
The Money Behind The Climate Denial Movement (2013) - pseudolus
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/meet-the-money-behind-the-climate-denial-movement-180948204/
======
rayiner
The underlying study is misleading, and the article’s characterization of the
findings is outright deceptive. The article claims that “nearly a billion
dollars a year is flowing into the organized climate change counter-movement.”
That billion dollars is the _total funding_ flowing into a variety of
conservative and pro-market organizations, which advocate on a wide variety of
issues.

The underlying study and the article also lump all of these organizations into
a “climate change denial” movement. That’s totally false. The official
position of organizations like Heritage Foundation is not to deny that climate
change is happening. Their position is, basically, the potential risks of
climate change are overstated and extreme solutions are not worth the cost.
That is not a climate denialism position, it’s a costs-and-benefits analysis.
The IPCC’s own estimates of the business as usual scenario show modest
economic impacts even under a business as usual scenario out to 2100. (Large
in absolute terms but relatively small in terms of the total world GDP.)

~~~
ianai
There’s the distinct possibility of 8c change by 2100 under business as usual.
8c means palm trees at the arctic and no clouds ever forming. If you think
that’s a tenable position for life then you’re fully on the denier side.

~~~
rayiner
That’s not a business as usual scenario: [https://www.carbonbrief.org/extreme-
co2-levels-could-trigger...](https://www.carbonbrief.org/extreme-co2-levels-
could-trigger-clouds-tipping-point-and-8c-of-global-warming)

> The Representative Concentration Pathways 8.5 scenario (RCP8.5), a very high
> emissions scenario examined by climate scientists, has the Earth’s
> atmosphere reaching around 1,100ppm by the year 2100. But this would require
> the world to massively expand coal use and eschew any climate mitigation
> over the rest of this century.

Also, it’s clearly a “tenable position for life” because temperatures were
that high as recently as 55 million years ago, and mammals survived:
[http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150914-when-global-
warming-...](http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150914-when-global-warming-made-
our-world-super-hot)

~~~
staktrace
"Tenable for life" is not the same as "tenable for human life"

~~~
refurb
Of all life, humans are probably the most adaptable.

~~~
yread
Why do people keep saying this? We're around only for a couple million years
if you count australopithecus. And during that time there were possibly
several periods with less than 100k individuals. Going from 7B to 100k would
be pretty close to extinction. 0.00143%

The question is can we keep industrial scale food production going? Can we get
people enough clean water?

~~~
refurb
People say that because of technology.

Name another species that can create its own energy, create new materials and
cure diseases.

~~~
polotics
We create our own energy? How? Ever heard of Thermodynamics?

~~~
ianai
This is where we’re feeling the real harm of fossil fuels, I think. We quickly
moved from traditional energy levels to astronomically more energy just by
burning oil and coal. We can lug around freight with relatively small amounts
of fuel. We could do even more astronomical feats with nuclear fission, but
introduced the technology to ourselves by blowing up two of our cities. So
it’s associated with mass death meanwhile the death associated with pollution
and fossil fuels are less visible.

------
motohagiography
Outside climatologists, geophysicists, biologists and other people with
scientific training, I am not sure most people are really equipped to argue
against evidence of human impact on the climate, or that human activity is a
non-factor in change. However, I do think that the policies countries and even
municipalities institute in response to the evidence are fair game. Wild lands
conservation, green belts on cities, reducing suburban blight and car
dependency, not importing garbage, and using tariffs to reduce dependency on
globalized supply chains are viable policy options, but ones that are
unpopular with many of the very people who use climate change as a motte for
global equity, justice, and economic central planning.

The people I know who dismiss climate activism and its acknowledgement don't
disagree with the science. They resent people who use climate change as a
proxy for another agenda that is unrelated and inconsistent with the needs of
reducing human impact on the planet (beyond reducing birth rates in wealthy
countries). These activists, whose insistence that everything is connected and
systemic, are not interested in solving problems, rather they use this
conflation of all things to muddy the waters and place themselves at the
centre of it, conveniently gate keeping what policy options are acceptable to
talk about.

