As I write these words, much of North America is sweltering
under near-tropical heat and humidity. Parts of the Middle East have set
all-time high temperatures for the Old World, coming within a few degrees of
Death Valley’s global record. The melting of the Greenland ice cap has tripled
in recent years, and reports from the arctic coast of Siberia describe vast
swathes of tundra bubbling with methane as the permafrost underneath them melts
in 80°F weather. Far
to the south, seawater pours through the streets of Miami Beach whenever a high
tide coincides with an onshore wind; the slowing of the Gulf Stream, as the
ocean’s deep water circulation slows to a crawl, is causing seawater to pile up
off the Atlantic coast of the US, amplifying the effect of sea level rise.
All these things are harbingers of a profoundly troubled
future. All of them were predicted, some in extensive detail, in the print and
online literature of climate change activism over the last few decades. Not
that long ago, huge protest marches and well-funded advocacy organizations
demanded changes that would prevent these things from happening, and politicians mouthed
slogans about stopping global warming in its tracks. Somehow, though, the
marchers went off to do something else with their spare time, the advocacy
organizations ended up preaching to a dwindling choir, and the politicians
started using other slogans to distract the electorate.
The last gasp of climate change activism, the COP-21 conference
in Paris late last year, resulted in a toothless agreement that binds no nation
anywhere on earth to cut back on the torrents of greenhouse gases they’re
currently pumping into the atmosphere. The only commitments any nation was
willing to make amounted to slowing, at some undetermined point in the future,
the rate at which the production of greenhouse gas pollutants is increasing.
In the real world, meanwhile, enough greenhouse gases have already been dumped
into the atmosphere to send the world’s climate reeling; sharp cuts in
greenhouse gas output, leading to zero net increase in atmospheric CO2
and methane by 2050 or so, would still not have been enough to stop extensive
flooding of coastal cities worldwide and drastic unpredictable changes in the rain
belts that support agriculture and keep all seven billion of us alive. The
outcome of COP-21 simply means that we’re speeding toward even more severe
climatic disasters with the pedal pressed not quite all the way to the floor.
Thus it’s not inappropriate to ask what happened to all the
apparent political momentum the climate change movement had ten or fifteen
years ago, and why a movement so apparently well organized, well funded, and
backed by so large a scientific consensus failed so completely.
In my experience, at least, if you raise this question among
climate change activists, the answer you’ll get is that there was a well-funded
campaign that deployed disinformation against them. So? Every movement for
social change in human history has been confronted by well-funded vested
interests that deployed disinformation against them. Consider the struggle for
same-sex marriage, which triumped during the same years that saw climate change
activism go down to defeat. The
disinformation deployed against same-sex marriage was epic in its scale as well
as its raw dishonesty—do you recall the claims that ministers would be forced
to perform gay weddings, and that letting same-sex couples marry would cause
society to fall apart? I do—and yet the
movement for same-sex marriage brushed that aside and achieved its goal.
Blaming the failure of climate change activism entirely on
the opposition, in other words, is a copout. It’s also a way to avoid learning
the lessons of failure—and here as elsewhere, those who ignore their history
are condemned to repeat it. Other movements for social change faced comparable
opposition and overcame it, while climate change activism failed to do so;
that’s the difference that needs to be discussed, and it leads inexorably to a
consideration of the mistakes that were made by the movement.
The most important mistakes, to my mind, are these:
First, the climate change movement was largely led and
directed by scientists, and as discussed here two weeks ago, people
with a scientific education suck at politics. Over and over again,
the leaders of the climate change movement waved around their credentials and told
everyone else what to do, in the fond delusion that that’s an adequate way to
bring about political change. Not so; too many people outside the scientific
community have watched scientific opinion whirl around like a weathercock on
too many issues; too many products labeled safe and effective by qualified
scientists have been put on the market, and then turned out to be ineffective
and unsafe; too many people simply don’t trust the guys in the white lab coats
any more—and some of them have valid reasons for that lack of trust. Thus a
movement that based its entire political strategy on the prestige of science
was hamstrung from the start.
