In "Trashing the Planet" Dixie Lee Ray, a zoologist who wrote her PhD thesis on the nervous system of a type of lanternfish, also former chair of the Atomic Energy Commission, tries to "unmask the doom-crying opponents of all progress". She masterfully distracts the attention away from anthropogenic causes of hole in the ozonelayer and states that volcanic eruptions inject an astonishing amount of hydrochloric acid into the stratosphere, and that it is unsure where stratospheric chloride comes from and whether humans have an effect on it. According to a review of the book in The Florida Green "the book is loaded with factual information refuting every eco-crisis you've come to love over the years" (McIver, 1992).
Even though the book was full of unsubstantiated claims it sold well and was expanded in 1993 to the bestseller "Environmental Overkill: Whatever Happened to Common Sense?". The book was closely related to two righ-wing think tanks, the Heritage Foundation and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, both active in denying climate science (Hamilton, 2010). Ray embodied the US conservatives fear of environmentalism as the new threat to progress, endless growth and extractionism. The worst of it was that environmentalism challenged these core ideas from the perspective of science, the foundation of western civilisation. The easiest way to resolve the resulting cognitive dissonance was to reject the science that created it by claiming the science was corrupted by bias.
Clive Hamilton (2010) traces the roots of climate denial to the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. After the 'Red Menace' had faded, the 'Green Scare' appeared in the form of environmentalism. The Rio Earth Summit in 1992 was the outcome of rising environmental concerns and a growing body of scientific research showing environmental decline, challenging the conservative worldview. Dixie Lee Ray attended the Summit, where she expessed her concerns regarding the socialist agenda of the UN officials sponsoring the event. Anti-environmentalism replacing anti-communism stills echoes on in climate denial propaganda such as the 2012 book "Watermelons: How Environmentalists are Killing the Planet, Destroying the Economy and Stealing Your Children's Future, by James Delingpole, executive editor for the London branch of the Breitbart News Network. Watermelon is the insult given to climate scientists by some libertarians, to show what they are really up to, a political conspiracy against big business and free market: green on the outside, red on the inside.
Source: Ray, D.L., Trashing the Planet: How Science Can Help Us Deal With Acid Rain, Depletion of the Ozone, and the Soviet Threat Among Other Things. Regnery Publishing, 1990.
Hamilton, C. Requiem for a Species. London: Earthscan, 2010.
Delingpole, J. Watermelons: How Environmentalists are Killing the Planet, Destroying the Economy and Stealing Your Children's Future. Biteback Publishing, 2012.