The ‘Green’ Agenda that is not about saving the planet

The ‘Green’ Agenda that is not about saving the planet

The green agenda that is about accumulating money and power, not saving the planet.

Let me start by making it clear that I am not rejecting the ecological viewpoint at all. I remain committed to the creation of the ecological society. I have identified myself as a ‘green’ since the time of the near breakthrough of the Green Party in the 1989 elections to the European Parliament, securing nearly 15% of the vote. I not only voted Green, I joined and campaigned for the Green Party. The Green Party is the only political party I have ever been a member of (I was rather attracted by the Green claim to be ‘the anti-party party,’ for the reason I have never seen truth as a function of political allegiance.) I let my membership of the Green Party lapse some time in 2018 (for reasons I make clear elsewhere). In all that time I wrote extensively on the need for the ecological transformation of ‘the political,’ outlining the case for a Green Republicanism and a civic environmentalism. I feel that I am entitled to call myself a Green and that I have over the years advanced a definite ‘green agenda.’ This essay is not a ‘Green God that failed’ confession. I am here to rescue my past work from the clutches of an environmentalism that has taken a wrong turn, not repudiate it. I will certainly admit to having got plenty wrong in the past, most especially when in campaign and communication mode, threatening the public with the ever narrowing window of opportunity, the clock running out of minutes, and the x degrees of warming that is sure to make a ‘hellhole’ of Earth. Many years later and the same threats are still being made. This is low politics on the part of people who are clueless about politics, and in the main hold politics – and people – in low regard. To my credit, at the same time I indulged in all the familiar campaign tropes I did attempt to develop a distinctively political and ethical dimension to ecology. I see precious little evidence that that work has had any impact on environmentalism. Instead, there is a combination of scientism, naturalism, and technocracy with romanticism and moralism, a strange melange of futurism and nostalgia. The political, moral, indeed metaphysical deficiencies of environmentalism leaves it prey to a decidedly wrong kind of green, a ‘green agenda’ whose principle agents are not the idealists and utopians but those with the power and resources to put dreams into action – the people who are already well-placed in the contemporary corporate world. Idealists and utopians used to their failure and desperate to see the green cause prevail may well be inclined to lend their support. Because, of course, we all want to ‘save the planet.’ It is this kind of green that is in my critical sights in this piece. Most of all, I write to ensure the consistency of ends and means, criticising those environmentalists who, in affirming ecological ends, have no qualms in reverting to decidedly non-ecological, mechanical, authoritarian, and repressive means. That’s not my kind of green.

The green agenda is about certain groups and elites extending and entrenching their own power, with ‘saving the planet’ serving as the cover. This is a money and power grab that has nought to do with ‘saving the planet.’ It certainly has nothing to do with ‘saving the people.’ The mentality at work is of a piece with the general who said that ‘it was necessary to destroy this village in order to save it.’ Austerian green measures seem explicitly designed the crash the economy rather than transform it. One green activist contacted me in response to my critique of environmentalism. He openly told me that measures of ecological retrenchment would have to be ‘involuntary,’ and that we would need to slam the brakes on the economy. I asked him who the ‘we’ taking the involuntary measures were in all this. If a genuine ‘we’ existed there would be no need for involuntary measures in the first place. What he meant was that a self-appointed enlightened few would have the right to impose unpopular (undemocratic) measures on the many. I was struck by the extent to which those giving voice to these anti-democratic demands presume that they are all part of the involuntarists’ club. They are a class of ‘useful idiots,’ people without money and power themselves, certainly without the kind of transformative structural power Marx thought the proletariat to possess, not principal creative agents, an ersatz public to be wheeled on and off the political scene by the real agents of change.

What follows below is not a systematic analysis and critique of the green agenda. I have done this work elsewhere and have no intention of repeating myself. I was involved in the environmental movement for a quarter of a century. I was a member of The Green Party, the only political party I have ever been a member of. I was also a member of Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Scientists for Global Responsibility, and many other such organisations. I had thought I had been making a positive contribution to developing a political, moral, social, and civic environmentalism. I see zero evidence that the principles I sought to develop with respect to a Green Republicanism and moral ecology had the slightest impact against the dominant naturalism, scientism, romanticism, primitivism, and technocracy. Environmentalism is a mess, a moral and political abomination that constitutes a direct threat to freedom, democracy, and social health and wealth. I present my principles and critical analysis in my main work. Below are passing observations, more ill-tempered than reasoned, but sometimes it is the poke in the eye that makes some people see more clearly.

I am reading detailed analyses of the true scale of governmental commitments to the green agenda with respect to expenditure, investment, energy infrastructure and their impacts on inflation and the cost of living crisis. Governments are committing themselves to ambitious Net Zero targets and policies, despite nobody actually voting for these measures, least of all those who will bear the fiscal burden. This is taxation without representation. There is a democratic deficit at the heart of this government-led environmentalism, but it is apparent that environmentalists could care less so long as their pre-political ends are achieved and served. The inhumanism of ecology as a naturalism and scientism translates very easily into an explicitly anti-democratic politics. Critical analyses are revealing the extent to which misguided energy and climate commitments and policies are contributing directly to an accelerating energy, economic, and fiscal crisis. Whether this crisis is an unintended consequence or direct aim of these commitments and policies is a debatable point. Those demanding environmental reforms claim to have the well-being of people and planet as their dominant thought; reformers of any and every stripe would hardly be expected to say otherwise. But when such reformers openly demand economic lockdowns and shutdowns, slamming the brakes on economic activity in order to curtail emissions, it is plain that the notion of well-being applies to an abstract humanity in the long-run, not flesh-and-blood human beings in the here and now. It is a division between the real and the abstract, the short- and the long-term that is familiar in radically authoritarian politics. These demands will send the figures on poverty, disease, health, and standards of living, which have been going in the right direction for more than a century, into reverse. Whether this inhumanism is deliberate or unintentional makes little difference to its effects. The catastrophe that climate activists continually threaten people with will certainly occur as a result of these measures. A social and economic catastrophe ruining the lives and livelihoods of millions in the short run is the price being exacted to avert the threat of climate catastrophe in the long run. The question is: which is the greater catastrophe? In weighing the evidence, it is not at all clear that temperatures will rise to anything like the numbers climate campaigners claim – they take outliers to state at extremes. To take catastrophic action causing social and economic collapse is a good strategy to destroy freedom and democracy and render people too poor and powerless to resist authoritarian imposition and austerity. The environmental advantages of such an approach are much less clear. The evidence is that concentrations of power and authority tend to insulate decision-makers and power-holders from the consequences of their actions. Environmentalists are pushing the world into a power dynamic that cares for nothing other than the gaining, accumulation, and maintaining of power by some at the expense of others. To them that hath shall be given … I’m just left to wonder whether such environmentalists are naïve or cynical or some strange combination of both. But the activists are not a genuine public, certainly not a democratic one, however much certain numbers of them may think themselves a ruling-class in preparation. That ruling class is already formed around corporate money and power. Some environmentalists have imagined possibilities of linking environmental reformation to socio-economic transformation. I have argued this myself. But it is clear that this transformation is the very last thing on the agenda of those preparing to absorb the world in the Green Megamachine. This is about extending and entrenching corporate power. To those who seek to avoid every awkward question that comes their way by alleging ‘conspiracy theory’ I simply ask: Who has the power and resources to push technology to the scale required by these extensive and expensive climate programmes? Please answer how you envisage ecological transformation being undertaken, and by which agents. And answer in realities rather than fantasies.

The world is in the grip of a cost of living crisis. At the heart of this is an energy inflation that threatens to take petrol, diesel, and domestic electricity and natural gas prices beyond the point of affordability for many people. This crisis is affecting all households and businesses, with hugely damaging consequences for the economy and the cost of living. When businesses lose money, people lose employment and income. These problems are intensified in developing economies, and even worse in poorer nations, with tragic consequences. There is a serious and increasing danger that the considerable progress that the world has made in reducing poverty, hunger, and communicable diseases since the 1990s will be thrown into reverse. Crashing the economy to curtail carbon emissions is a strategy for causing catastrophe, not averting it.

I would be cautious of going direct to green energy and climate commitments and policies. Climate ‘sceptics’ are doing precisely this, gleefully seizing on socio-economic crisis as positive proof of their long-held belief that climate action is economically harmful. But it doesn’t make them wrong. I would recommend that people read widely here, and read what environmentalists themselves argue with respect to energy policies and how governments have been getting these badly wrong. In other words, we haven’t quite been getting a green agenda, but ‘green’ policies filtered and applied through a decidedly non-green agenda. I can well believe it. I would simply ask environmentalists, with their wholly inadequate approach to politics: what did you expect? Of course environmental issues have been appropriated within existing power relations and prosecuted in a much less-than-green form. The response of greens to this misapplication has been the purest idealism and impotent reformism, full of prescriptions of what government ought to be doing, but utterly lacking in the organisational and structural power capable of compelling government to so act. Of course. The tragedy of environmentalism as politics is that it lacks the transformative structural power to make good its claims, either forcing recourse to surrogates or inviting overspill and appropriation.

Read my words closely. I am not arguing a conspiracy in which the green agenda is a Trojan Horse for authoritarian takeover. I am arguing that the combination of necessity and impotence leaves the field clear for those agents with the power and resources to act. Green hippies with start-up companies? Advocates of permaculture? People extolling the virtues of indigenous people? I really don’t think so. Since environmentalists seem congenitally incapable of learning the lessons here and getting their act together, I fully expect victory to go to the organised classes commanding power. Idealists and utopians with their technocratic dreams and designs are easy prey. They expect to be given a free-hand in politics, like no-one ever in politics. They really have no idea about people, politics, power, and history. They are easily expropriated.

The problems have been in the pipeline for a long time now, but are now hitting with force as the world emerges from the restrictions on economic activity as a matter of government Covid-19 policy. Although I cautioned against identifying environmentalists directly with the cost of living crisis, it is worth noting the not inconsiderable number of environmentalists who have extolled the nature-restoring virtues of Covid lockdown, going on to argue for intermittent periods of Climate lockdown in the future. That argument is now being explicitly advanced in academic papers (Ross Mittiga), as well as being advanced by climate activists and campaigners. It is difficult to witness these repeated demands and be lenient on environmentalists’ culpability with respect to growing authoritarian and anti-democratic forms. As conservative critics of environmental action press home their attack on costly green policies, undermining the green agenda in the eyes of a suffering public, I fully expect to hear environmentalists defend themselves by claiming that they ‘didn’t intend’ this and are ‘not responsible’ for that. I am inclined to believe them. But what makes this apologetics inadmissible is the sheer predictability of the green agenda coming to be appropriated and misapplied owing to a political and democratic deficiency. Intentions and responsibility have parted company.

The failure to put in place an energy policy whilst pushing harder, faster for carbon cuts, without reliable power generation in place. A relentless activism that is all about pressure and panic is all about pushing politicians and people into an unreasoning response, ‘now!’ because ‘it is time to act!’ That has been the main face of environmentalism as politics. To now accuse those governments of handling energy transitions badly takes the biscuit. Net Zero, decarbonisation, and the cutting of carbon emissions has been made an overriding objective, with much less attention – and time – given to the process of delivering that objective. Of course governments have bungled it. We really need the greens who are now denying their responsibility for the energy crisis to own their demands politically and seek office and the power with responsibility and accountability that comes with it.

Governments being pressured into ill-thought out commitments to net Zero have been social and economic suicide, and political suicide too, destabilising energy supply, increasing prices, and inviting popular discontent. The greens who pushed hardest of all for these energy objectives will have a hard time shifting responsibility. The argument that governments got the execution and implementation all wrong will cut no ice. These greens – authoritarian and elitist to the core – have learned nothing about the consequences of political action with a democratic deficit at its heart. The policy objects of green politics may or may not be justified. My key point, though, is that they have to be owned at all levels – by those who are the architects, by those charged with their implementation, and by those who bear the consequences. Ultimately, that is all of us. A minority who tries to push these plans through by the backdoor will one day be brought face to face with the revanchism of people who have been excluded and who are reacting against being hoodwinked.

The government should have done this instead of that, and the money men should have put the general interest before their own self interest, as money men very rarely do (which is why they make money). The people calling for others to sacrifice their interests for the greater good are not engaging in serious politics and are inviting the failure, misappropriation, and misapplication of their aims and ideals. Those who think that the government should do differently and do better very probably have a point. But power without responsibility, fixated on a single issue, is always easier than actual government, which requires the weighing and balancing of a range of issues. If you can do better, then put yourself up for election and persuade enough voters to put you in the box seat and assume responsibility. Tried it? Not enough people find you persuasive? Tough. We have names for people who seek to circumvent democracy whenever the people fail to support them.

I have warned time and again on this, seeking to set green policies within a Green Republicanism that creates the appropriately democratic policy framework. Bad process always but always comes back to bite reformers on their ignoble behinds. In pressing for green ends in the absence of green means, environmentalists have invited misappropriation and misinterpretation – they have done nothing to transform asymmetrical power relations and nothing to create the ethico-social infrastructure that embeds the framework of concerted and comprehensive action in social practices, habits, ownership, and place.

