Politicizing Climate Doomism: Part 2 - Origins

In this article I will provide historical and political context behind the psychological narratives of climate doomism

In part 1 of this series “Politicizing Climate Doomism”, I argued that the famous climate scientist Michael Mann gives a good definition of climate doomism. Using Mann’s definition, I argued that Mann engaged in climate doomism by rejecting solutions to the climate and ecological crisis (such as the Green New Deal).

At the end of the article, I talked a bit about appeals to human nature, and how they can be used selectively to put forth a narrative that goes something along these lines:

It’s human nature to distance yourself, not change your identity, to be self interested, and therefore because human nature is largely immutable, it’s not possible to do anything about climate change.

Mann points to Jonathan Franzen as an example of putting forth this narrative, and having read the article, I think Mann was correct. In this article I will look at some of the more well informed discussions from a climate psychologist on how to combat doomism.

The climate psychologist and economist Per Espen Stoknes writes in his 2015 book on climate psychology that:

Reason has won the public argument about climate, but so far lost the case. Even if there is widespread concern, most Westerners still choose to look away—despite the dire facts, or perhaps exactly because of them. Some of that apathy has its roots in deliberate denial and spin, but also to our susceptibility to it in the face of danger. (pxviii, Stoknes)

I think much of the book is well argued, though of course, it was written ten years ago. There has both been a significant increase in public understanding of climate change since then, as well as the desire for action on climate change. On the other hand, Stoknes still has a section in Thunberg’s The Climate Book (2022) that attributes climate inaction to:

When it comes to climate change, humans tend to put up mental barriers that prevent us from engaging. I summarized these as the ‘Five Ds’ of psychological defence: Distancing, Doom, Dissonance, Denial and iDentity.

I will not reject Stoknes view. I think many of the examples are a correct analysis of the symptoms. But to find the causes, you need to go beyond psychology and look at the political context.

What’s the purpose behind providing the context? Well, because the climate and ecological crisis is mainly a problem of political power, then you have to start by trying to understand power. Studying the rot allows for an antidote. If there’s no antidote, then yes, people will think climate change is inherently unsolvable. That’s one contributing cause of doom.

There are three ways that capitalists control us which I am interested in investigating: the corporate propaganda system, austerity, and social atomization.

Let's start with corporate propaganda. Being propagandized is like getting kicked in the head by someone, without being able to know how or where the kicks are coming from. In a worst case scenario, you don’t even know that you're being kicked in the head. Another name for such a scenario would be mental slavery.

Perhaps this analogy is more accurately described by Noam Chomsky, when he wrote in the early 1990s in the context of concentrated corporate power:

The general population doesn’t know what’s happening, and it doesn’t even know that it doesn’t know. One result is a kind of alienation from institutions. People feel that nothing works for them….They don’t even know what’s going on at that remote and secret level of decision making. That’s a real success in the long term task of depriving formal democratic structures of any substance.

Let’s trace back some of Stoknes discussions to provide political context for the “deliberate denial and spin” that's mentioned. The following examples are what Stoknes thinks are badly framed forms of climate communication; cost-benefit analysis, and puritan consumption messages. But they also accept some of the academic arguments about free riding and irrationality that’s been used to undermine climate action. I will provide context for these too.

But how has the climate policy been framed for the public? As massively costly. The message that has come from the calculators is that we'd lose a lot of money via higher gas prices, and that CO2 capture and storage equipment is very expensive. Putting a hefty tax on carbon would increase all kinds of costs. We'd lose economic growth. Cutting emissions would create job losses, losses for industry, loss of competitiveness, loss of wealth…. From a cognitive point of view it is damn hard to make a message of increasing the carbon tax attractive within the obstructive cost-based framing (p51-52, Stoknes).

This narrative can be traced back to the fossil fuel industries think tank, the American Petroleum Institute. But it has all sorts of propagandistic use cases from other corporate lobbies as well.

