The Climate Activism I Support
I have published extensive criticisms of climate campaigning and of environmentalist politics over the years, taking a very critical view of the nature of climate activism in recent years. So much so that I am being cold-shouldered, unfriended, and blocked by former associates, abused in other instances. It was, of course, inevitable that I would come to be accused of being a climate denier. Or, in asking impertinent questions with respect to means and asks, I would be asked the question in return: ‘are you a climate denier?’ It’s a test of faith. And a demand of fidelity. There is a climate emergency, assert the activists, and ‘nothing is being done.’ It’s ‘time for action.’ I question the notion of emergency. I was contacted a decade and more ago by ecologists such as Jason Box, who said it was a ‘all hands on deck’ moment on the planet. An emergency is the kind of thing which, if it is not dealt with immediately, has immediate consequences for the worse. The use of the term ‘emergency’ here is clearly an attempt to radicalize, incite action, and push governments, citizens, and businesses into a quick, unreasoning, response. This is the last approach that should be taken to genuine crisis. Such an approach can result in all the wrong options being taken through lack of thought, making a problem worse and wasting precious resources in the process, resources that could have been better targeted on effective solutions. The idea of solutions brings us to the next point. Climate activists are in the habit of repeating the accusation that the ‘planet is on fire’ and ‘nothing is being done.’ This kind of language is positively baneful, diverting focus and energy away from a correct diagnosis of problems and a considered development of solutions. The planet is not on fire and there is plenty being done, with more in the pipeline should resources allow and socio-economic collapse under the weight of unreasoned actions and commitments be averted. The catastrophizing of everything and the pushing of decisions and policies in the direction of ‘action’ is not serious politics, it is campaigning on steroids. Point made, issue raised, there is need to analyse problems and resolve them. This approach is wholly wrong, utterly counterproductive. This is evidence of a pressure group politics spilling over from its domain to encompass politics as a whole, unbalancing proper relations and more than likely inducing governments to make ineffective, expensive, and extensive commitments. The idea that ‘nothing is being done’ is flatly contradicted by the facts with respect to the commitments, levies, taxes, subsidies, and regulations already in place, and already having a deleterious impact on public finances, energy supply, business practice. I immediately stop listening to people who assert climate emergency, ‘nothing is being done,’ and ‘it’s time for action.’ These are slogans for T-shirts and social media.
Which brings me to the next point – those who remain critical, ask impertinent questions, and refuse to be swept along in an unthinking rush stand accused of being ‘climate solutions’ deniers.’ The accusation inevitably follows should you have the temerity to demand clarity on the nature of the problem at issue. I have put myself in the firing line on both counts. And I am entirely unrepentant. Time and again, from the 1980s and 1990s, but most explicitly from 2000, I have sought to draw attention to the socio-economic drivers underlying the crisis in the climate system. Far from denying that there is a climate crisis, I have been concerned to delineate its causes precisely in terms of its institutional, systemic, and structural make-up. Identifying, challenging, and changing social forms, relations, and practices is key to the resolution of the problem. Sadly, pathetically, climate activism has gone down the route of pressure group and reformist politics on steroids, levelling huge demands upon ‘government,’ showing no awareness of the fact that said ‘government’ is a crucial second order mediation of the very economic system which is systemically deaf to use values in the first place. I don’t waste my time distinguishing between the naïve, who are simply politically and sociologically illiterate, and the cynical, who are engineering crisis and manipulating fears and responses to steer the public into the direction of pre-determined ‘solutions’ under the corporate form (Big Tech and Big Government working hand in hand). The end result is the same. So when I am accused of being a ‘climate denier,’ either in terms of the nature of the problem or the identification of the solutions, I turn the accusation right back. There is a crisis in the climate system. The problem is that those with the loudest voices demanding action have failed to identify the nature of that problem precisely, meaning that their supposed solutions will backfire, make the problem much worse, wasting precious resources in the process.
The climate problem is not a scientific problem requiring a technological solution – it is a political problem which has its origins in specific socio-economic drives and its solutions in societal reconstruction and reformation. I have put the point bluntly to Green ‘friends’ over the years, in the hope that they would investigate further : climate change and global heating are not the central problems but are the physical manifestations of a problem that arises in social forms and relations that put the pursuit of exchange value before the preservation and reproduction of use value. This was always the socialist case. The realm of use value is the realm of labour as well as nature. Environmentalism is an anti-politics that attempts to make a direct, unmediated, assertion of theoretical reason/pure reason (the realm of science, facts, objectivity) over and even against practical reason (the realm of politics and ethics, values, motivations). Hence the repeated assertions of ‘tell the truth’ and other such demands. The dialogue, dissensus, nuance, and negotiation at the heart of politics is not merely missing, it is positively crushed by such an approach. It is an anti-politics which, inevitably, issues in explicitly anti-democratic actions and demands. In other words, in asserting the realm of use value against capital’s unrelenting pursuit of exchange value, labour has been ejected, damned as an ally of capital in an ecology-impairing accumulation process, leaving only an unmediated nature to demand. Politically and sociologically, this is a nonsense, discarding the mediations required for effective understanding and practice – solutions – and assertion ‘nature’ as an abstraction, an empty signifier. Such abstraction inevitably results in an impotent idealism, reifying the forces that need to be concretised, leading inexorably to bureaucratic incarnations of the common good, and authoritarian imposition and regulation thereof.
Far from being a problems and solutions denier, I have analysed the systemic causes of the ecological crisis in depth to reveal that environmentalism has inverted the true relations, putting a naturalism in place of the necessary mediations, combining a nature fetishism on the one hand (romantic notions of a Mother nature/Goddess, either benign or indifferent) with a scientism on the other. This translates into an anti-politics that is utterly bankrupt at the level of practice and motivations. The diagnosis of the problem is wrong and the solutions utterly misguided. (I have written extensively on this site on these issues, please refer to those writings).
That’s my first point, by way of prolegomena to criticism of climate activism. I make these introductory comments to make it abundantly clear that activists do not own problems and solutions and that accusations of ‘denial’ on their part are an attempt to possess, monopolize, control, and manipulate an issue. They are wrong on problems and wrong on solutions, leaving the crisis unaddressed to get worse in time, resulting in monstrous political and social forms through bad solutions.
In an exchange with advocates of world-wide ‘climate mobilization,’ I made all the above points with respect to the socio-economic drivers of climate crisis, only to be dismissed contemptuously with the words ‘left wing anti-capitalism is the new climate denialism.’ The reasoning is that climate solutions exist in the form of determinate policies and technologies and can be implemented and applied, ‘off the shelf’ as it were, by government, without the need for any divisive, transformative politics. As I said earlier, this is reformism on steroids, without any need to advance the claims of labour and involve the working class or ‘ordinary’ people of any sort. This is the new class war, waged from above and from the outside by ‘classless’ experts, educators, technocrats as would-be universal reformers. It is small wonder that the people who make, move, build, and grow things are in the sights of these reformers as targets for environmentalist management and manipulation.
Which brings me to the activists, the mere footsoldiers of forces outside of their scrutiny and control. I don’t look upon them sympathetically. I simply can’t credit so many adult men and women engaging in the most infantile of politics, a politics devoid of substance and nuance, devoid of a critical awareness of political economy, and devoid, above all, of connection with members of the demos. Such activists treat citizens as selfish, ignorant, uninformed children to be educated, with themselves as the educators. Predictably, it’s not an attitude that most people find endearing.