Government restrictions to control Covid had the effect of depressing economic activity and reducing global energy demand. Those who saw only the reduction or retardation of carbon emissions here started to herald lockdown restrictions. Such people fail utterly to see how drastic these measures are, both in their implementation and their effects – they are socially and economically unsustainable, unless the goal really is to destroy the economy and ruin the livelihoods of people and send consumption – and population numbers – into sharp reverse.

Reduced demand resulted in the reduction of the price of natural gas in the short run, but the price began to rise as producers reduced their output and lockdowns were eased. The problem is that natural gas prices continued to rise instead of stabilising, until prices spiked at over ten times higher than the average.

A key factor driving this rapid price rise is the extent to which governments printed money to finance themselves through the pandemic. The Covid restrictions which had the indirect consequences of stalling the rise of carbon emissions did not come cheap. Some sense of the exorbitant price to be paid is now becoming clear. That there are environmentalists who are pointing to the successes of Covid lockdown to argue for a climate lockdown merely indicates how bereft of a realistic politics they are. They are focused monomaniacally on the one thing, utterly incapable of weighing and balancing different forces and factors.

There were warnings from economists that this fiscal intervention on the part of governments would fuel the problem of inflation. The rise of the price of natural gas has increased the cost of fertiliser, and hence of the staple crops on which the world’s population depends, thus impacting deleteriously on food production. The increased cost of energy has also raised the cost of construction materials, transport and everyday goods and services.

The crisis is thus teaching some old lessons the hard way on the vital importance to economy and society of affordable, reliable, and abundant energy and other resources. Undermining these sources is a sure-fire recipe for political, social, and economic instability, creating the very last kind of necessity that is conducive to climate policy, a necessity that mires people and politicians in immediacy. People will neither think nor act for the future when they are so hard-pressed in the present. Sadly, environmentalists, making their goals ones of overriding importance, have never grasped the importance of this point – people struggling with a socio-economic necessity in the here and now will not sacrifice their interests for an imputed necessity relating to the distant future. That’s not serious politics; it is a patent idealism with zero grasp of political reality, one accompanied by a pious moralism to the effect that people ought to sacrifice themselves for the greater good. Such a politics is set up for a fall, leaving necessity available for appropriation by forces with a greater purchase on reality.

Governments are setting their countries on the path towards huge reductions in carbon emissions by way of legislative requirement. This is all about setting rather narrow parameters with respect to energy use, so that the choices that individuals and businesses make about electricity cannot but respect environmental limits. In other words, this is about presenting people with Hobson’s Choice as in no choice at all – it is about establishing and enforcing limits so that society lives within its means environmentally, regardless of choice. It is the imposition of limits and the removal of choice. The setting up of such narrow parameters is premised on the view that well-being depends first and last on eliminating carbon emissions, not on securing the energy upon which people, society, and the economy depend. We now see that energy being destabilized and rising to prices that are beyond affordability. I saw a Green ‘friend’ issue the statement that ‘energy should be expensive.’ In fine, there are grounds to the suspicion that making energy expensive to reduce its use has been a deliberate intention of environmentalist strategy. Going green means going without and, in unequal social relations, those lower down the income scale will be the ones going without the most of all. The poor can go to the wall. There are too many people on the planet anyway, making exorbitant energy demands that push society beyond its environmental means. I could plead poverty, but am sure the pleas will fall on deaf ears.

The costs of failing to secure stable and secure electricity supplies are horrendous in a society in which everything is electrified. Outage can cause problems for all the major social organisations, including crime and health, as well as transport, preventing people from getting to work. All the things that we rely on in our lives are hampered or halted when electricity supplies are disrupted.

It is therefore imperative that a nation invests in secure and stable power supplies. So far, so obvious. But maybe not so obvious. We live in an age when the political art of weighing and balancing imperatives of equal importance is giving way to the campaigners’ insistence that certain imperatives are of such overriding importance that other imperatives, of no less importance, come to be overlooked. Fossil fuels are attacked relentlessly, to be extirpated lest it be game over for civilisation, renewables promoted, problems in construction and supply ignored, nuclear ruled out on principle. The concern with stable and secure – not to mention affordable – supplies in the here and now has been rendered subordinate to the need to be environmentally sustainable in the long run. This is a dangerous way to make policy. We need supplies that will be available whether the sun is out or the wind is blowing and don’t leave us dependent on imports of oil and gas from countries who may not prove to be as friendly as they may seem.

Too many – particularly those innocent of politics, removed from political realities, and frankly disdainful of politics – determine energy policy as if they are in a science lab. The mess we are in is precisely what happens when you let STEM people dictate policy in politics. They focus myopically on the one thing, succumb to group think, ignore objections and contrary voices, and proceed to make errors that, when they occur, have everyone saying ‘how on Earth could an error as obvious as this been committed by so many clever people?’

There is always trade-off in energy between secure supplies, economic supplies, and environmentally acceptable supplies. The problem that politicians and policy makers face lies in hitting all those three targets as best they can at the same time. The ideal mix is not always possible. Keeping one plate spinning in the air is hard enough, but keeping three plates spinning at the same time is the hardest of all. That is the problem that politicians and policy makers have to solve practically. It is not a problem that campaigners pushing for their favoured energy solution outside of politics face. In recent years, campaigners and policy makers have almost exclusively focused on environment and that is not proving to be wise. With a crisis in energy supply and energy inflation we are seeing that the other things are at least just as important. There has been far too great a focus on the environmental, and this has come at the expense of the stable and secure and the economical and the affordable.

‘But we are not responsible, it’s the fault of governments who haven’t done it right / followed our instructions.’

This from people who have pushed and pushed and pushed the overriding importance of the environmental imperative from a position of power without responsibility. The apologetics isn’t going to wash. The only thing that will save environmentalism here is the fact there is some big money invested in it. Environmentalism will survive, but you can kiss goodbye to your green dreams.

We are told that we are part of a transition to clean and sustainable energy, a green industrial revolution that is generating jobs and business opportunities. It sounds bright and optimistic, but that really is a statement of business-as-usual, the same economic system with the same accumulative imperatives, with the same social forms and relations, just fuelled by ‘renewable’ energy. This is all very questionable in terms of the critique of political economy. Whilst this green or fourth industrial revolution is presented as system-change, it is anything but: it is no more a system-change than were the second and third industrial revolutions. The capitalist relations are left unchanged. On the contrary, this is about rebooting the capital system with clean green energy for another burst of industrial expansion. Those who think that the capital system, with its inherent accumulative dynamic, can be constrained within environmental limits institutionally and legislatively are living in cloud-cuckoo land. They are either political naifs guilty of a hopelessly idealistic global reformism or cynics deliberately engineering a crisis and necessity that drives the world into the arms of the global green megamachine, entrenching and extending asymmetrical power relations rather than transforming them.

I don’t know whether to accuse environmentalists of deliberate duplicity or uncomprehending naivety here. You probably have to take this case by case. I have no doubt that some environmentalists are hopelessly utopian, that some have no grasp of politics (and an open contempt of politics and ethics that renders them vulnerable to appropriation), that some see themselves as parts of a technocratic universal class of eco-reform and design, and some are manipulative. I would draw people’s attention to the sleight of hand that is frequently worked with respect to system-change. You will note here how eco-reformers will slide easily from a radical demand to transform the capital system to ensure that it acts within planetary boundaries to a demand to switch from fossil fuels to renewables. In other words, a change in energy comes to be presented as system-change in itself. It isn’t. And it is not even clear whether a) renewables can replace fossil fuels completely; b) whether the switching of renewables for fossil fuels will happen – the evidence from the past is that new forms of energy tend to supplement old forms rather than replace them.

Governments are making a long-term commitment to renewable energy by setting higher targets and offering generous subsidies for renewable energy generation extending into the future. That campaigners say that this is nowhere near enough indicates that environmentalists are strongly committed to this policy. The assumption is that such a commitment would create a domestic green manufacturing and energy-producing sector – the green industrial revolution (and most certainly not system-change).

These are high ambitions, but where is the evidence for them? Rather than creating new green industries based in the UK or Western Europe, these ‘green’ policies served only to create a market for technologies that are largely manufactured in the East, where costs are lower and prices are much cheaper, ironically as a result of the continued use of coal and the lower cost of labour. If you don’t change the social forms and relations, if you don’t restructure power, if you don’t uproot the accumulative dynamic … if you mistake a change of energy for system-change, then these bitter ironies are inevitable. If you think government will do it all for you then you are offering no more than the old reformist delusions on a global scale. Government is one of the capital system’s key second order mediations; it is concerned to regulate the conditions of capital accumulation, not to constrain accumulative imperatives within planetary limits. (I write at length on this in my work on Social Restitution in Marx and in my introduction to the thought of Istvan Meszaros (both 2018, links at the bottom).

Instead of nurturing domestic green energy production, European countries have simply increased their dependence on fossil fuels from foreign countries. That, of course, is a criticism of European governments rather than environmentalists themselves, who will – and do – argue that these governments are doing it all wrong. My point for environmentalists to consider is that, without a transformation of social forms and relations, it is the plainest idealism and utopianism to expect governments to act in a way that constrains capitalist imperatives in face of ecological imperatives. This is basically the old reformism on steroids; not only will it not work, it invites expropriation by those seeking a new lease of life for the capital system. I don’t disagree with environmentalists’ ends, I do disagree profoundly with their means, since they are wholly inadequate to the task, inviting appropriation by non- and even anti-ecological forces.

For now, we are confronted by a bitter irony: Green policies have resulted in an increased dependence on a single energy commodity – natural gas – in order to mitigate the problems of variability produced by renewable energy sources. Wind, wave, and solar are not reliable. Governments are thus committing themselves and their nations to ambitious net zero targets whilst having no idea how to meet them without prohibitive expense.

Money is both the big solution and the big problem. Which is to say it is no solution at all, merely a temporary get-out that sooner or later returns to demand the settling of accounts. To expand production, large industrial operations are required to find the capital needed to finance the costs that are created, from the hardware to the filling of the positions that were lost during the pandemic. It is a massive operation. For the best part of a decade, though, energy companies have been investing less on their operations, on account of the increase of the cost of capital for fossil fuel companies. The cost of financing oil and gas had doubled even before Covid, making investment in new operations economically unviable. Despite profits rising from the increased price of oil and gas, they are unable to raise the capital necessary to increase production, meaning that companies have been left unable to respond to increasing demand.

The problem has been a long time in the making.

In the 2010s, green campaigners, frustrated with the slow pace of climate policymaking, both nationally and internationally, stepped up the pressure. I should add that I was one of these campaigners. I sought to encourage environmentalists to develop a moral, civic, and political dimension, to create a socio-ethical infrastructure and characterology to go with the ambitious policy demands. This was not done. Instead, there was an intensification of climate demands and pressure upon government and the citizen body. This was the wrong approach, and is now generating some unpalatable consequences that threaten to rebound badly against environmentalism. Conservative critics are already mobilising, blaming green policies directly for the cost of living crisis. People under pressure will find this identification persuasive. For the reason that there is a democratic deficit right at the heart of environmentalism. For environmentalists, the members of the demos are not citizens whose participation in green politics is key to transformation, but a passive mass to be educated and enlightened and lined up behind pre-determined political positions. At the heart of environmentalism, then, is a democratic scepticism, even pessimism, a view that ‘the people’ are selfish and stupid, incapable of rational persuasion and voluntary obligation. We see this pessimism at work clearly in the use of climate fear and threat to move people to action. That pessimism reveals precisely the lack of social and democratic substance to environmentalism, something which forces recourse to institutional, legislative, and regulative force.

You hear the ‘scepticism’ towards democracy in the words of climate activists. When asked why they are engaging in direct action and civil disobedience, campaigners repeatedly claim that they have tried the conventional political channels and these have failed. The mentality is anti-democratic to the core. So consumed by the rightness of their cause, there is no recognition on the part of these campaigners that they have failed politically because of their own political ineptitude. I spent a great deal of my time in the environmental movement in the 2000s warning environmentalists precisely of their political deficiencies. I went in one direction, they went in the other. They looked at Brexit, at the election of Trump, and at the rise of ‘populism’ and ran in horror away from democracy. They had few organic links to ‘the people’ and had done nothing to cultivate those links. Instead, they engaged in an ‘educative’ pressure politics at a distance, lecturing and hectoring the people with respect to environmental problems. This has some merit in terms of raising awareness of an issue, but it is of decidedly short-term significance. The approach is subject to rapidly diminishing returns. When I heard the same people saying the same things over a decade later – the media doesn’t cover climate change, people don’t know and don’t care – I thought that surely to goodness there must be at least some climate campaigners who would realise that their approach was wrong.

When I started to write on ecology in the 2000s, I saw the real need for environmentalism to develop a political, social, and democratic content within. I saw the danger of scientism, authoritarianism, and idealist abstraction. I noted the failures of liberal democracy with respect to ‘global’ problems not to reject democracy but to radicalise it. I argued strongly for a thoroughgoing democratisation. Environmentalism went the other way. To many environmentalists, democratic politics seemed to be moving in an entirely different direction to their green agenda. Somewhere they had lost sight of the demos, and had failed to strike any democratic roots. Democratically bereft, they therefore sought new ways outside of conventional politics to assert their pre-political ends. The approach is inherently elitist and authoritarian, environmentalism defaulting to its old eco-authoritarianism on account of its lack of democratic roots and content.

