There are many complex reasons why people decide not to accept the science of climate change. The doubters range from the conspiracy theorist to the sceptical scientist, or from the paid lobbyist to the raving lunatic.

Climate scientists, myself included, and other academics have strived to understand this reluctance. We wonder why so many people are unable to accept a seemingly straight-forward pollution problem.

And we struggle to see why climate change debates have inspired such vitriol.

These questions are important. In a world increasingly dominated by science and technology, it is essential to understand why people accept certain types of science but not others.

In short, it seems when it comes to climate change, it is not about the science but all about the politics.

Risky business

Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s differing views on climate science were put down to how people viewed nature: was it benign or malevolent? In 1995 leading risk expert John Adams suggested there were four myths of nature, which he represented as a ball on different shaped landscapes.

1. Nature is benign and forgiving of any insults that humankind might inflict upon it and it does not need to be managed.
2. Nature ephemeral. Nature is fragile, precarious, and unforgiving and environmental management must protect nature from humans.
3. Nature perverse/tolerant. Within limits, nature can be relied upon to behave predictably and regulation is required to prevent major excesses.
4. Nature capricious. Nature is unpredictable and there is no point to management.

Different personality types can be matched on to these different views, producing very different opinions about the environment. Climate change deniers would map on to number one, Greenpeace number two, while most scientists would be number three. These views are influenced by an individual’s own belief system, personal agenda (either financial or political), or whatever is expedient to believe at the time.

However, this work on risk perception was ignored by mainstream science because science up to now operates on what is called the knowledge deficit model. This suggests that people do not accept the science because there is not enough evidence; therefore more needs to be gathered.

Scientists operate in exactly this way, and they assume wrongly the rest of the world is equally rational and logical. It explains why over the past 35 years a huge amount of work gone into investigating climate change.

However – despite many thousands of pages of IPCC reports – the weight of evidence argument does not seem to work with everyone.

No understanding of science?

At first failure of the knowledge deficit model was blamed on the fact that people simply did not understand science, perhaps due to a lack of education.

This was exacerbated as scientists from the late 1990s onwards started to be drawn into discussions about whether people believed or did not believe in climate change.

The use of the word ‘belief’ is important here, as it was a direct jump from the American-led argument between the science of evolution and the belief in creation.

But we know that science is not a belief system. You cannot decide that you believe in penicillin or the principles of flight while at the same time disbelieve humans evolved from apes or that greenhouse gases can cause climate change.

This is because science is an expert trust-based system that is underpinned by rational methodology that moves forward by using detailed observation and experimentation to constantly test ideas and theories.

It does not provide us with convenient yes/no answers to complex scientific questions, however much the media portrayal of scientific evidence would like the general public to ‘believe’ this to be true.

It’s all about the politics

However, many who deny climate change is an issue are extremely intelligent, eloquent and rational. They would not see the debate as one about belief and they would see themselves above the influence of the media.

So if the lack of acceptance of the science of climate change is neither due to a lack of knowledge, nor due to a misunderstanding of science, what is causing it?

Recent work has refocused on understanding people’s perceptions and how they are shared, and as climate denial authority George Marshall suggests these ideas can take on a life of their own, leaving the individual behind.

Colleagues at Yale University developed this further by using the views of nature shown above to define different groups of people and their views on climate change. They found that political views are the main predictor of the acceptance of climate change as a real phenomenon.

This is because climate change challenges the Anglo-American neoliberal view that is held so dear by mainstream economists and politicians. Climate change is a massive pollution issue that shows the markets have failed and it requires governments to act collectively to regulate industry and business.

In stark contrast neoliberalism is about free markets, minimal state intervention, strong property rights and individualism. It also purports to provide a market-based solution via ‘trickle down’ enabling everyone to become wealthier.

But calculations suggest to bring the incomes of the very poorest people in the world up to just $1.25 per day would require at least a 15 times increase in global GDP. This means huge increases in consumption, resource use and of course, carbon emissions.

