Insult Britain
Irritate Britain
Insulting Britons
Alienating Britons
Whichever way you want to put it, I’m impressed at the incredible, almost infinite, patience and basic decency of ‘ordinary’ people, who have been routinely insulted as selfish and stupid, as not knowing and not caring about the environment, and are now openly obstructed in their attempts to go about their daily business. Dare protest against the protestors, and people are castigated as being in denial of the climate emergency. We need to ask here: just where is this emergency?
I need to comment on the class war being unleashed on ‘ordinary’ people seeking to go about their daily business and the backlash of these people against environmental activists who seem very white, middle class, resource rich – people who are able to claim enough time away from work as to be able to stop others from going to work (thereby depriving them of much needed income).
I am not going to waste words on Insulate Britain. I have encountered these kinds of people for years in the environmental movement, people so convinced that they are in possession of the truth that they never deign to listen to contrary views, merely carry on hectoring and lecturing. They are a massive turn-off. The decades of political failure to which such characters constantly refer applies at least as much to them as it does to the authorities they target, and probably more so given that it is they who claim to be giving a lead on environmental matters. Leading means being persuasive and taking change-agents of all kinds and at all levels with you. It is this that the environmental ‘rebels’ have singularly failed to do over the years. Their tendency to dismiss the political process as a waste of time is not merely delusional, serving as a convenient cover for their own political failures, but dangerous. Democracy is under increasing assault from any number of quarters. To engage in extra-political action on account of possessing a truth that trumps politics threatens to bring the curtain down on democracy. Environmental rebellion and resistance as a war of attrition against ordinary people, preventing people from going about their daily affairs, may backfire spectacularly, unbelievably handing the moral high ground to those in government and business implicated in climate crisis, but who are able to claim that something is being done on the environment, and that that something is substantial and costly, and certainly not the ‘nothing’ that activists routinely claim. That defence will be persuasive to ordinary members of the public being inconvenienced daily by activists, and understandably distressed about ambulances getting stuck in gridlock, people missing medical appointments, suffering strokes, losing money and business. Playing fast and loose with people’s lives and livelihoods will merely alienate people from environmental questions, confirming to them that the environment is something external, repressive, and expensive. It’s the last thing environmentalism as politics needs. The constant apology that such action is required to sound the alarm and ‘wake people up’ to looming climate catastrophe has lost all meaning. That alarm call is subject to rapidly diminishing returns and should be used sparingly if it is to be believed. The problem is that it has been the constant refrain in environmentalism as politics, so much so that it is no longer believable and, if anything, is openly ridiculed. Doom has been predicted for us so many times now that it has become boring. Indeed, there are times when impending oblivion seems infinitely preferable to having to share time and space with the monomaniacal doomsters who dominate the environmental movement. I have used the language of eco-catastrophe myself in the past. We may still talk about environmental crisis. But if we talk about emergency and catastrophe, the facts and figures simply do not bear this out. Only by normalising outliers in ‘the science’ can the picture of doom and disaster be made credible. Billions are not going to die. As for predictions of wars, plagues, famines, and floods, they have always incited an interest. Nostradamus packed his Centuries with them. He claimed that the world would end in 1999 and seven months. He was wrong.
These environmentalist activists are one of the reasons I cut my links with environmentalism. The problem is much deeper than these characters and relates to the failure to bridge the gap between theoretical and practical reason. There is a presumption that action – on all levels, on the part of both government and governed – will simply follow the statement of science-based truths. Leaving aside the problem of the selective approach to ‘the science’ (taking outliers and extremes and presenting them as the norm), there is a failure to take politics seriously. And ethics. There is a complete absence of agency in these crude scientistic scenarios. And it’s not true science, either. These activists are simply the product of a crude scientism allied to a naïve romantic naturism. Their politics is predictably lame and unpersuasive. They then have the nerve to claim that they have tried ‘everything,’ they have gone through the democratic process, and it has failed. There is no understanding on their part that it is they who have failed. Because they don’t have the slightest understanding of politics, nor do they respect politics as a mode of disagreement and persuasion. The same applies to the individuals who compose the demos. Hence their inability to win support at the ballot box. They are unpopular, they lack connection with real people – and they know it.
