The creation of such alternate realities has by now become quite familiar in areas such as Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” and in global-warming denialism. As the climate crisis worsens, the general populace appears to recoil from the worsening news, fleeing the facts, preferring to disdain the science rather than confront the crisis. In one instance, the Harris polling organization claimed that in 2007, 71 percent of Americans said they believed that continued combustion of fossil fuels resulted in climate change, whereas by June 2011 it had dropped to 41 percent. Further, Gordon Gauchat has demonstrated that the only group to express severely diminished trust in science in surveys from 1974 to 2010 were self-identified conservatives, with university-educated conservatives displaying the steeper decline. Gauchat points out, “the emergence of ‘neoliberal science’ as an alternative to regulatory regimes has coincided with increasing distrust of science among conservatives.”

Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis …, loc. 668