Whereas I sought to develop a Green Republicanism and moral ecology to give environmentalism an internal motive power and content, eco-campaigners sought instead to bypass political and democratic institutions entirely, seeking to end fossil fuel production without the need for greens – or governments - to win consent for unpopular green policies.

Not only is this not democratic, and explicitly subverts democracy and the principle of self-assumed obligation; not only is this cynical, underhand, and manipulative; neither does it amount to system-change, merely a change in the energy that fuels the economic system. And at the end of it all, it is less than clear that this switch in energy is viable. It wouldn’t be the first time in history that a supposedly knowledgeable elite who thought they knew better than anyone had got things badly wrong.

I have in a number of essays and articles criticised the way that environmental campaigners have set out to scare the public and pressurise government into a state of climate urgency. I have criticised the politics of fear as a very low politics, indeed as an anti-politics inflicting a psychic violation on the members of the public. (I have gathered a lot of these writings together and presented them in book form, links below). I have paid scant attention to the funding of these campaigning groups and organisations, the places they get their money from and the motives of those who supply the money. ‘Follow the money,’ as they say, ‘and he who pays the piper calls the tune.’ There is definitely a tune being played here, the same tune over and again, a drone. My focus has been on the scaremongering, which substitutes for a genuine politics organically connected with the members of the public. On funding, I would like to see some empirical studies and critical analysis. I have not read the work of Cory Morningstar. She has been criticised as a conspiracy theorist. I have yet to see her detailed claims rebutted on point of fact. But it is not an area I have paid close attention to. I will simply note that the endless, relentless environmental campaign is well-resourced and well-connected, with doors in media and international politics being forever open rather than closed. Investors and financial institutions are being targeted and investments being triggered.

This seems to be so obviously an astroturf fake rebellion, with all the right faces being seen and right voices being heard in the right places. These ‘rebels’ are not socialist and have no links whatsoever with ‘ordinary’ people. They express complete contempt for the democratic voice and openly act against democratic institutions. The danger is that movements like this will licence an austerian environmentalist regime under the corporate form in the name of 'necessity.' As a leftist involved in socialist politics since my teenage years of the Miners’ Strike, this climate rebellion doesn’t look right and doesn’t smell right. In its public face, it savours of nothing more than the entitled, comfortable bourgeois all over it. These are not, however, the drivers of climate politics but the ‘useful idiots,’ the mindless ‘mass’ constituency to be wheeled on to pressurise action and to be just as quickly wheeled off once those policies and programmes and commitments are obtained. This has all the hallmarks of a high-priced protection racket. This could rebound badly on the environmental cause, identifying a just cause with the worst kind of politics, inviting a libertarian and populist backlash, possibly exploited by conservative forces who wish to prevent effective action on the climate. That reaction is already growing, and gathering support. But it may not be as effective as conservatives may think. Because behind the public face and the structurally flaccid footsoldiers of environmentalism lies real financial power, the main players in the green corporate form to come. Note well how often environmentalists present their protests as demands upon those with power to act. This is radically different from the practical reappropriation and egalitarian distribution of power at the heart of socialism. These people and this movement is not socialist, its demands fitting seamlessly into a new capital regime fuelled by clean green energy under the corporate form. Don’t look at the footsoldiers, those who parrot the slogans, look at the strategists, architects, and financiers.

In addition to frightening the public – putting people, especially young people, under immense psychic strain - climate scaremongering has also frightened investors by making it appear that their money was at risk. This has been achieved in two ways: 1) by claiming that the demand for oil and gas is certain to fall in the long-term; 2) energy companies found to be peddling lies, knowing the environmental harm caused by fossil fuels, would be subject to lawsuits and found liable for causing catastrophic climate change. The prospect of a reduction of demand combined with legal action against energy companies terrified investors into thinking that their assets would become worthless. The pressure intensified as companies were subjected to the demand that they be rated not only on their economic performance, but on their climate risks, and metrics that measured their Environmental, Social and corporate Governance policies (ESG). As Governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney put it: “this would establish a critical link between responsibility, accountability and sustainability.” Who could disagree? Carboniferous capitalism was to be legislated and constrained to death, encouraging investors to divest from fossil fuel companies and invest instead in companies with higher ESG scores, such as high tech and social media companies, companies in tune with the new corporate form. Again, whilst this is presented as system-change it is anything but; it is more akin to a palace plot within a still ruling class. Instead of a genuine restructuring of power, certain older industrial forms are eliminated to make way for the new. You can give it a green gloss to ensure that the shallow and superficial end of progressivism will cheer it on. By the time those cheering loudly finally realize that they’ve been had, and the revolution is going no further, it will be too late: it will be a done deal.

A company demonstrates its credibility to investors by adopting a strong accountability mechanism with respect to its climate change plans. The pressure exerted on financial institutions by shareholders induces them to withdraw financial services and loans from fossil fuel companies.

And this brings us back to energy inflation and the cost of living crisis. These pressures caused the cost of capital for fossil fuel companies to rise and investment in energy infrastructure to fall. I can hear Greens now blaming the cack-handed execution of justifiable green energy policies, and don’t disagree – but that’s what happens when you pay too much attention to back-seat drivers, and when those in the back-seat lack the power (and responsibility) to take the wheel. The result is an energy supply crisis causing prices to soar beyond affordability. The cause is rank bad politics on the part of all concerned. Against green campaigners, the idea that decision-takers and policy-makers will do your bidding and translate your demands into practice perfectly is risible.

And what if the campaigners are wrong and/or are involved in a game of bluff? What if ‘telling the truth’ is more about pushing a narrative that is designed to give the appearance of certainty to a decidedly uncertain gambit? The global demand for fossil fuels has actually increased rather than decreased. Fossil fuel-based electricity generation is set to cover 45% of additional demand in 2021 and 40% in 2022, with nuclear power accounting for the rest. Global electricity demand is growing faster than renewables, driving strong increase in generation from fossil fuels. And except for just one case, the climate lawsuits brought against fossil fuel companies have failed. And despite incessantly loud screaming from scaremongers claiming that ‘people are dying now!’ from climate change, people remain unconvinced. There is no actionable evidence of catastrophic climate change and no signs of people rising up to demand action from the government. The endless laments of environmentalists to the effect that ‘people don’t care’ are to be placed in this context. It’s not that people don’t know and don’t care. They have been subject to endless and constant ‘education’ and information – they just don’t buy claims that things are so drastic as to require bankrupting themselves and the economy and curtailing political liberties and democratic norms. In that, they are wise, not selfish and stupid. Environmentalists went hell-for-leather in the fear and pressure game. It was always a gambit. In large part it has succeeded, pressuring governments into a number of long-term climate commitments with no public support, consent, and legitimacy. But there was always going to be a point when the costs and consequences of these commitments would become publicly visible, putting them under critical and democratic scrutiny. As the problems caused by energy inflation get worse, the members of the public are noticing and are demanding answers to their questions about high prices. To the chagrin of environmentalists, public concern about climate change is falling rapidly. The new environmental campaigning of recent years can be effective only in the short run and is subject to rapidly diminishing returns. It is when the pressure is directed back at the environmental movement that its lack of real political substance will be exposed. This cost of living crisis has the potential to set environmentalism back a generation, if political liberties and democratic norms remain in place. In my economics masters’ thesis I identified a democratic deficit at the heart of the EU (EC as it was then) and predicted a revanchism of the regions. I shall predict the same thing with respect to the environmental movement. In fact, I warned of this very thing throughout the 2010s. And it was a warning issued from a position of support for the environmental cause. There is a climate crisis; we just lack an environmental movement that has the first idea how to practise an effective climate politics. The result is a very low ‘non’ politics indeed, one which combines a haughty and elitist educative approach on the one hand, emphasising climate facts and figures, with a cynical and manipulative approach on the other, subjecting the population to fear and scaremongering. When the public come to realize that their hardship as a result of rising prices has been caused by ESG and not climate change there is going to be hell-to-pay. I anticipate politics degenerating into the blame game in the near future, which each side seeking to blame their enemies for the cost of living crisis. And I fully expect Greens to keep denying responsibility, blaming governments for poor execution, whilst continuing to argue that energy should be expensive. If they are right, and the cost of energy should reflect its true ecological price, then they are indeed arguing for an energy inflation. Without an egalitarian restructure of power and resources, such a demand cannot but fall more heavily on those least able to afford higher prices. I dare say that greens will cover their backs by claiming to be in favour of equality. Fine. But where is the politics to make that demand realistic and actionable, rather than just being a pious cover.

In late 2021, the pioneers of ESG did actually take responsibility for rising energy prices, citing pressure from ESG investors. One energy expert claims that fossil fuel companies were ‘finding it increasingly difficult to raise financing,’ with investors putting banks ‘under pressure’ ‘to reduce or eliminate financing.’ Various green voices have celebrated the news from the first, making it clear that this was indeed their aim. Climate Votes on Twitter quote from this article: “Oil companies are finding it increasingly difficult to raise financing... while banks are under pressure from their own investors to reduce or eliminate fossil-fuel financing.”

Cost of Capital Spikes for Fossil-Fuel Producers

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-09/cost-of-capital-widens-for-fossil-fuel-producers-green-insight?sref=dGeAjauJ

Climate Votes comments: “Good. Much more pressure needed...” That’s the game being played, and ordinary people subject to rising and increasingly unaffordable energy prices are just so much collateral damage. Such greens pay the most mealy-mouthed lip service to an egalitarian distribution of resources, just to cover their backs against criticisms that green politics inflict an impossible burden on the poor. But their real passion is elsewhere. This is how Climate Votes explains its mission: “Bold climate action from investors is critical to put pressure on the energy, banking, and utilities sectors.”

Such greens achieved their objectives, the pressure they sought was mobilized, and the result is an energy crisis whose consequences are being born by the less well-off. Indicating how safely removed from harm the most vocally demanding are, climate campaigners celebrated the rise in prices, boasting that ‘Financial Markets May Kill Off Fossil Fuels Before Governments Do.’ The rise in energy prices was celebrated by green campaigners and journalists as a good thing, mission accomplished. But the triumphal tone of the cheering only served to make clear the extent to which environmental politics is remote from real politics and real politics. The burdensome implications of the things environmentalists were cheering started to become clear to others, particularly those on the receiving end. Those cheering at their victory were either detached from people and society or just plain callous as in sociopathic. And both of these things amount to the same thing.

ESG investors thought they were making the world a better place with their divestment. But the rising cost of energy started to inflict real harm, rendering the social and economic recovery from Covid tardy to the point of stagnation. This, in turn, ensures that the mental and physical health crisis faced by people is intensified. Rather than saving the planet and ensuring the well-being of the people, these actions have contributed to a financial crisis and an energy crisis that is likely to be with us for the foreseeable future, with harmful consequences for people and business, which are immediate in their impacts and have no short-term remedy. These costs and consequences are far worse and far more visible than any observable effects of climate change. And yet climate campaigners persist in ignoring their culpability with respect to the socio-economic crisis engulfing people, pressing the climate alarm button even harder. Their grasp of political reality is as slender as their connection to real people.

So who and what is behind ESG and this shareholder activism? We know what the aims are and we know the modus operandi - to scare investors and financial institutions away from fossil fuel companies. But who are the drivers?

In seeking an answer to the question it soon becomes apparent that we are in the realm of pressure group politics and lobbying, but on a grand scale. The principal agencies behind this climate campaigning are a small number of philanthropic foundations. I cited Climate Votes earlier. This is a Sunrise Project initiative. ‘The Sunrise Project is a global network of changemakers who believe in the power of social movements to change the world. We’re passionate about building networks who can drive the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy to reduce greenhouse pollution and create a healthy and prosperous future for everyone.’ Cue words straight out of the organisation theory handbook: ‘Sitting at the intersection of social movements and philanthropy, we’ve developed a ‘directed network’ model that supports networks of people and organisations to work together to achieve large-scale change that wouldn’t have been possible by individual organisations acting alone.’ The language is all well-crafted and well-selected. There is nothing organic about such networking, it is all strategic in the way that connection and change is engineered and planned. Instead of human interaction and connection as an organic process, something that human beings volunteer in their everyday life, change for people within these ‘projects’ is organised and planned: mechanically forced rather than an organic growth.

‘We take a system-wide view of the causes of, and solutions to, the climate crisis and are continually looking for opportunities to catalyse transformative change.’ The words ‘directed network model’ give the game away. This is a vanguard, and not a genuine social organisation rooted in social relations and practices.

This is just one of numerous examples. These organisations present themselves as ‘charities’ and ‘civil society organisations,’ when they are pursuing very distinctive agendas of their own, serving the business interests of their funders. They succeed so long as people judge them by their self-image and appearance, vague statements concerning all good things for all good people, with which we can all agree (since there is nothing to disagree with).

There really is a need to identify these organisations and identify who funds them and ask questions why. They are an extra-political, extra-democratic force exerting an undue influence on the public realm.

