The Climate Industry’s Misdirection Campaign - Highlighted Article

From: Breakthrough Institute - Substack

By: Jessica Weinkle

Date: May 3, 2024

The Climate Industry’s Misdirection Campaign

“If you could control someone’s attention,” asked the famous pick-pocket Apollo Robbins in a 2013 TED talk, “what would you do with it?”

Well, you may use it for misdirection — or the ability, as Robbins described it, to hold an audience’s attention intensely on one thing to distract them from some other thing. It is how a thief, as he demonstrated, can remove a watch from your wrist even as you focus on your hand.

Misdirection is as much a skill of the gentleman thief as it is of politicians and the media, which, in our era of short attention spans and constant flow of information, collude to create what journalist Mark Leibovich once called a “culture of distraction-mongering.” Our individual and collective attention has been artfully focused away from what is going on right in front of us.

We watch a constant flow of reporting on climate change: elite research publications drive media storms — and careers; the IPCC puts out reports with easily downloadable images and flashy movie trailers; weather-tainment channels offer a constant play-by-play on temperature stats; public tensions rise over insurance affordability; anxious youth plaintiffs take to the courtrooms; and the seasoned American political leader, John Kerry, decries the “demagoguery” that impedes progress towards net zero emissions and puts “the whole world at risk” of planetary destruction.

But what we don’t see — what most simply cannot see because it is too deep in the weeds of footnotes, methodological assumptions, and researcher professional networks — is how, behind all this noise, the climate industry is quietly pilfering the legitimacy of our institutions of knowledge and democratic governance. (continue reading)

The Climate Industry’s Misdirection Campaign