A common way to avoid this dissonance is denial. This entails ignoring or disbelieving information that, if accepted, would generate mental conflict. If one is strongly committed to a particular point of view, whether political, religious or something else, it takes an effort of will to acknowledge information that contradicts it. It also shows up in the familiar reaction to disturbing news, “My child [or spouse, dog, or favored political candidate] couldn’t have done that.”

There have been hundreds of studies documenting this tendency and weighing the factors that make it more or less prevalent, but little attention has been given to the one that matters most for situations like the one depicted in Silkwood: whether people believe they can act on difficult information to improve outcomes they care about. A useful way to think about the issue is to distinguish between two effects of uncomfortable information.

First, it is, well, uncomfortable; one feels worse experiencing the tension it engenders in one’s mind. That’s the dissonance avoidance effect. But taking in challenging information can also help one better understand the problems one faces so to deal with them. You may not be happy to find out that your house is at greater risk of flood or fire than you thought, but armed with that knowledge you can perhaps take better precautions or explore options for moving to a safer location. You may be disturbed to find out your country is responsible for offenses against people in other parts of the world, but this can also be a basis for pooling your political influence with others who feel the same way, so together you can change these policies. The second effect, then, is the usefulness value of information: its contribution to effective action.

Put this way, it becomes obvious that power, or at least the perception of it, plays a central role. Cognitive dissonance, uncomfortable as it may be, can be a step toward achieving higher goals, but only if those on the receiving end of new information and ideas feel they have the power to put them to use. To be powerless, then, is to experience the pain but not the gain, which means denial becomes a more likely response.

We can see this dynamic in Silkwood. In fact, the central character’s transformation is a vivid example of the effect that growing awareness of power can create on openness to a new and uncomfortable perspective. At the beginning of the film, Karen Silkwood is portrayed as moderately knowledgeable about radiation risk, comforting an older colleague who panics after she sets off an alarm for external exposure and counseling her to get a test for internal contamination. Her approach to her own safety, however, can best be described as cavalier. But as she begins to identify more closely with her union and realizes how the hidden information she has access to can be used as leverage against the company, she takes safety much more seriously. Her sense of potential power overcomes the force of cognitive dissonance.

But not so for all her coworkers. For dramatic purposes, the hostility some feel toward Silkwood is distilled down to two characters, at least one of whom is explicitly in denial over the dangers of radiation. The fear such workers express is that, by protesting, they will succeed in nothing more than getting the plant shut down, costing everyone their only hope of work in an economically depressed region of Oklahoma.

From this perspective, Kerr-McGee’s workers are hostages, and if uncomfortable information about the plant is brought to light, it’s better to look the other way. In fact, that’s what happened in real life, after the events depicted in the movie: Karen Silkwood’s inside information about the cover-up of faulty fuel rod welds was revealed, and the plant was shuttered the following year. This doesn’t justify denial, of course, but it puts it in context. Economic vulnerability raises the cost of solidarity without decreasing its value, since OCAW’s efforts and that of its allies benefitted workers across the country. In a situation like this, susceptibility to denial may depend on the extent workers think in terms of “I” rather than “we.”

Denial is often stark in occupational safety contexts, where the economic and health stakes for workers can be large, but it shows up in other contexts too. A strong case can be made, for instance, that it plays a role in public acquiescence to the ever-worsening climate crisis. On purely scientific grounds, 2026 should be a turning point in climate politics. Unprecedented heat waves in Europe, increasingly extreme weather in the United States and elsewhere, and a further upsurge in wildfires are making headlines, while evidence of intensified carbon cycle feedbacks is disturbing scientists.

Meanwhile, a September report by the United Nations Environment Programme, Limiting Overshoot, announced that holding global warming to the Paris Agreement target of 1.5 degrees Celsius is already impossible and that we should prepare for even hotter scenarios, which we will somehow have to reverse in the coming decades. Taken together, or even separately, these should evoke an urgent activist response, but instead climate politics is moribund. Climate change is almost invisible in the US midterm elections and political battles elsewhere. Opinion polls in this country show no upsurge of alarm, as the worsening climate trails nearly all other issues as a voter concern.

It would be a mistake to attribute this weird disjunction between objective danger and the lack of political response to any one factor, but cognitive dissonance is a likely contributor. There are many points of potential denial along the chain from science to politics: denial that the climate is changing at all; that its changes are due to human action (especially the burning of fossil fuels); that its effects are already harmful and are on track to become catastrophic; and that we have the tools to take action and prevent the worst. And there are also many competing economic, political and social entanglements that might make people resistant to processing the deteriorating news.

One factor is worth stressing, however: the feeling of abject powerlessness. After decades of agitation and debate, the kind of climate action that might have forestalled the current crisis has remained far out of reach, leaving many with little hope that the future will be any different. If this is a common feeling, one may decide to avoid the anxiety and just skip the latest distressing news on the climate front.

To the extent that such a dynamic is in play, we’re caught in a debilitating loop: discouragement from past political failure leads many people to pay less attention to a given problem. By paying less attention to those problems, people make continued political failure more likely. Arguably, this explains significant part of the mess we’re in.

To fight discouragement, some climate activists have been making the case that, while we could be doing better politically, in economic terms things are going forward: the costs of wind and solar energy are dropping dramatically, and investment in them continues to rise. Fair enough. The intention of such sunny observations is to interrupt the denial-and-defeat loop. But it needs qualification. New green energy cuts emissions when it displaces fossil fuels, but adding capacity alone does not guarantee an overall reduction in emissions. Alas, carbon emissions have continued to rise year after year, and the infusion of wind and solar hasn’t yet bent the long-term curve of emission increase. Even worse, warming depends on cumulative emissions, so even a modest decline, much less a leveling off, won’t be enough. Annual emissions must fall and ultimately reach net zero to halt CO-driven warming.

This is truly a difficult situation to find ourselves in. There are no easy answers to offer those settling into discouragement, since only a much more ambitious and resolute climate activism than we have seen has the potential to restore a sense of popular power — the conviction that we who reject the nightmare climate scenario really can force action to thwart it. Doing this will mean wedding the climate movement to a broader struggle against the suffocating power of capital, although what that entails is a story for another article.

The bottom line: Power in the hands of ordinary people matters not only for what it can achieve directly but also because it encourages us to face challenges we would otherwise find it easier to ignore or deny. We are all Karen Silkwoods on the greenhouse planet we call Earth.