“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…”
Carl Sagan’s nightmare vision has arrived, with a big boost from Big Fossil.
Peter Sinclair in Midland Daily News:
In 1982, scientists at oil giants Shell and Exxon informed corporate leadership of what they called the “clear scientific consensus” that continued burning of fossil fuels would raise global temperatures, with “catastrophic” (their word) consequences.
For a brief moment, leadership in the fossil fuel industry paused to consider the consequences of their business model, even installing equipment on supertankers to monitor carbon dioxide changes over the oceans.
But then something changed.
The fossil fuel leadership made a conscious decision to destroy America’s confidence in scientific fact and data.
While the industry was hardening oil production facilities against the extreme storms and sea level rise they knew were coming, they simultaneously set out to undermine public belief in science and scientists.
To find out how to do that, Big Oil looked to corporations that had already done it successfully — like Big Tobacco.
The key tactic was to seed doubt about climate science, and science in general, in the public mind.
A memo from the Brown & Williamson tobacco company showed the way, “Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing controversy.”
Fossil fuel interests used a playbook written by the PR firm Hill & Knowlton for the Tobacco industry — to “make people doubt what is true, and lose a sense of what’s not.”
This comprehensive and psychologically sophisticated program, informed by the most advanced techniques of persuasion, was spread through print, television, radio, and more recently, utilizing powerful internet algorithms, to target weaknesses we may not even know we have.
Big oil spread bits of disinformation, crafted for a media personality to reel off in seconds, but which might take a real scientist hours to unpack.
Media outlets were more than happy to elevate “the other side” of climate change — placing PR flacks on equal footing with reputable scientists. Setting up a phony “debate” meant much less pressure on journalists to do their job and find facts.
The fossil fuel industry’s plan worked. This summer, we read the results in headlines nearly every day.
Last week, four “1-in-1,000 year” weather events rocked various parts of the US.
Michigan is again suffocating this summer as even “God’s Country” in the north is shrouded in toxic wildfire smoke.
Effective action on climate has been delayed for decades, while changes in the atmosphere have locked in processes that will change planet earth for the next 10,000 generations. But there has also been collateral damage.
When they went after the credibility of the United State’s science crown jewels, NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and NASA — they also eroded American’s respect for the whole scientific enterprise.
Now, with the fossil fuel industry firmly in control, we are seeing a wholesale dismantling of the scientific infrastructure that puts America on course to an idiocracy. Not just scientists who forecast weather, and model climate change — but researchers across the gamut from biology to physics.
Younger scientists in particular are impacted — not just agency researchers, but graduate and even undergraduate programs that support the pipeline for future researchers.
Just as the recent Texas flood impacts were worsened by firings at the National Weather Service, public health has been degraded by the spread of doubts about vaccines, and now the elevation of the nation’s most prominent anti-vaxxer to cabinet level.
Not coincidentally, our country is currently seeing the worst outbreak of measles since the disease was declared eliminated in the US 25 years ago, and with lower rates of vaccination in many states, experts fear a resurgence in scourges like Polio.
In 1995, astronomer Carl Sagan clearly envisioned this moment when he wrote “I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues.”
He warned that Americans “unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true” were primed for “a kind of celebration of ignorance.”
Under Trump, and Project 2025, Sagan’s nightmare has arrived.
Yup, it’s happening. 2026 and 2028 can’t come soon enough.
Unfortunately the Democrats typically leave in place almost the degradations Republicans have rendered.
They invariably make big noises and publish very progressive budgets when they have no power to pass them, then do almost nothing when they do have it. Except for Bernie, AOC and a few others—the Squad has been reduced by money backing Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians—the Democratic rulership and most officials are still refusing to embrace the progressive agenda that would probably put them back firmly in power, in all 3 houses with a supermajority.
But what makes you think there will even be elections in ‘26 and ‘28?
With all the Terminator movies, and the warning about turning over A.I. to Skynet, I would have thought that the general political Zeitgeist would be a little more careful with things like A.I. and climate change. Man, was I wrong. But even warnings like those from Carl Sagan were ignore so, apparently, we are nothing more than a bunch of dumb monkeys. Remember this though the next time you watch a Planet-of-the-Apes movie.
I share your concern about A.I. + military, but I don’t think human-operated fighters and drones and missile batteries have such a good track record themselves. Attacking weddings and aid convoys, plus the disgusting practice of sending a second strike to hit the people who run to help those hit in the first strike (like domestic bombers who set off a second bomb to kill the first responders), has me wondering how much worse a non-emotional decision can be.
I think things get worse when A.I. defines the bad people as those beyond the weddings and aid convoys, to those people who instigated the violence. The USA + Israel see themselves as a boy scouts on the world stage. The A.I. may not agree.