turn it right around. But how?

  I found myself thinking of Mitch Hescox. He’s a coal executive turned pastor who now leads the Evangelical Environmental Network. He’s passionate about helping people who live in areas similar to his home in Pennsylvania, where the coal industry shores up the local economy while simultaneously poisoning the community’s water and its air. Mitch has seen firsthand the devastating impacts fossil fuels have on our health. He understands that the consequences are particularly bad for children, pregnant women, and unborn babies. As I talked about in the last chapter, fossil fuel use and its cascading impacts on heat, pollution, water, food, disasters, and security affects our health in a myriad of ways. That’s why Mitch refers to climate change as a “pro-life” issue. If Christians are truly pro-life from conception to death (rather than from conception to birth, as some people’s attitudes seem to suggest), they should be leading the charge to get rid of fossil fuels—not dragging their feet at the back or heading in the other direction.

  At the same time, though, it’s also necessary and appropriate to acknowledge the benefits that energy has brought us. Growing up as a missionary kid in Colombia was an experience I knew many at that university could relate to. Anyone who’s spent time in a poor country knows how profoundly poverty and lack of access to resources can impact people’s lives; but they might not know how directly fossil fuel extraction exacerbates it. In Colombia, for example, coal mining in the impoverished and largely indigenous department of La Guajira is, as political scientist Noel Healy puts it, “connected to a system of production entrenched in violence, bloodshed and environmental destruction.” Just one example is the coal industry’s exorbitant water use during a recent climate-amplified drought. This led to massive shortages that left whole villages without water.

  From rural Appalachia to the oil- and gas-rich Niger Delta, pregnant mothers, babies, and children face increased risk of cancer and birth defects due to fossil fuel extraction. Emem Edoho, an advocate for Nigerian children, says, “Oftentimes, residents… live in agonizing conditions, economically and socially, arising from years of neglect and deprivations and severe environmental degradations, caused by the production activities of most oil and gas companies in the area.” These environmental harms aren’t offset by financial gain, either; income inequality in the developing world is actually exacerbated by fossil fuel extraction, as kleptocrats find a way time and again to line their own pockets with the profits.

  Then there are the health problems associated with the combustion of fossil fuels. As I mentioned earlier, air pollution from fossil fuels is responsible for more than nearly 9 million deaths worldwide each year. (There are also several million deaths each year due to exposure to open indoor fires that many impoverished women have to cook on.) Two hundred thousand of these annual air pollution deaths are in the U.S. Who are these people suffering from lung disease, asthma, and other related conditions? Often those who can’t afford to live in a cleaner neighborhood with better air quality, as well as children and those who are already sick or infirm.

  Only after I’d thoroughly explored all of these issues did I turn to climate change and how the suffering global warming will cause around the world is not going to be parceled out equally. One Stanford study estimates climate change has already increased the economic gap between the world’s richest and poorest countries by as much as 25 percent. It has also negated over fifty years of advances in poverty and hunger reduction and could push 120 million more into poverty by 2030. The global south will continue to bear the brunt of future impacts, with the poorest 40 percent of countries experiencing a 75 percent drop in average income by end of century.

  Taken individually, any one of these reasons should be enough to convince us that there are better options than fossil fuels for the developing world, which is already suffering the impacts of climate change. Taken together, they overwhelmingly demonstrate how, if we care about life at all, then we already care about climate change.

  So what are the solutions? One of the most surprising is educating and empowering women and girls. Education reduces infant mortality, increases equality, and allows women the freedom to choose how many children they have.V In Kenya, for example, women farmers who were taught about agricultural technology and agribusiness increased their income by an average of 35 percent. In Mali, women who attend secondary school go on to have an average of three children; women who aren’t educated, seven. For each additional year of schooling a mother has, the chance of her child dying before the age of five decreases by 7 to 9 percent on average across developing countries; this increases to 10 percent in Malawi and 17 percent in Uganda. And around the world, children born to mothers who can read are 50 percent more likely to survive childhood than those whose mothers can’t. Education, empowerment, and poverty eradication, not abortion, are the positive routes to addressing climate change and building prosperity in the developing world.

  As Christians, I concluded my talk, our response to any challenge should be characterized by love. Jesus says, “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples,” and the apostle Paul amplifies this, instructing his readers that “the only thin
g that counts is faith expressing itself through love.” Love is key to acting on climate: caring for the poor and the needy, those most affected by the impacts of a changing climate, as well as creation itself. It’s not only our responsibility, it’s who Christians believe God made us to be.

  As I finished my talk, I was overwhelmed with enthusiastic students approaching me. Many of them asked, “Here’s what I’m studying; how can I apply what I’m learning to help with this issue?” Others shared how they’d never made the connection before, but it was very clear to them now why they cared.

  As I walked out, the administrator—he of the email—grabbed my hand and shook it vigorously. He thanked me for the talk. And the next week, Evan forwarded me an email he’d received from him. It said that I’d given him a new perspective on this topic and he really appreciated that Evan had invited me. He understood how his existing values connected with addressing climate change and he’d changed his mind.

  This was one of the most encouraging responses I’d ever heard. If we are going to fix this thing, we need everyone to get involved.

  I. The running joke in many parts of the state is that we get twenty inches of rain a year—all in one day.

  II. He may have been referring to Jimmy Carter, who, during the seventies oil crisis, famously advised people “to put on a sweater”—and was subsequently pilloried by conservatives who didn’t want the President fiddling with their thermostat.

  III. These plans were of varying quality. I scored them on ambition and feasibility with my colleague, economist Andrew Leach from the University of Alberta. They ranged from an A+ for the Green Party’s ambition to an F for the feasibility of the Conservative Party’s plan.