Their ‘non-politics’ – the claim to represent a truth of physics ‘beyond left and right,’ taking their stand on an apolitical and amoral ‘Nature’ (their God) – betrays the fundamentally anti-democratic nature of their demands. They arrogate agency and initiative to themselves. They present themselves as a knowledge elite, and so present themselves in an authoritarian educative model of top-down transformation.
The claim to be neutral and non-political is bogus; it is an attempt to claim an independence of the normal dissensus of politics, a claim to stand on a disinterested truth (whilst simultaneously condemning all others in politics as interested and hence biased). A brief examination of the background of the typical ‘activist’ reveals the same kind of people - white, materially comfortable, wealthy, even, resource rich, with time on their hands etc. They are free enough from the constraints and pressures of work to be able to engage in continuous action to stop ordinary people from going to work. The arrogance and smugness of these activists is angering people. People detect the 'I know better than you' hubris, and recoil from it. Many are noting that the tactics used are not persuading people to the environmental cause, but turning them against it. The tactics are counter-productive, sympathetic critics point out. That presumes that such people are interested in winning mass support and building a long-term public and constituency for substantial ecological transformation. They are not, and they have never been; they have no connections with people, no social roots. They make a virtue of being ‘classless’ and non-ideological, but that self-image exposes all the flaws. They are very much people who have earned their income and their leisure from being part of the social system, earning their relatively resource rich position from their position within asymmetrical social relations. They are the archetypal ‘do-gooders’ who want to do good things for all humankind out of the goodness of their hearts, with no base motives at all. It is the old reformism on steroids, well-meaning bourgeois who think ‘ordinary’ people too uneducated, too stupid, too selfish to be able to act for themselves. And it goes the way of all such politics – big, expensive, and ambitious government programmes extending the state over all aspects of life.
My criticisms therefore go deep into the class and ideological composition of environmentalism. There are very many people who make the mild criticism that whilst they are sympathetic to environmental issues, this type of action simply antagonises people rather than encourages support. This type of action is predicated on that lack of support; these activists know they are unpopular. But rather than locate the reasons for that lack of democratic appeal in their own political failures – the failure to persuade people, build and sustain a constituency, involve people – they simply condemn politics, people, and the democratic process as having failed. How convenient, and how blinkered. It’s not politics that has failed, it is environmentalism as politics that has failed. And instead of analysing the reasons for that failing and upping its political game, environmentalism turns on the public and subjects society to a war of attrition. They are not out to persuade people, they are out to hurt people. It is spiteful and vindictive, taking a vicarious pleasure in inflicting pain, and masking it all with the mealy-mouthed claim that it is all for the complaining public’s own good. As though people are not the best judges of their own good, only this self-appointed minority of political failures.
The response of government and police is interesting. The softly-softly approach has been noted by the public on the receiving end of these actions. The police response has not merely been woefully slow, it has actually looked complicit. Why? Two years ago I speculated with respect to Extinction Rebellion that the extreme tactics were designed to provoke the authorities into heavy-handed response, and built support on that reaction against police and state violence. It didn’t happen. I speculated that XR would then fade. We now see others, like Insulate Britain, taking the tactics on further. And still no effective response from the authorities. One could almost believe that government are on side, welcoming such activism as wearing down the public, softening them up, for the harsh austerian environmental regime to come. With tougher action, these activists may have had to reconsider their tactics. Instead, they have learned that they can cause massive inconvenience whilst suffering little in the way of repercussions. They will be arrested and released. Big deal. They have the time, and the social positions to survive a ‘criminal’ record.’ They will be fined. Big deal. The fines won't be much and will be paid by sympathetic supporters.
