I’m going to open my paper with a spoiler. You might say I’m opening with the punchline something no performer should ever do. But if you get nothing else from my hot air today, you can at least savor the six-word wisdom which I’ve pinched from one of the world’s most famous banker – turned – poet, T. S. Elliot.

TS Eliot wrote: “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”

Yes, you heard that right.

“Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”

So there you have it. The spoiler, the punchline, the thread of my talk. You all can sit back, relax, listen or snooze, for the next 20 minutes while I share with you how I reached the same conclusion as Elliot.

Not long ago, a board member of Ten Strands asked if I would be willing to read a book that shook her up, called Unsettled. What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters.

If the book could shake up this avid funder of environmental causes, then it was likely to challenge my thinking as well. I had read practically nothing written by anyone who questioned the human causation of climate change.

The author of Unsettled, Steven Koonin, had been President Obama’s Undersecretary for Energy. He recounts how his own firsthand research, after he left office, eventually led him to conclude, astonishingly, that humans have had a very small impact on the climate. He argues, for example, that the tiny particles emitted by burning fossil fuel, especially coal, actually have a beneficial cooling effect by blocking the sun’s rays. My knee-jerk reaction was to dismiss him, but some of the facts he cited caught my attention and seemed worth considering.

Curious about the thought process of the “other side”, I picked up another book, False Alarm, written by climate skeptic, Bjorn Lomborg. His audience is populated by climate crisis deniers who believe it is their God-given right to burn as much fossil fuel for as long and as fast as they wish. He not only casts doubt on climate change proponents, but he cleverly questions the science of climate modeling. He convincingly asserts that changes in climate can be explained by a number of natural aberrations such as: sunspots, unusual solar activity, and shifting magnetic poles. He even questions the accuracy of standard temperature measuring devices which have been used by scientists all over the world.

My head was spinning after reading Unsettled and False Alarm. I felt my commitment to being a critical thinker challenged. Those books made me ask if I was becoming one of those successful, white, old men (SWOM) who sticks religiously to the same, comfortable sources of information. Is it possible that I had become unaware of new scientific discoveries and evidence that refuted what I had come to believe about climate change? Was I like all those true believers 600 years ago believing Ptolemy’s worldview that the majestic planet Earth was undeniably the center of the universe? Would I have rejected Galileo’s simpler, more elegant explanation of the night sky when he used science to show how the sun was at the center and many planets orbited around it, including Earth, the third rock from the sun?

I have become more and more curious about how, and why, we tenaciously hold onto our beliefs. So I decided to explore the psychology behind our belief systems. How are they formed? Why do we live and die clinging to beliefs and positions that are familiar but not necessarily true? Are we all truly interested in “The whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”? Probably not.

Nearly a hundred years ago, Jean Piaget[1], a Swiss psychologist specialized in children’s cognitive skills. He wrote about how our early brains process our experiences, constructing pathways unconsciously into a labyrinth of neural networks helping us to interpret and understand the world. Modern science has built on his work.

As we grow up, out conscious psyche expands these neural networks into systems of interpretation, storage, and retrieval. Our brain processes and organizes incoming information and gives priority to familiar information over anything that is unfamiliar or contradicts what we already know. So, our beliefs become reinforced. Gradually these patterns solidify into what can be called our worldview, the lens through which we filter everything we hear, see and experience.

So. We humans have an unconscious mind and a conscious mind, and they frequently interact. My unconscious mind could be described as an Amazonian jungle, teaming with symbiotic and competitive relationships. Poisonous snakes slithering along tree limbs, silently devouring innocent creatures. Beautiful plants like the cobra lily tricking insects to follow the alluring aromas deeper into the plant, only to become the cobra lily’s feast. Flowers blossoming, titillating pollinators into sexual frenzies. Animals dying. Scavengers tearing out their organs, maggots eating their guts and fungi decomposing the remains.

