Confronting Climate Denial
Ralph welcomes James Damico and Mark Baildon, authors of “How to Confront Denial: Literacy, Social Studies, and Climate Change.” They discuss all forms of denial including climate science denial and climate action denial. Then, Ralph, Steve, David, and Hannah discuss three topics in the news, mass shootings, the war in Ukraine, and the outrage of pharmaceutical companies raising the prices of taxpayer funded Covid vaccines.
James Damico is a professor of literacy, culture, and language education at Indiana University Bloomington and a former elementary and middle school teacher from New Jersey. He is co-author of How to Confront Climate Denial: Literacy, Social Studies, and Climate Change.
There tends to be a lot of emphasis on “personal responsibility” for climate change. And I think we need a lot more nuance about how we talk about personal responsibility, but we want to start with an industry lens. Because that’s the kind of inquiry we think will be most productive in social studies and university classrooms.
James Damico
Mark Baildon is an associate professor in foundations of education at the United Arab Emirates University and a former middle and high school social studies teacher in schools around the world (United States, Israel, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, and Taiwan). He is co-author of How to Confront Climate Denial: Literacy, Social Studies, and Climate Change.
Social Studies is a pretty crowded field. But if we use climate as a connecting point, it’s an opportunity to talk about environmental racism, to look at the most vulnerable populations in societies and how they’re being affected by climate change.
Mark Baildon
We should never forget that many of these industries would never be in existence— much less the size they are— without government research and development funds. And that means your taxpayer money. And the industries include the aerospace industry, the biotech industry, the computer industry, the nanotech industry, the containerization industry. You name it, one industry after another was given a huge birth give by the taxpayer from Washington, D.C.
Ralph Nader
Confronting Climate Denial
Regarding the public financing of medical research, given the significant rôle of federal government financing in the development of pharmaceuticals, it might be wise for the government to expand the organization of their research capabilities and develop pharmaceuticals publicly such that any patents for the medication belong to the public. The government can then make and distribute the pharmaceuticals themselves or they can contract with privatized firms to only be involved in the manufacturing process in a cost-controlled manner. Public marketing of medications can then be eliminated or curtailed as is the case in many other countries. Foreigners watching US television are often shocked to see advertisements telling the public to tell their doctors what drugs they wish to take. I recently showed some video clips of US drug commercials to a foreigner and they thought for sure it was some kind of comedy piece. In other countries, the doctors tell patients what drugs, if any, are best for a given condition. Good luck getting the media to advocate for this given the vast advertising budgets of the pharmaceutical industry.
If the intellectual property of the pharmaceuticals are publicly owned, vaccines, along with other medications, can be developed, manufactured, and deployed globally in a relatively inexpensive manner such that outbreaks can be properly controlled. Furthermore, there should be international cooperation between countries to help develop inexpensive and beneficial pharmaceuticals and other medical technologies. Just as CERN, the pan-European science research group funded with public money, developed the technology behind the World Wide Web, partnering countries can work together to develop ‘open source’ medical technology. The infrastructure of the Internet relies on open source software. There’s no reason that I can see that medical technology should be any different. All of this applies to environmental technology as well.
Now, with this being said, this public process is not funded by the taxpayers as implied by Mr. Nader and others on this episode of the RNRH. The cost to the public is when the public fails to have access to medications they need, when public health disasters are poorly controlled, and so forth. The focus should be on ensuring that government is meeting the needs of the public just as previous public health scares led to the public development of sewers and clean drinking water. By falsely implying that federal government spending is constrained by tax revenue, Mr. Nader and company are falsely implying that the federal government is constrained in their ability to fund necessary public services. It is time that progressives realize the true ability to realize necessary public spending rather than continue to insist that progressives use false logic simply because we’ve always used false logic about government spending. It’s not that this narrative has produced winning results. What’s the point of persisting with it?
Also, given the topic of public research funding, has the RNRH discussed the topic of the corporatization and militarization of academic research? What about universities trying to profit off of intellectual property from research? Academia probably enjoys greater public trust than government, but I’m not sure if that trust is truly earned since much of academia is not under much public scrutiny even at public institutions. The topic of some large public universities ignoring undergraduate education, sometimes so faculty can pursue corporate research, while charging undergraduate students a considerable amount of money for courses is probably a consumer advocacy issue as well.
The larger problem is pollution, gluttonous overconsumption, waste, incompetent government. Years ago they started shutting down very efficient incinerators necessitating the dumping of refuse in landfills and shipped to other countries. Far more expensive and energy intensive. The "green" technologies are also wrong headed in most cases, requiring far more energy, often fossil fuels to get up and running, especially solar and wind energy. The government has promoted "green" energy programs creating pork barrel spending to benefit their cronies. Limit the airflights and other activities that directly impact the global warming challenge instead of totalitarian and destructive political efforts!