Fat People are Killing the Polar Bears (Again)
Last year we mentioned Ian Roberts’ theory, as reported in New Scientist, that fat people are responsible for more than their fair share of global warming, and, in order to get a snappy headline out of it, we tied it into another New Scientist article, which was critical of research by Willie Soon, who had suggested that polar bears aren’t as vulnerable as is widely claimed. Both NS articles were, in our view, rather shoddy, reflecting the magazine’s partiality in the climate debate. Who could not form the impression that fat people were more responsible than the rest of us for the demise of the polar bear, if they took the magazine at face value? Excuses for snappy headlines aside, our post – ‘Fat People Are Killing the Polar Bears‘ – was intended to demonstrate the confusion between the science and morality of climate change.
True to the eco-warrior’s demands that we ‘Reduce! Re-use! Recycle!’, Roberts’ argument – which deserves to go to landfill – has been recycled, in an article entitled Fat is an environmental issue in, yes, New Scientist magazine, who, on the same day, also reports uncritically more recycled ‘news’ from uber-eco-warriors, the WWF, that human activities are devastating the world’s wildlife. What have these fatsos got against polar bears, for goodness sake?
According to Roberts and his London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine colleague Phil Edwards, the fatties have to take the blame for not only climate change but also for panic-du jour, the global food crisis. Writing in the Lancet they argue that:
Petrol tanks and stomachs were competing well before biofuels were proposed to tackle climate change. Motorised transport is more than 95% oil-dependent and accounts for almost half of world oil use. Because oil is a key agricultural input, demand for transportation fuel affects food prices. Increased car use also contributes to rising food prices by promoting obesity which, for the reasons outlined below, increases the global demand for food.
Roberts and Edwards want the government to address the obesity ‘epidemic’, climate change and the food crisis in one fell swoop by making it more difficult for people to get around:
Urban transport policies that promote walking and cycling would reduce food prices by reducing the global demand for oil, and promotion of a normal distribution of BMI would reduce the global demand for, and thus the price of, food. Decreased car use would reduce greenhouse gas emissions and thus the need for bio-fuels, and increased physical activity levels, would reduce injury risk and air pollution, improving population health.
Of course, the government is already making it more difficult for people to get around. Increasingly, making it more difficult for people to get around is what governments are for, hence our point that local and national governments use ‘saving the planet’ to justify the reduction of public services, in favour of authoritarian, restrictive, and punishing policies, and in doing so, turn the notion of public service on its head.
But why pick on fat people? If calorie intake is the problem, what about those irritating, self-righteous athletic types? Or if resource use is what troubles them, how about, let’s say, academics, whose airmile quotient between conferences and (mis)use of precious paper outstrips by orders of magnitude what your average gluttonous member of the general public gets through? Or what about overweight academics? Or, overweight, denialist academics?
But calorie intake is not the only problem, apparently. Fat people are also lazy people, inclined to use cars more than the rest of us. And using cars makes you fatter. And then there’s all the extra fuel needed to transport all that extra lipid from A to B.
Recycling old research is, of course, necessary to keep the climate issue high up on the news agenda. But it has little to do with science. Nor, for that matter, news. It is political. And Roberts isn’t the only one doing it. Enter the WWF…
The latest data on the global biodiversity of vertebrates shows that it has fallen by almost one-third in the last 35 years. But experts say it may still underestimate the effect humans have had on global species counts.
The Living Planet Index (LPI) follows trends in nearly 4,000 populations of 1,477 vertebrate species and is said to reflect the impact humans have on the planet…
New figures show that between 1970 and 2005, the global LPI has fallen by 27%. This suggests that the world will fail to meet the target of reducing the rate of biodiversity loss set by the 2002 Convention on Biological Diversity.
Just as Ian Roberts grabs the headlines whenever – like some sort of bulimic ex-deputy prime minister – he regurgitates his antisocial theories, WWF can rely on the world’s media to tell it how the WWF like to think it is every time they publish the latest version of their Living Planet report. And they’ve been publishing it every couple of years or so for ten years now:
Year after year, the WWF and newspaper headlines tell us that wildlife is disappearing at an unprecedented rate. And yet the latest report, which surveys a larger number of species than previous ones and incorporates the expertise of scientists at the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), finds that the decline is not as bad as previous estimates have suggested. In the ten years that have passed since the first report, the Index has remained fairly constant. In fact, the 2008 Living Planet Index is the lowest since records began, despite the extra decade available for further declines. Carry on at this rate and, at some point, extinct species will start rising from the ashes. Of course, this apparent decline in species declines might be the result of many factors – increased sample sizes, involvement of the ZSL (for the 2006 and 2008 reports only), better controls for biased samples (earlier reports did not even attempt to control for the fact that species for which long-term population data are available tend to be species for which we have good reason to believe might be declining – rare or commercially important species, for example), etc. But the fact remains that species declines have been significantly overestimated in the past – by about a third, according to this latest estimate. It’s just that ‘Wildlife declines not as bad as previously thought’ doesn’t quite pack the same punch headline-wise. And one can only imagine the eco-pocalyptic headlines had previous estimates been found to be too low.
We remain unconvinced that the sample merits extrapolation to vertebrate species as a whole. The research has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal (although, according to co-author Dr Ben Collen of the ZSL, it has been accepted for publication by Conservation Biology), so all we have to go on is the WWF report (which isn’t much help) and an interview with Collen. He told us that, while all species were weighted equally in the index, they did check for bias towards declining species by looking at the rationale behind the collection of population data for each species in the first place. This way they were able to show that species declines did not become a more important factor in choosing which species to monitor over time. This, in turn, relies on the argument that conservation biology is a relatively modern sub-discipline, emerging in the 1980s. Prior to that, he said, the emphasis was on ‘natural resource management’. But, by the same token, natural resource management could be expected to be more concerned with monitoring scarce natural resources than plentiful ones. With regard to commercially important species, which might also be expected to be declining by definition, Collen told us:
That would be true if our index had a lot of commercially exploited species. But it doesn’t. We have 241 fish species in comparison to, say, 800 birds [a taxon that is less important commercially]. In an ideal world, we’d be able to pull out all this meta-data on all these individual species, but that’s not possible.
As we keep stressing, an environmentalist conspiracy this is not. It’s just convenient. It’s convenient for the WWF (obviously); it’s convenient for journalists and newspapers, in that they can keep on publishing big scary numbers devoid of sobering context; it’s convenient for the scientists at the Zoological Society of London who, like all scientists, increasingly have to justify themselves in terms of media coverage and social impact; and it’s convenient for directionless politicians. A sure sign of just how convenient big numbers are for everybody concerned is that, following the 2002 edition of the Living Planet report, Reuters reported erroneously, in a story picked up by many other outlets (including Yahoo, ENN, Planet Ark), that more than a third of all species had gone extinct since 1970:
The study found that human economic activity had reduced the number of surviving animal, bird and fish species by 35 percent over the past 30 years.
Freshwater fish had been especially badly hit, losing over half the species in existence in 1970, while key marine species – most of which provide food for the burgeoning popu
lation of humans – were down by just under 40 percent.
A simple mistake, perhaps. And yet nobody raised a sceptical eyebrow. Except us. As we said at the time:
News of environmental catastrophe tends to be accepted without question. The idea of plummeting biodiversity has become so ingrained in our mindset that the actual number of species reported to be disappearing per unit time doesn’t matter – just as long as it’s a very big number. Society, it seems, is content only when it can be confident that Mother Nature is drawing her final, wheezing breath.