Oops. Just got sidetracked in my unconscious jungle. Which reminds me of a story. An expedition of 10 explorers are hacking their way through nearly impenetrable jungle. At the end of the week, they have covered the length of two football fields. They are tired, hungry, lost, and frustrated. One of them decides to shimmy up a palm tree and look out over the canopy. The others on the ground hear him cry out: “Wrong jungle!”. The leader of the expedition shouts back up to him: “Shut up! We’re making progress.” Sound familiar?

Now getting back to my own jungle of unconsciousness, I need to make some progress here if I’m going to finish this paper on time.

So I’ve been asking myself: What are the common traits of our unconscious psyches? They can be unruly. Dangerous. Full of impulses deriving from fear, envy, distrust, rivalry, guilt, unruly sexual impulses, and the drive to hold an unchallenged worldview.

That’s the unconscious mind. The conscious mind, however, operates very differently. My own conscious mind resembles not an Amazonian jungle, but the Amazon Fulfillment Center.

In my brain, workers drive forklifts to the portals of my eyes and my ears. They load up thousands of pallets of information every second and deliver them to my mind’s foreman. He scans the QR codes sending the information to the right shelves, ready for retrieval when needed. Growing older, my foreman has gotten wiser about discarding irrelevant pallets, keeping only those that add coherence and integration to what’s already there.

Sigmund Freud, early in the twentieth century, postulated the existence of mechanisms in our psyche that maintain our sense of self, and protect us from spurious stuff that can knock us off track. He called these protective unconscious forces, “defense mechanisms”. Denial happens to be one of those powerful mechanisms which protects our conscious minds from anxiety producing thoughts and feelings. It can manipulate our sense of reality to keep our worldview intact, despite information to the contrary. Information that is too scary to accept gets automatically filtered out. Confirmation bias accepts as the truth, information supporting our worldview, and rejects information that contradicts it. Our memory becomes selective. Remember our banker – poet friend T. S.Elliot who concluded, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality[2]”.

Denial of reality. Sounds silly, but it is an undeniably powerful force. Just look at one recent example in popular culture today, the movie, Don’t Look Up in which Leonardo DiCaprio plays an astrophysicist whose research team has discovered, with the help of a telescope, thank you Galileo, an asteroid the size of Manhattan, on a collision course with Earth. Despite incontrovertible evidence, and countless witnesses, no one in government, the press, or the public at large, will believe his warning. Eventually, people do see the approaching asteroid flaming across the sky, getting closer and closer. But by then it’s too late to save planet earth.

I find it ironic that Don’t Look Up was skunked at the Oscars and had very poor attendance despite its star cast and big production budget. Critics said no one wants to see a blunt, bombastic, scary movie about the end of the world. Yet, hundreds of horror movies have been blockbuster successes. Don’t Look Up was too real, too close to home. It made audiences uncomfortable watching people who choose going to their own deaths rather than challenge their comfortable conviction that life just goes on. When given information that could save the planet, everyone turned their backs put their heads in the sand and said “Shut up. We’re making progress.” Still sound familiar?

As you all know, I’m an educator. Last year I turned my teacher’s gaze on myself wondering how good a critical thinker I actually am. How open minded am I? One tenet of being a critical thinker is you must gather evidence from sources that are diverse and even contrary. I examined my information sources. NPR, New York Times, the Atlantic, CNN, MSNBC the BBC, the Guardian, and the Chron. They all skew toward a worldview aligned with a liberal, rather than conservative, political mindset. In the end, I gave myself a D minus on diversity of information sources.

Reflecting on this failing grade, I began listening to news sources unfamiliar to me, like Fox’s Brian Kilmeade Show, The Fox News Hourly Update, the Fox News Rundown, the Nation, the Intercept, and the first 5 minutes of the Shawn Hannity Show. What did I learn? Well, I noticed all these sources didn’t outright say climate change was happening from natural causes. Cleverly, and consciously or unconsciously, they focused on how unbearably costly it would be to transition away from a fossil fuel economy. They said a world economy simply could not function without coal, gas or oil. They accused the rich nations of not caring about the developing world since a future without fossil fuels would prevent them from moving into the industrial age, keeping them in third world status. They celebrated fossil fuels continued dominance over renewable energy.

