Comment: Climate denialism is dead; the foot-dragging isn’t

By Mark Gongloff / Bloomberg Opinion

The good news is that after nearly half a century, 1.1 degree Celsius of global heating and countless natural disasters, people for the most part finally accept the basic science of human-caused climate change. The bad news is that they still don’t seem willing to do very much about it.

A new study of TV coverage of the 2021 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found few expressions of doubt about the basic science of anthropogenic global warming; almost all of which were confined to right-wing media such as Fox News. And even Fox has mostly morphed, relative to coverage of previous IPCC reports, from questioning the reality and causes of climate change to doubts about its severity and the need to take action.

Old-school climate skeptics still show up with depressing regularity in social-media feeds, of course, but they are probably over-represented in such fever swamps. The rest of the world has apparently moved on, which is a moment to celebrate.

Unfortunately, the new flavor of climate skepticism is almost as pervasive and unhelpful as the old kind was. Mainstream media coverage of the 2021 IPCC report was filled with sources expressing doubt about the policy responses to climate change, according to the study conducted by researchers from Oxford, Cornell and other universities, focusing on 20 news channels in Australia, Brazil, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States. Such voices were even louder on mainstream channels than on right-wing ones.

It is healthy and constructive to debate the right approaches to transitioning away from fossil fuels and preparing for an increasingly hostile climate. But much of today’s climate skepticism is designed to frustrate any sort of policy response at all.

Conservatives, the study notes, now generally acknowledge climate change is real and caused by humans. But they also suggest aggressive climate action will hurt economic growth, fuel inflation, punish low- and middle-income families and foster energy insecurity. They argue other polluting countries, particularly China, should act first. As has long been the case for climate skeptics — going back to the days when Exxon contradicted the science of its own researchers — the goal seems to be delaying the transition to renewable energy for as long as possible.

“Any definitive shift towards response skepticism across the media, such as vocal opposition to net-zero policies, represents an important new challenge to climate action,” Oxford researcher James Painter wrote in a column about his study.

Such arguments may already be having a real impact. Foot-dragging on climate is everywhere you look. At the recent G-7 meeting, the world’s most developed countries lost their nerve when it came to setting a timeline to phase out coal power. None yet has plans to reduce fossil-fuel use enough to achieve net zero by 2050 and limit global warming to 1.5C, as all have pledged to do. As Bloomberg Green noted, Japan is the worst offender in this regard, but the U.S. and Germany aren’t doing much better.

Meanwhile, Republican politicians in the U.S. are attacking banks, money managers and companies for trying to hasten the transition to renewable energy. Fortunately, companies are starting to push back, because all basically now agree that climate change isn’t just some liberal obsession but a real and growing threat to business. Those politicians are having to weigh their need to stir up the base with anti-woke performance art against their need for campaign cash.

So maybe there is some reason to hope it won’t take another half-century to change the climate consensus again, this time about the need for more-aggressive action. Given how much the planet has already warmed and how much carbon is already in the atmosphere, we no longer have five years to spare, much less 50.

Mark Gongloff is a Bloomberg Opinion editor and columnist covering climate change. A former managing editor of Fortune.com, he ran the HuffPost’s business and technology coverage and was a reporter and editor for the Wall Street Journal.