The Living Planet Index comprises but one half of the Living Planet report. The rest consists of the Ecological Footprint – the index of how many planets-worth of resources we are using up with our decadent modern lifestyles. We might revisit this in the near future. Because you can bet your internal organs that the footprint is as silly as the LPI is hyped. Suffice it to say for now that we suspect that humankind has been using the Earth’s resources at a faster rate than they can be replenished throughout the entire course of our history. Because the WWF’s calculations take absolutely no account whatsoever of the possibilities for technological development. How many planets-worth were we using prior to the Green Revolution, for example? How many planets-full of North American buffalo would have been required to make the Native American lifestyle ‘sustainable’? We like to think that someone somewhere has actually done the calculations. But then again, that sort of research isn’t quite so convenient for anyone.
It is also worth noting that the ZSL scientists involved in the Living Planet report are commissioned by WWF. At Climate Resistance, we don’t really give a monkey’s (endangered, fat or otherwise) who funds what research by whom. Many do care, however, including, as we have seen, New Scientist, who chose to make Willie Soon’s alleged links to the oil industry the focal point of its coverage of his polar bear research last year. Strange, then, that the mag doesn’t even mention the ZSL’s financial links to a dodgy pressure group in its coverage.
Environmentalism: "frustrated, angry and confused"
Over at the Daily Kos, and European Tribune, blogger ‘Johnnyrook’ attempts to connect ‘denialism’ with an ideology. The piece itself is an answer to a blog post elsewhere by Joseph Romm, The denialists are winning, especially with the GOP. David Roberts tried this approach on the Nation blog back in February:
Long-time greens are painfully aware that the arguments of global warming skeptics are like zombies in a ’70s B movie. They get shot, stabbed, and crushed, over and over again, but they just keep lurching to their feet and staggering forward. That’s because — news flash! — climate skepticism is an ideological, not a scientific, position, and as such it bears only a tenuous relationship to scientific rules of evidence and inference.
We replied that environmentalism used ‘science’ as a fig leaf. Environmentalism is an ideological position, whereas scepticism encompasses a range of objections to it, some of which are, in fact, perfectly valid on scientific grounds.
What Johnnyrook writes in Why Climate Denialists are Blind to Facts and Reason: The Role of Ideology is, frankly, unmitigated and unimportant crap. But it does offer some insight into the ‘thought processes’ of grass-roots Environmentalism. Johnnyrook whines that
Anyone who has tried to discuss Climaticide with a climate change denialist knows just how frustrating it can be. No matter how well informed you are, no matter how many peer-reviewed studies you cite, or how many times you point out the overwhelming agreement based on the evidence that exists among climate scientists that global warming is real and is principally caused by human fossil fuel use, you will get no where. Your adversary will deny the facts, cherry pick the scientific evidence for bits of data that, taken out of context, support his/her denialist view, or drag out long-debunked counter-arguments in the hope that they are unfamiliar to you and that you will not be able to refute them. If you succeed in countering all of his arguments he will most likely reword them and start all over again.
Climaticide? Climaticide? Is it even possible to kill a climate? But moving on, Johnnyrook clearly believes himself to be in possession of a faultless argument. So it must be the rest of the world that’s wrong. Who said environmentalism was emotional, arrogant, and infantile?
After a couple of hours of this, you end up frustrated, angry and confused. You give up and storm off vowing to study and learn even more so that next time you will be better prepared and able to convince the denialist of the error of his/her ways.
Our advice to little Johnny is that perhaps his tantrums would be easier to manage if he reflected on why his arguments aren’t convincing, rather than sought to find other reasons to explain his failure. But Johnny’s tantrums are characteristic of the environmental movement as a whole – a movement that is unable to take responsibility for its own failures.
No, the true climate change denialist is an ideologue. Understanding this fact is key to comprehending the denialist mentality and to knowing how to respond to denialist arguments. Ideologues are adherents of closed, ideological systems, in which all problems are ultimately attributed to a single cause: original sin (Christianity), the accumulation of private property (Communism), restrictions imposed on a superior race by inferior ones (Fascism), the destruction of “freedom” by “Big Government” (Conservative/Libertarian).
And here Johnny gives us some insight into why he fails to make convincing political arguments. First, he doesn’t recognise his own perspective as ideological, and that it is, in his own terms, about a ‘single cause’. Perhaps we can help him – spell it out for him, in fact – with the aid of some emphasis to illustrate our point:
ENVIRONMENTalism
Environmentalists see society as intrinsically, fundamentally, inextricably linked to ‘nature’ – manifested as the ‘environment’. To the Environmentalist, all moral actions are transmitted through the biosphere. Your wealth, relative to another’s poverty is not seen in terms of the political, sociological, or historical background to your circumstances and those of your counterparts. It is instead seen in terms of biological and geological processes. You buy a big car, and the consequence is that it rains too much/doesn’t rain at all on the poor, starving child in Africa. So, instead of addressing the poverty of the poor child through developing a critique of the socio-political relations throughout the world in order that we might begin to help, the Environmentalist just wants you to withdraw from your evil lifestyle. This moral framework is unchallengeable, according to the Environmentalist, because the causal chain between your consumer choice and the plight of the child in can be explained in ‘scientific’ rather than social terms; the car, the combustion, the CO2, the greenhouse effect, the warming, the climate change, the drought. (Forget any sense of proportion between these steps).
This perspective takes poverty as a given. Indeed, it needs poverty. Without poverty to designate a moral absolute, Environmentalism’s moral calculations would cease to have meaning. Its objectives are, therefore, not to abolish poverty, but to make it ‘less bad’. And, of course, the abolishment of poverty is, according to Johnny’s maxim, ‘ideological’. Thus, we are prevented from approaching the problem of poverty – or even the effects of climate change – through politics. In other words, poverty is not seen as a political problem. After all, poverty is natural. Just ask Malthus.
Second, Johnny gives us a particularly ignorant description of ideologies. Christianity is all about ‘original sin’, apparently. But can we comfortably say that Christianity is an ideology? It may well offer us an account of creation, but not necessarily to the exclusion of other ideological ideas. Can a Christian not be committed to free trade, on the one hand, or the abolition of private property on the other? There are interesting moral arguments for both. But why should Jesus be bothered, either way? And isn’t that a problem for Christians, rather than political scientists? Communism, apparently, blames all problems on the accumulation of private property. Actually, Marx’s contention was that the accumulation of private property is necessary to create a working class in an industrial – rather than feudal – society. In this sense, the accumulation begins to solve many of the problems of oppression and inequality. And Johnny is very much mistaken with his conception of Fascism, which he confuses with nazism. Nazism is indeed a racialised form of Fascism. But Fascism itself isn’t a necessarily a racist ideology, and there is no consensus amongst historians about how fascism can be characterised; it is an issue of much debate, somewhat clouded by the fact that, at the time of fascism and Nazism, ideas about race such as eugenics were mainstream and orthodox – dare we say, the subject of a consensus. Finally, Johnny confuses libertarianism with conservatism. Yet conservatism, as the name suggests, seeks to use the state to preserve social orders, traditions and cultures, while libertarianism is a broader term, in that a libertarian would generally object to the state’s intervention in such matters. Johnny’s grasp on political ideologies is weak. No wonder then, that he fails to recognise
his own.
He continues, oblivious,
Once the initial conclusion is reached (often after a long, complicated chain of deductive reasoning–Marx’s Capital, the writings of Ayn Rand, etc.) that factor X is the source of all of society’s ills, all debate outside the ideology’s framework ends.
Hmm. Hasn’t Johnny opened his story by telling us that carbon is the source of society’s ills?
One may deduce new positions from the ideology’s fundamental principles, but the fundamental principles can not be questioned because such questioning might undermine the entire ideological system and the psychological security that it provides, leaving the true believer in that most urgently to be avoided of states: UNCERTAINTY. Ideology is thus, inevitably, by it’s very nature, anti-empirical.