Having dug deep into the roots of the crisis in the agencies of environmental anti-politics, I now come to the topsoil of activism and why it is an utterly misguided approach to the environmental crisis that is unfolding. I leave to one side the question of how much of this approach is down to naivety and how much to cynical manipulation. I’m not so much a Conspiracy Theorist as an “It’s Flaming Obvious and Hidden in Plain Sight” Theorist. “They” who can be identified are actually telling you what they are doing; the problem is that those in the grip of ‘emergency’ mania just don’t want to hear it. That’s the point about extreme activism around extreme slogans like ‘nothing is being done’ – it is engineered to stoke and exploit fear and push people into an unreasoning, uncritical response. I merely ask, when demands are made and ratcheted upwards: who has the resources? Who has the money and power? Who has the interest? And who benefits the most? (In answering, I don’t allow people the politically and socially evasive language of ‘we’ and ‘all’ and ‘humanity’ – these categories are abstract and empty, contrived to conceal the particulars).
If people insist on using the charge of ‘denialism’ here, then I feel entitled to excoriate those who demand climate ‘action’ on the part of ‘government’ but close their ears to those concerned to identify and uproot the socio-economic drivers of climate crisis. They are deniers of the socio-economic causes and political solutions, and it leads to the infantilism in politics that characterises climate activism.
I am against neither climate action nor the pursuit of solutions to climate problems, the very opposite. I am for the right action with respect to a correct diagnosis of the problems, a view which begs the question of ‘rightness,’ which in my view entails much more than science, technology, and naturalism. This is the difference between the environmental politics I advocate – and have advocated for a quarter of a century – and the politics I criticize. This is a question of how you do politics and campaigning properly, with a view to actions that are effective in making a difference for the better.
I am not against activism. I have been a campaigner and supporter with respect to Green issues since the late 1980s. I am, however, concerned that we see activism for what it is and take care not to burden it with a weight it cannot carry. The problem here is one of over-extension. It is the absence of an effective politics in the first place that is causing those in the grip of naturalism/scientism to press activism into heated service in the most inorganic of ways. The passage I remember most from Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers is this from chapter 11:
‘Such as were only beautiful gave their beauty, whence, without doubt, comes the proverb, "The most beautiful girl in the world can only give what she has." Such as were rich gave in addition a part of their money; and a vast number of heroes of that gallant period may be cited who would neither have won their spurs in the first place, nor their battles afterward, without the purse, more or less furnished, which their mistress fastened to the saddle bow.’
I don’t expect activism to give more than it can give, and I am most concerned to expose the politically dangerous delusions of those who think it can. We need to do politics properly, as adult citizens with stakes, interests, loyalties, and commitments, not as children with wild fears and fantasies and zero responsibility for their consequences. The politics incited by current environmental activism is an invitation to moral hazard, free-riding, and renting – it is a most inorganic politics indeed, a politics of authoritarian imposition and bureaucratic imposition, not to mention austerian repression.
If people engage in stupid campaigning involving actions that are counter-productive to their cause, if they are confused or impossibilist with respect to goals and ends, then those who are also concerned with these issues have a right and a responsibility to criticise. Political ineptitude – and worse – is a gift to those who really are in denial of problems as well as solutions. Hacking off the people rather than taking them with you gives political opponents a democratic mass to appeal to, a mass with a grievance and a grudge to exploit. Already, the exorbitant price of energy is being explained as a result of Green policies and commitments. If Greens don’t take the people with them they are wide open to a populist revanchism exploited by false friends of ‘ordinary’ people.
I say this as someone who has argued and campaigned for socio-ecological transformation since the 1980s, as someone who has challenged neoliberals, anti-socialists, ‘climate deniers,’ the lot. It should hardly be a point of great political insight that a commitment to the right cause doesn’t necessarily guard against political ineffectiveness and ineptitude. The problem is that people who are convinced that they are right can tend to be so convinced as not to bother much with the challenges of communication and persuasion: their ends are so right and true as to spare them the effort of furnishing means of the same high standard. The pernicious doctrine of the ends justifying the means is back with a vengeance, and it won’t end well, least of all for the cause to be advanced.
For years I offered broad support to environmental campaigns whilst making critical comments with respect to environmentalism as politics, in the hope that people would listen and learn. Listening and learning are the last things that those in the grip of campaign imperatives do. As my criticisms became more pointed and my support more conditional, environmentalists looked away. It was clear to me that they enjoyed the group reassurance and the groupthink and listened to nothing that existed outside of these parameters, except to denounce it as denialism. I had been involved in some pretty stupid and inept politics in the hope that people would learn by experience. They learned nothing with respect to their own political ineptitude. When challenged as to why they are engaging in civil disobedience, disrupting the lives of ‘ordinary’ people, activists claim that they have tried the democratic road and conventional politics and that these have ‘failed.’ This is deeply dangerous language, justifying all those with extreme, minority views without popular support to take extra-political action. What is most remarkable – and worrying – is the extent to which liberal/leftists denounce each, any, and every affirmation of place, people, and patriotism as ‘fascist’ are either silent, apologetic, or supportive with respect to these explicitly anti-democratic extra-political actions and justifications on the part of climate activists. The assumption seems to be that agreement with the cause and its goals and ends renders the means right and just. This is complacent, giving evidence of the precisely the kind of thinking by which leftist movements have betrayed and perverted their principles in the past.
This is a truly depressing, but sobering, spectacle. I started to read and research on Marx in 1990, sketching out the outlines of a thesis on the man and his work in 1992. I was intrigued to know, as the walls in Eastern Europe came tumbling down, how Marx’s emancipatory commitments could have turned out to be so repressive in practice. I argued that those commitments could be recovered now that Marx had been freed from his Communist prison. I presumed that others, freed from misplaced political loyalties and false orthodoxies, would be similarly prepared to learn the negative lessons of bad socialist practice. The fact that I am seeing the same old mistakes being made tells me that the problem is less with theory than with a practice that will be inevitably flawed given the fallen, fallible nature of human beings. As a post-enlightenment critical thinker, Marx had over-estimated how rational human beings are. Marx had developed a reflexive, self-critical, self-monitoring praxis to bring about the free, rational, and humanist society, but human beings are never so free, rational, and humane in the first place – they succumb to a range of the old sins, as is their wont. I see the road being taken again. And because the cause is right and just, those in error with respect to means don’t listen and won’t listen. Tolkien is much the better guide here. He knew that the Ring would be more damaging in the hands of Gandalf the righteous – because people motivated by the good and who think they are in possession of the good will act righteously, unaware of the extent to which they are doing otherwise.
It’s entirely possible for people with the right ends and goals to be politically inept and lead remarkably stupid political campaigns. I call these campaigns ‘anti-political,’ for the reason that they are often almost entirely bereft of the essential components of politics, the dialogue, the cultivation of support, consent, the give-and-take with decision- and policy-makers and such like. People who are disdainful of politics in the normal run of things display a tendency to idealism and impossibilism in practice. They seem to think that politics is a matter of identifying problems and solutions and having politicians as philosopher kings act and enact, as if there is a straight line connecting theory to practice. That betrays a complete ignorance as to how politics works. And that ignorance comes from a prior contempt for politics. You don’t learn about something if you don’t take it seriously in the first place. We have been living in an age in which scientists and technicians, those impressed with their knowledge of objects, the simple stuff of life, have openly expressed their disdain for those who deal with the messy, complicated, difficult stuff that is humanity. This quote from Susan Blackmore is typical: “Finally, we might decide that civilisation itself is worth preserving. In that case we have to work out what to save and which people would be needed in a drastically reduced population – weighing the value of scientists and musicians against that of politicians, for example.”