In 1991, a report was also released by the economic consulting firm Charles River Associates, commissioned by the American Petroleum Institute (API), the US petroleum industry’s primary trade association. The report’s author, David Montgomery…claimed, with scant evidence, that avoiding global warming would provide no economic benefits until the year 2100 and that even then the damage would never amount to more than 0.5% of GNP (id.)

This cost-benefit analysis approach was dominant from 1991 to 2008 in environmental economics. After the global financial crisis, the narrative slowly started to erode towards “green growth”, or “a-growth”. The cost benefit analysis is still one of the main narratives of climate denialism in the right wing media, however. Moving onto the next point:

What about the environmentalists? The typical frame—also unwitting—is that of impending catastrophe and all the sacrifices we must make to avert it. Since climate change is so huge and destructive, they've said, we must do everything we can to stop it. We consume too much, and therefore should eat less meat, fly less, have no or smaller cars, save energy at home, and reuse and recycle rather than buy new stuff. Yep, that’s right: No more tender beef for you. You lost. We all have to sacrifice our over-the-top lifestyles, get real, live decently and prudently. Eat your broccoli, get on your bike, and smile…. from a framing perspective, what comes across to the public in historically Christian countries is a sermon about sin and repentance. We must sacrifice our sinful pleasures now in order to be purged for a clean and bright but very far-off future. It’s the same framing that has been repeated for a thousand years or more in Christian cultures … without any noticeable improvements in behavior (p52, Stoknes).

Michael Mann actually explains the origins of this quite well in The New Climate Wars that is referenced in my last article. It’s a common tactic for the corporate propaganda system to push this kind of puritan narrative. One famous example he gives is the crying Indian advert, which ends with “People start pollution; people can stop it”. This advert was funded by Coca Cola and PepsiCo, and is rejuvenated in the myth of recycling, which is often more accurately described as “waste colonialism”.

In terms of blame shifting from fossil fuel industries, the best example would be British Petroleum’s personal carbon footprint calculator.

Now I want to look at two political narratives in his book that are brought up, but left aside due to the focus on the psychology of denial.

Internationally little happens, political scientists argue, because countries choose to compete and disagree rather than cooperate. If the world’s countries were acting for the common good, they would quickly agree on a global price of carbon—and stark regulations and enforcement procedures to go with it. … Well, most governments see their primary task as maximizing the wealth and welfare of their own citizens, not other countries’ citizens. And with no global price or binding treaties, there is little to be gained by setting higher carbon taxes or more ambitious regulations than other countries do (p20, Stoknes).

I have already written about the prisoner's dilemma in this article. To summarize, the prisoner's dilemma in climate change is framed as a problem of states with competing national interests. This is why the economist William Nordhaus called it the “national dilemma” (p317, Climate Casino). It’s important to realize that “national interest” is often used as a propaganda term as code word for elite interests. In the article I wrote, I pointed to the elite interests of the motor lobby in New Zealand interfering with the national interest to have public transportation, which would reduce emissions.

The use of this kind of Orwellian terminology, and cost benefit analysis has made it easier to put forth these kinds of national dilemmas and free rider narratives. These narratives now exist mostly on the right and have taken the form of what can be called “climate whataboutism”. This narrative seeks to shift blame of emissions onto the Chinese.

I was unable to find the origin of climate whataboutism and where it comes from in researching this article. But the furthest I can trace it back is to US senator James Inhofe, in 2009. He got donations from Koch industries, so that’s the likely point of origin here. This narrative is more popular in cultures that embrace right wing nationalism. But it was also pushed by David Attenborough, supposedly Britain's most trusted man. In that case the narrative is rooted in Attenborough’s old fashioned and somewhat eugenics based overpopulation ideas.

