Is Climate Denial Spreading? If So, Why?

A recent poll regarding the public’s attitude toward climate change funded by the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC) and conducted by the university's National Opinion Research Center (NORC) and the Associated Press (full results here) is getting some mention in in the more general press.

According to the poll the percentage of the public that believes climate change is a reality does not seem to have budged much--at 74 percent, within the familiar range of the past several years. What seems more significant is that the percentage who think climate change is not primarily human-caused has dropped--from 60 percent in 2018 to 49 percent in 2023. This seems mostly a matter of the growth of those who think natural/environmental factors are contributing equally as human factors to the phenomenon, which has jumped from 28 to 37 percent over the same time frame, rather than any drastic growth in the number of those who think it is mostly or entirely a natural phenomenon, which has risen comparatively slightly.

Still, if the change does not seem very extreme (one still has 86 percent at least believing that human contributions matter) it is not the direction in which those concerned for anthropogenic climate change would have hoped to see things moving--which, of course, is to see the number of those who recognize the reality of climate change as an essentially anthropogenic phenomenon growing, widening the support for action on the problem. Indeed, from the perspective of those concerned with the issue, and the extremely successful resistance of opposition to any meaningful action on it, any erosion is troubling. The shift from believing climate change is primarily human-caused to believing it is equally of natural causes is especially so because of what it may portend--a transition from the view of climate change as human-caused toward the view that human activity has nothing much to do with it at all.

Thus far I have not seen much interest taken by commentators in why this change may have occurred, important as that is to understanding their implications. However, I can think of at least three factors being of some significance here:

1. Less Mainstream Press Attention.
I have had the impression--unscientific, but all the same, strong and consistent--that amid pandemic, inflation and war climate change has got less press than before in the mainstream media, leaving people somewhat less conscious of the issue than before, and of the scientific consensus that climate change is an anthropogenic phenomenon. At the same time I have noticed no evidence that those pushing the opposite view have slackened in their efforts to persuade the public that climate change is nonexistent, or at least not caused by human activity. The result may be that there is less contestation of the climate denialist view than before, and that this is having its effect on public opinion. It is easier to picture this being the case because

2. The Country's Politics Are Shifting.
It is a commonplace these days that the country is becoming more "polarized" between right and left. I am not so sure this is a really useful way to think about the situation--in part because if there is indeed a left turn on the part of any significant portion of the population (a claim open to question given the ambivalence of the evidence) it is far from making itself felt in the country’s political life as an actual force. By contrast those who have moved further right have done exactly that. (Consider, for instance, how much better Donald Trump fared in his presidential primary than Bernie Sanders, or the weight the Freedom Caucus has within the Republican Party, as against that of the Democratic Socialists of America on the Democratic Party.) Attitudes toward the environment have been no exception here--and it is easy enough to picture those who have shifted rightwards as less willing to acknowledge anthropogenic climate change than before.

3. What "Human-Caused" Climate Change Means May Be Less Clear Than You Think.
It is a truism that polling reflects not just popular feeling on an issue, but the way in which it was asked about it--which can be tailored to elicit the answer the poller desires, or, should the poller be insensitive to the nuances of their own words, produce a misleading result they did not desire. Where this is concerned consider what it means for humans to be causing climate change. Specifically consider how many of those shaping the discourse on the subject have gone to great lengths to make people think of the human impact on the climate as a matter of individual "lifestyle" choices by everyday people--their diet, their choice of appliances, etc.--rather than collective behavior as manifest in large organizations ultimately directed by a powerful few--for instance, the investments of energy and utility companies, or the decisions of major governments. (Indeed, the EPIC poll itself is saturated with such thinking, particularly noticeable in its barraging the surveyed with questions about their personal consumption habits.)

Dumping the responsibility for the climate crisis on hard-pressed individuals who make their consumption choices from a range of options very limited by their means--(which many have long called out as unwise and unjust, an extreme inversion of Uncle Ben's teaching, putting on those who have none of the power all of the responsibility) plausibly elicits a refusal of that responsibility from many. No, they say, I am not the cause of a crisis, which inclines them that much more the view that there is no crisis of humanity's making generally, or even any crisis at all. Which, of course, is exactly the intended result of this "individualization" of the problem in the view of those critical of "climate inactivists" (who note, for example, that the individualistic vision of personal carbon footprint management came not from Greenpeace but BP).

If one accepts this reading of the situation at all then there seem to be three obvious "takeaways," none new to anyone who has been paying much attention, but worth repeating because they simply do not seem to sink in with a great many persons who really need to understand them:

1. The mainstream media so often held up as "our saviors" in a world of "fake news" and other such threats has often been anything but. (After all, it is the mainstream media that consecrated climate denialism as an intellectually respectable position in the first place--and left deeply flawed understandings of the possibility for response as the sole alternative--because of the political biases shaping its framing of the issues.)

2. The environment cannot be treated as conveniently disconnected from other issues the way some prefer to think. Quite the contrary, as people who pride themselves on alertness to the functioning of ecosystems should be aware, everything is connected, and how they think about other things will affect how they think about this thing.

3. Where those connections are concerned one especially cannot ignore the issue of wealth, power and justice when addressing problems like climate change, and the environment generally, a lesson too many environmentalists have forgotten too many times in the past.