A little more conversation, a little less action, please;
All this aggravation ain't satisfactioning anyone.
I am reading people trying to defend the activists involved with Insulate Britain. The defences are along the same lines as those mounted for Extinction Rebellion. The thing that impresses me most about these apologetics is the extent to which they abuse ‘ordinary’ people and people with power and responsibility for decision (in politics and business) for neither knowing nor caring about the environment. The position is utterly idealistic, the purity of principle afforded by distance from political and socio-economic reality. Hence the incoherent combination of scientism, naturism, and culturalism (and concomitant tendencies to moralism and romanticism) among such environmentalists.
I’ll offer some random comments in passing. I’ve written too much over the years, and too little of it has had enough of an effect on environmentalists for me to spend any more time on this. I've been campaigning and writing on the environmental crisis since the 1980s, campaigning for policies to address the hole in the Ozone layer and playing a little part in the great Green electoral successes of the late 1980s. In all the time I campaigned on Green issues, I was also concerned to identify and overcome of the deficiencies and failures of environmentalism as politics. You can find any number of texts on this site concerning the need to establish theoretical and practical reason on a continuum, overcoming the chasm that has opened up between the two, saddling us with the problem of bridging. That problem is still with us, hence the shrill tones of those concerned to draw attention to what ‘the science’ has to say on the scale of the crisis we are in. Simply stating a truth from some Archimedean Point that is claimed to be independent of political and social interests and processes will not serve to motivate and inspire effort on the part of others. More than likely, it will put people off. I will admit to a number of errors during my time as an environmental campaigner in this respect. In particular, I would draw attention to tendencies to focus on outliers in ‘the science’ and to normalize extremes in public discourse, making possibilities seem like probabilities, even certainties. I did this, writing of 4C temperature increases, warning of ‘Hell on Earth,’ predicting eco-catastrophe in the near future, and threatening the great public with dire consequences if they failed to act now. In my defence, I will say my arguments were a little more nuanced than that, always emphasised the need for persuasion and politics, and placed the agency of the individual members of the demos at the heart of an ecological self-transformation. And I still maintain that the facts and figures on climate crisis make for worrying reading, making long-term social transformation imperative. But by that I do mean social transformation, and not some environmental rescue squad so wrapped up in problems and their technical resolution as to miss the human factor. It is easy to become so absorbed in activism as to lose sight of reason and evidence. I issued the ‘all hands on deck’ alarm with respect to the crisis in the climate system many years ago. It is language I would caution against using now. That the ship didn’t sink should tell us to be more circumspect when talking of emergency. These deadlines and timescales come and go, and with them the willingness of a tired public to listen anymore. I also employed the language of ‘x years to save the planet,’ followed by seemingly endless lists of environmental doom and disaster – floods, fires, famines, extinction events, desertification and so on. Activists still reel off these lists in TV and radio interviews, oblivious to how ineffective they are. Take it as read that the public know all about calamitous events threatened as a matter of routine. It is truly depressing to hear how often environmental activists take the opportunity offered by TV and radio interviews to start threatening doom and disaster in the near future if we fail to act NOW! Economies will crash, people will starve, the health service will fall apart, people will die, in millions! The difficult questions, of course, relate to appropriate and effective action.
The conflation of activism, journalism, science, and politics is a blight, a bane on the practical, and critical, environmentalism we need, and I now urge people to make the necessary distinctions. In my defence, these writings and arguments from my past campaigns were all offered in the cause of activism, drawing on the research findings of others, citing those findings to draw certain conclusions. And I always made the point of arguing that the politics and ethics of environmental action are independent of ‘the science,’ if related to it. The tendency to consider politics and ethics as secondary and derivative with respect to science and nature is a blight in environmentalism I have criticized from the first, and its debilitating effects are now apparent in the despairing politics goading the people and authorities of the UK in the present day.