Note the reference to an abstract “we” that doesn’t exist, prior to drawing distinctions between those who are worthy of being saved and those who are not. The politicians are an easy target, given their unpopularity in having to do the hard yards of policy and practice in the human world. This is far harder to do than anything scientists and musicians do. Note also the pernicious doctrine of weighing the value of different people against one another. I’ve had these arguments with ecology colleagues and friends. For them, the ‘we’ to be saved is themselves and their kind of people, with everyone else being disposable. I was present at one dinner in which an ecologist friend of a friend openly declared that ‘it is time to cull the herd.’ I asked which government would they charge to do the culling, and according to what criteria. The idea that human beings are a plague on the planet has been expressed many times over the years. The term ‘useless eaters’ has also been repeated extensively. And yet liberal/leftists are most concerned to identify anything smacking of ‘populism’ – people – as fascist.
My basic point here is that Blackmore’s view is one that betrays complete contempt for politics. It is hardly surprising that the similarly contemptuous would also be the most politically ignorant and inept. It is as well to be aware of how easily the ‘reasoning’ here slides to embrace people well beyond the easily vilified categories – it’s no step at all from the ridiculed politicians to the people they represent, or sections of those people. Scientists and musicians? I’m used to hearing ecology friends denigrate poetry. Plato banned poets from his ideal Republic. Won’t it be a wonderful civilisation indeed when it is populated only by scientists? These are the very excited dreams of would-be Saint Simions.
It's lonely here
There's no one left to torture
Give me absolute control
Over every living soul
That's an order!
Leonard Cohen, The Future
The rational society in which there is only the one class of those who give the orders, yet no-one to order. This is the epitome of idealism and abstraction, those who live off the labour of others being so removed from productive realities as to think reality is the creation of their own genius. I’ll guess that the people who make, move, build, and grow things won’t be discarded, simply put under control, managed and manipulated.
To which I simply say, aren’t scientists really stupid.
Beware abstraction and idealism, particularly when these things are rooted in contempt and naivety. These things issue in a politics that is unpopular and ineffective in the first instance and dangerously counter-productive in the second. Wishful thinking is a bane on radical politics, betraying causes and principles into the wrong powers and practices time and again. The world largely operates on the basis of a power dynamics. You may regret this realism and seek to trump it with the realism of a prior physics, but this is a breath-taking naivety which may be acceptable in children but is utterly unworthy of adults. I don’t blame the youth for the idiocies and inanities of the current wave of climate activism – I point the finger squarely at the adults so contemptuous of politics and people as to render them political naifs. They have nothing to offer politically, no way of winning support to their cause, no way of motivating and self-obligating the members of the demos, so they think to go direct to power and the decision- and policy-makers. By that approach, they betray principles and causes to power dynamics, without being able to influence those dynamics in the slightest.
The simple lesson to draw here is that it is entirely possible to be morally right in the abstract but politically inept and strategically incorrect in practice. It matters a great deal to identify precisely what you are arguing for and how you propose to deliver your demands. A confusion on ends cannot but result in a confusion with respect to means, bringing incoherence to the cause. We should note the extent to which strength of conviction and commitment becomes more vehement and vociferous the more confusion and incoherence becomes apparent. It is an attempt to deny the force of criticism. Ultimately, it is an attempt to deny contrary realities. The bad news for activists is that reality never goes away as a result. What tends to happen is that those with ideological commitments attempt to bend reality – and people – into principled shape, perverting ends in the process.
There are plenty of ways to do politics, campaigning, and activism right, to get things done in a world of different actors with different interests and priorities – that’s politics.
Define a goal and see how it can be practicable at the level of law. Woolly ambiguities and vague general slogans may incite activism and attract attention when pitched at extremes. Job done, the question is what is now to be done with regard to specific problems and policies. You have to be precise, specifying the nature of the problem and the details of the solution. As soon as I hear there is an ‘emergency’ and ‘nothing is being done,’ I switch off – this is the language that characterises the lowest rung of the political game. Those who employ such language are either still trying to radicalize others, drumming up numbers for their magical 3% critical mass, or are congenitally incapable of moving on.
You need grassroots campaigning as well as networking at all levels, getting influential people and groups on board. Plenty of this is being done. My concern here is that the resource-rich will, as ever, dominate and determine the ends. But this is the next stage. But this involves making contact with organisations and institutions across the political and social spectrum, presenting them with proposals that are practicable and not merely symbolic. We should be well beyond the stage of attention-catching gestures, especially those attritional gestures which seem designed to provoke the public. If the intention is to wear the public down so much that people give in in search of peace, you may well find the opposite more likely – for every action, there is a reaction; if you push, people will push back, not least when energy and food supplies and social services are being destabilised and destroyed. Fascism? Be careful of what you wish for.
When it comes to gaining attention and winning support, broad general appeals pitched to extremes can be effective. But such shock tactics have a short shelf life and are subject to rapidly diminishing returns. When it comes to action, narrow, targeted approaches are better than broad expansive ones. The suspicion is that there is a dual approach being taken away, with attention, both supportive and critical, overwhelmingly focused on the attention and attrition, to the neglect of the strategists moving their policies – and interests – into place. Are the activists aware of this? Are the critics of said activism aware? Who cares?
It all depends on your aims and objectives. If mere survival is the height of your ambitions, then any authoritarian despot will do. That, in my view, is not a coherent response to the megamechical ecologically destructive anarchy being unleashed on the world but its culmination and confirmation. Those in the grip of scientism, naturalism, and technocratic mentality are simply unable to see this – their mentality is part of the problem and the preparation, the ‘dark Satanic mills’ of the mind that made techno-urban industrialism possible in the first place.
But if you do have your goals and ends right, then there is a need to be politically effective when it comes to securing them in practice and policy. There is a need to be clear about the problem to be solved, the changes that are required to resolve it, and how this is to be brought about. There is also a need for clarity with respect to who the agents of and audience for this change are. Abstract references to ‘we’ and ‘our’ reveal either impotent idealism and illiterate politics or a suspiciously ideological evasion (the classless class of techno-bureaucratic planetary managers who talk in general terms of ‘humanity’ so as to avoid the specifics of political economy and its class dynamics).
This also entails targeting communications clearly and intelligently so as to make best use of always scarce resources, acting in ways that are most likely to obtain the desired response. To have failed in doing this in the past should be the occasion to examine your own practices and approaches in an endeavour to identify what you have been doing wrong and learn to do better. The tendency to assume because the cause and the end is right and just and therefore any failure that has occurred is the result of faulty political institutions and ignorant, indifferent citizens is a lame apologetics that covers one’s own political ineptitude. This attitude ensures that the self-examination and self-correction necessary to any learning experience doesn’t take place. Activists and campaigners remain absorbed in their political ineptitude, only getting shriller and more hysterical as a result of their continued failure. It is in this context that the doctrine of the ends justifying the means becomes especially dangerous, begging the questions of which social, political, and cultural boundaries will be the next ones to transgress. If it is true, as some activist apologist continually claim, that ‘life is more important than x, y, and z,’ then environmentalists are claiming the licence to do anything they like in the name of ‘emergency’ and ‘necessity’ – said ‘life’ in the abstract trumps everything. From inconveniencing people attempting to go about their daily business it is a short step to just simply overriding people on any level. If ‘life’ stands at the top of the list of priorities, then we can kiss goodbye to democratic governance, civic norms, human rights, the lot. It merely remains to be pointed out that the environmental record of authoritarian regimes is poor in the extreme, and for predictable reasons – not ideals and ends, but power, is what drives those regimes. Power has a dynamic of its own, with leaders selected for their concern to obtain, retain, monopolise, and use power, power as an end in itself, not as something to use for the public good. Those who lust after enlightened despots have a fantasy of power being used in furtherance of worthy ideals. This is infantile.