One of the biggest funders of ESG lobbying organisations is British billionaire hedge fund manager Sir Christopher Hohn. Hohn’s investment firm, The Children’s Investment Fund (TCI) is one such funder. The TCI grants a small percentage of profits it makes into The Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF), also operated by Hohn. CIFF in turn makes large grants to various organisations, some of which it founded, which employ scare tactics and misinformation to promote ESG investment. CIFF is a major funder of organisations that seek to use law courts to force governments to implement and enforce green policies, and to bring lawsuits against energy companies for damages which they claim to be the result of climate change. This pressure spreads fear that investments will come to lose value.

Both directly and indirectly through subsidiary grant-making philanthropic foundations, CIFF funds hundreds of organisations that exist to lobby governments, political parties, politicians, public bodies, private companies and global agencies with respect to climate. In this way, CIFF and other such ‘philanthropic’ organisations have succeeded in realigning governments on climate policy, completely distancing and supplanting the democratic public from politics and policy-making.

As for the term ‘philanthropy,’ it is very good business. From its origins as a relatively small hedge fund, TCI has grown from holdings worth around just one billion dollars in early 2014, to nearly $42billion dollars at the end of 2021. This coincided with its climate campaigning. Between 2013 and 2020, Christopher Hohn gave well over half a billion dollars to green campaigning and ESG lobbying organisations. This is just a tiny fraction of the profits made by Hohn’s hedge fund, but such ‘environmental activism’ has proven hugely successful in expanding money and power. These grants are not merely ‘philanthropic’ but have had a profound impact on policy as well as being hugely profitable.

Such ‘philanthropic’ organisations are not the only advocates of these ESG campaigns. Central banks are leading advocates of ‘responsible’ investment. Importantly, none of the actions incited by ESG campaigning possess a democratic mandate. These actions are inherently political with decidedly political impacts and effects with respect to resources, but proceed via an entirely extra-political way, free from democratic scrutiny, intervention, and check. The only scrutiny and check comes by way of standards that are formulated and imposed outside of the political process.

Thus ESG campaigning and lobbying organisations demand that companies adhere to a framework that was developed outside of the conventional political and business sphere by an organisation with the name of the Task Force for Climate-Related Financial Disclosures, or TCFD. Who and what is the TCFD? Yet another acronym in a world dominated by important sounding acronyms. Such bodies sound important and authoritative, and are certainly seeking to speak to society with an authoritative voice. But they are essentially obscure organisations staffed by self-appointed experts and dictators, selected from an incestuous pool of strategically networked people. They are neither responsible nor accountable to anyone outside of their own world of directed networking to engineer change, capture politics, and make money. This is a world of finance and power, entirely lacking in democratic content and intent. The TCFD itself was was founded by another obscure organisation, the Financial Stability Board (FSB). The FSB is an intergovernmental agency that was created by members of the G20 and the European Union, their financial ministries and central banks. The senior staff which run TCFD are drawn from the world’s most powerful firms: Black Rock, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, Swiss Re, Aviva, JP Morgan Chase, BNP and Unilever. The chairman of TCFD is the billionaire media tycoon, investor, and anti-fossil fuel campaigner Michael Bloomberg.

We are dealing with people who eschew the normal processes of business and politics, the open markets of the economy and democratic elections, in order to re-rig the rigged game behind the scenes and present the demos with a done deal. Are you still feeling green? People who are desperate for action and bereft of structural capacity and political nous tend to close a blind eye to dubious means and processes. They present their images of children, young women and people of different races and call it real leadership. These soppy idiots don’t realize that they are being had.

The Governor of the Bank of England makes the commitment to create a framework and a set of standards that holds business and society to account explicit: “our goal for COP26 was to build a financial system in which every decision takes climate change into account.”

People need to understand clearly – and quickly – that the norms of governance are being re-written in favour of money and power. These actions are turning our notions of democratic governance – very imperfectly realized to this day – on their head. Democratic governance, recognising liberty under law, proceeds in accordance with the principle of self-assumed obligation. The standards holding people to account are determined within that democratic framework. This is being explicitly overthrown by people seeking to re-rig and re-wire the system in their favour. The colonisation and capture is disguised under the cover of ‘climate change.’ A ruling class never ever makes its own particular interest as its principal motivation but always presents its interest as the general interest of society. And idealists, lacking much by way of structural capacity and political power of their own, are ever prone to take such claims at face value, taking self-image as the true image. The problem is that, whatever the enlightened aims and standards claimed, power proceeds by a dynamic of its own. The whole process is soon governed by what needs to be done to obtain and maintain power. Do people read history anymore? By this I mean ‘read history’ as in ‘study history’ and absorb how people act, how politics really works, how change actually happens, which is always very different to the slide-rule certainties of the strategists. I note the tendency of people to read history in the form of sporadic raids on the past in order to confirm what they would like to believe to be true.

Take the attempts to draw a parallel between civil disobedience on climate change and the struggles of Gandhi and Martin Luther King jr. The claim is that peaceful, non-violent struggle is the key to change. But the comparison is utterly non-historical since the contexts are entirely different. There is a world of difference between nationalist and racialist struggles against oppressors in undemocratic circumstances, where democratic and civic norms were not respected, and people protesting in nations with the full range of democratic norms and civic liberties. The climate protestors are simply people who have failed at politics because they are bad at politics, and who now take advantage of democratic norms and civic liberties to make themselves awkward to others. Go too far too long down that route and authorities may well one day be tempted to curtail democratic rights and liberties. Already the protestors can be heard shouting outrage. At the same time, some environmentalists are declaring the inadequacy of liberal democracy when it comes to addressing climate change, calling openly for more authoritarian governance. These people are muddled, incoherent, and a menace to democracy as well as to their own cause. If ever a movement was full of people likely to cause an uncontrollable mess of unintended consequences, then it is the environmental movement, staffed from top to bottom with very clever people who see only the one thing but who are utterly incapable of weighing and balancing a whole range of important factors and imperatives. And this despite endlessly stressing ecological principles of interconnection and interdependence. They seem to know the language like straight A students, but lack fluency in communication. Again, the impression is given of a mechanical approach, a ‘directed networking’ that is all about an education, engineering, and design that is initiated and driven from the outside, not an organic process that unfolds from within – a vanguard of elites and experts. Examine the roots of these people and you will find that a good deal of them, certainly the educators and strategists, are all still ‘at school,’ that is, are members of some organisation or other, seeking to hold the world to account with respect to standards formulated outside of the political process. These bodies are growing like a cancer within the body politic, clogging up society’s organic processes of growth. Spend some time in this company and you soon start to notice a consistent mindset. There is the elitism, of course, in the constant lecturing and talking down to others, indicating that we are in the presence of a knowledgeable elite who have tasked themselves with informing the empty heads of others. With this, though, there is also the remoteness – this knowledgeable elite are always apart from the people they address, entering the social world from a privileged position outside of it, like members of Bacon’s secular scientific priesthood. It is apparent in the disdain for democracy, the dislike of debate and dialogue, and the distaste for exchange with people as peers. You notice it, even, in claims that ‘the science is settled’ and ‘there is no debate’ to be had. Such people already know the truth, and this truth is pre-political in the sense of having been formulated prior to any political engagement. Others – mere ordinary citizens – are incapable of generating knowledge of their own, which is quite a presumption given that citizens possess far more ‘real world’ experience than the caste of educators obsessing monomaniacally on their pet subject and interest. The ‘educative’ approach of this caste is mechanical rather than organic, intervening into life processes from the outside rather than unfolding growth from the inside. The effect is calcifying, freezing what had previously been liquid, fluid, and alive, like stirring in too much cornflower. For all that such people claim that the standards to which all are to be held to account are ecological, the approach is mechanical and deadening, creating a Green Megamachine that is antithetical to genuine ecological principles. The approach is legislative, regulative, institutional, and bureaucratic, suffocating natural process, autonomy, voluntarism, spontaneity, and creativity – it represents the culmination of Weber’s rationalisation as a warning of “the polar night of icy darkness” to last us all our days.

Such environmentalism is the very antithesis of ecology, social as well as natural. It indicates an ideological mindset, a social and intellectual death, a sterility. This notion of frameworks and standards formulated outside of the process of living contains the idea that values are determined with slide-rule precision and fixed. It denies the organic change and is the end of learning. We shouldn’t take protagonists’ claims of being ‘green’ and ecological at face value but hold them to ecological standards too. These people are the ‘would-be universal reformers’ that Marx denounced (the vanguards who, yet, took over Marxism and socialism to make these bad words with a bad history). They are that most loathsome of creatures, the bureaucrats of knowledge and power.

On point of fact, Mark Carney is both the Governor of the Bank of England and Chair of the FSB; he founded the TCFD and appointed Bloomberg as its chairman.

This is precisely how ‘directed networking’ operates – like cancer, clogging up the social body, killing the social ecology. Such people are big on the values of ‘cooperation’ and ‘collaboration.’ But what they mean by these words and what others, particularly genuine environmentalists, mean by them are two different things. Neither cooperation nor collaboration are virtues in themselves: it matters a great deal with whom we cooperate and collaborate and to what end. The TCFD, for instance, collaborates with some of the world’s wealthiest people as well as with central banks to supply ESG campaigning organisations with recommendations as to how companies should be rated, how companies should implement green policies and be held to account, and where ESG investors should ‘choose’ to put their money.

Directed networking from without is very different from organic networking from within, collaboration driven by a pre-determined agenda is very different from a collaboration that emerges spontaneously from within social processes. We are in the presence of an organised, directed movement that claims to be ecological but is in fact its very antithesis. It may well succeed, in the same way that socialism was colonised, captured, and converted from being a social movement to becoming an abstractly political and bureaucratic movement of top-down reform.

We now come back to the causes of rising energy prices …

(Take it as read that the people involved will say ‘not us.’ I’ve no interest in apologetics, least of all that kind of apologetics which involves people preserving their innocence by claiming others got the right ideas wrong – with bad process and bad politics, that is always bound to happens: take politics seriously, develop political capacity on your own part, and then practice what you preach rather than charge others with the task of implementing your doubtless perfect designs. I have zero tolerance for ‘clean hands’ people in politics – such people are always right in the abstract, and always condemning others for their failure to live up to the standards of unicorn land – such people are all over the environmental movement. This is not serious politics and it is not democratic politics, and it can generate some appalling consequences).

Printing money.

We come to the links between Covid and climate politics. They may seem different things, but the very excited way in which certain environmentalists warmed to Covid lockdown, seeking to extend it into a climate lockdown, indicates that we are in the presence of the same mindset. The policies implemented to get us through the Covid pandemic have cost a fortune. This was achieved by printing money. And it was the members of the Financial Stability Board – the central banks and financial ministries of G20 governments – who printed this money, knowing fine well that this would create inflation. (It’s basic economics, too much money chasing too few goods, too few goods being the result of shutting down the economy. Environmentalists, yet again failing to respect the principle of interconnection, fixated on the one thing – the slowing down of carbon emissions – and celebrated. Crash the economy and there will be consequences. Inflation and a cost of living crisis is one of those consequences (in addition to the health crisis, social dislocation, economic crisis, but, hey, see how a little bit of nature has been restored here and there …).

The FSB knew and approved of ESG campaigning and lobbying organisations’ intentions to starve energy producing companies of capital, and knew that this would push up costs and raise prices.

“This is the first COP to bring together so many of the world’s finance ministers, businesses and investors with such a clear common purpose.” (Rishi Sunak).

Instead of checking inflation, these architects of a permanent crisis have engineered it and ensured its continuation. And you still think you are an environmentalist? Check the company you keep. Check the terms of your cooperation and collaboration.

“The Glasgow Alliance for Net Zero has now brought together financial organisations with assets worth over $130 trillion dollars of capital to be deployed.” (Rishi Sunak).

Super! Is this the company you want to be keeping? Who else has the resources to achieve ambitious climate targets? Does anyone care too much about the means so long as what are deemed to be the right ends are served? Does anyone take politics and ethics seriously anymore? Democratic norms and civic liberties?

And are the ends being pursued the right ones in any case? I wouldn’t presume anything in this regard.

At COP26, Rishi Sunak and Mark Carney, acting as UN special envoy on climate change, announced a new phase in the financial sector’s war on reliable, abundant and affordable energy. This as energy prices were rising.

“You’re already talking about inflation getting up to over 10 per cent – highest level since the early eighties, as the Governor, you know, it’s your job to try and keep it at close to two per cent, I mean how does that feel, seeing it sky-high?” (Sky News interviewer)

Put on the spot, with people demanding answers and solutions concerning the cost of living crisis, all those who have been pushing for adherence to ESG standards can be found saying the same thing: ‘not us.’ They will blame anything and anyone but themselves, from the Covid-19 pandemic to Russia’s war in Ukraine.

“Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is pushing up gas prices and food prices all over the world. Seventy per cent of the increases of prices in March came from Putin’s price hike in gasoline.” (Joe Biden).

Empirical analysis shows quite clearly that high costs and their inflationary consequences in terms of rising energy prices were known and programmed into actions long before either of these historical shocks. Other consequences are also clear: Bloomberg’s wealth has increased from $55billion to $82billion since the start of the pandemic.

“Tackling the issue of climate change is going to require all of us to do a lot more work. We’ve got to take responsibility for what’s going on, on this planet.” (Mike Bloomberg).

