'Climate: The Movie', Martin Durkin's latest excrescence
Posted by Ian M on April 7, 2024, 2:12 pm
All the same old charlatans getting wheeled out to repeat all the same old tired, pro-industry lies. Some of the points about working class people being most affected by govt policies to (supposedly) address the problem will probably be accurate, but then that's an argument for more equitable responses that aren't hamstrung or outright exploited by the demands of the corporations which own the political system. And of course it says nothing about the reality of the problem.
I Watched The Climate Deniers' New Movie So You Don't Have To
A British filmmaker's latest attempt to convince us that climate change isn't happening is a feeble affair. But propaganda doesn't have to convince everyone to be effective.
Dave Vetter Apr 05, 2024
Just how lucrative are fossil fuels? According to some estimates, the global oil and gas industry reaped profits of at least $4 trillion in 2023, with further analysis indicating that the sector has generated almost $3 billion a day, every day, for the last 50 years. We may never know how many trillions the industry holds in assets, infrastructure and legacy capital.
These are truly mind-boggling sums. Which only makes Climate: The Movie (The Cold Truth) all the more perplexing. Because, while it’s not surprising that the fossil fuel lobby is still making propaganda films, what is puzzling is how low-rent they are.
In his 120-minute screed, director Martin Durkin and friends set out to prove a) that there is no climate emergency and b) it is climate scientists who are corrupt, actually. “This is a story of the corruption of science,” Durkin mutters. “It’s a story about the bullying and intimidation of anyone who dares to challenge the climate alarm.” The thesis is a neat, if lazy, piece of reality-inversion; a feature-length manifestation of “every accusation is a confession”. Climate science is “a wonderful way to increase government power”, croaks William Happer, a retired physicist famous for agreeing to conceal the sources of his funding. The film goes on to roll out a veritable Who’s Who of lobbyists, cranks and conmen, almost all of whom have well-established ties to the fossil fuel industries.
Following his cold open, Durkin launches into an Adam Curtis-style montage, with 1950s promotional reels showing how “capitalist mass consumption” has granted people never-before-seen levels of prosperity—never dwelling on the fact that the footage features exclusively white figures in exclusively American settings. The planet Durkin lives on is one of infinite resources, to be plundered forever for the benefit of a never-ending troupe of handsome fellows in pinstripe suits and Cadillacs, and pretty ladies in pinafores. In Durkinworld, actions don’t have consequences, and the bill never comes due. We, the pale northern lords of all creation, may simply gorge ourselves in perpetuity till kingdom come, amen.
Durkin quickly returns to his star cast, and of the many logical fallacies Climate: The Movie employs, the appeal to authority is ridden the hardest. The film revels in its panoply of “experts”, giving lavish introductions to a panel of mostly retired mostly men, few of whom have any background at all in climate science, and all of whom have their own very special relationship with ethics.
It need hardly be said that the “science” presented in Climate: The Movie, well, isn’t. As the Skeptical Science blog has shown, the film scores a near-full house on the anti-science, climate denial bingo card. All our favourites are here, including “the Medieval Warm Period was warmer” (it was regional); “it’s cold!” (so what?); “CO2 is plant food” (yes?); “satellites don’t show warming” (wrong); “CO2 is only a trace gas” (small volumes of things can have large effects); and “it’s the Sun” (just, no). (I urge you to read the Skeptical Science post for a detailed breakdown of the multiple falsehoods and fallacies presented.)
The poor quality of the arguments presented should surprise no one. After all, 76% of the people featured in Climate: The Movie have the dubious honour of having their own profile page on Desmog, the fossil fuel lobby tracker. And even that statistic doesn’t fully express the oiliness of those involved. Six of the “experts” have their own page on the website of the oil industry’s favourite “think tank”, The Heartland Institute. As in, Heartland publicly acknowledges that those individuals work there. These include the aforementioned Happer, along with astrophysicist Willie Soon, beneficiary of at least $1.2 million from the fossil fuel industry, according to the New York Times. Another Heartland alumnus, Patrick Moore, falsely claims to be a co-founder of Greenpeace.
