It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)

September 12, 2023 5:16 PM

Meet the Shadowy Global Network Vilifying Climate Protesters
“They’ll throw something out into the public sphere, which will get a little bit of press, and then before you know it, a new law has been written, possibly by one of them. And now you have the criminalization of what was previously seen as legitimate civil protest.”
Atlas decribed as a think tank that creates think tanks.
All the usual culprits: AFD in Germany, Agribiz in Brazil, US evangelicals, The IEA in UK, Koch, & Murdoch in Australia, Big Oil, etc etc
posted by adamvasco (42 comments total)

can we have the bees back please
posted by lalochezia at 6:53 PM on September 12, 2023 [7 favorites]

I am shocked, shocked! To find that the Fraser Institute in Canada is part of this.
posted by fimbulvetr at 6:55 PM on September 12, 2023 [4 favorites]

Almost as soon as Last Generation began staging protests, in early 2022, Schäffler began describing them as terrorists, calling the group a “criminal organization” and publicly demanding it be investigated for organized crime. Media outlets, including conservative publisher Welt and the more mainstream Der Spiegel, soon echoed Schäffler’s framing. Just six months later, in May 2023, German police conducted nationwide raids on Last Generation activists; police said the group was “a criminal organization that was fundraising for the purpose of committing further criminal action.” It was almost exactly the response to Last Generation that Schäffler had recommended.

Also sounds quite similar to the playbook being used against the Stop Cop City protests. One wonders what the connection there to the Atlas Group is.
posted by eviemath at 8:07 PM on September 12, 2023 [15 favorites]

the little-known but enormously powerful Atlas Network, a global network of more than 500 member think tanks advocating for “free market” policies

¯\_ (ツ)_/¯
posted by flabdablet at 10:03 PM on September 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

ಠ_ಠ
posted by y2karl at 10:43 PM on September 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

Atlas Network at SourceWatch
posted by flabdablet at 10:47 PM on September 12, 2023 [6 favorites]

Last week I found a Christian Dominionist anti-nature / anti environment movement 'Resisting the Green Dragon', seems widespread in NZ churches, but is from the US. Many of these people are impressionable (no surprises there!) and the less psychopathic ones are conflicted e.g.
Divine attribution? The interaction of religious and secular beliefs on climate change attitudes [link to a Cambridge theological j].

Green Dragon is an anti-nature, anti-environmentalist sub-movement of the Dominionists. The religion of Morrison (Australia), Luxon (NZ National Party right wing), deSantis.. and ~30 senior UK Tories.

I've personally seen fundamentalist attitudes drive people to suicide.
posted by unearthed at 2:35 AM on September 13, 2023 [7 favorites]

From 2019 via Le Monde Diplomatique: How US climate deniers are working with far-right racists to hijack Brexit for Big Oil....array of connections between President Donald Trump, right-wing lobbies in the US, and far-right parties in the UK and Europe.....An alliance to fracture Western Europe.
In UK the Tufton Street hosts a long list of groups many with anonymous US funding, and are mainly ignored by main stream Media. It has been described as the most influential address you’ve never heard of.
posted by adamvasco at 5:02 AM on September 13, 2023 [6 favorites]

Having noticed that our candle burns low, they decided to light the other end.
posted by mule98J at 6:13 AM on September 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

Climate Science Is under Attack in Classrooms: Schools are a growing battlefield in climate politics as conservative states reshape their curriculum to downplay people’s contribution to rising temperatures

So there's a massive, coordinated, multi-billion-dollar campaign to convince people that climate change isn't a thing they should worry about. It's been going on since at least the seventies.

Let's talk about why.

There are two possible outcomes when it comes to climate change. Outcome one, climate change is a problem that can be managed by human beings with our current technologies and resources, and with a lot of effort we can maintain a habitable planet.

Outcome two is that climate change is a larger problem than human beings can solve, the environment is an incredibly complex and energetic system that we can't even hope to control given our current technology and resources, and we'll be lucky if a handful of humans survive when the planet becomes uninhabitable.