It is for environmentalists to up their game big time on the politics, rather than continue to think that lectures and demands drawn from science and technology will suffice to do the job (and a tendentious and selective approach to science and technology to boot). I’ll not repeat myself here, simply say that scientific knowledge and technological know-how give people the ability to act, they do not make people want to act; they do not in themselves have the qualities of the virtues. I have argued consistently for the cultivation and acquisition of the virtues as qualities for a flourishing life. Without those virtues, and without the inner motives allied to collective means and mechanisms of transition and transformation, environmentalism is a hollow shell, lacking in inner motive force. Environmentalism is stuck in educative mode, endlessly informing empty heads passively in expectation of action, constantly issuing ‘wake up’ calls when that action – predictably – fails to materialize. This approach doesn’t work, for all of the reasons given above and many more besides. The fact that we have learned by experience that it doesn’t work should itself have been enough to induce environmentalists to change tack. Unfortunately, they are doubling down on education and consciousness-raising. It is remarkable how dull-witted those who seek to lead an environmental transformation really are. I suspect that they know it is futile. I do know that instead of a genuine politics, they are simply trying to put pressure on government to act, treating ‘ordinary’ people as passive objects – and collateral damage – rather than as citizens and agents in the whole process. This is a political calamity for environmentalism, effectively severing green issues from their roots in the social and moral ecology.
For too long now I have heard activists lament that "people don't know" and "people don't care." That view is wrong. Not only is that accusation misguided – serving to further demotivate the citizens on the receiving end of that abuse, it is a lame excuse for failure. We ought to be well past that stage. The real challenge lies in cultivating the conditions of responsiveness and co-responsibility. I have little hope in this respect, for the reason I was arguing this fifteen, twenty years ago in environmental circles. I have found that if it doesn’t involve science and technology, or some decadent Mother Nature worship, too many environmentalists don’t actually listen. I hear the accusation that people neither know nor care now and simply move on, knowing there is nothing to see here, only a tired apologetics on the part of people who are themselves uncomprehending and clueless. Such a politics is bankrupt. “We have tried the democratic process and it has failed” is a common response on the part of activists when challenged as to why they don’t stand for election. That response is revealing in any number of respects. The first thing to note are the inherently anti-democratic assumptions of that response. Such people are convinced that they possess ‘the truth’ and that this truth is non-negotiable, beyond dialogue and compromise, that is, beyond the normal exchanges of politics; when people fail to obey and comply, environmentalists in possession of this truth feel authorised to simply bypass people and seek the means by which that truth is to be enforced. That view puts politics and people on ice: politics is dissensus and disagreement, an exchange between different others with alternate platforms with a view to finding a basis for agreement. The claims of XR and such like to be ‘beyond politics’ can be located in this totalitarian temper. Such an attitude is toxic, inimical to liberty and democracy both; it is the ‘end of politics,’ an expression of the totalitarian potential secreted within revolutionary politics. It is the very thing that I, as a socialist, have sought to exorcise from radical politics.
More than this, though, there is the complete inability to see that it is not the political process that has failed but that environmentalism as politics has been utterly inept. I am not criticising with hindsight here. I have made this criticism at every step of the way over the years I spent as an environmental campaigner and activist. The crude enlightenment model of informing empty heads is passive, fails to engage, inspire, and motivate people, and has no effect on people. The desperation expressed by so many activists setting out deliberately disrupt the daily activities of ordinary people is born of the many years of failure on the part of environmentalism as politics. I predicted it and established the reasons for it, and so it came to pass. But rather than learn lessons here, activists remain blinkered. So convinced are they of the rightness of their cause – armed as they are with ‘the science’ as unarguable authority – that they condemn politics and the people for failing to respond and act rather than subject their own failures to provide a viable, plausible, and affordable alternative to a close examination. Such people are more concerned with being right than with being ineffective. Rather than persuade, they will seek to impose and enforce. And they are not right, either. I can date the time I started to distance myself from these environmentalists precisely. My blog posts detail the spats I started to have with activists, beginning with the nasty attitudes some expressed with respect to the Thomas Fire in California. This would be December 2017. I challenged their wildly unrealistic assumptions and expectations with respect to phasing out cars in California and found myself on the receiving end of the most patronising lectures from people I knew, and people who knew me to be someone fairly knowledgeable and well-read. I started to see environmentalists as ‘ordinary’ people saw them – as smug, self-righteous, shrill, and sanctimonious know-nothings posing as know-it-alls. It was thoroughly off-putting, and I made that criticism. Ignored. I started to notice the hectoring and lecturing all the more from that moment on, and became aware of the extent to which environmentalism as politics is stuck in that didactic mode. The final straw was the circus around Thunberg et al. And XR. The constant refrain that the media never covers climate change is laughable – it has been covered to death and has become utterly boring. Without the means and mechanisms of effective climate action, constant coverage of climate crisis is psychologically enervating. People will switch off to preserve their sanity. It is for environmental campaigners to provide the modes of action and organisation that stimulate agency on the part of people. This they have singularly failed to do, hence their constant demand that “government” should act. That’s the trick they are trying to pull, pressure authorities at all levels to declare a climate emergency and then constantly be on their back to meet their commitments or face the charge of falling short. There is zero transformation in this. The slogan ‘system change or climate change’ is just that to these people, a mere slogan to galvanize government action – and expenditure. Costs may increase, but there will be no fundamental transformation at the level of social relations.