It’s easier to deny climate change, than to deny our own ideologies

So in many cases the discussion of the science of climate change has nothing to do with the science and is all about the political views of the objectors. Many perceive climate change as a challenge to the very theories that have dominated global economics for the last 35 years, and the lifestyles that it has provided in developed, Anglophone countries.

Hence, is it any wonder that many people prefer climate change denial to having to face the prospect of building a new political (and socio-economic) system, which allows collective action and greater equality?

I am well aware of the abuse I will receive because of this article. But it is essential for people, including scientists, to recognise that it is the politics and not the science that drives many people to deny climate change.

This does mean, however, that no amount of discussing the ‘weight of scientific evidence’ for climate change will ever change the views of those who are politically or ideologically motivated.

Hence I am very sorry – but I will not be responding to comments posted concerning the science of climate change but I am happy to engage in discussion on the motivations of denial.

Mark Maslin is Professor of Climatology at University College London.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Brought about by the recent fall in oil prices, investors are beginning to review the economics of unconventional oil and gas. For the last few years there have been a number of damning reports about the economics of unconventional fossil fuels.

Now it seems those long-ignored observations are being taken seriously by the money-lenders of Wall Street.

John Maynard Keynes was one of the most significant economists of the Twentieth Century, whose observations still draw the ire of pundits and politicians today.

One of his better-known economic aphorisms was, “If you owe your bank a hundred pounds, you have a problem. But if you owe a million, it has.”

Sound advice, but what if you owe hundreds of billions? Then it becomes a problem for the whole economic system, not just the bank.

QE: Floods of funny money for fossil fuels

During the early 2000s a lot of Wall Street’s ‘funny money’, based around complex investment schemes, flowed into unconventional oil and gas developments. It was seen as the new ‘revolution’ in America’s energy system, and a new, politically approved path to energy independence.

When that funding stream collapsed, after the 2007/8 financial crisis, the number of drilling rigs operating in America collapsed too.

In the wake of the crisis the US and other governments instituted quantitative easing (QE) – in effect conjuring ‘free money’ from governments, given at near zero rates of interest to the major banks and finance institutions.

Problem was, in the wake of the crisis, there was little to invest all that ‘new funny money’ in. Throwing free money after bad, the US fracking industry mopped up a large wad of QE cash, and shortly after the number of drilling rigs in the US took off again.

Looking for a fast return, sections of the finance industry specialise in ‘high risk’ or ‘junk’ investments – which in America is reckoned to be worth $1,300 billion.

Over the last 10-15 years the global finance system has loaned the American unconventional oil and gas industry hundreds of billions of dollars. Today somewhere between $150 and $550 billion of those loans are considered to be ‘junk’.

The fracking Ponzi scheme exposed

Now, as oil prices fall, the precarious, Ponzi scheme nature of these investments is being exposed – although the basic facts were made public by the New York Times over four years ago.

There’s a whole lot of reasons why many have seen ‘fracking’ as an economic train wreck waiting to happen. What’s triggered today’s reality-check is the large and fast fall in oil prices, and recent studies which have exposed the flaws in the investment models which underpin the industry.

Now the ‘shale boom’ appears to be over, and the spin and hype which drove that revolution are finally being exposed. And, as Keynes suggests, if this triggers a wider crisis in the bond market it has the potential to cause problems way beyond the parochial issue of ‘fracking’.

The problem with unconventional oil and gas is that it takes a lot of engineering to produce a small return of product. Some studies, such as one carried out by the Oxford Institute of Energy Studies in early 2014, reckoned that half of all unconventional wells were losing money – and the industry as a whole had written-off assets worth up to $35 billion.

To put that into perspective that’s more than JP Morgan’s post-crash bank bailout, and a bit less than Citigroup’s – but unlike the bailouts that $35 billion would never be paid back!

Across America there are a large number of small oil producers – ranging from a few thousand to just four or five barrels of oil per day. These are the people at the bottom of the industry who exist largely on historic land rights and loaned capital.

As oil prices fall, lacking the economic power of the major companies, these are the people who see the biggest impact on their earnings. As a consequence they are more likely to shut down and default on their loans.