We repeat:
Moreover, is it not precisely uncertainty that blights the environmental movement? Isn’t it the environmental movement that needs to tell us that ‘the science is in’? Wasn’t it Johnny who was, just a few paragraphs ago, evincing his own sheer and absolute rightness? Isn’t the entire momentum of the environmental movement predicated on a ‘scientific consensus’?
Johnny borrows from Naomi Oreskes’ critique of the “tobacco strategy”, which we discuss – at some length – here. Oreskes’ thesis is that doubt has been manufactured against the scientific case that smoking causes cancer and that global warming is caused by anthropogenic CO2, out of an ideological conviction. This forgets two things:
1. That, whatever the scientific evidence that smoking causes cancer is, and whatever the evidence that humans are influencing the climate is, our response to that evidence is necessarily political. Only a lack of response – indifference – is apolitical. In the case of smoking, the possible political responses to such information are many: we could put out the information that smoking causes cancer; we could restrict the sale of tobacco; we could ban it altogether; or we could even decide that we should all smoke more and die horribly. But all options are political.
2. That any objection to a political argument in favour of a course of action, founded on a scientific case, will necessarily ‘doubt’ that the scientific evidence is sufficient to warrant the political action to which one objects. To point that out is to state the obvious.
Johnny’s uncertainty and Oreskes’ ‘tobacco strategy’ hypotheses are meaningless. They say no more than “objectors doubt the proposition”. But Oreskes and Johnny have convinced themselves that scientific evidence exists in some separate, apolitical space, from where it can make scientifically sound political arguments; they hide their political ideology behind their scientific fig leaves.
He continues with another mischaracterisation…
The Soviets understood this way of thinking perfectly because Marxism too is an ideology, only in Marxism the great enemy is not the State but private capital.
Actually, the state is the ‘enemy’ in Marxism. For Marx, communist society is a stateless society, and the state is the apparatus of the bourgeoisie; it maintains the conditions in which the working classes are oppressed. Marx explicitly seeks the abolition of the state. Johnny is completely wrong.
He goes on to argue that it is pointless to argue with people who hold an ‘ideological’ objection to climate change alarmism, because ‘facts’ are not important to them. He offers a psychological account of his political opponents:
ideologues find psychological safety from an uncertain world in the certainties of their ideology. What you think of as an argument about global warming, they perceive as an attack on their entire world view. And they’re right of course, even though it’s not your intention.
We have seen attempts to profile the psychology of ‘deniers’ before. Here, for example.
What is interesting here is that Johnny, who, as we can see, fails to recognise his own ideology as an ideology, now makes an attack against all ideology – against all political perspectives. Ideology is now a symptom of a pathology, in much the same way that religion is seen as a pathology by Richard Dawkins et al; it is a comforting delusion, with a biological basis. This scientistic nihilism allows Johnny to diminish his opposition, rather than confront them. Isn’t this what the Nazi’s do, according to Johnny’s account of ideology, to other races? Aren’t other races, by virtue of this pathology, not only morally and intellectually inferior, but biologically inferior too? Johnny has just diminished his opponents to sub-humans, who do not have the right to engage in political discussion or to raise political objections. Disagree with Johnny and you are persona non grata. Johnny isn’t even capable of identifying the opposition – of which he is evidently utterly ignorant – to his ideas. He doesn’t need to know what ideas in an ideology might commit an ‘ideologue’ to an objection to Environmentalism, and it would seem that he doesn’t care. All he can see is that convictions to ideas appear to stand in the way of his own beliefs.
Johnny’s claim to empiricism belies his blatant anti-intellectualism. He too wants ‘facts’ but only in the sense that a caveman wants a club. He says that “one should generally ignore the denialists and concentrate on persuading the open minded”. But anyone who is open-minded has to agree with him, or they are suddenly closed-minded. Johnny finishes:
For those of us in the reality-based community, understanding the role that conservative/libertarian ideology plays in determining Climaticide denialist behavior, whether sincere or simulated, can be very useful in making sense of the denialist position, a position which, ultimately, is rooted not in facts and critical thinking, but in political and psychological needs.
For Johnny to tell us that ‘denialists’ are blinded by ideology seems as reasonable as, say, somebody who wants to completely reorganise society around a principle of, ohh, let’s say, ‘harmony with nature’, telling us that they are against reorganising society around a particular principle. Of course Johnny has an ideology – Environmentalism. And of course he is an ‘ideologue’. Why then, does Johnny protest so much about ideology?
Johnny’s inability to reflect on his own ideology, his poor grasp of politics and his disregard for others all go some way to explaining his frustration, anger, and confusion. This is a symptom of the environmental movement. We have written before about the many different ways that Environmentalists have tried to diminish their opponents by questioning their psychology and moral character, and by trying to locate a conspiracy – in every way, in fact, other than through careful, honest, political argument. Johnny’s emotions characterise the shrill, impatient, self importance of the environmental movement, which prefers trantrums to debate, and panic and alarmism to convincing arguments. It prizes emotion over intellectual engagement. Environmentalism isn’t so much a cause to fight for, than a symptom of belonging to nothing. It is, nonetheless, an ideology – one that needs to be challenged.
Something old, something blue, something borrowed, something green
Bernard Ingham, former press secretary to Margaret Thatcher, asks in the Yorkshire Post (H/T Benny Peiser):
In the election for London’s Mayor, the Greens got just over three per cent of the vote. Leaving aside such misguided places as Norwich, where the Green Party gained three seats, they struggled elsewhere to poll anywhere near that. […] Yet Labour, Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and Nationalists dance slavishly to the Green tune. […] Why do we put up with this “green” extortion to so little purpose? That’s the real mystery.
We have asked this question before. Environmentalism is a political ideology, yet its influence on policy decisions is not challenged politically in this country, and barely anywhere else. How come?
The closest thing to a challenge are the scientific discussions offered by ‘sceptics’, ‘deniers’, ‘realists’ or whatever you want to call them. Of course, these challenges are waved away by many as ‘politically-motivated’ – as if Environmentalism was above that sort of thing. And there’s the rub. ‘Politics’ has become a dirty word, and Environmentalism fills the void, because, with ‘scientists’ backing it, it is presented as a ‘value free’ set of imperatives that we must all respond to. Environmentalists will tell you that it’s not a question of political values, it’s a matter of material fact, scientifically established by the IPCC. But the truth is that the unchallengeable measurements that the movement depends on do not exist. Instead, science only lends Environmentalism credibility through the ‘precautionary principle‘; it is superficially plausible that anthropogenic CO2 will cause global catastrophe (given a substantial number of mainly political assumptions), therefore it is worth treating the possibility of a nightmare as a certainty, according to this doctrine.
From here, Environmentalism easily becomes a religious world view: we start to see disobedient countries through this prism (Burma and its missing mangrove swamps being the latest example); we start to judge the actions of others through green-tinted spectacles; and we start to do the things that are demanded of us, ‘for the sake of the planet’ – not for a genuine conception of a ‘greater good’, but just the mitigation of a worse bad.
Back to Ingham’s question: the Tories (as any party would) will explain their recent success at the polls as a consequence of their taking green issues more seriously. For example, last Friday, on BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions, Chairman of the Conservative Party, Caroline Spellman, said of the successes her party had enjoyed the previous night,
Our council candidates campaigned very simply on following policies that would deliver a cleaner, greener, safer country, one that is more family friendly, and one that gives tax payers better value for money. That is a very simple message, it’s one that the electorate like, that is why they have returned conservative governments – in local government – because they like what they see.
Spellman’s words offer no political vision whatsoever; just a promise of better management of public (and, most likely, private) life than the Labour Party – which is exactly the basis on which Blair took power from Major in 1997. The vote did not reflect an ideological shift among the public, nor Blair’s resonance with the electorate. But contrast Spellman’s words to those of Sir Bernard’s former boss. Whether you agreed with her or not, Thatcher’s aim was a political transformation of the UK, if not the world. She went Green as that vision was running out of steam, in spite of its success (and she closed far more coal mines than any environmental protest could wish for).