Campaigns in furtherance of specific ends and goals need to be executed with consistency in discipline, direction, focus, and energy, with a realistic appraisal of what is achievable given resources and timescales. Open-ended and variegated commitments may ensure general appeal whilst avoiding difficult questions of realisation, but sooner or later they will flounder in the interface with reality, taking turns either unanticipated by activists and idealists or engineered by those concerned to appropriate and reorient a cause in favour of their own interests.
There is a need to focus on the feasible and the realisable. The alarm bells should have sounded as soon as campaigners could be heard denigrating and dismissing politics as the art of the possible. If it is true, as they argued, that the climate crisis was such as to render the art of the possible invalid, then it is too late to do anything anyway, other than confess your modernist secular sins, admit your goal of making a Heaven on Earth has turned hellish, and make your peace as best you can. If you want to pitch problems at such extremes, then I will call your bluff and demand you show your hand. If you’ve got nothing to offer the art of the possible, then you have nothing to offer and are merely creating a noise that detracts from serious problem-solving.
This brings me to the current wave of climate activism. I swear if I see or hear the slogan, the apology, the alibi “save the planet” once more, I may finally learn to drive and drive all day every day. Because these people are enough to drive anyone mad – and drive people away from environmentalism. I reserve the greatest ire for Extinction Rebellion and its manifold and increasingly undisciplined offshoots. These organisations could have been designed to invite the appropriation of environmentalism by the possibilists and realists of money and power. You can work out for yourselves who those people could be. Just ask the question as to who has the capacity to push technology to the scale required by these extensive and expensive climate programmes, and who has the money and resources as well as the interests. Not green hippies at grassroots, for sure.
Is there a clear objective to these climate campaigns? Beyond the slogans, it is possible to discern certain aims and objectives. The way that these have been framed as demands to government tend to be off-putting: it is the language of protection-rackets, hostage taking and ransom demands. It is the very antithesis of the Green Republicanism and civic environmentalism I have spent a lifetime developing. As for the stated aims to overthrow the government, I’d be inclined to laugh if the damage to socialist and environmentalist politics not so serious. Roger Hallam writes that ‘everyone knows how to bring down a government – by blocking the economy to create a crisis that forces change.’ What genius. In the past, this was the language of Marxist socialists who at least had some connection with the trade unions and trade union struggle, that is, the social force with the structural capacity to obstruct the mechanisms of accumulation. The likes of Hallam and other eco-extremists have zero connection with the agents with the structural capacity to engage in transformative action. They are vanguardists, Leninists without the workers, a reversion to Jacobinism and, as such, bourgeois to the core. They know how to bring down a government – they have no idea how to win popular support to be able to form a democratically elected government in the first place. And they don’t want to know. They know that their aims are extreme and utterly lacking in support, so they set out to engineer crisis in the hope of profiting from chaos. These people are delusional and dangerous. They make a mockery of the socialism and political ecology that I have spent a lifetime trying to recover from the clutches of extremists. It may well be a hopelessly lost cause that asks much too much of people. Demands for the ‘removal’ of the ‘complicit political class’ and their replacement by a ‘citizens assembly’ can only be made and supported by people who know nothing of politics, power, and history, or people who do. I spent my academic years trying to clear Marxism of the taint of totalitarian democracy. I would have been better off staying on the building sites and earning some real money.
Apart from anything else, it is not remotely clear what is supposed to happen after the political class has been removed and the citizens’ assembly is put in place. Here, immediately, is incoherence. Demands that governments ‘tell the truth’ clearly imply that ‘the truth’ already exists in pre-political form. In which case the role of the citizen’ assemblies are redundant, vehicles to give the semblance of democracy, with people giving their consent to the truth fed to them by experts. Who appoints the experts and why? Who are they accountable to? More to the point, how can we remove them?
There doesn’t seem to be a plan or a programme, just a grab-bag and wish-list. This is fantasy and delusion. But at least it involved identifiable objectives, which gave a movement shape, direction, and impulse. It raised awareness by promoting vague, ill-defined goals, demanding changes of impossible scales and rapidity so as to expose government and business to the charges of ‘doing nothing.’ It worked in that it has succeeded in mobilising large numbers of people screaming emergency and demanding action. But the approach will backfire spectacularly on the environmental movement. Making demands that can never be delivered not only puts existing governments on the backfoot, it renders all and any government impossible. In other words, this kind of climate campaigning hobbles the power and legitimacy of the very governmental agency required to address climate crisis and implement climate policies and programmes, coordinating them globally. The demands are deliberately pitched to impossible extremes to ensure that governments cannot act on them, giving campaigning strength to the claim that ‘nothing is being done.’ This is an assertion of power without responsibility, and it destroys the basis of an effective environmental politics.
This is not the ecological transformation of ‘the political’ that is required, but rank bad politics. These campaigners calculate that if you paint an apocalyptic picture of the dismal future that awaits humanity, young people will be radicalized enough to join the movement, older people too, motivated by a humane desire to protect the young. This is a very low politics indeed, a cynical manipulation of human impulses, inorganic and mechanical to the core. These people are not furnishing an alternative to the megamachine of the modern age, they are its apostles. They have led people astray.
The objectives are a combination of fantasy and delusion. And have spread diffusely into a confusing array increasingly impossible demands. Coherent political purpose has been diluted precisely because different people are joining the movement for change for different reasons. To ‘act’ and ‘do something’ to ‘save the planet’ is so general an aim that it invites myriad interpretations. The contemporary climate movement is a peculiar mix of many movements, combining an appealing nature fetishism and anarchism with a scientism and authoritarianism. It doesn’t cohere. Notions of a loose collective leaderless movement is the plainest political infantilism. It may be a thrill to be involved, carrying placards and parroting slogans, but there is a complete lack of clarity and discipline that undermines political effectiveness. The ‘grown ups’ – the people with money, power, and connections – will take over easily. It is easy enough to recruit an ‘army’ of activists demanding action from others, but when that action comes, it is well-nigh certain it will not conform to the fantasies of the radicalised. So we will gets splits, rebellions, and the break-up of the mobilised masses. Easy come, easy go, if there is nothing to hold people together. More offshoots and smaller, ever more extreme, groups.
Look beyond the noise and spectacle and try to determine whether there are clear campaign goals and objectives. If all we see are the same slogans and assertions designed to radicalize at extremes, then we can be sure that the movement has run its course and is ripe for the picking. Was this the strategy, presuming that there are strategists at work? Rather than engage in the hard work of politics, negotiation, dialogue, the building of support and consent, there is an attempt to go past politics to put emergency, crisis, and necessity on the political agenda and, once having placed it there, to expose the inadequacies of the climate utopians and idealists and have the issue taken over by the ‘realists’ – those with the money, power, and connections to act effectively. The campaigners can still be heard claiming that ‘nothing is being done,’ all evidence to the contrary. The public on the receiving end of austerian energy policies and expensive green taxes and levies will rightly point out that they are paying a prohibitively expensive price for this ‘nothing.’ This is evidence of a cause stuck in campaign mode. The claim that ‘nothing is being done’ makes good recruiting sense, but continues to beg the question as to what is to be done once recruitment has taken place. To continue making claims such as this indicates that we are not faced with serious politics here, merely the dwindling dead end of permanent protest. Such a movement exhausts itself in due course, with whatever truth it contained being taken over by extraneous forces.
