Gaslighting the climate-striking students

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win,” a quote commonly misattributed to Gandhi, nevertheless encapsulates his understanding and that of many other social justice leaders. Given the recent attacks against hundreds of thousands of climate-striking students, though, it is clear that it misses a stage: right after they ignore you, they gaslight you.

Gaslighting means to manipulate someone’s perception of reality so that they doubt their own sanity. Right now, we are seeing world leaders, government ministers, editors of major media, all lining up to try to gaslight us, their citizens, the public. They want us to disbelieve our own eyes and ears, our own minds, reasoning and emotions — because the alternative is simply impossible for them to bear. They cannot bear the fact, the reality, that a new generation is rising up and raising its voice, showing its power through striking and non-violent civil disobedience, demanding a habitable planet, and thus casting a bright spotlight on the older generation’s abject failure to curb the power of fossil-fueled industries and halt climate breakdown.

Read the story from Medium by Julia Steinberger - “Gaslighting the climate-striking students.”

Exxon deliberately misled public on climate science, say researchers

ExxonMobil has knowingly misled the public for decades about the danger climate change poses to a warming world and the oil giant’s long-term viability, according to a peer-reviewed study.

 An activist protests outside Exxon Mobil’s
annual shareholder meeting in Dallas in 2016.

An analysis of nearly 200 documents spanning decades found that four-fifths of scientific studies and internal memos acknowledged global warming was real and caused by humans.

Read The Guardian story - “Exxon deliberately misled public on climate science, say researchers.”

(Listening to a panel discussion last night at the RMIT University about climate change and the law, it became obvious that it was rather difficult to prosecute someone, or a corporation, for the outcome of a damaged climate, but it was viable to initiate legal action on the basis that an organization had failed to acknowledge a difficulty, had not been honest in its dealings with shareholders or the public, and so had failed in its fiduciary responsibilities - Robert McLean)