Why climate change deniers love to hear they are committing treason

They love to see themselves as brave victims of McCarthyism, standing up against a wave of pseudo-scientific indoctrination

by Leo Hickman, The Guardian, July 1, 2009

Strong words from Paul Krugman, the Nobel-prize winning Princeton economist, in his column for the New York Times this week. After watching the debate in the House of Representatives last week before the vote on the Waxman-Markey climate-change bill, Krugman said he was appalled by the claims made by some of the climate change deniers who reside within the Grand Old Party.

As I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn't help thinking that I was watching a form of treason – treason against the planet … If you watched the debate on Friday, you didn't see people who've thought hard about a crucial issue, and are trying to do the right thing. What you saw, instead, were people who show no sign of being interested in the truth. They don't like the political and policy implications of climate change, so they've decided not to believe in it – and they'll grab any argument, no matter how disreputable, that feeds their denial.

One sight in particular seemed to rile Krugman: representative Paul Broun of Georgia standing before the floor and grandly stating that the climate change "hoax" has been "perpetrated out of the scientific community." What's more, his statement generated a somewhat stilted ripple of applause, as can be seen on this YouTube clip. Broun's views on climate change have been aired before – he has renamed the Waxman-Markey bill on his Twitter feed [6] as the "Wacky-Marxist Tax and Cap Bill" – but to find this sort of crackpot denial being aired in the House ahead of a pivotal vote, as opposed to in some dark corner of the internet, left Krugman angry:

Is it fair to call climate denial a form of treason? Isn't it politics as usual? Yes, it is – and that's why it's unforgivable. Do you remember the days when Bush administration officials claimed that terrorism posed an "existential threat" to America, a threat in whose face normal rules no longer applied? That was hyperbole – but the existential threat from climate change is all too real. Yet the deniers are choosing, willfully, to ignore that threat, placing future generations of Americans in grave danger, simply because it's in their political interest to pretend that there's nothing to worry about. If that's not betrayal, I don't know what is.

Krugman is not the first person to raise the spectre of climate change denial being an actionable crime. Mark Lynas, for example, has speculated in the past about "what sentences judges might hand down at future international criminal tribunals on those who will be partially but directly responsible for millions of deaths from starvation, famine and disease in decades ahead." James Hansen has also argued that the chief executives of large fossil fuel companies that actively spread doubt about climate change should be put on trial for "crimes against humanity and nature".

The deniers love this sort of attack, of course. It steels them to hear accusations that they are committing "thought crimes," or "treason" no less. They love to see themselves as brave, "truth"-wielding Galileos standing up against a wave of pseudo-scientific indoctrination. They trot out the predictable comparisons to the Salem witch trials and McCarthyism. It all helps to feed into their grand conspiracy theory that climate change is, indeed, a big lefty hoax dreamt up solely to squeeze more taxes out of us all.

You can't help conclude that we're heading for one hell of a day of reckoning with all this. Someone's going to lose spectacularly big in this particular culture war. I certainly know where my money is, but the sad thing is the bragging rights will be irrelevant given the reality of what will be going on outside our windows. If only it were true that all that was at stake was a debating society trophy.

Link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2009/jul/01/climate-change-denier-treason