This is the content of a talk I gave on a lunchtime Teams meeting with members of the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) as part of a series they are holding this week to help kick start the Year of Trade Union Climate Action. Now that, for the first time, elements of the far right launched a physical attack on a climate march in Manchester at the weekend we can see how weaponised lies have violent consequences; making combatting them all the more urgent.
What I aim to do in this brief talk is identify the main sorts of climate denialist mythmaking – firstly on the science, secondly on the social and economic front – identify where they come from and why they can be so potent and suggest sources of info to counter them.
The overarching aim of climate misinformation is to muddy the science, to confuse, deflect and delay. As such it doesn’t have to be coherent or consistent.
Climate Science itself is very clear.
1 Gases like CO2 and methane trap heat in the atmosphere. As you add more of them, you trap more heat. Do this continuously and you will get a trend of global heating – a greenhouse effect.
2 The main source of greenhouse gases is industrial and agricultural activity, primarily burning fossil fuels. Since the start of the industrial revolution in around 1750 the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has been pumped up from 280ppm to around 425 ppm today.
You sometimes get people who say that temperatures aren’t rising, most often as sarcky asides during cold snaps – where’s that global warming then, huh? But most people most of the time now know temperatures are going up, because its what they are experiencing. The hottest years on record are all in the last ten.
So the arguments you tend to get are that that these rising temperatures aren’t due to greenhouse gases but due to other “natural” factors. Temperature has always varied. Its been hotter and colder in the past. Its all due to other, natural factors that are way more powerful than anything we are doing. All these arguments amount to an absurd proposition. That you can add 145ppm of ghgs into the atmosphere in just under 300 years with no effect whatsoever.
Nevertheless, to briefly touch on these arguments
1 Volcanic activity tends to have a cooling effect. The year without a summer in 1816 caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora. Not a useful explanation for things generally heating up.
2 Solar activity goes in cycles and in the last 40 years the variation as been below 0.1%. Since 1750, the burning of FFs has had 270 times the impact of solar activity. So, no explanation there.
3 Long term variations in the Earths orbit and tilt, caused by the gravitational pull of the larger planets, which have indeed been responsible for much more dramatic shifts in global temperature than we are seeing now, “snowball Earth”, forests at the South Pole, go in what are called Milankovitch cycles which take place over 100s of 1000s of years. The cycle we are in the middle of now would imply a slight cooling effect at the moment, if we weren’t forcing the pace. So, yes, things have been significantly hotter and colder at points in the past, but those factors are not operating now, while the forcing effect of greenhouse gas emissions IS happening now.
One last one on the science. Farage and the like express incredulity that CO2 is classed as “pollution” when it is actually plant food. A wonderful illustration of the principle that a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. CO2 is NOT classed as pollution – paradoxically pollution has tended to act to cool the atmosphere, and successful attempts to clean it up, like in China in the last decade or so, has accelerated heating. CO2 is a greenhouse gas. And that’s the problem. It does encourage some plant growth, but this is limited, and counteracted by the impact on plants of rising temperatures on habitats – as trees can’t migrate – and extreme weather on harvests. As we’ve seen in the UK in the last couple of years. And as rising chocolate and coffee prices are witness.
Leaving aside social media, and the algorithms promoted by big tech, which generate excessive attention for emotive misinformation – if you read most UK newspapers you get a very weird and hyped view of the world just from their choice of adjectives.
Climate targets are always “unhinged”, or “lunatic”, or “eye watering”. Politicians identified with them, like Ed Miliband, are always “swivel eyed” or “eco loons” or “hypocrites”.
Renewable energy is always derided as “expensive” and/or “unreliable”.
All of these are free floating. They don’t attach to any reasoned argument, but the constant repetition of “the eye watering costs of net zero” creates a delusion that is taken for granted. Its what the press does on many issues of course.
This venom is being generated from the fossil fuel industry and its political tools, from Trump to Farage to Claire Coutinho.
Like any industry facing an existential threat to its profits FF companies are acting with the same sense of social responsibility as the asbestos and tobacco companies did before them in denying any association between their products and cancer – and are acting from the same playbook – funding “think tanks”, buying up lobbyists and astroturf media outlets like GB News, running bot farms to deny, deflect and delay.
As they now Donald Trump in the White House, pushing for “Global US Energy Dominance” through doubling down on fossil fuels and trying to force the rest of the world to do the same – they now have control of the world’s biggest bully pulpit to speak power to truth.
Part of this is an ideological war on reality. Defunding and closing down government departments scientific and academic bodies that research or monitor or regulate climate impacts or wider harms to the environment, banning use of climate related terms in government documents, even setting up a Federal body to edit academic papers so that they don’t challenge the Administration’s line that “climate change is a hoax”. US academics at international conferences have taken to using burner phones.
This works very directly at home, and there is straight government to government pressure to shift policy against renewable energy, but through the immense financial clout of FF billionaires they are also funding pro Fossil Fuel political formations like Reform in the UK, to which the more traditional Right is bending. As Kemi Badenoch put it to the FT in the summer, for the Conservatives now “the model is Javier Millei”.
The formula that the BBC use about this is “the political consensus on net zero has broken”. What they do not note is that the scientific consensus has NOT. What was a 97% agreement on the human causes of climate change among scientists according to surveys in 2013 has now risen to 99%. We need to be clear that what this means is that Parties like Reform and the Conservatives do not have a policy that grasps reality, which means that having an “impartial” or “balanced” debate on this issue gives undue weight and attention to bad faith fantasists.
Looking at some of the things they say.
