The article in the url below is making a nuanced distinction between "climate denial" and "climate dissonance." The author is arguing that we have progressed (or should that be, regressed) from denial to dissonance and that this shift is consequential because it captures the gap between what corporations are now promising, and what they are delivering (now or into the future):
"… this basic phenomenon, in which powerful people make climate pledges that turn out to wildly outrace their genuine commitments, has now become so pervasive that it begins to look less like venality by any one person or institution and more like a new political grammar. The era of climate denial has been replaced with one plagued by climate promises that no one seems prepared to keep."
In other words, the author is acknowledging that few corporate leaders can now get away with ignoring climate change or not at least pretending to do anything about it. The trouble is that this denial has been replaced with promises to act that remain essentially meaningless:
"For years, when advocates lamented the 'emissions gap,' they meant the gulf between what scientists said was necessary and what public and private actors were willing to promise. Today that gap has almost entirely disappeared; it has been estimated that global pledges, if enacted in full, would most likely bring the planet 1.8 degrees Celsius of warming — in line with the Paris agreement's stated target of 'well below two degrees' and in range of its more ambitious goal of 1.5 degrees. But it has been replaced by another gap, between what has been pledged and what is being done. In June, a global review of net-zero pledges by corporations found that fully half of them had laid out no concrete plan for getting there; and though 83 percent of emissions and 91 percent of global G.D.P. is now covered by national net-zero pledges, no country — not a single one, including the 187 that signed the Paris agreement — is on track for emissions reductions in line with a 1.5 degree target, according to the watchdog group Climate Action Tracker."
But, because the embrace of apparent action is so comprehensive, the effect is to introduce ambiguity in the name of clarity:
"Five years ago, the stakes were clear, to those looking closely, but so were the forces of denial and inaction, which helps explain the global crescendo of moral fervor that appeared to peak just before the pandemic. Today the rhetorical war has largely been won, but the outlook grows a lot more confusing when everyone agrees to agree, paying at least lip service to the existential rhetoric of activists."
It seems we have entered a more dangerous phase (confirmed by the failure of the recent COP27 meeting), where we now kid ourselves that we are doing something, when we are no better off than before all these pledges were made. In fact, the author argues, we are worse off than during that time:
"Rhetoric this unmoored from reality is often called disinformation. It is also simply disorienting — especially given how many narratives have been layered over our picture of the post-warming future. … But even among those who take the inevitability of warming seriously, there's also a lot of normalization and compartmentalization, which allow many of the world's most privileged to regard climate suffering as distant, if tragic."
Kidding ourselves that we are doing something, it turns out, is likely worse than deliberately doing nothing:
"We nod our heads reflexively about proposals to plant a trillion trees, without realizing that doing so, as climate scientists like David Ho have pointed out, would set the carbon clock back by less than eight months at current emissions levels. (Plus, trees burn, unfortunately; last year, in fact, the carbon released by wildfires exceeded that released by any of the world's economies except the United States and China)."
Take care
David
David Chandler
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What's Worse: Climate Denial or Climate Hypocrisy?
By David Wallace-Wells
June 26, 2022
The New York Times Sunday Magazine
Late Edition – Final
14-15