Surely, if anyone knows how that played out, and consequently, why the world seems to have gone green, Ingham does?
Disagreeing that politics is dominated by a green consensus is the Independent‘s Andrew Grice, who complains that “nobody is talking about climate change” anymore.
We might just look back on May Day 2008 as the moment when the power of green politics peaked and went into reverse. I hope I’m wrong, but I doubt it. The reaction of the two main parties to the elections was instructive. Desperate to prop up his own position after Labour’s rout, Mr Brown needed to toss a few bones to the voters and jittery Labour backbenchers. So it suddenly emerged that he was about to dump the so-called “bin tax” – allowing councils to charge householders who do not recycle their rubbish. Downing Street didn’t confirm it, and five token pilot schemes will go ahead, but it’s clear the bin tax has been binned.
A temporary halt to the progress of a law demanding that people recycle, or face punishing fines means that climate is off the agenda, apparently.
Grice goes on to complain about the possibility that a 2 pence rise in petrol/diesel tax will be scrapped – even though the current high price of fuel makes these entirely unnecessary, as the Inland Revenue already takes VAT (17.5%) of the sale price (~£1.108) on top of ~£0.50 a litre of petrol. A genuinely ‘anti green’ policy would surely make fuel cheaper, rather than allow it to get much more expensive. Grice continues:
Mr Brown was not alone in relegating the environment to the back burner. David Cameron, the wind in his sails after the elections, held a prime ministerial press conference in which he set out his priorities for government. Significantly, the words “environment” and “climate change” did not appear in his 1,200-word statement.
It is indeed a rare thing when David Cameron utters 1200 words, none of which are green. These seem to be the ones Grice is referring to. Here is another speech Cameron made shortly before that one:
If Cameron has indeed abandoned the environmental cause, he has done it very suddenly. But there’s nothing in the later speech which contradicts it, in spite of Grice’s claims.
Of course, 1200 is a small number of words. If, perhaps, green was ommitted from Cameron’s speech, it was because the cause has been fully embraced by all of the parties. Why mention it? Likewise, does the fact that we can find 1200 words uttered recently by Caroline Lucas that include no reference to the environment mean that our favourite Green Party MEP has also turned her back on Mother Nature? As is the case with most shrill environmentalists, Grice confuses omission with opposition. It is what Cameron didn’t say which upsets him. A bit like a failure to say Amen after a prayer, or to say grace before a meal; it offends religious sensibilities. So Grice treats it as a statement that the Tories have dropped all green policies, and are to stand against them in the future.
No such luck. And, as is clear from the past, the Conservatives have been key to establishing environmental orthodoxy in the UK.
The reason there is no challenge to Environmentalism is that there is nothing to challenge Environmentalism with. Instead, Environmentalism, and the senses of crisis and urgency it generates, are useful vehicles for policies for the sake of policies, and for the purfunctory policy initiatives that masquerade as ‘progress’. Historically, for example, it has been sufficient to announce programs to build new homes on the basis that places for people to live are a good thing. New towns, however they turned out, were planned on the premise that it would make life better, and society more rewarding. Now, homes themselves are problematic. The very idea of housing developments upsets people. They use up resources and roads. They change the view. They are the manifestation of the idea that ‘hell is other people’. Environmentalism is on hand to furnish ways in and out of that problem. For those wishing to resist new developments, instead of making selfish objections to the planning process, they can appeal to the ‘greater good’, and claim that the principle of environmental ‘sustainability’ has not been given due attention. Developers, in reply, can greenwash their proposal, to claim that the greater good is being served. Never mind that homes are supposed to be all about people.
Politics today, whether it be Cameron’s or Grice’s, needs crises – real, or imagined – in order to maintain their relevance to an increasingly disengaged public. These appeals to catastrophe are wrapped up in the language of political change. But claims to be about radical change for the sake of “SAVING THE PLANET” belie an exhausted political perspective on the world that increasingly fails to connect with the public in any other way than through high drama, and struggles to distance itself from its opposition.
The current success of the Conservative Party follows the descent of the Labour party, whose 1997 success followed the descent of the Tories, who had enjoyed, since 1978, success at the polls after Labour’s problems in the 1970s. It seems that rather than winning elections, parties loose them. We punish their embarassing yet inevitable failure to connect with the public and reward their increasing mediocrity. This is the environment that Environmentalism has thrived in.
Critics of Environmentalism from the right claim that it is the reincarnation of failed socialism. Clearly, that criticism is incomplete. Critics of Tory policy, such as Grice, claim that ‘vote blue, go Green’ rhetoric is nothing more than spin; empty gestures to convince the public that it is responding to their fears. This too misses the point that that is also the very nature of the environmental movement, which has, like conservative ideologies of the past, used such fear to stand in the way of progress and harked back to traditional ways of life and natural social orders, lest unintended consequences of change cause upheaval.
Challenging environmental orthodoxy will take more than not mentioning it. That is not because Environmentalism is a powerful political idea, but because it exists as a consequence of the inability of political perspectives – Left and Right – to reflect on their own collapse.
When a Butterfly Flaps Its Wings, Environmentalists Just Flap
We’re glad to see that the BBC has removed the error we flagged up on Thursday. Where it said
The scientists predicted such species would struggle to cope with the 5.4C rise in tropical temperatures expected by 2100.
it now reads
The scientists predicted such species would struggle to cope with the 2-4 degrees Celsius rise in tropical temperatures predicted for the late 21st Century.
It’s certainly not as ridiculously alarmist as it was. But we are no less confused as to where the new figure, 2-4 degrees Celsius, comes from than we were with the last one. It looks like some sort of hybrid between AR4 projections for tropical sea temperature increase and global average surface temperature rise. Which is odd, given that temperatures in the tropics are expected to increase less than those at the poles and temperate regions.
Anyway, we missed a trick with our last post on the issue. As commenters have reminded us, mosquitoes are insects too. But they’re the sort of insects that spread tropical diseases and, given that we already know that climate change change will be a Bad Thing, they must, therefore, be expected to buck the trend and increase in numbers and range as a result of climate change, spreading tropical disease as they go. Alex Cull puts it rather nicely:
Cuddly species such as polar bears and koalas, pretty butterflies and other cute creatures such as pandas and dolphins will suffer massive extinctions. At the same time, we will see a rise in nasty, unpleasant species such as weasels and wolverines, anopheles mosquitos, icky bacteria and other creepy-crawlies such as slugs, snails and puppy-dog tails. No arguments please.
Climate change is bad for insects; but it’s good for bad insects. Another BBC article reveals that it is good for British butterflies, too – but in a bad way…
Butterflies need a warm summer in order to help numbers recover from last year’s washout, say conservationists.
Data from the UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme showed that eight species were at an all-time low as a result of an unsuccessful summer in 2007.The main reason behind the decline was an above average rainfall, which meant the insects, such as the common blue, had fewer chances to feed or breed.
In other words, Britain’s butterflies would benefit from the sort of warmer, drier summer that we are told we’ll be getting more of as a result of climate change. (Although given that the BBC also reported recently that the “Next decade ‘may see no warming'”, what are the chances of that?) And yet, UK Biodiversity Minister (yes, there really is such a thing) Joan Ruddock still manages to twist things around so that it becomes a climate change scare story:
Butterfly populations also indicate the speed and extent of climate change. We will provide every encouragement for those working to conserve them.
OK, so it’s hard to blame the BBC this time. But imagine the headline had the butterflies suffered after a particularly hot, dry summer.
