In his State of the Union address this January, President Obama said, “No challenge – no challenge – poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change.” The American people, when asked to name the nation’s most important issue, don’t even mention climate change. This illustrates a common dichotomy; many influential people say that climate change is a very, very, very important issue, and they’ve been saying it for a long time, yet they haven’t created a groundswell of popular demand for major, serious action.
Various explanations are offered for this fact, typically focused on giving reasons for the bad decision-making of the public that doesn’t want to take action. Some blame the American news media, particularly Fox News. But only a small portion of Americans watch Fox News, and an even smaller portion of the world’s population. While some liberal outlets may say that they view climate change as the most important issue, the evidence suggests that they really don’t. We’re I to judge by how much attention is given in Slate or The Daily Beast in the past month, I’d have to conclude that pizza places in Indiana which don’t cater gay weddings are a bigger threat than global warming. The media as a whole plainly attention to what people want to read about. It reports on climate change some, yet not as you’d expect from the greatest threat in existence.
Another explanation is from psychology: people are programmed or hard-wired to pay the most attention to immediate threats, rather than long-term and abstract ones. But when the President and others like him declare that they’re focused on the long-term threat of climate change, such psychological theories can’t explain that. Is the President hard-wired differently?
What the ruling elite won’t theorize is that the public may be making a smart choice by not pushing climate change up the priorities list. A typical member of said public may see it like this. Disasters, catastrophes, threats of civilizational collapse and human extinction make for good stories. We can see this clearly at the movie theater. In the latest Avengers movie, arch-baddie Ultron aims to wipe out humanity. If Ultron instead sought to derail a trade agreement, the movie would be less successful.
That’s fiction. The attractiveness of disaster stories appears in alleged non-fiction too. Hal Lindsey wrote a book explaining how Bible Prophecy guaranteed the end of the world by 1988; it sold thirty million copies. More recently we’ve had the Mayan calendar doomsday that wasn’t. For the less mystically minded, there have been plenty of scientific apocalypses: the Y2K bug, peak oil, and long lists of doom-related overpopulation and pollution predictions.
So given all the doom that’s been prophesied and hadn’t happened, an average person might just conclude that when the experts come around yelling “catastrophe!” and “disaster!”, they can be safely ignored. Indeed, systems in place encourage the experts to make failed prophecies of doom.
Harold Camping predicted Armageddon on May 21, 2011. It didn’t happen, but he got lots of publicity. In the late 90’s I read scores of articles assuring me that Y2K would cause horrible things. Predicting disaster is a good way to sell books and magazines. Predicting the absence of disaster usually isn’t.
Moreover, some people have an interest in frightening us with horrible consequences. In 2013 we had the “sequester”, a cut to the federal budget that’s quite small compared to the entire budget. For months before it happened, politicians and pundits (and certain members of this board) assured us that these minor trims to federal programs would cause death, destruction, unemployment, and horrors beyond imagining. Then the sequester happened, and none of the promised consequences followed. No deaths, no rise in unemployment, no widespread devastation. But certain political groups had a strong motivation to make us believe that the sequester was bad.
So to an ordinary person it may look like this. The experts are usually wrong when they predict disaster. Media and politics push them to make lurid predictions of horrible outcomes which never occur. Why worry?
Hahahahaha, it feels so smugly satisfying to be superior.