In which of these scenarios is a multi-billion dollar global public relations campaign to deny climate science and peddle techno-hopium to the population?

What bothers me the most about the climate change denialism campaigns I've seen happening for over four decades now is that the wealthy and powerful are behaving exactly as I'd expect them to if climate change can't be solved.
posted by MrVisible at 7:38 AM on September 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

Alternatively, the reason the wealthy and powerful are pro-denialism is because they're gigantic self-centred unimaginative arseholes.
posted by ambrosen at 8:34 AM on September 13, 2023 [7 favorites]

That's the thing. The alternative to the wealthy and powerful having given up hope for fixing climate change is that they're all insane. They've all gone completely bonkers, have lost all human feeling and compassion, and are playing crazed and inscrutable games with us like mad demigods. They're so crazed that they can't understand basic science or their own lived experiences of climate change, despite the fact that they run multi-billion-dollar global megacorporations.

It's not exactly a viable theory. Nor is it very reassuring. Nor does it make climate change any more likely to be soluble.
posted by MrVisible at 9:07 AM on September 13, 2023

I don't think the wealthy think climate change can't be solved, or at least significantly mitigated. I think they don't want to be inconvenienced by society doing so.
posted by mollweide at 9:42 AM on September 13, 2023 [6 favorites]

No, the alternative is that the wealthy and powerful are looking at various potential futures, and figuring that while the outcome they are pursuing may be worse for humanity as a whole, they personally expect to retain more wealth and power under that outcome. They haven’t been personally affected by climate change much yet, so the human tendency to (emotionally, at least) expect the future to be similar to the present impacts their expectations and decision-making. They also have so much that the fear of losing relative privilege (power over others) is stronger than their fear of some (underestimated due to cognitive bias as noted) decline in their personal quality of life.

And while no doubt some of the ultra-wealthy are indeed sociopaths, one thing I observed while attending university with some scions of global wealth is that they have bought into a very skewed worldview that dehumanizes the vast majority of humanity - people are generally pro-social, so it takes some conditioning and denial of reality to get most people to act anti-socially on the scale dictated by capitalist exploitation; and it takes strong class segregation, where the ultra wealthy and powerful never actually interact enough with the rest of us to challenge the false narratives they have convinced themselves and their offspring of. Instead, they in many cases truly believe that a more egalitarian society will actually be worse, or that the general populous can’t be trusted to make rational and beneficial decisions democratically. So they discount such solutions as non-viable based on their skewed misunderstanding of how the world is and how other humans are.
posted by eviemath at 9:44 AM on September 13, 2023 [10 favorites]

It’s not a rational or fact-based reaction. But neither is it insane, nor indicative (necessarily) that they don’t think climate change can be solved.
posted by eviemath at 9:47 AM on September 13, 2023

They're so crazed that they can't understand basic science or their own lived experiences of climate change, despite the fact that they run multi-billion-dollar global megacorporations.

My view is that they're so crazed that they can't understand basic science or their own lived experiences of climate change because they run multi-billion-dollar global megacorporations.

Once you have access to the kind of instant whim fulfilment available to people who run multi-billion-dollar global megacorporations, you get to stop paying attention to the real world, because dealing with the real world is now wholly your personal assistants' problem. And you can afford to go through personal assistants like they were toilet paper.

Plus, these people are fucked in the head to begin with. I often make reference to Billionaire Personality Disorder, not because I'm joking but because I really believe it should be listed in the DSM. Seriously, why would anybody sane want billions of dollars?

I think BPD is mainly what accounts for the attitude of the non-billionaire toadies who work in these think tanks to do billionaires' PR bidding. I can't imagine anybody working in such a capacity unless they actually thought that billionaires were admirable by definition.
posted by flabdablet at 10:06 AM on September 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

Okay, let's say that's all true.