It is much easier to abuse people than it is to involve and motivate them in an effective political movement that is able to grasp how the behaviours to be changed are locked into socially structured patterns. Without a critique of political economy that is located in social relations, a political movement is utterly idealistic and impotent, doomed to attempting to engineer change ‘from the outside.’ Environmentalism thus degenerates into the very vanguardism that has been the graveyard of leftist politics since ever, the elitist Blanqui-Buonarotti model that Marx thought he had transcended. By these means, the ends are displaced, and principles are realized by being perverted into their opposite in practice.
The idea that all you have to do to inspire "action" is to inform empty heads and "raise awareness" among the passive mass is not merely crude, it is simply ineffective. It misdiagnoses the problem as lack of knowledge that requires education, and hence produces a solution that doesn’t work, only wastes a lot of time, energy, and money, diverting and perverting these things into sterile channels. The fact that this approach has failed to work all these years should have told environmentalists this. They are supposed to be the clever ones, boasting so many with teaching and university backgrounds. But they seem unable to learn this point, and instead default to abusing the selfishness and stupidity of ‘ordinary’ people. This is politically and sociologically illiterate, the result no doubt of being so detached from the common people and their concerns.
And that's even before we come to the really difficult questions of targeting policies and programmes to problems, not to mention questions of the substantial cost, who will pay, and who will be responsible for implementation. There is a legitimate role for activism. The problems come when activism dominates and even absorbs the entire terrain. Instead of practicalities there is a constant pitching to extremes with the intention of pressuring change. Hence the constant refrain that “nothing is being done.” There is plenty being done, at quite a cost, a cost that people are already noticing in their energy bills and taxes. “It is not enough,” comes the stock charge from activists from the outside of the political process. This is an attempt to claim power without responsibility and it is utterly destructive of the political process, wearing down the public realm by subjecting it to myriad competing and ultimately impracticable claims. That constant pressure gradually wears down trust and faith in public authority, giving the impression that governments – and democratic institutions – are worthless. It is utterly self-destructive, undermining the public realm that is essential to any effective environmentalism.
Ambitious – some would say impossible - demands which are unattached to the means and mechanisms of action is a recipe for delusion and extremism. You may as well ask for a herd of unicorns and my little pony. Net Zero by 2030? By 2025? Net zero is a big ask for 2050. Is it possible? Is it even desirable? But activists enjoy the feeling that they are on a crusade. Politically, this is a pathetic spectacle. The good nature and patience of the British public - and the authorities - is being abused in a deliberate attempt to provoke violence and conflict. The damage these people are doing to the social ecology is unconscionable, the damage to the political ecology may well be even worse. Instead of the constructive efforts that are required to transition to an ecological society, there is an utterly destructive anti-politics, the kind of which locates environmentalism firmly within the doomster scenario. It is born of desperation and does indeed make the environmental cause seem hopeless.
That there are some who expect them to be feted because they are so public in caring so much about the climate indicates the level of delusion that is now upon the world. Take a look at the environmental programmes already underway around the world (despite certain environmentalists parroting the phrase “nothing is being done”) as well as those ambitious goals being demanded and ask: who or what has the power and resources to push technology to such a scale. I’ll give you a clue, it is not ‘ordinary’ people and certainly not green hippies with startup companies.
