Orwell Watch: On Bill Gates and Climate "Denialism"

Global warming is so powerful, it reversed the meaning of "conspiracy theory"

In the process of writing “Bill Gates Says We’ll Survive Climate Change, World Furious” the other day, I was forced down an interesting rhetorical rabbit hole, but it was too much of a mouthful for that article. The issue however came up again in the new America This Week, as Walter and I discussed Animal Farm. A sign from above! So, returning to the theme:

First, I misused the word “optimism” in describing Gates’s conversion on climate. As the Microsoft co-founder is a monopolistic reptile-whore of the highest order who smells money through his flickering tongue, never budging except in the direction of more profits, my guess is Gates reached a real “tipping point,” in which his climate advocacy had finally become too large of a pimple on the chin of Microsoft’s business model. Amid efforts to lock down the AI-generation equivalent of OS, his old firm will need the energy footprint of a small star. “It turns out humans will survive!” in that sense just feels like a follow up to other cheery posts about next-gen nuke plants.

Nonetheless, Gates and other climate activists have always issued caveats in fine print suggesting warnings like “We have 12 years to live!” weren’t meant to be taken literally, because (as the New York Times just put it) “even the most dire forecasts don’t predict… the end of civilization anytime soon.” As was the case with Covid, tariff catastrophe and other issues, a lot of modern press rhetoric is designed to inspire unmitigated terror. This eliminates phrases like, “Very bad, but…” Things are either total disasters or not.

One fascinating way of doing that has been to reverse the concept of “conspiracy theory.” Once, you were a socially unacceptable kook if you believed in invisible connections between the Bildeburgs, Rothschilds, the CIA, and whatever else you’d read about. You know, like Michael Moore being the Bush administration’s bullhorn:

Ironically, Moore would get a taste of the new conspiracy theory concept when he later produced a movie that questioned the environmentalist movement. He became an exemplar of a new word, one which rendered Gibson-style kookdom upon those who didn’t absolutely believe in things:

DENIALISM: Barely used until this century, it spiked in the middle 2010s.

Denialism’s ascent was due almost entirely to the global warming issue. If you look at the graph above you’ll see a spike in the early 2000s, which appears related to a handful of books and articles, mostly about denial of the Holocaust. But the term really took off with the 2009 publication of Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives, by New York Times author Michael Specter:

Future themes not just of media campaigns but efforts to tackle “science denialism” through censorship were present in this book, which Specter explained grew in part out of a dinner party encounter: