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Study Finding Peer Pressure Moves People On Climate Is like "Handmaid's Tale," According To Denier [1]

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Date: 2023-04-27  

On Monday , we talked about how $795,000 homeowner Anthony Watts is working with the Heartland Institute to sell $2,000 thermometers to compete with the global temperature records. But what’s up with Watts’ namesake blog, WattsUpWithThat?

These days? Not much. Last week, for example, Watts' replacement blogger Eric Worrall was triggered by a Scientific American story covering a literature review paper showing that peer pressure is the most effective way to get people to adopt more climate-friendly behaviors.

According to the study, just providing information was the least effective way to motivate people to change their behavior, followed by showing people specific feedback about their behavior, such as a meter for personal energy consumption. Having people make a commitment and simply urging them to act sustainably were a bit more effective, and financial incentives were a bit more effective, still.

But the biggest response was to social comparisons, highlighting the sustainable behaviors of others seems to set an expectation that people are eager to meet. Predictably, people were much more likely to take the easiest behavior change routes, like recycling, saving water, and not littering, with fewer willing to consume less or walk or bike instead of drive.

From that rather milquetoast study arose a completely unhinged response from Worrall. "Can you smell the whiff of Chinese social credit systems," he begins after quoting Scientific American, "in which the government increasingly becomes involved in bullying people who don’t conform to the direction of their leaders?"

No, we can't, and if you're smelling things that don't exist like Worrall, you may be having a stroke.

"What's next?" he asks, moving from one entirely imagined horror story to the next. He wildly brings up imaginary climate fines and “neighborhood interventions” before ending up at "a 'climate inquisition', which coerces ordinary people reported by their neighbours into publicly confess [sic.] their climate sins."

No, that's not what’s next. It's not anything, except the ramblings of a scared man who literally backs up his point that America is free and Communist China is bad with an embedded video clip from Seinfeld where a bunch of Americans pressure Kramer about not wearing an AIDS ribbon. Apparently, Warrell thinks this parody of American social pressure in the '90s is an apt metaphor for how the "freedom from social bullying" is what differentiates between "free societies like America and communist tyrannies like Communist China." (Which is communist, in case you weren't sure.)

"But the climate bullies are deadly serious," Worrall wrote, after the not serious Seinfeld clip. "Nobody will be laughing if the climate bullies get their way," which is also false because the climate bullies are already laughing at you, Eric, for spending your time proverbially licking Big Oil's boots as though fossil fuels are your father and a kid on the playground just said their dad, renewables, can totally kick your dad's butt.

But then Worrall’s article does take a rather serious turn: "Authors of stories like ' The Handmaid’s Tale ' and ' If this goes on ' fantasised about the threat of religious fanaticism overthrowing the Republic, about the USA becoming a Iranian style religious dictatorship, but they picked on the wrong religion. It is the climate religion which is the real and present threat to Western liberty."

Fact check: In June of 2022, the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and now states across the country are denying reproductive rights due to Christian fanaticism.

But according to Worrall, it's actually "green zealotry, with its demands that everyone abide by its tenets regardless of whether you believe, with its intolerance for freedom and non-conformity" that is the villain. He calls climate concern "the religion which threatens to deliver us all into tyranny and subservience to the state, unless we push back against its autocratic demands."

Uh huh. Last we checked it wasn't climate activists passing laws to ban library books , or ban financial institutions from considering certain types of risk when investing, or try and unconstitutionally kidnap trans children .

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/4/27/2166202/-Study-Finding-Peer-Pressure-Moves-People-On-Climate-Is-like-Handmaid-s-Tale-According-To-Denier

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