Take a critical look, too, at the demands that the brakes be slammed onto the economy to ‘save the planet from eco-catastrophe.’ Such an action will certainly result in catastrophe, sending the progress that has been made on poverty, disease, famine etc this past century and more into reverse in short time. But we have seen, haven’t we, the complete indifference of these environmentalists as activists to the health and well-being of flesh-and-blood human beings. Like all zealots, they happily sacrifice the life and liberty of real individuals to the greater good of the great abstraction that is called ‘humanity.’ Here, the inherent misanthropy of ecology as the new dismal science rears its head once more. ‘There are too many people on the planet ..’ ‘people are the problem’ etc. Now we have this war of attrition against ordinary folk for failing to obey and comply with environmental diktat. Who, I ask, is paying the taxes to fund these ambitious climate programmes?
Consider, then, the transfer of resources that all of this will entail. Leftist fantasists think this is about restructuring power away from the rich, and don’t see that the transfer of money will be from the ordinary folk to the rich corporations. Who else has the capacity to undertake these ambitious climate programmes? Examine activists on this question – as I have - and all you will receive – at best - is some idealist talk on the circular economy, the ‘real materials’ economy, and the doughnut economy. I’m all for the sustainable economy, I’ve argued for that very thing at length. But unless ideals are grounded in a critique of political economy and attached to their means of realisation, there is a danger of overspill and appropriation. The idea of ‘necessity’ in politics is an open invitation to authoritarian imposition ‘for the greater good.’ If you don’t have ‘ordinary’ people with you or, better still, a substantial section of the demos with the structural and organisational capacity to act – and the will and motivation to activate that capacity – all that there is is that great abstract collectivity which is “government.” That’s all I hear from activists like this, “government.” “Government” will pay, “government” will act. Without democratic participation – and there is zero evidence that environmentalists have the first idea how to incite and sustain that, or even an interest in doing that in the first place - that road leads to an austerian environmental regime under a ‘clean green’ corporate form. And to think that there are friends and foes who think this bourgeois reformism on steroids is socialism; it is the very antithesis of socialism, merely another exercise in its degeneration as a top-down state collectivism. Thankfully, ‘ordinary’ people – being so ordinary – have seen right through it and give it a wide berth. The environment is too important to be left in the hands of environmentalists.
There is also a need to be more aware of the cost of ‘going green,’ and much more critical of green measures. Something isn’t good simply as a result of being ‘green’ – and isn’t necessarily green, let alone effective in resolving the problems they claim to resolve. This whole area is an open invitation to rents and free-riders. All those things relating to the bureaucratisation of ‘the good’ which discredited ‘socialism’ in the past stand poised to discredit environmentalism in the present. There will be an enormous backlash when the costs of ‘going green’ become apparent, especially should all that expense – already deemed to be ‘not enough’ – be shown to be ineffectual. At present, there has been a conspicuous failure to develop the global framework for the concerted, comprehensive action that is proposed – and required. That leaves nations having to take unilateral action in a way that invites free-riding from other nations. It is economic suicide, and only foolish nations, or nations worn down by internal pressure, will go down that route. It is absolutely inept politics, and utterly futile in its impact. No nation is in a position to change the global temperature by going to Net Zero, not least when the actions of China, India, and the emerging economies of Africa are going in precisely the opposite direction. Any effective, just, and practicable action has to be global, collective, and concerted, since we are talking about a global climate system.
The activists claim that the UK should be leading the way out of the Industrial Revolution it led the world into. This is the key line of assault. Significantly, it is couched in overtly religious terms of ‘climate guilt’ or sin. This is a secular religion, the very worst kind of religion, a religion framed in wholly human terms, without hopes of mercy, forgiveness, and redemption.