This has all the hallmarks of a sponsored, licensed phoney rebellion.
Extreme Ex-thinking Rebellion!
If you ask them "do you think someone who is brainwashed would know they are brainwashed" they can't say yes. Then ask them if they think they could have been brainwashed, they will always say no.
It's so obviously an astro-turf fake protest, so naturally that all the well-meaning bourgeois are in on it and making a point of being publicly visible and vocal in their support. And all can pose as being virtuous because, muh, ‘climate change.’ They are not marxist and not socialist and have no links whatsoever with working class people. They are not democrats, either, and express complete contempt for the democratic voice. The claim that they have tried ‘everything’ in politics and it has failed is pure apologetics. What they ought to admit to themselves and to others is that they have engaged very badly in politics and failed hopelessly. It is they who need to up their political game. Rather than do that, they turn on politics and people. But here I am not only repeating myself, I am wasting more of my precious time and energy.
The danger is that movements like this will licence an austerian environmentalist regime under the corporate form in the name of 'necessity.' Take a look at the climate policies and programmes that are already underway as well as those which are planned. And ask one simple question: Who has the power and resources to push technologies to the scale these people demand?
Not hippies with startup companies, that’s for sure. I was involved in environmental politics in an attempt not merely to publicize the crisis in the climate system, but to develop an ecological self-socialisation from below, to complement the concerted, comprehensive framework of climate action required from above, giving it a substantive sociological content and democratic legitimacy. I was concerned that environmentalism be characterized by a democratisation as against a top-down authoritarian bureaucratisation. I was interested in constituting a genuine public, a Green Republicanism that took politics seriously, an Ecopolis constituted by an eco-citizenry practising the ecological virtues. That remains the way forward. It is a path premised on a democratic, indeed an anthropological, optimism, holding that ‘ordinary’ men and women are rational, moral agents, possessing a common moral reason, and capable of assimilating truth and acting upon it. The advocates of climate doom betray an anthropological and democratic pessimism that is self-defeating. I finally broke with the Green movement over the antics of this crowd and the way they seek to bully and coerce compliance rather than win and shape a genuine public. There is an implicit pessimism in their protest, based as it is on the presumption that people cannot be reasoned with and persuaded, only cajoled. I am leery of all references to a general "we" and all attempts on the part of some to speak for general others. And I would always treat those who claim to speak the voice of truth in politics with a huge degree of scepticism, involving as it nearly always does the claim that said ‘truth’ trumps popular consent, will, and opinion. Like God, fanatics and extremists in politics always claim the monopoly of truth. The passion and commitment of people to a cause offers zero evidence for the truth, relevance, and sanity of that cause. Take it as read that people who enter politics do so because they think their cause is right and just. The problem of politics is how to balance and negotiate between those competing claims so as to preserve the civil peace that allows all to hold their views whilst disagreeing with others. When one side not only asserts that their truth trumps all others, but seeks to end dialogue and engagement, then we have put politics and people on ice.
I always look for the end game. I see only a Green authoritarianism down this road. I no longer post on environmental issues. There is an elitist contempt for "ordinary" people among this crowd.
Over the years of my involvement in Green politics I presented my case positively, in the hope that it would influence greens and environmentalists into taking politics seriously. Instead, environmentalism continued down the road of scientism and naturism, combining a crude assertion of facts with a naïve moralism deriving from ‘Nature’ and Nature worship. This isn’t serious politics and is as far from constituting a genuine Green public as can be. I made my objections crystal clear on this in a few pieces I wrote a couple of years ago.