Also featured is Matthew Wielicki, who quit academia for unspecified reasons, and has since found himself the subject of an entire MMFA article on climate misinformation. Wielicki was even more recently caught using Chat GPT to create fake citations for his reality-averse arguments. Even Nobel Prize-winning physicist John Clauser, included solely to lend the film an air of scientific rigour, is on the board of the CO2 Coalition, a lobby group helmed by a man who, for 25 years, was Chief Operating Officer of the American Petroleum Institute. Aside from King Charles III, who probably didn’t agree to be in the film, non-industry voices are few and far between. Keen observers will pick out speakers from other lobby groups from the fossil fuel-championing Atlas Network, such as Steve Davies of the Institute of Economic Affairs, and Ross McKitrick of the Fraser Institute. Many of those featured like to show up for gigs organised by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, an organisation that can call itself a charity thanks to weak British laws.
It’s all very sad. But Durkin has history when it comes to polemic unencumbered by fact. Among his past achievements are Brexit: The Movie, which stars a cavalcade of far-right British politicians and assorted grifters, and Great American Race Game, a film that claims the Democratic Party has used the welfare state to control Black Americans. Durkin’s first foray into climate denial was 2007’s The Great Global Warming Swindle, a film so grotesquely misleading that it became the subject of a Commons Select Committee report, which is what the British Government does when something awful happens.
It’s such a wasted opportunity: all that combined brainpower, and between them the cast members fail to offer anything new to undermine our understanding of global warming and its causes. And if you can’t give us anything persuasive, at least give us something fun—Taylor Swift is a priestess of the Hollow Earth? Disney is using space lasers to submerge Florida? Come on, Heartland Institute: if you can’t go big, go home.
And yet, there are serious points swimming within this tragicomic flotsam. The most obvious of these is that Climate: The Movie is the product of the long-established industry playbook of manufacturing uncertainty. Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway offer a comprehensive account of this strategy in 2010’s Merchants of Doubt, focusing on the 20th century efforts of the tobacco lobby to challenge the growing pile of scientific evidence linking its product to severe harms to human health. In their book, Oreskes and Conway lay out how Big Tobacco, and subsequently Big Oil, “convinced people who didn’t know otherwise that there was still a lot of doubt about the whole matter.” Michael E. Mann more recently expounded upon this mechanism in The New Climate War, showing that, indeed, in many cases Big Tobacco and Big Oil aren’t just employing the same strategy, they’re employing the same people.
As it happens, Climate: The Movie is very nearly frank about this point. Durkin himself directly references the doubt mechanism in the film, delivering his own ironic imitation of a climate-literate stance: “Those who deny the climate crisis are not just wrong, they’re dangerous, spreading the poison of doubt among a gullible population,” he mimics. “These climate deniers are flat-earthers; they are anti-science.”
Well, quite. As Oreskes and Conway put it: “The protagonists of our story merchandized doubt because they realized—with or without the help of academic decision theory—that doubt works.” After all, to the uninitiated, Climate: The Movie looks and sounds like a regular documentary. At no point is the audience told that the film they’re watching is simply PR for the world’s most powerful industry.
Unfortunately for us all, it doesn’t especially matter that every one of the film’s silly claims is easily debunked: here, on a platter, is a pile of sciencey-sounding spam that the industry’s useful trolls can hurl at scientists and climate communicators in a bid to waste bandwidth. The ultimate intention is to lead regular people to call into question the veracity of valid scientific findings—perhaps even the legitimacy of science itself.
None of this is to say that Climate: The Movie isn’t oudated: it is. Research indicates that only 15% of Americans now believe that climate change isn’t taking place, so organised climate denial efforts have moved beyond “it isn’t happening” to trying somewhat more persuasive tactics, such as undermining confidence in climate solutions.
But that doesn’t mean Climate: The Movie’s colonialist, narcissistic, reality-allergic sophistry doesn’t have a hungry and influential audience. There can be no doubt that many of the empty tropes and falsehoods bandied about here are being put to use in the corridors of power—particularly in Washington, DC, where so many of the oil lobby’s unreliable narrators spend so much of their time. Because, as Durkin and his cast so gleefully point out, Imperial America, the globe-straddling hegemon, was built on oil. And those that built it will not readily relinquish their power.
Always baffles me that certain people are so ready to believe that the overwhelming majority of climate scientists, NGOs, experts are all colluding for some sinister, as yet undefined purpose, but the idea that the vanishingly small faction of scientists paid by the people with a vested interest in preserving the status quo because they are making money hand over fist while destroying our future just couldn't possibly be dishonest.
...no amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party...So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.
on April 7, 2024, 2:12 pm