Climate changes, it's a fact, and humans are impacting it, that is not
seriously controversial. What is controversial is freighting the solutions
with a destructive, class war agenda designed to leverage a crisis, spread
poverty, and centralize governance.

~~~
Angostura
> They resent people who use climate change as a proxy for another agenda

In my experience, it's more a question that whenever action is proposed, they
simply claim as an axiom that it those proposing action _actually_ have
another agenda.

"You want to introduce tax on carbon emissions? You clearly want big
government to control our lives and destroy American industry".

This kind of paranoid thinking is problematic in introducing effective
measures.

~~~
motohagiography
There is probably more middle ground. Many people read problematic, and just
hear counter-revolutionary.

If we agree on reducing carbon emissions, and using policy tools to do it,
there are a lot of solutions that don't require trusting that a carbon tax
will be used for anything but general revenue.

Without limits on what the money is used for, it's the same as a progressive
VAT/consumption tax, which isn't a necessarily terrible idea if it replaced
the current VATs, income and other burdens, but when it's just another largess
fund for connected believers, it's a nonconstructive shibboleth for an
identity politics agenda.

Someone wrote here the other day on Scissor ideas that some differences of
opinion can only be reconciled through power, and it's a seductive idea, but
we all know what the alternative to discourse looks like, so I think it's more
valuable to support ideas that contribute to preserving it as the means for
reconciliation.

~~~
Angostura
> there are a lot of solutions that don't require trusting that a carbon tax
> will be used for anything but general revenue.

There are indeed. Carbon fee and dividend is perhaps the most popular proposal
in the world. Under this system the revenue is immediately returned to the
general populace, equally on a per-person basis.

Why are you assuming any other kind?

~~~
motohagiography
We would be getting into the weeds of it, but it's just redistributive, with
all the moral hazard associated with that, and without applying it to direct
investment in a carbon sink technology that mitigates the problem.

There are values that just don't scale well without trade offs against things
like human dignity (loaded, but important), and applying the sentiments behind
equity to vastly heterogeneous global interests is one of them.

While I (and my more reactionary and working class friends) understand that
carbon taxes presumably compensate The People for the consequences of what was
formerly an environmental externality - the use of climate as just a pretext
for redistribution signals what gets perceived as an underlying dishonesty and
illegitimate elitism that makes it difficult to legitimize the rationale, or
outcomes.

For example, basic income funded by indirect taxation is an interesting
solution to a specific set of problems around technology and globalization,
but it requires a level of trust that has been damaged by freighting climate
with these other agendas. Still doable, but to honestly discuss the options
requires frank talk about limits and boundaries to its application.

I've got opinions like anyone and I'm not always entirely above point scoring
either, so it's going to take real work for people to do it.

Having read things like Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind, and watching
Scott Alexander's influence, the question of what the fundamental
irreconcilable difference of interest may be is the most pressing question.
How do we reconcile interests and coexist with people whose most basic beliefs
we experience as alien? Some would just say, "win," even independent of
political persuasion, but I'd argue there is immensely valuable work to be
done to find ways to do better.

