The metamorphic mechanics of "new denialism"

"New Denialism" is a metamorphic concept; it is shaped by a diplomatic feedback between a tempered reframing of climate science and the global movers of climate action/inaction, mainly; governments and intergovernmental bodies, transnational corporations, and asset management firms. Much has been written, and rightly so, on the role of private interests in the maintaining of systemic stasis (denial and delay), but to grasp the adaptive face of post-denial climate obstructionism, or new denialism, is to acknowledge that it does not operate with the sole objective of delayism; it provides an alternative to climate action, and it does so within the confines of institutional legitimacy. Indeed, it occurs in the (re)structuring of the following: 1) the degree of urgency 2) the avenues of possibility 3) the interests and diseconomies of concerned nations 4) the linguistics of climate, shifting from a holistic ecolinguistics approach to an isolated "weather issue" that strictly requires less carbon emissions and more electric cars, hydrogen, and an open-ended understanding of sustainability 5) the globalized labels that lock action within market-based solutions: Net Zero, carbon capture/ geoengineering, and carbon trading, all subsumed under the legally non-binding and actionably vague umbrella of "the energy transition." There are "master narratives" of progress and crisis resolution that are endemic to the democratic economies, and by enshrining liberal constitutionalism as "the end of history," as Fukuyama did in 1992, the risk is that many of the ideas and/or ideologies that drive climate obstructionism (and other interlinked issues) are naturalized, under the aegis of an impartial, pre-political document called the constitution, as "the best of the worst." This disqualifies the necessity to question the fossilized assumptions that underlie the liberal truisms, old and new, from "growth" and "modernization" to the UN-coined phrase "sustainable development." Espousing a systemic reading of New Denialism, this paper proposes a conceptual map to navigate the symbolic and substantial barriers to climate action within liberal constitutionalism. These include the mechanisms of reification, justification, and dissimulation of systemic problems, consequentialist idealism (conflating the means with the outcome), the equivocation between rights and liberties, labor fragmentation’s influence on thought (separating interlinked questions into research silos that don’t communicate), resource mobilization theory as a liberal Faustian bargain for climate actors, the economics of discount rates, the lack of culture-specific approaches to climate action in international treaties and IPCC reports, the overuse of hyper-generic mobilizing concepts without direct avenues for action (creating powerlessness), the use of bothsideism or false balance to create doubt and recalibrate climate discourse within a "non-problematic/ inoffensive" reading of objectivity, and, crucially, the lack of a common utility metric, without which all action reverts back to market mechanisms. Based on an oral history I conducted with more than fifty oil and gas insiders in positions of leadership, widely-known climate experts and climate skeptics, and working within a anthropogenic system dynamics approach, this paper suggests a "new scientific storytelling" framework to reintegrate climate science into the "3 S’s" of human survival: safety, security, and sustainability.