Naomi Oreskes's Reading List

"Quite a lot, as anyone who reads the book will see. It’s absolutely fascinating on a number of levels. First, we have a famous, articulate and politically astute novelist taking up the issue of climate change. I think that’s extremely important because one of the arguments that Amitav makes in this book, which I agree with one hundred percent, is that for too long this problem has been discussed as scientific question; it’s mostly been covered by science journalists and written up in the science pages of the newspapers. But it’s fundamentally no longer a scientific question. The science—the key scientific issues—have been resolved now for a long time, but it’s a political question because we have to do something about it. It’s an economic question because it has to do with how we run our economies based on fossil fuels, and it’s also a deeply historical question. Amitav looks at the long history of fossil fuel exploitation and the way it’s linked to colonialism and post-colonialism, and to make the argument that if we’re going to fix this problem, we have to understand the larger historical, economic, and social context as well. The book is also an explicit call for humanists—writers and authors and novelists and others—to become engaged and think through: How did we get into this situation? And how do we get out of it? And as Amitav says, it’s a kind of derangement. We’re on a path that is going to lead to tremendous destruction—what has just happened this week in Houston and Mumbai and Barbuda is exhibit A—and yet most of us are going about our lives as if nothing particularly special is happening. And, as we know, American politicians are going about their lives still in many cases in denial about the basic framework of this problem. You’re right, I only said exhibit A in the sense that it’s the most obvious and immediate right in this moment in American life. But, of course, you’re absolutely right. We’ve had Superstorm Sandy, Hurricane Katrina, the Russian fires of a few years ago, and the European heat waves of 2003, not to mention the recent floods in South Asia. There have been all kinds of incidents where we have seen what I call the human face of global warming. We’ve seen how climate change is already impacting people—causing damage and causing death—but somehow we don’t assimilate that. This is the point that Amitav Ghosh is calling ‘the great derangement’, that there is something frankly deranged about having all these things happening in front of our faces that are terrifically costly—both in terms of monetary damages and impacts on people’s lives—and yet somehow we don’t connect the dots. As you say, we could call this exhibit F and we have not connected the dots from A to B to C to D to E to F and also, I would say, to ExxonMobil and all of the fossil fuels companies that even today are continuing to explore for still more oil and gas reserves. That is a kind of craziness."

"It is a very dark book and, by recommending it, I’m not suggesting I necessarily agree with everything in it or even necessarily agree with his ultimately bleak assessment, but I do think it’s an extremely important book. I say that for two reasons. I think he’s fundamentally right about the essential point, which is that we have a tremendously difficult time assimilating just how serious this problem really is. For that reason, I think that there’s a tendency for many people—even people who accept that this problem is real—to say that ‘well, we’re going to fix this, we’re going to get out of this mess.’ I’ve certainly seen this among climate scientists. I’ve heard many of them say out loud in so many words, that they are afraid to say how bad the situation is lest it causes people to shut down. So, there’s a sort of truism that prevails in the climate community that if you tell people how truly awful it is then they won’t listen. This came out particularly in the past summer. I don’t know if you saw an article in New York magazine about the worst-case scenario for climate change could, and a lot of climate scientists got upset. There was a whole twitter feed arguing that this was bad strategy. The scientists weren’t really disputing the facts, although a few of them thought that the journalist got a couple of things wrong — and I do think he got a couple of things wrong — but mostly they were just afraid that people wouldn’t listen to a message that negative. I think that there’s something problematic there. On the one hand, we can all get it that if the message is too bleak then perhaps people will shut down – that’s a legitimate and valid concern – but, on the other hand, if it really is that bad then think about it: if you go to the doctor and you have terminal cancer with only three weeks to live, most of us would like the doctor to be straight with us so we could get our affairs in order and figure out what to do with the time left. I think that if we’re not honest with how serious this situation is, then we can’t get our affairs in order, and we can’t figure out what to do. We don’t have the sense of urgency that we need to have, because we really don’t have a lot of time left; we are a bit like that terminal patient. The time is running out, and I don’t think that most Americans have a clear sense of that. “There’s a very big elephant in the room: the long history of organised systematic climate change denial” Roy has done something very important by putting on the table just how bad this could be. He may have slightly exaggerated, but consider how many articles and books and newspaper reports understate the threat. Again, I wrote a paper a few years ago in which we showed that scientists had in fact been actually underestimating the threat of climate change. Considering how much underestimation there is, I think it’s a useful corrective to read a book that is may be overstating the case — but possibly not. People need to take that perspective on board and take it seriously."

