There was a battered paper cartoon pasted to our office cupboard, sometime back in the year 2000. It depicted a landscape of power plants belching smoke, in the foreground of which was a billboard where an enthusiastic woman in a sunhat sipped a margarita through a straw. A speech bubble came from the woman’s lipsticked mouth: “Global warming?” she gushed. “I can’t wait!”
It was supposed to be a joke.
Memory of that cartoon provoked an old, nihilistic laugh to echo in my throat at a confluence of climate events this week, 20 careless years later. Dear world, three months after they began, the Australian fires are not out. Today, ash is raining in our nation’s capital, orange flames stare over the mountains behind Canberra. Scientific consensus, affirmed by Australia’s exhausted fire chiefs, is that the fires are effects of the anthropogenic climate crisis. And yet even as the fires roar at the physical gates of power, on Sunday the conservative columnist Andrew Bolt, of the Murdoch press, published an insistence that climate change is “overall, a good thing”. The only thing missing from this new cartoon is the lipstick.
Bolt’s claim actually represents some intellectual evolution on the issue. It wasn’t so long ago that global scientific consensus on the reality of climate change amounted to naught but an “end-of-the-world religion” to him. He’s hardly the only conservative megaphone that’s been braying to disrupt meaningful political action on climate change these last, wasted, crucial decades. He is, however, a useful local avatar to illustrate the history of both the denialist campaign, and how encroaching reality is obliging the adaptation of its messaging.
It was as far back as 1896 when scientists first warned about the climatic impact of fossil fuel emissions. In 1956, the New York Times advanced the same concerns; an article appeared with the headline “Warmer Climate on the Earth Could Be Due to Increasing Carbon Dioxide in the Air”. Although these warnings were ignored, fossil fuel corporations such as Shell and Exxon sat quietly on studies that confirmed their key assumptions. Finally, research from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1988 informed a fateful, public conclusion that a “greenhouse effect … is changing our climate now”.
But by 1989, organisations were already appearing pursuing overt strategies – copied from the tobacco industry – to sow doubt about the validity and credibility of the scientific alarm, downplay the significance of evidence and demobilise meaningful political action. From the beginning, climate denial has been driven by two conflating forces; the financial interests of fossil fuel companies and a conservative political movement that sees environmental regulation as a challenge to ideological preferences for private property, neoliberal economics and borderless capitalism. Denialist thinktanks like the Heartland Institute praise themselves for service to an “ultimate goal” that has, of course, nothing to do with facts or science, but instead “to keep global warming alarmists from winning the public debate”.
This is the decades-long frame into which Bolt and his comrades slip. A non-scientist himself, Bolt’s analysis more or less always conforms to a pattern perfected worldwide; locate an isolated item of contradictory, impenetrable data and insist its existence proves climate science is a shibboleth of untruth, misquote a credible scientist, quote a non-credible one, and insist all climate activists are unhinged loons.
How bleak it is now, with Canberra burning, to revisit Bolt’s comments of 2006, when he was the subject of a Media Watch investigation of his selective misstatements on climate data. “Some people believe that bushfires may get worse in the future because of man-made global warming,” announced Media Watch, “Andrew Bolt isn’t one of them.” By 2009, so tight was the grip of denialism over the discourse, if not the facts, that Bolt felt confident enough to declare “this mad global warming scare could at last be over”.
Really?
2009 was the same year that future prime minister, Tony Abbott similarly declared “the climate change argument is absolute crap”, one more example of the impressive cohesion of conservative commentary with its political result. A side note: not one 2016 Republican candidate for president accepted the science of climate change. Back here, denialist MPs such as the internationally embarrassing Craig Kelly are frequent guests of Bolt’s show.
What to make of Bolt’s most recent concession to the reality of actual climate change is what his insistent “good thing, overall” messaging reveals of the new political reality facing the conservative movement. Unlike an election result that can be willed into existence through sheer force of persuasion, the planet is not actually persuadable. The ideological resistance among conservatives to address the source of climate crisis is so powerful, so historically entrenched, that flames literally surround the city in which the conservative Australian prime minister himself has announced that “resilience and adaptation” amid the fires will substitute for climate mitigation, prevention, action to make them stop. On cue, the megaphones insist this nightmare will be good for us.
Take it from one of the selectively misquoted credible scientists: global heating is not heralding a new agricultural prosperity, these forces are causing forests to burn, not to bloom. They can’t offer solutions. The propaganda of a new denial is all they’ve got.
• Van Badham is a Guardian Australia columnist
