Dear Editor,

Derek Ridgeley wrote an op ed a year ago in The Mountain-Ear called “Climate Politics, the role of consensus” in which  he asserted that for this country  to do anything meaningful about climate change, we would need to get consensus on a national level. That change would be driven by the convinced masses who believe that not only climate change is real and happening today, but that they are ready to do something about it. Ready to make personal changes and dare I say the word, “sacrifice”. But how to get that consensus. I got a peek into just how hard that will be when I attended a small gathering, socially distanced and all. Over burgers we talked about stuff, and then somehow the subject came up about Covid and I said something to the effect that there were now 200,000 deaths due to Covid. One of the other participants voiced his opinion that the numbers were inflated. That he stopped watching network news because it was all lies. I asked by how much the number was inflated. He said the real number was closer to 20% of the 200,000, maybe only 40,000. The other men in the circle nodded in agreement as if this were a proven fact. This gentleman was an engineer from a major aerospace firm in the area, an intelligent individual. This is one of many popular conspiracy theories foisted by Q Anon, an anonymous person who leaves clues and hints as to what is really supposedly going on behind the scenes in Washington DC. This diminishing of the Covid deaths serves the purpose of understating the severity of this pandemic and thus absolving our current president from any fault for our poor response. Here is the Wikipedia definition of Q Anon.  

“QAnon is a far right conspiracy theory alleging that a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles running a global child sex-trafficking ring is plotting against President Donald Trump who is battling them, leading to a ‘day of reckoning’ involving the mass arrest of journalists and politicians. No part of the theory is based on fact.”

 I listened to a doctor debunk this conspiracy by saying that if someone has diabetes and gets Covid, or someone with high blood pressure gets Covid, that in neither case would that person have died had they not gotten Covid. Covid was the key contributing factor in their deaths. They are included in the 200,000. The conspiracy would not include any of these deaths. Frontline health workers and doctors are pleading with people to take this virus seriously. We are on track unless something changes to have close to 300,000 by January 1, 2021.   

My question is how do we bridge the gulf between this individual and his friends and the “other side?” The NY Times, Washington Post, LA Times, etc are all listed as untrustworthy, “fake news,” yet they have high standards for verifying anything they print. Q Anon posts assertions without any substantiation and is believed as truth. Thus there is no common ground and these folks are unreachable. And the social media reinforces this. Depending on what you click, you can be fed a continuing diet of information and misinformation that reinforces that side of the argument. Thus a silo is born.   

My conservative brother emailed me with a series of statements that were meant to divide. They were about gays, immigration, etc and they were full of half truths and false choices. I asked him not to send this out because it was wrong and harmful. He responded that it had “a lot of meat in it”. I then picked apart five of these assertions to make my point that this email was very incorrect and that what he was circulating could very easily be from a Russian troll trying to sow divisions among us. I asked him again to please not circulate this sort of stuff. He never responded.   

So, how to get consensus so we can finally take action about climate change when so many are turned off and won’t believe scientific evidence? According to the UN climate change panel we had nine years to make some very dramatic course corrections in fossil fuel use. We have burned through one of those nine and have seen the profound damage that climate change can wreak. How to get consensus? It starts with defeating all the climate deniers in Congress and the White House. Nothing will happen overnight, but we need to get started.

Bill Thibedeau 
Gilpin County