Climate Change Deniers versus Climate Change Decriers: The Pragmatics of Climate Defense in the Age of Disinformation

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:Analyzes the sociolinguistic dynamics of climate communication, useful for scholars studying ESG discourse and disinformation.

🏛政策担当者:Highlights how well-intentioned decrying can backfire; regulators should consider disinformation in climate policy design.

Thirty-five years ago, Bill McKibben published his best-selling popular depiction of climate change, The End of Nature . Nearly a decade ago, Naomi Klein’s global best-seller This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate presented her detailed case for why: “thought leaders” must resist and reverse the degradation of Earth’s climate in the face of denials that this policy change was impossible. This gambit presumes when presented with disturbing facts on how and why rising fossil fuel use is degrading the climate, like-minded readers will wisely rise, readily organize, and rationally stop such destruction. Both authors have thriving careers as “thought leaders,” but the gamble that informative writing would inspire game-changing decisive actions has backfired. In fact, the intensity of their climate change decrying for millions of “action laggards” is often twisted into disinformation to justify climate change denying. Nature has not ended, and climate change has not changed everything. Costly climate disasters are increasing, but habits of embedded symbolic action tied to moralistic decrying suggest McKibben and Klein now play new roles as traders in the networks of disinformation. In today’s ESG-guided climate politics, major energy companies nod appreciatively to climate change decriers, pledging future perfection at carbon reduction in contrite climate change denialist exchange for sustaining their carbon emissions. This is a puzzle. Are answers to the puzzle to be found in Klein’s latest book, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World , which explores to what degree everyday life now is not engaged with the natural world? Instead, denial and disinformation seem to ensnare many in “trips into the Mirror World” where sustainable degradation produces “digital doubles” of fulfilled future pledges of true sustainability in the 24x7 attention economy underpinned by the falsehoods of current concentrated carbon intensity.

• semanticscholar https://doi.org/10.32855/1930-014x.1061first seen 2026-06-29 08:11:31