In the same week large swaths of the US were under extreme heat warnings, Joe Biden’s Justice Department filed its most recent motion to dismiss a landmark climate case by arguing that nothing in the Constitution guarantees the right to a secure climate.
I thought about the hole in the ozone just this week and was so baffled. It was a really big deal when I was a kid. There is a hole in the ozone and CFC is the problem so the solution was to ban CFCs, the hole repaired itself and we all survived… 30 years later and climate change if gonna fuck us, the problem is burning too much fossil fuels, the solution… donno, say climate change isn’t real and hope for the best?
What you’re missing is that the CFC ban, and environmental regulations to stop acid rain, and similar government actions in the '80s and '90s, hurt profits. And businesses learned from that.
Big Oil especially saw the writing on the wall. It knew global warming was real and environmentalists were going to come after CO2. So they brought together teams of PR experts and MBAs, they consulted with tobacco lobbyists who fought government regulation for decades, and asked them “how can we prevent governments from regulating fossil fuels before they start?”
And the answer was “make environmental science partisan, get one political party on our side, and as long as you can keep a bipartisan consensus from forming you can keep government from doing anything effective”.
And it’s been stunningly effective.
Frankly, if the link between smoking and lung cancer was only identified today, there’s absolutely zero chance smoking would be banned or regulated nationwide. Tobacco industry lobbyists would be funding pro-smoking public service announcements as aggressively as the dairy industry does milk ads. Republican politicians would hand out cigars at rallies. Tucker Carlson would have whole shows dedicated to the idea that vaccines cause lung cancer. Every newspaper opinion piece saying smoking is harmful would be countered by another opinion piece saying the science isn’t settled and we can’t take away American’s freedom based on uncertain science. Conservatives would be chain smoking to own the libs. Yeah, individual blue cities and blue states might be able to regulate smoking. But half the country would believe the link between smoking and lung cancer was invented by communists to steal Americans’ freedoms. And no effective collective response would be possible.
The difference between the '80s and today is corporate America is much better at controlling the political narrative to prevent collective action. And without collective action we can’t do shit.
The US has milk ads … in traditional media? Strange.
Well said. Nothing corrodes my hopes and dreams like the responses to coronavirus and Sandy Hook. The Merchants of Doubt have been busy.