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https://www.facebook.com/groups/254937244865308/permalink/2685821065110235/?ref=share&mibextid=NOb6eG

“”James Greenberg
“Climate denial didn’t begin with Donald Trump, and it isn’t simply the product of people who don’t understand science. It is older, more organized, and far more intentional than that. Long before climate change became a partisan battlefield, it had already been mapped by corporations, lobbyists, and political strategists who learned that you don’t have to win a scientific argument to win time. You only have to create enough friction that action stalls.

The early phase of denial was blunt: climate change is fake, scientists are lying, environmentalism is a plot. But as the evidence became impossible to ignore, the strategy changed. Today, the dominant approach isn’t to deny the problem—it’s to delay the solution. The rhetoric now sounds reasonable: “Yes, the climate is changing, but the models are uncertain.” “Yes, it’s serious, but it’s too expensive to fix right now.” “Yes, it matters, but China must go first.” This is how denial survives long after it stopped pretending to be science.

One of the most common distortions begins with a familiar half-truth: “The climate has always changed.” It has—but never at the speed or global scale now being measured. Past transitions took thousands of years; we are racing through one in a century. Natural cycles don’t explain that. Industrial emissions do.

For many people who accepted earlier denialist narratives, the appeal was never just ignorance. It was a way of preserving a moral world when the facts threatened identity. That remains true. But delay now performs the same function more subtly. It concedes the reality of the crisis while insisting that action must wait: until technology improves, until the economy stabilizes, until someone else moves first, until a future that never arrives.

The most important shift in the politics of climate change is that its fiercest opponents no longer need to argue that global warming is a hoax. They only need to argue that meaningful action is impossible—too expensive, too disruptive, too unfair. The message is different; the outcome is the same.

In corporate boardrooms, courtrooms, and regulatory agencies, outright denial became harder to sustain, so the strategy evolved. Instead of attacking the science, it now attacks the feasibility of responding to it. The new denialism is more polished and more institutional. It speaks the language of concern while obstructing every credible response. It no longer says “climate change is fake.” It says “we need more research,” “technology will solve this later,” “adaptation is enough,” or “we can’t afford to act.” The goal is not persuasion. The goal is paralysis.

This tactic is not new. In the 1980s, Exxon’s own scientists modeled global warming with unsettling accuracy. Their internal projections from the late 1970s match observed warming better than many peer-reviewed studies from the same period. Yet that knowledge did not produce leadership. It produced a risk-management strategy: treat knowledge as liability. In an extractive economy, uncertainty becomes a resource.

That logic soon migrated to policy, media, and law. When the Trump administration scrubbed climate language from federal websites, barred officials from using the term, and slashed research funding, it was not a dispute about evidence. It was a governance strategy—disable the institutions capable of responding to the crisis, and the crisis becomes unmanageable by design.

Today that strategy is sophisticated and networked. It includes legislation drafted by fossil-fuel lobbyists, litigation designed to stall renewable projects for years, and a media ecosystem that treats delay as prudence. These tactics succeed not by persuading the public, but by shaping the institutions that allocate risk, cost, and responsibility. State legislatures preempt local climate action. Fossil-fuel companies publish glossy sustainability reports while expanding extraction. The language sounds reasonable. The purpose is not.

Even the concept of the Anthropocene has been conscripted into this effort. What began as a geological hypothesis—the idea that human activity has left a permanent mark on Earth’s stratigraphy—has become a cultural narrative that spreads responsibility across everyone equally. In that framing, climate change is the work of “humanity,” not the corporations and political systems that extracted, burned, and profited from fossil carbon. If everyone is responsible, no one is accountable.

That is the logic of delay: it acknowledges the harm, but refuses the urgency. It treats time as the solution when time is the problem. It promises action later: after the market adjusts, innovation matures, or politics calm down. Caution becomes justification. Complexity becomes excuse.

We have seen this playbook before. In the 1950s, tobacco companies didn’t need to prove cigarettes safe. They only needed to manufacture doubt long enough to keep people smoking. The fossil fuel industry learned from that model and refined it. You don’t need to defeat the science. You only need to convince people that certainty isn’t possible yet.

And the strategy has worked. Even after record heat, Arctic wildfires, megafloods, and smoke drifting across continents, policymakers treat climate action as discretionary. Delay is not neutral. It preserves the flows of capital, energy, and authority that define the existing order even as the climate destabilizes around it. We behave as though delay is the middle ground. It is not. It is a decision—and the one most likely to make every future option worse.

The question today is not whether people “believe” in climate change. Belief is the wrong metric. The real question is whether knowledge can still compel action when power is organized to prevent it. The science is settled. Time is not. Every year spent waiting is a choice—not a pause.

The atmosphere does not negotiate. The carbon budget does not care about elections or cultural conflict. And the future will not distinguish between those who denied the science and those who accepted it but refused to act. Delay is simply denial carried forward in time.” “”