Three items from the news the past few days. First, some quotes from a piece about how climate change deniers have refined their game.
TNR, The New Republic, Genevieve Guenther, 24 Jun 2024: The New Climate Denial Is Based on These Six Terms, subtitled “The new obstructionist approach doesn’t say global warming isn’t happening. Instead, it argues we don’t need to phase out oil and gas.”
The larger issue here is that deniers of climate change, evolution, vaccines, and so on, *always* have an ulterior motive. They’re never interested about the pure science of the matters (else there are *lots* of other things they might be concerned about). In the case of climate change, whatever their surface arguments are, their underlying motivation is to preserve the status quo, in this case the interests of the fossil fuel industries.
But OK, what are their six terms? The piece begins:
Climate change is “a hoax,” Donald Trump sneers, using his best wise-guy accent. This is what most people think of when they think of climate denial. And for good reason. “Climate change isn’t real” serves as the party line of the MAGA base of the GOP. In the first Republican primary debate of the 2024 election, entrepreneurial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, perhaps gunning to become Trump’s vice presidential pick, declared that “the climate change agenda is a hoax!”
It’s absurd, at this point, to claim that climate change isn’t real: Every summer a ghastly parade of stories about deadly extreme weather marches across the news, and climate scientists can now explicitly attribute this weather to climate change. Even 70 percent of young Republicans now connect climate change to human activity. So now Republicans in swing states, titans of finance and tech, as well as coal, oil, and gas executives themselves, have started spreading a new, more subtle form of climate denial. This new denial acknowledges that climate change is real but still seeks to justify continuing the fossil fuel system.
And in the next para, the six terms (which I will bold), with some brief context.
This propaganda is spun out of six key terms that dominate the language of climate politics: alarmist, cost, growth, “India and China,” innovation, and resilience. Together these terms weave a narrative that goes something like this: “Yes, climate change is real, but calling it an existential threat is just alarmist. And, anyway, phasing out coal, oil, and gas would cost us too much. Human flourishing relies on the economic growth enabled by fossil fuels, so we need to keep using them and deal with climate change by fostering technological innovation and increasing our resilience. Besides, America should not act unilaterally on the climate crisis while emissions are rising in India and China.” This narrative is designed to encourage the incorrect and dangerous belief that the world does not need essentially to stop using fossil fuels—either because climate change won’t be that destructive or, in some versions of the story, because the world can keep using coal, oil, and gas and still halt global heating anyway.
The article goes on to explore how these terms are used and misused. I’ll quote this one passage, yet another example of how scientists use certain terms very precisely in ways the general public thinks of much more loosely.
We can see how this dynamic plays out by looking at the word uncertainty. As the Harvard historian of science Naomi Oreskes showed in Merchants of Doubt, fossil fuel partisans created doubt about the reality of climate change by talking incessantly about scientific “uncertainty” in their public statements about global heating. And they used the word so effectively because they exploited its cultural ambiguity—a quality that arises when a word means one thing to a group of people in a particular subculture but another thing to the general public. Most people understand uncertainty to mean something like “not knowing for sure” or “not having concluded yet.” Scientists sometimes use the word in this way too, of course, but not always. When climate scientists speak of the “uncertainty” of their findings, they usually refer to the range of possible outcomes they can project with confidence. Indeed, uncertainty and confidence are actually synonyms in scientific discourse: Scientists can say either that a model produces an “uncertainty interval” or that it produces a “confidence interval.” And those intervals do not indicate “either it happens or it doesn’t.” Rather they span everything that could possibly happen, from the best- to the worst-case outcomes. So when scientists were being the most scrupulous in their communications about the climate crisis, trying to give the public a full sense of what they confidently knew at the time, they unwittingly echoed the message that there was some “uncertainty,” which people then interpreted as meaning they weren’t sure if climate change was real. In a truly fiendish act of appropriation, fossil fuel interests managed to recruit scientists into inadvertently spreading doubt.
Scientists are used to thinking statistically, and proportionally, along spectra of possibilities; most ordinary people, but especially conservatives, tend to think in black and white terms. Something either is, or isn’t. That’s not how reality works.
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And here’s another piece that is about how language changes.
NY Times, guest essay by Stephen Marche, 25 Jun 2024: Today’s Teenagers Have Invented a Language That Captures the World Perfectly
Every generation creates new words to distinguish themselves from their elders. That’s how human nature works, and it’s how language works. There are no fundamental basic truths about language; they were not all created in their present forms 6000 years ago.
