How conspiritualists monetize climate change

Conflating issues and "gotcha" memes all lead back to them

Conspiritualists often conflate numerous topics in order to confuse their followers, which usually results in a product or service being sold for one of the more questionable inclusions on their lists. This is apparent when it comes to climate change.

A second casualty in their messages is context, which I’ll address a little further on. Sadly, the negation of context leads to a complete lack of empathy, often displayed by people who fashion themselves as “healers” and “coaches.”

While proving intentionality is nearly always impossible, we can speculate about the range of reasons people conflate issues:

• Some see no conflict in selling a “solution” to a problem they’re decrying because they really think it’s going to help.

• Some might not make a connection at all.

• Some notice a hole in the market and rush in to fill it, beliefs or ethics be damned.

A combination of the above is also possible. Let’s focus now on the techniques being used.

Everything’s heating up

Last week, the Washington Post published an article with disturbing statistics:

• Phoenix broke a record of 19 straight days above 110 degrees, which was predicted to continue for a week or more; the city also set a record low temperature of 97

• El Paso reached 100+ degrees for 33 consecutive days

• Miami had a heat index of over 100 for 38 consecutive days

• Nationwide, 80 million people were experiencing a heat index of at least 105 degrees

Let’s stop saying “climate change is coming.” Blockbuster movies really messed with our heads by implying that only major catastrophes, like a tidal wave in LA washing over NYC, is the “real” mark of global warming. We’re in it, it’s going to get worse with the upcoming El Nino, and a lot of people are in trouble. 

Terms like “historic heat” and “thousand-year rains” are meaningless when they occur every year. Yet the topic causes many eyes to glaze over. I was writing about climate change topics in the nineties and covered it more extensively a decade ago. And as time went on, people paid less and less attention.

After publishing a series of articles, one editor told me to stop “because they don’t get a lot of attention.” An existential crisis becomes secondary to clicks. Tragically, more valuable currency in the attention economy is Jordan Peterson getting hundreds of thousands of views and thousands of likes with “climate hoax” tweets. 

Peterson is a troll, but others see opportunity. Last week, Luke Storey, an Austin-based self-purported metaphysics teacher and former fashion industry something put out a climate change post with a photo of contrails (condensation trails) in the sky.

The wink-wink is chemtrails, a ridiculous conspiracy theory spun up in the mid-nineties about governments changing the weather by releasing chemicals into the atmosphere.

As with every conspiracy theory, there is some truth in this: the Chinese government employs 37,000 people in the Beijing Weather Modification Office, which has performed “cloud seeding” to change weather since at least 1995. The government seeds clouds with silver iodide loaded into rockets for some noble purposes, like putting out wildfires, and some questionable ones, like ensuring there’s no rain during the Olympics. 

Cloud seeding is real, but consumer airlines toxifying the environment with chemtrails is not. That’s not what Storey thinks, however. The aspiring influencer has one of the most extensive downlines ever: there are over 200 spiritual tchotchkes for sale on his website, like EMF-blocking devices and reverse osmosis water systems. And as you scroll through his posts, you notice a theme: identify a danger that he, the contrarian thinker, has sorted out, and then buy a product to address one of the “solutions” to said problem.

In the above contrails post, Storey pontificated over the earth’s rapidly shifting climate patterns, mixing conspiracy with reality. Let’s look at a few examples from his screed:

• Human pollution is a travesty.

Absolutely true.

• Examples I find the most concerning:

• Cell towers/wireless radiation

Completely made up.

• Micro-plastics

Absolutely true.

• Glyphosate

Contentious, but continuing research is pointing to real problems.

• Factory farms

Absolutely true.

• Chemical plants

This is such a broad statement as to be meaningless. Which chemicals? Where? What are the regulations in those regions, and have they been broken?

• and so on…

This is the real giveaway. Storey has listed some nonsense alongside some real issues, with a few ambiguous statements thrown in. He’s basically saying “now let your imagination run wild,” which is not a serious statement.

• I do not believe paying more taxes will change the weather, nor that cow farts make the planet hotter.

Also not a serious statement. Where are those tax dollars going? Texas isn’t exactly a haven for progressive environmental projects, so locally he’s probably right, but again: ambiguity. And you can’t list “factory farms” above and then negate one of the biggest drivers of climate change in factory farms. He contradicts himself within a few graphs and likely doesn’t even realize it.

