If environmentalism does nothing else, it forces you to stop and wonder, do words still mean anything?

When the Green Party’s Caroline Lucas was elected to Parliament earlier this year, she made the following speech, with these words for her voters:

Thank you so much for putting the politics of hope above the politics of fear.

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So what does the politics of hope actually look like? According to Lucas, it looks like this…

The Imperial War Museum in London may seem like a strange place to launch a report on climate change. But that’s where I am this morning, along with speakers from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Research, the Women’s Institute and the museum itself.

Why? Two reasons. First, climate change is one of the greatest threats to our country since the last world war. It’s not only environmentalists who are saying this. Business leaders, prime ministers, major charities and generals have all recognised the level of risk.

Second, if we are to overcome this threat – and the alternative is simply too awful to contemplate – then we need to mobilise as a nation in a way we haven’t seen since 1945.

There could not be a more precise expression of the politics of fear than this.

A politics of fear demands that we sacrifice normal ways of life and our ambitions for the sake of survival. That is to say the politics of fear demands not only that we accept austerity, but that we accept fewer political and civil freedoms, and that we put up with a government whose legitimacy is solely premised on the claim that it — and only it — can see us through some crisis. On top of this, Lucas promises catharsis:

People put up with so much disruption and deprivation because they knew there was no alternative, and because they believed society would emerge stronger at the end of the war.

As far as I am aware, the people who believed that society would emerge ‘stronger at the end of the war’ were the ones who used gas chambers and ovens to purge society of what they saw as holding it back. But let’s not confuse environmentalism and Nazism; Lucas is simply thick in the head, not a fascist.

WWII appeals to Lucas for several reasons, each of them a mythology. First, it exists as a story of moral absolutes. Thus re-inventing it creates the possibility of a favourable comparison to the leaders that won the war against unspeakable evil. Second, it harks back to an era of deference to authority, and of a country united by a shared purpose. Third, it creates a baseline for statements about the possibility of annihilation, against which comparisons could be made.

This is nothing all that new or unique to the Greens attempts to mythologise the war. Informal discussions with those of a hysterical, Leftist mentality will often result in unfavourable comparisons to fascism, if for instance, you don’t hold with a particular (i.e. their) anti-capitalism. And more recently, many identifying with the Right have mirrored the tactic. Many discussions about the climate these days seem to inevitably draw somebody to claim that the Nazi’s were in fact a Left movement because, National Socialism has the word ‘socialism’ in it (d’uh), and because it’s a ‘collectivist’ ideology, whereas the Right is more concerned with the individual… This stop, Obama-care; next stop, death camps. Both forms of historical revisionism forget what is historically particular to fascism and nazism, and so reveal the poverty of perspectives in the present, never mind on the past.

Reinventing the complex geopolitics of the 1930-1940s to create a black and white moral universe is the expression of a completely exhausted argument. During the other most recent expression of a politics of fear, the War on Terror, countless attempts were made to make Saddam Hussain ‘Hitler’, thus casting the leaders of the Coalition of the Willing as the Churchill or Roosevelt of the 21st Century. (No one wanted to play Stalin in this re-enactment). Lucas plays the same game of make-believe.

Previously on this blog, we’ve called this phenomenon pastiche politics. You take a moment from history — WWII, the Moon landing, slavery… — and you find some superficial way of attaching it to the climate debate. Some go even further, dressing up as ‘climate Suffragettes’. The irony being, of course, that democracy is the problem for these protesters: everyone has the vote, but are not voting the right way. Democracy isn’t doing what the climate Suffragettes want it to do. It’s a peculiar, postmodern phenomenon, that environmentalists — in the broadest sense of the word — epitomise, even if it isn’t particular to them. Environmentalism, then, says something about society and politics more broadly.

In the report itself, Lucas explains its origins.

We have been here before. That’s why I commissioned this report from the leading writer and analyst Andrew Simms, to explore what lessons history may be able to give us. There appear to be many.  In the 1930s, some politicians of all parties ignored the threat of war brewing in Europe and failed to take the steps to deter aggression or prepare early enough to defend ourselves. At the time, the two main excuses put forward to justify inaction and appeasement were that there was not enough money to pay for proper defences, and that the British public would not support a government that took tough measures.

Simms is better known for his monthly countdown to Armageddon in the Guardian. In August 2008, the New Economics Foundation, which Simms is a policy director of, published a report and a campaign website, claiming that within 100 months, the world would cross those fabled ‘tipping points’ unless immediate action was taken to drastically reduce emissions. This kind of environmental reasoning is typical of the NEF’s claims. For instance it argues that economic growth is no longer a possibility without environmental degradation and catastrophe, and calls for a new model of economics, focussing on happiness instead. And so it becomes clear that the ‘foundation’ for ‘new economics’ is disaster. That is to say that the NEF embody the politics of fear absolutely. It’s dressed up in token, progressive gestures about regard for human ‘well-being’, but without the promise of doom, these latter day Noahs are with Ark, but without flood.

The emphasis that the NEF have placed on well-being has become increasingly influential amongst the political establishment. David Cameron, for instance, has absorbed the NEF’s nonsense, and is set to create a ‘happiness index‘ to rival the UK’s economic performance measure, GDP.

To make the point then, that this is not new, not unique to environmentalists, and symptomatic of some broader phenomenon, it’s worth pointing out that the New Labour government attempted to create a ‘quality of life barometer‘ in 1998.

Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott has revealed a set of 13 indicators which will be published each year. The index will comprise facts and figures, ranging from housing to wild bird populations, which can be used to judge the government’s progress.[…] He said: “This is the first time any country has tried to put these indices – the social and the environment – alongside the economic and I’m quite proud to be doing it.” […] He said: “We are used to judging the economy’s performance on the basis of the GDP, inflation and employment figures. I want these headline indicators over time to become just as useful and familiar, reported regularly on TV, radio and in the newspapers.” The areas covered will include not just social investment, but also water quality and numbers of wild birds, to show the severity of hedgerow destruction.

The seemingly radical impulse to de-emphasise economic growth in matters of public life, therefore, do not emerge from radical movements, but as we can see, emerge from the establishment themselves. Yet more curiously, the promise to deliver ‘well-being’, happiness, and ‘quality of life’ comes with the threat of ecological crisis. The politics of fear will make you happy. What on earth is going on? Lucas gives the game away in the conclusion to her introduction:

Our aim is to help forge the national consensus that will support this or future governments in sustained, radical action. This is an ambitious project: but only if we show ambition can we hope to resolve the threats to our country that the changes in our climate are bringing.

Only a crisis can create the basis of a ‘national consensus’. Environmental politics, then, is not about protecting the environment, but about protecting a political establishment that has lost contact with the public. Whether or not ‘climate change is happening’, today’s politicians need it. What else could they use to ‘mend’ ‘broken Britain‘? The irony, of course, is that neither the climate, nor Britain is broken, but its political leaders are. They project their crises onto the atmosphere.

It’s a Guardian headline that might cause you to think its journalists were taking a good look at themselves,

Online news service promotes false climate change study

But Suzanne Goldenberg is pointing her fingers elsewhere.

An online news service sponsored by the world’s premier scientific association unwittingly promoted a study making the false claim that catastrophic global warming would occur within nine years, the Guardian has learned.

The study, by an NGO based in Argentina, claimed the planet would warm by 2.4C by 2020 and projected dire consequences for global food supply. A press release for the Food Gap study was carried by EurekAlert!, the news service operated by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) , and the story was picked up by a number of international news organisations on Tuesday.

“This is happening much faster than we expected,” Liliana Hisas, executive director of the Universal Ecological Fund (UEF) and author of the study, said of her findings.

I can’t quite believe what I am reading. A Guardian journalist… A guardian environmental journalist… is accusing someone of alarmism?

In an email, Gavin Schmidt, a Nasa climatologist wrote: “2.4C by 2020 (which is 1.4C in the next 10 years – something like six to seven times the projected rate of warming) has no basis in fact.”

The AAAS, which runs the EurekAlert! News service, removed reference to the study from its website on Tuesday afternoon.

“We primarily rely on the submitting organisation to ensure the veracity of the scientific content of the news release,” Ginger Pinholster, director of the office of public programmes for AAAS said.

“In this case, we immediately contacted a climate-change expert after receiving your query. That expert has confirmed for us that the information indeed raises many questions in his mind, and therefore we have removed the news release from EurekAlert!”

But by then the study had been picked up by a number of international news organisations including the French news agency AFP, Spain’s EFE news agency, the Canadian CTV television network and the Vancouver Sun, and the Press Trust of India.

For some climate scientists, the false claims made by the UEF paper recalled the highly damaging episode in which the IPCC, the UN’s climate science body, included the false information about melting of the Himalayan glaciers in its 2007 report.

Lawks-a-lordy! Even Gavin Schmidt is worried about over-egging the climate change pudding!

Are they finally beginning to get it? Is the Guardian going to be the newspaper of coherent, sober environmental reporting? They’d have to do something about this little series, though… In August 2008, Andrew Simms of the New Economics foundation declared that there were just 100 months to save the planet:

If you shout “fire” in a crowded theatre, when there is none, you understand that you might be arrested for irresponsible behaviour and breach of the peace. But from today, I smell smoke, I see flames and I think it is time to shout. I don’t want you to panic, but I do think it would be a good idea to form an orderly queue to leave the building.

Because in just 100 months’ time, if we are lucky, and based on a quite conservative estimate, we could reach a tipping point for the beginnings of runaway climate change

Simms has been writing a monthly doomsday countdown article ever since. And now there are — according to him — only 71 months left.

If Goldenburg really wants to challenge naked alarmism, she could stay in her employers offices. The Guardian is such a deep and rich mine of doom-saying and hysteria, I’ve never had to look much further than its latest articles for something to blog about.

Damien Carrington seems to be in unusually reflective mood, too…

By mass, 99.9% of the Earth is hotter than 100C. That means that not far below our feet is the power to boil unlimited water and generate clean, renewable energy. Is the UK throwing all it can at this extraordinary opportunity? Of course not, who do you think we are? Germans?

That contrasts strikingly with the more glamorous sister of deep geothermal energy, nuclear power. Both ultimately tap the heat generated by the decay of radioactive elements. Geothermal plants send water down holes to bring to the surface the heat from natural radioactive decay deep in the mantle. Nuclear power mines the radionucleides, concentrates them, sends them critical and then wonders what to do with the leftover mess – not very elegant by comparison.

Credit where it is due, it’s the right kind of question to ask. And it also speaks about the possibilities that exist, rather than the predominant eco-narrative of doom and limits. But Carrington is only so reflective…

Because instead of asking ‘why nuclear, rather than geothermal?’, a better question would have been ‘why wind, rather than geothermal?’. After all, wind has been the ‘technology’ of choice for environmentalists in government and in newspapers. It’s wind that enjoys the most support from government. And it is wind that really divides opinion; both about its efficacy, and its own impact on the natural environment. Who could really object to a geothermal energy plant? (I am willing to place a bet that should the UK ever get round to developing geothermal energy production, some environmentalist will find a reason to raise objections to it.)

There is no choice between nuclear and geothermal, of course. We could do both. What’s interesting is the way we see alarmism creep sideways into Carrington’s argument: nuclear is dangerous, and therefore undesirable. Nuclear is dangerous, of course. But if it wasn’t dangerous, it probably wouldn’t be as useful. Carrington begins an interesting discussion, but it’s ultimately predicated on the silly preoccupation with risk, rather than a sober discussion about how it can be managed. The reason we should develop nuclear energy is that it offers us greater possibilities, not because, just like geothermal, it allows us to ‘keep the lights on’. The discussion about energy still treats demand for energy as something that has to be met, almost begrudgingly, by authority, for the sake of merely coping. The energy discussion should instead be informed by what it is possible to do with more and more of it: more movement, more life, less manual labour, less going without. But that discussion is completely offensive to the core of the environmentalist’s perspective, which is absolutely committed to the idea of natural limits. The differences between the way human-centric and eco-centric arguments about energy develop are moral, not technical.

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I have an article up on Spiked today, about the new climate change exhibition — Atmosphere — at the Science Museum, London.

A large wall of projected graphics greets you as you enter the London-based Science Museum’s new exhibition,Atmosphere: Exploring Climate Science. Disembodied voices read the words that appear across the monolith: ‘Science can show us that greenhouse gasses are increasing… Science can show us that the carbon cycle is being disrupted… Science can show us what’s already changing…’ But for all the talk of science, it was eco-propaganda on display.

Read it here…

Bob Ward asks

Why have UK media ignored climate change announcements?

Yesterday’s announcement that 2010 tied for the warmest year ever recorded on Earth was ignored by nearly all UK media outlets. How can this be?

Many people have offered their ideas about how this can be in the comments below his article. Ward is not given to listening, but in this case, he might be able to claim that the censorious instincts of the Guardian’s comment editors have prevented such advice from reaching him. Here’s some more advice to Ward, anyhow.

The fact — if it is one — that 2010 was the ‘hottest year’ was ‘known’ before 2010 began. In December 2009, the Met Office announced:

Climate could warm to record levels in 2010

A combination of man-made global warming and a moderate warming of the tropical Pacific Ocean, a phenomenon known as El Niño, means it is very likely that 2010 will be a warmer year globally than 2009. […] The latest forecast from our climate scientists, shows the global temperature is forecast to be almost 0.6 °C above the 1961–90 long-term average. This means that it is more likely than not that 2010 will be the warmest year in the instrumental record, beating the previous record year which was 1998.

This statement had the following caveat:

A record warm year in 2010 is not a certainty, especially if the current El Niño was to unexpectedly decline rapidly near the start of 2010, or if there was a large volcanic eruption. We will review the forecast during 2010 as observation data become available.