Here is another point about human psychology that is bought up, that I may discuss in my next article:

Psychologist and economist Daniel Kahneman has summarized a lot of cognitive research into describing our two minds, or our two main cognitive systems: the fast and the slow. The fast system is a kind of quick-and-dirty thinking based on rules of thumb, habit, gut reactions, and biases… stem. … With regard to the climate problem, we really have to do a lot of slow, deliberative reading, noticing, and thinking to get a sense of urgency. … Most people tend to avoid slow, complex thinking by using a simpler and fast evaluation, to use Kahneman’s metaphors. (p40, Stoknes)

While I don’t really know much about behavioral economics, I doubt almost anyone really thinks that the rational utility maximizer (homo economicus) is a reality. The fossil fuel industry itself has made selective use of this critique of neoclassical economics. According to Gordon Katic, writing for Salon:

A team of Exxon-funded scholars, including Kahneman, conducted extensive research into jury decision-making. This work purported to show that jurors were incapable of working through these sorts of cases.

The narrative here was to argue that juries are inherently irrational when they try to critique the fossil fuel industry, because:

juries should be friendly to corporate cost-benefit analyses, including costing potential legal damages from environmental disasters.

According to the article, this line of thinking has also influenced the way law is taught in universities, in a book called “punitive damages”.

In summary, Stoknes’ work which argues that certain types of narratives produce climate inaction are strengthened by the fact that they can be traced back to the fossil fuel industry. This information is useful for getting people to understand who’s kicking them in the head and where it's coming from.

The next article in this series will likely make some fairly speculative arguments surrounding Stoknes’ five Ds of psychological defence: Distancing, Doom, Dissonance, Denial and iDentity.

Endnotes

Attenborough, David. Referenced in "David Attenborough Has Betrayed the Living World He Loves." The Guardian, 7 Nov. 2018, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/07/david-attenborough-world-environment-bbc-films.

Chomsky, Noam. "The New Global Economy." The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many, Odonian Press, 1993.

Franta, Benjamin. "Weaponizing Economics: Big Oil, Economic Consultants, and Climate Policy Delay." Environmental Politics, vol. 31, no. 4, 2021, pp. 555-575.

Inhofe, James. Statement from U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, 16 Sept. 2009, www.epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2009/9/post-ec9d2e62-802a-23ad-43bf-f16606d02192.

Katic, Gordon. "The Insidious Elitist Upshot of Behavioral Economics." Jacobin, Aug. 2024, jacobin.com/2024/08/behavioral-economics-exxon-valdez-elitism.

King, Lewis C., et al. "Shades of Green Growth Scepticism among Climate Policy Researchers." Nature Sustainability, vol. 6, 2023, pp. 1316-1320.

Kulin, Joakim. "Climate Whataboutism and Rightwing Populism: How Emissions Blame-Shifting Translates Nationalist Attitudes into Climate Policy Opposition." Environmental Politics, 2024, pp. 1-21.

Mann, Michael. The New Climate Wars: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet. PublicAffairs, 2021.

Nordhaus, William. The Climate Casino: Risk, Uncertainty, and Economics for a Warming World. Yale University Press, 2013.

Painter, James, et al. "Climate Delay Discourses Present in Global Mainstream Television Coverage of the IPCC's 2021 Report." Communications Earth & Environment, vol. 4, no. 118, 2023.

Renwick, Douglas. "Guest Blog: An Explanation of the Atrocities in West Papua with a Broad Context." The Daily Blog, 18 Jan. 2016, thedailyblog.co.nz/2016/01/18/guest-blog-douglas-renwick-an-explanation-of-the-atrocities-in-west-papua-with-a-broad-context.

Stoknes, Per Espen. What We Think About When We Try Not To Think About Global Warming: Toward a New Psychology of Climate Action. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2015.

Thunberg, Greta, editor. The Climate Book. Penguin Press, 2022.

"Waste Colonialism: Countries Grapple with West's Unwanted Plastic." The Guardian, 31 Dec. 2021, www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/dec/31/waste-colonialism-countries-grapple-with-wests-unwanted-plastic.

"Why the World's Recycling System Stopped Working." The Guardian, 17 Aug. 2019, www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/aug/17/plastic-recycling-myth-what-really-happens-your-rubbish.

“Climate Change is not a Prisoners Dilemma.” Substack, April 2025, https://douglasrenwick.substack.com/p/climate-change-is-not-a-prisoners