James Greenberg
Never before has a civilization known so much about the forces undoing it—or worked so hard to deny them. How is it that, despite all the scientific data and even the evidence of our own experience, so many people continue to believe that climate change is a hoax?
The simple answer is that fossil-fuel money turned denial into an industry. For decades, public-relations firms have flooded the media with carefully crafted doubt, transforming an empirical question into a cultural battle. Climate change has become less about carbon molecules than about identity, loyalty, and belonging.
Yet the roots of denial run deeper than propaganda. They lie in how human beings construct meaning. We do not perceive the world as it is, but through the lenses of culture and language. Our understanding of reality—and even what we count as evidence—is shaped by cultural logics that organize experience, emotion, and belief. These logics give coherence to our lives, but they can also make us blind to facts that threaten them.
An anthropologist I know who worked with Amazonian peoples once told me a story that captures this perfectly. He had lent his motorized canoe to some hunters to go downriver. On their way back, they ran out of fuel. Unfamiliar with outboard motors, they reasoned—based on its sound and the petrol’s color—that it must run on alligator blood. They killed an alligator and poured its blood into the tank. Of course, it didn’t work.
It would be easy to laugh at this, yet their reasoning was coherent. Their logic was structured by analogy and inference—the same cognitive tools science relies on. Their premises were cultural, not empirical—yet their reasoning was rational within that frame. The deeper lesson is that all reasoning operates within the boundaries of belief.
Now imagine they persisted—believing the outboard ran on alligator blood—and explained its failure as the result of a missing spell or divine interdiction. At that point, they would have crossed from hypothesis to conviction. Evidence would no longer matter. This is where cultural meaning hardens into ideology.
Every society faces uncertainty and risk. Cultures manage these by imposing order—by creating systems of knowledge, ritual, and morality that render the world predictable. Science and religion both perform this work, but through different logics. Science grounds knowledge in evidence and predictive power; religion anchors meaning in faith, ritual, and revelation.
Scientific knowledge is always provisional, open to revision. Religious belief, by contrast, rests on premises that cannot be proven or disproven: that God or the gods exist, that creation has purpose, that human rituals, prayers, and offerings are efficacious. Those premises give life moral coherence, but they also sanctify other ideas: that authority is divinely ordained, that power signifies virtue, that prosperity is a sign of favor. When belief fuses with identity, it becomes impermeable to evidence.
Climate change denial arises not from ignorance but from refusal—the insistence on preserving meaning against a truth that demands moral reckoning. Science challenges the old cosmology of human dominion over nature as a divine exemption from consequence. It reveals that nature operates under immutable laws, that our pretense of mastery has limits, that extraction carries costs, and that the planet itself can rebel. For those whose sense of order depends on human exceptionalism, that is not merely threatening—it is heresy.
Denial becomes a symbolic defense. It protects a moral and social order built around fossil fuels as emblems of prosperity, freedom, and masculinity. The internal logic runs deep: oil is abundance; regulation is tyranny; environmentalism is elitism. To accept climate science would be to admit complicity in harm and to question the premise of an economy that equates consumption with virtue.
Viewed anthropologically, denial performs the same function that ritual once did. It preserves a sense of stability when material reality no longer supports it. It transforms refusal into righteousness and disbelief into belonging. Within that logic, carbon becomes both pure and polluting—the fuel of prosperity and the stain of guilt. Denial restores purity by turning guilt into pride, indulgence into patriotism, and exploitation into faithfulness.
These meanings are not spontaneous. They are cultivated and financed. The fossil-fuel industry long ago learned that defending profits required defending the worldview those profits depended on. Its public-relations campaigns built an entire moral cosmology around carbon—freedom, growth, destiny—offering coherence in a world of uncertainty. By the time politicians joined the chorus, the theology was already in place.
This logic is powerful because it tells people who they are and who their enemies are. It replaces the complexity of climate systems with a moral drama in which faith, freedom, and prosperity are under siege by godless elites. In that story, every hurricane, wildfire, or drought becomes a test of conviction rather than evidence of change.
Historically, this cosmology descends from the Western theology of dominion—the belief that mastery over nature was proof and purpose of divine favor. It survived the Enlightenment by merging with industrial capitalism and the Protestant ethic that linked salvation to productivity. Climate denial is its late-industrial offspring, clinging to the moral promise that exploitation is destiny. The flames consuming the planet are the afterlife of a theology that mistook power for virtue.
Climate change denial, then, is not simply the rejection of science. It is the preservation of meaning in a world that feels morally unmoored. It defends a collapsing cosmology by doubling down on the myths that built it. Facts alone cannot dissolve that grip. What might is a new story—one that speaks to the same need for order and belonging, but grounds it in interdependence, care, and accountability. To change minds, we must first change meanings.
James Greenberg is an anthropologist who writes on Facebook
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