The Met Office’s recent predictions have done more to damage their credibility than their successes have engendered confidence. The curious affair of its ‘secret’ cold winter advice to government comes at the end of a series of problems that the MO has made for itself, and now makes it seem yet more intransigent, and raises yet more questions about the purpose of forecasting. Do we forecast so that we can be ready for wind, rain, and snow; or is prediction now a political exercise — a ritual designed to remind us of something? This simple question is given greater weight, I believe, when we notice that contemporary politics completely devoid of almost any other substantive discussion about the future. The forecast decides our future for us — it is politically, morally, economically instructive.

And so it is a surprise to find to find MO staff treating their task so casually. For instance.. The 2010 forecast, made in late 2009, was another of its annual rituals, as sure as the seasons themselves…

Each December or January the Met Office, in conjunction with the University of East Anglia, issues a forecast of the global surface temperature for the coming year. The forecast takes into account known contributing factors, such as El Niño and La Niña, increasing greenhouse gas concentrations, the cooling influences of industrial aerosol particles, solar effects, volcanic cooling effects if known, and natural variations of the oceans.

So, it looks as though the MO may have got it right in 2010. But, in 2007, its report promised.. exactly the same,

The world is likely to experience the warmest year on record in 2007, the UK’s Met Office says.

An extended warming period, resulting from an El Nino weather event in the Pacific Ocean, will probably push up global temperatures, experts forecast. [Jan 4 2007.]

… So, what’s the point in all those staff and computer equipment, if all you need to do to make a ‘forecast’ is to say the same thing over and over until it happens?

But the El Nino didn’t turn out to have the force behind it that the MO had imagined, and both quickly changed direction. Said the Guardian in August that year,

The forecast from researchers at the Met Office’s Hadley Centre in Exeter reveals that natural shifts in climate will cancel out warming produced by greenhouse gas emissions and other human activity until 2009, but from then on, temperatures will rise steadily. Temperatures are set to rise over the 10-year period by 0.3C.

As we pointed out in early 2008, the MO’s, err… MO was straightforward…

The MO’s MO was to puts its money either on the developing El Nino or La Nina trend. And when global temperatures are getting as low as they have been in nearly three decades, predicting ‘a cold spell’ is no work of genius, and neither is the ‘prediction’ that it will get warm again… at some point. As we said, in April 2008, as snow covered the UK.

From here, it is likely that temperatures will rise after 2010, and that an El Nino event would follow, driving temperatures up again. Safe to say that the MET is on the money when it predicts an increase in 2010. Possibly. Maybe. either way, we have to wait… and remember… until 2010 to see if the gamble pays off.

Was this any more sophisticated a form of forecasting than this game show from the 1980s…

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Meanwhile, the Met Office continued to make the same order of claims…

2008 is set to be cooler globally than recent years say Met Office and University of East Anglia climate scientists, but is still forecast to be one of the top-ten warmest years. … Global temperature for 2008 is expected to be 0.37 °C above the long-term (1961-1990) average of 14.0 °C, the coolest year since 2000, when the value was 0.24 °C

2009 is expected to be one of the top-five warmest years on record, despite continued cooling of huge areas of the tropical Pacific Ocean, a phenomenon known as La Niña.

Perhaps surprisingly, the 2008 forecast was better than the 2009. 2008 came in tenth warmest year, but 2009 did not make the top 5. (According to the Hadley Centre).

But this post is supposed to be about 2010, and Bob Ward’s complaint that the media have ignored its record high temperature…

Not only was it ‘known’ that 2010 was the hottest ever year before it had even started, the claim was repeated by meteorologists and the media, throughout the year.

Just ten days into 2010, and the Guardian’s Robin McKie reported that,

It may be a hard notion to accept after a week that has seen the nation paralysed by snow and ice. Nevertheless, meteorologists are adamant that our world is still getting warmer. Indeed, many now believe that 2010 may turn out to be the hottest year on record.

‘It’s early days’, said the BBC’s Paul Hudson in February, ‘but it’s definitely first blood to NASA, The Met Office Hadley Centre and others in forecasting 2010 to be the warmest year on record.’

‘March and April warmest ever’, reported the Christian Science Monitor in May, and pointed to a US National Research Council report, which

…called for accelerated action to curb greenhouse gases, greater emphasis on research into technologies that will help wean the US from its fossil-fuel habit, and more focus on adaptation to global warming.

Later in May, Jonathan Leake of the Times said,

CLIMATE scientists have warned that 2010 could turn out to be the warmest year in recorded history. They have collated global surface temperature measurements showing that the world has experienced near-record highs between January and April.

‘June Was the Fourth Consecutive Month That Was Warmest on Record’, announced Science Daily, in July.

Later that July, the National Geographic added,

Thanks to a combination of global warming and an ocean-warming El Niño event, 2010 is set to become one of the hottest years ever recorded, a new report says.

In August, CBS reported that ‘Last month was the second warmest July on record, and so far 2010 remains on track to be the hottest year.’

In September, Juliet Eilperin in the Washington Post claimed, ‘2010 headed toward being hottest year on record’.

While the year’s not over yet, 2010 is on track to tie 1998 as the hottest one on record. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Wednesday that the first eight months of 2010 tied the same period in 1998 for the warmest combined land and ocean surface temperature on record worldwide.

The UK’s other alarmist newspaper, The Independent, repeated a claim from alarmist reinsurance firm, Munich Re, that 2010 had been an “‘exceptional year’ for weather disasters”.

2010 has so far been the warmest since measurements began 130 years ago. New temperature records were set in Russia (37.8 degrees centigrade) and in Asia (53.5 degrees in Pakistan).

As the year drew towards a close, and the COP16 talks began, Vicky Pope of the Met Office told Bloomberg,

The average temperature for the year through October shows 2010 will be one of the two warmest years in a series that goes back to 1850, said Vicky Pope, head of climate science at the Met Office. Scientists at the agency are preparing to revise data since 2000 to adjust for a new method that masked some of the rising temperature trend, she said.

And before the year was even out, the Telegraph headline read,

Cancun climate change summit: 2010 was hottest year on record

So to Bob Ward, we can say that the story he felt the media had ignored had in fact been running constantly throughout the year — all of it premature, and much of it . It was old by the time it was news. Far from being ignored, the press, meteorologists and politicians had been using the story to effect alarm, and momentum for their agendas. And perhaps that’s why the press now disappoint him. It simply isn’t news.

Ward and his fellow campaigners seem to need to have the climate change narrative running throughout the year, and attached to every weather-related news story. And it is this need which ultimately undermines the credibility of the science. It appears as a nakedly political effort, turning any story about human-interest or a scientific development into a campaigning tool. This precludes a sober public discussion about climate change, and turns it into something resembling a Hollywood B-movie. Ward wants you to read about the fact that 2010 was nearly as warm as the warmest year ever, until your eyes bleed. Or is he more like a man possessed by a religious fervour: everything becomes a sign… a SIGN… A SIGN!