There are obvious parallels here with the US sub-prime mortgage crisis. As these many small loans go bad the effects compound up the ‘food chain’ of finance. One measures of this is the bond yield, the earnings from energy investments – which have been sliding all year.

Fearful that the ‘shale revolution’ might implode, some vocal free market pundits are calling for assistance to be given to the US shale industry.

More significantly, in terms of the potential losses, it’s the biggest players in the US shale industry who are practising the moist egregious tactics to keep on the ‘drilling treadmill‘ – continuously keeping new wells coming on stream in order to make up for the low returns and short productive life of the ones drilled previously.

At the national level some of the larger unconventional oil and gas companies have been playing the market to massage their credit ratings – to keep the investment dollars flowing in.

Locally some are receiving back-door subsidies as US states overlook unpaid taxes, or pick up the bill for plugging old abandoned wells. In Florida, they proposed to front-load the high exploration costs for shale onto consumer’s utility bills. Meanwhile some companies under-pay royalties to landowners, or under-pay their workers, in order to save money and make their balance sheets look better.

And that was before December 2014 …

The real fracking financial earthquake began in the first week of December, when oil prices fell below $70 / barrel – the point at which most unconventional production becomes barely economic.

Lower prices were already hitting the Canadian tar-sands industry too, where the break-even price for new projects is estimated at $115 / barrel.

The week before OPEC had unexpectedly decided to keep oil production unchanged – guaranteeing a further fall in prices as traders off-loaded their increasingly loss-making futures contracts. Then sections of the financial media began to express concern about the viability of the unconventional oil and gas sector.

By the second week of December, when prices dropped to $65 / barrel, there were reports that the ‘bubble’ in shale investments might be a serious problem for bond investors – potentially risking another market crash.

As a result the value of many US, UK and Australian unconventional oil and gas companies fell further – to the point where Australian analysts suggested they would make ideal speculative take-over targets, and Canadian dealers start to short-sell tar sands debt in anticipation of a further fall in value.

At the beginning of this week, the third week of December, as oil prices hit $60 / barrel, the off-loading of bonds began as investors tried to limit their exposure to the risk of a crash.

As in 2008, companies started to decommission drilling rigs once again. The shale industry may have written off $35 billion in the last 10 to 15 years – but right now bond holders are staring down almost $12 billion of losses in the last few weeks.

OK – shale is going bust, isn’t that a good thing? Looked at narrowly it is, but there are two problems this gives rise to.

Who’s going to clean up the mess?

Most importantly, where the industry has taken hold (the USA, Canada and Australia) widespread bankruptcy would allow the industry to walk away from the liabilities for the pollution they have created. This potentially dumps billions in clean-up costs on to state and national governments.

The second problem is the collapse of ‘political capital’, as politicians seek to distract attention from one failure by jumping on another bandwagon. In the short-term we might see the nuclear industry strutting around saying “I told you so”. The green energy lobby has also been panicked by recent price falls.

In fact the long-term fundamentals of energy supply have not changed – the current trends have everything to do with the geopolitics of oil and little to do with what will happen to oil prices in five or ten years time.

Those realities are likely to be drowned out as industry and lobby groups noisily queue at the government’s door to sell yet more ‘production’ technologies to gullible politicians, and an incredulous public.

What we need instead is long-term thinking. The difficulty is, in the fall-out from the failure of shale, the more fundamental arguments about the relationship between energy and the economy will be missed.

Bumping up against ecological limits

The greater argument we should be having is about growth and ecological limits, and whether growth has reached its limit in the most developed nations. This isn’t just an issue of climate change, or the depletion of national resources.

The founders of modern economics – Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Malthus – all believed that the economy would grow to a certain point and then stop. That’s not just an issue of material consumption; it’s about the finite nature of the world.

For example, how many hours of TV can you watch a week, or how many ready meals can you consume, before all your available free time / space is saturated?

What the ‘fracking bubble‘ demonstrates is not simply the bankruptcy of extreme fossil fuels – it’s the economic model itself which is bankrupt. Even students studying economics at universities around the world understand that point, and are lobbying for change.