Second, the climate change movement made the same mistake
that the Remain side made in the recent Brexit vote in the UK, and Hillary
Clinton’s presidential campaign seems to be making on this side of the pond: it
formulated its campaign in purely negative terms. David Cameron failed because
he couldn’t talk about anything except how dreadful it would be if Britain left
the EU, and Clinton’s campaign is failing because her supporters can’t talk
about anything but the awfulness of Donald Trump. In exactly the same way, the
climate change movement spent all its time harping about the global
catastrophes that were going to happen if they didn’t get their way, and never
really got around to talking about anything else—and so it failed, too.
I’m not sure why this sort of strategy has become such a
broken record in contemporary political life, because it simply doesn’t work.
People have heard it so many times, if all you can talk about is how awful this
or that or the other thing is, they will roll their eyes and walk away. To win
their interest, their enthusiasm, and their votes, you have to offer them
something to look forward to. That doesn’t mean you have to promise rainbows
and jellybeans; you can promise them blood, toil, tears, and sweat; you can
warn them of a long struggle ahead and call them to shared sacrifice, and
they’ll eat it up—but there has to be a light at the end of the tunnel,
something that doesn’t just amount to the indefinite continuation of a
miserably unsatisfactory status quo.
The climate change movement never noticed that, and so
people quickly got tired of the big bass drum going “doom, doom, doom,” all the
time, and wandered away. It didn’t have to be like that; the climate change
movement could have front-and-centered the vision of a grand new era of green
industry, with millions of new working-class jobs blossoming as America leapt
ahead of the oh-so-twentieth-century fossil-fueled economies of other nations,
but it apparently never occurred to anyone to do that. Instead, the climate
change movement did a really fine impression of a crowd of officious busybodies
trotting out round after round of doleful jeremiads about the awful future that
would swallow us up if we didn’t do what they said, and that did about as much
good as it usually does.
Third, the climate change movement inflicted a disastrous
own goal on itself by insisting that nobody with scientific credentials ever
claimed that an ice age was imminent, when anybody over fifty whose memory is
intact knows that that’s simply not true. Any of my readers who are minded to
debate this point should get and read the following books from the 1970s and
1980s: The
Weather Machine by Nigel Calder, After
the Ice by E.C. Pielou, and Ice
Ages by Windsor Chorlton and the editors of Time Life Books. These
were very popular in their time, and they’re all available on the used book
market for a few bucks each, as the links I’ve just given demonstrate. Nigel
Calder was a respected science writer; E.C. Pielou is still the doyenne of
Canadian field ecologists, and the third book was part of Time Life Book’s Planet
Earth series, each volume of which was supervised by scientific experts in
the relevant fields. All three books discuss the coming of a new ice age as the
most likely future state of Earth’s climate.
While you’re at it, you might also pick up a couple of
really good science fiction novels, The
Winter of the World by Poul Anderson and The
Time of the Great Freeze by Robert Silverberg. Anderson and
Silverberg were major SF authors in the 1960s and 1970s, at a time when success
in the genre depended on close attention to scientific fact, and both authors
drew on what were then considered credible forecasts of an approaching ice age
to ground their stories about the future. If you’re going to insist, along the
lines of George Orwell’s 1984, that Oceania has never been allied with
Eurasia, you’d better make sure that nobody’s in a position to check. If they
can, and they discover that you’re lying, your chance to convince them to trust
you about anything else has just gone out the window once and for all. That’s
how a great many people responded to the climate change movement’s attempt to
rewrite history and erase the ice age scare of the 1970s and 1980s.