"What I really like about Dale and Bonnie’s book is that it’s about the human face. They’ve told us stories that help us imagine what it could be like living in an altered future where, essentially, there’s nothing left that isn’t built or controlled by humans. I think it’s a great book for helping us to think through what climate change could mean for our future and what kind of life we might be living in the future if we don’t get this situation under control. I think it’s a brilliant book to teach with or for a book group, because it’s such a good book to stimulate a conversation about why the authors have told these particular stories, why they they chose these stories to tell. All of the books I have chosen are about grappling with the meaning of climate change. This is something that scientists don’t like to talk about. In fact, its something they are not equipped to talk about because that’s not really what science is about and it’s not how scientists are trained to think or talk. And yet if we want people to take climate change seriously, they need to understand what it means. And I don’t just mean economically or in terms of hurricane intensification but what it means for our lives. That was the motivation that led Erik Conway and me to write The Collapse of Western Civilisation , to get a sense of what’s really at stake here and – again, like Roy’s book – how bad this could really be. In The Collapse of Western Civilisation we were trying to get at the political meaning, not just in the sense of climate change denial but what massively disruptive climate change could mean in terms of its threat to liberal democracy. So, all these books in different ways are getting at meaning."

"In some ways, this book gets back to your first question about how we came to be in the situation we’re in. It overlaps with the work that Erik Conway and I did in Merchants of Doubt to identify the ideological underpinnings of climate change denial. You’re right that this book is quite different from the others in tone and topics, but again it’s about meaning. One of the things that Erik and I argued in Merchants of Doubt was that many of the people who deny climate change believe — and I think in some cases authentically so — that they are defending freedom. What we showed in our work was that the climate change deniers that we studied were resistant to accepting the scientific evidence of climate change because they feared that it was going to be used as an excuse to expand government and limit personal freedom. That motivated them to downplay, discount, and ultimately deny the scientific evidence of climate change. But they really did think that they were protecting freedom. And, this, on some level, is the story of 20th century neoliberalism—or at least its founders. It’s the story of a group of thinkers who wanted to place individual liberty and freedom at the centrepiece of their ideological thinking and also at the centrepiece of economic theory. Otherwise, they argued, we’re on the slippery slope to socialism. or as Friedrich von Hayek called it ‘ the road to serfdom .’ “You work because you believe that if you get the factual information clear, explain it well, and make it available, then people will respond in a rational way. For scientists to discover that’s not true has been shocking” Angus Burgin’s book is relevant because I want to argue that these people who apply those arguments to climate change have got it upside down. They think they’re defending freedom but, in fact, they’re putting freedom at risk. At the end of the movie version of Merchants of Doubt , we argument the following: think about American society or European society, think about any liberal democracy, what are the conditions under which we consider it acceptable for the government to force people to leave their homes, order martial law, and order the national guard to come in? The answer is in one of two situations: warfare and natural disasters. We take it as routine now that in the case of a natural disaster the government has the right – even the obligation – to order evacuations to protect people for their own good. This is an extreme loss of freedom. So, there’s a deep irony here. The people we studied worked with the tobacco industry because they didn’t think that the government should regulate tobacco because they didn’t think that the government should protect people from themselves; they thought that people should make up their own minds about whether to smoke cigarettes or not, or ride a motorcycle without a helmet, or anything else. They thought that any time that the government begins to intercede, even if it’s for your own good and even if it’s to protect you from the harms of tobacco, you’re on the slippery slope to socialism. But now look where we are with Hurricane Harvey in Texas. Of course, the government is intervening to protect people because actually that’s what most people think should happen — including most conservatives and Republicans. But now imagine a future where Hurricane Harvey isn’t an unprecedented terrible catastrophe but a frequent, normal thing. One can picture a situation where troops are mobilised to go in wherever they’re needed, and where people are not just relocated temporarily but permanently. A situation in which governments begin to say ‘you can’t live in the Texas gulf coast anymore or you can’t live in the Louisiana gulf coast anymore because it costs too much money to protect you. So, we’re going to make you move. We’re going to move you to Austin or we’re going to move you to Salt Lake City.’ In our science fiction dystopia The Collapse of Western Civilisation , this is what China does: it moves three hundred million people away from coastal areas. We wrote that as a sort of fantasy — a sort of ‘what if?’ scenario — but as climate change unfolds we begin to see it’s no longer a fantasy. Governments may forbid people from living in certain places that are simply too costly to protect. What’s happened to your cherished personal freedom then? It’s gone. You don’t even have the basic right to decide to live where you want to live."