The fact is, however, is that the UK has been leading the way out of the Industrial Revolution. Those of us coming from unemployment blackspots as a result of rapid deindustrialisation know this all too well. No one gives a damn for those struggling to get jobs and carve some kind of a position for themselves in the world. I had thought green politics would incorporate a socio-economic dimension, only to find that it completely scotomizes questions of class. In terms of policies, though, the UK has been a world leader on climate policies and targets. The UK is leading. Some of the claims are disingenuous, no doubt, with problems being exported. But costs, expenditures, and tax bills don’t lie – the UK has been leading. Has the rest of the world been following that lead? The hell it has! Plenty of countries, acquiring new industries by the dozen a day, are laughing all the way to the high value end of the global economy, picking up the industries we say are now outmoded and relocating them to their own countries, spewing out all the carbon emissions we have cut, and taking all the jobs and prosperity we once had. All those expensive efforts – expensive in social as well as fiscal terms – are not making one iota of difference to global temperatures. Idealism dies a cold and lonely death in the world of real politics. The demand that the UK – or any other of the older industrialised nations – come to lead the way ignores the fact that the UK – and a number of these nations – has been leading the way for a number of decades now. At what point do you wake up and realize that the industrialising countries and emerging economies are not going to follow suit, that the great green dream of Net Zero is not going to happen by way of unilaterial industrial disarmament. This is an industrial self-destruction that few nations will be foolish enough to embrace. It is the road to internal impoverishment, the loss of economic capacity and control over energy. In effect, the nations ‘going green’ are rendering themselves poor and impotent in a world that will be dominated by new economic powers. China has declared its intention to build one hundred new airports in the next decade. Any deindustrialisation on the part of the older nations will be more than offset by the industrialisation of others. Try making the appeal to those new global powers that they should deindustrialize and see how far it gets. Idealism detached from practical means is a blight in politics.
If there are substantial amounts of money to be spent on climate change, the question is what that money is best spent on. Unilateral action in an attempt to change the world’s temperature is foolish and futile, not least because other counties aren’t going to follow suit and take the necessary actions to cut their carbon emissions; indeed, they are increasing their carbon emissions each year. To continue going down that route is to waste time, resources, and effort, and invite an anti-green backlash when the failure – and high cost – becomes apparent. Such actions will only be effective if worked in tandem with the actions of other countries. In the absence of a concerted, comprehensive framework for global action, adaptation is a better bet. Getting to Net Zero, at whatever cost – probably vast - will make little or no difference. Unless global humanity reverts to being hunter gatherers. There are more than a few environmentalists who entertain such ambitions, pointing to all manner of arguments showing how happy we were in the state of innocence. ‘We’ were also few. This is errant nonsense, a reactionary cul-de-sac. The problems that the world faces are not chronological, they are structural – there is no going back, it is neither possible nor desirable.
As a substitute for the socialism which offered the principle challenge to capitalism for a century or more, environmentalism has proven to be a damp squib, a miserable motley of scientism and naturism, combining a fetish of science and technology with a romanticism of nature, a nature worship of a benign nature. Nature is indifferent and doesn’t give a damn one way or the other, there is no viable ethic able to motivate effort and inspire agency in this ‘Nature.’ And science as authoritative voice is merely the reification of this indifferent Nature. The result is an environmental politics that is not fit for purpose, that doesn’t even count as politics, even makes a virtue of being ‘non-’ or even anti-politics. The failure to persuade, motivate, and inspire follows as a matter of course.
Jobs, jobs for all and not just jobs for the rich, the highly educated, or those wanting to work in services and offices, are what are required. Green jobs are promised, millions of them. Where? The contempt for ordinary folk trying to get to work is palpable, indicating zero concern for the jobs people already do. Such indifference is of a piece with the concern to slam the brakes on the economy, and thereby put millions out of work as a price worth paying to cut carbon emissions. It takes all kinds of people to create a healthy, viable, and sustainable society, one that pays attention to the social as well as the natural ecology. There is a need for legislative and tax reform to enable the maximum number of our citizens, with their different attitudes, interests, skills, IQ's. etc to participate in the economy. This is what we need politics to start delivering on. There is no reason why this cannot be done in a way that is in tune with the planetary ecology.