On point of fact, it’s simply not true that ‘nothing is being done.’ Governments the world over are committed to Net Zero policies. Campaigners will, of course, simply keep changing the goalposts to say ‘not enough,’ forever putting governments on the backfoot in face of unrealisable demands. If once you concede a demand in order to seek peace you have legitimised the claims of the demanders, who will continue to press forward. The solution is simple: nothing happens without the mandate and consent of citizens, voters, and taxpayers. That so much has been happening without those things in place, so much which is hugely expensive, suggests that governments are in on this environmentalist corporate take-over of the public domain. Radical it ain’t. That said, it is still worth making the point that these Net Zero commitments came from committees that put in the work over years, detailing in painstaking terms all the steps that need to be taken to get to Net Zero according to the proposed timetable. All that work was done in order to identify climate ambitions and goals that were feasible. The proposals may or may not prove over-ambitious in time. One thing is for sure, the people who shout ‘not enough’ at everything those putting a shift in are capable of nothing constructive, only interventions that threaten to short-circuit the entire process. The same the world over. China is committed to Net Zero by 2060, India by Net Zero. These are countries rightly weighing and balancing other, no less important, goals. Notions of ‘the planet’ and climate being an overriding priority that trumps all other goals are inadmissible. We have just seen this reasoning at work with Covid, creating a long-term disaster in terms of social, mental, and physical health. The last people to listen to are those who speak the language of overriding priorities whilst listening to no-one and learning nothing by experience. The transnationals are on board with Net Zero, too. There is plenty being done, mobilising huge resources and committing business and government to substantial investment programmes.
The problems that we face are not easy ones to solve. They will take time and expertise, they will take clarity of thought, and they will need the consent of the people. Campaigners consistently fail to acknowledge the many things that are being done. The idea that ‘nothing is being done’ is mere meaningless noise on the part of those on a radicalisation and recruitment kick. This is not where problems will be diagnosed and solved. Unfortunately, it is this noise that is attracting all the attention, drawing media criticism and earning the anger of the long suffering public. It has long been time for the adults in the environmentalist room to rein this activism in. Many, to their credit, have tried, the likes of Tamsyn Edwards for one. But not enough. And nowhere near enough of them from within the political wing of environmentalism. If those shouting ‘nothing’ or ‘not enough’ is being done offered an analysis of how things could be done faster and better, and with the support and consent of the people, all well and good. But they don’t. They just offer the same fears, fantasies, and delusions. This will throw environmentalism in bad light, undermining the political and civic dimension it needs for enduring and legitimate change. Such activism fails to develop the sense of ‘ownership’ required on the part of the people who are expected to bear the burden of consequences when it comes to policy. The approach puts a democratic deficit at the heart of environmentalism, something that cannot but backfire on the cause in time. Already we are hearing demands to repeal Net Zero or hold a referendum on it, given that nobody actually voted for it. In the context of stresses on food and energy supplies, there are concerns that environmental policies are being pushed too hard, too fast, and too far. The commitment to Net Zero stands condemned for bankrupting the economy and impoverishing the nation. Renewables, it is charged, cannot do the job.
Climate campaigners should have a clear and coherent response to those criticisms. Instead, there are assertions with regard to the priority of cutting emissions and evasions to the effect that nothing matters other than the priority of ‘saving the planet.’ The charge is that the actions being taken are expensive and repressive, will cost huge resources and produce little effect. Assertions of priorities here merely evades the question. Campaigners need to be made to respond. Otherwise all that we are hearing is noise. The campaign premise that ‘nothing is being done’ is fit only for radicalisation and recruitment. It is a political mythology that serves the interests of campaign groups, but which is irrelevant in terms of serious politics. There is no detail to analyse, no action to scrutinize, no practical commitments to unpack. It’s fine for recruitment purposes, but not fit for anything else. To ‘change the world’ requires that you see the world clearly as it is, not how you want it to be for campaign purposes.
Then we come to the target audience of this climate activism. Who is it? Is there one? Many people have claimed that the actions will put people off the environmental cause. This may well be true, but the purpose of these actions has never been to win popular support. In a profound sense, these actions are a war of attrition against the public, a punishment for the public’s failure to support Green parties in the past. The public, it is now clear, were good judges. They know when they are valued and they know when they are held in contempt. The contempt these activists have for democracy and conventional political institutions is based on a deep-rooted contempt they have for people in general. To them, people ‘don’t know and don’t care,’ are stupid, selfish, and indifferent. It never once occurs to environmentalists that they may be doing politics wrong, that they have the wrong approach to people. They see the members of the demos not as active, informed, creative agents of the public realm but as passive, unenlightened, ignorant masses to be educated. That condescension is palpable and the public resent it.
The reasoning is that the public don’t need to be won over in any case. The principles of self-assumed obligation and ‘no taxation without representation’ have been openly jettisoned in favour of environmental philosopher kings and vanguards seeking to build and lead the 3% critical mass which, they claim, history shows to be all that political change requires. I’m a historian by training. I hear these people use and abuse history and shake my head at their mediocrity.
The point is, they don’t care to build a public for environmental politics, they merely want to incite and engineer change by extraneous, manipulative force. Once more I note the extent to which supposed ecologists embrace and advance the most inorganic form of politics and change. They engage in outrageous actions in the hope it will be covered in the news, earning them platforms on which they can proselytize about the ‘end of the world’ and other such stuff we have been hearing since ever. In their fantasy, they believe that environmental issues are never covered and have never been covered. We have heard nothing but. I’ll go further. By the early 1990s the neoliberal revolution had done its damage and run its course. The jury on the corporatisation of public business was in and it was time for reckoning. Instead, we got Clinton and Blair and the globalisation and further liberalisation of economic relations. The day of political reckoning for liberalisation under the corporate form keeps getting put back. From the concern with acid rain and the ozone layer in the 1980s up to the present day, environmental issues have dominated the radical political agenda. With what result? Public business has been corporatized and hollowed out, the social contract is in ruins, large areas of the nation are becoming lawless, the health service is collapsing, and people are being put on the scrapheap. We need to start paying a lot more attention to the moral and social environment and a lot less to the natural, for the reason that the crises arising in the latter have their roots in the former.
So much precious time has been wasted politically.
I remember buying Ralph Miliband’s Divided Societies when it was published in 1989. Miliband wrote eloquently on the future for socialism and class struggle, making it clear that if you are not waging class struggle from below you can be sure the ruling class are waging it from above as a condition of their continued rule. He noted the crisis in the agencies of labour representation and socialisation, arguing that the socialist alternative will never emerge until this crisis is resolved. He sketched out the conditions for that emergence, conceding that it will occur only over the long run:
“It is extremely improbable that the issues discussed in this chapter will soon be put to the test: the conditions do not at present exist – and will not exist for some time to come in any advanced capitalist country – for the coming to power of the kind of government that would seek to bring about a radical transformation of the existing social order. But .. it is quite realistic to think that these conditions will come into being in the next ten, twenty, or thirty years – a long time in the life of an individual, but a mere moment in historical time. In this perspective, class struggle for the creation of democratic, egalitarian, co-operative, and classless societies, far from coming to an end, has barely begun.”
Ralph Miliband Divided Societies 1989: 234
Sadly, or should that be scandalously, the politics of social transformation has still barely begun. We are more than thirty years on now, which is long enough time to have learned the nature of the contradictory dynamics of class and capital.
What happened? We got Clinton and Blair and the age of middling mediocre reformists who, instead of calling a halt to and reversing liberalisation, advanced it aggressively on a global basis. The corporatisation of public business continued unabated, entrenching and extending the corporate form.
