CLIMATE: There’s no denying this label packs a political punch
Jean Chemnick, E&E reporter
Greenwire: Friday, May 15, 2015
The word “denial” — meaning refusal or withholding — entered the English language from Old French hundreds of years ago, but it gained linguistic muscle with A.A. Brill’s translation of the Austrian father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, in the early 20th century.
Denial, or Verneinung in Freud’s German, came to mean refusing to acknowledge a painful or uncomfortable truth, despite overwhelming evidence.
In politics, there was “Holocaust denial,” “moon-landing denial” and “evolution denial” — all flowing from Freud, with its implications not only of untruth but of mental illness.
And now the word’s in the center ring of the global warming fight: “climate denial.”
“Climate change has always been a kind of a framing war,” said George Marshall, founder of the Climate Outreach Information Network in Great Britain and the author of the book “Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change.” “If you can get out there and you can get your language inserted into the discourse, it’s your ideas that dominate.”
Marshall and co-author Mark Lynas published the first reference to “climate denier” in the English-language press in a 2003 op-ed they wrote for the left-leaning magazine The New Statesman.
They wanted those words to sting.
They did — and still do. Consider that the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) threatened to sue left-leaning Common Cause and the League of Conservation Voters last month, charging that they had falsely branded ALEC as promoting “climate denial” (E&ENews PM, April 6).
Environmentalists, meanwhile, label opponents as “deniers” when they disavow not only the link between warming and human emissions but the urgency of the issue or the policies designed to address it.
An offshoot of the Obama presidential campaign, Organizing for America (OFA), ran a “Climate Change Fantasy Tournament” alongside the NCAA’s March Madness brackets, asking supporters to “vote for the worst denier in America.” Senate Environment and Public Works Chairman James Inhofe (R-Okla.) won for tossing a snowball on the Senate floor (E&E Daily, Feb. 27).
“Deniers” also figured in recent League of Conservation Voters’ pleas for funding and in Climate Action Campaign messaging about House legislation to allow states to opt out of U.S. EPA’s carbon rule for power plants. The campaign wrote recently that the bill now working its way through the lower chamber is “part of a broader effort by climate deniers to eviscerate the President’s Clean Power Plan.”
But while environmentalists say they are making inroads with a public that is increasingly aware of climate change and impatient with those who continue to dispute it, they’re a long way from what Marshall says is the endgame.
“In the end, if you win the frame war, your opponents back off and they start using your language,” he said. “And then you’ve won.