My advice, in the first instance, is to stop taking people at face value and look beyond the nice and green self-image they project. There is greater evolutionary advantage in appearing to be virtuous than in actually being virtuous, pursuing a private gain whilst others continue to serve a public good. This works in the short run, of course. In the long run, such a culture selects the much less than virtuous at the expense of the virtuous. Such people only project an insipid green persona, with all of its warm but vacuous ‘all humanity’ statements, in order to fool those impressed with the appearance of virtue. Beneath the greenwash, girlwash, and every nice thing wash lie ruthless, corporate managerialists. It has long since been time for environmentalists to develop an awareness of the dangers of misplaced loyalty and misdirected enthusiasm and examine critically the true nature of global climate politics. Many, particularly those who specialise in science, technology, and design, as well as romantics who are motivated by a love of Nature, are openly disdainful of politics, treating it as secondary to the physics and hard sciences. Such people are particularly prone to being misled: they see the seemingly right ends and objectives and pay scant regard to the means and processes that take us from here to there. They are easy prey to the men of power and money, and default and defer to them for want of any political, fiscal, and structural capacity on their own part.

“Fighting climate change is one of the biggest challenges we’ve ever faced. But it’s also an opportunity.” (Mike Bloomberg).

Who could disagree? Me, for one.

Never waste a crisis. If you don’t have a crisis, then engineer one; if you do have a crisis, then exaggerate it. State at extremes and panic people into an unreasoning response that has them destroying their health and wealth and handing over their democratic and civic freedoms. Note the extent to which these characters are now moving from accusations of problems denialism to solutions denialism. This is entirely illegitimate since there is a qualitative difference between questions of science and questions of politics, policy, and political economy: questions of solutions in the field of practical reason are quite legitimately open questions to be debated, discussed, and deliberated, with dissent not merely permissible but imperative. Those who level the accusation of solutions denial reveal themselves to be out-and-out authoritarians seeking to move directly from scientific facts and figures to policy prescription. This is the end of politics, of democracy, of the idea that the governed have a legitimate say in determining the terms on which they are governed.

To repeat: I make these criticisms not to repudiate green politics but to protest its diversion into sterile inorganic channels and its perversion as a result. The enthusiasm and loyalty of environmentalists of various stripes are being exploited, and people in despair at having got nowhere politically for decades are happy enough with the prospects of success to lend their support. It is here that political naivety becomes particularly dangerous. People whose heads are full of climate facts, figures, eco-designs, and technologies which are impotent in themselves are inclined to latch on to any power that holds out the possibility of getting things moving and done. This is an error that will prove fatal to any genuinely ecological approach. I write as an ecologist in the broadest sense, in recognition of the principle of interdependence. I look at the modalities and mentalities of the dominant form of environmentalism and I see something utterly inorganic, an expression of the very instrumental and mechanical order to be overturned, not a coherent response to it. These critical observations reveal that the green agenda as it now exists is driven not by the desire to save the planet, as its loyal footsoldiers believe, but by the drive for money and power. The PBI of the environmental movement do not constitute a genuine eco-public, but the very opposite – they are a mindless mass fed slogans and mantras to parrot. Listen to them in interviews and you very quickly realize that they are saying the same thing over and again. Job done, programmes secured, investments triggered, and they will be wheeled off the stage, leaving the strategists and architects in place as Guardians.

“We will soon be starting to defeat climate change. And it is possible thanks to the leadership of persons like Michael Bloomberg.” (Antonia Guterres). Hail, Caesar!

The campaigning and lobbying organisations established to ensure adherence to climate standards on the part of government and business, and the governmental institutions and programmes suitably adapted in response, are all about aligning environmental concern to private interests in the name of protecting the public interest. Environmentalists bereft of political nous and innocent of political economy take the image for the reality and so betray themselves and their cause.

In breaking rank with the environmental movement I am feeling a burden being listed. It is far healthier, if a whole lot lonelier, being loyal to a principle rather than to a movement. And I am grateful to have rediscovered my roots in an idiosyncratic working class radicalism, a radicalism that follows its instincts and refuses to do as it is told. In the words of William Cobbett:

“The cause of the people has been betrayed by hundreds of men, who were able to serve the people, but whom a love of ease and of the indulgence of empty vanity have seduced into the service of the bribing usurpers, who have spared no means to corrupt men of literary talent from the authors of folios to the authors of baby-books and ballads, caricature-makers, song-makers all have been bribed by one means or another . . . playwriters, historians . . . none have escaped.”

William Cobbett, Political Register, 24 April 1819, pp. 980–81

I know that my words will wound many green friends and former colleagues; I know, too, that remaining silent will would me – and the cause of environmentalism – even more. You are being had, and ‘ordinary’ people will pay the price and are paying the price. It may already be too late to pull back. Pull back to what? That’s the problem with a politics of climate and emergency: drastic times require drastic measures; who else has the power and money to take effective action?

But here’s the punchline: rather than working to create financial stability, those behind ESG have deliberately engineered instability in the form of an inflation crisis that governments are unable to either manage or mitigate. Pity the people now mired in a cost of living crisis. And pity those seeking to draw attention to the looming climate crisis. People are now too mired in the immediacy of the financial and social crisis in the here and now to have resources to spare for a climate crisis that is always on the horizon. ‘It’s happening now!’ climate activists scream, ‘people are dying now!’ they insist. The claims don’t ring true, for the reason that they are not remotely as observable as the facts of the cost of living crisis. Hence the need for civic disobedience and endless protest – people are in no need of consciousness raising when it comes to energy inflation and the cost of living crisis – it is obvious.

Those pushing for the green agenda have struck fear into investors in order to drive finance away from vital energy infrastructure and resources, without replacing lost capacity with secure and affordable sources of energy. The people doing this hid their influence behind campaigning and lobbying organisations with ‘philanthropic’ intent and charitable status to persuade government and businesses, the public and investors, that they were motivated by the greater good.

‘We all know that it’s all in a good cause, don’t we?’

Right.

“Fighting climate change and growing the economy really go hand in hand.” (Mike Bloomberg).

Tell me how ‘growing the economy’ is in tune with an organic growth as against the inorganic expansion grace of capital’s accumulative dynamic. It’s a genuine question. I need to hear environmentalists lending their support to the dominant green agenda distinguish a genuinely ecological economy and polity from a new industrial expansionism fuelled by new energy. A change in the form of energy is not the same thing as system-change. We need to know, precisely, how the economy is to be recalibrated.

“Our new goal is to close a quarter of all the world’s existing coal plants by 2025 and cancel all proposed new coal plants as well.” (Mike Bloomberg).

To repeat, that aim does not entail system-change at all, merely a change in the form of energy. Capital’s accumulative dynamic, which generates imperatives driving an inorganic expansion, is the very thing transgressing planetary boundaries. Those keen on preserving capitalist relations and forms – and its asymmetries in power and distribution – have been keen all along to have environmentalists focus only on energy: instead of the capital system as such, the target is identified as ‘fossil fuel capitalism.’ It seems radical, and draws people who consider themselves to be radical in. But the whole approach performs a slight of hand that changes targets – instead of capital logic and relations, it is fossil fuels that are targeted.

Xxxx

Jason Hickel on Capitalism:

People often assume that capitalism is defined by "markets and trade". But markets and trade existed for thousands of years before capitalism. Capitalism is only 500 years old. So what is distinctive about this economic system? Three things (well, more, but three for now):

1. First, and most importantly, it is defined by enclosure and artificial scarcity. The origins of capitalism lie in a systematic effort by elites to restrict people's access to commons and independent subsistence, in order to render them reliant on wage labour for survival.

Over the past 500 years, this has taken the form of privatization of commons, forced dispossession, destruction of subsistence economies and - particularly in the colonies - taxing people in a currency they do not have in order to induce them to seek wages in that currency.

This continues today, with attempts to ensure an artificial scarcity of access to essential goods such as housing, healthcare, education, transit, and so on - goods that could very easily be provided, at high quality, on a universal public basis.

Where universal public goods do exist, these have usually been won by longstanding struggles by labour movements and other progressive forces (including the anti-colonial movement).

2. Second, capitalism is organized around - and dependent on - perpetual expansion, meaning ever-increasing production of commodified goods. It is the only intrinsically expansionary economic system in history (meaning it basically has a crisis if it doesn't continually expand).

Crucially, under capitalism the purpose of increasing production is *not* primarily to meet human needs, but rather to extract and accumulate profit. That is the overriding objective. (It is also the main objective of innovation).

It's important to distinguish here between small businesses, which quite often operate with a steady-state, use-value logic (and which obviously preceded capitalism), and corporations whose main objective is expansion and accumulation (which define the capitalist era).

To sustain the process of perpetually increasing surplus accumulation, capital requires an ever-rising quantity of inputs (labour and nature), and requires that these inputs be obtained as cheaply as possible.

This introduces a constant pressure to depress real wages and attack environmental protections wherever possible (in the absence of countervailing political forces). The result is a system that, left to itself, automatically generates inequality and ecological breakdown.

3. Finally, capitalism is notable for precluding democratic decision-making. Even in countries that prize political democracy, democratic principles are rarely allowed to operate in the sphere of production, where decisions are made overwhelmingly by those who control capital.

The result is that decisions about what to produce, for what purposes, for whose benefit, and under what conditions are generally made in the narrow interests of the capitalist class (workers, the people actually *doing* the production, rarely get a voice at all).

It is worth pondering how our production priorities (and our treatment of labour and nature) might be different under conditions of economic democracy. Existing evidence suggests that democratic conditions lead to less exploitation, more equality, and more care for ecology.

In sum, the tendency to equate capitalism with "markets and trade" naturalizes a system that is not natural, and prevents us from having a clear-eyed view of how it operates and how we might want to do things differently.

(The "more" I referred to involves exploitative relations of race, gender and imperial power, which are effects of the tendencies described here, and which sustain them, but this deserves a thread unto itself - coming soon).

We can have a democratic economy organized around meeting human needs at a high standard, where production is socially just and ecologically regenerative. Such a system is possible, but it will require a political movement to bring it into being.

Hickel’s analysis is spot on, particularly with respect to the accumulative dynamic at the heart of capital logic. He is also pertinent with respect to democracy and decision making. I would also draw attention to what is called the power of non-decision, the way that certain issues of crucial importance to the mass of people get excluded from consideration given the way that they encroach on power and accumulation. This analysis also makes clear why my relations to the dominant form of environmentalism have become increasingly abrasive. I remain critical with respect to political economy. I am less than sure how many environmentalists are similarly critical. I note how many, when I push them on class and capital, translate these politically loaded socio-economic terms into the politically neutral technical terms of organic and inorganic growth. I am profoundly sceptical of this recourse to a terminology that abstracts specific social forms and relations out of the account. This attempt to render socio-economic questions scientific has the demerit of deradicalizing and depoliticising a fundamentally political issue.

The eco-activists and the more strategic-contemplative campaigners behind them may seem to be radical and may seem to be anti-capitalist in their demands for system-change, but I note the sleight of hand many of them perform when they target what they call “fossil fuel capitalism” and not the capital system as such. This can happen easily when the ecological contradictions of capitalism are translated into the politically neutral terms of organic vs inorganic growth. We need to target capital logic and the accumulative dynamic more precisely and explicitly. The term “capitalism” in the phrase “fossil fuel capitalism” is actually redundant – eco-activists and campaigners who do this are basically equating system change with a change of energy form. This is superficial. It is also ideological to the extent that it conceals material relations, class dynamics, and capital logic, all of which drive the transgression of planetary boundaries. It undermines, also, democratic self-determination, something which, I would argue, that the fossil fuel anti-capitalist / renewables pro capitalists are also complicit in. Sorry Greta Inc., you are either deluded or are seeking to delude others.

“Ending fossil capitalism doesn’t mean we have to implement socialism. We’re stuck in an unimaginative 20th century debate. Regardless of what we’ll call the economic system, it is essential that it functions within the planetary boundaries.” (Greta Thunberg).

I prefer a thoroughgoing critique of political economy to this game playing. The question of capitalism and socialism is one of much more than names and is far from outdated: it concerns, precisely, how to uproot the accumulative dynamic that systematically drives the transgression of social and planetary limits.

The whole area is a mess. First of all, a real debate needs to be had on the capital system: is it even desirable, let alone possible, that the capital system be uprooted and supplanted? If so, how? It is a serious question. The work of destruction is easy enough, the work of reconstruction much harder. Where are the people doing the constructive work? They are thin on the ground. Capitalist forms are not easily supplanted. Who is working to create new and economically viable social forms? I don’t see anything like enough constructive work being done to make the supplanting of the capital system remotely viable in the near future.

So maybe a palace plot is the best we can expect? Maybe. But don’t expect the plotters to really have the general interest at heart, regardless of their claims.

Then there is the issue of energy itself. Are renewables reliable and affordable? We are dealing with a politics tinged with bitter irony. The absence of reliable and cheap energy has brought about the very problems that climate activists have continually threatened us with as a result of global heating: the loss of agricultural productivity, the return of hunger and poverty, and the rising of prices. The obsessive concern with carbon emissions and the myopic concern with fossil fuels at the expense of political economy has resulted in a cost of living crisis within a broader economic crisis that will impact harmfully and directly upon millions of people for years to come.