However, there remains the controversy over the methodology by which NOAA and NASA GISS compile their data. And there remains the question about the significance of 2010 being nearly the warmest ever year, but not quite. Just as with the extreme events that caused chaos in New Orleans, foresight might well have prevented the devastation in Australia, which some alarmists are now trying to link to climate change. And there ought to be a public discussion — not about how tiny incremental changes in temperature produce catastrophes — but how such foresight could prevent tragedies such as experienced in Pakistan this year. The message of floods might well be that climate, changing or not, can be prepared for better than predicted, mitigated, or prevented. In other words, we shouldn’t let the forecasters do all the planning.

In the wake of the attempt made on congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords’ life, head of environment at the Guardian, Damien Carrington asks,

I have received a handful of threats by email and phone myself, which given my low profile is a measure of the extent of the problem. My better-known colleagues George Monbiot and Leo Hickman receive more.

So it’s clear that even in issues such as climate change there is an active fringe of people deploying violent rhetoric and hate mail against those with whom they disagree. Could that tip the balance between thought and action in the mind of an unstable individual? It’s a worryingly plausible thought.

Let me know what you think in the comments below.

I suggested that Theodore Kaczynski’s (aka The Unabomber) manifesto bore uncanny resemblance to much of the narrative offered by the Guardian’s ecological team…

1. The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in “advanced” countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued development of technology will worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human beings to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering—even in “advanced” countries.

2. The industrial-technological system may survive or it may break down. If it survives, it may eventually achieve a low level of physical and psychological suffering, but only after passing through a long and very painful period of adjustment and only at the cost of permanently reducing human beings and many other living organisms to engineered products and mere cogs in the social machine. Furthermore, if the system survives, the consequences will be inevitable: there is no way of reforming or modifying the system so as to prevent it from depriving people of dignity and autonomy.

3. If the system breaks down the consequences will still be very painful. But the bigger the system grows the more disastrous the results of its breakdown will be, so if it is to break down it had best break down sooner rather than later.

4. We therefore advocate a revolution against the industrial system. This revolution may or may not make use of violence: it may be sudden or it may be a relatively gradual process spanning a few decades. We can’t predict any of that. But we do outline in a very general way the measures that those who hate the industrial system should take in order to prepare the way for a revolution against that form of society. This is not to be a political revolution. Its object will be to overthrow not governments but the economic and technological basis of the present society.

5. In this article we give attention to only some of the negative developments that have grown out of the industrial-technological system. Other such developments we mention only briefly or ignore altogether. This does not mean that we regard these other developments as unimportant. For practical reasons we have to confine our discussion to areas that have received insufficient public attention or in which we have something new to say. For example, since there are well-developed environmental and wilderness movements, we have written very little about environmental degradation or the destruction of wild nature, even though we consider these to be highly important.

… Thus, we might to want to look for clues about the expression of violence in the thinking behind it. Accordingly, we find in environmental ideology the belittlement of humanity, as I pointed out on the website:

Leo Hickman: Humans are too stupid to prevent climate change from radically impacting on our lives over the coming decades. This is the stark conclusion of James Lovelock, the globally respected environmental thinker and independent scientist who developed the Gaia theory. http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/mar/29/james-lovelock-climate-change

James Lovelock: Unfortunately, Gaia is in trouble today, says Lovelock. It is infected by a virus called Homo sapiens. Humans are destroying ecosystems, killing off species in their thousands and destabilising climates. “We became the Earth’s infection a long and uncertain time ago, but it was not until about 200 years ago that the Industrial Revolution began: then the infection of the Earth became irreversible,” he says. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/mar/01/biography-scienceandnature

John Gray: Homo rapiens is only one of very many species, and not obiously worth preserving. Later or sooner, it will become extinct. When it is gone the Earth will recover. Long after the last traces of the humans have disappeared, many of the species it is bent on destroying will still be around, along with other that have yet to spring up. The earth will forget mankind. The play of life will go on.

In order to kill people, you must first dehumanise them, to make them sub-human, or undermine the value of humanity, such that people can become indifferent to people.

Carrington worries about the bit of hate mail he gets from deniers, conveniently ignoring missives sent the other way, and the casual disregard for democracy evinced by environmentalists as a matter of course.

But what he forgets most is that environmentalism is an open poison pen letter, to all humanity.
Adding later,

“Humans are too stupid to prevent climate change…”, “…a virus called Homo sapiens…”, “Homo rapiens is only one of very many species, and not obiously worth preserving”, are not statements about something that is going to happen in the future; they are statements about the moral value of humanity.

Monbiot: It is a campaign not for abundance but for austerity. It is a campaign not for more freedom but for less. Strangest of all, it is a campaign not just against other people, but against ourselves.

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty Four: There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always— do not forget this, Winston— always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever.

The point is straightforward enough. In order to do violence, one needs to have made oneself indifferent to the victim, either by making him sub-human, or by degrading entirely the concept of humanity.

And we don’t have to look hard for evidence of environmentalists doing precisely that.

Once you are convinced of the idea that humanity is like a cancer/virus/plague, it is undoubtedly easier to be indifferent to human suffering; at best, and to enjoy it, at worse.

The point is to see environmentalism as an ideology, just as with any other ideology of hate.

The Guardian moderator decided to delete my comments about Kaczynski, without even leaving the usual ‘This comment has been removed by a moderator. Replies may also be deleted.’ notice in place of the deleted comments that litter the CiF site. I repeated the comment, along with the suggestion that the moderator explains how my comment breaches their guidelines. No word from them, yet they deleted the comments. I now find the words…

Your comments are being premoderated.

… above the text entry field on the CiF website.

What could they possibly be afraid of?

Swearing? Nope.

‘Ad hominem’ argument? Nope.

Rudeness? Nope.

Lies or libel? Nope.

All of these exist in abundance on the CiF website.

What seems to have upset the moderators at CiF is a straightforward argument that peoples’ attitudes towards other people are shaped by the ideas they are exposed to. The anti-human message of environmentalism makes it easier to be indifferent to humans, therefore.

So you can say that humans are a cancer on CiF. You can say that humans are a virus on CiF. You can say that the human race is ‘not obiously worth preserving‘.

But you can’t say that these ideas are dangerous. You can’t challenge these ideas. And you can’t hold the authors of these ideas to account.

Bishop Hill points to Steve Connor in the Independent, who urges:

Don’t believe the hype over climate headlines

Connor is complaining about the story run in the Independent a decade ago, claiming that

Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past

Three years of cold winters have caused sceptics to revisit claims about the UK’s winter climate and climate change.

Connors defence of the Indy’s headlines is that

Headlines are meant to draw people into a story and have to conform to quite rigid restrictions on space in the printed medium – where this headline first appeared. They are meant to be accurate, but they can never do full justice to the nuances of reporting. This is even more true when it comes to the more complex nuances of science.

Gosh, the Indy are worried about scientific nuance being lost in the headlines…

But the original article had indeed said what the headline said.

According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event”.

“Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he said.

and

David Parker, at the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in Berkshire, says ultimately, British children could have only virtual experience of snow. Via the internet, they might wonder at polar scenes – or eventually “feel” virtual cold.

So while, Connor may be right to claim that

The headline in this case is not what the story itself said, as Dr Viner made clear. The story was about the frequency of snowfalls, and how “snow is starting to disappear from our lives”, which the it stated clearly.