So short version, returning carbon tax money to the general populace means
general revenue, for general spending, which is not something conservatives
tend to trust.

~~~
Angostura
I think this is a very good example of what I was talking about.

Bring up the idea of taxing carbon - making manufacturing actually pay for the
disposal cost of the CO2 they generate and suddenly people pop up talking
about: "There are values that just don't scale well without trade offs against
things like human dignity".

There's talk of "the use of climate as just a pretext for redistribution
signals" and away we go.

This stuff has nothing to do with "is it a good idea to apply market pricing
when it comes to dumping waste into the atmosphere?

"it requires a level of trust that has been damaged by freighting climate with
these other agendas"

You know who has been doing the freighting? The industries who will do
absolutely anything to avoid a rational debate about how we apply a cost to
their polluting ways.

> How do we reconcile interests and coexist with people whose most basic
> beliefs we experience as alien?

Who are these people who basically don't believe the scientific evidence that
we are destroying the ecology we rely on?

> which is not something conservatives tend to trust.

Fine - I await with interest conservatives actual proposals for reducing CO2
emissions. But I can't afford to wait too long.

------
aazaa
> And yet, for some reason, the idea persists in some peoples' minds that
> climate change is up for debate, or that climate change is no big deal.

Hold it right there.

Anthropogenic climate change (not just that the earth is warming, but that we
are responsible) is a _scientific hypothesis_. Like all hypotheses, it cannot
be proven true, only disproven by contradictory evidence.

Doubt is a critical element in testing any hypothesis. Success by doubters in
poking experimental holes in hypotheses is how science moves forward.

When a hole is poked into a widely-held hypotheses, that's the stuff of
scientific revolutions. Also, groupthink is a real thing and has exerted a
powerful hold over scientists of every generation. For these reasons, widely-
held hypotheses should be viewed with some skepticism anyway.

Every scientific hypothesis is "up for debate," and the day that isn't true is
the day science dies, replaced by yet another form of tyrannical religion.

It's disturbing to see this kind of talk coming from Smithsonian.

~~~
comicjk
> Like all hypotheses, it cannot be proven true, only disproven by
> contradictory evidence.

This is true, but not helpful, because it's a framework that treats all
probabilities except 0 and 1 as equivalently vague. Anthropogenic climate
change > 1℃ is extremely likely, 99%+ probability. It could be wrong, but it's
not useful skepticism to just say "it could be wrong" about everything. The
IPCC is putting out good probabilistic forecasts. Scientists are doing the
work of testing the hypothesis. As new evidence comes out, we should respond
to it. In the present, we have to act using the probabilities we have.

~~~
akvadrako
99% probability is nothing - that's just 3 sigma. In real sciences you usually
don't say something is highly likely until 5 sigma, which is 99.99994%.

~~~
comicjk
"99% probability is nothing" is innumeracy. A demand for five sigma before
taking action - treating probabilities between 0 and 99.9999% as equivalent -
is defensible in a high-energy physics experiment, where adding another sigma
just means collecting data for another month. But in most of life, demanding
that level of certainty is a guarantee of mistakes: getting the extra
certainty takes time, and inaction during that time is itself a decision that
can be wrong.

I don't know if you consider chemistry a real science, but my employer makes
decisions based on probabilities less certain than 99% every day! We accept
that sometimes we will be wrong, and plan so we can tolerate that too. This is
how you use science in the real world.

------
dilap
I've gone from just sort of blankly accepting that, of course, global warming
is true + catastrophic, to now wondering if it's over-hyped or uncertain. The
kinds of arguments around it make it seem more like a moral or even religious
hysteria than a well-supported belief. Science should invite skepticism and
questioning, not try to shut it down w/ shouts of someone being a "denier".

A little bit of warming seems certain; the catastrophic scenarios, not so
certain.

[https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2017/06/epistemic-caution-
and-...](https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2017/06/epistemic-caution-and-climate-
change.html)

Reducing fossil fuel use is still the prudent thing to do, of course.

~~~
Brakenshire
You need to distinguish between the scientific base, and activism through a
particular political lens. The latter can be hysterical, that doesn’t have any
relevance to the former.

