This is part 11 of A Climate Counternarrative.
Put together, the climate narrative illustrates the adage that propaganda is as much about controlling what people think as it is about controlling what people think about.
It is fair to describe the carbon accounting framework as a textbook case of Orwellian Newspeak. It is shaping conversations in specific directions without its users noticing. So do the carbon cycle, other stock and flow like models that silence internal dynamics, and predictive models that do without reality checks. The result is an expensive train wreck.
The only thing that keeps the narrative going is the fact that debates stay inside the perimeter set by the carbon accounting framework. Detractors need to be mindful that factual information does not matter to demoralized people. The only thing that will move them is hope tied to promises. The problem-reaction-solution model hinges on this. Debunking or dismissing The Science point blank merely creates cognitive dissonance. If you are currently doing that, try empowering the believers instead. Put solutions in front of what they fear. Prompt them to act. Doing so will give them hope.
Believers will see the light eventually, because the climate narrative is self-defeating. It prompts those who take their destiny into their hands to reconnect with nature. In doing so, they learn how to turn our planet into a paradise, become one with it, and escape the clutches of servitude. Their numbers keep growing. The question is not if, but when those who want only to live life as they see fit stop being mischaracterized as alt-right, anti-science fascists or backwards tribespeople.
Climate science is not the only field whose language has been captured, at that. Conservation is another. As critic Mordecai Ogada points out, white ranchers explore and hunt game, whereas black herders encroach and poach bushmeat. The field oozes of cultish, patriarchal nonsense. To wit, replace Nature with God in conservancy discourse, and you’ll often get a decent sermon for a puritan parish. Nature doesn’t need to be protected, much less locked up or defended against invading species that could sully its purity. It needs only to be loved, nurtured, and embraced for its fertility.
The treatment reserved for those who dare go against the climate narrative deserves nothing but contempt. Jeff Gibbs must have struck a chord for calling out the profiteering of those who are funding the green movement in his Planet of the Humans documentary. Mischaracterizing his deep green take on climate change as that of a closet ecofascist was straight out of the propaganda playbook. The actual ecofascists in this story are the schemers who funded the coordinated charge against Gibbs’ work.
