On Climate Change, the only fear is fear itself

Roosevelt’s warning against catastrophism should be heeded by environmentalists

We’re doomed I tell you doomed

Campaigners and commentators often say that global warming should be addressed as if it were a war.  They’re never entirely clear who the enemy is in this conflict, but we get the point.  This is an existential risk and requires a national effort equivalent to that mobilised in a war of national survival. However, what they seem to forget is that the first thing you have to do in a real war is not panic.

Keep Calm and Carry On was the first law of civil defence and for a very good reason. Wars are won through morale as much as from military might. If people sit in their homes immobilised by fear the battle is lost is lost.  Success requires collective effort toward specific and achievable goals. Whether that is making tanks or growing food. Above all, people must feel that victory is possible. 

The Green’s approach to winning the climate war, by contract, seems to be from Private Frazer school of civil defence . “We’re doomed I tell you, doomed!”  In 1940, when Britain stood alone against the Nazis, Private Frazer’s forecast was a pretty rational appraisal of the military situation. But sometimes hope has to be generated - especially for the young who were kept from harsh realities.

In Word War II,  Schools didn’t try to frighten children with lessons on how many millions were going to die.  Parents didn’t send them to sleep with bedtime stories about how much damage a bomb can do.  Yet a generation of kids has now been schooled in climate catastrophism. They are now deeply troubled about images like the planet boiling or everyone dying in a biblical conflagration. It is having a profoundly damaging impact on children’s mental health - a phenomenon that is being described as “pre-traumatic stress disorder.

Social scientists who report this phenomenon of eco-anxiety seem to believe that raising a generation of fearful children is inevitable and even desirable as a spur to action on climate. It is almost certainly not. Having children lying awake at night helps no one. They are more likely to grow up apathetic and disempowered solipsists, unable to cope with their own lives let alone address the social changes necessary to cope with climate change.

In a war, to continue this metaphor, it is vital to know when battles are being won, great and small. Even set backs can be reframed as achievements, such as the evacuation of British forces from Dunkirk in 1940. Imagine the press headlines today: “Britain Defeated in Europe; Thousands Dead; Nazi Invasion Imminent; UK “Will Be Enslaved!”.

There also seems to be an aversion to recognising when things are actually going right

Psychotherapists often tell their clients to stop “castastrophising” their problems: always looking at worst case scenarios. Resorting to panic may feel like a solution to a crisis because it briefly floods the body with endorphins, but it is ultimately self-defeating. The body’s “fight or flight” mode cannot be sustained indefinitely. It invariably descends into apathy, cynicism and debilitating depression.

The climate movement, perhaps for understandable reasons, has been addicted to catastrophism. Environmentalists and writers vie with each other in their apocalyptic forecasts of burning forests, drowned cities, millions dying in fire and flood. We’re told that climate change means mass starvation, desertification and uncontrollable migration. There is no time to lose. “Global warming has become global boiling” says the UN’s Antonio Guterres descending into environmental bathos.

These forecasts of doom make the prophets feel righteous and are eagerly amplified by a media that thrives on the negative. Climate activists provide a reliable source of scary stories not least the stunts of direct action groups like Green Peace. They also smother in obloquy anyone who dares to depart from a script which is taken directly from the Book of Revelations.

There is no doubting the reality of anthropomorphic climate change. However, this addiction to catastrophism can lead, as in the individual, to its flip side. People become desensitised to the disaster movie, because there is no resolution to it. Nothing ever changes, despite people doing what they are supposed to do: recycling, cutting out meat from their diets and generally trying to do their bit by reducing energy consumption. The crisis only seems to get worse and the only solution is to abandon economic growth and, as the chairman of COP28, Sultan Al Jaber put it, “return to the caves” which isn’t a solution at all.

Eventually people shut off because they have to get on with their lives, irritated at being made to feel guilty because they can’t afford electric cars, “eco” homes or heat pumps. They just want their family to have a warm home, go on holiday, do the school run - life goes on. Across Europe people are just turning off.It’s no good berating them as climate change deniers because they increasingly lack confidence in, and finances for, the solutions to climate change that even environmentalists doubt are likely to work. That just makes it worse.

