Why do people reject the science of climate change; what are the consequences of accepting misinformation and what role does psychology and the media play in overcoming this resistance?
This webinar features internationally recognized speakers and authors with interesting stories, facts and examples of how ‘truth’ has become unanchored, is undermining science, and creating roadblocks to a common public understanding and dialogue about the risks and challenges for tackling climate change and biodiversity loss.
Presenters:
Dr. Andrew Hoffman, Professor of Sustainable Enterprise at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business and School for Environment and Sustainability, and a Winspear Fellow at the University of Victoria’s Gustavson School of Business, is an internationally acclaimed author and scholar of environmental issues and sustainable enterprise.
Dr. Hoffman’s research, teaching and writing examines the ways that environmental issues emerge as managerial, economic and political concerns. He has been featured in the New York Times, Scientific American, Time, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, and on National Public Radio.
Dr. Hoffman believes that the public debate around climate change is no longer about science but about values, culture and ideology. He has published 18 books and more than 100 articles and book chapters, many of which have won major awards. In 2020, he received a Best Teaching Award and a Distinguished Scholar Award in 2018, plus has been recognized many times during the course of his career.
Mace Rosenstein is a celebrated Washington, DC lawyer and constitutional expert. He covers the impact of unethical political leaders and how those in positions of power rationalize their lies and why others believe them sometimes fervently. His experience advising media and telecommunications companies on complex strategic, policy, legal, and regulatory matters for nearly 30 years, provides an inside look into the workings of media and messaging.
Dr. David Fago is a clinical psychologist and adjunct associate professor of psychology at the University of Maryland. He has both engaged in and supervised clinical practice for the past 45 years and published several papers and book chapters. He explores the psychology behind fact and fiction and ways to overcome the divide.
Bob Sandford is an award-winning author and editor of more than 35 books. He holds the Global Water Futures Chair in Water and Climate Security at the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health and co-hosts this fascinating webinar with Creatively United founder, Frances Litman.
Comments/Resources
David Fago: Since last week, I became aware through a friend here in Washington, DC who is an environmental scientist (and who attended our last Wednesday webcast) that last autumn Scientific American published a special issue titled Truth, Lies & Uncertainty, with multiple articles by both scientists and non-scientists from various disciplines. The articles speak to many of the issues (and more) that Mace and I discussed.
Another resource includes this article by James Hogan.
Additional Q&A
Q. Please repeat ” what is the purpose of a corporation” Myth – to make money for shareholders. Fact?
A. Andrew Hoffman: Ask any business student what the purpose of the corporation and he or she will parrot that it is simply to “make money for its shareholders,” even to the point of believing that US corporate law demands it, even though no such law exists. In fact, any attempt of shareholders to sue a company for not maximizing value is faced with the “good judgement rule” – if the directors of a corporation acted on an informed basis, in good faith and in the honest belief that the action taken was in the best interests of the company, then they have performed their fiduciary responsibility. In fact, there is statistical correlation between share price decline and a CEO losing his or her job. The notion of shareholder primacy emerged in the 1970s with the Chicago School of Economics and is not only inaccurate, but can also lead to market problems such as excessively short time horizons for investment planning and measures of success, and a focus on only one type of shareholder who, in the words of Cornell Law Professor Lynn Stout, is “shortsighted, opportunistic, willing to impose external costs, and indifferent to ethics and others’ welfare.” These types of investors are one of the factors that helped spur the Great Recession of 2008. Today, even historic acolytes of shareholder value like former GE CEO Jack Welch are turning against it, calling it “the dumbest idea in the world,” and adding that “shareholder value is a result, not a strategy … Your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products.” Business Professor and Management Consultant Peter Drucker took a broader view than that, arguing in the 1950s that “the purpose of a company is to create a customer.” Profits are one metric of how well the company performs this purpose but ultimately, he argued, “the business enterprise…exists for the sake of the contribution which it makes to the welfare of society as a whole.” Such a notion leads to a completely different approach to the role and education of the corporate leader.