The problems come when environmentalism comes to be appropriated by the middle class and made to fit their own ‘non-class’ lifestyle concerns. People who are not struggling to pay their bills, keep a roof over their heads, or feed their families are utterly blasé when it comes to issuing demands that impose extra costs on families who financially struggling. The cost of Net Zero to poorer families is never considered. There seems to be an assumption that ‘the rich’ have the money and will pay. It’s like the last hundred years never happened. ‘The rich’ don’t capitulate so easily, that’s why they are rich. The money will be raised from other sources.
There is a moral blindspot at the heart of the entire campaign, evident in the claim that the ‘greater good’ of ‘humanity’ in some as yet to be attained ‘future’ trumps the real life concerns of flesh and blood individuals in the present. This is morally disastrous reasoning of the kind that has characterised dictatorial movements and regimes throughout history. It is this ethic that we can have expected leftism in politics to be alert to, not least on account of how it has undermined every leftist cause it has infected. How easily the green movement betrayed the ideals and values it once raised. How utterly depressing to hear the old talk of breaking eggs being peddled again. With this amount of egg breaking, these characters had better make a damned good omelette. I can’t see it, other than sociologically vague talk of ‘saving’ the planetary ecology. How does that pan out, institutionally and structurally? I want to hear a lot more from people who are struggling to pay their bills and want to see cheaper energy bills for people struggling with the cost of living. Forcing those bills up deliberately in order to be ‘greener’ can’t be justified in those simple terms. There is more to this question than survival, and it is environmentalists’ failure to see that that explains their predicament. And their desperation.
Without a concerted, comprehensive framework for climate action, there is only the futile, foolish, and impotent idealism of unilateralism, something which traps us all within the inexorable il/logic of collective inaction – no one actor will take the necessary steps unless all others do, which means that no-one does and all die. The pressure now being mounted for the UK to lead the way reveals the utter political ineptitude at work. The UK, like most other democracies, is a soft and easy target here, with the rights of protest and plethora of civil liberties making a politics of permanent protest possible. These rights and liberties may not be able to survive this constant and growing wave of activism rendering public and social life unworkable. The country is being implored to ‘take one for the team,’ a futile – and costly - gesture which merely exports jobs and prosperity to other countries and racks up debt at home. This will rebound badly against green concerns, particularly those that are not profitable to corporate capital. Since those other countries are not going to do likewise, we are better off serving the interests of our constituents in the here and now. Other countries need to play their part. If they don’t, forcing ordinary Britons to buy new heat pumps and such like isn’t going to make a jot of difference, only make green policies unpopular and the target of a libertarian revanchistm. Even a cursory examination of the numbers here reveals how misplaced this environmental activism is – a 1% reduction in China's output would be the same as the UK cutting our output by 1/3. But, yes, agreed, a substantial part of the UK’s emissions’ reductions can be attributed to the shift of production to China and India. How very dare they!? Such is the hardball world of politics, get used to it and get real. Idealism dies a cruel death in this world. The similarly futile campaign for unilaterial nuclear disarmament has now turned into a campaign unilateral industrial disarmament, with much the same features, the virtuous marching up and down signalling their virtue in the most pious of terms at safe remove from the socio-economic pressures of life. The repeated claim is that if we give a lead and disarm first, then everyone else will follow suit, all evidence to the contrary.
So what, really, is driving this movement, which is so manifestly futile in terms of its stated aims and ideals? More power, more control, and more money for the elite, say the cynics, with activists as mere dupes. There may be forces at work behind the scenes or, more likely, on the sidelines preparing to pounce and appropriate ‘necessity’ on their terms, but I take most people involved to be genuine, idealists at heart, and utterly ineffectual as a result. The environmental problem will be taken out of their hands sooner or later. Look at the demands being made, examine the expenditures involved, and the technologies required, and ask who has the capacity to deliver. It’s not ordinary people. No wonder ordinary people are treated so callously and casually by environmental activists. As for the activists themselves, they are not the main players either. They even admit to the failure and futility of their past efforts in politics, claiming that they are now motivated by despair. Look behind this and beyond this and you will see the classic traits of radicalisation and recruitment, the language pitched at extremes to scare and terrify the concerned into action. Job done, investment made, and plans undertaken, and this crowd will be stood down as of no further use. The policies and programmes will make a lot of ordinary people poorer, for certain, but it will with equal certainty make a select few people filthy stinking rich, too. These actions are not merely futile – and politically practicable only via authoritarian imposition – they will cost taxpayers and businesses an exorbitant amount of money that will make it even more difficult to compete on the global stage. It has all the hallmarks of decadence on the part of people who have never wanted for anything in their lives, and think that that degree of comfort will always be the case in the future. As for their terror at a future deprivation for their children, try a lifetime lived in the industrial heartlands of the UK – where were you then when people like me were expressing concern for our present penury and our complete lack of a future? Personally, I don’t care if I never encountered pious bourgeois idealism in any of its forms ever again.