~~~
GarrisonPrime
Of course it has relevance to the former. Today’s science is highly
politicized, and driven by ideology rather than objective observation. What
else can be expected in a government-grant-driven system.

~~~
Oletros
> Today’s science is highly politicized, and driven by ideology rather than
> objective observation.

Are you accusing all cliamte scientists of fraud?

------
INGELRII
There is a great book: "Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists
Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming"

Two things to learn from the book:

1) The are same people and organizations behind many science related denials:
DDT, tobacco, SDI defenders, acid rain, ozone hole, and climate change denial
are linked to same group of people. They try to "maintain the controversy" and
"keep the debate alive".

2) The usual suspects don't do this just for the money. Sure, they take money
from business sponsors, but the merchants of doubt themselves are not purely
cynical operatives and money grabbers. There is type of Manichaean paranoia
and ideology behind it. It's related to cold war mentality and free market
fundamentalism.

George C. Marshall Institute (GMI) was one of the centers of this ideology
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_C._Marshall_Institute](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_C._Marshall_Institute)

~~~
GarrisonPrime
While I don’t doubt your assertion that a select few are responsible for the
bulk of the push-back on such issues, I think it’s good to have some
resistance. Humans are so prone to wishful thinking and following consensus,
it can be healthy to keep the debate alive longer than one might think
necessary. It helps one clarify your position to yourself, for one.

~~~
makomk
Some resistance is definitely necessary if you care about whether the claims
being made are true, yes. For example, take this article about the oceans
supposedly soaking up much more heat than previously thought, which made it to
HN a year or so ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18352506](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18352506)
The comments are full of people confidently taking it as yet more inevitable
evidence that we're even more doomed than previously thought, we need to
overthrow the entire system of global industry, etc.

The article was retracted, followed by the underlying study. One of those
pesky members of the climate denial movement spotted that they'd messed up
their calculations, and the authors basically copped to this. This shouldn't
have been necessary. They were using a bizarre, indirect method to try and
estimate something we'd already measured directly, and got an answer that
contradicted that existing measurement. The first assumption should've been
that their method was wrong and it should've taken a hell of a lot of evidence
to overcome it, but there's such a strong bias towards claims of climate doom
that it got a spot in Nature and uncritical regurgitation in the global press
instead. (Part of the problem is that Nature has a general bias towards
shocking, novel claims that leads to them publishing dubious work, but it's
hard to imagine them being so gung-ho about work leaning in the opposite
direction.)

Naturally, most people who read the existing coverage will never see the
retractions and will continue to be influenced by the now-retracted claim.

~~~
dredmorbius
The distinction you'll find leads your 2nd paragraph: _the study was
retracted_.

The climate denial movement never budges a nanometer on any of its points. The
scientific movement admits its mistakes and errors.

And yes, there's dispute in small details of the matter. The grander narrative
has been clear since the 19th century. No, not a typo. Not since the 20th, but
the 19th.

~~~
makomk
I'm pretty sure they have budged on some of their points, and that folks have
taken this as proof they admit they're entirely wrong, but putting that aside
for a moment...

Suppose for a moment that the scientists hadn't budged. That they'd listened
to all the folks who say that climate change deniers are simply liars who
aren't worth listening to and not even bothered to look at their complaints.
Who would you believe - the Nature-published scientists or the evil climate
denial movement? Because unless you'd be willing to believe the deniers over
the mainstream scientific community, it seems like we're in unfalsifiable
territory here, where if the mainstream scientists admit they're wrong it
proves they're right, and if they don't it also proves they're right.

~~~
dredmorbius
"Let's suppose what didn't happen and assume it did...."

Science, as a process, is a process at arriving at truths. It's fundamentally
_dialectic_ , as opposed to _rhetorical_ , the profession practiced by many
around the denial movement, several in this thread.

Naomi Oreskes' name has already been mentioned here. In addition to writing on
climate (and ozone/CFCs, tobacco, lead, asbestos, etc., etc., etc.) denial,
she's written on the history of one of the more amazing feats of collective
mind-changing in science: the adoption of the theory of plate tectonics, or
continental drift, as it was first called.

When proposed, the theory was ridiculed as completely crackpot. But what
happened was that more and more evidence, _and_ mechanisms, turned up. And,
yes, over the course of about a half century, many of the original objectors
died. But from roughly 1915 to 1965, established views changed from believing
that the continents had always occupied their current positions to the
understanding that they very much _had not_.

