Friday, August 10, 2012

Naomi Wolf Slams America's "Ignorance Industry"

Activist/writer Naomi Wolf has about had it with her homeland's "stasis of stupidityblocking any meaningful action to respond to man-made climate change.

It is fairly well-known what has been behind that climate change denial in America: vast sums pumped into an ignorance industry by the oil and gas lobbies. Entire thinktanks to obfuscate manmade climate change have been funded by these interests, as have individual congressmen and women. Entirely typical, for instance, is Louisiana Representative John Fleming, whose campaigns,    according to blogger John Henry, accept about $200,000 a year from oil and gas lobbyists, and who uses his social media pages to deny global warming.

It is weird to live inside that US denial about climate change. Last year, for example, as tropical storm Irene approached New York, we duly boarded up windows, put in emergency supplies, and heard endless alarming bulletins from the mayor's office about which neighborhoods were likely to be submerged if the tides surged – without ever hearing from local officials or the media a word connecting rising sea levels with manmade global warming. All the more weird because New Yorkers weren't writing off portions of their downtown neighborhoods to overflowing seawater a century ago.

It is weird, too, to watch the leaves turn red earlier and earlier in the fall in the American northeast and have absolutely everyone say, "the weather is strange" – yet never see mainstream media reflect any interest in the connection between human industrial activity and that strangeness. And this weather map shows how widespread and extensive that extreme weather is in the US.

Wolf contends that political deadlock and media indecisiveness present an obstacle the American public cannot overcome, preventing them from engaging with the global warming reality.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I often wonder whatever happened to all that energy poured into castigating the tobacco corps for lying about smoking's hazards; the result was a huge drop-off in smoking..
How can we harness that same N. America-wide energy to combat the climate change deniers - or did they learn their lesson from Big Tobacco?

leftyinparadise.wordpress.com

The Mound of Sound said...

Interesting point. The tobacco lobby campaign to sow doubt on the link between smoking and lung cancer formed the model for the fossil fuel lobby's campaign to sow doubt on the link between carbon emissions and global warming. It's no small coincidence that, initially, many of the same 'scientists' and PR types who had formulated the campaign for RJ Reynolds formed the cadre of experts who set up the fossil fuel industry's campaign.