Some activists argue that ‘we’ owe some moral debt for creating the modern industrial world, that ‘we’ should ‘lead the way’ to pay our ‘CO2 debt’ and not worry about the cost and the cruel burden on the poor. As a fully paid up member of ‘the poor,’ I ask: who is this ‘we’? I repeat, when ‘we’ - those of us living in the midst of mass unemployment in the deindustrialising economies of the UK - asked for help in the midst of mass unemployment, sufficient numbers of the country chose to put their voting consciences elsewhere, leaving us to rot. I don’t need to be guilt tripped by very materially comfortable people about stolen futures. Now the architects of the politics of selfishness are out in force, as if salving their guilt in some way. It is not an edifying spectacle to see them take spite on those trying to get to work.
IB - like XR before them - seek to provoke the police/authorities into a response they could then portray as heavy-handed and present themselves as martyrs/victims to the cause. It didn’t happen with XR and it hasn’t happened with IB. Rather than rally to the cause of the poor non-violent resisters, the public are turning angrily on them. This is not surprising given the extent to which the environmental activists seem intent on provoking the public to violence, in a last desperate attempt at martyrdom. It really is a pathetic spectacle to behold. These people are victims in a land without oppressors. Note how often they present their disruptive, and explicitly anti-social, behaviour as peaceful and non-violent. This is hogwash from first to last, and utterly irresponsible and manipulative to the core. These activists have nothing to offer, no solutions at all, only a permanent protest in the name of climate alarm and doom to ratchet up pressure on 'government.' But some of them may well be very conscious of their role in paving the way for those waiting in the wings who do have solutions – and technologies – to offer, at a price.
How many years is it that we have to ‘save the planet’? I remember when it was ten, some twenty years ago, then seven (Bill McGuire’s book Seven Years to Save the Planet written in 2008, which is thirteen years ago). Now, no doubt to fit the urgent mood that prevails, it seems to be three or four. And we are all supposed to be galvanised to act to stave off the end of the world that is sure to come. Those years will pass quickly. But I doubt the activists will go away. All other deadlines have gone one by one. I hate to point the obvious out, but these threats are now met with complete indifference, when not merely laughed at. The sounding of the alarm is subject to rapidly diminishing returns. If the alarms of forty years plus ago were right, then it is too late anyway; if it is not too late, then those alarms were wrong, implying that it is wise to treat all such alarms with a pinch of salt. Alarmism has no effect any more.
The authorities probably thought that in time these activists would come to realize the futility of their position and go away, ignored and unharmed. They didn’t. Instead, the peaceful and non-violent protestors became even more annoying, I suspect that if they do now come in for rougher treatment than they have received so far, no one will care, beyond welcoming it as not before time. It is a clown show. The environment needs to be taken out of the hands of such people, they are political cretins who ensure that environmentalism punches well below its scientific weight. My suspicion is that this politics has been engineered precisely for such appropriation, normalizing ‘necessity’ in the political realm and making society and citizens available for government diktat in league with green corporate capital.
One person writes: “The Gaia deception was contrived by Globalist groups such as The Club Of Rome to brainwash the general public into accepting Totalitarianism and ultimately population reduction. They're useful idiots, nothing more.”