Those who persist in demanding that climate change be at the top of the agenda need to wise up and quick: it has been and you have done your money with your cack-handed ‘non’ politics. The technocratic approach of ‘neutral’ climate facts and figures and eco-design and technology is a busted flush. People are beginning to see the corporate power and interests behind the ‘philanthropic’ claims. And they will start to ask some awkward questions. I’ll start the ball rolling with this question: how is that, as the mass of people suffered the consequences of lockdowns and high energy prices, people who style themselves as philanthropists have come to increase their personal wealth by a factor far in excess of the money they have given?

This shouldn’t come as news, but utopian designs can be dangerous for society, particularly when their proponents are unclear and unfussy when it comes to the means of their realisation. The principle that the means should be consistent with the ends should be observed. Those fixated myopically on one overriding goal – the reduction of carbon emissions, the ending of fossil fuels – tend to accept any available means to their preferred ends. The entire approach has the potential to subvert democracy, destabilise communities, and banckrupt economies, whilst licensing power-grabbing and profiteering under the cover of the public good. Everyone agrees with the public good, but not everyone is as careful as they ought to be when it comes to ensuring that process is fit for purpose.

Are environmentalists able to pull back from the brink and recover their sense of direction? I suspect that far too many are by now far too gone, safely and securely fixed in their ‘schools.’ They are connected with too many others as colleagues, feel a sense of loyalty, and have far too much history and emotional investment to be able to break free. I was always a fairly semi-detached, critical and independent green, but even I felt as though I was betraying the cause when in fact I was trying to recover it from out of the clutches of bad process and practice. Rather than admit that the green agenda has been set on the wrong course, I suspect that many will see flaws as necessary evils and compromises and double down on the commitments to Net Zero targets. Because that is the mindset that now dominates in environmental circles – carbon emissions and fossil fuels are the dragons to slay and those raising more profound issues of institutional and structural causality and complicity merely threaten to destroy momentum.

In the meantime, governments facing a supply and inflation crisis are tasked with the impossible. A huge part of the problem in the UK, of course, is the privatisation of energy. In France, energy is still majority publicly owned. The government has been able to impose an energy price cap of 4% The UK energy price cap will increase from £1,277 to £2,800, which represents an increase of 119%

I tend not to refer to privatisation, though, seeing the public-private fight as something of a phoney war. Privatisation was less about expanding private ownership than about extending the corporate form through the corporatisation of public business. We are dealing with a process of corporatisation that is advancing on all fronts. It is certainly driving the new green agenda, and too many greens, bourgeois to the core, are on board. They like to see themselves as tidying up messy capitalist business, just as they did when they colonised socialism and turned it into a regime of bureaucratic regulation as against social self-government.

With investors scared away by green fear, where will the capital investment required to increase supply and reduce prices come from? Climate activists are openly targeting fossil fuels, directly, taking their protests to oil terminals. It is open war. Do governments and energy companies have the nerve to face down green organisations that have promised to wage climate war on land, at sea, and in the courts? And do governments have the ability to spring the economy from the policy trap created by climate campaigning organisations backed by the wealthy and the powerful, and which destroyed domestic industries and energy production, and increased dependence on foreign suppliers?

One thing is certain, this crisis has only just begun. It has been deliberately engineered, both in terms of certain effects aimed for and in terms of unintended consequences. The various parties involved will be more interested in parenting responsibility for harms and burdens upon others than in taking responsibility themselves. It is hard to see who has the ability to assume responsibility in any case. This crisis will continue to get worse until the unaccountable, irresponsible, anti-democratic, and self-serving agents driving the ‘green’ agenda and influencing government policy are identified, exposed, and prevented once and for all from using their resources to engineer fundamental changes in society. I make these criticisms not to repudiate ecology but to reclaim it from the grip of anti-ecological forces. I remain an ecologist: how many of those subscribing to the new corporate green agenda can say the same? Are they even aware of the extent to which they have fallen into the hands of corporate bureaucrats, technocrats, and bean-counters?

Summing Up

Looking out to sea in my new Llandudno home, I see a panoramic view in part ruined by an offshore wind farm that is not very offshore at all. It is one of many power stations in beauty spots being erected on land and sea all over the country. We need energy, of course. But this despoliation of views of natural beauty involves a curious understanding of ecology. I’m intrigued by the extent to which those who don’t engage in a critique of political economy, and who are therefore blind to the extension of the corporate form, are happy with power stations in beauty spots and the old mantra of ‘jobs, growth, and investment’ in the new form of the ‘green industrial revolution.’ Such people are curiously uncritical and non-political, and dangerously so.

I would need to check the figures before offering a view. I need to know how much power this offshore wind farm generates. It is windy here in Llandudno, so I expect to see some impressive figures being recorded. I often see the windmills hardly turning at all. The general complaint is that the windmills are intermittent and therefore unreliable. It is wise to analyse the figures before concluding that such power stations in beauty spots are either ostentatious PR gestures, with little real capacity to power a complex society and economy, or something of symbolic importance, ensuring the complicity of environmentalists in the crucifixion of land and sea. So long as there is economic activity, or any kind of human activity, there will be a need for energy. Two decades ago I argued that energy usage is the real game-changer, recalibrating the economy and shifting to a society that is simple in means and rich in ends in order to reduce energy demands. That, I would argue, involves the creation of a genuinely ecological society. And a reduction achieved this way is very different from slamming the brakes on to crash the economy.

Put simply, broadly the same ends, but very different means.

The underlying problems of supply shortage and lack of capacity can be directly attributed to the activities of ESG campaigning and lobbying organisations and the obsessive assault on fossil fuels in the contemporary environmental movement. They pursue this one goal as a singular imperative, blinding themselves to the need to take into consideration other, no less important, imperatives.

I am intrigued by the extent to which this ‘green agenda’ is, like ‘woke’ politics, a specifically Western phenomenon. It has all the characteristics of self-hatred and self-destruction. The heavily anti-western prejudice demonstrated by some is unmissable, with denunciations of the evils of Western civilisation accompanied by fetishized celebrations of the wisdom of indigenous people. The lunacy, indolence, and sheer laziness of these people is breath-taking. If indigenous people past and present are less ecologically destructive than Western people then that is as a result of a more limited technological reach than superior wisdom. There are countless examples of indigenous people engaging in ecologically destructive behaviour (the slash and burn techniques of the Bantu for one). This is not merely ignorance, it is prejudice. It is pious and impotent bourgeois fantasy and lamentation for a lost world that never was, never will be, and never could be. More fool those on the Left for allowing themselves to be sucked into that hopeless void. The whole mentality is regressive and reactionary and would be given a very wide berth by anyone retaining any kind of grasp on reason and reality. When the world looks to develop a vaccine, it is to supposedly ‘Western’ science that it turns, not to the wisdom of indigenous people.

There is a definite sense in which the ‘green agenda’ has come to be caught up in a specifically anti-Western animus. A number of white liberals are engaged in an extended episode of self-flagellation. Unchecked, this can only end in self-destruction. And looking at the daily diet of doom and gloom, it is hard not to draw the conclusion that some are in the grip of a death-wish, looking forward to a future release from their miserable existence. The entire mentality is hopeless in its contradictory nature. On the one hand it protests environmental destruction and demands action; on the other hand it asserts the inherently destructive nature of all human beings at any stage of development beyond primitivism and a hunter-gathering existence, making destruction well-nigh unavoidable. The doomster mentality saps the energy and undermines all hope for positive action. People in the developing world must look at such people, living in the midst of abundance, and be perplexed at such stupidity. It has all the hallmarks of decadence, a self-hatred on the part of those saturated with the excess of their comfort and looking for a deeper meaning to life. Godless to a man and woman, they have no hope and turn on the civilisation that nurtured and supported them.

This contradiction is a microcosm of greater contradictions. The romanticism and West-hating primitivism adumbrated above is a counterpart of the technocratic spirit which seeks an ecological modernisation through science, technology, and industrial expansion. Although apparently antithetical, the planetary fetishizers on the one hand and planetary engineers and managers on the other are twin aspects of the same abstraction of society and nature from the forms of social mediation. To the former, ‘nature’ is an object to be revered and worshipped, to the latter, ‘nature’ is an object to be manipulated, used, and exploited. Both err in seeing ‘nature’ in abstract terms independently of forms of social practice and mediation. The errors of green politics and practice are to be located in this faulty approach to ‘nature.’

But, yes, it is indeed true that, in an ultimate sense, ‘Nature’ trumps all and that the would-be planetary controllers - WEF, WHO, Gates, Soros, Vanguard, Blackrock, add your favoured suspects - are all being played by a greater force. These controllers have been encouraged to place themselves in the position of environmental Guardians by the lack of resistance on the part of a zombified ‘green mass’ scared by repeated climate alarms, seduced by warm green slogans, and hypnotised into unthinking compliance. So we get a doubling-down on pseudo-science in the authoritative voice. Step back for just an instant and it is easy to see the appropriation, the inversion, and the blatant manipulation. As a tutor, I constantly urged students to read against their prejudices, examine why the view they sought to advance might be wrong, understand why contrary views might be right, and test themselves against a steel-man rather than settle for easy victories against a straw man. Should you do all of that, you might well come to strengthen the case you are making rather than undermine it. Politics has lost the capacity for reflexivity and self-criticism; too many venture forth in a spirit of faith and loyalty, unaware that they may be demonstrating faith in and loyalty to empty symbols and signifiers rather than vital principles. The consistent failure of environmentalists to properly relate the fields of scientific reason and practical reason (ethics and politics), the failure to take politics and ethics seriously, the dominant scientism and technocratic mentality, and the almost complete absence of political economy made it clear to me that the environmental movement was wide open to appropriation by non-ecological forces from within the world to be transformed. The problem with the language of ‘necessity’ and ‘emergency’ is this: once it becomes manifestly clear that you lack the ability to step up to the scale of the challenge, others with resources adequate to the task are free to step in and take control. It is here that the lack of political economy becomes particularly debilitating. The rich backers of environmental campaigning and lobbying are located firmly within the corporate form and, through their ‘green’ ‘philanthropy’ are looking to commodify and control the as-yet unenclosed resources of the natural world as a new financial market. I am at a loss to understand why so many supporting the new green agenda fail to see this. It was a warning that was constantly made in the ecological circles I moved in, from the late 1980s onwards. Read any of the literature from that period and you will see warning after warning about the enclosure of the global commons (for instance, Jeremy Rifkin’s Biosphere Politics from 1992). Seriously, people, read, reflect, and ask the awkward questions of power, resources, authority, and control. Is that so difficult? With greens/environmentalists I consistently had the sense of being in the presence of idealists without the power to act on their ideals, who were prepared to resort to any agency with the resources and capacity to deliver on aims and objectives. That’s a dangerous game. To them that hath shall be given … It should come as no surprise that the most powerful agents at any one time are the ones whose power in some way derives from the very social system implicated in the crisis to be resolved.

It is possible to understand this outbreak of Western self-hatred. It is a peculiarly middle class conceit. Those most hysterical about ‘saving the planet’ are the ones who bear a heavy responsibility ruining it. The constant demands for retrenchment and a cutting back of consumption come very easily from those who have never had to want for anything. These are people brought up on foreign holidays, second and third homes, from multiple car and multiple television families, bottled water, and myriad brand and status obsessions exploiting third world sweatshop factories, etc.. etc. This means sod all to working class people like me. I come from the north west of England. I left school to face mass unemployment on Merseyside. We had the one television in the house until I bought a portable TV for £149 with my student grant in 1987. That one television was black and white until 1983. We never had a telephone until 1986. We didn’t have a holiday every year (just the seven overall), and none abroad, all in the UK. I never flew in an airplane until 2014. I have never driven let alone owned a car. The family had to have transport for the family building business. We would travel to social occasions in the truck when we had it and then the van. My story is not unique. In fact, I would say that I probably had more than many other working class people. But these details should go some way to explaining why it sticks in the craw to hear very comfortably off middle class people, accustomed to living very comfortable lives, trying to assuage their guilt by asserting that we all need to cut back to ‘save the planet.’ To which I say ‘stuff the planet’ and stuff the middle class guilt-trippers most of all. With typical self-importance, such people insist that theirs is the dominant voice. They are a blight on environmentalism to the extent that they are clueless about material relations, class dynamics, and political economy (as they tend to be). These are the people who will routinely call for the social ownership and ecological use of ‘capital,’ little realising that the identification of capital as a thing, a factor of production, is the bourgeois definition that ignores the deeper understanding of capital as a relation and a process. With that approach, such people would universalize capitalist relations rather than check and abolish them. They would turn society into the universal factory. Again, this is perfectly in tune with the corporate form.