Every time I’ve brought up this issue among climate change
activists, they’ve responded by insisting that I must be a climate change
denialist. That’s the fourth factor that’s contributed mightily to the
crumpling of the climate change movement: the rise within that movement of a
culture of intolerance in which dissent is demonized and asking questions about
tactics and strategy is equated with disloyalty. I’m thinking here especially,
though not only, of an embarrassing screed by climate change activist Naomi
Oreskes, which insisted with a straight face that asking questions about
whether renewables can replace fossil fuels is “a
new form of climate denialism”. As it happens, there are serious
practical questions about whether anything—renewable or otherwise—can replace
fossil fuels and still allow the inmates of today’s industrial societies to
maintain their current lifestyles, but Oreskes doesn’t want to hear it: for her,
loyalty to the cause demands blindness to the facts. As a way to alienate
potential allies and drive away existing supporters, that attitude’s hard to
beat.
Stunning political naïveté, a purely negative campaign, a disastrous
own goal through a constantly repeated and easily detected falsehood, and an
internal culture of intolerance and demonization: those four factors would have
been a heavy burden for any movement for social change, and any two of them
would most likely have caused the failure of climate change activism all by
themselves. There was, however, another factor at work, and to my mind it was
the most important of all.
To understand that
fifth factor, it’s useful to return to a distinction I made here two weeks ago
between facts, values, and interests. Facts are simply statements of what
happened, what’s happening, and what will happen given X set of conditions—the
things, in other words, that science is supposed to be about. Whether or not
anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are causing the global climate to spin
out of control, whether or not books published in the 1970s and 1980s by
reputable scientists and science writers predicted a coming ice age, whether or
not the project of replacing fossil fuels with renewable resources faces serious
difficulties—these are questions of fact.
Facts by
themselves simply state a case. Values determine what we should do about them.
Consider the factual statement “unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions are
responsible for an ongoing increase in weather-related disasters.” If the rate
of weather-related disasters doesn’t concern you, that fact doesn’t require any
action from you; it’s when you factor in “weather-related disasters ought to be
minimized where possible,” which is a value judgment, that you can go on to
“therefore we should cut greenhouse gas emissions.” Not all value judgments are
as uncontroversial as the one just named, but we can let that pass for now,
because it’s the third element that’s at issue in the present case.
Beyond facts and
values are interests: who benefits and who loses from any given public policy.
If, let’s say, we decide that greenhouse gas emissions should be cut, the next
step takes us squarely into the realm of interests. Whose pocketbook gets raided to pay for the
cuts? Whose lifestyle choices are inconvenienced by them? Whose jobs are
eliminated because of them? The climate change movement has by and large
treated these as irrelevant details, but they’re nothing of the kind. Politics
is always about interests. If you want your facts to be accepted and your
values taken seriously, you need to be able to respond to people’s interests—to
offer an arrangement whereby everybody gets something they need out of the
deal, and no one side has to carry all the costs.
That, in turn, is
exactly what the climate change movement has never gotten around to doing.
I’d like to
suggest a thought experiment here, to show just how the costs and benefits
offered by the climate change movement stacked up. Let’s imagine, for a moment,
that there’s an industry in today’s industrial nations that churns out colossal
amounts of greenhouse gases every single day. It doesn’t produce anything
necessary for human life or well-being; it’s simply a convenience, and one
that, not that many decades ago, most people in the industrial world did
without and never thought they’d need. If it were to be shut down, sure, a
certain number of people would lose their jobs, but most of the steps that have
been urged by climate change activists would have that effect; other than that,
and a certain amount of inconvenience for its current users, the only result
would be a sharp decrease in the amount of carbon dioxide and certain other
greenhouse gases being dumped into the atmosphere. That being the case, shouldn’t
climate change activists get to work right now to shut down that industry, and
shouldn’t they start off by boycotting it themselves?
The industry in
question actually exists. It’s the commercial air travel industry.
You may have
noticed, dear reader, that nobody in the climate change movement has been out
there protesting commercial air travel, and precious few of them are even
willing to cut back on their flying time, even though commercial air travel a
massive contributor to the problems the movement claims to be fighting. I know
of two scientists researching climate change who have pointed out that there’s
something just a little bit hypocritical about flying all over the world on
jetliners to attend conferences discussing how we all have to decrease our
carbon footprint! Their colleagues, needless to say, haven’t listened. Neither
has the rest of the climate change movement; like Al Gore, who might as well be
their poster child, they keep on racking up their frequent flyer miles.