These various reports on single studies/comments support an argument made a while back by Joe Kapinsky:
the genre of ‘study published today’ stories holds back understanding rather than enhancing it
Science just doesn’t work in the way that the media generally portrays it, as an accumulation of individual studies that are like separate pieces in a giant jigsaw of truth. Science proceeds by replication, rejection, corroboration, falsification, stumbling up blind alleys, reformulation etc etc. It’s messy.
The only purpose this sort of science reporting serves is drama. It’s science as soap opera – it’s what we tune into when there is nothing else worth watching. It merely provides environmental politics with its latest installment of salacious talking points.
Fat People are Killing the Butterflies
Steve Connor, science editor at the Independent newspaper warns us that
Tropical insects rather than polar bears could be among the first species to become extinct as a result of global warming, a study has found.
What does that even mean? Are the polar bears OK after all? Is the environmental movement looking for a new mascot for climate change? Is it out with the charismatic mega-fauna because of the environmental ethic that ‘small is beautiful’? But it’s nothing compared to the headline it appears under:
Insects ‘will be climate change’s first victims’
An image of a butterfly follows, with the caption…
Many tropical insect species, including butterflies, can only tolerate a narrow range of temperatures, and an average rise of 1C to 2C could be disastrous
Contrast with the measured language of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences article on which Connor reports, and which the journal has kindly made available for free:
Our analyses imply that, in the absence of ameliorating factors such as migration and adaptation, the greatest extinction risks from global warming may be in the tropics, where biological diversity is also greatest.
This is not the first time the Independent has gone on about butterflies as the harbinger of doom. Back in March – a particularly cold March, as it happens – Environment Editor Michael McCarthy hit us with:
Last month, [climate change] produced its most remarkable image yet – a photograph, taken in Dorset, of a red admiral, an archetypal British summer butterfly, feeding on a snowdrop, an archetypal British winter flower.
But as we pointed out, the red admiral is far tougher that McCarthy gives it credit for, occasionally making an appearance in Winter, and is certainly not unusual in Spring and Autumn. Yet again, the Independent is making claims about the vulnerability of species that aren’t consistent with the state of knowledge.
The BBC is no more level-headed about the research…
The scientists predicted such species would struggle to cope with the 5.4C rise in tropical temperatures expected by 2100.
5.4C expected by whom? Well, expected by the anonymous author of the BBC article, apparently. Certainly, the IPCC makes no specific prediction for temperature rise this century. And 5.4ºC is not mentioned in the PNAS study, nor in the accompanying press release. The only match we can find is in IPCC AR4 where it is the top-end prediction for SRES scenario A2 (Table SPM.3), the range of which is 2.0-5.4ºC. But why pick 5.4ºC? If you’re just looking for a big number to scare people with, then why not plump for the upper value for the A1 scenario (1.4-6.4°C)? Is this like buying the second cheapest bottle of wine in a restaurant to prove you are not a skinflint? Or like Josef Fritzl wondering why everyone hates him when he could have been so much more horrible? [EDIT: The BBC has now “corrected” this error.]
Call us pedantic if you like; but imagine the outcry had the BBC reported that global temperatures are expected to rise by only 1.4ºC by the end of the century (the second lowest low point among the four AR4 SRES scenarios). But then, of course, it’s not just journalists (and activists) who are happy to over-egg the ecopocalyptic pudding. When, for example, Bob May (erstwhile President of the Royal Society and former chief scientific advisor to the UK government) confidently asserted in the popular media that a global temperature of 2ºC will put 15-40% of all species at risk of extinction, it was on the basis of a single, worst-case study. He was no less unobjective when he announced that climate swindler du jour Martin Durkin was also some sort of whacko HIV/AIDS denialist. And then there are the science academies, who, while being suspicious of the industry move towards open access publishing, are happy to make papers of the the-world-is-screwed-and-we’re-all-going-to-die variety available to all and sundry for free. Which is what the US’s National Academy of Sciences have done with this paper. And last year the Royal Society did it, too, when they published a paper which they claimed proved once and for all that the sun has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with global warming. This wasn’t just any old paper; it was, in the words of the Royal Society itself, “the truth about global warming“. And for some strange reason, we are still expected to take these academies’ opinions on what we should do about climate change as the last word on truth and beauty – “respect the facts” as Bob May puts it.
Newspaper editors and headline writers could – possibly – be forgiven for not understanding quite how science works. It’s harder to see how science correspondents could. And it’s laughable that the science academies seem not to. Funnier is that scientists and science academies are only too happy to criticise journalists, newspapers and TV producers when they report the science ‘wrongly’ (and you can bet your house that none of them will be criticising the Independent or the BBC on this occasion). But what do they expect? What sort of example do they think are they setting?
As we keep saying, this is no conspiracy. It’s just that – as they’ve been trying to tell us for years – scientists are human, too. Being human and everything, scientists are as jittery about the future and unsure of their role in society as the rest of us. But just because it turns out that they are as anxious as the rest of the world, it doesn’t mean that there’s any reason to take the claims of environmentalists at face value, or any less reason to maintain objectivity. Just as global warming is convenient for local governments, directionless leaders and crisis politics, it is also convenient for scientists and science academies lacking raison d’être.
Science might never have been quite the objective producer of facts that we like to think it is. But that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t strive to be an objective seeker of facts. Because striving to be objective about the facts of the material universe is precisely what science is supposed to do. When it applies itself instead to arming political narratives with legitimacy and authority, it talks itself out of a job.
Global Warming… Jumping the Shark…
Wikipedia tells us,
The term jumping the shark alludes to a specific scene in a 1977 episode of the TV series Happy Days when the popular character Arthur “Fonzie” Fonzarelli literally jumps over a shark while water skiing. The scene was so preposterous that many believed it to be an ill-conceived attempt at reviving the declining ratings of the flagging show.
The expression is used to refer to tired TV shows which have similarly passed their peak.
Once a show has “jumped the shark” fans sense a noticeable decline in quality or feel the show has undergone too many changes to retain its original appeal.
Now, the same is true of the much over-cooked global warming. The Observer reported at the weekend:
Surge in fatal shark attacks blamed on global warming
But, of course, we need the numbers.
Two deaths in the waters off California and Mexico last week and a spate of shark-inflicted injuries to surfers off Florida’s Atlantic coast have leftbeachgoers seeking an explanation for a sudden surge in the number of strikes. In the first four months of this year, there were four fatal shark attacks worldwide, compared with one in the whole of 2007, according to the International Shark Attack File at the Florida Museum of Natural History inGainesville.
Gosh. Interesting. But correlation and causation, and all that. We ought to be careful. What is the warming climate doing to the sharks, to make them attack us?
‘The one thing that’s affecting shark attacks more than anything else is human activity,’ said Dr George Burgess of Florida University, a shark expert who maintains the database. ‘As the population continues to rise, so does the number of people in the water for recreation. And as long as we have an increase in human hours in the water, we will have an increase in shark bites.’
Hmmm. That’s not global warming though, is it?
Some experts suggest that an abundance of seals has attracted high numbers of sharks, while others believe that overfishing has hit their food chain.
Hmmm. Still not getting the ‘global warming’ thing…
Another contributory factor to the location of shark attacks could be global warming and rising sea temperatures. ‘You’ll find that some species will begin to appear in places they didn’t in the past with some regularity,’ he said.
“Could be”. Things “regularly appearing” where they hadn’t been “in the past”. We’re not going to worry about it until we see sharks in rollerblading rinks. It turns out that the headline is misleading.
The only sense which can be distilled from this absurd article is that sharks only attack you when you’re wet. Global warming has nothing to do with it.
Save Any Planet
For Green buffoonery in all its ghastly, opportunistic, incompetent, self-righteous glory, there is the latest episode of the BBC’s The Apprentice. That’s the series where someone incredibly rich and successful like Donald Trump conducts a “job interview from hell” in which ambitious young things compete for employment at Trump Central. In the BBC version, silly posh people and salt-of-the-earth working class types battle it out for a job with Cockney barrow boy Sir Alan Sugar, whose businesses are worth, we are told, 800 million pounds.