"I chose this book for a couple of reasons. As you said, the politics of climate change is a difficult and dark subject and none of the books I have chosen so far is exactly an upbeat read. So, it is helpful in all this to find a way to keep a sense of humour. It’s not always easy but Tom Toles does that. And, of course, satire can be one of the most effective means of communication. So, I thought it would be good to add something that – even though it’s a very serious book in some ways – is also not as hard and difficult as the other books. It also connects back to Amitav Ghosh’s point: that this whole situation is pretty much insane. One of the brilliant things about Tom Toles’ cartoons is that he shines a light on that and he makes people realise how really crazy some of the things that climate change deniers say are and how crazy some of the things they do are. I could go on for hours lecturing about some of these things but with Tom Toles’ cartoons you get it in an instant. Because the politics of denial is so closely linked with the world of post-truth, post-facts, and alternative facts. Climate change deniers didn’t invent the phenomenon of alternative facts — that goes back to the 1930s and the origins of public relations and mass marketing media and, the tobacco industry had a lot to do with that. And there’s a fine line between advertising, disinformation, and alternative facts. That’s part of the point of the paper that Geoffrey Supran and I just published on ExxonMobil. A lot of ExxonMobil’s disinformation was published in the form of advertorials – advertisements presented in the form of an editorial – made to look as if they were discussing factual matters. This is partly why those advertorials were so damaging. The seemed to be making factual claims, but actually they were promoting disinformation. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The problem of disinformation and the blurring of boundaries between fact and fiction is a central in our society today. Many people want to say how horrible Donald Trump is — and, of course, I do think he’s horrible — but Republicans have been saying that climate change is a hoax for fifteen years or so. And even the ones who didn’t say it was a hoax had been disparaging, downplaying, and discounting the scientific evidence and saying ‘it’s not really that bad and we can adapt, and don’t worry the technology will rescue us.’ There’s been organised denial in the Republican party for a long time and that’s a pretty scary state of political affairs. I think this is what Michael Mann is referring to when he talks about it driving him crazy. It’s really hard as a scientist, when you’ve dedicated your entire life to try to understand the natural world and to articulate factual information as best as you humanly can, working incredibly hard at that and participating in mechanisms designed to help people identify factual information like the National Research Council or Royal Society panels or the IPCC. You work at these activities because you believe that if you get the factual information clear, explain it well, and make it available, then people will respond in a rational way. For scientists to discover that that’s not true has been quite a shocking state of affairs. And especially because people of our generation — Mike and I are of a pretty similar age — grew up in a time where governments did accept scientific information and did use it to do things and make policy. We now see a reversal where science is deeply disparaged. It’s at the point now where people aren’t shocked anymore, but we should be shocked. It’s a shocking state of affairs. It does make you despair a bit because if people won’t even accept the factual information, how are we supposed to have a reasoned conversation about different potential remedies? I was raised to think that you could disagree with somebody but still respect them, and you could have a reasoned conversation about the best approach to, say, ending the Vietnam War or the best approach to ending racial discrimination. When I was growing up, nobody I knew would say that racial discrimination wasn’t a real thing. We all agreed that it was real and bad; the question was a strategy and tactic question about how best to address it. Now you have people who won’t admit that climate change is even a real thing, much less that it’s bad. What does that do to democracy? How can you have an informed debate when people are in denial about the facts of what’s happening in the world around us? I think that’s what Mike and Tom Toles are referring to when they talk about damaging our democracy and driving us crazy. I think it’s already changed for the better in most places in the world but not the United States. I see the US as an anomaly. I travel all around the world and see a green technology revolution taking place. It’s quite amazing what’s happening in many places with the incredible uptake of renewable energy technology and a really rapid decline in the price to install solar and wind electricity just in the last five years. I think there’s tremendous grounds to be optimistic, particularly when you look carefully at what’s been happening and you can see the drivers of these changes and there’s been some very good work done partly by colleagues at MIT. It’s been a question of what’s driven the fall in the price of, say, solar photovoltaic technology in the last few years? And the answer is that it’s a combination of technological innovation and policy. The right policies send clear signals to the marketplace that then encourage the private sector to commit and really work on these things. When you get the right policies in place, the private sector can step in and make a difference. That’s not happening in the United States right now. The policy signals are in the wrong direction, with Donald Trump pulling out of the Paris Agreement and saying he wants to expand coal development and increase offshore drilling for oil and gas. But elsewhere in the world, in many places, the signals are much better. The United States is the single biggest producer of greenhouse gas emissions from a historic standpoint and one of the top emitters from a per capita standpoint but, nevertheless, about eighty percent of emissions now don’t come from the United States. So, if all the rest of the world gets on board and addresses this issue, the world as a whole could largely solve this problem. I think if the world moves forwards, I’d like to believe – I have to believe – that what’s going on in the United States right now is a temporary aberration. A lot of people are saying that maybe it’s a last desperate gasp of a number of retrograde tendencies in American culture. I hope that’s true. I don’t think any of us really know, but if the world moves forward then one of two things will happen: either the United States will get on board, or it will be left behind. If it is left behind, then that will be sad because America has made great contributions to the world, but if that’s what happens then that’s what happens. At one point I started planning a book project about solutions — what it would look like to fix this problem — and I imagined the story would take place in Korea because South Korea is a very innovative country. But my husband said to me, Naomi, if the solution takes place in Korea then Americans will not view that as a happy ending. I realized he was right. I think it’s easier right now to imagine a happy ending that is not centralised in the United States, but I also think that a lot can change in a few years. I don’t think the situation is hopeless — I don’t take Roy Scranton’s view — but I do think it’s very serious and more deeply serious than most people have acknowledged."