I speculated a couple of years ago with respect to Extinction Rebellion that the authorities deliberately went easy on the protestors, thereby springing the trap these "peaceful, non-violent" provocateurs were setting. IB, like XR, are clearly out to incite a tough response so as to be able to portray the authorities as heavy-handed and themselves as victims with a cause. It didn't happen this way. I do remember early on in the XR protests an XR spokesperson refer to police repression. The lines were clearly already written. People laughed. Instead of poor oppressed victims, the public see the protestors/resisters as a pain, socially disruptive and utterly monotone, with the one simple message they keep repeating putting us all to sleep instead of waking us up. The ones who are sincere are deluded; then there are the others, the ones who are deliberately waging a war of attrition on the public to ratchet up pressure on government to commit to ambitious and expensive climate programmes. Those programmes may or may not be necessary, but are for the public to decide and determine, not self-appointed vanguards.
We are being held to ransom by the infantile actions of a minority. The correct reaction to such disruption, we are urged, is to listen, to talk, and to try to understand ‘the message.’ The problem is that people have done this. It is impossible not to ‘get the message,’ given that it has been repeated at every opportunity, and for years now. The problems come with respect to practical politics and economics in acting on the message, something which is far more difficult than forever sounding the climate alarm. Saying that we have x amount of years to ‘save the planet’ and that fires, floods, and famines are to come is the easy bit – any idiot can repeat that ‘message’ (and that is precisely what they do). But note how often these activists say that are not concerned to persuade or argue, that this issue is ‘beyond argument’ and that ‘there is no debate.’ That reveals that they seek access to public forums merely to dictate what they consider to be truth – and themselves to be the monopolisers of that truth – to a passive public. The arrogance is breathtaking, and reveals the extent to which activists have departed from reality. That public constitutes government, politicians, citizens, and taxpayers – all the real agents of politics and political change. The idea that such agents will passively concede to demands from outside the political and social realm is fanciful to say the least; in fact, it is delusional. People have listened and attempted to engage, but these activists do not want to talk, they want to dictate. In their own words, they are not interested in persuasion, only in information and education. Politically, there is no negotiation of consent, only the insistence that people sacrifice their interests, suppress their needs, and submit to their demands. That they express outrage at being ignored indicates the extent to which these activists are in the grip of a fanaticism. The failure of people to respond is entirely predictable. And yet they persist in their behaviour. This is the point at which listening, talking, and understanding ends and where such people may rightfully be swept aside, whether by the legal authorities or, if they are unwilling to do their public duty, then by the public themselves. I have zero sympathy for these activists either way. I hold them and their enablers in complete contempt and thoroughly denounce the adults in the environmental movement who have been too slow to speak up. There has been a democratic deficit at the heart of environmental politics from the first. The efforts of people like me to remedy that deficiency by way of ecological self-socialisation and democratisation from below has just been rendered void by these activists. You have lost people and lost them for good. That leaves only the authoritarian imposition of environmental austerity as the only game in town for green politics. Genius. The vanguardist fag end of a collapsed socialism took over and took environmentalism down the wrong route.
It is also a thoroughly bad politics. Everyone who enters politics does so in the belief that they are acting for some good or other. Everyone with a cause thinks that their cause is true and just. The extent to which these environmentalists think that their cause is the one which trumps all other causes – and the issues of mundane life, like getting to work and getting to hospital – is utterly myopic, and dangerously so. If all that there is is a number of groups advancing claims upon the public realm and demanding action, in no time there will be no public life left. For all of their talk of “government,” these groups are making government unworkable – the very thing needed for effective environmental action. There is a breakdown in the public imagination. If we let these activists continue, let alone give in to their demands, then we can expect the entire public realm – and society - to be brought to its knees by every group of activists with a cause and attendant demands, no matter how ridiculous, unreasonable, and impossible. Activism, removed from critical reflection and lacking in reflexivity, is the blight of modern society and politics. For years, I have had activists telling me to stop ‘idle intellectualizing,’ ‘it is time for action!’ To those who have insisted ‘don’t think, act!’, I now say, ‘don’t act, think!’ Establishing contemplation and action in proper relation brings me back to my pet subject, establishing theoretical reason (our knowledge of the world) and practical reason (how we act in light of that knowledge, the realms of ethics and politics) on a continuum. As St Bernard of Clairvaux, Dante’s final guide in The Comedy, argues, “Action and contemplation are very close companions; they live together in one house on equal terms. Martha and Mary are sisters.”