British readers with an hour to kill within the next four days can watch the show here. For everyone else, it goes something like this…
The candidates must come up with a brand new occasion for a range of greetings cards. Will they find a gap in this saturated market? And will their ideas be commercial?
What the two teams come up with is Happy Singles’ Day and, yes, Save Planet Earth Day. As bad as Happy Singles’ Day may be, a packaged greetings card celebrating the use of fewer resources is, as Sir Alan points out, a complete non-starter. But that alone does not explain the excruciating hilarity of the team’s attempts to sell them to retailers. What makes the pitches for Save Planet Earth Day such exquisitely uncomfortable viewing is the religious zeal with which they fight the cause. These guys think they ought to believe what they are saying. The problem is that they don’t believe it. Which makes it tricky to convince others. But as any environmentalist worth their salt knows, when people don’t believe you, you emotionally blackmail them or appeal to their sense of self-loathing. Team leader Kevin does both. In his pitch to market leader Clinton Cards, he resorts to:
If you don’t put your weight behind it, then it’s just the same as the US saying “we don’t care about pollution”
Kevin missed a trick there. Why stop at the US? Surely, anyone who begs to differ with environmental orthodoxy is worse even than that – they’re more like rats, slave traders, or Holocaust deniers.
Greens would interpret Kevin’s embarrassing Green epiphany rather differently. They would write it off as mere Greenwash, just another cynical attempt by business to tap into the grassroots popularity of the Environmental movement. The problem for that theory is that the Environmental movement is not popular. No sooner had we mentioned last week the ABC News poll where global warming didn’t figure at all in the US public’s list of priorities, and last year’s Ipsos Mori poll that showed that the great British public aren’t quite so Green as Britain’s Great and Good like to think we should be, than there was another poll, which found that 70% of us would not approve of tax hikes in the name of tackling climate change. The trouble is not that Kevin et al are cynically trying to exploit a market; it’s that they’re trying to sell a product that is wrapped up with a cynical ideology, and for which there is no market.
That the public are not as gullible as the Kevins of this world would have it does not bode well for green initiatives that rely on consumer power. Fairtrade, for example – still far from a market leader – won’t stand a chance once we realise that it’s not actually particularly ethical to give people a friendly pat on the head and toss them some loose change to make sure they carry on doing all those jobs that we wouldn’t touch with a barge pole.
The beauty of it all for self-righteous greens, however, is that you don’t actually have to take any responsibility when you fail – you just blame the consumers. Just as Kevin does when reflecting on what went wrong with his pitch:
If that’s the attitude everyone takes, then we’re not going to be able to save any planet
Sir Alan didn’t get where he is today by not cynically exploiting markets. Nor by cynically exploiting non-markets. Nor by cynically blaming people who refused to buy his wares. Kevin gets fired.
Bottom Feder
A link to this article came our way…
Procreation is killing the planet, and traditional religion is to blame, Global-Warming cultists insist. First the industrial revolution had to go. Then it was to the wall with oil company executives, those malignant Carbon Interests. Next, SUVs were declared enemies of the planet.
Hmmm. This is the first time we’ve heard the claim that environmentalists blame ‘traditional religion’ directly for environmental degradation. Noticeably, the claim is not actually attributed to the environmental movement in general, but to an individual, an Oliver “Buzz” Thomas, who asks in a USA TODAY article, “Might our religion be killing us?”. Thomas argues predictably that religious doctrine encourages people to have more babies, thereby creating a greater environmental impact through ‘overpopulation’. Yawn.
You may be wondering why we, the editors of a site that intends to challenge climate orthodoxy, are sceptical of the claims made by Don Feder in his GLOBAL WARMING — LEFT’S LATEST EXCUSE FOR THE WAR ON THE FAMILY. The reason is that it’s difficult to establish which is worse, the intellectual poverty of the environmental movement – as Thomas exhibits – or the intellectual dishonesty of Feder in this article. The fact of the former should make the latter unnecessary. What are we to make of Feder, then?
Notice that Thomas is no atheist, but is in fact a Southern Baptist minister. And notice too that there is no real substance in his article that one could fairly attribute to the ‘Left’. Yet Feder appears to maintain that Thomas’s remarks are evidence that the left are trying to attack the family, and religion.
As we have argued before, Environmentalism and conventional religions are strikingly compatible. But this is not just some dispute about different interpretations of biblical texts, Feder – who is allegedly a political consultant, seems to be absurdly ignorant of political theory. He tells us that
For 200 years, the left has been fixated on an imaginary overpopulation crisis. In 1798, Thomas Malthus warned that wars, famine and plagues were needed to reduce the “surplus population” else we would soon inhabit Planet SRO.
But Malthus’s ideas had no currency in the Left. Quite the opposite. Lenin – about as left as lefties ever got – said of them that they were “an attempt on the part of bourgeois ideologists to exonerate capitalism and to prove the inevitability of privation and misery for the working class under any social system”. Indeed, Tomas Malthus, the classical economist, was in fact a keen fan of Adam Smith – the ‘father of capitalism’. To claim that Malthus is key to the development of the left is as sound as claiming that a pope was instrumental in the development of the ideas in Darwin’s “origin of the species”. A key assumption for Malthus was that poverty is the consequence of the poor’s moral shortcomings rather than unequal structures of society. Again, where’s the socialism? Nonetheless, Feder continues,
In his 1969 book, “The Population Bomb” (the prequel to “An Inconvenient Truth”), Paul Ehrlich forecast worldwide famine by 1975. Natural resources would be severely depleted and arable land exhausted in a futile effort to keep up with the population explosion.
Neither was Paul Ehrlich ‘Left’. He was on the board of advisors of the Federation for American Immigration Reform until 2003 – “The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) is a non-partisan, non-profit 501(c)(3) educational organization in the United States that advocates changes in U.S. immigration policy that would result in significant reductions in immigration, both legal and illegal.” And the Left has never been about submitting to ‘limits to growth’, thereby arresting progress; it’s goal has been to distribute the fruits of that progress among those who actually produce stuff, rather than those who merely own it.
It’s not as if Feder doesn’t know that he’s talking bullshit…
If Global Warming didn’t exist, the left would have to invent it. In fact, they did. As Nigel Calder, former editor of the British magazine New Scientist explains: “Twenty years ago, climate research became politicized in favor of one particular hypothesis, which redefined the study as the effect of the study of greenhouse gasses. As a result, the rebellious spirits essential for innovative and trustworthy science are greeted with impediments to their research careers.”
… If he knows that climate research was politicised twenty years ago, he would know that it was politicised by the then UK Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher – a Conservative, and friend and ally of Ronald Reagan. Her administration – a right wing administration, arguably farther right than the party’s tradition – found the ideas of Paul Ehrlich and Malthus expedient. They were communicated to the PM by the likes of neomalthusian (he admits to the term) Sir Crispin Tickell, a senior British diplomat at the time.
