Beating Back the Harbingers of Doom
How to roast Chicken Little for dinner
Progressives need bad news to advance their change agenda.
Conservatives need bad news to restore past practices.
The Media need bad news to make a profit.Pity that the news keeps getting better.
I have spent the last six weeks wintering in Manila. Not once has the electricity been cut. Public transport and services are improving across the city of 17 million, waste is better managed and wealth is starting to be more evenly distributed among an emerging middle class. After 38 years of coming here, I have even started drinking the tap water. Sure, the chaos of the Philippines is nowhere near Singapore’s safety (curious if strict punishments like caning for petty crimes would ever change this place) but everything here is a lot better than five years ago.
And I see similar improvements everywhere.
Air pollution levels are declining in Europe as efficiencies expand and advances in filters and scrubbers curb emissions.
Food safety and quality improve as technologies deliver and processes improve.
Food security is more guaranteed as farmers improve yields and the food supply chain integrates to address stress points.
Public health quality has developed as long-standing diseases are prevented, treated or managed.
Impacts from transportation, communications and waste are lower as infrastructures continually improve, particularly in large urban regions.
Energy markets and infrastructure has guaranteed a constant stream.
Green spaces and forests are returning and inland waters better managed.
And this has taken place despite a global pandemic, hot wars and the economic fallout from fiscal constraints.
There are surely challenges (increasing populations, declining resources, a warming climate, biodiversity threats) but researchers, innovators and entrepreneurs are more than meeting these challenges with timely solutions. We are living longer, healthier lives, with more wealth and prosperity (and no longer just in the Western urban areas).
So why, on almost every metric, are people so negative and critical about the state of our existence? Why are activists allowed to spread malinformation that tries to undermine the success of innovators and entrepreneurs? Why is no one correcting those campaigners who want us to believe the air quality is worse, our food is killing us, we’re sicker than ever before and biodiversity is collapsing. All of this is pure bullshit, but as it is being repeated by enough influential people, it has defined our narrative.
By framing all of these “failures” under the umbrella of climate collapse (earth’s vengeance), activists are able to dismiss any human advances under one massive, fictive apocalyptic cloud. The climate change campaign has become the ultimate meat grinder, bringing every possible activist issue into a single, irrefutable end of days prophecy. Humanity and the environment are being destroyed, the doomers argue, and their only solution is to stop capitalism (stop the innovators and entrepreneurs who have been providing the needed solutions). Given their funds, passion and networks, it is almost impossible for facts to counter these zealots, their double-speak and manipulative campaigns.
So this is more than simply a ‘glass half full’ vs a ‘glass on fire’ discussion. There is such a corruption of the narrative, a censoring of dialogue and a coopting of the media to make any discussion one-sided.
No Market for Good News
Since the days of yellow journalism, we have known that if it bleeds, it leads. The media is not responsible to report on reality especially as fear and emotion sell so much better. The reality is that there is no market for good news. The weather news reports on the storms, droughts and wildfires. Bumper harvests aren’t news while crop failures make the front page. Wealth creation is not celebrated but used to highlight those who failed to advance.
This race to the bottom has encouraged a widespread hypocrisy. The disaffected will yell into a waiting microphone about what they don’t have, and then use their expensive personal devices to share their footage of exclusion across their wide networks of supposedly disenfranchised communities. Activist NGOs campaigning against wealth, capitalism and non-transparency are pulling in millions in dark, undeclared donations from billionaires, their taxpayer-supported foundations and opportunistic tort law firms. They face no scrutiny or evaluation since their campaigns point us toward what they claim are greater evils. Up is down, in is out, and their green solutions (pro-organic, ban nuclear…) are anything but good for the environment.
Doesn’t the media have an obligation to report when the public is being misled, when the hypocrisy is widespread and when the consequences of activist campaigns could be devastating? The problem here is that such reports would be counter-intuitive and run against the prevailing Western narrative. Such stories would be welcomed like nails on a chalkboard.
To try to get people to see that NGOs who portray themselves as virtuously acting on our behalf are in fact captured interest groups willing to lie to keep their lucrative funding channels open;
… to try to get people to see that the chemical industry develops synthetic substances because they are more sustainable solutions;
… to try to get people to see that the fear and uncertainty are part of a coordinated strategy to undermine capitalism and trust in industry;
… to try to do any of this would be doomed to failure, invite the wrath of activist zealot attacks and alienate most news organizations’ readerships.
It is almost as if people want to believe that natural is always better, that organic farmers do not use pesticides, that industry will constantly cheat, that tech companies spy on you, that NGOs are acting out of kindness and that regulatory scientists are all in the pocket of industry.
It is too difficult to push against this capitalist conspiracy narrative especially if riding the wave of outrage will sell more ink. So it doesn’t matter if none of it true. If people continue to want to believe something, the truth does not factor at all in the equation.
OK Doomer
This is becoming really dark. My apologies. I’m told I need to be more pleasant and positive, especially when my impulse is to start yelling at people and using the S-word. So what can we do to try to stem the success of these harbingers of doom?
We need to continue to show the corruption in the activist movements. People with strong, passionate beliefs do have a conscience and while the nastiest groups work hard to discredit anyone who shines a light on their rot, if enough people are repeating the information, they may think twice about working with the zealots. Hardcore activists like Carey Gillam are perhaps too jaded to notice (or care) that her Environmental Working Group (EWG) pay check comes from dark-funded special interests, but maybe some young scientists will see that and walk away.
We need to take the news organizations to task when they amplify bogus fear campaigns. I set up The Firebreak to create a means for the media to be held accountable and shine a light on the money, special interests and corruption behind much of the environmental health campaigns being disguised as news. This is important as such trash stories are often lazily reposted by other news wires. The recent EWG snooker claiming that chlormequat levels were showing up across America at dangerous levels (and two working days later, a law firm just happened to file a class action lawsuit against the company EWG was targeting) was widely ridiculed. If this is done consistently and relentlessly, responsible news companies will think twice before going down the EWG rabbit hole again.
And ridicule is the final word. Many of these fear campaigns are so wildly ridiculous that they are just begging for satire but we are often too polite or too fed up to bother to call out the perpetrators. But giving the liars free rein to spread their nonsense just makes their stupid claims seem believable. Yesterday a salesperson in a cosmetics shop wanted to reassure me that the product was safe because it was natural and organic. I suspected this kind, innocent person truly believed this so I took several minutes to correct her. If everyone with a high-school level of science did the same, perhaps that silly narrative would lose its teeth.
If we continue to ignore the nonsense going on in activist campaigns and parroted in the media, then sorry to say, we are truly screwed.