Geography, geology, fossils, radioactive decay (as both heat source and
clock), undersea surveys, earthquake faults, seismic analysis. _The
preponderance of evidence changed minds._

[https://www.worldcat.org/title/plate-tectonics-an-
insiders-h...](https://www.worldcat.org/title/plate-tectonics-an-insiders-
history-of-the-modern-theory-of-the-earth/oclc/1114571537)

[https://www.worldcat.org/title/rejection-of-continental-
drif...](https://www.worldcat.org/title/rejection-of-continental-drift-theory-
and-method-in-american-earth-science/oclc/38989594)

------
neffy
Back in the day (1998), when it was very much not a thing, I remember 4
supposedly different, very professional (for the time) climate denial sites
popping up on a search, all of which if you looked at the raw html code, were
obviously from the same web page company.

And I was enlightened.

------
mrfusion
Disclaimer. I’m a believer. But at this point isn’t there money behind both
sides? I can’t imagine there wouldn’t be.

~~~
Dumblydorr
The problem is the GOP is bought by fossil fuel, even though solar and wind
and nuclear can lobby, they can not compete with record setting fossil profits
in 2019 dollar amounts, thus the GOP will continue to get on their knees
before this industry. We need to technologically destroy the profits that
drive denialism. We need to make EVs, renewables, nuclear, etc. so much better
that fossil can't compete... seems unlikely but tech may be the way.

~~~
Consultant32452
It's funny how perspectives can be so different. I feel like the GOP has been
politely waiting for the DNC to come to terms with the fact that nuclear is
really the only path forward to provide clean stable grid power.

~~~
wk_end
Can you point to any source that indicates that the GOP, broadly, is pro-
nuclear and anti-CO2 like your comment suggests? I'm skeptical but genuinely
open to the possibility of being corrected.

~~~
Consultant32452
[https://news.gallup.com/poll/248048/years-three-mile-
island-...](https://news.gallup.com/poll/248048/years-three-mile-island-
americans-split-nuclear-power.aspx)

>Republicans (65%) are more likely than Democrats (42%) to favor the use of
nuclear power. Republicans typically have been more supportive of nuclear
energy throughout Gallup's trend dating back to 1994.

It's true Republicans aren't as hung up specifically on CO2, but Republicans
have been largely in support of nuclear since before you ever heard the phrase
"climate change." If we had listened to Republicans back when it was just
"clean air" we'd be in a much better position.

~~~
Ididntdothis
I don't recall the GOP advocating for nuclear power. They are less opposed to
it but I have never heard that they actively pursued it.

~~~
DFHippie
The GOP is interested in nuclear power because they know that since the 60s
the Left has been _against_ nuclear power. They bring it up as a way to gore
the Left's ox, not as something they're actively pursuing to fight climate
change. The policy they pursue is trolling and antagonizing their domestic
enemies. Any effect of this on climate policy is incidental.

------
carapace
I'm given to understand that climate denialism is more-or-less confined to the
USA, can anyone shed some light on that?

~~~
spenrose
It's confined to the USA and Australia, where the combination of powerful
Murdoch media and rural fossil fuel billionaires reign over the conservative
parties. (Canada and UK get some spillover.) See above links to "Dark Money"
and "Merchants of Doubt" for US. For Australia:

[https://reneweconomy.com.au/australia-get-stupid-clean-
energ...](https://reneweconomy.com.au/australia-get-stupid-clean-
energy-99268/)

~~~
Avalaxy
> It's confined to the USA and Australia

No it's not. It's very much a thing in Europe too.

------
drallison
STOP! This is a 2013 paper. It is 2019.

Climate change is supported by evidence and we humans are the cause. The
situation is worse than we ever imagined. It is an existential crisis, which
must be mitigated. If we don't do something major and do it soon, extinction
of much of life on earth will be the result. In fact, we may already be too
late to be able to take actions to avert collapse.

