Are you REALLY concerned about the coming climate "catastrophe"?

Then get off your fat, "brat" duff, turn up the thermostat, delete your Snapchat app, and go find a good shrink who will help you realize you're repressing your love for Elon Musk and Exxon Mobil

With every major storm that causes serious damage, or every spell of hotter than normal temperatures, the mainstream press dutifully and routinely, sometimes even ominously, reminds us that the human race is experiencing the catastrophic effects of climate change.

And?

Well, that’s the problem.

As our civilization pumps more and more Co2 into the atmosphere and mean planetary temperatures slowly rise, one very vocal segment of the population demands immediate and decisive action, while an equally vocal faction chides the other one for “alarmism”. 

The rest apparently say “meh”.

According to the Pew Research Foundation, a sizable majority of Americans are adamant about combating climate change.  But Pew in a separate poll - ironically - found that doing so is only eighteenth in a list of priorities when they actually go to vote – one notch down from “strengthening the military”.

There are many possible reasons for this discrepancy. 

One major factor may be that the public may be tired of the constant doom-casting of those who tell us we only have six months, or six years, or whatever Greta screeches about until Antarctica melts away like a giant ice cube in a glass of hot spiced Glühwein. 

In other words, just don’t overhype the danger, say research psychologists Wände Bruine de Bruin and Gale Sinatra.  They write:

You probably have been hearing phrases like “climate crisis,” “climate emergency” or “climate justice” more often lately as people try to get across the urgent risks and consequences of climate change. The danger is real, but is using this language actually persuasive?

No, they argue. Let’s just call it “climate change”.  It’s far less anxiety-producing.  And then we might be more willing to do something about it, like turn the air conditioner down to only 72 rather than 70 when it’s 112 outside.

De Bruin and Sinatra also note that people get their panties wound up tight if we use scary phrases like “climate justice”, which maybe sounds too much like the gods sending down a hailstorm to dent up the hood of our brand-new gas-guzzling SUV when we could have opted to buy an EV.

And if you use such an irenic figure of speech, grandpa who calls all environmentalists “communists” won’t know what you’re talking about anyway.

The live-green-or-die rhetoric, according to an article in the Independent Women’s Forum, is producing climate-Armageddon fatigue even among teenagers and twenty-somethings, the demographic that is supposed to be waking up every night in cold sweats in the aftermath of Al Gore-themed nightmares about Manhattan plunging into the ocean a la Atlantis.

“Only 50 percent of respondents ages 18 to 34,” the article notes, “said climate change is a serious problem–down from 67 percent in 2021”.

It would be nice to blame the insidious influence of Russian bots, Tik Tok, Taylor Swift, and too many young minds marinated with Minecraft for the growing mental lethargy when it comes to the real possibility that Las Vegas might soon become uninhabitable.

But in an age where even Ivy Leaguers feel disoriented without a decent conspiracy theory to explain all that ails them, it’s better to go with tried-and-true master villains like…the fossil fuel industry. 

Cue The Guardian which has never overlooked a leftwing conspiracy theory it didn’t like.  Recently the überprogressive UK newspaper devoted an entire article citing a United Nations official who blamed growing public indifference toward climate matters on a “massive disinformation campaign” by the oil and gas companies. 

According to The Guardian,

Selwin Hart, the assistant secretary general of the UN, said that talk of a global “backlash” against climate action was being stoked by the fossil fuel industry, in an effort to persuade world leaders to delay emissions-cutting policies. The perception among many political observers of a rejection of climate policies was a result of this campaign, rather than reflecting the reality of what people think, he added.

Now cue the president of Exxon Mobil with face paint resembling the Joker, who strikes a pose on CNN cackling and rubbing his hands with glee over all the poor unenlightened souls who have been brainwashed into full greenwashed zombieness from all the TV, Facebook, and Snapchat ads with Kim Kardashian repeating sonorously the mantra “climate change is not real, climate change is not real”.

Or maybe the reason we don’t snap to attention and salute to all those vilified climate “alarmists” is because, well, we allow climate skeptics to have a forum at all. 

Writing once more in The Conversation an entirely different gaggle of “psychologists” with the names Jiang, Newman, Reynolds, and Schwarz - no, it’s not a law firm - warn us that their “new research has produced worrying findings”, namely, that the kind of “climate misinformation” all the perverted petro partisans are uploading into our brains through the slyest of subterfuges “may be more effective than we’d like to think because of a phenomenon called the illusory truth effect”.

