A portrait of propaganda as an old woman

A while ago, I had a chat with Robert Bryce for his Power Hungry podcast. During the chat, Robert asked me “What is propaganda?” It’s a concept I often refer to in my writings as you know but the question caught me unprepared.

It’s always difficult to come up with a simple definition of something you are familiar with but have never tried describing. I can’t remember what I said then but it must have been something along the lines of passing lies for truth using bits of truth to make it sound more plausible.

This week, I had the pleasure of getting the answer I was looking for served on a plate by fellow Energy Transition podcaster Tammy Nemeth.

Tammy sent me this little jewel from Covering Climate Now — an initiative that, per its own About page, “collaborates with journalists and newsrooms to produce more informed and urgent climate stories, to make climate a part of every beat in the newsroom — from politics and weather to business and culture — and to drive a public conversation that creates an engaged public.”

I’m sure you’re agree this is a very journalistic way of looking at the world. Words like “objective”, “impartial”, and “ethical” come to mind. Unfortunately, they come accompanied by another tiny little word. “Not”.

But on to the jewel, which advises the good people working at outlets such as Reuters, Bloomberg, Al Jazeera, NBC, AFP and several hundred others, to use 15 specific words to drive the climate change message home.

“Extreme heat is driven by climate change. Climate change is driven by burning fossil fuels.”

These are the 15 words that CCN advises journalists to use, with the aim of focusing their messaging on what CCN calls “the true culprit” of climate change. I don’t need to tell you what that real culprit is, right?

Scrolling down the jewel, which is, of course, a stellar example of journalistic excellence, we come to the following paragraph, which reduced me to tears. I don’t mind clarifying those were tears of joy. Here’s the paragraph:

The good news is that the clean energy transition is arriving faster than anyone expected. In a series of articles describing that arrival, New York Times reporters David Gelles, Brad Plumer, Jim Tankersley, and Jack Ewing also elegantly make the extreme heat-fossil fuels connection: “As the planet registers the highest temperatures on record, rising in some places to levels incompatible with human life, governments around the world are pouring trillions of dollars into clean energy to cut the carbon pollution that is broiling the planet.”

Now, to be perfectly honest, I wouldn’t call the broiling climate pollution syntactic structure elegant. I would actually call it crass and overdone but I’m not part of the CCN and I’m probably jealous of their professionalism.

As I was reading this jewel, one word surfaced from the depths of my memory. Lots of words in today’s post, I know. That word was agitprop. Here’s a quote from the entry about the concept from Britannica:

“Agitation is thus the use of political slogans and half-truths to exploit the grievances of the public and thereby to mold public opinion and mobilize public support. Propaganda, by contrast, is the reasoned use of historical and scientific arguments to indoctrinate the educated and so-called “enlightened” members of society, such as party members.”

Need I highlight any parts? I suppose not. Political slogans and half-truths to exploit grievances and mold public opinion? Check. Reasoned use of historical and scientific arguments? Check. Well, kinda. Indoctrination as the goal? Well, check. Lenin and his buddies would have been impressed if they could see their rightful agitprop heirs and heiresses doing miracles with scientific data.

For a wonderful illustration of how agitprop actually looks, let’s head to the CCN’s 10 Climate Change Myths Debunked page. My tears of joy became torrential here.

MYTH 1: Scientists do not agree about climate change.

FACT: More than 99% of climate scientists agree that human activity is overheating the planet.

• EXPLANATION: Few if any scientific issues have been studied and debated as much as climate change. The scientific consensus is overwhelming and durable. In this article, Kate Marvel, a NASA climate scientist, says: “We are more sure that greenhouse gasses are causing climate change than we are that smoking causes cancer.”

• LANGUAGE FOR JOURNALISTS: Scientists overwhelmingly agree that burning oil, coal and gas is overheating the planet.

Powerful stuff. With figures, although I would argue they could’ve chosen a paper that featured a fraction rather than a whole number. Fractions look more believable and they make a greater impression.

And what about that quote from the NASA climate scientist? Honestly, I knew I will live to see the day when climate change is called worse than smoking and although this is not what that scientist actually says, it is still powerful stuff.

Now, for the “Language for journalists” section. Each debunked myth has one. The presence of that section does not aim to help journalists who for some reason find themselves at a loss expressing the thoughts they have while researching and writing a story.

No, the section aims to package the message that CCN wants to send in the most effective form so it has maximum impact on the audience. Yes, I know you knew that but I felt the need to spell it out nevertheless. Shall we say it all together? Indoctrination.

What the CCN is, in fact, is an agitprop incubator with a global reach. There is no other word for it. It takes scientific data and uses it for indoctrination purposes. Take the 99% consensus claim, for instance. It links to a paper that says:

From a dataset of 88125 climate-related papers published since 2012, when this question was last addressed comprehensively, we examine a randomized subset of 3000 such publications.

