Climate Activists Want to Induce Fear and Panic, Even If the Facts Get in the Way
Climate Activists Want to Induce Fear and Panic, Even If the Facts Get in the Way
There are striking parallels between the Covid “emergency” and the climate “emergency,” which suggest that the assault on science and on civil rights that we saw during the pandemic will continue for the foreseeable future. The very same strategies that governments used to manipulate and blackmail citizens into compliance with draconian and illiberal laws during the Covid scare are already being rolled out to justify highly costly and intrusive interventions in the name of environmentalism.
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Before we go on, I should mention that I am all for clean air, and the preservation of nature, and an end to harmful and disproportionate forms of pollution of the environment. Where I take issue with the environmental movement is in the way they actively seek to stir up fear and panic, and make their cause an “all-or-nothing” matter upon which reasonable negotiation and trade-offs become impossible or unthinkable.
The discourse and language being employed by climate activists to discuss climate change suggest that we are being gradually softened up for some majorly disruptive and coercive “interventions,” based on the fear that our planet is on the brink of collapse.
I do not doubt that there are climate activists who sincerely believe that our world is on the brink of collapse, and that all competing considerations are insignificant. But this sort of attitude is a dangerous form of emotivism disconnected from genuine rational inquiry and seemingly immune to the actual scientific evidence.
Emotivism of this sort may be excusable in an ill-informed adolescent, but it is not excusable in a public leader. Consider the words of United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres: He has repeatedly warned that the world “faces climate chaos”; in July 2023, in response to an unusually intense spate of heatwaves, he said, "the era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived."
This apocalptic, doomsday rhetoric is not even accepted by the United Nations’ own panel of climate experts, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC), whose new head, Jim Skea, denied earlier this year that climate change amounted to something equivalent to an existential crisis. Cautioning against climate catastrophism, he said, “the world won’t end if it warms by more than 1.5 degrees, it will however be a more dangerous world,” in an interview with German magazine Der Spiegel.
The best way to illustrate the illiberal and absolutist nature of the environmental movement - or, to be more precise, certain dominant strands of the environmental movement - is simply to note the striking similiarities between the manipulations, distortions and oppression we saw during the pandemic “emergency” and those we are seeing in connection with climate change and environmental policy:
A catastrophist narrative: “The Science” is invoked repeatedly to “prove” that we are heading for Armageddon..unless we take swift and dramatic action, now, before it’s too late. This is exactly what happened during the pandemic: “the Science” was invoked to “prove” that we were being overrun by a lethal virus, and would pay a steep price, unless we take drastic measures, now. The reason for this narrative is that just as people were reluctant to put on masks and inject themselves with an experimental vaccine, many people are reluctant to stop flying or driving cars.
Over-simplification of “the science”: It turns out that “The Science” being relied on to prove we are heading to a very bad place, and can only arrest our collapse by reducing our “carbon footprint,” is notoriously complex and contested. Climate warming is happening, as it has happened in the pre-industrial past. But the idea that reducing our carbon footprint by x amount will reduce climate change by y amount in z years is a very daring hypothesis, not a self-evident fact, that must be reconciled with long-term changes in climate and with other factors that could influence climate change. Sounds a lot like the notion that if only more people wore masks, or if only we closed the schools a few more months, the virus would behave itself, or the notion that if we just lock down a city for a while, far fewer people will be exposed to the virus.
Labelling dissenters as backward or stupid: Those who even tentatively question the “official” Establishment position on climate change and its remedies are labelled as uneducated and backward, or beholden to special interests. There are respected scientists who could question some of the simplistic slogans of the environmental movement (e.g. the notion that drastically curtailing certain economic activities will reliably and substantially reduce climate change) but the political pressures to stay quiet rather than be labelled backward or stupid are substantial. The very same thing happened in relation to the debates about vaccines, masks, and lockdowns.
By-passing rational assent with coercion: It is very noticeable that politicians who invoke the climate “emergency” very often suggest that the “emergency” is so grave that we cannot wait for citizens to actually agree on anything - we need to impose the changes from the top down, and we need to expropriate people if necessary - consider the case of the Dutch farmers, who are about to lose their land, courtesy of the European Union and the Dutch government. More subtle but no less sinister interventions have been proposed - for example, to use a Central Bank Digital Currency to reward people who reduce their “carbon footprint” - and potentially penalise those who do not.
This heavy reliance on coercion and manipulation and impatience with the democratic process should raise alarm bells. It is precisely what happened when governments restricted people to their homes and penalised people for refusing to get injected with an experimental therapy. The more a government relies on coercion, the more you have reason to suspect they have weak evidence to back up their actions.
Heavy reliance on emotions of guilt and solidarity: The environmental movement relies heavily on the emotions of fear, guilt, and solidarity, that are stirred up by doomsday predictions that mix science with pseudoscience, to scare the hell out of citizens; and then they tell us, “if you will just be a good boy/girl and reduce your carbon footprint, the emergency will go away, and you will be saving the planet.” Those who don’t go along with the climate movement are labelled bad citizens. So the motivation for accepting the climate agenda is a mix of fear, guilt, and solidarity, not a rational assessment of the scientific evidence.
Complex tradeoffs replaced with simplistic imperatives: The notion that climate interventions should involve tricky cost-benefit tradeoffs is not given much space in public debate, much as such considerations were ignored by Covid policymakers. Climate activists seem to want all or nothing. They defend things like 15 minute cities with little thought to disruptions to local businesses when streets are closed off or traffic rules are made inordinately complicated. Public officials expropriate farmers to reduce their “carbon footprint” without showing any sign of having actually processed the potential damages they are doing to communities and their way of life. Tradeoffs are the bread and butter of policymaking, yet they seem to be quietly ignored in the climate debate, just as they were in the debates about lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and school closures during the pandemic.
The science behind climate change and climate policy is complex, and I certainly do not claim to understand it. But if there is one thing I have found to be true in relation to social problems, it is this: those who offer a simplistic and comforting solution to an extraordinarily complex problem are either profoundly deluded or intentionally hoodwinking their listeners.