Affirming Democracy and Politics against Techno-Bureaucratic Managerialism (2020) 153 60,887
https://www.academia.edu/44725764/Affirming_Democracy_and_Politics_against_Techno_Bureaucratic_Managerialism
I’ve been slamming Extinction Rebellion on social media. People are mystified as to why they seem to deliberately alienate people. It’s not a mystery. XR are not remotely a left or socialist or democratic movement, they are elitist to the core. Their assumptions of people are cynical, their approach to people manipulative. They are not out to persuade people and build a popular movement. Instead, they are about ratcheting pressure on people and governments 'to act.' It’s systematic bullying. The claim to be engaged in ‘peaceful protest’ is also duplicitous. Their actions are systematic, abusing that principle to engage in a war of attrition against the public. Provocation and outrage are part of a war of attrition. Such a movement is reactionary in political terms. Indeed, they explicitly deny politics, stating truths to government and citizens from outside of the political realm. They thus put politics – and people - on ice. The authoritarian implications of such ‘non-politics’ are evident. This is the old ghost of eco-dictatorship speaking the language of unanswerable ‘necessity.’
People are not ignoring the threat, they are trying to deal with the complexities in terms of causes and solutions. Don't kid yourself that these cretins have anything to offer, beyond monomaniacal restatement ratcheting pressure on 'government' (bypassing people and democracy).
It's a wake up call...ding a ling a ling...wake up!!
People have the message and are working away on the hard part. It's the people demanding action whilst ignoring all the hard policy, institutional, socio-economic, and democratic-consensual parts of the question who are the ones who need to 'wake up.' They have nothing to offer. They seem stuck in sounding-the-alarm mode. We are well beyond that. In all the years I spent in the environmental movement I was at pains to point out the need to cultivate modes of persuasion and response, paying particular attention to devising the means and mechanisms encouraging and enabling collective response on the part of individuals locked into structured relations and patterns of behaviour. Those making the most noise on the need to wake people up are the ones who need to open their eyes and ears and do some serious thinking. In terms of modes and agencies of action, all they have is that great abstraction called ‘government’ (a surrogate collective purpose if ever there was one), technology (in the hands of the corporations), and a taxpayer funded environmental gravy train. And they have the nerve to call this ‘system change.’ If you didn’t laugh at this, you would weep. Or just get angry. I am both sad and angry as to have wasted so much of my life in this company, in the deluded belief that they ever listen to anything or anyone but their own self-righteousness voices. They’ve been wrong on the politics all along, hence the decades of political failure they have racked up, despite the wealth of knowledge, science, and technology in their corner. Environmentalism is a monumental cause led by political cretins. The environment needs to be taken out of their hands (begging the question, by whom?)
The people who engage in stunts like this, claiming that people are 'sleep walking,' are clueless. People have got the message - policies and policy frameworks, system change, uprooting socio-economic drivers, winning popular support etc are the hard part. Stunts etc are infantile.
We are dealing with an institutional and systemic deafness. It seems well-nigh impossible to get this point through to people who seem to think the problem is lack of awareness, and so shout loudly every day about climate change, claiming it is never covered. It is. A lot. Ah, but not in the right way, and not 24/7. The problem is that environmentalism is a field in which there are too many activists and nowhere near enough strategists and politicians. Hence environmentalism seems stuck in a politics of permanent protest and resistance, forever levelling demands upon power, but never being able to constitute an alternate power. And the problem with activism is that nothing is ever enough. Instead of a feasible politics premised on reasonable and realisable demands, we have impossible fantasies which are constantly being inflated beyond the means of realisation.
My critiques of XR went largely ignored – activists tend not to have time to read anything other than material that they can immediately press into service as propaganda. But I had some responses from those who were uncomfortable with the fetish for law-breaking and resistance.