We also use a second sample-weighted approach that was specifically biased with keywords to help identify any sceptical peer-reviewed papers in the whole dataset. We identify four sceptical papers out of the sub-set of 3000, as evidenced by abstracts that were rated as implicitly or explicitly sceptical of human-caused global warming.

In our sample utilizing pre-identified sceptical keywords we found 28 papers that were implicitly or explicitly sceptical. We conclude with high statistical confidence that the scientific consensus on human-caused contemporary climate change—expressed as a proportion of the total publications—exceeds 99% in the peer reviewed scientific literature.

Do you know what percentage of 88,000 is 3,000? The engineers and other maths-savvy people among you will know. I had to let Google calculate it. It’s 3%. Well, 3.4%, to be accurate (and more believable). The 99% consensus is based on a 3.4% sample of climate-related papers published over a decade.

In other words, there is a 99% agreement among the authors of 3.4% of climate-related papers published since 2012 that climate change is caused by humankind and its use of hydrocarbons. We are all shocked, I’m sure.

I won’t bore you with any more quotes from the CCN website or its partners. You read the news. You’ve seen the talking points, because that’s exactly what they are. Talking points in an agitprop narrative. And the narrative is working. It is driving national and international policies, investments, mental problems, and shaping future generations through the educational system.

But you know the funny part? The funny — and quite annoying — part is that nobody involved in the narrative seems to have studied the history of the Soviet bloc in any depth whatsoever. If they had, they would’ve learned that agitprop only works up to a point. And that point is the moment when everyone realises that they have been fed lies and half-truths.

Once that point is reached, and it inevitably gets reached because such is the nature of reality, the narrative has no chance. It has to either adapt or die, very much like a living being. The climate change narrative, I fear, has been moving in a direction that makes it inflexible and incapable of adapting very well.

Instead of absorbing truths like the record coral growth in the Great Barrier Reef last year, or the growth in polar bear population numbers, the CCN media either ignore them or, in the case of polar bears, “debunk” the information… by effectively stating that nobody knows how polar bear populations have changed over the past 70 or so years. That’s something Lenin and his buddies would’ve been disappointed by.

Even more disappointingly, the media and its sources of climate information are so eager for the next scare they get themselves in awkward situations such as this one.

Last week, Yahoo News republished an Independent article headlined UK weather: Heat health alert issued as Met Office predicts 28C temperature. Clicking on the link to the story, however, took me to a whole different headline: UK weather: Met Office shares update on how long rain will last. Alas, they couldn’t change the headline in the permalink, if that’s what the links are called, so there the story remained heat-alarmist.

The aggregator where I saw the story, meanwhile, did not give up on the narrative. First, the article appeared in its featured story feed with the almost original headline, with the minor change of referring to temps “soaring to 28C”. Leaving aside the idiocy of that statement, NewsNow then changed the headline to this:

They want their heat wave and if they’re not getting it in reality, they will get it online.

Then there are the awkward revelations such as this one by the IMF that oil and gas subsidies hit a record last year. To be sure, last year was no ordinary year for energy, to put it mildly, but the IMF noted that direct subsidies have more than doubled over the last three years.

The IMF also said something else that I dare not paraphrase so I will quote it directly:

“But an even bigger concern, the IMF said, are implicit subsidy costs, which are likely to keep rising as damage from a warming planet spreads. Consumers did not pay for over $5 trillion of environmental costs last year, the IMF said.”

This is how agitprop dies. It dies when reality refuses to play along and when more people decide to speak out. It dies when we overdose on “It’s all your fault” and get sick with it. It dies when more people get the courage to question the narrative.

I hesitate to get my hopes too high but I have noticed that a growing number of scientists are more and more openly challenging the narrative. And there are definitely more non-scientists signalling they’re fed up with that same narrative. And for that, we have to thank social media.

In Soviet times, there were no social media. In those times, it was so much easier to make agitprop work for longer. People had only one source of information — state media.

That was the sort of information source former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinta Ardern wanted to nurture in the country, too. This is the sort of information source the EU’s von der Leyen and friends want to nurture in Europe, too.

Remember the “We are the only ones who tell you the truth” statement, which I’m not quoting verbatim for reasons of bad memory. That’s the dream.

The dream is doomed, though, because there are too many sources of information now and the Arderns and von der Leyens of the world cannot ban them all. They could certainly try and they are already trying but it will never work.

The reason it will never work is that if they start with the bans this will only lead to more people starting to ask questions and more people daring to challenge the narrative. And that’s how the climate agitprop movement will die. At the hands of the truths they tried so bravely to suppress.