So, my worldview was being challenged, and as I beat back my defense mechanisms, my worldview expanded, a little, taking in some points from a conservative political mindset. But I couldn’t shake my doubts around how those stories cast the fossil fuel industry in such a positive light.

Another facet of being a good critical thinker is to investigate where the sources you rely on are getting their information. The conservative media sources sound like mouthpieces of the fossil fuel industry. In the interest of profit, corporate executives use psychology, advertising, and their own research reports to promote their worldview: Fossil fuels have nothing at all to do with climate change. Any apparent causation was merely correlation.

Whether purposefully or innocently, the conservative media report on the messages that these fossil fuel corporations want the public to receive.

The fossil fuel industry isn’t the first industry to spin the truth to make a buck. In fact, the fossil fuel industry’s denial strategy is straight out of the playbook of the tobacco industry. Beginning in the late 1940s, tobacco companies devised a wildly successful, though deceptive media campaign to keep smoking popular as long as possible despite the ever-mounting medical evidence that smoking kills.

Let’s take a closer look. Suppose you began smoking when its popularity blossomed during World War Two. Let’s say you’ve been smoking a pack and a half a day. And then, in 1953, the Sloan-Kettering Institute publishes a report about how cigarette tar painted on the skin of mice caused cancers that subsequently killed them. The media widely publishes news of the report, warning smokers.

The people most alarmed by the newspaper and television reports were the tobacco industry executives! They moved fast to protect their jobs, their bonuses, their profits, their empire. On December 15, 1953, the presidents of Phillip Morris, US Tobacco, Benson and Hedges, and American Tobacco met at a hotel in New York City. They invited a guest, John Hill, the CEO of America’s most effective marketing firm, Hill and Knowlton. They hatched a marketing scheme so heinous it would be proven in court decades later, to be conspiracy to commit fraud. Other tobacco giants joined in.

Together they set about to convince the public how the media had overblown the dangers of smoking. They proclaimed over and over and everywhere, “There is no sound scientific basis supporting the sensational accusations in that report.” They established the Tobacco Industry Research Committee which published its own report casting doubt on the overwhelming evidence linking cigarette smoking to cancer and creating the impression of controversy.

The “smoking is safe” campaigns ramped up even more vigorously after the first warning from the Surgeon General in 1964. TV ads stayed on the air until 1971, when they were finally banned, but advertising continued on transit signs and billboards, at sporting events, concerts and even in cartoons. Finally in 2009, Congress granted some limited authority to the FDA to regulate tobacco products.

The tobacco companies kept smoking popular and glamorous for over 5 decades, long after Phillip Morris’s first “Marlboro Man” had died of lung cancer. Smokers rationalized away that ironic death with their worldview, adopted from the tobacco companies, that smoking was safe and “that could never happen to me” outright denial.

What does this tobacco industry intrigue have to do with energy companies? They copied the PR brilliance of the tobacco companies. They have built a communications empire capitalizing on confirmation bias and denial, too. In the bestselling book Merchants of Doubt, the authors detail how Exxon scientists first discovered in the 1950s how fossil fuel burning was altering the atmosphere’s chemistry by pumping carbon dioxide into it. Rather than releasing those findings, Exxon hired, guess who? Hill and Knowlton, the same firm employed for decades by the tobacco industry.

Hill and Knowlton designed mis-information campaigns for the fossil fuel industry. They filled the airwaves selling the romance, status, convenience, the necessity, and even the inalienable right to drive a gasoline powered car. They convinced much of the pubic it was laughable to even think something as small and harmless as a human being could possibly harm something as immense and inexhaustible as the earth’s atmosphere. Funding from the fossil fuel industry created and supported “public interest” groups whose sole goal was to cast doubt on the possibility that human activity could have global repercussions. Organizations like the Heritage Foundation sent free flashy classroom books to 200,000 teachers for use in their science curriculums to discredit any notion of human responsibility for the degradation of earth and its atmosphere.