Climate deniers are irresponsible, distracting, and amoral. They don't seem to
understand how science is done and how scientific knowledge is created. They
are well funded, apparently by the same cabal of folks that protected tobacco
companies and blessed clean coal.

It is true that Global Climate and its various drivers is not well understood,
yet we persist in under-funding research. We have too little data, too few
people working on the problem, and no organization with global reach and
global authority coordinating things, setting rules, and running things.
Decisions about mitigation need to be based on rational analysis and not on
political, economic, or social grounds. Some decisions and actions will
necessarily be unpopular.

I too like what Eric Weinstein said about climate change:

">The fact that we do not have much historical data and good verifiable models
to understand how the planet climate behaves under large changes in parameters
(CO2 emission, etc.) makes it even more important and urgent to act. We never
know at what moment the system will cross the threshold, and damage becomes
irreversible, and planet destruction accelerates."

We are already in regimes which are outside historical experience and data,
that is, in uncharted territory.

Personally, I think it may all be over and that everything will collapse
sometime between 2030 and 2050 while everyone is sitting around denying that
there is any problem.

------
fallingfrog
Right now very close to my house there is a gas and oil storage facility and a
pipeline connected to it. The city, under pressure from activist groups, has
declared a climate emergency. And yet, nobody has connected the dots on the
fact that if we get off fossil fuels in a timely manner, that facility is
going to _close_. Nobody is planning for it or expecting it. The company is
not facing higher insurance rates and investors are not worried. Nobody has
requested or made any plans for how the facility could be closed. And I see
the same pattern worldwide: nobody is actually making the kinds of plans they
would be making if they thought that some of the oil and gas was going to be
made unavailable permanently. You would see that signal in the stock price of
Exxon Mobil and the price of oil.

This tells me one thing: the current plan is that we are going to extract and
burn _every last drop_ of fossil fuels everywhere in the world. That is,
whatever anybody says, the current plan.

~~~
DFHippie
"Plan" suggests people got together and arranged it. It is the generally
acknowledged _most likely outcome_ given our demonstrated inability to
overcome the people attempting thwart collective action. Maybe this seems like
a slim distinction, but I think it's important to say that not everyone
recognizing the likelihood of this outcome is actively planning it.

~~~
fallingfrog
Not everyone, just almost everyone with power.

------
FabHK
Mods: (2013), please :-)

------
StreamBright
I find Richard Lindzen's work & view very interesting on the subject. He adds
more color to this.

"He has published more than 200 scientific papers and books. From 1983[1]
until his retirement in 2013, he was Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[2] He was a lead author of
Chapter 7, "Physical Climate Processes and Feedbacks," of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Third Assessment Report on climate
change. He has criticized the scientific consensus about climate change[3] and
what he has called "climate alarmism."[4]"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lindzen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lindzen)

------
bjornsing
> Clarifying the institutional dynamics of the CCCM can aid our understanding
> of how anthropogenic climate change has been turned into a controversy
> rather than a scientific fact in the U.S.

I know how unpopular this comment will be in some circles, but I feel I have
to say it anyway: Anthropogenic climate change is not a “scientific fact”. It
is a theory, and (to the best of my knowledge) an untestable one at that.

I believe in anthropogenic climate change, but I don’t think it’s a good idea
to abandon the scientific method and intellectual honesty in some desperate
attempt to convince others of this. I fear a world without truth and science
more than I fear one a few degrees warmer.

~~~
FabHK
Sure, just like quantum mechanics and evolution are "just theories". In other
words: our current best understanding of the world, provisional (subject to
further revision or even deeper, more fundamental understanding), but
extremely well established and most definitely the most rational position to
hold.

~~~
bjornsing
Yes. I wouldn’t want to call quantum mechanics or evolution more than a theory
either. QM has the advantage that it makes a lot of very precise predictions
that can be tested. Evolution has the (weaker) advantage that pure chance is
not an alternative explanation for the data.