At this point we have to differentiate between those who are blundering unwittingly in the direction of the green megamachine and those who are deliberately bringing us to this. Going back to the Club of Rome and long before, taking in eugenics and the role of science in politics, ecology has always had a misanthropic strain, obsessing over population control and global resource allocation to ensure only the right kind of people survived. The mantra of "saving the planet" is a cover for the elimination of a comfortable standard of living – or even the prospect of such a thing – for most people. The people behind this are playing a long game, seeking to advance on a number of fronts, economic, financial, and social. Issues arising with regard to the planetary ecology are grist to the mill. Crisis is their opportunity. They are fluent in the language of ‘necessity’ and ‘emergency.’ Their most used word is ‘must.’ They speak in authoritative and imperative voice. With the collapse of the financial system will come the final expropriation of private property as collateral for the accumulated debts that have accrued under their fiat money Ponzi scam. Those who think such a thing a tad conspiratorial should consider that Marx himself drew attention to the abolition of private property as a chief characteristic of the capital system, noting the irony that the very thing his critics accused communism of doing was being accomplished by the system they sought to defend. It’s not communism that stands on our horizon, though, but a global neo-feudalism characterised by imposed and enforced imperatives, a strictly monitored and micro-managed serfdom, with drastic population reduction in climate controlled cities a realistic prospect. (Think not? Just read the works of the lauded and lionised James Lovelock and such like, and put two and two together).

The world is run by a ‘universal class’ of classless people who utterly loathe and despise the people. They see people as selfish and stupid, as unproductive, as ‘useless eaters’ consuming the planet's resources, which they, of course, are keen to claim for the right type of people, which is themselves. They are sociopathic. Those comments apply not only to the usual suspects in the ruling class, the people the Marxists once called the capitalist class, in the days when leftism still spoke the language of class rather than identity. The words apply also to those vanguards of knowledge elites and technocrats who are to be found all over the environmental movement (see my work on techno-bureaucratic managerialism below). Spend much time in the company of greens and you will very quickly detect the covert, and often overt, misanthropy. As a green, I sat at the table with other greens who, seeing me as one of their own, spoke freely: ‘it is time to cull the herd.’ I asked who was to do the culling, who was to be culled, and which government would you trust with the power to cull? And to be fair, the environmentalist to whom I addressed those questions understood the objections I was raising. Even so, there is an unconscious, unthinking misanthropy underlying ecology which has the potential to come to the surface in times of necessity.

There was a time, long, long ago, when leftists were socialists rather than solipsists and stood up for ‘ordinary’ people in their struggles against powerful vested interests rather than particular identities. Nowadays, it seems that politics of all persuasions in thrall to the same vested interests, with political differences pertaining to variants of the same thing. But it’s those interests and service to them that counts above all supposed political differences, with democracy being undermined every step of the way.

I have an American friend who shocked me one day when calling me a ‘globalist.’ I have always argued that the concerted action within a comprehensive framework required to address climate change will only succeed if it is grounded in small scale practical reasoning, virtuous action, proximal relations, a love of place, and a sense of co-responsibility and ownership. I still argue this (I still think there is a climate crisis and that this crisis needs to be addressed). What had happened is that the specific character of my views had been drawn into the political dogfight, with the ‘local’ aspects of my argument coming to be lost from view through the dominant green emphasis on the ‘global’ dimensions. Donald Trump had emboldened conservatives in calling the globalists out on this from the start of his presidency, and my political affiliations aligned me with the globalists against the people. It shook me up. But it made me wonder about my political commitments and allegiances. With the friends and colleagues I had – and still have – it is easy to see how I could be considered to be a member of the ‘universal class’ of techno-bureaucratic managerialists that I criticise in my work – an educator involved in climate communication and campaigning, arguing for climate action, I tick all the boxes. But I am not a ‘globalist,’ and the fact that I could have been so identified had me concerned to make the fine distinctions.

The assault on fossil fuels is ill-balanced. It has all the hallmarks of a hit-job on the part of those with a vested interest. Fossil fuels permitted the economic expansion that boosted living standards and life expectancy. There are also certain inconvenient facts such as the fact that the air is vastly less polluted than it used to be and the fact that the number of environmentally related deaths has plummeted in the past century. There has never been an environmentally safer time to be alive than today, and yet environmentalists are screaming daily that we are all going to die because of environmental problems. One day, perhaps, if actions are not taken (and actions are being taken), but not now. Environmentally related deaths are nothing like they once were, not even close. The problem is that you cannot reason people out of a position that they have not been reasoned into in the first place. Fear and neurosis work so deep into the psyche that delusion can continue on the basis of emotional investment alone. Sad to say, the green agenda has not merely been subject to corporate capture and control, it has in large part been defined and driven by corporate power. I just wish that more environmentalists would pay more attention to political economy rather than seeking constantly to translate sociological and political questions into neutral terms (e.g. reconceiving capital accumulation in terms of a distinction between organic and inorganic growth). Such neutrality scotomizes issues of specific social forms and relations, effectively concealing the very problem at issue. People need to wake up to the green scam that is being attempted, greens most of all, if they want to reclaim the green agenda for ecology. Those who say ‘follow the science’ need also to ‘follow the money.’

In my economics masters’ thesis of the mid-1990s I challenged the view that the old politics of redistribution had been replaced by an emphasis on economic growth. I argued that a redistributive politics was still being practised, only in reverse: instead of resources going from poor to rich, the express intention was to shift resources from labour to capital. I argued that this process was integral to the emergence of the new corporate form. I see no reason to change that assessment.

UN Admits: ‘Climate change policy is about how we redistribute the world’s wealth’

https://wwwDOTclimatedepotDOTcom/2017/05/24/global-warming-is-not-about-the-science-un-admits-climate-change-policy-is-about-how-we-redistribute-the-worlds-wealth/

Interesting. It makes complete sense that ‘globalists’ would take an interest as to how the world’s population and wealth could be brought into alignment with its climate goals. I would expect a top-down process such as this to involve the redistribution of resources from ‘ordinary’ people to the rich and powerful. I would expect them to present this as being in the general interest. And I would expect anyone with a critical brain cell in their head to be somewhat sceptical of such claims. Unless you think a ruling class of pious idealists seeking to govern in the interests of each and all a realistic view of history and politics. Climate campaigners do indeed seem convinced that it's all in a good cause.

Ottmar Edenhofer, lead author of the IPCC’s fourth summary report released in 2007 candidly expressed the priority. Speaking in 2010, he advised, “One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. Instead, climate change policy is about how we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth.”

That makes me wonder in which way this redistribution will be attempted. I would be most surprised to see a restructuring of class power in favour of labour against capital. Some comments leave us wondering. Thus U.N. climate chief Christina Figueres has stated that the true aim of the U.N.’s 2014 Paris climate conference was “to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution.” That in itself doesn’t say much – from what to what? Stated thus, it could mean little more than a renewed commitment on the part of bureaucrats to manage capitalism in its own interests.

But if it is about regulation, then they have businesses where they want them with this insistence on ESG, a kind of social credit system for businesses. If they don't fall into line, they will be given a low rating and won't get funding and loans. It's putting business under the squeeze to ensure compliance.

I tried to develop a genuinely political and ethical dimension to ecology, only to find that the agenda was driven by neurocrats (neurotics and technocrats) feeding the fear of global heating to incite action. Over the years I saw the goalposts being moved, constantly, with impossible targets being set to ensure that whatever happened activists could claim that it was never enough. This is not serious politics, merely pressure group politics on steroids and in the grip of campaign imperatives.

This has the hallmarks of strategic purpose and direction as part of a long-term agenda. Pushed by who? The UN, certainly, and various front organizations and ‘big government’ and ‘money groups’ coalescing in the direction of World Government, with them and their ilk at the top. (As to whom this ‘ilk’ refers, see my book on techno-bureaucratic managerialism. People are obsessing over ‘woke’ the moment. Woke will be beaten so long as people stick to facts and logic, so long as we remain on nodding terms with reality. The managerial strain running through the world will be much harder to check and uproot, its interconnections extending across government, finance, and culture. Marx looked at the tendencies towards cooperation and interconnection underway in his own day and called it the abolition of the capitalist mode of production within the capitalist mode of production. He thus underscored the way that socialism emerges almost as an organic development out of capitalism. But in addition to the objective factor he underscored also subjective developments with respect to working class self-organisation and self-activity. These subjective developments are now lacking or deficient or underdeveloped).

There is a new ruling class in the offing which has all the characteristics of a Mafia operating a protection racket, cajoling/coercing people into compliance by threat and fear. This class has infiltrated Banking/investment, government and the civil service, all the main political parties, and media and culture. The bulk of the population are unaware that these ‘would-be universal reformers’ plan to subvert those political and social institutions geared democratically to the common good, and depress the standards of living for the mass of people by a planned ‘death of a thousand cuts' over the long-term. The process is underway, undertaken under the cover of ‘saving the planet.’ ‘Nature’ is the new God, inspiring both blind loyalty and culpability in an anti-democratic inhumanism. We are confronted by people who are dedicated to nothing less than the destruction of Western Civilization. They have a full spectrum of front and shill groups, just like a spiders web, the financial money trail links them all. They are, in truth, quite easy to spot – they are the people who never miss the opportunity to say how ‘evil’ the West has been, is, and always will be on account of some original sin. The most pathetic and delusional are the easiest of all to spot. These are the ones who never fail to damn white westerners whilst extolling the virtues of indigenous people. I would laugh at such people were the situation not so serious. The same with respect to the new Puritans of ‘woke,’ who have us raking over the past in search of the sins of our grandfathers and grandmothers in order to prove our sinful state in the present, for which we must perform public contrition, without hope of mercy, forgiveness, and redemption. When we are damned by our own irredeemable iniquities we are stripped of agency and initiative in the present. We are effectively being called upon to confess that we have uttered thoughts and committed acts which we can never atone for, and are therefore condemned to spend the rest of our days caught in this endless cycle of performative atonement. To be mired in the past in this way serves to divert attention from the present, and the attempts by some to hijack culture and society and turn it to their own ends. When all our time and energies are consumed in litigating the past, others are at work in the present attempting to steal the future. It is interesting that the people who obsess about Western crimes in the past have nothing to say about China’s crimes in the present. The people who have had plenty to complain about during the Age of the USA are going to be deliriously happy during the Age of China to come, I’m sure. I just don’t have a feeling that they will be allowed to be so vocal in fighting the culture war should that happen. Some civilisations value freedom and democracy, some don’t. It is interesting to see freedom and democracy being devalued in the practice of Western radicals. That seems remarkably self-defeating to me.

Which brings me back to the flabby relativism of comparing different cultures in the moralistic and utterly unhistorical terms of good and evil. The ideas are hopelessly utopian, with standards drawn from the unicorn land of their reinvented and reimagined Eden of indigenous people. They wax lyrical about native American cultures and societies, portraying them as veritable idylls in which people lived in harmony with one another and with nature. They cherry-pick the facts to portray these people as children of nature living peacefully together in lands of milk and honey characterised by democracy and complete equality. The perfect society that has been a long and hard time in creation once already existed, and still exists here and there in the societies of indigenous peoples.

This is an obvious manifestation of anti-Westernism. It is crude, simplistic, naïve, unhistorical, moralistic – in a word, decadent. This mentality is an expression of the bourgeois mentality in its decadent phase. Disgusted with present bourgeois society, such a mentality is congenitally incapable of looking beyond that society, least of all to a socialist future (which these minds condemn as merely a variant of the same thing), and turn to a lost past with a self-loathing. Everything that isn’t them is good, everything that is them is evil. It is a self-flagellation and self-immolation. And it is bourgeois to the core. In the Grundrisse, Marx writes of the bourgeois mind that is incapable of transcending the antithesis between bourgeois society present as the end of history and lamentation for the pre-modern fullness that has now been lost to history. This antithesis will accompany the bourgeois mind to its ‘blessed end,’ wrote Marx. The bourgeois mind in its decadent phase is all over contemporary anti-Westernism.