He is only half right… And the fact is that the journalist, Charles Onians, incredulously reported the claims, giving emphasis to their shock value. Nonetheless, Connor blames the sub:

A more accurate headline would be something like: “Snowfalls are becoming less frequent in our little corner of the world but that doesn’t necessarily mean that snow will disappear from our lives completely and forever.” Unfortunately, any sub-editor who would suggest such a tediously long headline is unlikely to last very long.

Hmm. Yeah. Blame the sub… who, presumably also worked up this little gem from the delicate, scientific nuance contained in the story…

Who does Connor think he’s kidding? The Independent is just about as alarmist as it is possible to be. And that’s why things like this happen:

The Guardian has a couple of articles claiming that the UK police infiltrated environmental activist organisations.

Today’s paper:

He turned up with long hair, tattoos and an insatiable appetite for climbing trees. Few people suspected anything odd of the man who introduced himself as Mark Stone on a dairy farm turned spiritual sanctuary in North Yorkshire.

Yesterday’s Observer:

Legal documents suggest Kennedy’s activities went beyond those of a passive spy, prompting activists to ask whether his role in organising and helping to fund protests meant he turned into an agent provocateur.

There is some speculation that a current trial of protesters may collapse as a consequence.

It’s all very intriguing, of course. But all the talk of the possibility that Mark Stone/Kennedy may have been an ‘agent provocateur’ belies the fact that the state — that is to say the British government, and the UK’s political establishment — wanted the same thing as the protesters: strong, international, legally-binding restrictions on CO2 emissions. The thing which has held the deadlocked government back from realising its ambitions is that dreaded nuisance, the British public, not those dreadlocked nuisances, eco-protesters.

To make the point, here are again two things I’m fond of using to demonstrate the fact that the eco-activists are merely doing what the government want them to do. Here is the current PM, holding a press release at Greenpeace’s London HQ:

[youtube 8gr5rIK097E]

Here is the previous Secretary of State for Energy and Climate change, Ed Miliband, now leader of the Labour Party:

When you think about all the big historic movements, from the suffragettes, to anti-apartheid, to sexual equality in the 1960s, all the big political movements had popular mobilization. Maybe it’s an odd thing for someone in government to say, but I just think there’s a real opportunity and a need here.

Maybe the police were worried about what might happen if environmental activists actually succeeded in targeting one or more of the UK’s power stations, disrupting the Grid. I know, it sounds crazy.

But if the police are really worried about public order in the wake of self-righteous activists closing down the UK’s electricity supply, leading to widespread chaos, they should perhaps go and have a word with these sitting-down-activists…

… rather than these ones…

This is Polly Higgins, she’s a barrister, and an eco-warrior. She wants there to be an international law to punish ‘ecocide’.

[youtube NwQ82ZQJ6Hk]

This is why this is an absurd idea, in case it wasn’t already obvious.

Higgins idea is that ecocide is

“the extensive destruction, damage to or loss of ecosystem(s) of a given territory, whether by human agency or by other causes, to such an extent that peaceful enjoyment by the inhabitants of that territory have been severely diminished”

There are already many problems with this idea, and it has only just been taken out of its box.

The biggest problem is that ‘the extensive destruction, damage to or loss of ecosystem(s) of a given territory’ has happened spontaneously, or ‘naturally’, throughout history. Perhaps in the same way, entire groups of people have perished. But we would not call the death of a given population of people through plague, famine, or some other natural catastrophe ‘genocide’, which is what Higgins wants us to understand ‘ecocide’ as equivalent to. And by the same token, there has never been a natural genocide.

You couldn’t try ‘nature’ for the spontaneous transformation of forest into savannah or desert, nor for the emergence or passing of an ice age. Yet these things surely are nothing but ‘the extensive destruction, damage to or loss of ecosystem(s) of a given territory’ which ‘severely diminishes’ the ‘peaceful enjoyment by the inhabitants of that territory’. So in order to cope with this problem, Higgins makes a distinction between ‘ascertainable ecocide’: deforestation, oil spills, fossil fuel extraction, pollution-dumping; and non-ascertainable ecocide: tsunami, earthquake, typhoon, Act of God. The line of interest here is that ecocide is caused ‘by human agency or by other causes’, but it’s only ecocide that is ’caused by human agency’ which is pertinent.

Several new problems emerge.

1. Is ‘ascertainable ecocide’ (deforestation, oil spills, fossil fuel extraction, pollution-dumping) a problem for ‘the inhabitants of [a] territory’, if it is not the case that ‘peaceful enjoyment by the inhabitants of that territory have been severely diminished’? This is the ‘if a tree falls in the forest and there is nobody to hear it, does it still make a sound’ question for the eco-lawer-warrior.

2. Is there not an acceptable level of diminished ‘peaceful enjoyment by the inhabitants of that territory’, and what is it? That is to say, surely we accept the occasional oil spill, because pulling oil out of the ground creates many new possibilities for human life, which are not possible otherwise. Put another way, isn’t the occasional disturbance of ‘peaceful enjoyment by the inhabitants of [some] territory’ the price of a better condition of existence?

Before any light is shed on these questions, Higgins outlines the concept of ‘crimes against peace’, which have already been established, and which are tried in the International Criminal Court (ICC).

[youtube JHO30rNSksA]

The existing ‘crimes against peace’ are crimes against people: genocide, crimes against humanity, war crime, crime of aggression. They are, according to Higgins:

• a) Principles of universal validity which apply to civilisation as a whole
• b) The prohibition of certain behaviour
• c) Universally outlawed
• d) morality based on the sacredness of life

These definitions are somewhat redundant. ‘Principles of universal validity which apply to civilisation as a whole’, for instance means no more than ‘law’. And most laws are to some extent the ‘prohibition of certain behaviour’. Point c — ‘Universally outlawed’ — is a mere restatement of a and b. Higgins could have shed as much light on ‘crimes against peace’ by saying ‘laws are laws’.

‘In essence’, says Higgins, ‘a crime against peace is a morality based on the sacredness of life’. Can she really mean that?

Genocide is a ‘crime against peace’, so a simple substitution of equivalent terms gives us the following paraphrase:

Genocide is a morality based on the sacredness of life.

It should be clear here that Higgins is talking gobbledegook. To be charitable (or rather, to give sense to her proposition such that we can take issue with it) what she seems to want to say is that life is sacred, and that therefore there is a moral imperative to protect life, and that the laws which prohibit ‘crimes against peace’ are intended to serve that imperative. The laws and the crimes they prohibit are not ‘a morality’; laws are not morality, and morality is not law. One can act morally outside of the law, and conversely one can act immorally within the law, and one can seek to turn moral ideas into laws, but they will never be equivalents. Higgins, the barrister, has presumably studied law, and so really ought to be aware of the distinction. Moreover, Higgins should be aware of the distinction between a crime and a law.