On the other hand,
climate change activists are eager to shut down coal mining. What’s the most
significant difference between coal mining and commercial air travel? Coal
mining provides wages for the working poor; commercial air travel provides
amenities for the affluent.
The difference
isn’t accidental, either. Across the board, the climate change movement has
pushed for changes that will penalize people in what I’ve called the wage
class, the majority of Americans who depend on an hourly wage for their income.
The movement has gone out of its way to avoid pushing for changes that will
penalize people in what I’ve called the salary class, the affluent minority of
Americans who bring home a monthly salary. That isn’t a minor point. There’s
the hard fact that, on average, the more money you make, the bigger your carbon
footprint is—but there’s also a political issue, and it goes to the heart of
the failure of the climate change movement.
I’ve had any
number of well-meaning climate change activists ask me, in tones of baffled
despair, why they can’t get ordinary Americans to take climate change
seriously. My answer is not one they want to hear, because I tell them that
it’s because well-meaning climate change activists don’t take climate change
seriously. If you don’t care enough about the CO2 concentration in
the atmosphere to accept some inconveniences to your own lifestyle, how much do
you actually care about it? That’s the kind of logic that ordinary Americans
use all the time to judge whether someone is serious about a cause or simply
grandstanding, and by and large, climate change activism fails that sniff test.
Ordinary
Americans, furthermore, are all too used to seeing grandiose rhetoric deployed
by the affluent to load yet another round of burdens onto ordinary Americans.
It’s not the affluent, after all, who have been inconvenienced by the last
thirty years of environmental regulations, trade treaties, or what have you. To
wage class Americans, anthropogenic climate change is just more of the same,
another excuse to take jobs away from the working poor while sedulously
avoiding anything that would inconvenience the middle and upper middle classes.
The only way climate change activists could have evaded that response from wage
class Americans would have been to demonstrate that they were willing to carry
some of the costs themselves—and that was exactly what they weren’t willing to
do.
The bitter irony
in all this, of course, is that the climate change movement was right about two
very important things all along: treating the atmosphere as a gaseous sewer in
which to dump wastes from our smokestacks and tailpipes was a really dumb idea,
and the blowback from that idiocy is going to cost us—all of us—in blood. Right
now all three of the earth’s major ice caps—the Greenland, West Antarctic, and
East Antarctic ice sheets—have tipped over into instability; climate belts are
lurching drunkenly north and south, putting agriculture at risk in far more
places than a crowded, hungry planet can afford; drought-kindled wildfires in
the American and Canadian west and in Siberia are burning out of control...and
unless something significant changes, it’s just going to keep on getting worse,
year after year, decade after decade, until every coastal city on the planet is
under water, the western half of North America is as dry as the Sahara,
glaciers and snowfall are distant memories, and famine, war, and disease have
left the human population of the planet a good deal smaller than it is today.
That didn’t have
to happen. It might still be possible to avoid the worst of it, if enough
people who are concerned about climate change stop pretending that their own
lifestyles aren’t part of the problem, stop saying “personal change isn’t
enough” and pretending that this means personal change isn’t necessary, stop
trying to push all the costs of change onto people who’ve taken it in the teeth
for decades already, and show the only kind of leadership that actually
counts—yes, that’s leadership by example. It would probably help, too, if they
stopped leaning so hard on the broken prestige of science, found a positive
vision of the future to talk about now and then, backed away from trying to
rewrite the recent past, and dropped the habit of demonizing honest
disagreement. Still, to my mind, the crucial thing is that the affluent
liberals who dominate the climate change movement are going to have to
demonstrate that they’re willing to take one for the team.
Will they? I’d
love to be proved wrong, but I doubt it—and in that case we’re in for a very
rough road in the centuries ahead.
*******************
On a less dismal note, I’m pleased to report that the print edition of The Archdruid Report is up and running, and copies of the first monthly issue will be heading out soon. There’s still time to subscribe, if you like getting these posts in a less high-tech and more durable form; please visit the Stone Circle Press website. 