With the political defeat and economic humbling of the working class we got a retreat from socialism across the board. Socialist academics found that they were academics first and foremost and socialists not at all. Postmodernism was all the rage. Politically, green issues came more to the fore, taking the place of the ‘old’ issues of class and redistribution. Not that class and redistribution went away. On the contrary, from the 1980s we saw a ruthless class war from above designed to redistribute resources from labour to capital. With green issues came a greater emphasis on politically neutral science and technology, a depoliticisation that was ideological to the core. It appears, too, in the assertions of a classless ‘we’ and ‘humanity’ alongside the dismissal of class as an outmoded ‘us and them’ concept. It’s an ‘us and them’ world is my response, and denying that social reality does nothing to change its nature.
The sidelining of socialism in favour of Green politics will, in retrospect, look like a atrocious detour, not least because it is becoming increasingly clear that the resolution of ecological problems is a political challenge that takes us to the heart of the socio-economic system. We have slipped so much politically that some supposedly radical and leftist people, fully paid up members of the enlightenment model of scientific reason, need the declaration of impotence on the part of scientists themselves to wake them up to the fundamentally political nature of the environmental crisis.
“At some point we need to recognise the problem is political and that further climate change science may even divert attention away from where the problem truly lies.”
(Bruce Glavovic, Professor, Massey University; Iain White, Professor of Environmental Planning, University of Waikato; Tim Smith, Professor, University of the Sunshine Coast).
The ‘climate problem’ is political to the core and so is the solution. Climate change is not the primary problem, it is the physical manifestation of a problem that lies within social forms and relations and the way that these mediate the interchange with nature. Environmentalists who assert the primacy of ‘nature’ in abstraction from social mediations and practices deliver us to an impotent, ineffective politics that lacks motivational, inspirational, and practical force as well as lacking social democratic content. They come at the problem from the outside, as though ‘the science’ gives them a privileged vantage point from which to observe the world and from where to ‘tell the truth’ and issue order. The time for pressing science into service as politics and ethics and for advancing technological workarounds to avoid the hard work of politics has long since been over.
Elitist and anti-democratic to the core, these activists are wearing their unpopularity as a badge of honour.
“So what if Extinction Rebellion isn’t popular? We’re protesting to bring about change and it’s working.” So long as people are talking about the issue, anything goes. The people who make these claims fail to see that people are not talking about climate crisis and its solutions, they are talking about the extreme actions of the activists. When those actions rather than climate crisis become ‘the issue,’ campaigning has taken a seriously wrong turn. These activists mistake noise and controversy for effectiveness, presuming that if their antics are being talked about then something must be getting done. This is the self-justifying, self-validating mindset of the fanatic. They will point to polls suggesting that most people think climate an important issue to address and claim success. There is no basis for that assertion in fact. The polls have said much the same thing going back to the 1980s. Things get contentious when we move from broad assertions to specific policies that cost citizens and taxpayers something. That is why those citizens and taxpayers need to be on board, ‘owning’ a cause and a movement. Because, ultimately, it is people who will be the burdens of climate policies and programmes. That is precisely why the principle of self-assumed obligation needs to be made central to environmental politics and not shunted to the sidelines in favour of fanciful notions of 3% critical mass. These are not claims backed by fact but acts of faith. We are in the presence of justification by faith. To engage in a politics that is designed to obstruct, inconvenience, anger, and antagonise broad sections of the great public is, in a democratic polity, an act of political suicide. We could condemn such actions as remarkably self-defeating, but it seems that such activists have zero interest in democratic politics. Year in, year out, environmentalists have abused the electorate as selfish, stupid, and uncaring, and have been mystified as to the lack of positive response on the part of the people. There is now a growing tide of political opposition to environmental policies. That tide will grow as the cost of living crisis worsens and public retrenchment and energy inflation bites harder. It is then that the need for popular support will be required. Hacking ‘ordinary’ people off through outrageous actions will mean that that support will not be there when it is needed. That tide of opposition is in part due to environmental policies beginning to bite, fiscally, but part of it may well be due to extreme climate activism. Actions breed reactions. Even if this is not the case, those actions are gifting opponents of climate action with grievances to exploit, and have large sections of the antagonised public on their side. I don’t think this opposition is actually a reaction to climate activism but is, instead, due to the fact that, contrary to activists’ claims, big things are indeed being done on the climate, and effects and expense are beginning to be felt. Far from ‘nothing being done,’ plenty is being done, and is now coming under assault. Instead of working to defend and extend those commitments, buttressed by popular support and legitimacy, climate activists make the false claim that ‘nothing is being done,’ hacking off people whose support climate policies need, rendering what is being done vulnerable to being scaled back or dismantled – with the support of the long-suffering and well-miffed masses! Genius!
The critics of climate commitments are doing precisely what climate activists refuse to do and are seeking to build popular support for their climate opposition. The activists make it easy for them, giving them a target to hit. They point to the extreme actions of the activists and denounce climate change as an alarmist, apocalyptic ideology. The activists have given them this charge gift-wrapped. GB news and Talk Radio have these activists and alarmists on daily, proselytising and eye-rolling as they predict fire, flood, and famine with all the relish of true believers. The impression is given that critics are sane and sober with reason, logic, and evidence on their side. The activists think they have done a good job in getting coverage. Each side sees only what they want to see.
Activists might want to try to consider why the growing reaction seems far more reasonable than the climate actions that provoked it. This anti-politics is hugely counter-productive.
So what would a reasonable climate activism strategy look like?
It’s simple, if you stick to key principles.
Identify and frame aims and objectives clearly, state them in such a way that they are practicable and could mobilize support from the great public.
Work out where the heavy lifting needs to be done and focus attention and energy there.
Take the public with you. As environmental measures start to bite, there will be a backlash demanding their scaling back or removal. You need to be able to resist that backlash, by having clarity in terms of ends and delivery, but also in terms of popular support. Justification by faith simply sends unarmed prophets into the hard arenas of politics. There needs to be a campaign of communication and persuasion, not radicalisation. The emphasis shouldn’t be on the necessity of climate policies but on climate policies done right. The backlash to environmentalism is not being caused by the extremism of the activists but by ill-conceived commitments and badly implemented policies. However well-intentioned, these things bring a cause and movement into disrepute and result in a loss of support more than anything else. The antics of extremist activists merely make the job of opposition and push-back much easier, delivering the support of broad masses of people who have been pushed well beyond their patience. Climate revanchism will be felt as a liberation and a relief from austerity and repression.
DO IT RIGHT!
Which means weighing and balancing a number of commitments rather than singling out one as being of overriding concern. That means curbing carbon emissions whilst still feeding people and keeping the lights on, protecting energy security, offering accessible and affordable energy, working with the grain of people as they are and not as you romanticize them as being according to lifestyles based on value preferences.
One of the biggest errors that climate campaigners could make is to enable political opponents to equate bad environmental policy with environmental policy as such. The biggest achievement it could make would be to define an environmental policy that could be owned across the political spectrum. In teacher training I was taught that a good lesson plan is one that could be handed on to other teachers, understood, and delivered in the case of its author’s absence. The same principle applies to environmental policy – if things are done right, that policy will survive changes in government.
I keep returning to this idea of ‘ownership.’ Let me explain. One reason why Margaret Thatcher found it easy to privatise the nationalised industries is because the notion of public ownership was illusory in the first place. These nationalised industries were remote, bureaucratic and empty; there was no internal identification with them. People need to ‘own’ policy and commitments with respect to the ends, giving scope to debate the means.
