Climate denial is a right-wing trait

George Monbiot

It was Australia's second climate change election. Climate change deposed the former leaders of both main parties: Kevin Rudd (Labor) because his position was too weak, Malcolm Turnbull (Liberal) because his was too strong. When Julia Gillard, the new Labor leader, also flunked the issue, many of her supporters defected to the Greens.

Labor's collapse began when the senate rejected Rudd's emissions trading scheme. Faced with a choice of dissolving parliament and calling an election or dropping the scheme, he chickened out and lost the confidence of the party. Gillard's support began to slide when she proposed to defer climate change policy to a citizen's assembly. Nearly 70 per cent of the votes she lost went to the Greens.

Turnbull, like Rudd, was ousted over the emissions scheme, but six months earlier. His support for it split the Liberal party, and just before the first senate vote last December he was overthrown by Tony Abbott, who had told his supporters that climate change “is absolute crap”. If Abbott manages to form a government, he will reverse the result of the 2007 election, in which the Liberal party was defeated partly because it wouldn't act on climate change.

Situation in Australia

It's not difficult to see why this is a hot issue in Australia. The country has been hammered by drought and bushfires. It has the highest carbon dioxide emissions per person of any major economy outside the Arabian peninsula. Australians pollute more than Americans, twice as much as people in the U.K. and four times more than the Chinese. Most Australians want to change this, but the coal industry keeps their politicians on a short leash. Like New Labour in the U.K., Rudd and Gillard's administration was a government of flinchers. It has been punished for appeasing industrial lobbyists and the right wing press.

Australia provides yet more evidence that climate science divides people on political lines. Abbott is no longer an outright denier, though he still insists, in the teeth of the facts, that the world has cooled since 1997. Some members of his party go further: Senator Nick Minchin maintains that “the whole climate change issue is a left-wing conspiracy to de-industrialise the western world”. (He has also insisted that cigarettes are not addictive and the link between passive smoking and illness can't be demonstrated). A recent poll suggests that 38 per cent of politicians in Abbott's coalition believe man-made global warming is taking place, in comparison with 89 per cent of Labor's people. It's the same story everywhere. At a senatorial hustings in New Hampshire last week, all six Republican candidates denied that man-made climate change is taking place. Judging by its antics in the Senate and primary campaigns all over the U.S., the party appears to be heading for a unanimous rejection of the science. Vaclav Klaus, the ultra-neo-liberal Czech president, asserts that “global warming is a false myth and every serious person and scientist says so”. The hard-right U.K. Independence party may soon be led by Lord Monckton, the craziest man in British politics, who claims that action on climate change is a conspiracy to create a communist world government. The further to the right you travel, the more likely you are to insist that man-made climate change isn't happening. Denial has nothing to do with science and everything to do with politics.

The explanation

In the London-based Daily Telegraph, the Conservative Daniel Hannan tried to explain this association. “When presented with a new discovery, we automatically try to press it into our existing belief-system; if it doesn't fit, we question the discovery before the belief-system.” He's right, we all do this. It is also true that in some respects an antagonism to climate science is consistent with right wing — especially neo-liberal — politics. The philosophy is summarised by this chilling statement from Vaclav Klaus. “Human wants are unlimited and should stay so.” But right wing denial leads to perverse outcomes. In a desperate attempt to appease deniers in his party, Turnbull proposed handing £70bn to industry to soften the impacts of acting on climate change. Rudd's scheme was more or less self-financing. Abbott intends to lavish subsidies on polluting companies without demanding any corresponding obligations. State handouts? Rights without responsibilities? When did these become conservative policies? Since way back. In the U.S., Republicans also favour green incentives for industry, without caps or regulation. Worldwide, subsidies for fossil fuels are 12 times greater than subsidies for renewable energy. Many of the most generous handouts are awarded by right wing governments (think of the money lavished on the oil industry under Bush).

Yes, climate change denial is about politics, but more pragmatic than ideological. The politics have been shaped around industrial lobby groups — which in many cases fund those who articulate them. Right-wingers are making monkeys of themselves not just because their beliefs take precedence over the evidence, but also because their interests take precedence over their beliefs. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2010