The difficulty Higgins has with a clear exposition of the ‘crimes against peace’ and their philosophical basis is owed to the fact that she wants to make them do what they were not actually designed to do. Higgins wants to extend ‘crimes against peace’ to protect all life, whereas they are originally conceived to protect only human life. That is to say that the moral foundation of the laws prohibiting ‘crimes against peace’ is the understanding of the sacredness of human life, not life in general. Thus her list a through c is designed to sound like a plausible set of premises, but in fact are tautologous, ultimately meaningless, and are not reflected in the wider literature about ‘crimes against peace’. For instance, if you search for these expressions on Google, you will find that it returns results that link mainly to discussions about Higgins’ own conception of ecocide, not international law. Thus this outline of crimes against peace is very much unique to Higgins.

So it is only after her reinvention of ‘crimes against peace’ that they become about protecting ‘the well being of life’, and a sleight of hand allows her to extend this to ‘the well being of all life’ as though she had only made a minor adjustment to the language:

These crimes are put in place to protect and uphold the well-being of life. I’m proposing that we extend that definition to including a fifth crime. And that is the crime of ecocide. And we extend the well being of life to not just human life, but to all life.

But this is far more than a minor adjustment to the language. It is a complete re-writing of the language and its meanings, and the philosophical underpinnings.

Now we have an answer to our two questions from the first film. The ‘inhabitants’ who are the victims in the definition of ecocide:

the extensive destruction, damage to or loss of ecosystem(s) of a given territory, whether by human agency or by other causes, to such an extent that peaceful enjoyment by the inhabitants of that territory have been severely diminished

… are any entity which is ‘life’. I.E. the members of the ecosystem are the inhabitants of an ecosystem. Tree, bug, germ, mouse, bush, mushroom… are all now protected by the law prohibiting ecocide.

So the most obvious (and fatal) problem for Higgins definition of ‘ecocide’ is that it should only be prohibited by law if we hold with its premise that ‘all life is sacred’. Some people may well believe such a thing, but they are few and far between, and there is no automatic reason to assume that people would necessarily agree with this, in the way that we can expect people to have mutual regard for human life.

That should be enough to show that ‘ecocide’ should not be made a crime. It is a matter of conscience, perhaps. But not a matter for courts of law. Nonetheless, there emerge some curious contradictions and redundancies from the original conception, which reveal more about Higgins ‘thinking’ in particular, and of environmentalism in general.

On Higgins’ view, human agency makes humans subject to the law prohibiting ecocide in order to protect all life. But the definition does not protect all life from itself, nor humans from other organisms. Humans, then, are exceptional, in that the faculty of agency makes it possible for them to be culpable, yet is not understood to give them any privilege, nor even any protection from the elements, or from any natural thing.

This is remarkable, because human agency is the exclusively human attribute from which the premise that ‘all human life is sacred’ emerges. It is the faculty of agency which makes human life sacred. Only a human can reason about the sacredness of anything, be it humanity, pig, or life. This is the premise of the international laws intended to protect human dignity from systematic degradation: mass murder, humiliation, persecution, and so on. But the object of sacredness in Higgins’s view is in the first instance human life as a mere biological process, not ‘human life’ as a mere condition of agency. Higgins misses the very important thing about human life: it is experienced; it has purpose, intention, values. Instead, on Higgins view, the thing which gives human life its identity is ‘agency’ as though it were some arbitrary characteristic, such as extravagant plumage, adaptation to a particular ecological niche, or some well-developed instinct that makes it subject to laws.

Higgins has denied the very thing which made ‘crimes against peace’ particular to humans. The consequence of her move from human exceptionalism to anti-humanism is that she commits the crimes that the definition of ‘crimes against peace’ were designed to prohibit: she degrades humanity. She credits humans with less moral worth than slugs and toads, not merely because she privileges some abstract notion of ‘life’ over ‘being alive’, but because she turns agency — which ought to be a characteristic that privileges human life — into something which makes humans obliged to endure life within natural limits, while being the only organism capable of both endurance, and conceiving of a means to improve it: chopping down forests; drilling for oil, coal and gas; eradicating pests and diseases; intensive agriculture, etc.. etc.. This is what is meant on this blog by ‘anti-humanism’. It runs deep throughout environmentalism. Yet it is presented by environmentalists as a straightforward telling of the facts.

More trivially, perhaps, is the redundancy within the definition of the crime.

the extensive destruction, damage to or loss of ecosystem(s) of a given territory, whether by human agency or by other causes, to such an extent that peaceful enjoyment by the inhabitants of that territory have been severely diminished

Now we know that the word ‘inhabitants’ means any living thing, and that living things comprise ‘ecosystems’, and that ecosystems are geographically bounded, we can again substitute equivalent terms in the expression to produce the following absurdity:

the extensive destruction, damage to or loss of ecosystem(s) of a given ecosystem(s), whether by human agency or by other causes, to such an extent that peaceful enjoyment by the ecosystem(s) of that ecosystem(s) have been severely diminished

Higgins admits as much in a circuitous rewording of an existing crime against peace that protects the environment, the emphasis of which she again moves from people to all life in general.

‘widespread long-term and severe damage to the natural environment which would be clearly excessive in relation to the concrete and direct overall COMMUNITY advantage anticipated’
= the extensive damage to the ecosystem(s)
= Ecocide

The law Higgins modifies had obviously been designed to protect those caught up in a war from aggressors damaging the productive capacity of the land. The law was never designed to protect ‘nature’ or ‘life’ in general. But through word play, and after concealing the basis for the law, Higgins radically transforms its purpose. The word ‘community’ had previously been ‘military’. Thus prohibiting any force from causing damage to the resources on which human populations depend, in order to inflict punitive or malicious damage to that population. The ‘natural environment’ gets substituted for ‘ecosystems’ and the word ‘community’ gets substituted, again, for the ‘members of ecosystems’, i.e. all life. So once again, the substitution reveals the tautology.

widespread long-term and severe damage to ecosystem(s) which would be clearly excessive in relation to the concrete and direct overall ecosystem(s)’ advantage anticipated.

Clearly there are problems now with the proportion of any ‘ecocide’ crime. Ecocide could almost be any crime, otherwise. Chopping down a tree would deprive the ‘community’ of its ‘ecosystem’. Is chopping down a tree ‘ecocide’? Two trees? A small forest? To establish some proportion, Higgins establishes some existing legislation might be useful, with the definition of ‘size, duration and impact’. Size can be easily established, according to Higgins by doing things like looking at satellite images to gauge the extent of deforestation, for instance. Various agencies monitor the ‘depletion of species’, she says, and this information could be made available.

The recent Mexican gulf oil spill is given as an example of long-term extensive damage. Leaving aside the questions that exist about the actual extent of the damage caused by the oil spill, and taking Higgin’s claims at face value, the spill would surely not fall under either category of ‘ascertainable ecocide’ or ‘non-ascertainable ecocide’. After all, it wasn’t a deliberate leaking of oil into the ocean. And to compare it to the existing equivalent, genocide, no Nazi would have been able to pretend that they ‘accidentally’ murdered 6 million Jews. It wasn’t human ‘agency’ which caused the oil spill, because ‘agency’ isn’t a factor in the kind of negligence that would ’cause’ an accident. Moreover, since it is people, and not abstract agencies such as ‘companies’ that she wants to try, it would be hard to locate the individuals ‘responsible’ in such a huge operation. Yet presumably, she want’s to hold BP’s directors — who likely had little to do with the actually technical process — to account. Again, the concept of agency in Higgins’ understanding is limited, and only serves to make humans morally culpable, without being in fact independent moral agents.

