Denying climate change’s reality and human origin frees polluting from moral self-sanctions

Evidence

Warmer weather is said to make life more pleasant and productive in cooler northern regions. This may be personally comforting as long as one disregards the millions of people living near the equator whose lives are disrupted and dislocated by rising temperatures elsewhere. 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, 2730

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the vault’s existing claims about how ordinary people rationalize supporting harmful policy via displacement of responsibility and denial — Bandura’s mechanism chapter corroborates Cooper’s social-conservatism argument. — connects to: Denying dependence on nature sustains non-sustainable resource use. — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 104
• ADDENDUM: Climate denial as moral disengagement parallels the mechanism arguments in ‘Grafting & Growth’ regarding tamarisk trees and how we rationalize interventions on natural systems.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2730