Q. How fearful are politicians about removing subsidies to fossil fuel companies, and how can we help them to overcome that fear?
A. Andrew Hoffman: To my mind, the central calculus is based on economics, jobs and political clout. If a politician is going to take action against the fossil fuel sector, they have to be able to say that their district is going to be able to do better economically for the action. Are there more jobs in renewables than fossil fuels? Is the region completely dependent on fossil fuels, or can they diversify their economic base? Will the fossil fuel money that goes into campaign donations, PAC support or other political activities be outweighed by the money that comes from countervailing forces? Can the politician make the case that certain actions now will either delay the inevitable or change that outcome (even the American Petroleum Institute is putting out a press release supporting a carbon price)? In the end, what will the politicians base think, and will they get reelected? I wonder if there are certain districts where the political base would welcome action and see the fossil fuel industry as too dominant (as we see happening in Detroit with a desire to shift the economic base away from automotive).
A. Bob Sandford: I should point out that in a cooperative federalist state like Canada removing fossil fuel subsidies is a thorny issue. Petrostates like Alberta and Saskatchewan are loath to do it because of the contribution of oil and gas revenues to the provincial economy making it a concern that they will alienate the foundation of their political base: those working in, or linked, to the fossil fuel industry. In considering removing such subsidies, the federal government has to be careful or the most affected provinces will feel targeted and scream bloody murder and threaten to leave confederation as Premier Kenney has threatened. It should be noted, however, that many Albertans now clearly see that Kenney’s United Conservative Party is neither united or working toward uniting the citizenship, nor is it conservative. It is libertarian and it is pitting Albertans against one another and, if truth mattered at all, should properly name itself the Fossil Fuel Party. The intelligent way around this, however, is to redirect the subsidies to a just transition to renewable energy that does not leave workers who relied on the oil and gas sector behind, but instead helps them through the transition to different but perhaps related jobs in the emerging clean energy sector. I know people in the oil and gas sector who know our climate is changing and that we have to move off fossil fuels, but they don’t want to be left holding the bag. Nor should they be left holding the bag. Proper redirection of oil and gas subsidies can give these people confidence in the future. We need to give them that confidence. That is what just transition means. I believe I said that in my Earth Day presentation.
Q. I would love to know more about those students in Management studies who let go of selfish desire and commit themselves to public welfare.
A. Andrew Hoffman: When I first started teaching over twenty years ago, students who wanted to change the world turned to schools of public policy and nonprofit management for their training. Today, many are turning to schools of business management and they are bringing with them a desire to explore a new sense of the economic, social and environmental purpose of the corporation and their role as leaders. One survey found that 67% of business students want to incorporate environmental sustainability considerations into whatever job they choose; another found that 88% of business school students think that learning about social and environmental issues in business is a priority and 83% state they are willing to take a salary cut for a job that makes a social or environmental difference in the world. By 2019, business ethics entered the top 5 most popular subjects for the first time, with nearly 25% of incoming students wanting a job focused on social impact after graduating, and nearly 50% wanting to do so later in their careers. Whereas previous generations of business students were exposed primarily to the idea that business should only be concerned with increasing profits for the shareholder (articulated most famously by Milton Friedman from the University of Chicago and Gordon Gekko in the movie Wall Street), many of today’s business students show an interest in moving beyond such narrow views and dedicating their careers to making a difference in the world. But business programs are not keeping pace with this reality. In a critique in the New Republic critique, MBA student John Benjamin argued that the business curriculum stifles discussion of the common good while emphasizing the over-riding objective of profit maximization as unquestioned. Rather than cultivating open-minded stewards of the economy, he argued, they are taught to ignore shareholder capitalism’s obvious ethical lapses and avoid any kind of systemic analysis of it. Indeed, many students seem to graduate with a narrower understanding of business than when they entered the program. According to Craig Smith, Professor of Ethics and Social Responsibility at INSEAD, “Students come in with a more rounded view of what managers are supposed to do but when they go out, they think it’s all about maximizing shareholder value.” One student told me that she felt that her values were under attack every time she walked into the building.
