Who Started a Rumor that Climate Change Is a Hoax?
And why?
Barbara Kingsolver’s 2012 novel Flight Behavior is an alarm bell that still rings, about how climate change threatens the monarch butterfly’s habitat and ultimately, its existence.
But screaming in the background of this book is a growing popular view that climate change is a hoax. We know now, in 2021, that this belief was engineered. But who would jeopardize the natural world on Earth to plant this hoax, and why?
In Kingsolver’s book, Dellarobia talks with the scientist, Ovid, who has come to her neighborhood to study and protect the monarch butterflies. She worries why people like her “husband, guys on the radio”, are complacent about climate change. “They say it’s not proven. … Why would people buy snake oil when they want medicine?”
Ovid says, “Fifteen years ago people knew about global warming … they would all answer: Yes it exists; it’s a problem — conservatives or liberals, exactly the same. Now there is a divide.”
Today I was curious about what happened in America to discredit this science, and found a report from 2017 in the New York Times. Here is an excerpt.
Those divisions did not happen by themselves. Republican lawmakers were moved along by a campaign carefully crafted by fossil fuel industry players, most notably Charles D. and David H. Koch, the Kansas-based billionaires who run a chain of refineries…
Kingsolver should have the last word because I have to believe it’s stronger than the Kochs’ disinformation. In the book Dellarobia is speaking about the monarchs:
They were so beautiful, that was the thing. The hardest work was to resist taking comfort.
I say, we must resist being ok with this. It can be changed.
Great comments Deda. I am reading this book right now.