Politicians are not necessarily stupid. They’re goaded into it by well-connected economists who tell them that they have a fool-proof model for how the world works.

The problem is that model is broke. And fracking, or futile carbon trading, or never-ending austerity, are simply manifestations of a failure to accept that it’s time to change the whole model that underlies the political economy.

Paul Mobbs is an independent environmental consultant, investigator, author and lecturer.

A fully referenced version of this article is posted on the Free Range Activism website.

The European Commission today decided to delay vital action plans on tackling air pollution and using precious resources more carefully.

The changes are based on its Regulatory Fitness Programme, it said, “which seeks to cut red tape and remove regulatory burdens, contributing to an environment conducive to investment.”

President Jean-Claude Juncker explained: “We are committed to driving change and to leading an EU that is bigger and more ambitious on big things, and smaller and more modest on small things.”

And the environment, it seems, is one of the “small things” that can be shuffled off for another day – even though the proposed National Emissions Ceilings Directive (NEC Directive) would save an estimated 58,000 lives and €40 Billion per year.

Soon, a decade of delays – while people die

The air quality plans would return at a later date “as part of the legislative follow-up to the 2030 Energy and Climate Package”, insisted the Commission.

But this is only adding delay to delay – the NEC Directive was originally expected in 2005 but then delayed because of the 2008 Climate and Energy Package, and did not appear until 2013. Now ClientEarth lawyer Alan Andrews fears a further delay of several years:

“It looks like Juncker has kicked this into the long grass. This proposal is already nearly ten years overdue – we can’t afford to wait another ten. Further delay will mean more people will die or be made seriously ill from heart attacks, strokes, cancer and asthma.

“The UK government views environmental regulation as ‘red tape’ so has stood quietly by and let this happen. British MEPs of all political stripes have played a leading role in opposing Juncker’s plans to scrap the proposal – it’s time the government showed similar leadership.”

Friends of the Earth Director Andy Atkins agrees: “These crucial plans should have been fast-tracked, not parked. Tens of thousands of people in Britain alone die prematurely each year from air pollution. Delaying the action that is desperately required will cost yet more lives.”

Europe claims a proud history of protecting our health and environment, he added, “but recent decisions have put a huge dent in its green reputation.”

Also dropped was a proposal to designate the heavily polluted Baltic Sea as a ‘Nitrogen Oxide Emissions Control Area’ on the grounds that “no foreseeeable agreement” would be reached.

Circular economy package – in a permanent loop?

Another major caualty is the ‘Circular Economy Package’ which would reduce waste by encouraging better design, re-use and recycling.

The Commission says that a “new, more ambitious proposal” on resource use would be submitted in 2015, while the driving rationale for its changes to the work programme is to focus all energies on “jobs, growth and investment”.

However a letter from Ikea, Unilever, M&S, Kingfisher, and manufacturers’ association EEF opposing the Commission’s plans to ditch the package was published in the Daily Telegraph today.

The package, they wrote, “offers huge potential for job creation, resource security, environmental protection and economic growth in Britain and the rest of Europe and abandoning it would be short-sighted.

“There is a great deal of support for the package from many sectors, and the World Economic Forum has suggested that developing the circular economy would save $1 trillion a year.”

According to the Impact Assessment of the Circular Economy Package, its full implentation – including an EU-wide increase in recycling rates to 70% – would create 580,000 new jobs.

Eleven member states plead to retain the package

The UK industrialists’ letter urged UK ministers to “send a clear message to Jean-Claude Juncker, the President of the Commission, that the programme must be retained to protect the continent’s environment, economy and competitiveness in the long term.”

But their voice was not heard in government. The Commission’s decision was taken despite 11 member states urging it not to withdraw the proposal – but the UK was not among them. “The silence from the UK government has been deafening”, says Atkins.

Finally UK environment minister Dan Rogerson said this morning that the government supports the NEC Directive on air quality – but believes amendments are needed to make the 2030 targets “realistic”.