How is that any more hopeful? The vast majority of the planet's resources are in the control of people too stupid/crazy/blind/selfish/arrogant/insane to see that without their cooperation we could all become extinct, making everything they've ever worked for meaningless.

Raising awareness isn't going to change their minds; they've already been exposed to enough information about climate change to convince anyone but the dumb rubes who watch their right-wing TV networks. If they haven't done anything about it yet, now that the world is pretty obviously on fire and flooding, they're not going to do anything. Ever. And even if they did decide to, they're crazy, remember? They certainly can't be trusted with a project like de-terraforming the Earth if they can't grasp the science behind it.

And these are the people in charge of the future of humanity?

If this is what you truly believe, that climate change is both a soluble problem and an existential crisis, and that the people who have the resources to literally save the biosphere and all of humanity are too crazy and selfish and evil to do it...

Then we're just as screwed as if they'd given up.

The kind of change that it would take to depose the wealthy and powerful of the world, globally, and replace them with people who would selflessly use the resources to fight climate change would, I'd think, emit enough carbon and pollutants to make the effort moot. Wars are not good for the environment.

I truly don't know what people find reassuring about this 'the wealthy and powerful are not capable of thinking like human beings' theory.
posted by MrVisible at 10:27 AM on September 13, 2023

MrVisible that list of attributes perfectly describes the 7 Mountains Dominionists, the Catholic Integralists and the signatories of the (very anti climate change response) the Manhattan Declaration SPLC link, a theocratic pact between the above plus the Eastern Orthodox Church.
posted by unearthed at 12:27 PM on September 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

Agreed somewhat MrVisible: We need powerful people to choose to reign in fossil fuels, meat, etc.

It's clear however that conflicts differ dramatically in their ecological footprint. Yes, modern warfare aims towards force projections for imperial conquest, which burns considerable oil. I'd think popular uprising could emit way less CO2, which admittedly sounds pretty unlikely. Yet, there were like 25,000 protestors blocking a motorway in the Netherlands last weekend, so by no means impossible.

We anyways do not require all nation to have their fossil fuel elites gain sense or be deposed. There are only 750 oil refineries in the world so any sufficiently powerful nation could temporarily stop everyone else refining, which likely slows down coal. And good strategy could make this not so temporary. It's very hard to make people stop eating meat of course.

In fact, we've no real evidence that individual societies could choose to forgo so much energy, hence many folks place their hope in peak oil, like Nate Hagens maybe. An authoritarian government who could suppress consumption maybe inherently unstable.

We're not so doomed as Tim Garrett projects though, because human culture remain extremely adaptable. We could decide that fossil fuels, meat consumption, and maybe large scale trade, are acts of war so heinous that any response is proportional.

We'd have a period of violence where some nation play to win power through more oil, while others play merely to just stop oil, but then we hopefully internalize the limits imposed by these new international norms.

It's better than rabbits, dear, etc who depend upon predators to control their numbers aka consumption.

Anyways..

One environmental activists killed every other day in 2022

One key driver of violence is green extractivism: "extraction of rare earth minerals used in the production of electric cars and wind turbines."
posted by jeffburdges at 12:44 PM on September 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

Slightly a tangent: the deeply problematic TTRPG Werewolf: The Apocalypse is fundamentally a game of supernatural eco-terrorism, in which the players fight to prevent a group of supernatural nasties serving the Wyrm from destroying the ecosphere with pollution and environmental devastation. It's about as subtle as an episode of captain planet.

AND YET: the 'burn the planet' think tank is called Atlas, and now ScoMo's pentecostal cult is now talking about the Green Dragon.

Makes me want to turn into a giant raging death carpet, is all. We're not supposed to be the parody, but I think this universe IS the parody. Or maybe, the mockery- we're the twisted mirror world, except sadly lacking in eyepatches, goatees, and BDSM gear as casual wear....
posted by LeRoienJaune at 12:51 PM on September 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

I truly don't know what people find reassuring about this

I'm not trying to reassure people. I'm trying to encourage people to demand, organize and and vote for wealth taxes that make staying a billionaire impossible.

