Both Sides Should Separate Misinformation from Reasoned Debate about Climate Change Policy

This is a guest post by Matt Burgess who is an assistant professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is also co-chair of the Heterodox Academy Campus Community and host of the Free Mind podcast. Starting in August, he will be an assistant professor of economics at the University of Wyoming, and a presidential fellow working on free expression and constructive dialogue. His research focuses on political polarization of climate change, the macroeconomics of climate change, and natural resource management. He is working on a book project called How Polarization Will Destroy Itself, whose thesis is summarized on his Guided Civic Revival Substack.

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Matt Burgess

On the Left: A Case of Misinformation about Misinformation

A local progressive climate change advocacy group recently invited me to speak to them about my research on bridging political divides. In the Q&A, a member asked me how to address oil and gas industry misinformation in their communities. I responded by asking what the oil and gas industry was saying in their communities.

A fossil fuel lobby group was running ads, they told me, which said that Colorado had one of the cleanest natural gas industries in the world. This is true (by many measures), I responded, regardless of who said it and what their motives are. It’s also true that natural gas development (replacing coal) has contributed to recent declines in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. If you want to persuade people that superseding climate considerations support leaving Colorado’s natural gas in the ground, then make your case, I said.

Motives Do Not Determine Truth

This exchange reminded me of an earlier conversation I had with a community leader in western Colorado—a conservative part of the state. He told me that they had one of the largest shale-gas deposits in the world, and that environmental regulations from Democrat-controlled state and federal governments restricted its development. Developing this natural gas resource would improve their local economy, which is much poorer than the economies of front-range communities like Denver, Fort Collins, and Boulder, who disproportionately voted for the current Democratic governments.

These statements are also true, regardless of whether we think further developing western Colorado’s shale gas is a good idea. How would the people in western Colorado react if someone like me—an environmental studies professor from Boulder—told them that they only wanted to develop their shale resources because fossil fuel companies were poisoning their minds with misinformation? Probably not well.

A far more effective strategy for winning these communities’ support for the energy transition would be to listen to them, take their concerns seriously, and devise policies that address the concerns. For example, the Colorado state government recently passed an oil and gas taxation and regulation package that was negotiated with major industry and environmental groups, and received broad support from both sides.

On the Right: Reasonable Skepticism Creating a Vulnerability to (Actual) Misinformation

On the other side of the divide, I sometimes see conservatives start with reasoned skepticism about climate change policies—similar to what I heard in western Colorado—but then get sucked down rabbit holes of actual misinformation about climate change science.

For example, on a recent episode of his popular podcast, Jordan Peterson interviewed Patrick Moore, a leader of the CO₂ Coalition known for criticizing climate science. Moore and Peterson stated that we don’t know whether CO₂ causes global warming (it could just be natural cycles), that the evidence of past global warming could be the result of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) fudging its numbers, and that climate change is beneficial to humanity because CO₂ increases plant growth and by extension food production. “Our emissions of CO₂ are the salvation of life on Earth,” Moore said, unchallenged by Peterson.

These claims are easily refuted. There is overwhelming evidence that the Earth has warmed by roughly 1 degree Celsius, on average, since the mid-1800s, and that human greenhouse gas emissions (including CO₂) are the primary cause of this warming. Higher CO₂ concentrations have resulted in more plant growth globally, on average, but for many regions and crops, this effect has been offset by increases in drought and extreme heat caused by climate change. For example, climate change has reduced crop yields in sub-Saharan Africa, and, partly as a consequence, hunger there has been increasing for the past decade. Beyond crop yields, climate change has damaged the global economy, infrastructure, and human health, on average, by increasing sea levels, heat waves, infectious disease, some types of storms, and wildfire severity, to name a few. Hardly the salvation of life on Earth.  

Moore makes some other points that are valid and worth discussing, including criticizing anti-human undertones in some climate advocacy and criticizing the politicization of academia. But these points are overshadowed by his forays into pseudoscience.

The point is: neither supporters nor opponents of climate change policies help their cause by blurring the lines between misinformation and reasoned debate about facts, tradeoffs, and their normative implications.

Stick to Facts

Progressives turn people off by dismissing reasoned criticism of climate policies as “denial” or “fossil-fuel misinformation”. Conservatives make it too easy to dismiss their reasoned criticisms of climate policies as climate change denial, when they also amplify actual climate change denial uncritically.  Both sides would have the best chance of persuading people if they rigorously seek out and then stick to the facts, and jettison both pseudoscience and ad-hominem attacks.¹

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Footnote

1. Lee here. While I generally endorse Matt’s emphasis on sticking to facts and avoiding ad hominem, this final sentence is actually an empirical question. Do facts persuade people more than ad hominem attacks? I do not know. Also, persuade people of what? There is the truth of the claim, the integrity and decency of the claimant versus accuser, trust and credibility afforded to academia and experts, and more. The effectiveness of ad hominem for persuading people of different things might itself vary depending on the outcome. Secondarily, avoiding pseudoscience and misinformation is not that easy. Although some things are clearly pseudoscience (e.g., astrology) and others science (e.g., astronomy), there is no hard, clear line between pseudoscience and science, and misinformation is little more than being wrong — and people are wildly overconfident about wrong beliefs all the time. Avoiding misinformation in science and politics often means doing a deep dive into source credibility, references, and alternative sources or reporting, and most of us don’t usually have time for all that. And if you don’t, you really are in no position to stick to the facts because you do not have them, in which case, the best approach may be epistemic humility — avoiding making strong claims altogether when you really have neither the expertise nor have done the deep dive necessary to do so.