Q. Can we counteract purveyors of false hope, such as carbon sequestration and storage, not yet proven?
A. Andrew Hoffman: We love technology and silver bullet solutions. These technologies allow us to continue our lives as before and the technology will clean up the unintended consequences. There are entire industries that are searching for those silver bullet solutions just to stay in business – oil, coal, natural gas, cement. It would be unrealistic to expect them not to try to survive by innovating their way out of the problem. Let them try, but keep pressure on for the market shift that must come. In the end, they will succeed and find a way to operate while managing their carbon footprint, or they will fail and be replaced by an alternative.
A. Bob Sandford: Yes, we can. But to do so we need to pay close attention to the science and fact. There are two reasons to be distrustful of CCS as it is being piloted in Canada. The first problem is that it is being done to pressure every lost drop of oil out of deep finds. Put enough CO2 under enough pressure into a deep well and you can push the remaining hard to get oil out. Carbon sequestration is not the main focus. Also there are not many places where the geological formations are such that sequestration is possible on a scale large enough to make a difference in terms of drawdown. Secondly, we do not reliably know how long carbon can be sequestered in this way. The oil and gas sector has kind of shot themselves in the foot here. There are more than 70,000 orphaned and abandoned oil wells in the western provinces. Hard to sequester carbon dioxide under pressure under a pin cushion. Secondly, there is the not insignificant matter of unintended consequences. Carbon dioxide under pressure is a solvent powerful enough to mobilize mercury and other heavy metals. Not good when they bubble up with the water table to the surface. So to answer the question. Yes there is a way of counteracting purveyors of false hope and that is, as Andrew Hoffman said, to pay attention to the science, call them out when they lie and make them prove incontrovertibly that what they say is true in terms of scalability, duration of capture and unintended consequences. Make them demonstrate that Truth Matters.
Q. How can we leverage the common ground of our children in negotiation with those of differing world views? If we can be better ancestors that would help.
A. Bob Sandford: Many of us may have been born in a geological epoch called the Holocene. Geologists have marked the Holocene as unique because of its relative climate stability. It was this stability that allowed our civilization to come into existence. But many Earth scientists now believe that we live now – all of us – in a new epoch, a dangerous Anthropocene, a geological period marked by the realization that humanity has become a major geological force on a planetary scale. The Anthropocene is seen as an epoch in which Earth system decline is on a collision course with the elastic ethics of our time; an epoch in which the warnings of experts have been insufficient in comparison with the scale of the crisis.
The threat we face we is existential. If we do not act now – we could soon live in a world so changed that much of the history, literature and culture that has enriched our lives may no longer be relevant any more because the very landscapes upon which our heritage was established will have changed. The places that we so love, the places in which we have established our identity and sense of place may no longer be as we knew them ever again. And we as people will not be the same again.
Indigenous peoples know that addressing these matters is a matter of cultural survival. Many of us the rest of us don’t see it yet, but addressing these threats is a matter of cultural survival for all. Children and our youth have begun to see this, but children, in the absence of effective adult action, should not have to stand up for the planet on these matters. That said, I firmly believe that we can understand the global problem we face then we can address it; and we can do so in a way that will benefit and improve the lives of all.