Environmentalism has become mixed up with the new obsession with being right rather than effective. That is fatal in politics. The temper of politics is judicious and dialogic, based on exchange and mutual learning. No matter how just your cause – and everyone who enters politics believes that their cause is just - if you give fuel for the government to dismiss you publicly, then you have failed. These actions have the singular demerit of making entirely reasonable demands profoundly unpopular. People will stand behind government on a law and order platform, thus depriving environmentalism of the democratic force and legitimacy it needs to get anywhere. Blame the bog-standard Leninists who calculated that all that they need to effect change is 3.5% of the population. The inherent elitism and vanguardism – and the profoundly anti-democratic character – of this now dominant strain of environmentalism is now manifest. The public have now experienced it directly, and have been on the receiving end. The routine way in which activists continue to justify their actions by asserting that the public needs to be educated, informed, and woken up is not merely extremely patronising, it is plain wrong, and reveals precisely what is wrong with environmentalism as politics and why it has failed so pathetically – its inherent elitism and concomitant democratic deficit. But the claims that critics are making that such actions are counter-productive, alienating people rather than attracting them, is missing the point. Such actions are designed to provoke a reaction and incite actions from government, also to recruit a minority, not a majority, a critical mass and not a democratic mass, to the cause. Such a movement has no genuine political content, and holds politics, like the uneducated masses, in contempt; it doesn't give a damn about popular support and legitimacy - just pushes for a rescue squad from within an untransformed system. It is thoroughly elitist and reactionary, with no grasp of politics of the give-and-take and compromise of politics and, only a complete contempt for people who disagree with them. Politics is disagreement. Each person has his or her own inner ‘yes’ and ‘no.’ It is not for some to tell others that certain cases and causes are unarguable and that people must accept them – that there is no debate. People like this are clueless, undemocratic, and dictatorial in thinking that they can just state truths to politics from outside the realm of politics.
As for this need for education and to ‘wake up,’ I heard all of this back in the 1980s. I have spent the past fifteen years or more arguing for the need to get beyond this educative mode, because that is not where the problem lies. I may as well have been talking in hieroglyphs. Something I have learned about too many environmentalists is that if something doesn’t conform to their values and prejudices, they just don’t listen, merely dismiss and ignore – they learn nothing.
Like climate crisis has been missed. The problems lie in uprooting the causes. This group claim to be "beyond politics." That's debilitating. It's the pretence that these idiots are the only ones who know or care that reveals the elitism and cynicism behind groups like this.
We should have learned never to judge people and movements by their self-image. What are they offering? What is the end-game? They are big on saying "nothing is being done" when basically all they offer is pressure on steroids. Counter-productive.
Someone comments on XR:
“As someone who has long supported XR and its cause, this was a terrible idea. It's obvious everyone was going to be outraged by this, and it just gives your biggest critics more ammunition.”
It’s a typical comment, but misses the point. It's meant to outrage. This movement is not about winning support, it's about waging a war of attrition that wears people and authorities down. The political implications are authoritarian, undemocratic, and reactionary. Climate has to be reappropriated from groups like this.
There's nothing courageous about a hijack, and rather presumptuous to think only a few can see the climate problem. This problem is nuanced and beyond simplicities movements like these peddle. The statement of a problem is not the resolution of it. No nerve, no nous, nothing, a political zero that the public has rightly rejected time and again. Hence they are forced to show their hand and seek the imposition via a coerced government of expensive, austerian climate policies. Environmentalism doesn’t need these political cretins endlessly restating the obvious in a war of attrition. Like infants whining at parents until they give in. Try some grown-up politics. Of course, you have none, the contempt for people is palpable. Morally and intellectually tone-deaf.
I know a number of Green friends who were uneasy about the likes of Roger Hallam and Extinction Rebellion, so I gave them these writings for them to contemplate. No one raised objections, but neither did any of them offer agreement. Instead, regrettably, there is weakness and confusion, a vague hope that something good will come of activism in the name of the right cause. Such people will always be prey to those of strong will in politics.
This is an attempt to force government actions/investments/programmes that will be riddled with rents and free riders. There are some big demands being made by this group. These are people who will insist that ‘nothing is being done’ at a time of substantial governmental programmes and investments, costing billions, and involving increased energy bills for ordinary folk. Nothing! Nothing? Only if you are resource rich. Ask yourself once more who has the power and resources to push technology to the scale required.
