The Blight of Permanent Activism Supplanting Politics
Over a year ago I wrote a series a writings that involved a thorough take-down of Extinction Rebellion, focusing especially on environmental activism as a purported ‘non-politics’ that turns easily into the authoritarianism of an anti-politics. I gathered those commentaries together in one place and issued them under the title of Affirming Democracy and Politics against Techno-Bureaucratic Managerialism.
This work, in turn, built on the book I issued early in 2019 challenging Extinction Rebellion’s claims to be a radical movement engaged in system change.
Climate Rebellion and System Change
Such works have not earned me popularity among activists and loyalists. I don’t take people at their own self-image, least of all in politics. And an uncritical radicalism that is entirely lacking in reflexivity is a positive menace, both to itself and its own principles as well as to society in general. It is a faith rather than a politics, and a faith that has been decoupled from all those things that keep true believers on the right side of self-righteous fanaticism.
These works were recently discovered on certain commons forums and shared. I saw initial support and enthusiasm and bailed out. I turned off notifications in anticipation of abuse. That has been the norm in the past. And there is no reasoning with the abusers. We have reached the stage in which people are in need of deradicalisation. They have been whipped up to a frenzy but lack the political means and structural capacity to act. Such people are the perfect constituency for authoritarianism.
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 actually had an effect on environmentalists for me to spend much time on this anyway. I've been campaigning and writing on 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 also concerned to warn of the deficiencies and failures of environmentalism as politics. I will also admit to a number of errors on my part in this respect. In particular, I draw attention to the tendencies to focus on outliers in ‘the science’ and normalize extremes in public discourse. I issued the ‘all hands on deck’ climate alarm many years ago. I also employed the language of ‘x years to save the planet,’ followed by constant lists of environmental doom and disaster – floods, fires, famines, extinction events, desertification and so on. The conflation of activism, journalism, science, and politics is a bane on an effective, practical, and critical environmentalism and I now urge people to make the necessary distinctions. In my defence, these writings and arguments 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.
It is for environmentalists to up their game big time on the politics, rather than continue to think that science and technology will suffice to do the job (and a tendentious 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. Against this, environmentalism is stuck in educative mode, informing empty heads passively in expectation of action. This doesn’t work, for the reasons given above. The fact that we have learned by experience that it doesn’t work should be enough – without the arguments above – to induce environmentalists to change tack. Instead, they are doubling down on education and consciousness-raising. I suspect that they know it is futile and that they are simply trying to put pressure on government to act, with ‘ordinary’ people as passive objects – and collateral damage – in the whole process. It is a political calamity for environmentalism, cutting green issues off from 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; the accusation doesn’t work; and it is an excuse for failure. We are well past that stage. I hear that accusation now and I just move on, knowing there is nothing to see here, only 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 is its inherently anti-democratic assumptions: we have ‘the truth’ and it is non-negotiable, something beyond dialogue and compromise; when people fail to obey and comply, we will simply bypass people and seek to enforce that truth. That view puts politics and people on ice: politics is dissensus and disagreement, an exchange 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. 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 made this criticism at every step of the way over the years, that the crude enlightenment model of informing empty heads is passive, fails to engage, inspire, and motivate people, and will have no effect. 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 – and ‘the science’ as unarguable authority – that they condemn politics and the people for their failures rather than subject their own failures 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.
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 try to engineer change ‘from the outside.’ We descend into the very vanguardism that has been the graveyard of leftist politics since ever. 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 inform and "raise awareness" among the passive mass is not merely crude, it is ineffective. It misdiagnoses the problem as one of education, and hence produces a solution that doesn’t work, only wastes a lot of time, energy, and money, diverting and perverting them 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, with many coming from 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 policies and programmes which are targeted precisely to problems, as well as 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 democracy – are worthless. It is utterly self-destructive, undermining the public realm that is essential to any effective environmentalism.
You may as well ask for a herd of unicorns and my little pony. Ambitious – some would say impossible - demands which are unattached to the means and mechanisms of action is a recipe for delusion and extremism. Net Zero by 2030? By 2025? It 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, it 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.
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 or 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 is appropriated by the middle class and made to fit their own ‘non-class’ lifestyle concerns. People who are not struggling to pay their bills, to keep a roof over their heads, to feed their families are utterly blasé in issuing demands that impose extra costs on families who financially struggling. The cost of Net Zero to poorer families is never considered. 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. How easily the green movement betrayed the ideals and values it once raised. 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.
Without a concerted, comprehensive framework, there is only the futile, foolish, and impotent idealism of unilateralism, something which traps us all within the logic of collective inaction – no one actor will take the necessary steps unless all others do. 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, the rights of protest and plethora of civil liberties making a politics of permanent protest possible. The country is being implored to ‘take one for the team’ futile – and costly - gesture which merely exports jobs and prosperity to other countries and racks up debt at home. 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. 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, a substantial part of the UK’s emissions’ reductions can be attributed to the shift of production to China and India. How dare they!? Such is the hardball world of politics, get used to it and get real. Ideals die a cruel death in this world. The similarly futile campaign for unilaterial nuclear disarmament has turned into a campaign unilateral industrial disarmament, with all the same features, the virtuous at safe remove from the socio-economic pressures of life marching up and down signalling their virtue in the most pious of terms. The repeated claim is that if we disarm, then everyone else will follow suit, all evidence to the contrary.
So what, really, is driving this movement, so manifestly futile in terms of its stated aims and ideals? More power, more control, and more money for the elite. It's that simple! Look at the demands, examine the expenditures, 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 beyond this and behind and you will see the classic traits of radicalisation and recruitment, the language pitched at extremes to scare and terrify the frightened into action. Job done, investment made, plans undertaken, and this crowd will be stood down. 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 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’? Those of us living in the midst of mass unemployment in the deindustrialising economies of the UK? I repeat, when ‘we’ 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. 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.
The whole area is riddled with anomalies. The IPCC are clear that human CO2 emissions were not significant enough to influence the climate until 1950. If you look at any chart it can be seen clearly - so the emissions from early in the Industrial Revolution to 1950 amount to almost nothing, they're entirely tokenistic. Especially when you know that more than 50% of the CO2 humans have ever emitted - ever - has been since 1990. So try again Mercy - why exactly should we "lead the way"? Just because we created the modern World?
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. It's hogwash from first to last, and utterly irresponsible and manipulative to the core. These activists have nothing to offer, no solutions at all to offer, only a permanent protest in the name of climate alarm and doom to ratchet up pressure on 'government.' 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, 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. I hate to point the obvious out, but these threats are now met with complete indifference, when not merely laughed at. The sounding of such alarms 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 all such alarms be treated with a pinch of salt. This has no effect any more.
I think the authorities thought that in time these activists would realize their own futility and go away. I suspect that if they do now come in for some rougher treatment, 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. 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, springing the trap these "peaceful, non-violent" provocateurs were setting. IB, like XR, are clearly out to incite a tough response, portraying the authorities as heavy-handed and themselves as victims with a cause. It didn't happen. Instead, the public see them as a pain, socially disruptive and utterly monotone with the one simple message they keep repeating we all need to wake up to. 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 they 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 for years now. The problems come with respect to practical politics and economics when it comes to acting on the message, something which is far more difficult than 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 are rightfully 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 is the blight of modern society and politics.