We cannot allow it to be too late. We are on the steepest learning curve we have ever been on but we are finally getting the message that human health equals planetary health. The first thing we should take heart in is that we are gradually making a transition in our society from generating and defending evidence of why we need to address the climate threat, to having some of the most powerful and innovative minds in the world shifting the conversation to how we address the climate threat in ways that would not destroy the global economy by way of energy transition. As the likes of Bill Gates have clearly indicated it will not be easy. We have some of the technology to make it possible, but there are also technologies and ways of organizing ourselves that need to be invented if we are to become net carbon zero globally by 2050. But, Gates states very clearly, whichever nation gets to sustainability first and helps the rest of the world do so also, will become prosperous, indeed. While we wait for those technologies and more ways of efficiently working together, we have to rely on what we are learning about how the Earth’s biodiversity-based planetary life support system itself can help us get through this bottleneck in the human journey. Fortunately, we do not live in a petri dish alone. If we did, we would likely be finished by now. And herein resides hope. We share this dish with other beings and it is they who are saving us from ourselves.
We share Earth with the living world. Constructed over billions of years our biodiversity-based life-support system is remarkable beyond imagination. The living Earth can be our ally and our partner in reversing the damage we have done to our only home. This tells us that what we need to do is restore the world and bring long-term sustainability back to the petri-dish. To do that, we need a new narrative. Planetary health provides that narrative. To restore stability to our planet we must restore its biodiversity. It is the only way out of this crisis that we ourselves have created.
We now know what Indigenous peoples have known for thousands of years. We can reduce and moderate the threat of climate disruption by protecting, restoring and constantly rehabilitating natural system function. From this we see that this is not the end of the world. It is just the beginning of another. Perhaps because we are so connected, people today, as this pandemic has demonstrated, have expanded capacity to think in terms of community rather than just thinking about themselves. There is great power in realizing this – for it is at the local level – where we live – that we have the most power to effect change and to act most effectively in service of where and how we live and who we love, now and in the future.
We have before us a moment during which we can turn this great pause, and the catastrophe that caused it, into an opportunity for global re-set and the emergence of new hope for the future. But to make that transformation we have to act on behalf of that hope. The mobilization of hope is a precondition of effective action.
In this emergency, simple idealism can still prevail. If people cooperate, they will achieve better outcomes and more durable solutions than they can on their own. It is not irrational optimism to believe that cooperation can change or even save the world. It is simply common sense. We can do this, but we have to do this now. We are in a transformational moment. Let us seize it.
In my view, we need to prepare now for the moment when society realizes the emergency it faces and the urgency of addressing the climate threat as we were forced to do so when the pandemic erupted into our global consciousness, but unlike what happened with COVID, we will have everything in place to move forward together globally.
A. Mace Rosenstein: From a political perspective, I think there is an opportunity to engage and, over time, find common ground by continually focusing on the existential threats facing our children and the world they will inhabit. One would like to think that, ultimately, parents will agree that we must act to save our children even if it’s too late to save ourselves. There are lots of useful evolutionary, philosophical and literary precedents here, and even Biblical texts can help open doors to people of faith. Remember, for example, that God did not want Abraham to kill his son; surely in our time we don’t need to demonstrate our faith by sacrificing ours. I think also that, if we focus on our children, then it’s possible to occupy this ground together without wasting time on the ultimately pointless argument over assigning blame.
I also would suggest that we let our children lead, and support them as they do. This in turn can be another means of finding common ground with those with differing views: even if we disagree on the merits we still can work together to support our children as they work to create the world they would like to see — or, if we can’t help them, at least get out of their way. (Remember Dylan’s verse of nearly 60 years ago: “Come mothers and fathers throughout the land/And don’t criticize what you can’t understand/Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command/Your old road is rapidly aging/Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend a hand . . . .”) A striking example in my view was the adult support that coalesced around Juliana v. U.S., the lawsuit filed by 21 young climate activists arguing that failure to ensure an inhabitable planet amounts to an impermissible government “taking” under the U.S. Constitution. Although the case was dismissed on appeal on jurisdictional grounds, it has opened an analytical path that other young activists are pursuing. There are other examples.
Q. Can the market solve these problems without being coupled with smart regulations that constrain all actors to a level playing field?