The fossil fuel companies’ campaigns covered up their responsibility for climate change. They possessed the motivation, resources and resolve to remain very profitable and paid dividends to shareholders for the last half century. Just as the push for renewables was making some headway, the energy companies are back with a vengeance, taking advantage of the wide-open playing field with oil shortages caused by the sanctions on Russia in the wake of its invasion of the Ukraine.

Another essential aspect of critical thinking around climate change is to evaluate the accuracy of predictions made by environmental advocates. Here are a few.

Going all the way back to 1798. Thomas Malthus wrote An Essay on the Principle of Population[3] in which he projected population growth would outstrip earth’s ability to provide the necessary food supply resulting in mass starvation unless population controls were implemented.

Two centuries later, in 1970, Paul Ehrlich confidently declared, “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make…The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”

In 1996, Richard Smalley, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, said "Unfortunately, oil production will likely peak by 2020 and start declining[4].” 

Malthus was utterly wrong, since free enterprise greatly increased the food supply as the population increased. We have not seen the high starvation rates Ehrlich predicted. And we’re nowhere near peak oil production[5].

These predictions were so wildly off base because prognosticators fail to include the critical component of human’s ability to adapt through innovation. Reflecting on those failed predictions has shined a light on my own denial.

Critical thinking, as you can see, requires an appreciation of language and how it is used. The media often use amped-up descriptives and skew a story to appeal to their audience, whether human causation believers or the completely different audience of nonbelievers. The media cares most about winning eyeballs. Whomever they belong to.

But, when I hear “unprecedented in recorded human history,” that really gets my attention. Take the diminishing Sierra snowpack as reported in 2021. It was the lowest ever recorded[6]. The California Water Resources Control Board said January and February were “the driest… on record.” That is undeniable. It hits me right between the eyes.

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So, here we are. You have my opening punchline and my 20-minute wind up. Here’s my wind down and take away.

As I age, I don’t want to be naïve and lulled into automatically agreeing with a point of view coincidentally consistent with my own. I’ve learned a lot from my exploration about the defense mechanisms of denial and confirmation bias and how they work subconsciously to filter out nonsense and terrifying information. Left unchecked, those mechanisms can fog our minds to recognizing any ideas that challenge our worldview, that stifle truth and reality. And I for one want more of both.

I’ve come to the end of my time. And what have I learned? What can I conclude? I’ve discovered that to learn and grow as a whole human being I need to be open to everything. Not just the beliefs and ideas which I find most comfortable. I’ve learned I want more truth, more reality in my life and I want my eyes wide open. Which means to be exposed to a diverse variety of friends and information sources. I’ve learned that I’m not as well informed as I thought I was. In fact, the older I get the less I know and in fact, I have more questions than answers. But I still lead with my love of life and my passion for the education and environment. And ultimately, my love for this fragile precious third rock from the Sun we call home.

I opened this talk with T. S. Elliot who said, “humanity cannot bear much reality.” I close with a quote from a contemporary of Elliot’s, the Austrian poet, Rainer Maria Rilke who wrote in his Letters to a Young Poet:

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer[7].”

So I raise my glass to all of us and to fully “living our questions”.

Thank you.

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[1] Jean Piaget: https://www.verywellmind.com/piagets-stages-of-cognitive-development-2795457

[2] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/13681-humankind-cannot-bear-very-much-reality

[3] Thomas Malthus https://www.supersummary.com/an-essay-on-the-principle-of-population/summary/

[4] The Completion of the Oil Era: The Economic Impact, Carlos A. Rossi, 2010

[5] http://peakoilbarrel.com/

[6] https:/www.mercurynews.com/2022/02/28/sierra-nevada-snowpack-disappearing-after-driest-january-february-in-recorded-history-third-year-of-california-drought-all-but-inevitable

[7] René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke Letters to a Young Poet, https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/717-be-patient-toward-all-that-is-unsolved-in-your-heart

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