Late in Michael Mann’s recent book, The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet, he showcases a cartoon. In it, a man sporting an Uncle Sam hat ponders a thermometer that’s labeled “Climate Action Time.” The degrees on the thermometer, from low to high, read: “Too Soon,” “Too Soon,” “Still Too Soon,” and then, above a break in the thermometer: “Too Late.”
The New Climate War is a detailed, passionate, and insightful overview of the latest schemes by fossil fuel interests and their minions to halt or delay a transition to a clean energy economy.
This, simply illustrated, is one of Mann’s chief arguments: that the latest strategy by climate “inactivists”—those seeking to stall serious efforts to mitigate climate change—is to make Americans believe it is too late to stop its worst effects.
When I learned that Mann, a Penn State climatologist, had published a new book, I jumped at the chance to review it. I had written on climate change in the past and interviewed climate scientists, including Mann. But when I received the book and considered the title, I didn’t have high hopes.
The “new climate war?” Really? The percentage of Americans who deny climate change has plummeted, and everywhere you look are signs that the United States is finally embracing renewable energy: solar panels, wind farms, hybrid cars. Even the Denier-in-Chief has been voted out of office. I feared Mann’s book was a cynical attempt to profit by scaring people into believing a “war” still existed.
Well, I was wrong. In fact, a significant portion of Mann’s book is dedicated to railing against just such cynical money grabs. The New Climate War is a detailed, passionate, and insightful overview of the latest schemes by fossil fuel interests and their minions to halt or delay a transition to a clean energy economy. It offers an eye-opening dissection of the debates among progressives about the best way to usher in that transition. While most of those debates are in good faith, Mann argues that others are driven by fossil fuel interests seeking to divide the left.
Mann’s central argument goes like this: The science supporting human-induced climate change has become virtually impossible to refute. Indeed, we are increasingly able to see the effects with our own eyes. A recent Yale poll found that only 7 percent of Americans completely disputed the idea of climate change, and Americans are now four times more likely to be alarmed by it than to deny it.
Because of these shifting attitudes, “the forces of denial and delay—fossil fuel companies, right-wing plutocrats, and oil-funded governments”—have pivoted from parroting the tired old canards, such as “the science isn’t settled” or “it’s a hoax” to adopting devious new techniques.
These techniques include deflecting responsibility for action from corporations to individuals; using wedge issues to divide the left; demanding purism of activists; and spreading what Mann calls “Doomism.” If the old climate war were fought over the right’s attempt to stop belief in climate change, then the new war is over stopping action—and these are “the enemy’s” new tactics.
Mann spends a lot of time on Doomism. He attacks not only “doomist” scientists and pundits, but methodically dismantles popular doomist articles, focusing on Jonathan Frazen’s “What if we stopped pretending?” in The New Yorker, and David Wallace-Wells’s “The Uninhabitable Earth” in New York magazine. Mann shows how Doomism becomes insidious: Once it’s embraced by respected news outlets, industry-supporting trolls and bots blast those views all over social media, spreading a sense of helplessness.
The reasons we have struggled to combat the coronavirus are akin to why we’re struggling with climate—the rejection of science and experts, an embrace of phony solutions, and cries that a change in behavior means a loss of freedom.
“Doomism today arguably poses a greater threat to climate action than outright denial,” Mann asserts, not only because it breeds disengagement but also because the overhyped claims “play into efforts by deniers and delayers to discredit the science.”
The strategy disagreements on the left are handled with appropriate diplomacy. I was surprised to learn how fraught, and potentially paralyzing, these are. Carbon pricing, for example, has historically been a no-brainer on the left—whether through a direct tax or cap-and-trade—but there’s a growing and justifiable belief that a carbon tax will hurt the poor the most. Thus, carbon pricing is now opposed by influential progressives, including Bernie Sanders.
Similar to this is the concept of “energy poverty,” which argues that lack of energy access is the top threat to people in the developing world, and fossil fuels are the best way to provide that energy.
Mann argues that the first of these is a legitimate debate (he supports carbon pricing), but the second is an example of a “contrived” wedge issue wielded by industries to “divide and delay.” What gets lost in this discussion, and what Mann rightly points out, is that climate change will undoubtedly hit the poor the hardest—the wealthy can relocate to less vulnerable areas, but the poor cannot. A 2015 World Bank study found that climate change could drive 100 million people into “deep poverty” by 2030. Mann cites this study to bolster his point that the fight against climate change is itself a fight for environmental justice.
If there’s a weak stretch in The New Climate War, it’s Mann’s discussion of personal responsibility in fighting climate change versus government action. While he’s clear that both are necessary, Mann places far more emphasis on the latter. He insightfully shows how industry has tried to shift the discussion almost exclusively to the individual—one tactic, he explains, is to scream about the “hypocrisy” of scientists like him who don’t adhere to a purist approach with their own carbon footprints. How dare you fly! But Mann downplays personal responsibility so often that you’re nearly left believing your own behavior doesn’t much matter.
The strongest part of Mann’s book is the final chapter. It’s the obligatory “solutions” chapter, but it leaves one feeling genuinely optimistic.
Mann emphasizes that climate denial as a force in U.S. politics is all but dead—I was surprised to learn that the Heartland Institute, a longtime bastion of deniers, has seen its conferences shrink and its sponsors dry up. Mann relates uplifting stories of university divestment and the dedicated youth movement, and makes a strong case that we are approaching a “tipping point” of climate activism.
But it’s Mann’s comparison of climate change to the current pandemic that resonates most. He shows that COVID-19 denial is extremely similar to climate denial, and the reasons we have struggled to combat the coronavirus are akin to why we’re struggling with climate—the rejection of science and experts, an embrace of phony solutions, and cries that a change in behavior means a loss of freedom.
Placing the comparison in a more holistic context, Mann introduces us to the concept of Gaia, the ancient Greek’s personification of Earth. The Gaia hypothesis of the 1970s posited that life interacts with Earth to form a “synergistic and self-regulating system.” Mann floats a provocative question: What if the coronavirus is Earth’s immune system fighting back against the human virus, which is exploiting her resources and plundering her natural wonders?
Mann answers his own question: “Our response to the coronavirus pandemic shows it’s possible for us to change our ways when we must. Unlike microbes, human beings have agency. We can choose to behave like a virus that plagues our planet, or we can choose a different path. It’s up to us.”
Let’s get to it.