In May 2009, a development officer at the University of Michigan asked me to meet with a
potential donor—a former football player and now successful businessman who had an interest
in environmental issues and business, my interdisciplinary area of expertise. The meeting began
at 7 a.m., and while still nursing my first cup of coffee the potential donor began the
conversation with “I think the scientific review process is corrupt.” I asked what he thought of a
university based on that system, and he said that he thought that the university was then corrupt,
too. He went on to describe the science of climate change as a hoax, using all the familiar lines
of attack—sun spots and solar flares, the unscientific and politically flawed consensus model,
and the environmental benefits of carbon dioxide.
As we debated each point, he turned his attack on me, asking why I hated capitalism and
why I wanted to destroy the economy by teaching environmental issues in a business school.
Eventually, he asked if I knew why Earth Day was on April 22. I sighed, as he explained,
“Because it is Karl Marx’s birthday.” (I suspect he meant to say Vladimir Lenin, whose birthday
is April 22 and is also Earth Day. This linkage has long been a source of support for some on the
far right who believe that Earth Day is a Communist plot, even though Lenin never promoted
environmentalism and Communism does not have a strong environmental legacy.)
I turned to the development officer and asked, “What’s our agenda here this morning?”
The donor interrupted to say that he wanted to buy me a ticket to the Heartland Institute’s Fourth
Annual Conference on Climate Change, the leading climate skeptics conference. I checked my
calendar and, citing prior commitments, politely declined. The meeting soon ended.
I spent the morning trying to make sense of the encounter. At first, all I could see was a
bait and switch; the donor had no interest in funding research in business and the environment
but instead wanted to criticize the effort. I dismissed him as an irrational zealot, but the meeting
lingered in my mind. The more I thought about it, the more I began to see that he was speaking
from a coherent and consistent worldview, one I did not agree with but which was a coherent
viewpoint nonetheless. Plus, he had come to evangelize me. The more I thought about it, the
more I became eager to learn about where he was coming from, where I was coming from, and
why our two worldviews clashed so strongly in the present social debate over climate science.
Climate Science as Culture War by Andrew John Hoffman :: SSRNhttps://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2944200