I have written at length and laboured the point somewhat for a reason. The antics of climate activists and campaigners are seriously hacking me off, as they are the great public. The problem with confronting those actions directly is that it adds to the noise, taking the focus of attention away from where it should be. It is dangerous ground. The cycle of actions breeding reactions is a vicious one that takes you further and further away from where you need to be. At present, far from radicalising the public, these actions are justifying conservative forces in their disdain. These forces have frequently claimed environmentalists to be extreme, apocalyptic, and authoritarian. These activists seem to be doing their level-best to prove them right.
"When fascism comes back, it will be under the guise of anti-fascism"
How telling that the people who scream ‘fascism’ at anything and anyone who dares mention faith, family, community, and nation are either silent, apologetic, or supportive in face of the explicitly anti-democratic, extremist, and authoritarian climate activism taking place across the western world. This liberal/Left is lost, not least because it is utterly disconnected from the ‘ordinary’ people it holds in complete contempt and see as a plague on the planet.
It’s a clown show. I waited a long while for the adults in the environmental movement to find the nerve to rein this in. Instead, they either incite such actions or engage in apologetics.
I’ve been forced to conclude that the adults don’t intervene because, deep down, they know that they have failed politically and have no alternative. The actions smack of desperation.
That’s the Left, they are not right, and I’m gone. I have made my opposition clear:
Affirming Freedom and Democracy and Resisting the Authoritarian Temptation: The Allure of Eco-Authoritarianism under the Sign of Climate Necessity (2022) 228 pages 82,008 words
The Critique of Environmentalism as Naturalism and Scientism Critique (2022) 245 pages 87,641 words
The Politics of Hope against the Ecology of Fear (2021) 442 168,708
Affirming Democracy and Politics against Techno-Bureaucratic Managerialism (2020) 153 60,887
Climate Rebellion and System Change: Rebellion or Revolution? (2019) 706 264, 821
Just Stop Oil’s attack on the Sunflowers was not just a silly stunt, but an elitist and authoritarian assault on one of humanity’s greatest acheivements. There is something profoundly anti-human about the willingness to trash great art. There is something profoundly anti-human about ecology.
The anti-human vandalism of Just Stop Oil
Spiked are making hay on this:
Environmentalism is a deeply misanthropic movement. When you see the human race as a problem, you’ll soon start to hate human beings
Just Stop Oil’s contempt for the masses should come as no surprise.
Looking to use the threat of criminal acts that cause problems for others, seeking to ensure that your demands are imposed on everyone else, is a form of terrorism. Apologists who claim that the painting would have been behind glass and hence unharmed are missing the point. Actions such as this are normalising the transgressing of social boundaries. Others taking such actions will not necessarily be so careful as to cause non-harm. Further, the value of such actions lies in their shock value. Like drugs, pornography, and violent movies, once the shock is absorbed, there is a need to go further and further to produce further shocks. The point concerns the normalisation of shock and transgression. Already, apologists are asking which is more important, art or life. If you make ‘life’ the overriding priority, then the destruction and discarding of anything is justified. This setting of a false antithesis is not accidental; it is stated openly in the work of various eco-authoritarians. I critiqued Ross Mittiga at length on precisely this point in Affirming Freedom and Democracy and Resisting the Authoritarian Temptation: The Allure of Eco-Authoritarianism under the Sign of Climate Necessity (2022). I argued the point at length for the reason, stated in that work, that I saw that same assertion of ‘life’ over everything coming to be repeatedly made in the times to come. Here we are.
With respect to Net Zero, there is a need to avoid the situation in which opponents can claim this is a globalist agenda, with politicians and corporate oligarchs having a climate change love in, and the people no longer having a say in how they are governed. That charge can only be avoided if democracy is enriched, embedded, and extended.
I don’t make a fetish of Net Zero, either in terms of supporting it or criticising it. It’s ambitious and it’s costly. It’s nip and tuck whether governments can make the transition by 2050, not least for the reason that it attempts substantial cuts in emissions without substantial societal transformations at the same time. I tend to the view that Net Zero is not the be-all and end-all that certain environmentalists and their critics see it as. From a Green perspective, Net Zero is a continuation of the reformist, regulatory approach that proceeds within the ecologically damaging economic that stands in need of transforming from the root. In fine, Net Zero allows governments to put off the transition as transformation that is required in the hope of innovating technologies and strategies down the line, and which may not work at scale in any case. In other words, it’s a huge gambit. Net Zero is not a hill I would choose to die on as a political ecologist. I can see environmentalists coming to waste their time and energy on a long defence of Net Zero against critics, in the same way that people wasted their time and energy on half-way houses like the Paris accords and the EU, as if the New Jerusalem had been delivered by such institutions. The energy transition being pursued will work only if it is set in the context of a broad societal transformation. And by transformation here I mean something that looks to supplant existing social forms with forms that are viable, sustainable, and command popular support. For all of the intense activism of recent decades, the movement for such a transformation has barely got off the ground. Now there’s an issue that eco-activists could get their political teeth into, coming up with an alternative strategy that transcends the parameters of corporate capital.
I’ll repeat what I have said from the first. The younger generation are being terrorised, traumatised, and radicalised and it is those who are responsible for doing this, for want of a genuine politics capable of winning popular support on their part, who should be brought to account. They know what they are doing; they are cold and calculating and utterly unconcerned with the social and psychological consequences and harms born by others. And they don’t care that they are alienating the great public, either. I’ve attempted to rein them in, and been unfriended and blocked without a word for my efforts, sometimes by ‘friends’ of ten years standing and more. These people are taking environmentalism into a blind alley, in precisely the opposite direction from the Green Republicanism I have spent two decades arguing for. I’m tempted to dismiss them as cranks and cultists. They are bringing out the misanthopic menace that has stalked environmentalism from the start. Loathing humanity, the war of attrition they are currently waging against the great public comes easily to them. You get the distinct impression they don’t much like people anyway.
I think that many are naïve and idealist, others politically clueless and remote from ‘ordinary’ people, whilst others are just extremists. If I were more cynical, or more conspiratorial, I would be inclined to think that such actions are being strategized by forces who wish to pitch the environmental issue at such a high level of intensity as to force action well beyond the capacities of environmentalists, with the result that these environmentalists come to be sidelined. That leaves money and power, of course, those with the capacity to push technology to the scale involved in effective climate action.
Who else? The politically inept engaging in such anti-politics?
I’m pointing the finger at those who are the archtitects of this strategy of attrition and law-breaking rather than the younger people terrorised, traumatised, and scared into unreasoning response. That was the strategy all along. Check what the likes of Roger Hallam were saying in this respect a few years ago. He drew three circles of people, the activists who know what should be done in the top circle, people with a degree of knowledge in the middle circle, and a mass who know there is a crisis want something to be done in the larger circle. The strategy is to recruit as many as you can from the second circle and then ignore the rest, proceeding to scare the wits out of the people in the third circle, building the demand for action. I’ve had people contact me in an attempt to recruit me to the first circle. I refused and I criticised. I was sidelined.
I hope these young people get their lives back, I hope they remember the people who abused them, and I hope they sue.
I can only praise the patience of the much abused British public in enduring all of this with fortitude. People have been subjected to massive stresses and strains these past years, going back to the financial collapse in the late 2000s. People are doing their best to keep it together. And these clowns seek to add to the distress. I don’t have that patience. This is what happens when people who have zero connection with ‘ordinary’ people – other than contempt – try to do politics. It’s the adults inciting this I’ve been putting in the dock. I had more than a few of them as ‘friends,’ and have been getting rid of them on social media as quickly as they’ve been getting rid of me. I know them well. For years I’ve been arguing for Greens to develop a properly political and ethical dimension in order to remove the democratic deficit at the heart of environmentalism. This anti-politics is the product of the bogus metaphysics of the naturalism that dominates ecology – a ridiculous nature worship on one side and an arrogant technocratic scientism on the other. I’ve put it bluntly to remaining ecology friends – you have to translate theory/knowledge into the field of practical reason (ethics and politics, the realm of values and motivations). I’ve done it at length and in depth, and they just ignore it thinking that their ‘climate facts’ trump everything. Physics trumps politics, they assert, totally ignoring the fact that it is the mediated relation beween the social metabolism and the universal metabolism of nature that is all important.
