Political gaslighting in the fight against the Climate Crisis.
It has now been confirmed by NASA, the EU, and the UK Met Office that 2023 was the hottest year on record. But fear not, as Conservative MP, Heather Wheeler, joyfully commented in response to this earlier this month on BBC Politics Live, it snowed in London the other day.
While this initially may appear as a light-hearted remark, the conflation of weather and climate as an argument against the seriousness of the climate crisis is a track lifted straight from the greatest hits of illustrious climate deniers such as Donald Trump. Unfortunately, hearing words of this nature has become increasingly common from UK government officials, who choose to deviate public attention to often irrelevant and divisive culture wars, whilst quietly granting new oil and gas licences, subsiding fossil fuel companies and lobbying for other environmentally harmful industries.
By publicly minimizing the urgency of the existential threat that the climate crisis represents, and actively pursuing policies that go against established scientific facts, politicians are employing a strategy of information manipulation that constitutes political gaslighting. The efficacy of this approach is bolstered when journalists fail to scrutinise and challenge decision-makers, which can enable dangerous misinformation to filter into mainstream consciousness and influence wider public opinion.
Gaslighting is a term that is perhaps most commonly now associated with romantic relationships, but it also manifests in a variety of other situations and dynamics including at the workplace, in family relationships, medicine, and politics. It involves controlling a person or people by psychological means including the management of information. Within the political sphere, it largely relates to the deceptive use of information, employed to destabilise, and disorientate opinion on political issues concerning the public.
To deceive the public on climate science, politicians may use denial, lies, concealment, and dismissiveness to undermine the credibility of those who hold opposing views. In the case of scientists or experts, they may dismiss the accuracy of research, misrepresent data, or fail to disclose their own data source, to discredit opponents and damage their professional reputations. The data is conclusive, and we can already see the devastating global impacts of the climate crisis as planetary tipping-points are reached and surpassed. Our future has never been more uncertain, and it is this fear of the unknown that psychoanalysts identify as a key vulnerability gaslighters aim to exploit.
It is important to note, that unlike ordinary deception, not all perpetrators are acting intentionally. However, while non-deliberate gaslighting may not involve a considered attempt to control someone’s perception of reality, it still consists of undermining the gaslightee’s experiences, self-esteem, and sense of being. Wheeler, however, may be exempt from this excuse. As a staunch Brexiteer, she continues to manipulate facts in order to construct a façade of Brexit Britain that is completely at odds with the reality most UK citizens are living in.
The carefully selected language used by politicians, underlines how the British public are being gaslight over climate action. In his 2023 Environmental Improvement Plan announced last January, Rishi Sunak promised a “blueprint for how we will deliver our commitment to leave our environment in a better state than we found it” and “not just halting but reversing the decline of nature”. Similar sentiments came from the then Environment Secretary, Thérèse Coffey, who confirmed the government would be putting “a spotlight on water quality and rivers” as “nature is vital for our survival”. Carefully polished statements like these form a smokescreen that simply mask the real action and inaction of the government.
Despite his best efforts to promote the UK as a climate leader, Sunak has actively pursued multiple environmentally harmful policies. Notably, this has included giving the green light for new North Sea oil and gas licences, using the false pretence of ensuring energy security, and the now debunked claims that it will lower household bills. In recent years, British waterways have borne the brunt of widespread negligence and mismanagement. Private water companies have prioritised lucrative shareholder profits over environmental responsibility, knowingly dumping raw sewage to leave rivers on the brink of ecological collapse and our seas too toxic for swimming.
This deliberate deception through material manipulation provides false reassurance that the state is taking them seriously and acting in accordance with science. It is neither a novel idea nor restricted to politicians alone. Countries and corporations strategically leverage big data, artificial intelligence, and black box algorithms to control information consumed by the public. At the extremes, outright denial of the science is used to plant seeds of doubt amongst populations, a notable example being, Cop28 President, Sultan Al Jaber, who recently claimed that “there is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5C.” Political gaslighting in this way spreads the seeds of uncertainty and paves the way for further exploitation of fossil fuel sources, both threatening democracy and having far-reaching consequences on climate discourse and policy.
Groups, communities, and larger populations are targeted with the intention of instilling feelings of self-doubt, confusion, and hopelessness, ultimately reducing the public ability to form sound judgements or influence policies that affect their short-term and long-term well-being. The effects of this deceptive use of information along with the increasingly extreme response to peaceful protests only leads to a weaker, more fragmented climate movement with a lesser ability to force climate action on the scale required to address the challenges we face.
Despite the best efforts of MPs in recent years to extinguish the final embers of public trust, the British government remains a respected, and highly influential institution. However, when confidence in the government dissipates on their ability to tackle climate issues, its authority to act on other challenges is severely undermined. By denigrating scientists and climate experts presenting peer-reviewed, scientific evidence, politicians only succeed in alienating and reducing the credibility of the community we need the most. And what happens when the next pandemic arises, and we are instructed to listen to the science?
In much the same way magicians deploy attention management techniques to draw audience attention to one thing to distract it from another, the government divert the public eye from their failure to act on climate issues, choosing instead to focus on immigration, the cost-of-living crisis, and immaterial culture wars. The politicisation of culture, manifesting in culture war arguments such as the ‘war on woke’ are often used tactics that have been employed is to distract voters’ attention from government failings in key policy areas.
So, given the overwhelming evidence of an impending ecological catastrophe, how are political leaders able to push the narrative that they are acting responsibly, sustainably, and in the public interest?
This form of deception has only gained traction because of the collective decision to view the climate crisis issue in isolation. It has become increasingly apparent that as David Attenborough famously noted in 2020 that “saving our planet is now a communications challenge”, yet current discourse largely fails to acknowledge the intrinsic link between the climate crisis and other pressure issues.
Contentious political topics such as immigration, energy bill increases, the cost of living crisis, mental health epidemics, and countless more are all highly impacted by human-driven climate change. Rapidly warming seas and changing weather patterns are driving an increase in the frequency and intensity of droughts, floods, storms, fires, food and water shortages, and armed conflicts. By remaining dependent on fossil fuels, we are increasingly at the mercy of unstable or politically hostile nations. An overhaul of our current model and a substantial increase in renewable source investment is required if we are to prevent such dramatic fluctuations as seen after Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine.
If sections of the public feel immigration levels are already too high, how will they react when increasing numbers of climate refugees arrive on UK shores in coming decades?
Too often in climate and sustainability discourse, responsibility and blame are apportioned to the individual, diverting the lens from the corporations and governments with the power to drive real top-down change. In her study of political gaslighting in the climate change discourse during the 2016 US election, Latif (2020) noted that communication scientists often consider public ignorance of climate change science as the leading cause of climate change communication difficulties. Implementing narrative repair strategies such as transformative explanations to remove misconceptions in difficult-to-understand concepts could reduce public vulnerability to “populist narratives and stringent attitudes toward climate issues”.
Political gaslighting from British politicians in the climate debate presents a very real threat to the essential development of sustainable policy and wholesale changes to our collective way of life. The manipulative use of information, vilification of experts, and unsubstantiated doubt that cast doubt on verified scientific evidence must be scrutinised and called out by journalists whose role is to hold these officials to account. If not, public support for climate initiatives will never materialise, and time is running out.
In the meantime, let us hope Ms Wheeler used her snow day to swot up on the differences between the weather and the climate.