Billionaires can only be billionaires because we let them. We could just decide not to, then stop.
posted by flabdablet at 12:54 PM on September 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

Billionaires can only be billionaires because we let them. We could just decide not to, then stop.

When you put it like that, it sounds easy.

But the wealthy and powerful are indeed wealthy and powerful, and they don't want to give up their power or wealth.

So they deploy stuff like global multi-billion-dollar public relations campaigns to keep themselves in power. (Plus private armies, entire despotic regimes, that sort of thing.) Now, given the knowledge that it takes to create an effective campaign like that, and the money it takes to run one, the wealthy and powerful could have made a huge dent in the climate change problem over the course of the past four decades or so, if they thought it was a soluble problem. That would have been much better public relations than the PR campaign.

If billionaires thought climate change was soluble, the PR campaign would be unnecessary.
posted by MrVisible at 1:35 PM on September 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

Again, it’s not that billionaires don’t think that climate change is soluble. It’s that they don’t personally like or benefit from the solution that is best for the rest of us.
posted by eviemath at 1:48 PM on September 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

Or, they don't think it'll work, and they've got other uses for their resources.

Oops, I guess we're saying the same thing.
posted by MrVisible at 2:02 PM on September 13, 2023

Uh, no. Unless you have a very different usage of “will work” than me (for me, “will work” means will avoid the worst outcomes of climate change).
posted by eviemath at 4:09 PM on September 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

That's the definition I'm using too.
posted by MrVisible at 4:23 PM on September 13, 2023

We need to come to terms with the fact that powerful people will never choose to make the changes needed to both mitigate the present and coming climate change effects and prevent worse ones from happening, because it will require their power to be destroyed. The ecological crisis is a social crisis [pdf].

The best models we have active today are the Zapatistas, StopCopCity, and likely a bunch of others I don't know about.
posted by Grimp0teuthis at 5:02 PM on September 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

This post is reminding me... my old job is organizing this:

https://www.endfossilfuels.us/

It's this Sunday, September 17th in NYC at 1pm. I know there are a lot of mefites living in or near New York, the more of us who can go, the better.
posted by subdee at 5:14 PM on September 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

The idea that nothing can be done about the status quo so we have no realistic option but to accept it? That's a specific and deliberate line of billionaire PR spin.

Bemoaning the effectiveness of anti-reality PR while amplifying it is a weird look.

PR is nasty toxic evil stuff, but it can only do so much. A concerted grass roots driven campaign against smoking tobacco made a huge dent in tobacco sales over the last forty years despite the best efforts of exactly the same people now responsible for anti global warming PR. It happened where enough ordinary people got it together to install political representatives who made it happen. We can do and are doing the same thing against global warming. I see no reason to assume that we couldn't do it for wealth taxes as well.
posted by flabdablet at 9:49 PM on September 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

Oh, I'm not saying nothing can be done.

I'm saying, billionaires lie. They have to be good at lying to be billionaires. They have teams of professional liars at their disposal. So you can't tell anything from what they say except what they want you to think.

You have to watch what they do. And they're acting exactly as I'd expect them to if they believed climate change isn't a soluble problem. They're spreading propaganda to keep the issue as confused as possible, gathering vast hoards of resources, doing research on survival in hostile environments (like an uninhabitable Earth), setting up networks of communication satellites, and building bunkers.

So I think we should be asking ourselves if billionaires should be the only ones to survive this. I'm all for billionaire survival, whatever gives the human race a shot at getting through the loss of our home biosphere, but I'd like to see a broader representation of humanity survive.

Just because the ship is sinking doesn't mean we can't build lifeboats. And if the wealthy and powerful are building them already, maybe we should be thinking about what the rest of us can do to survive the conditions they seem to be expecting.

