Michael Hoexter, Ph.D.
Contents
- Conventional “Hard” Climate Denial
- A Web of Soft Climate Denial
- The Foundations of Soft Climate Denial in Economics
- Settling on Neoliberal, “Market-Based” Carbon Gradualism
- Soft Climate Denial, Fossil Fuels, and the Hedonic Self
1. Conventional “Hard” Climate Denial
The Rio Olympics opening ceremony highlighted global warming as a major theme of international concern even on an occasion of diversion from the cares of the world. That most Brazilians understand intuitively and uncontroversially that climate change is a real threat contrasts with the still substantial fights that occur in parts of the Anglophone world regarding the reality of human caused climate change. A powerful minority in that world, strongest in the United States and Australia, holds to the idea that climate change is a hoax. The Republican governor of Florida, a state that almost certainly will lose population centers and land area to rising seas, has, for instance, banned the use of the words “climate change” by state employees. Meanwhile we are, due to a strong El Nino and climate change combined, experiencing record average global temperatures and are seeing signs that we may be approaching tipping points in the destruction of the habitable biosphere to which we are adapted as a species and civilization. Due to the ravages of 2016’s heat, the Anglophone world even might now eject climate deniers from the arena of legitimated public discourse.