As a lifelong 'green,' I say that the actions of this group are extreme and wrong-headed. They are the product of long-standing political failure on the part of greens and environmentalists. Such people have thought that science and technology could do the work of practical reason – politics and ethics, the things that build will and agency and motivate people to act. They cannot. Instead of learning the lesson of political lack and deficiency, they now explicitly reject politics and the democratic process. I have news for them – their errors stem from rejecting those things in the first place.
Their extra-political demands are delusional. Zero carbon by when? That will almost certainly cause catastrophe, crashing economies and sending decades of progress on poverty, disease etc into reverse. Such demands are utterly unrealistic, betraying an infantilism on the part of those advancing them. I am only left to speculate that beyond the antics and the pressure there is an attempt to push the state into embracing the Green corporate form, something which the children triggered by activism and slogans can't see, but which the more strategically minded behind them can. In her evidence to the hoc committee, XR co-founder Gail Bradbrook asserted that the country needed to mimic the wartime spirit, by which she meant the willingness of the population to submit to rationing – a wartime economy. Their aim is a locked-down society. Their claim to be democratic is tied up in the thoroughly anti-democratic idea of a ‘citizen’s assembly,’ so manifestly a ruse to go round democracy and the fact that green measures are unpopular. The educative model of an authoritarian and elitist politics is evident in the claims that selected people will be taught critical thinking skills and be given the correct evidence. It is hard to credit that adults with time on their hands could come up with thinking as cack-handed as this, as though the general public would accept austerian environmental measures in terms of taxation and rationing because a select number of them have been led to the ‘correct’ decisions. How about a social transformation to get rid of the poor, revolution instead of world war? Or is that too difficult? Too much like politics? Requires too much involvement with real people?
The Committee on Climate Change Net Zero by 2050 programme was based on the belief that you could achieve net zero without asking people to make difficult and unpopular sacrifices nor to put back the progress we’ve made worldwide in reducing absolute poverty. The whole area has a whiff of political unreality about it. Translate it into a political regime and you have the starkest authoritarianism.
Environmental activists use the slogan "system change, not climate change," but display zero understanding as to what is entailed by this. Government action and expenditure is not system change. No doubt they will continue to employ "the end of the world" as their trump card. The appeal to that kind of ‘necessity’ is just so dangerous in politics, inviting governments into all kinds of actions overriding the will of the common people for an abstract common good. I thought we had learned to avoid the pernicious doctrine of the end justifying the means. That's the only language these people use and it is undemocratic to the core.
Laughably, such people fail to see how the appeal to doom is subject to rapidly diminishing returns. That card has been overplayed, and people see it as the emotional claptrap it is. It’s only value lies in terrifying children and recruiting them into becoming activists in the cause. Activism is the blight of the age, getting in the way of identifying problems and solutions and engaging in effective politics.
And now we read that Bill Gates is funding geoengineers in their plans to dim the sun. Over a decade ago I warned about the dangers of ‘men as gods’ gambling with the planet under the pretext of saving it. That’s the problem with framing politics in terms of necessity – when your own politics fails, then the path is cleared for others to offer their solutions. And if these solutions prove unpalatable, who can disagree, given claims of ‘necessity?’
Of Gods and Gaia: Men as Gods Gambling with Gaia (2012) 954 342,097
My consistent and thoroughgoing critique of the inherent elitism and authoritarianism of planetary engineers and planetary managers has been motivated by a vision of a green republicanism with social force and democratic content. It has been largely ignored. The political failures of environmentalism were entirely predictable, not least given its almost complete failure to take politics seriously, including building on popular agency and participation. Men and women are not citizens in this understanding, merely empty heads to be filled with climate facts. Anyone with a scintilla of political and historical knowledge could have warned about the motivational and moral failures of such an approach. But such people are thin on the ground in environmental circles.
