Climate change denial escalates through stages that progressively free behavior from moral self-sanctions

Evidence

In the third stage, skeptics acknowledge that global warming is real and that humans contribute to it, but the effects are trivial or even beneficial. … Arguments in the final stage claim that human actions cannot affect the earth’s temperature and that regulatory policies to curb carbon emissions will be economically disastrous. The climate is not changing—or even if it is, the changes are not of human origin or remediable by human action—so there is no need to change lifestyle practices. Nor is there anything to get morally exercised about, and harmful behavior is freed from the restraint of moral self-sanctions. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2729

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Bandura’s own earlier chapters on moral disengagement mechanisms, and to stages-of-denial frameworks in other contexts. — connects to: Suppressing our emotional response to environmental disaster enables our own destruction — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 1195; Climate denial has moved from disputing data to defunding its collection — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New…, 252
• SEED: Angle: the parallel between climate denial and other staged moral disengagement battles (tobacco, evolution denial) as a single analytical frame.