Hope Requires Fighting the Hope Industry

Hope is crucial to most political activism, but when the situation is dire, watch out for the “hope industry.” It’s made up of institutions and people who send out messages of false hope, stoking collective ignorance, soothing consumers’ consciences, and revving up the climate change engine.

In the age of climate change, false hope is everywhere. It takes two main forms: denial and necessary illusions.

The denial message is spouted and funded by the core of the U.S. hope industry: the big energy companies and the Republican Party. Some peddlers of denial say climate change is not happening. Others acknowledge its existence but say humans did not cause it. And yet others within the corporate hope industry say climate change is real but deny its gravity, telling us that smart companies can solve the problem. Hey, no worries. Because the problem doesn’t exist or will resolve itself.

According to polls, about 40 percent of Americans buy into this corporate false hope. The mass denial is devastating to real hope.

Some liberals tend to believe that the problem can be solved within the existing economic and political system. The liberal false hope is that conventional politics can deal with the problem—or that personal changes in lifestyle (recycling, driving hybrids, going to farmer markets) will do the trick. Along with liberal citizens, self-proclaimed “environmentally friendly” companies—whether Exxon and Chevron or Bank of America and McDonalds—promote this denial. Hope-peddling corporations make money off their “greenwashing,” a word invented to describe the acts of companies that lie to persuade consumers that their products are environmentally safe. This goes beyond “clean coal” companies and oil corporations fracking for natural gas. A 2010 report called “The Sins of Greenwashing: Home and Family Edition” conducted by the environmental marketing agency TerraChoice showed that 95 percent of consumer products claiming to be green were lying or obfuscating in some way, and the annual Greenwash Academy Awards have exposed some of the worst offenders. Whole industries profit deceitfully on individuals’ efforts to live green.

False hope also takes the form of “necessary illusions”—corporate-manufactured messages that justify corporate rule. Noam Chomsky has identified several of the necessary illusions in circulation within our society: the virtues of the market, the benign invisible hand of capitalism, the morality of American militarism, and American exceptionalism. In the context of climate change, these translate into the following false hopes:

False Hope #1: Technology Will Solve the Problem

Many environmentalists join the corporate hope industry in believing that technological innovations—from solar panels and wind turbines to electric cars and bio-diesel fuels—will save the day. Technological change is certainly necessary to help heal the planet, but believing in a technological fix to a systemic crisis is magical thinking and false hope.

False Hope #2: Capitalism Will Solve the Problem

Capitalism may have created some of the climate problem but by another trick of magical thinking, the hope industry argues it is also the only system certain to fix it. This necessary illusion rests on the reigning neoclassical economic view that self-correction is built into capitalist markets. Market theorists argue that if climate change creates the costs that environmentalists predict, fossil fuel sources will lose out in the market and the problem will be corrected naturally. Keynsians, meanwhile, argue that the necessary changes will follow from prodding by government regulatory and tax incentives.

The hope industry doesn’t tell us that capitalism requires endless expansion of production and consumption in a finite world. Companies that don’t sell more than their competitors will lose market share and capital investment, and eventually be driven out of business. Capitalism “externalizes” the inevitable costs of more and more production, shifting the pollution burden down the road to future generations. This partly reflects the power of capitalist companies—including energy giants such as ExxonMobil, one of the most profitable companies in the world—to resist paying the costs themselves. It also reflects the inability of the market to accurately see the true costs, which—in the case of climate—are indirect, diffuse, and set to occur most...