Beware climate schemes/scams as power grabs. A politics framed in terms of emergency, crisis, panic, and necessity is always prone to overspill and appropriation. Truth be told – recognizing the dangers of seeming conspiratorial – I suspect that this is precisely what is going on. I have read Gail Bradbrook from Extinction Rebellion admit – as have several other XR spokespersons – that they have tried the ballot box and failed to win sufficient support, so the challenge is to mobilize a critical extra-political mass to mandate extensive and expensive climate programmes on the part of government. That figures.
All you need to do is read the comments underneath articles and videos on this question. One says this:
“same old people protesting, same ones arrested then released to go and protest again, it just seems the government/officials are quite happy to let this disgrace carry on.” Inaction on the part of the authorities, suggesting complicity, is a common observation.
But there is another aspect to this. The claim that the activities of XR and now Insulate Britain activists are turning people against the environmental cause presumes that the purpose of such activism is to build mass support. It isn’t. That has never been a concern of such environmentalists. They have their heads full of fantasies that just 3.5% of the population is required to force substantial change. They are vanguardists to the core, Leninists of the environment. They are the very antithesis of democracy and socialism. It is indicative of the sad, degraded state of leftism in politics that too few people on the Left are calling them out in the most vehement of terms.
We are hearing all the usual terms of abuse that have been directed against environmental activists – smug, self-righteous, zealous, delusional and so on. These activists seem hell-bent on proving their critics right. Most of all, though, they strike me as boring. Words cannot describe the utter tedium I feel at hearing the same arguments, the same rationale, time and again. I’ve seen and heard the same things so many times over the years that I am forced to conclude that environmentalism suffers from a congenital political and intellectual capacity. We are still being warned about the looming eco-catastrophe on the horizon, as if we have never heard these warnings before. We are still being told that ‘people don’t know,’ we are still being told that the media doesn’t cover climate change. I have heard this kind of language being repeated constantly ever since my first involvement in Green politics. I heard Thunberg and her supporters saying the same things a couple of years ago, repeated ad nauseum. And it no longer washes. In fact, it is pure hogwash.
The language is popular because it allows its proponents to move immediately into educative mode, seeing themselves as the educators full of climate knowledge and the citizens as empty heads to be educated. People, naturally, find the educative mode patronising, a denial of their autonomy and agency as citizens, and so keep their distance. For being rightly sceptical, people are castigated for their ignorance and indifference. I can go back two decades and more and recall hearing greens condemn people for neither knowing nor caring about environmental issues. I tried in all that time to get environmentalists to see that that was not the problem and that these were the wrong conclusions to be drawn from the failures of environmentalism as politics. The lessons have still not been learned. Instead, the contempt for people has now intensified into a war of attrition upon normal social life.
We are well past alarm calls and notions of waking the public up. Climate crisis has been covered to death. So much so that people are becoming bored rigid with it. If you keep pitching the environmental message at the crisis and catastrophe level, and keep telling people that ‘nothing’ is being done and that doom and disaster are inevitable, then people will switch off. Either people won’t believe you, having become accustomed to alarm as the normal environmental noise, or they will believe you to the extent of thinking the problem really is of such scale that nothing can be done in any case.