Anthropogenic climate change unfortunately lacks those two advantages.

------
anovikov
Why not take a simplified, but beneficial view of climate change which will
work well for both conservatives and liberals alike?

"It is likely that we are experiencing some global warming which is likely to
get worse in the future, and it is likely to be man-made by emitting some
greenhouse gases, mainly CO2 and methane, into the atmosphere, and if so we
should curb these emissions to avoid some bad long term consequences, but even
if that is a mistake, it is a good idea to scare people with because curbing
these emissions also makes life of those damn Commies, that pesky Middle East,
and many other s __thole countries that hate us, worse, and limit their
resources which they use to harm us, so good idea to do even the theory behind
it proves wrong. Those liberals aren 't going to go for that to fight Commies,
but they will if you scare them with some made up stuff like dying corals or
flooding islands, well enough".

------
nec4b
Climate change has unfortunately become a banner under which many extremist
groups like eco-fascist, socialists, various SWJs and other kind of
authoritarians rally. And they changed climate change into climate hysteria to
promote their specific ideologies.

------
pjkundert
"Denialism".

That's the end of the conversation then, I guess. To bad.

------
hogFeast
Billionaires fund "Climate Denial"...oh, evil billionaires using their secret
dark money trusts.

Billionaires fund Extinction Rebellion...oh, virtuous enlightened
billionaires, so smart, so moral.

~~~
DFHippie
Yes, some billionaires do good things and some do bad things. And some do a
mixture of the two. It's hard to wrap your head around, but there it is.

------
o_p
Lets talk about the money behind climate change too, I bet theres a lot of
"clean" energy patents lying around that with some new regulations and taxes,
would worth billons.

------
tomohawk
Not the complete story.

[https://freebeacon.com/issues/climate-change-reporting-
websi...](https://freebeacon.com/issues/climate-change-reporting-website-
obscures-its-funding-with-dark-money-network/)

------
whydoyoucare
To me science is never settled, and anyone who claims climate crisis is pretty
much definite has an incentive that has other hidden angles than we are led to
believe. This is not a denial position, but is largely characterised so.
Nothing in science is black-and-white, there are infinite shades of gray in
between.

Having said that, Freeman Dyson also seems to share this opinion, and I think
it carries some weight:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiKfWdXXfIs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiKfWdXXfIs).
Another article also says the same: [https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-
planet/2019/09/a-clim...](https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-
planet/2019/09/a-climate-modeller-spills-the-beans/)

The later link also highlights an important aspect from IPCC's report: "In
climate research and modelling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a
coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction
of future climate states is not possible. (Chapter 14, Section 14.2.2.2.)]"

Whatever I know about modeling and Lorenz's theories, I do think long-term
climate predication is impossible given our current models. Is that denial?
Certainly not, and I am open to change my mind as models become more accurate
and more data is avaiable.

Till then I would not want my wallet to be lighter in the name of carbon
taxes, please.

~~~
james-mcelwain
Unfortunately, making policy isn't a matter of epistemology. If we prevented
ourselves from making any kind of decisions due to uncertainty about our
empirical claims, we would be stuck in a kind of ethical paralysis that would
prevent any kind of coordinated policy.

To argue that inherent complexity means we should remain in a state of
inaction is in itself a form of denialism. The fact that it is difficult to
make predictions about chaotic systems does not mean that the null hypothesis
is automatically true.

~~~
whydoyoucare
I don't know any example where a legislation (especially which levied tax) was
rolled back because the argument no longer held true. And hence my skepticism
of "carbon taxes".

Additionally, I do not see anyone arguing a moderate position on legislation,
which logically follows, considering the data may be wrong. Action based on
potentially incorrect data is as big a problem as much as the null hypothesis
you define. I am hard pressed to see a legislation that talks about reducing
materialistic consumption, or living frugal, but we are very interested in
increasing taxes. No?