And on the subject of ‘traditional religion’, and the ‘left’s attack on the family’, Marx – again, a fairly leftish kind of lefty – says this of Malthus:
Although Malthus was a parson of the English State Church, he had taken the monastic vow of celibacy — one of the conditions of holding a Fellowship in Protestant Cambridge University: “Socios collegiorum maritos esse non permittimus, sed statim postquam quis uxorem duxerit socius collegii desinat esse.” (“Reports of Cambridge University Commission,” p. 172.) This circumstance favourably distinguishes Malthus from the other Protestant parsons, who have shuffled off the command enjoining celibacy of the priesthood and have taken, “Be fruitful and multiply,” as their special Biblical mission in such a degree that they generally contribute to the increase of population to a really unbecoming extent, whilst they preach at the same time to the labourers the “principle of population.” It is characteristic that the economic fall of man, the Adam’s apple, the urgent appetite, “the checks which tend to blunt the shafts of Cupid,” as Parson Townsend waggishly puts it, that this delicate question was and is monopolised by the Reverends of Protestant Theology, or rather of the Protestant Church. With the exception of the Venetian monk, Ortes, an original and clever writer, most of the population-theory teachers are Protestant parsons. [Capital, Ch 25, note 6]
Marx’s point here, like Feder’s, is that Malthusianism is used to coerce the working classes, not for the benefit of the Left, as Feder claims, but for the capitalist elite. Malthusianism is just good, old-fashioned fear of the uncontrolled masses. Too many of them is a problem, you see, for capital. They start demanding things. And they start becoming a viable political force, rather than merely a useful source of labour.
The left must have its scapegoat. This is absolutely essential. For Marx it was the bourgeoisie. For the ’60s New Left, it was America — spelled with a “k.” White males are the villains of multiculturalism. Now, it’s babies and retrograde churches that are destroying the planet. The environment has assumed the role of the proletariat, the Third World and racial minorities in earlier models of damnation and salvation.
If it wasn’t so utterly dishonest, it would be funny that Feder should talk of scapegoating in an article where he attacks the ‘left’, which isn’t left, for characteristics of the right, in defence of the poor and the oppressed at the hands of the bourgeoisie!
The left has always worried about the reproductive patterns of certain people. As Jonah Goldberg explains in his book “Liberal Fascism,” from the beginning, racial eugenics was a project of the left — or progressives, as they called themselves then and now. H.G. Wells, a hero of pre-World War II progressivism (a socialist who wrote science fiction, much like Al Gore), said that in order for humankind to move to the sunny uplands of utopia, “swarms of black and brown, and dirty (lower class) white and yellow people” would have to be discouraged from breeding — or physically eliminated. Moreover, Goldberg explains, “The foremost institution combating eugenics around the world was the Catholic Church.”
In fact eugenics was as much an orthodoxy prior to WW2 as climate change is today. Both the left and the right bought into it. Many US states had programs of compulsory sterilisation, and there’s probably no point in raising that little matter of racial segregation in the southern states up until… oh, well after eugenics was unfashionable. It is only with tunnel vision that Feder can make the point. Indeed, he cites just one prominent socialist. But it wasn’t simply Wells’s socialism which made him keen on eugenics, but his scientism. Indeed some religious movements have stood in the way of eugenics, but arguably, only because reproductive technologies threaten to undermine their influence, by separating our behaviour from its consequences, or otherwise undermining religious orthodoxy. What appears to be a positive stand against the evil of eugenics also stands in the way of life-saving, and life-enhancing medicine and research. Feder is not speaking about anything positive. We agree that it is a bad idea to campaign against families after the fashion of the Chinese one-child-per-family policy. But on the other hand, it is bad to coerce people into families through orthodoxies. Whether you want states or ‘traditional religion’ to maintain the family, the idea that the family unit is both right, and natural, and is the bedrock of society is undermined; it is still a claim that families can only exist with such forms of intervention. Why would families need a religion or a state to exist? What is more, how can Feder honestly claim that the traditional church does not worry about ‘the reproductive patterns of certain people’? It’s not as if the church doesn’t speak about sex before marriage, gay relationships, contraception, and all that stuff.
There are plenty of things to criticise the old left for. But no need. Because it no longer exists. Feder misses the point that Environmentalism is perfectly compatible with right wing, religious as well as ‘liberal’ perspectives. Indeed, it’s more at home with the old right in that, ultimately, it serves to maintain elites and class structures. There’s no problem making rubbish up about Environmentalism if all you want to do is score points here and there against political (or even religious) rivals, as Feder seems to want to do. It’s not fine if you think Environmentalism is a dangerous idea that needs challenging. And it does need challenging. There is plenty of scope for people on the right and left to have interesting conversations about what’s wrong with Environmentalism. But the intellectual dishonesty of Feder’s article is no way to challenge the intellectual poverty of Environmentalism. Please, let’s raise the standard.
Who Are the Real Climate Criminals?
If there’s one thing that’s supposed to annoy us British about Americans, it’s their environmentally unfriendly ways. And not just George Bush and his Exxon-funded cronies. It’s the whole lot of them – as highlighted by the recent ABC News poll where “global warming” scored a big, fat zero (see page 6) in the US public’s list of priorities.
Contrast with London’s Mayoral candidates all battling to save the planet. The “central pledge” of New Labour’s Ken Livingstone to his electorate includes: “London will tackle the great environmental problems, above all climate change, to ensure that our success is sustainable.” And the whole thing is only one sentence long. Boris Johnson (Conservative) pledges “a ban on bottled water, a ban on internal flights, recycling, green procurement and sustainability”. Both claim to be against Heathrow’s third runway on environmental grounds. And there’s still somehow room for a Green Party candidate. Politics: available in any colour, as long as it’s… well… Green.
But is our superciliousness towards the green credentials of the USA really justified? Are we really that different here in the UK? Not according to an Ipsos Mori poll last year, which indicated that more than half of us are not convinced that the science of climate change is robust enough to justify a Green revolution. Despite the vast sums of cash available to the environmental PR machine to keep the looming ecopalypse at the front of our minds, nobody’s really that interested, it seems.
Funnily enough, environmentalists like to blame their failure to capture the public’s imagination on oil-funded “deniers” (whose budget is a fraction of Greenpeace’s alone). Or they’ll blame the selfishness of the public itself, who need to be hectored into making “ethical” consumer choices… and taking fewer baths.
But is there another reason for our complacency? Could it be that we have a better nose for eco-friendly bullshit than Livingstone’s “London will tackle the great environmental problems, above all climate change, to ensure that our success is sustainable”, or Boris’s “a ban on bottled water, a ban on internal flights, recycling, green procurement and sustainability” give us credit for? Both look like nothing more than attempts to convince us that they’re taking armageddon seriously, rather than serious attempts to make the world a better place.
So why, given the public’s lack of interest, isn’t there a candidate with the balls to stand up and challenge Environmentalism? Where is the candidate who thinks a third runway is a good thing? It’s not as if Londoners don’t want to use airports. Or who thinks there aren’t enough roads? Or that a new de–salination plant is a better idea than saving water by hectoring Londoners with “if it’s yellow, let it mellow, if it’s brown, flush it down”?
Perhaps it’s because green policies can’t actually do any harm. We might be ambivalent, but we’re hardly going to vote against saving the planet. Which is perhaps why everyone from the BNP through to Socialist Worker are striking a green pose. Environmentalism is attractive to unimaginative politicians precisely because it’s seen as inoffensive and uncontroversial.
Except that it is offensive. And it should be controversial. Just ask Gareth Corkhill, the father of four who was fined a week’s wages by Copeland Borough Council and slapped with a criminal record for overflowing his wheelie bin by 4 inches. (And environmentalism is supposed to be ‘progressive’!). Once authorities get it into their heads that human concerns can take second place to a higher purpose – saving Mother Nature, Gaia, or whatever you want to call her – no reason exists for them to imagine that they owe the public anything, or are even accountable.
Environmentalism isn’t the left-wing conspiracy that those whom it accuses of being a right-wing conspiracy are wont to accuse it of being. It’s just very convenient, that’s all. Public servants can become policemen; they can suddenly make life more difficult in the name of saving the planet. Eco-Proles can be farmed out to Eco-Homes in Eco-Towns that lack flushing toilets and where the only water you are allowed to use is that which falls on your land. And to complain is to have the blood of future generations on your hands, or to be a bin-abusing ‘carbon criminal’. Environmentalism turns the purpose of government and public service on its head.
