No Disaster Can Claw the Deniers Out of Their Corner

It is an instructive exercise, to imagine the climate change-related disaster that finally might make prominent deniers — that is, right-wing politicians and their very loud and rich supporters — admit that something needs to change. Instructive because it is likely impossible: when you dig yourself in this deep, carving out an ideological niche in a scientific issue, there’s no getting out. There’s no “whew well that one sure seems like a climate disaster, let’s get to work on this” when the answer to every disaster now is to just blame liberals or, when they happen in a red state, ignore their underpinnings entirely.

The fires still raging in the Los Angeles area would, in even a mildly more sane political environment, function as the long-awaited wake-up call. The fires are very obviously a climate disaster, a function of changed conditions like the “whiplash” between wet and dry, and a result of overall elevated risks that are traced to warmer temperatures, declining sea ice, and more. They have brought the country’s second-largest city to its knees, displaced thousands and killed dozens, and could push major industries over the edge. They may end up as the most expensive disaster in U.S. history. And the loudest voices on the right are still just blaming Democrats and DEI.

Through maybe the mid 2010s, my armchair psychology explanation for the refusal to face reality was based on, essentially, shame. If you more or less helped destroy a livable climate, would your brain really allow you to face up to it? As things got worse and hotter and wetter and burnier, disavowing very public denial would mean accepting some degree of blame, and for a problem this big that seemed like a sort of mental gymnastics very few would be capable of. Today, shame in the political sphere more or less doesn’t exist; instead, no one will ever change their tune because the boss won’t let them. Trump’s obscene climate change denial — even outside of his absurdist response to the fires, one of his early moves will reportedly be to ban offshore wind power development — is the party line, like everything else he says or does, and no one in the Republican Party has the spine to waiver from it.

The result, of course, is the same — motivations aside, we now have decades of evidence that deniers won’t stop denying, in a meaningful sense. This includes delayers — they may admit the change is happening, but will stop well short of wanting to do anything about it. This latest catastrophe offers an easy way out, taking place in a blue city in a blue state; but the multiple hurricanes in Florida last year, or major flooding in Texas, or any number of other red state disasters don’t move the needle either.

There is also the issue of time scales. Preventing a wildfire from doing its worst damage is an acute challenge, one that can be addressed to some degree through short-term policy; this is in some ways a tiny silver lining, as even red states will call some move or other “coastal erosion protection,” say, and manage to do some climate change adaptation that dare not speak its name. The larger question, the one they refuse to even consider, requires decades-long changes to systems that are easy enough to dismiss today and tomorrow. And it’s true: reducing fossil fuel extraction this year will not meaningfully alter the trajectory of a hurricane nine months from now.

And so the instructive exercise basically short-circuits, you can more or less work your way up to The Day After Tomorrow-level events before fundamental change seems at all possible. With each worsening year, each Helene or Milton or Palisades Fire, the trenches get deeper, and the people who dug them couldn’t reach the top to crawl out if they tried.