Defending our Climate in the War Against Science with Joe Romm

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Our guest for this episode is Joseph Romm, an American author, blogger, and Ph.D. in Physics from MIT who advocates reducing greenhouse gas emissions to limit global warming and increasing energy security and efficiency through green technologies through climate communications.

He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the founding Editor-in-Chief of progressive news aggregator Front Page Live and Chief Science Advisor for the Emmy-award-winning documentary series Years of Living Dangerously. He’s been called the web’s most influential climate change blogger.

For five years, Romm was at the Department of Energy as Assistant Secretary under Clinton administration, with many politics and special interests at play against his somewhat utopian MIT “world of physics” approach. “It was certainly an eye-opening experience,” he recalls. “It’s a massive agency, of which Energy Technology is only about a quarter of it. It runs all the National Labs in the country.”

But even though there was a lot of bureaucracy, he has fond memories of that period. “If you’re there long enough, you know how it works, and you can help tweak the levers. I got a lot of experience communicating.”

While discussing causes of climate change, climate change solutions, and overcoming climate change deniers, of course, we couldn’t ignore the way that personal information is currently being sold to manipulate the public, with cases as conspicuous as that of Cambridge Analytica where something as apparently harmless as a survey turned out to be a way to scrape a massive database of personal preferences that could be used to target campaign ads.

In the past, political campaigns sought this type of information through market research panels and PR firms, but in this case, the information was collected with a hidden motive.

“People didn’t realize by filling out the survey, they were opening them and their friends’ profiles up,” Romm explains. “And they created psychographic profiles of people, and those were used to target them with voter suppression efforts.”

Joe Romm of the Self Surveillance Aspect of Social Meida

And while I share his concerns, I couldn’t help to point out that every company dealing with big data (Google, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, etc.), is doing exactly just that, which is why Shoshana Zuboff wrote, “Unless democracy revokes the license to steal and challenges the fundamental economics and operations of commercial surveillance, the epistemic coup will weaken and eventually transform democracy itself.”

“It’s absolutely true”, Romm admitted, pointing out that the one thing that dystopian science fiction writers like George Orwell – who coined the term doublespeak – couldn’t imagine is that it wouldn’t take a huge state to achieve nearly total control of people, but that it would be the people themselves who would give up their own privacy in order to use a bunch of apps.

With extreme weather incidents on the rise, it’s harder for deniers to say with a straight face that the climate isn’t changing, but they keep using division and deflection as strategies, as Michael E. Mann explains.

Romm recalls a specific example during the last Presidential Campaign, where he participated in an event to inform Latino moms about climate change. To his astonishment, he discovered a whole disinformation campaign on the matter elaborated in Spanish. He’s optimistic that, regrettably, such cases are not isolated. “I think you can assume there is a pervasive disinformation effort,” he says.

For more insights on Romm’s collective psychology perspective, effective communication strategies for refuting climate change denials, and how to win support for climate policy action, listen to the full interview or check out these podcasts

Climate Communications Podcasts by Eric Schwartzman

• Climate Scientist Michael E. Mann Reveals Culprits in War Against Science
• How to Prepare for Climate Change with New York Times Bestselling Author David Pogue
• Harvard Professor Naomi Oreskes Talks About Her Book Merchants of Doubt
• How Global Warming Became Climate Change at the US Dept. of State with Liz Murphy and Billie Gross at the State Department

And if you’d like to support the podcast, review us here on Apple Podcasts.

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