These people are truly pathetic. They see nothing of value in the West, even as they happily exploit the benefits of free speech, science, ICT, prosperity undreamed of by past generations to denounce how evil the West is. I think it was Dostoyevsky who said that the devil would never give thanks. These people are entirely thankless. In search of wisdom, they go first and last to indigenous people and never to the West. I utterly reject the sharp antitheses these people make, pitting cultures against one another in utterly unhistorical terms of good and bad. There is something of value in all cultures, something that everyone can learn from. But when it comes to developing a vaccine, for instance, it is not to the wisdom of indigenous people we turn but to so-called Western science. And which countries are people undertaking long, arduous, and hazardous journeys to enter? US, UK … not indigenous tribes. The footfall gives the game away. None of the people extolling the virtues of indigenous people ever show the remotest sign of joining them in their Edenic innocence. What hacks me off about this nonsense is that Rousseau, yet again, is being targeted as the origin of this delusional thinking. Others, including even Diderot, wrote far more in the line of the noble savage than did Rousseau. Rousseau’s principle argument was not ‘back to nature’ but forwards to the realisation of our better nature in a civic freedom, the very opposite. But it is easy to understand why so many people misread Rousseau here – they want to, it serves their purposes. Such people know next to nothing about native societies and peoples, they are fetishizers pure and simple, people who pick out what they want to see and magnify it to fit their fevered imaginations. They have all these theories about the state of innocence indigenous people lived in. These theories stem from their own wishful-thinking, not from any actual history. I once enjoyed the work of Margaret Mead. And then I read how the native people she studied realised early on the nature of her interest and started to feed her the facts she wanted to hear, particularly on free love and sexual liberation. These people are fantasists, bored bourgeois unable to commit themselves to the hard work of transcending bourgeois society. They look back to the past, part in lamentation, part in imagination. They are looking to find a standard by which to highlight and criticize the negatives of their own society. This is how indigenous peoples function for the anti-Westerners in the day, not because they have any particular virtues that are actionable in present society – try it if you disagree, practice what you preach, and see if it works for any large group in a complex society – but because its highlighted (selected) qualities can be used as a counter-weight to flag up the iniquities and inadequacies of the West. All of these indigenous societies are held to be enormously egalitarian and peaceful and living in harmony with nature, all claims which are made in order to excoriate Western capitalism. It appears radical but is in fact thoroughly reactionary. Note well that that approach devalues and denigrates centuries of social struggle and democratic advance which, along with economic expansion, brought us to the high standard of living we have today. All of this is just thrown away out of self-loathing masked as fantasy. And such people are not actually that interested in the native people they fetishize. They certainly show no signs of living like them, let alone joining them. I’m pretty sure that they all visit the dentist when they have a toothache. I think they would accept anaesthetic as some evidence of progress. For all of their high moral tone about the rapaciousness of the West, the Western anti-Westerners are engaged in a plunder of their own, a cultural plunder in which they pillage native societies and peoples for a few banalities and generalities which they present as the highest wisdom. So we have assertions of harmony offered as the great antidote to the hideously competitive and inegalitarian and unecological wretchedness of western capitalism. Plenty parrot this nonsense, on the presumption that anti-capitalist rhetoric indicates a radical position. It doesn’t. This is not radical at all, but utterly regressive and reactionary. The hard work of institutional, structural, and systemic analysis is eschewed for fantasies of a reimagined and reinvented past that the fantasists have zero intention of ever committing to. The sight of the new Edenic innocents extolling the virtues of primitive living on social media every day is delicious to behold. It beggars belief that some people take them so seriously.

In themselves, such people are harmless. Their fantasies are idle enough. I wouldn’t send these people out for a loaf, let alone trust them to survive any length of time living by nature. They are the romantic wing of a larger, and much more powerful and dangerous naturalism – one which has science and technology on its side (the death of God, the indifference of nature, the insignificance of humanity, design which mirrors natural processes etc). Here we enter the realm of a scientism which translates easily into technocracy in its political terms.

Conservative critics note that the Green movement only really started to take off politically after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Hard-Left activists left politically and ideologically homeless jumped on the Green bandwagon to further their anti-capitalist cause. I’m less than sure that there is a direct correlation here. Very many of the ‘hard-left’ known to me identified Green politics as bourgeois to the core, a left liberalism that diverted attention from class and capital, certainly from the working class and class politics of redistribution. In arguing the case for eco-socialism, I have been countered time and again by Green who argue that the environmental record of the Soviet Union, identified as socialist, was worse than the capitalist west. They see the identification of the Soviet Union as state capitalist, with the accumulative dynamic and class structure still firmly in place, as semantics. I would be cautious of sweeping generalisations and surface level definitions in this entire area. But it is true enough that the locus of radical politics shifted from socialism and class to Green politics. As to whether Green politics is anti-capitalist, the evidence is mixed. In my experience, Greens tend to prefer to speak in banalities and generalities here, as in demanding an economy that respects planetary boundaries. This doesn’t necessarily require that capitalism be supplanted by socialism, we are assured by some. Such people target what they call ‘fossil fuel capitalism’ rather than capitalism as such. But it is hard to see how an expansionary economy powered by an accumulative dynamic cannot but transgress environmental limits, without a strong regulatory framework. Green reformists seem to think that such a framework can be imposed without strangling economic activity, but it is difficult to know if they are being serious or duplicitous, engaging in the gutless revolution of death by a thousand suffocations.

But, yes, at the level of generalisation, the Green cause does have potential for those whose politics is driven by an explicit anti-capitalism. I’m left wondering just how left this so-called hard left is, though. Their primary motivations are destructive rather than constructive. Marx argued that socialism emerges from within the lines of development immanent but repressed within capitalist forms and relations. The potentiality for such socialism, then, exists within the capitalist system in the process of being superseded. Those motivated primarily by anti-capitalism seek to extirpate capital first and foremost, and then build on the ruins. If they build at all. I see no evidence of constructive work in the perspectives of the Hard Left, other than ‘building the party,’ no doubt with an eye for being organised to take advantage of the chaos to ensue. With regard to a viable economic system that supplies the legitimate needs of the people – let alone make money – I see nothing. I am also suspicious of the extent to which climate activists obsessing over carbon reductions advocate economic lockdown, even slamming the brakes on the economy (as I have been told more than a few times for comfort now). None of this indicates that the work of reconstruction is underway, only a destruction fuelled by the hatred of capitalism, of the West, of white people, all of which has bourgeois guilt and self-hatred at its core. Whatever that is, it has nothing to do with socialism and the working class except their complete absence.

Whereas socialism and the working class were progressive, Green anti-capitalism is thoroughly regressive. The ‘back to nature’ animus of those who make a fetish of indigenous people and lifestyles is bourgeois to the core, bourgeois in its state of decadence and decline. Disgusted with the present, without hope for the future, seeing notions of building on immanent potentials to create a socialist society as more of the same industrialism, they look back. Civilisation destruction, deindustrialization, and ‘back to nature’ is the plan. Which is no plan at all, merely a psychosis. It’s a cultural revolution designed to unravel culture, taking us ‘back to the fields’ and to an Edenic Zero. It is evidence of infantilism in politics. Not that these people take politics seriously. Many of them express an open disdain for politics, presenting themselves first and foremost as lovers of nature over against politics. The contempt for politics reveals a dangerous blind spot at the heart of the romantic wing of the Green politics. Always there will be politics, and often the very worst, repressive, kind of politics accompanies those who are in denial of politics. Such people prefer to speak in the certainties of the authoritative voice: ‘nature’ and ‘the science’, for instance.

But they are playing politics and they know it, pretensions of being ‘neither left nor right’ and ‘beyond politics’ notwithstanding. The strategists engineering the crisis in political and institutional legitimacy have very definite political ends in view, with their shock troops among the activists doing their bidding. Many are genuine enough. I have known many people who work in the field of permaculture. They have told me repeatedly that politics is a waste of time. I ask them that when the collapse they are sure is to come does indeed come, will the people who do take politics seriously, the people armed with guns and other such hardware, leave the permaculturalists alone? Or do you think the people who have shown the way in working with nature will be expropriated and enslaved? Once more.

Take. Politics. Seriously.

I am reading that Sri Lanka is in one hell of a mess, in part because of a radical, ill-thought, switch to organic food production, banning fertilizers. The crops have failed, people are starving, and there is mass unrest. Look closely at eco-activists claims of chaos as a result of climate change and you will often find that failure is the result of bad policy on the part of failing and failed states. Quite often, that bad policy is ill-thought out Green policy. The green dream of an organic return to nature is not working out so well in Sri Lanka. Unless the real objective is depopulation after all ….

In part, the cost of living crisis is the cost of going green. Going back decades, greens have insisted that prices should reflect real costs. The hard austerian edge to green ‘non’ politics was there from the very start. Which is why it is hard to take green apologetics with respect to the energy supply and inflation crisis seriously – a reduction in both supply and usage and an increase in costs and prices were planned all along. We are mired in a cost of lockdown recession, and yet certain climate campaigners are arguing for a Climate Lockdown extending the austerity. The abhorrent doctrine of TINA has been revived: ‘There is no alternative.’ If we have learned one thing from the wretched experience of that doctrine in political history it is that there is always an alternative, invariably a better one, and the apostles of TINA are engaging in projections of false necessity and false fixities. I argue for a civic environmentalism as against the ecomentalism that has overtaken the Green movement. We, the people, are being called upon to foot the bill for the wealthy, abandon our liberties and accept our places in the new serfdom. Can’t pay, won’t pay. Max Weber described Marx’s Communist Manifesto as a ‘pathetic prophecy.’ The idea that our new corporate masters are enlightened green despots is a decidedly pathetic politics and prophecy, and lethal to boot.

People agree with clean energy, in the same way that they agree with ‘nature is good’ and we should all live in harmony. Which is to say that people agree with banalities and generalities that don’t actually address practicalities. I’m all in favour of clean energy. It is so much better than dirty energy. But where do we get this clean energy from and how? Where are the plants and the infrastructure? We will get rid of nasty coal and everything will run on solar and wind power. No one asked where from. Getting rid of one energy form without having its replacement in place will lead to a crisis in supply, increased cost, rising prices. But greens, as back seat drivers who never take the wheel, will say that the policy makers got the policies and their execution all wrong and didn’t follow the precise orders of those who presume to exercise power without responsibility. Such people know nothing of politics, they are bog-standard authoritarians who presume to legislate and dictate at a safe distance from responsibility and accountability. I don’t doubt governmental incompetence for a minute, it is the nature of the beast. Which begs the question of the extent to which all these ambitious and expensive climate programmes are premised on a perfectly competent big government. It would be a first in history.

Eliminate fossil fuels, fail to develop renewables that are reliable and affordable – or even existent – and there will be rising costs that have a knock on effect that affects everything else. In normal times a price peak would have a subsequent exploration boom and new discoveries causing price to stabilise, relatively quickly. Now, however, exploration is forbidden and the funds for investment are confiscated in the name of ‘saving the planet.’

Going green means going without. The austerian impact in economics is as predictable as the authoritarian character in politics. Going green means being poor, cold and hungry, and the current 'cost of living' crisis is the beginning. But greens don’t much like people anyhow, unless they are the innocents of their own invention.

But I speak in sweeping generalisations because, by now, I am tired of wasting my time in green politics. There is a need to differentiate between different kinds of greens: there are strategists and technocrats, there are romantics and nature lovers, there are globalists and there are localists, there are the millionaires and billionaires who are funding it all to defraud the public and destroy democracy and there are the idealists who are useful idiots. And there are the hypocrites, the ones who fly private jets around the World to tell the plebs that they need to cut back their consumption. These are the same people who constantly warn that the sea levels are rising rapidly and that major cities and coastal regions will be flooded, yet buy up multi-million dollar seafront mansions at the same time. I remain committed to ecology: a political, social, civic, and moral as well as a natural ecology in an integral philosophy. I am strongly opposed to the destructive, delusional lunacy of ecomentalism.

I have started to see activists, questioned as to the impact that their activism is having on ‘ordinary’ people, respond by claiming that ‘movements push and people follow.’ The attitude is elitist to the core, indicating that we are in the presence of vanguards which openly repudiate democracy. I would urge ‘ordinary’ people that whenever they are pushed by movements they push back and hard, for their own good. The people who push others for their own good don’t actually have the good of those others at heart at all.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Below are a number of books I have written over the years, setting out my own civic, social, and moral ecology in the first instance, developing those principles through a critique of the political economy of ecology, culminating in a systematic critique of environmentalism. In this critique I challenge both ‘globalism’ and primitivism as two aspects of the same green mentality, as backward looking and regressive as it is futuristic. The nature romantics and technocrats are not opposed to one another but are twins – the planetary fetishizers, planetary managers, and planetary engineers are close family relations. And they are diametrically opposed to the ecological view I have developed in my work. Whilst the above is something of an ill-tempered rage against the green agenda as a money and power grab, I have presented my critiques and principles in inherently rational and democratic terms in my main work. This work has, in the main, been ignored by environmentalists, telling me clearly that, like all fanatics and extremists, they are hell-bent on their own agenda, despite its manifestly anti-democratic forms and its deleterious economic consequences, and more than likely because of them. The movement has its psychic origins in the inherent misanthropy of ecology. ‘No one ever talks about over-population,’ say growing number of greens who never stop talking about the human species as a virus on the planet. This movement and its mentality are regressive and reactionary. More fool any leftist, liberal, progressive, or radical who thinks they can hitch their principles and aims to the environmental juggernaut. ‘Necessity’ cares nothing for your principles. As environmentalists are fond of repeating: physics trumps your politics. At the same time that they repeat this inhumanism as a mantra, they advance a distinctively authoritarian ‘non’ politics of their own.

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

https://www.academia.edu/68328275/Essays_in_Environmental_Critique

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

Being and Place: The Dialectics of Catastrophe and Hope: Restoration and Restorying (2019)

Climate Rebellion and System Change: Rebellion or Revolution? (2019)

The Ecological Comedy: The Case for an Existential Literary Ecology (2019)

The Economics of Flourishing (2019)

Being at One: Making a Home in the Earth's Commonwealth of Virtue (2016)

Lewis Mumford, Civic Environmentalism and Ecological Regionalism (2014)

Politics, Planetary Engineering, and Environmentalism: The Politics of Gaia (2012)

Of Gods and Gaia: Men as Gods Gambling with Gaia (2012)

Lewis Mumford and the Architectonics of Ecological Civilisation (2012)

In Search of Ecopolis: The Political and Philosophical Principles of Social Ecology (2011)

The Coming Ecological Revolution: The Principles and Politics of a Social and Moral Ecology (2011)

From Green Principles to Politics (2011)

Lewis Mumford and the Search for the Harmonious City: The Architectonics of an Ecological Regionalism (2004)

THE CITY OF REASON vol 7 The Ecological Concept of the City (2004)