I’m glad I’m in print detailing the failures of environmentalism as politics, because this activism is getting ugly in the extreme. I blame the kids much less than the adults behind this. The adults have deliberately set out to radicalize and traumatize, pushing things to extremes to force a quick and unreasoning response. They have done this as a result of their own political ineptitude and failure. I have had several exchanges with those defending these extreme actions with claims that ‘climate change is so much worse’ and ‘nothing is being done.’ I reminded them of the extensive and expensive climate programmes, subsidies, and levies already in place – which people have not voted for. To defend those climate policies effectively will require popular support, and here are the activists hacking the public off. It’s the same EU crowd, they are bureaucrats and authoritarians to the core and don’t care about democratic deficits. They are the same people who see fascism everywhere, as if they give a damn about democracy.
The pernicious doctrine of the end justifying the means seldom ends well – not least when the end, in terms of policies, finance, and consent/legitimacy with respect to extensive and expensive climate programmes are less than clear. Activism that incites unreasoning response is not helpful.
There are times when I strongly suspect that the activists are being gamed by strategists who want to push emergency and necessity, normalize crisis, and promote extreme measures. I keep asking eco ‘friends’ who has the power and resources to push technology to scale and undertake the ambitious climate schemes they propose. I give them a clue: not green hippies with start up companies. I’ve been unfriended and blocked a few times now for that question.
Climate campaigners are now talking about ‘solutions denial’ as well as climate denial. I point out that there is a clear distinction between science and the realm of facts and things and the realm of politics, policy, and democratic consent and self-assumed obligation. Denial at the level of ascertainable facts in the realm of science is one thing; controversy and disagreement in the realm of practical reason is perfectly legitimate. They have zero respect for politics and democracy basically because they think human beings a plague on the planet. There should have been a reckoning after a quarter century neoliberalism. Instead we have had these Green cretins giving us another form of “there is no alternative,” all of it giving “government” licence to sell what’s left of the public realm to the corporate form. These people have blown the radical moment with an utterly regressive anti-politics.
I’ve been in the Green movement for a quarter of a century. I don’t have fond memories of my involvement. I would have thought my expertise in politics, economics, and history would have been of interest to people who seemed so concerned to ‘change the world.’ Instead, eco-activists and ideologues contemptuously ignored everything I sought to tell them about how change in human society occurs. They hold the humanities in the same disdain they hold human beings. They think they are all-knowledgeable and all-powerful because they have ‘the science’ and technology. The UN Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications Melissa Fleming recently asserted that "we own the science." And the technology. And the control over the means of life. This is the Techno-Bureaucratic Managerialism I criticised in Affirming Democracy and Politics against Techno-Bureaucratic Managerialism (2020). This is the new class war – hence the war of attrition on the streets against the working class, albeit that these activists are the mere footsoldiers. Hence odious right wingers who did their level best in the past to put the workers in a straightjacket now claiming to speak for the inconvenienced workers against the pampered protestors. These same right wing defenders of the workers will scream in horror should the workers ever go socialist again. It’s bourgeois to the core, wherever you look. This is what happens when the working class are kicked out of politics and culture.
I see dear Greta is now saying that we should keep nuclear as an option. Of course she is. There is an utter energy debacle in Germany, Australia, and elsewhere. I also think this is not so much a reading of the writing on the wall as a long-planned realism asserting itself. Beware the impossibilists. If you make impossible demands with impossible timetables, then those with power and resources will appropriate necessity and emergency to give you the reboot of the capital system with clean green energy under the corporate form.
“Listen to the screams of the children!” one Green ‘friend’ who unfriended me urged. I said it was people like him who traumatized and terrorized these kids with their “end of the world” nonsense in the first place, only to demand that we listen to their screams in the second. He didn’t like it. He unfriended and blocked me without a word. I tracked him down on another social media account I have and told him he was a coward. He ran away again. People who refuse to answer impertinent questions are very suspicious. Truth doesn’t mind being questioned; falsehood does. These people should be charged with child abuse. We are not on course for collapse and extinction, unless we implement the austerian environmentalism these cranks demand. One wrote to me saying that we have to deliberately crash the economy to stop emissions, ‘involuntarily if need be.’ They openly justify climate coercion. They are true believers with all the hallmarks of cultists. It’s a death-cult. We’ve have the destabilisation of energy systems. It’s now food supply.
I have a test now when it comes to politics – are you on the side of the people who make, move, build, and grow things? Or are you seeking to undermine them and put them under external control?
I’m waiting for the adults to turn up and show some respect for people and politics. Beware the people of money and power in the wings. I’m wondering why government and the authorities are so lenient on these activists. Anyone would think they are on board with austerian environmental economics – so long as they entrench and extend the corporate form.
I hate to speculate. People take your speculations as firm predictions and take great delight in pointing out your errors. I do like to warn, though.
I suspect that these activists are being allowed to carry on commiting these acts with impunity and given a disproportionate amount of media coverage in order to a) avoid accusations of heavy-handedness by the authorities and b) generate such public anger as to create a demand for draconian legislation. Give them enough rope and they will hang themselves. Unfortunately, the rest of, with causes and grievances of our own, will be hanged, too. These actions ensure that when parliament bring in new legislation laws against protests it will have public support. However, the powers will be used and abused to stifle any protests that are deemed undesirable to the establishment. The activists will complain about authoritarian infringements of the right to protest, free speech, freedom of assembly etc. The fact is, they deliberately set out to incite that infringement on the part of the authorities from the first, to portray themselves as poor peaceful people with the good of all at heart, being suppressed by the cruel, heartless ‘system.’ That fight against oppression, they calculated, would win people to their cause. It didn’t happen. The authorities backed-off, adopted a light touch, and let the protestors go to work stopping ‘ordinary’ people attempting to go about their daily business. Instead of winning people to their cause, the protestors have seriously hacked the great public off. So much so that if and when draconian legislation is proposed, it will have substantial public support. That will harm other people with other causes to promote and grievances to settle. These clowns have scored a spectacular own goal for environmentalism. Even worse, they have fostered a climate which will make it difficult for people to engage in protests, campaigns, demonstrations, and strikes in other social areas the future. People have had enough. In pushing issues to the letter of the law and beyond, exploiting the fine margins and the give-and-take that comes with the right to protest, these characters have smashed the spirit of the laws. And that harms not only their own cause, it harms the rest of us and whatever causes we may have. You have to use these things sparingly.
They are pushing the police, the emergency services, the law, the authorities to breaking point. When they glue their extremities to surfaces or climb buildings and bridges, people say ‘leave them there!’ The protestors know that the authorities can’t do that, since they have a duty of care and safety. They set out to hold the authorities to that duty, wasting precious time and resources in the calculation that this attritional strategy will one day wear government down. That’s a dangerous calculation to make. What may well happen is that the authorities will decide that the nation can no longer afford to care, be concerned with safety, and allow freedom of expression and association, and remove the lot. The protestors have, from the start, been determined to portray the authorities as authoritarian. Be careful what you wish for. And remember that there are ecologists such as I who wished for none of this, and warned of the likely outcome.
Are you listening yet?