How Climate Change Misinformation and Apathy Helped Trump Win

People don't say the world is ending all the time. Religious conservatives do. That's what they don't see. I grew up in a religious conservatives community and pretty much every Democratic president was labeled the anti Christ, heralding the end of days. Saddam was also the devil who was gonna end the world, and Arafat, and Osama, and Benihana, etc

More and more it's clear to me that many people don't think at all. What do you get with a culture who lives paycheck to paycheck, undervalues education, and overvalues social media? You get a people who only care about right now, and have no vision for the future.

It's not that they don't care I think. It's more that the human brain is not very good at understanding and visualising massive things (be it numbers, space, complex systems, etc).

We're really good at gathering and communicating information though, which helps us make sense of the world.

The big problem is that we allow people's opinions to have as much weight as data and facts. So when you have data and facts about climate change presented at the same level as climate denialism, most people don't really see the difference when it comes to the weight of the data vs the opinion of some guy.

It's almost like some people benefit from withholding information, controlling the narrative, and having a public with low critical thinking.

Part of what they are saying is that they distrust mainstream media sources. Which if I were to rephrase as the for-profit media that aims to maximize engagement regardless of the long-term effects upon the user, would that help it become more understandable? The media lies, some portions of it more than others, and even when it tells the truth it does so in a manner that is highly skewed towards maximizing their profits.

And then the whole "people say" gets even worse, because who vets those people? During the pandemic, literal doctors were prescribing Ivermectin and telling people to avoid the vaccine, and there was a huge conspiracy theory about Dr. Fauci.

Normal people can't understand the science on their own, are too busy with their lives to learn, and also they simply don't want to. But they're not entirely wrong - you really can't trust what "people say" (e.g. they also say to buy crypto) - and that germ of truth is what helped sell the lie.

i.e. the disinformation peddlers were quite strategic in predating upon our weaknesses, where "news" would do things like talk about Donald Trump nonstop, which gave him millions of dollars of free publicity, and helped him get elected (the first time I mean, but probably also the second).

So "we" are not blameless here either, if we turn a blind eye to the faults on one side and simply would rather blame "the other side" as if that were all that were needed to explain the entirety of the situation. That is a comforting lie, an "alternative fact" if you will. I may not have explained this well, but I hope you see what I was trying to say.

I think there's definitely an element of "the people in charge know what to do", or that it's a transient problem, not one which locks us into effort for centuries.