A. Andrew Hoffman: In a word, no. When I think of the market, I think of a network of actors that include corporations, governments, civil society, consumers, really everyone. It is surprising to me how few business schools offer courses on government lobbying, much less collaborative and constructive lobbying. Indeed, common perceptions are that the government has no place in the market, that regulation is an unwarranted intrusion in the market and that all lobbying is corrupt. These views are naïve and destructive. Government is the domain in which the rules of the market are set and enforced, and lobbying is basic to democratic politics as governments seek guidance on how to set the rules of the market and usher reforms as needed. We need to develop a new mindset where companies that are serving society can participate constructively in policy formation, seeking policies that help to make society and the economy strong and fair in the aggregate, not just for the select and affluent few. This is not unrealistic. The Cato Institute (which tends to advocate for less regulation of the market) conducted a survey that found that 59% of Americans “believe regulations, at least in the past, have produced positive benefits” and 56% believe that “regulations can help make businesses more responsive to people’s needs.”
Q. How do you see the effect of Russian and Chinese interference in our liberal democracies “truth?” How to combat it?
A. Bob Sandford: It is greater than we think. One in four tweets on the subject of climate change on any given day is generated by a bot. As I said, for half of all Canadians and Americans, social media are their only sources of news. I had to laugh when I heard an expert on Artificial Intelligence explain that governments no longer have to pay to put listening devices in the homes of citizens any more. People are happy to pay to do that to themselves. Forget Big Brother. How about his sister? Have you met Siri, are you intimate yet with Alexa? Come in Beijing! Can you hear me Moscow?
A. Mace Rosenstein: This takes us down the rabbit hole of social media, which is an appropriate subject for a separate discussion. We touched on this during the live question period on March 24 but there is much more to explore. I think we can agree that the echo chamber of Facebook and Twitter and Parler and all the rest is a huge part of the problem; that’s the easy discussion. The much more difficult one is how to address that problem consistent with international and national legal structures intended to protect human rights generally and rights of free expression in particular. The “Section 230” debate in the States right now — whether social media platforms should be subject to legal liability for false or defamatory content posted by unrelated third parties — illustrates the difficulty of the problem. And there are no good precedents: none of the old legal regimes applicable to newspapers or broadcast media or telecommunications are useful in this context.
Q. Why are these guys in their extensive linguistic verbiage so adamant about the paranoia and the lies that they seem to want to subvert; but are very much promoting the unbelievable?
A. Mace Rosenstein: We weren’t “promoting” paranoid thinking or belief in the “unbelievable.” Rather, we were trying to understand their etiology. As David noted in his consideration of “empathic” listening, if we are to have any chance of engaging with those of differing views — including Hofstadter’s “paranoid spokesman” — we have to try to understand what the paranoid belief system is responding to. To paraphrase Brecht, in order to change the world you might have to embrace the enemy.
Q. Love Canal didn’t change the waste our culture disposes of; it simply changed where we dumped that waste. Environmental Racism is the result.
A. Andrew Hoffman: The legacy that Love Canal leaves behind is multiple. For one, the disaster created a whole new dimension to the environmental issue. No longer were environmental problems foreseeable, originating from an expected source. Now they could emerge from a place as seemingly safe as your own backyard. This brought hazardous waste into the lexicon of the average citizen. Second, as a direct result of Love Canal, President Carter signed into law on December 12, 1980 the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA) or Superfund. Under this Act, chemical and oil companies (among others) would be charged a feedstock tax to cover its funding and, more importantly, these companies would be charged for the cleanup of any historic waste sites that had even just minor involvement with. In essence, these companies would be penalized, ex post facto, for actions that were legal when they were undertaken. And, it compelled companies to begin to list environmental liabilities as “material” concerns on their 10K filings. This changed the economics of both creating and disposing of hazardous waste. And that changed management practices. It began the process of thinking about waste production rather than dealing with it at the “end of the pipe.”