Because things are not looking good for our plucky species at the moment:

Mouse Lung Structure and Function after Long-Term Exposure to an Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Level Predicted by Climate Change Modeling

Conclusion:

The results of our study clearly demonstrate that long-term exposure to a level of atmospheric carbon dioxideCO2
predicted by the most up-to-date climate change models can negatively impact lung structure and function in female mice. Although the effects we saw were modest, there were biologically relevant impairments in a range of lung structure and function parameters. These trends may have progressed to statistical significance if we had continued our exposure for a longer period of time or had a larger sample size. Importantly, our results show that early life is a time that is particularly susceptible to the effects of increased atmospheric carbon dioxideCO2 exposure, with mice commencing exposure as adults showing no adverse effects. Further studies are required to tease out exactly when the most sensitive window of exposure is. Our data suggest that, in this mouse model, the period in which the lung is undergoing rapid growth and alveolarization is particularly important. Regardless, these data suggest that moderate elevations in atmospheric carbon dioxideCO2 cannot be dismissed as insignificant in terms of their direct effects on health. Our data provide the rationale for further exploration of this phenotype. Future research is needed to assess whether long-term exposure to moderately increased carbon dioxideCO2 also negatively impacts other organs that have previously been shown to be impacted by short-term, high-level carbon dioxideCO2 exposure (e.g., the brain, kidneys, and bones). It is our opinion that with atmospheric carbon dioxideCO2 increasing 2 to 3 parts per million per year2–3 ppm/y, it will not be long until a level is reached that is directly detrimental to human health. Thus, continued research in this area and increased effort in curbing carbon dioxideCO2 emissions are both urgently required.

posted by MrVisible at 10:37 PM on September 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'm saying, billionaires lie. They have to be good at lying to be billionaires. They have teams of professional liars at their disposal. So you can't tell anything from what they say except what they want you to think.

You have to watch what they do. And they're acting exactly as I'd expect them to if they believed climate change isn't a soluble problem.

And I'm saying, billionaires are delusional. They have to be delusional to be billionaires. They have teams of professional enablers propping up their delusions. So you can't tell anything from what they do except what they're deluded about.

You have to understand what they believe. And they're acting exactly as I'd expect them to if they believed that their own personal immortality is not only achievable but justifiable: there must be in-groups whom the laws of nature protect but do not bind, alongside out-groups whom the laws of nature bind but do not protect.

Just because the ship is sinking doesn't mean we can't build lifeboats.

The ship isn't sinking, it's in danger of becoming stranded on an endless mudflat because its engines have boiled off the ocean. We don't need lifeboats, we need to shut the fucking engines down and hoist the fucking mainsail.
posted by flabdablet at 11:24 PM on September 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

That billionaires are preparing for an outcome with more significant climate change does not mean that an outcome with less climate change/disaster is impossible. It just means that billionaires don’t want the better climate outcome or don’t think it will be as beneficial to themselves, and/or are sufficiently insulated from reality to be discounting future negative impacts in their reasoning. Because billionaires, like all humans, reason emotionally and are influenced by cognitive biases.
posted by eviemath at 5:46 AM on September 14, 2023

And I'm saying, billionaires are delusional. They have to be delusional to be billionaires.

Okay. So the wealthy and powerful are all insane, which is a consequence of being wealthy and powerful. Anyone who becomes wealthy and powerful becomes insane, and specifically insane in a way that makes addressing climate change anathema to them.

That means that climate change leadership is impossible. That no-one, no country, no leader, no corporation, no government, can help solve climate change.

As soon as we replace the current crop of wealthy and powerful with ecologically educated, globally motivated, honest, straightforward, forthright, upstanding and self-sacrificing people, they'll be corrupted too and we'll be back where we started.

The whole 'the wealthy and powerful are all coo-coo-pants crazy' theory doesn't really offer up a lot of hope. Plus, you know, it's at odds with the fact that while most of the wealthy and powerful throughout history have been assholes, they're generally not full-on lunatics, nor are they prone to full-on lunatic behavior.