The problem is not that people don’t know and don’t care, it is that the precise institutional and transition strategies as well as public policies – and who will pay for them and carry them out – have not been established. That’s a failure of environmentalists and their inability to come out of the hectoring and lecturing educative mode. I have many green and environmentalist friends who have spent years complaining that climate crisis isn’t the leading – even the only – story on all the news bulletins. Because, of course, nothing else matters if there is no liveable environment. Climate trumps all things. Including politics. It is this monomaniacal non-thinking that has led environmentalism into this political cul-de-sac. The people who need to wake up here are the environmentalists themselves. People have got the message, they believe there is a problem. The doom-laden language is showing itself to be utterly self-destructive. According to a global poll published in the Lancet, one in four young people are thinking twice about having children. This is ludicrous and has all the hallmarks of a death-cult. In predicting millions – billions even – of deaths in the future, people are refusing to have children. Talk about self-fulfilling prophecy. But, point taken, people are environmentally awake – they are as awake as anyone can expected to be. Now what? When environmentalists have a politics that answers that question, then we might start getting somewhere. And I mean have a politics, not a surrogate for that politics. Any fool can draw up a wish-list of environmental demands and hand it over to government to enact. That kind of thing may work in authoritarian regimes which do not require the consent of people and business – those people expected to pay for ambitious, extensive, and expensive environmental measures. But not in a democracy. And this is my point – there is an inherent and implicit authoritarianism and elitism in the way that environmental measures are being drawn up outside of the political process, demanded of government on pain of continued disruption, and imposed regardless of whether people have voted for them or not. How about form your own political party, present your measures before the public, and persuade people to vote for you and pay for your ambitious climate programmes? The activists know fine well that such a party would be trounced in the elections – as they have been time and again. So they resort to an attritional strategy to force governments to implement programmes they know to be electorally unpopular. Such people care nothing for democracy and would happily bring the curtain down on the idea that people have some say in making the laws by which they are governed. That attitude is lurking behind oft-repeated claims that physics trumps politics and that physics doesn’t care which way you vote. I’ve exposed the dangerous fallacies of scientism and naturalism in politics in many places and won’t pursue it here. The level of thought here is mediocre. And boring. The way forward lies in bringing physics and politics into proper relation, and that entails the involvement of a creative moral, intellectual, and citizen agency. Instead, we have the same po-faced would-be universal reformers armed with an unarguable truth and knowledge of necessity.
What’s needed now isn’t people hectoring and lecturing ordinary folk, disrupting their lives and bringing more stress into their already stressful lives. Some idea of the collective means and mechanisms of action – institutional, political, and psychological – would be very handy. You’ve had long enough to have been working on those.
And here’s the punchline. Far from ‘nothing’ being done and ‘nobody’ acting on the climate, there are any number of planetary planners, engineers, managers, and bureaucrats already in the field, experts of all kinds, and people with plenty of ideas for mobilising the resources and raising the money required for effective action.
I repeat the question: who has the power and resources to support and enact environmental programmes of such ambitious size and scale? We are not talking of an ecological grassroots and self-socialisation here, the democratisation of power and politics I have supported my entire life; we are talking a green corporatism. Hence the cries of ‘emergency’ and demands for ‘action’ get taken over by the only agencies with sufficient power and resources to implement such schemes/scams. And who could disagree, seeing as we are in a climate emergency? That’s the problem with bad process and a non-political politics. You think the greens can dim the sun and all manner of other things that the geoengineers have had in the pipeline for years? Me neither. At this point, the eco-modernizers, working within the corporate form, take the environment out of the hands of those well-meaning but naïve and demonstrably incapable green idealists.
If you pitch a problem so high as to exceed your own capacities – political as well as financial – then you are issuing an open invitation to extraneous agencies to intervene and take a problem over. The only thing to work out is whether this overreach is unintentional or deliberate. The anthropological pessimism expressed by some of the leaders of the environmental movement – declaring conventional political means (i.e. attempts to persuade and raise support for climate action) to have failed, rather than admit their own failure – suggests deliberate; the naïve sloganeering and nature romanticism of supporters suggests unintentional. Either way, this is a dead-end.
These are the questions for anyone active in politics to answer. What is it? What is it going to cost? Who is going to pay? And who is going to do it?
There is a need to be sceptical of all those people who shift responsibility for their demands to others, particularly ‘government.’
In talking the language of doom and disaster incessantly, under the pretext of waking people up and getting government to act, activists serve only to intensify the idea of ‘necessity’ in politics, inviting appropriation by those forces which possess the fiscal and structural capacity to act. At that point, the environment and its problems will be taken out of the hands of the activists, people so politically inept and intellectually lame that you really could cry for the future. The environment is far too important to be left in the hands of environmentalists.
And that is my final word on green politics. I have a life to be living. I have wasted years in Green ‘politics.’ I no more time to waste.
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