Environmentalism is all very convenient – for everybody except real, live human beings. So who’s more in tune with their electorate on environmental matters? Copeland Borough Council? Boris? Ken? Or George Bush Jr?
Slaves to Bad Analogies
Given the occasional inability of environmentalists to resist the temptation of equating those who challenge the political orthodoxy on climate change with those who opposed the end of slavery, it was only a matter of time before someone would liken the reduction of carbon emissions to the Abolition. That Someone, it turns out, is Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who wants to de-carbonise the world entirely. Weeeeeeeell, it can’t do any harm can it? But more than that, it would be a positive kick up the arse for the economy, apparently. After all, says RFK, the industrial revolution, and all the benefits that brought for humankind, was only possible because of the Abolition. The Business and Media Institute reports:
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants to ‘abolish’ carbon usage and sees a direct comparison to the end of slavery … According to Kennedy, “industry and government warnings” about avoiding “economic ruin” should not be heeded because abolishing slavery did not cripple the British economy as was predicted “Instead of collapsing, as slavery’s proponents had predicted, Britain’s economy accelerated,” he argued.
OK, so the Business and Media Institute is hardly likely to be a bastion of objective, detached journalism, and you are welcome to make your own minds about how low Kennedy was actually stooping with his analogy, by reading his piece for Vanity Fair on which the above report reports.
But there’s no getting away from the fact that it’s a crap analogy. Slavery, carbon. Carbon, slavery. If carbon reduction were expected to damage the economy, would it be not worth saving the planet after all? Should we regret ending slavery had the Abolition led to economic problems? Are those who merely want to reduce CO2 emissions – James Hansen, say – akin to those who argued for having fewer slaves?
And even if you give Kennedy the benefit of the doubt on his intentions, his wider argument is preposterous. He might as well be advocating that we go around throwing bricks through windows on the basis that the economy would be stimulated by all the extra work it created for glaziers. Sorry Mr Kennedy, but the Abolition was the right thing to do purely and solely because slavery is immoral. And anyway, wasn’t the industrial revolution well under way before slavery was prohibited?
History, eh?
It’s funny how this whole climate change debate thing seems so contemporary. And yet denialism, scepticism, certainty, doubt and liberty, and the tensions between them, were hot topics well over a century ago, as the following passage from Mill’s essay On Liberty shows. Of course, warmers might argue that the urgency demanded by the danger posed by climate change means that we need to revise our understanding of liberty. But weren’t opponents of Mill also arguing the case for a less liberal sort of liberty? Warmers who read this blog might also observe the short shrift we’ve given to casual claims of geometrical congruence between immoral arguments of the past and climate change scepticism, and decide that we are hypocrites. But our point is simply that debates of the past really can inform contemporary ones. And not in a “you disagree with how we want to change things, just like those horrible slave-traders disagreed with how the Abolitionists wanted to change things, therefore you’re as bad as they were” sort of way.
Strange it is, that men should admit the validity of the arguments for free discussion, but object to their being “pushed to an extreme;” not seeing that unless the reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case. Strange that they should imagine that they are not assuming infallibility, when they acknowledge that there should be free discussion on all subjects which can possibly be doubtful, but think that some particular principle or doctrine should be forbidden to be questioned because it is so certain, that is, because they are certain that it is certain. To call any proposition certain, while there is any one who would deny its certainty if permitted, but who is not permitted, is to assume that we ourselves, and those who agree with us, are the judges of certainty, and judges without hearing the other side.
In the present age — which has been described as “destitute of faith, but terrified at scepticism,” — in which people feel sure, not so much that their opinions are true, as that they should not know what to do without them — the claims of an opinion to be protected from public attack are rested not so much on its truth, as on its importance to society. There are, it is alleged, certain beliefs, so useful, not to say indispensable to well-being, that it is as much the duty of governments to uphold those beliefs, as to protect any other of the interests of society. In a case of such necessity, and so directly in the line of their duty, something less than infallibility may, it is maintained, warrant, and even bind, governments, to act on their own opinion, confirmed by the general opinion of mankind. It is also often argued, and still oftener thought, that none but bad men would desire to weaken these salutary beliefs; and there can be nothing wrong, it is thought, in restraining bad men, and prohibiting what only such men would wish to practise. This mode of thinking makes the justification of restraints on discussion not a question of the truth of doctrines, but of their usefulness; and flatters itself by that means to escape the responsibility of claiming to be an infallible judge of opinions. But those who thus satisfy themselves, do not perceive that the assumption of infallibility is merely shifted from one point to another. The usefulness of an opinion is itself matter of opinion: as disputable, as open to discussion and requiring discussion as much, as the opinion itself. There is the same need of an infallible judge of opinions to decide an opinion to be noxious, as to decide it to be false, unless the opinion condemned has full opportunity of defending itself. And it will not do to say that the heretic may be allowed to maintain the utility or harmlessness of his opinion, though forbidden to maintain its truth. The truth of an opinion is part of its utility. If we would know whether or not it is desirable that a proposition should be believed, is it possible to exclude the consideration of whether or not it is true? In the opinion, not of bad men, but of the best men, no belief which is contrary to truth can be really useful: and can you prevent such men from urging that plea, when they are charged with culpability for denying some doctrine which they are told is useful, but which they believe to be false? Those who are on the side of received opinions, never fail to take all possible advantage of this plea; you do not find them handling the question of utility as if it could be completely abstracted from that of truth: on the contrary, it is, above all, because their doctrine is “the truth,” that the knowledge or the belief of it is held to be so indispensable. There can be no fair discussion of the question of usefulness, when an argument so vital may be employed on one side, but not on the other. And in point of fact, when law or public feeling do not permit the truth of an opinion to be disputed, they are just as little tolerant of a denial of its usefulness. The utmost they allow is an extenuation of its absolute necessity, or of the positi
veguilt of rejecting it.
In order more fully to illustrate the mischief of denying a hearing to opinions because we, in our own judgment, have condemned them, it will be desirable to fix down the discussion to a concrete case; and I choose, by preference, the cases which are least favorable to me — in which the argument against freedom of opinion, both on the score of truth and on that of utility, is considered the strongest. Let the opinions impugned be the belief in a God and in a future state, or any of the commonly received doctrines of morality. To fight the battle on such ground, gives a great advantage to an unfair antagonist; since he will be sure to say (and many who have no desire to be unfair will say it internally), Are these the doctrines which you do not deem sufficiently certain to be taken under the protection of law? Is the belief in a God one of the opinions, to feel sure of which, you hold to be assuming infallibility? But I must be permitted to observe, that it is not the feeling sure of a doctrine (be it what it may) which I call an as sumption of infallibility. It is the undertaking to decide that question for others, without allowing them to hear what can be said on the contrary side. And I denounce and reprobate this pretension not the less, if put forth on the side of my most solemn convictions. How ever positive any one’s persuasion may be, not only of the falsity, but of the pernicious consequences — not only of the pernicious consequences, but (to adopt expressions which I altogether condemn) the immorality and impiety of an opinion; yet if, in pursuance of that private judgment, though backed by the public judgment of his country or his cotemporaries, he prevents the opinion from being heard in its defence, he assumes infallibility. And so far from the assumption being less objectionable or less dangerous because the opinion is called immoral or impious, this is the case of all others in which it is most fatal. These are exactly the occasions on which the men of one generation commit those dreadful mistakes, which excite the astonishment and horror of posterity. It is among such that we find the instances memorable in history, when the arm of the law has been employed to root out the best men and the noblest doctrines; with deplorable success as to the men, though some of the doctrines have survived to be (as if in mockery) invoked, in defence of similar conduct towards those who dissent from them, or from their received interpretation.
Now we come to think of it, this post could have been addressed to Paul LaClair. Because Matthew needs to be able to recognise a good argument when he sees one; not to pick factual holes in arguments he already disagrees with because his parents do.