Compared to Climate Denial, Qanon Is Benign

...the right surrendered a generation ago, when it embraced climate change denial...

By Cory Doctorow / Pluralistic

"Serious" figures on the right say that the presence of an open Qanon conspiracist in the GOP Congressional caucus represents a crossroads for Republicans: does the party support reality-based policies, or will it surrender to unhinged conspiracies?

Says John Quiggin: the right surrendered a generation ago, when it embraced climate change denial: "all the governments in the world, backed up by every major scientific institution, were advancing a fraudulent theory of global warming."

This position wasn't merely something party bosses threw at low-information voters, either: the intellectual, libertarian wing of the party, like Cato's Pat Michaels, advanced an explicit, conspiratorial account of the climate emergency.

" … it’s not the science determining how much it’s going to warm. A lot of people don’t know this, but it happens to be true, and you know, we could speculate as to why that paper was published right before the 2016 election? I wouldn’t want to impute causation, but gee …"

"So now, the academy roots for anything that is big government that it feels it can tie onto to maintain this relationship. The roots of political correctness, there are many, manifold and varied. But one of them certainly was the enslavement of the academy."

As Quiggin points out, climate denial is far more consequential, unhinged and reality-denying than Qanon. Qanon, stop the steal, etc at least posit that there's a conspiracy in service to a massive, ambitious goal, stealing a nation or a planet.

"By contrast, Michaels wants an equally expansive conspiracy with tens of thousand of participants (including lots of rightwing governments), whose object is – the establishment of an emissions trading scheme?"

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Lead image credit: Yen Strandqvist/Chalmers University of Technology