Higgins moves on to establish ‘why’ it is necessary to make ‘ecocide’ a crime.

[youtube PF8rTEqBai0]

Says Higgins…

100 living species become extinct

1,000 acres of peat bogs are excavated

150,000 acres of tropical rainforest are destroyed

2 million tons of toxic waste is dumped

22 million tons of oil are extracted

100 million tons of GHGs are released

… each day

These look like dramatic figures. But the basis for #1 at least, can be ignored straight away as completely alarmist. The definition of ‘species’ is not particularly robust, and the only way that the existence of a species can be established is by a positive identification. The non-existence of a species can only be established by looking everywhere, simultaneously — an impossibility. These results are the product of a model, and the model itself is going to contain far more assumptions than facts. And just as the notion of ‘species’ is ambiguous, so too is the definition of ‘extinction’. The weakest of all material claims made by environmentalists are about ‘biodiversity’ and extinction.

We can also ask ‘so what’ to the remaining questions. What is the problem of 1,000 acres of peat bog being excavated? What value does peat have, while it merely sits there, being peat? And isn’t Higgins also against the extraction of fossil fuels which would make it unnecessary to extract peat — if it’s being used for energy? How much rainforest is really being destroyed? Where? and isn’t it also true that many parts of the world are seeing massive reforestation? And again, isn’t it the case that the real saviour of the forests is the oil well? If there’s oil and coal available, who in their right mind would want to use wood?

The UN, says Higgins, as though it were an authority, says that ‘ecosystems are at tipping point’, as if that meant anything. But it doesn’t. What is a ‘tipping point’? More to the point, what is an ecosystem, and how is it determined what its ‘tipping point’ actually is? Nobody knows. Onto this bogus ecological reasoning, Higgins adds the headline findings from an attempt to determine the financial value of ‘ecosystem services’, and the ‘damage’ to them that has been caused by ‘corporates’. Between $2.2 and $4 trillion, she claims, of ‘ecocide’. But is this spurious figure a big price for the benefit? What’s the point of assessing costs without assessing benefits? Don’t ask the UK’s former chief prognosticator, Sir David King, who believes that the conflicts in Dafur and Iraq are fought for water and oil respectively, and that as such, we can say that this century will be the century of ‘resource wars’. But what does a scientist know about wars, and why they are fought? The claims can be easily dismissed. Dafur is a region that has historically experienced long and deep periods of drought — mother natures own form of ecocide; and before either of the military campaigns in the gulf, the price of oil stood stable at around $20/barrel. At such low prices, the real problem is not resource scarcity, but on the contrary, its over abundance. David King’s advice to the government is as ill-conceived as Higgins’; yet King was actually appointed. The lunatics are running the asylum. But if only it was as simple as madness…

We have to break the cycle, says Higgins, of ecocide>resource-depletion>conflict>war. She demands that it be broken urgently. But her claims are premature. A recent study in PNAS concluded that

Scientific claims about a robust correlational link between climate variability and civil war do not hold up to closer inspection. […] The graph shows change in the estimated probability of civil war (five variants) for six alternative climate measures, based on 1,000 simulations for each model specification. Given the feeble impact of climate, illustrating the range of uncertainty is more meaningful than plotting point estimates of predicted probabilities. In all but one of the specifications, the 95% confidence bands for the climate variables include both positive and negative effects. Moreover, neither temperature nor precipitation performs consistently across models as even the sign of the mean first difference estimate for a given variable is sensitive to model specification. Only the final model (5f in Fig. 2) returns a statistically significant climate parameter estimate; apparently, major civil war years (i.e., years with at least 1,000 battle deaths) are more frequent in years following unusually wet periods—a result that directly contradicts the notion of scarcity-induced conflicts.

As has been argued on this blog, the naturalisation of complex social phenomena such as conflict and poverty is one of the most damaging things about environmentalism. Now we can see this danger made real in the prose of Higgins’ argument. She pretends that a law abolishing ‘ecocide’ will prevent war. But surely the reality is the opposite. The implication that wars are fought for resources should create an imperative to locate more resources, and better ways of using them. But instead, Higgins wants us to reduce the production of water, and oil. Far from reducing the possibility of resource wars, by limiting their supply, environmentalism and environmental institutions such as laws against ecocide will make them happen.

[youtube WgFSE9yMm_s]

Higgins now moves to consider ‘lessons from history’. And this is something we’ve all seen before: the comparison of arguments against environmental regulation with arguments against the abolition of slavery. Slavery is a topic discussed on this blog here, here, and here. And as we point out, the comparison of making equivalents of using oil and using slaves depends on the degraded understanding of what makes slavery wrong in the first place. It should be no surprise that somebody who only holds with the limited understanding of human agency that Higgins has should find it easy to draw a comparison between denying humans the right to express their freedom and filling up the car.

Listen carefully to Higgins’ narrative:

We can see what happened 200 years ago with the aboltion of slavery. At that time there were 300 companies trading either directly or indirectly in slaves. There were 600 million slaves on the market. What we had there was upstream, the traders who were the 300 companies and downstream we had the 6,000 consumers. They were the end users.

In 1810 — 200 years ago — there were just 1 billion people on the planet. The graphic says differently, but in the voice over, Higgins claims that 600 million of them were slaves. I assume that she intended to say that there were 6 million slaves, but that she got confused. But the mistake it speaks generally about her lack of fluency with the facts she’s using that she didn’t spot her mistake as she said it, nor even in post production, nor even in watching it since it has been published. But the figure is meaningless in any case. Slavery, of course, only features in this argument to provide a moral absolute: something we’re already committed to. It’s a lazy way of making an argument. And it gets more sloppy. The abolitionists’ strategy was to turn off the supply of slaves, and so it is with resource ‘exploitation’: we should turn off supply. We should make those responsible for supplying resources also responsible for ecocide. And the arguments against abolishing slavery look like the arguments against environmental legislation. Even if this is true — which seems unlikely, unless you think that a barrel of oil ought to have legal rights — it’s true only by virtue of the facts of the market. Arguments about the regulation of any trade will take a similar form, because, although the commodities in question may be different, the mechanism of their exchange is always similar. That’s the point of capital: it permits the exchange of things of different types: labour, wool, coal, and food have little in common as substances, but can be exchanged for money, and vice-versa. There is absolutely nothing of interest, therefore, in the comparisons Higgins draws.

