Michael Mann, distinguished professor and director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University, and author of the new book “The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet,” was interviewed on “Democracy Now! Below are excerpts from the interview, along with the link to the full interview.
“…[We] have been seeing an increase in these massive tornado outbreaks that can be attributed to the warming of the planet…we’re going to continue to see that climate change is going to combine with natural factors, like the La Niña event that we’re experiencing, to produce ever more extreme examples of these sorts of phenomena.
“…[Here] we saw nearly a hundred people die from these unprecedented tornadoes. But if you look at the total impact of climate change around the world — wildfires, droughts, floods, heat waves, coastal inundation — climate change is already costing far more lives than COVID-19. It is deadlier…so the denial of climate change is deadlier even than the denial of the basic science behind COVID-19….
. . . [But] here’s the difference. There isn’t a huge, global lobby, the world’s wealthiest and most powerful industry, the fossil fuel industry, that has a stake in the COVID-19 debate. So, it’s fairly easy for these Big Tech companies, these social media companies, to suppress COVID denial videos and posts. There isn’t a huge corporate interest that’s going to get in their way. With climate change, it’s a whole different story. We are talking about an effort by the world’s largest, most powerful industry, the fossil fuel industry, to prevent any meaningful action on climate, and to accomplish that in part by using social media to promote denialism and dismissal.
“And here, the social media companies are being complicit…many of them are getting a lot of advertising money from the fossil fuel industry, so it’s inconvenient to their business model to challenge that industry…we have to take them to task, because they are doing great harm. They’re making profits by doing great harm to all of us.
“The climate models . . . if anything, are underestimating the impact that climate change is having on these extreme weather events and the tendency that we will see for even more extreme weather events if we continue to burn fossil fuels. This really drives home the importance of bringing our carbon emissions down dramatically, as quickly as possible. . .
” . . . [And] make no mistake…it is Africa and other developing regions that are seeing the worst consequences of climate change, and yet they contributed the least to the problem. …there needs to be a commitment from the industrial countries to developing countries to help them develop clean energy infrastructure. We don’t want them to go through the fossil fuel stage of economic development…we have to provide them with the financing and the resources to develop clean energy technology…that means the United States, the EU and other industrial countries need to ante up.
“. . . [You] asked earlier about what gives me optimism…It’s the young folks…the youth climate movement. It’s 40,000 children marching through the streets of Glasgow to put pressure on policymakers. . . “
