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Fox News is the a major barrier to that happening. There are those on the right that believe in climate change and think that we need to take action but they a

Fox News is the a major barrier to that happening. There are those on the right that believe in climate change and think that we need to take action but they are vastly underrepresented on Fox. With that being the case most Republican voters will believe that its a worldwide leftist conspiracy and few Republican politicians will dare defy this orthodoxy. That's why we have Republican congressional leaders saying things like people can't change the climate only God can (Inhofe), that sea level rise is caused by rocks falling into the ocean, and that increasing atmospheric CO2 levels are the result of more people exhaling. Short of one of Murdoch's children changing the Fox line, only losing elections will change this behavior.

claydavisss 8y ago
Welcome to HN, where we switch from damning Google for supporting censorship at home or in the PRC...to suggesting that banning a TV network is a precondition for saving the world.
- thinkcontext 8y ago
  Nowhere did I suggest banning. I said it was a barrier to change because it ill informs its viewers.
soundwave106 8y ago
The issue here is that this more or less blames the messenger and not what I see as the root cause. For a long time (1980s-2000s for sure), major fossil fuel companies and other extraction industries -- famously ExxonMobil and Koch Industries (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_cont...), but quite a bit of others as well, have spent a lot of time funding and backing climate change denialism. The extraction industries tended to align to the Republican side, so these scientifically unsound opinions have tended to trickle up through conservative think tanks (eg Heartland Institute) and eventually down to the populist outlets (like Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and the like). It does seem like that some of the oil companies are kind of weakly coming around to the fact that climate change is not something you can simply misinformation away. Maybe the lawsuits against extraction companies (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/mar/20/can-climate-litigation-save-the-world https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/mar/20/can-clim...) are helping here. Regardless, it is not nearly enough to me at the moment. This is the pipeline that needs to be shut off in order for the message to be clearer on the right wing side in America. Unfortunately, the concept of climate change denial has taken hold on the "conspiracy theory" side of American politic, so the concept is going to be floating around out there for a while (there are 18th century conspiracy theories still active after all). But what I'd hope to see if the extraction industry misinformation stops is that the more rational side of conservative American politics realize that this is a problem. Unlike most of Europe, it is difficult to think of many conservative politicians and personalities in the United States who are not denialists. (Arnold Schwarzenegger's one of the few I can think of immediately that is strongly convinced that climate change is a huge problem.)

claydavisss 8y ago

Welcome to HN, where we switch from damning Google for supporting censorship at home or in the PRC...to suggesting that banning a TV network is a precondition for saving the world.

thinkcontext 8y ago
Nowhere did I suggest banning. I said it was a barrier to change because it ill informs its viewers.

soundwave106 8y ago

The issue here is that this more or less blames the messenger and not what I see as the root cause. For a long time (1980s-2000s for sure), major fossil fuel companies and other extraction industries -- famously ExxonMobil and Koch Industries (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_cont...), but quite a bit of others as well, have spent a lot of time funding and backing climate change denialism. The extraction industries tended to align to the Republican side, so these scientifically unsound opinions have tended to trickle up through conservative think tanks (eg Heartland Institute) and eventually down to the populist outlets (like Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and the like). It does seem like that some of the oil companies are kind of weakly coming around to the fact that climate change is not something you can simply misinformation away. Maybe the lawsuits against extraction companies (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/mar/20/can-climate-litigation-save-the-world https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/mar/20/can-clim...) are helping here. Regardless, it is not nearly enough to me at the moment. This is the pipeline that needs to be shut off in order for the message to be clearer on the right wing side in America. Unfortunately, the concept of climate change denial has taken hold on the "conspiracy theory" side of American politic, so the concept is going to be floating around out there for a while (there are 18th century conspiracy theories still active after all). But what I'd hope to see if the extraction industry misinformation stops is that the more rational side of conservative American politics realize that this is a problem. Unlike most of Europe, it is difficult to think of many conservative politicians and personalities in the United States who are not denialists. (Arnold Schwarzenegger's one of the few I can think of immediately that is strongly convinced that climate change is a huge problem.)