[youtube _uCB8FfO2UI]

Higgins now considers some institutions that already exist, which may serve the aim of fighting ecocide. There’s not much to say about the nonsense, except to say that she again extends the definition of existing legal definition to encompass all organisms, not merely people. She then extends this further to argue that ‘We need now to move towards protecting all community interests. So that would be the water, as well as the soils, as well as the air, as well as the land, as well as the species who live within that territory.’ It would not be able to exist as an organism in the world Higgins wants to create.

Ecocide is already understood as a moral crime, says Higgins, it just needs to be made formal. But how true is this?

It may well be true that oil spills and the like cause public anger. But this is largely because it has an effect on people, and that such a mess for both humans and wildlife might, in many cases, have been avoided by due care. The claim that the public reaction to environmental disaster legitimises the creation of a law banning ecocide is a stretch: most people do not think that trees, nor water, air and land, have rights.

Punishing ecocide with fines doesn’t work, says Higgins, only incarceration provides the disincentive necessary to prevent it. She would lock up CEOs, heads of states, heads of financial institutions. These people would not want to jeopardise their liberty, and so would refuse to permit, or involve themselves with anything likely to cause ‘ecocide’. Thus they are turned from planet-destroyers into planet-savers. Meanwhile, of course, nothing would happen. No mining of energy. No economic or technological development. No chemical production. No industrial agriculture. No hospitals. No schools. No Factories. There could only be subsistence lifestyles in Higgins’ bleak Utopia.

[youtube qkimgUYb5uU]

Higgins now summarises her argument, begining with an account of ‘strict liability’ as it stands in the UK.

Parliament creates an offence of strict liablity because it regards the doing or not doing of a particular thing itself so undesirable as to merit the imposition of a criminal punishment on anyone… irrespective of that party’s knowledge, state of mind, belief or intention.

The involves a departure from the prevailing cannons of the criminal law because of the importance which is attached to achieving the result which Parliament seeks to achieve.

On this basis, shouldn’t proposing the crime of ecocide should fall into this category? It is a disgusting idea, which degrades the very concept of humanity, making the human no more significant before the law than an ant, worm, or for that matter, germ… Except that, unlike animals, humans can be tried and punished. This idea, then, is worse even than the medieval practice of trying animals as happened throughout Europe. Infestations of rats, insects, leeches would result in their being summoned before a court, and threatened with excommunication. They were, as beings in creation, subject to Gods law, and as such were given legal representation, and often won, leaving humans to suffer. It took the enlightenment to end such practice. And it was in this era that the concept of humanity developed, such that we would now see the summoning of an animal to court, or extending rights to animals as legal subjects as ridiculous. Until now, that is. Higgins, who wants to extend legal rights to trees and insects — the ‘wider earth community’ — epitomises the end of humanism:

View the planet as an inert thing, and what we do is we impose a value. We commoditise the planet. That is property law. View the planet as a living being, and we recognise the intrinsic value, and we take responsibility.

What was discovered during the enlightenment was that nature has no intrinsic value. Value is an inherently human concept. Only humans valorise. Nothing else is capable of understanding value. Without humans, then, the planet really is inert. Moreover, it is evident that the planet is not a living being — no planet is a living being. By presupposing a ‘value’ for ‘the planet as a living being’ Higgins reduces the whole of humanity into merely another species, and this creates the basis of a system of law — a powerful set of institutions — to extend the reach of her poisonous ideas. As I pointed out in the previous post, Higgins wants to replace the tyranny that exists as a figment of her imagination as a real, functioning, institution: eco law, which punishes eco criminals. The real purpose of eco law is to create an eco-tyranny, in control of resources in exactly the way Higgins imagines EON to be.

If the law is an ass, its mother, the law-maker is presumably not going to be troubled by the family resemblance being pointed out — she is after all, by her own admission, no better than any other ‘inhabitant of the wider earth community’.

It seems unlikely that her ideas will ever be realised, because there would be a very real fight about any such law and the institutions to serve it being created.

Yet having said that, there remains an important question. How is it possible that someone can come to embrace these absurd ideas without seeming to have reflected at all critically on their soundness, and their consequences? If it can happen to Higgins, can’t it happen to any other eco-loon in a position of power?

This blog has argued previously that environmentalists have tended to alienate themselves through the expression of their own ideas in the public sphere. Maybe this has two implications.

First, we should openly point at and mock Higgins and any institution that gives her ideas positive space: the Guardian, and the UN, in this case.

Second, we should take more seriously the fact that the positive developments that the last few centuries of human history have produced seem to be disappearing from public debate. We now have Higgins demanding a forced march back beyond the dark ages. We should be sure about what we are defending, and not imagine that this is just a debate about whether or nor ‘climate change is happening’ that can be settled with the correct scientific account. It’s bigger than that, and even climate change alarmists should be concerned about what Higgins proposes.

Geoff points us to a Guardian article, which he points out goes some way to demonstrating the tendency of climate-alarmists to undermine their own credibility, and to alienate themselves against the wider public. Rather like the 10:10 campaign did with the ‘splattergate’snuff video…

Why we need a law on ecocide Until we have a law to prosecute those who destroy the planet, corporations will never be called to account for their crimes

Sophie Scholl, a Munich University student, was executed for revealing the truth about the activities of the Nazi authorities; today 20 brave Ratcliffe whistleblowers have been sentenced at Nottingham crown court for plotting to draw attention to the truth of the activities of another German entity. This time, replace the tyranny of the Nazis with the tyranny of the energy giant E.ON.

It should not be necessary to point it out: the Nazis systematically murdered millions of people; E.ON provides its customers — homes, schools, hospitals, churches, synagogoes, mosques, factories, offices — with electricity. If any of its customers don’t want to use electricity, they are free to turn off their appliances, and go hug a tree.

There is no Tyranny of E.ON. Nonetheless, in Polly Higgins’ fertile imagination, there is. And she proposes that to overthrow it, we need the creation of an international law, like the ‘crimes against peace’, such as genocide, called ‘ecocide’. That’s right, Higgins wants to oust the imaginary tyranny with a very real one. Says Higgins,

Sixty years ago the tyranny was Nazism. Today it is pursuit of profit without moral compass or responsibility. Despite the planned Ratcliffe protests, it is one that the majority of humanity accepts regardless of the known consequences. We look the other way
from the daily reports of destruction of our world by those who are in a position of superior responsibility; the master controllers of our fates are those who determine how we live our lives. It is the heads of the top corporations who gamble with the fate of our planet; those who produce and supply our energy are the most culpable of all.

Notice that Higgins first points the fingers at us… We’re no longer innocent bystanders: ‘… the majority of humanity accepts regardless of the known consequences.’ There are only degrees of guilt in her nasty moral universe.

She then makes an interesting move. In her view, we are culpable because we ignore ‘the master controllers of our fates are those who determine how we live our lives’, but we’re less culpable than the real baddies. And her answer, of course, is to morally-blackmail us into consenting to the creation of the means to create precisely the role of ‘master controller’, which hitherto only existed in her imagination. Higgins’ conception of ‘ecocide’ would make it almost impossible to run a company that produces and supplies energy. Thus the supply and production of energy falls under the control of a cartel of eco-lawyers.

Polly Higgins… You are an eco-fascist.