So, what's driven the wealthy and powerful of the past few generations insane? Why are they all acting like climate change can't be solved? Why is funding a gargantuan multi-billion-dollar public relations campaign to confuse people about climate change such a common symptom of their insanity?

And... let's say all of the wealthy and powerful are insane, and it's impossible to be sane while wielding vast wealth and power. What action items does that leave us? How do we solve climate change under those circumstances?
posted by MrVisible at 5:51 AM on September 14, 2023

Yeah, MrVisible is right and we should all just give up and bow to his superior wisdom.
posted by ambrosen at 5:53 AM on September 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

That billionaires are preparing for an outcome with more significant climate change does not mean that an outcome with less climate change/disaster is impossible.

No, it just means that the people with the best access to resources and information, the people who fund studies and universities, the people who can make experts drop everything and come and brief them on whatever they like, have given up hope that it's a soluble problem.

The people who control the resources aren't going to focus them on solving climate change. They're going to try to keep themselves alive.

It just means that billionaires don’t want the better climate outcome or don’t think it will be as beneficial to themselves, and/or are sufficiently insulated from reality to be discounting future negative impacts in their reasoning.

Which looks, to the external observer, exactly the same as if they don't believe climate change can be solved and they're trying to work out how to survive on a planet that's gone fully feral.
posted by MrVisible at 6:07 AM on September 14, 2023

10 Billionaires Stepping Up to Fight Climate Change. Doesn't include Bill Gates or George Soros.

I've no idea if more billionaires are realists or deniers about climate change. But it's not true that all billionaires are climate change deniers.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 6:31 AM on September 14, 2023

Oy. We are going around in circles here. For the third time: billionaires aren’t insane, nor have they “given up hope that it’s a soluble problem” (with preventing significant climate change and significant negative impacts to much of humanity being the ‘solution’ in this context); they have a different preferred outcome than the rest of us. The climate change outcomes that prevent the worst negative impacts for most people are feasible, but are not the outcomes that will most benefit billionaires; thus they are not the outcomes that billionaires are (in general) working toward. Some/many billionaires are actively working against the outcomes that would most benefit the rest of us because they think those outcomes in fact are feasible, and they don’t want them/they prefer different outcomes.

That understanding has important implications for what actions the rest of us should take.
posted by eviemath at 8:04 AM on September 14, 2023 [6 favorites]

Some/many billionaires are actively working against the outcomes that would most benefit the rest of us because they think those outcomes in fact are feasible, and they don’t want them/they prefer different outcomes.

That.
posted by flabdablet at 9:49 AM on September 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

I think the wealthy have decided that humanity as a whole can't coordinate enough to combat climate change, and Malthusian collapse is inevitable. So they're stripping society for parts and investing in ways and places to ride it out, hoping they'll be the only ones left. Having placed their bets, they are now doing whatever they can to make their bets pay off. So from my point of view, the only moral thing to do is bring Malthus to the wealthy.
posted by hypnogogue at 10:23 AM on September 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

There are at least 2,640 arguments for a guaranteed annual maximum wage of oh, say, $100, 000 per annum. Or let them be the first Martian colonists, for that matter. On their dimes.
posted by y2karl at 11:12 AM on September 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

Okay. So the wealthy and powerful are all insane, which is a consequence of being wealthy and powerful. Anyone who becomes wealthy and powerful becomes insane, and specifically insane in a way that makes addressing climate change anathema to them.

“And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.”
― William Gibson, Count Zero
posted by FatherDagon at 8:51 AM on September 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

Last time I counted there were eleven copies of the Fraser Institute in Canada, all taking anonymous donations, and all are non-profits who pay no taxes. Canadian taxpayers are subsidizing a foreign-run propaganda campaign within our borders, while our opposition parties demand a government inquiry into Chinese influence.

If environmentalists were running think tanks with that kind of clout, you'd hear the screams of outrage all the way to Nunavut. Governments here would convene a special inquiry... oh, wait, they already did that.
posted by sneebler at 6:03 PM on September 16, 2023 [3 favorites]