The Denial Machine (documentary response)

The Denial Machine is a documentary that explores the controversy surrounding climate change; particularly, why the issue has turned into a bipartisan political struggle in the last decade or so. The documentary focuses on a couple of factors that turned climate change from a fearful scientific discovery to a heated debate between environmentalists and "climate deniers." The Denial Machine blames this transformation on the use of language, political funding by large corporations, and well-spoken public climate deniers who aren't qualified to be denying climate change, among other things.  

For example, at one point when linguistic expert Frank Lutz is interviewed, he explains that he advised President Bush to abandon the phrase "global warming" in favor of the more friendly-sounding term "climate change," as the former indicates a worldwide catastrophe and the latter implies a natural, nonthreatening cycle. Such usage implies that climate change isn't as big of a deal as Bush's opponent, famous environmentalist Al Gore, was making it out to be.

 This is an example of a "denial machine:" that is, the intentional denying of a certain fact in order to achieve a certain goal. Another example this documentary presents is what it calls the first "Denial Machine:" the tobacco industry. For years, big tobacco companies campaigned to deny that smoking causes poor health, challenging the scientific research that backs up the anti-smoking claims in hopes of preventing a loss in sales. Eventually, however, the problem became so huge that even the tobacco companies had to admit that smoking can cause bad health effects. The Denial Machine argues that the climate change debate follows this same model, except instead of tobacco companies, now it's oil companies and other high-carbon producing industries.


This documentary reminded me of something that George Marshall talked about in Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change: strong story-telling is much more persuasive than simply presenting the scientific facts and letting people decide for themselves. A captivating story is one that has a cause, effect, a perpetrator and a motive. Greedy scientists are trying to fake global warming in order to get more government money. Big Oil Companies are funding climate denial in order to keep making money (the story that The Denial Machine tells). The truth is unfortunately much more complicated than this, and telling the story like that an oversimplification for the sake of captivating an audience.

The Denial Machine is an alright documentary. It's captivating and draws an interesting parallel between climate change and the tobacco industry. However, it can be overly dramatic at times, painting big oil companies as lying villains who pull tricks and fund liars in order to keep making as much money as possible. The truth is often too complex to fully tell in 45 minutes (the running time of the documentary), so it's somewhat distorted into an easy to tell and exciting to follow story of good vs evil. This documentary tells a captivating story, but after reading Don't Even Think About It, I'm somewhat suspicious of anyone who presents a "good vs evil" argument on climate change, knowing our tendency to internalize the information that confirms are views and disregarding anything that contradicts what we want to believe.