Overall, its going to cost too much to meet NZ targets. As if doing nothing, or doing things more slowly, can be done with impunity. We are already in a situation in which the costs of failing to act earlier are starting to hit us. “Natural” disasters are becoming more intense and frequent. Recovering from them increasingly costly and debilitating. Parts of Canada, Florida and California and the rest of the world are becoming uninsurable. The UK environment agency has projected that 1 in 4 UK homes will be at risk of flooding by 2050. And, in a sign of the decline of business ethics that comes with this, a third of the victims of the recent US wildfires were subject to scams in the aftermath. We will have reached a civilisational tipping point when the costs and effort involved in recovery is too great, as we are hit by one impact after another like a flurry of blows from a boxer that will KO us. The OBR has projected that, if unaddressed, climate related risks could drive the UK’s national debt to 270% of GDP by 2070, up from less than 100% today. THAT would be eye watering.
By contrast, the OBR also projects that the cost of meeting the UK’s net zero targets over the 25 years to 2050 is £116 billion; less than £70 per person per year, or 19p per person per day. Are anyone’s eyes watering at the prospect of that. A snip at the price I’d say, and certainly worth the investment to secure a liveable planet for our grandchildren.
Specific arguments they raise…
- The UK is only 1% of emissions, so what we do doesn’t matter.
The UK is responsible for its 1%, as every other country is responsible. No one gets a free pass, or is entitled to freeload on the efforts of others. The UK’s historic emission are far higher than average or our fair share, one estimate in the Lancet was that it was 7%. That’s from a few years ago and might be on the high side as estimates go, but we do have some living down to do. Also, emissions by consumption in the UK are 2% of the global total, so we have to carry our own can.
- The UK is ahead of other countries, taking on an unfair burden and there are no prizes for coming first
This isn’t an approach they’d advocate for the Olympics, but the prize is a liveable planet; rather more important than a gold medal and worth forcing the pace on.
The UK is not in the lead. We are about seventh – which is pretty good and we should be proud of it – but this isn’t about where we are in relation to other countries, and wanting to slack off and drop back into the pack that’s just jogging along and hoping for the best, its grasping the fact that the faster we move the more we limit the damage. That’s the prize.
- What’s the point of the UK doing anything when China/India…?
There’s a point because if we weren’t doing anything, everything would be worse, irrespective of what anyone else does.
In the case of China, which has a per capita carbon footprint somewhat higher than the UK but half that of the US, its emissions are peaking and have been at a plateau for about 18 months. Coal production has peaked and their coal fired power stations are currently operating at about 50% capacity as they are redefined as back up. The projection from the IEA and others is that China’s emissions will fall much more quickly than they have in the developed countries because their deployment of renewable energy and EVs is on such a vast and rapid scale – solar farms the size of Bristol. This is having a knock on effect globally, with the export of renewable technology alone knocking 1% off global emissions last year and the impact of EVs replace FF cars significantly reducing global oil demand. India is also moving very fast towards renewables and their per capita carbon footprint is about half that of the UK. Its worth noting that 60% of developing countries are more advanced in getting their electricity from renewable sources, and electrifying their entire energy supply, than the US is.
- Your energy bills are high because of “stupid net zero”
UK energy bills are high because 1. they are set by the price of gas, which is higher than the cost of electricity generated from renewable sources. In fact Analysis by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) shows that in 2024 UK wholesale electricity prices would have been over 30 per cent higher if there had been no wind power generated in the UK 2. 25% of the bill goes in profits for the energy companies.
- Heat pumps don’t work when its cold
This will come as an enormous surprise to the 60% of people who use them in Norway.
- EVs have a higher carbon footprint than FF cars
The manufacture of EVs is more carbon intense than for FF cars, but over their lifetime, the impact of the manufacture is cancelled out after about 2 years or 15,000 miles. As batteries become more efficient and last longer, this will become ever more the case. And, in passing, all the elements of batteries, and wind turbines for that matter, can be recycled, so we are not going to be left with mountains of toxic waste (as if we don’t have that now, take a trip to Rainham).
- We can’t stop global heating, we just have to live with it
Trying to implement the Paris Agreement has cut the projected increase in global temperatures for 2100 from a catastrophic 4C to 2.8C on current policies and between 2.3 – 2.5C on current pledges. That’s still bad, but we’re moving in the right direction and need to accelerate not slack off. Every 10th of a degree makes a difference to how damaging and costly this will be.
Adaptation without mitigation would be impossible because the damage would be so severe that we couldn’t cope with it. Swiss Re has compiled a list of countries that are most likely to face ecological collapse if heating is left unabated. It starts with South Africa and Australia, which the rest of the world might be able to cope with, but number three on the list is India; one in every 5 people on the planet, with conditions deteriorating everywhere else too. Nightmare.
It ain’t (just) what you do, its the way that you do it
Some genuine problems are built into not transition itself, but the way its being done. An example is the botched insulation schemes run by successive governments which have been based on providing subsidies for householders to employ barely competent, or downright fraudulent, white van men – with the same sense of social responsibility as the FF companies – to use inappropriate materials, installed in an inappropriate way leading to 93% of them causing black mould and having to be redone. This growing wheat in flower pots, consumer led approach takes the fly by night, fragmented, micro business dominated UK construction industry as a given and will continue to cause disasters if persisted with in any warm homes programme. What we need instead is a proper level of investment in the reconstruction of Local Authority Direct Labour Organisations, with properly trained and educated unionised workers (who see insulation as part of a social mission to rescue their communities and therefore see their work as important to get right and a source of pride, not just a job) through local FE colleges, working on a street by street plan to get the maximum economies of scale, insulating the areas with the worst fuel poverty first to get the earliest and greatest reduction in costs, in fuel use and carbon emissions and all the health benefits that flow from that (including the mental health benefits of no longer being under the cosh from the meter).
Urban ramblings 