• I trust TV and politicians to inform me about the climate approximately…0%.

More ambiguity. I would trust climate researchers most, but instead he leans on tropes.

• This image shows how the climate is being ‘changed’. And it’s being done intentionally, by the same people who want to tax you to stop it.

Partly true, but not how Storey presents is. Contrails are a driver of aircraft-induced climate change. “Chemtrails” are not.

• Until then I’ll just be over here waking people up to the fact that maniacal psychopaths like Gates are literally trying to block out the sun by covering the entire surface of the Earth with aluminum, barium, and other metal particulate that are known to be toxic to all biological life.

Gates’s support for spraying calcium carbonate into the atmosphere was scrapped. “Trying to block out the sun” is hyperbolic, though I agree it’s not a great idea. That said, a small amount of an inorganic salt being sprayed into part of the atmosphere is not “covering the entire surface of the Earth with aluminum, barium, and other metal particulate.” Storey just made that up and packages it in one conspiracy-laden post.

So while Storey isn’t selling prepper kits, this word salad post hints at “problems” like EMF, for which he sells 19 anti-EMF products on his website, such as a “quantum tech baseball cap” and a Faraday Infrared Sauna. My favorite is the EMF-proof boxer briefs that claim to “balance your immune system and fight off infections.” The manufacturer’s site says that 78% of customers report a “boost in cognition.” They sell Storey-sponsored “Faraday boxer briefs” sell for $69 a pair.

Watch what they say, then watch what they sell.

Seeking empathy—anywhere

Conspirituality is dominated by natural-living hustlers who both romanticize a symbiotic relationship with the earth that never actually existed and deny that climate change is happening—or, at least, punt the reasons for it to absurd levels.

Or, as evidenced in another series of posts last week, exploit an unfortunate recurrence of climate change—tornadoes—to parade their supposed moral high ground.

On Wednesday, 165 MPH winds whipped through North Carolina, completely destroying a Pfizer pharmaceutical plant. Conspiritualists like Ben Raue, “Plant Based Ben” posted giddy memes about the destruction being “karma,” while Danielle LaPorte said it “destroyed evidence” in the comments.

Meanwhile, Amber Lee Sears dropped this gem.

Nearly 25% of Pfizer’s sterile injectables for US hospitals are produced at this plant (and 8% of all the nation’s sterile injectables), which employs 4,500 people in a rural area of the state 45 miles outside of Raleigh. A former textile and agricultural producing region, pharmaceuticals have diversified the local economy. This plant is responsible for important medicines and products, like IV bags, anesthetics, and syringes. A nationwide shortage of some of these products is now predicted as hospitals across the country are soon going to be out of necessary supplies. 

But for influencers like Raue, Sears, LaPorte, and many others, it was the perfect gotcha moment for the vaccine maker. Their inability to focus on real issues with American health care—the outsized pay of pharma executives; the difficulties so many have in securing health care; pharma lobbying and DTC advertising—is lost on them. They’re anti-vaxxers, Pfizer is the devil, and so good that the plant was destroyed. That’s all the context they need.

The story that plays out in their heads is an epic mythology where they’re on the side of good and any damage to their enemy is justified, even if the real damage is the thousands of workers (at least temporarily) out of jobs and the countless patients who will be unable to access medicine in the coming months.

And forget discussion of climate change in the memes they’re trading. It’s not even in their consciousness.

You can’t both scream at the government about everything and yet refuse to partake in the system that creates the regulations that could actually impact the environment.

Instead, it’s a delusional and twisted romance all the way down: a romanticized image of a past that never was and a romanticized non-solution with how to get out of this mess. Buy all the products you want, dream about transcending the earthly plane to somewhere greater, but meanwhile a whole lot of us are in the grips of something terrible that’s only growing worse, and refusing to face it head on for what it is isn’t helping anyone.

That’s not what it’s really about for these conspiritualists. It’s always been about them, not their communities, not people in need, and certainly not the environment.

Update: Since writing this article, Pfizer has updated the damage report. While a lot of medicine was destroyed, it appears their other plants will make up the “many weeks of” medications and supplies that were damaged.