The piece begins:
My son just completed high school and when he leaves for college in the fall my life will change in ways I’m still struggling to contemplate. Among the things I’ll miss most are his lessons in teenage slang. My son has always been generous with me, and I’ve found the slang of his generation to be so much better and more useful than any that I’ve ever used. His slang has also offered me an accidental and useful portrait of how he and his generation see the world.
The primary value of slang has been to create linguistic shibboleths, a way to differentiate yourself quickly from other people. Sometimes the distinction was generational, sometimes it was racial, and sometimes it was ideological, but the slang itself was ultimately a form of social etiquette. From one generation to the next, the terms changed, but the meanings typically didn’t. New words were routinely adopted to express familiar concepts: one generation’s “cool” becomes another’s “dope” and so on.
Members of my son’s generation have a vastly superior approach to slang. They’ve devised a language that responds to the new and distinct reality they face.
Anyone with children, especially ones on the cusp of adulthood, has to reckon with the shameful fact that the world we’re leaving them is so much worse than the one we brought them into. My son’s slang reflects that: It’s a distinct language created for a society that’s characterized, online and off, by collapsing institutions, erosions in trust and a loss of faith in a shared sense of meaning.
And the writer goes on with examples, all of them new to me. “Mid.” “Glazed.” “Sus.” “Cringe.” And “based.”
That each new generation invents slang to capture in a word complex situations is… an advance in human thinking. I think. These new words become a part of the language, at least for a while. The piece ends:
Young people, as they have from the beginning of time, are figuring out exclusive terms to describe their world. As always, it’s a world that the olds cannot comprehend or co-opt. The world of my son’s generation is a dark one — full of corporate triumph and the defeat of public spirit, where systems of meaning are decaying and a lack of clarity is spreading.
The kids themselves are the only bright spot, which is why I’m so grateful my son offered me a glimpse into the language of his generation. Another purpose of slang is to demonstrate generational distinction, yet slang has brought my son and me closer. It’s taught me that the current crop of teenagers created a language to describe the flawed reality we’ve abandoned them to, and in doing so they’ve proved themselves less deluded and more innovative than we were.
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And this item is on the same theme.
NY Times, Jamelle Bouie, 25 Jun 2024: Why Republicans Are Talking About Biden’s ‘Dictatorship’
Again, there’s a lot of projection here. The piece begins:
The United States under President Biden is a “dictatorship,” according to Doug Burgum, governor of North Dakota.
“Under Joe Biden,“ Burgum told Fox News, “we’re actually living under a dictatorship today where he’s, you know, bypassing Congress on immigration policy; he’s bypassing Congress on protecting our border; he’s bypassing Congress on student loan forgiveness; he’s defying the Supreme Court.”
Asked on Sunday to defend his claim, Burgum, who is apparently on the short list of potential running mates for Donald Trump, stood his ground, telling CNN that Biden is “bypassing the other two branches of government to push an ideological view of — whether it’s on economics or whether it’s on climate extremism — he’s doing that without using the other branches.”
It is an odd sort of dictatorship in which the head of state is bound by the rule of law as well as by the authority of other constitutional actors, one in which the dictator’s critics can organize to defeat him in an election without intimidation, penalty or threat of legal sanction — and in which he will leave office if he loses. If nothing else, it is hard to imagine a world in which Biden is both a dictator and someone who would allow Burgum, a regime opponent, to speak freely on national television as he works to defeat Biden at the ballot box.
Anyone who claims Biden is a dictator has not experienced true dictatorship. Republicans are always predicting dire consequences that reflect what they themselves would do.
Just as Americans are not living under a Biden dictatorship — in which the watchful eye of Dark Brandon prowls the nation in search of malarkey — the United States is also not on the verge of collapse. Our economy is the envy of the world, we remain the pre-eminent military power, and for all of its serious problems of representation and inclusion, our political system is still capable of handling at least a few of the major issues that face the nation. It does not downplay the challenges we confront to say that we have the capacity and the resources to meet them head on. That, if anything, makes it all the more frustrating that we have not yet secured decent housing, health care, child care and education for everyone in this country. None of these things are beyond our material ability to accomplish — far from it.
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No music today. I made a trip to the post office today to mail a key to the estate seller of Larry’s estate. I’m still getting paper mail to Larry about his empty Bank of America accounts.
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Every day I reread and copy-edit my post from the evening before. If this comment is still here, I have not yet done so for this post.