And what exactly is that “phenomenon”?  Well, it’s the supposition that “we are more likely to believe a lie if we encounter it repeatedly”.  Hitler’s propaganda minister made that point almost a century ago, thank you. 

But, it’s not only Goebbels’ “big lie” but even the occasional little white lie that can send us collectively into a disastrous death spiral of oil-industry-induced zombification. 

“Worse,” the authors us, “the [illusory truth] effect works immediately – a lie seems to be more true even after just one repetition.”

That’s exactly why whenever my 6-year-old grandchild is caught for the second time in a row with chocolate on side of their mouth, even though they vigorously reject my paranoid proposition that they had shamelessly raided the jar full of Reeses’ Peanut Butter Cups, I automatically and uncritically accept their denial. 

The psychologists certainly know what they’re talking about, and they have data to prove it.

Not only should we close our eyes and put our hands over our ears while yelling “la la la la la” whenever Uncle Ollie in his car mechanic’s overalls snorts that climate change is “no big deal”, we shouldn’t allow all those climate denying Pew Researchers even to interview him.

Oh, wait. You say they did?

Yep.

Last year Pew did in-depth interviews with a select sample of your average everyday spent-their-entire-lives-in-Cincinnati sorts of climate skeptics, which did not include Donald Trump and Elon Musk.  Pew has concluded:

…large shares of Americans support the United States taking steps to address global climate change and back an energy landscape that prioritizes renewable sources like wind and solar. At the same time, the findings illustrate ongoing public reluctance to make sweeping changes to American life to cut carbon emissions. Most Americans oppose ending the production of gas-powered vehicles by 2035 and there’s limited support for steps like eliminating gas lines from new buildings.

So you’re saying it’s not because of fossil fuel industry treachery or even “the illusory truth effect”, but because people simply don’t want their modest and financially fragile life styles to deteriorate even further than they have in recent decades? 

Nah, that can’t be. We don’t need just a “psychologist”. We require a psychoanalyst.

So cue Tad DeLay, author of Future of Denial: The Ideologies of Climate Change and released this summer by Verso, which Wikipedia characterizes as “a left-wing publishing house based in London and New York City, founded in 1970 by the staff of New Left Review.”

It should not to be confused with Verso Skin Care, which claims to have invented Vitamin A-based therapies for aging and warts.

DeLay’s book is a fairly easy and engaging read, and it’s chockablock with hard, but fun facts that add up to the sentiment of the famous Bob Dylan ditty about how “we’re on the eve of destruction”, even though we think that means New Year’s Eve and we’d much prefer to party.

Of course, DeLay is not exactly a psychoanalyst - sorry, bait and switch here.

But as a philosopher and theologian he has written a lot about Freud and Lacan, whom in previous books such as God is Unconscious and Against: What Does the White Evangelical Want? he leverages to psychoanalyze all the conservative Christians he grew up with in Arkansas.

In the former tome DeLay he suggests his own Frenchified, post-structuralist, religio-theoretical version of a “hillbilly elegy” comes down to an expose of how overly ordinary bubbas refuse to acknowledge trauma.

Facades of humility and arrogance alike betray the illusions we inflict upon ourselves with an irascible wrath, all for the misguided notion that our trauma will not surface and show itself through the veneer of security.

Right.

In Future of Denial DeLay applies this diagnostic protocol of “irascible wrath” to all those millions, if not billions, of climate-crisis-denying dolts who refuse to accept the obvious, but inconvenient truth that the apocalypse is scheduled for, well, tomorrow.

DeLay laments:

Surely guilt for our carbon and easy lifestyles built on the suffering of others is among the feelings we repress. Symptomatic returns of the repressed exacerbate injustice: foolishness pseudo-activity, moral distancing, and violence. Once repression starts, ever more frantic activity is marshaled against the unconscious becoming conscious. Like Freud said, “Repression is not an event that occurs once but that it requires a permanent expenditure”.

A ”permanent expenditure” like, say, $3,608 for the average monthly rent of a two-bedroom apartment in Baltimore, where DeLay apparently has lived recently?

No, idiot, that’s not what the good doctor meant.  Hold your tongue and, as Lacan says, enjoy your symptoms!

So we seem to be at a tragic impasse in the appalling, apocalyptic adventure of the Anthropocene.

If neither Heidegger’s “god” nor Kamala Harris can save us, who can?

Where is Batman?