The drift to the political right in the EU is being fuelled by this popular backlash. Parties like the Alternative fur Deutschland, now running second in the Germans opinion polls, have begun to campaign as much on heat pumps as on immigrants.

The panic button has been depressed once too often and public interest in festivals of doom like COP 28 is fading fast. You see this reflected in the climate talks at this year’s COP28 which I noted in an earlier column. In the absence of public engagement in, and enthusiasm for, green initiatives, COP lapsed into grumpy bickering and finger pointing. Petrostates accuse other petrostates of being backsliders and phoneys when the reality is that they are all hypocrites.

There also seems to be an aversion at these assemblies to recognising when things are actually going right. It seems heretical, for example, to celebrate the fact that Britain halved CO2 emissions on 1990 levels - in advance of most of the developed world. The UK is one of the very few countries that has a viable plan to reach Net Zero, according to the International Energy Agency. And that hasn't changed since Rishi Sunak scrapped unrealistic plans to ban petrol and diesel cars by 2030 and replace 20 million gas boilers by the same date. Britain is still on course to reduce emissions by 68% on 1990 levels by 2030. Thats far ahead of the US for all John Kerry’s righteous climate posturing.

Nor does the green lobby seem especially interested in market successes like the fall in the price of renewable energy. If you mention the Eiffel Tower-sized wind turbines on Dogger Bank you’re likely to be attacked, as I was, for being a shill for corporate capitalism. Yet the reality is that only corporate capitalism, directed by the state, possesses the investment necessary to make the transition from oil and gas a reality. Socialism isn’t going to come to the rescue. The endless blaming of “late capitalism” is pointless displacement, a means of avoiding responsibility rather than taking it. It is like teenagers blaming their parents for their own failures.

People Aren’t Stupid

There was a time perhaps when public ignorance, fuelled by corporate propaganda was arguably greatest obstacle to addressing climate change. Back in the late 90s - when people used to say how they’d rather like a bit of global warming to make British summers more tolerable.  But that phase is over.  No one is in any doubt about the reality of climate change and the public is up for dealing with it - as every opinion polls shows. 

But climate campaigners don’t seem to appreciate this.  They think that people are stupid and addicted to consumerism and cars.  They need to be knocked on the head by campaigns like Just Stop Oil, a slogan as hypocritical as it is misleading. Damaging paintings in art galleries must be the most brainless way yet devised to win support for a cause. Except perhaps for JSO’s other stunts, like trying to block busses carrying asylum seekers or sitting on top of London Underground carriages. Who do they think they are persuading?

The people blocking the roads, often students or middle class pensioners, benefit from fossil fuels in countless ways, from the Gore-Tex cagoules on their backs to the iPhones and computers they use to coordinate their interventions. Climate campaigners may not go on holiday or fly much but they invariably move around and that involves the expenditure of fossil energy. 

Most have cars back home if they have families, and all of them heat their homes, one way or another.  The food they eat depends on fertilisers derived from fossil fuels as do the triple-glazed windows and insulation material they want us to install as a matter of urgency. The NHS that looks after them would be impossible without the drugs developed by the pharmaceutical companies using fossil fuel derivatives. Or the mountains of medical and surgical equipment made with plastics and other materials.

Middle class professionals have the freedom to work from home part of the week and the bien pensants typically live in London where you don’t need a car because public transport is so good   Most working people - over 60% - depend on their cars to get to work. In most of non-metropolitan Britain there is no practical alternative. Yet people who drive are made to feel the are sinners killing the planet. Well there are 36 million of them at the last count. Guilt is the least constructive emotion as any therapist will tell you.

Hence the current public switch off from climate alarmism. Voters have had enough of it. Everyone wants to save the planet, but people have the more immediate problems of keeping their families warm and fed in a cost of living crisis, getting to and from work, and getting the kids to school and the various music lessons and sports they do. They particularly resent being accuse of being “far right” if they ask sensible questions about the wisdom of closing the roads under the Low Emission Zones.

If you keep lecturing people on how sinful they are, you set yourself up for a reaction. The “unco guid”, as the poet Robert Burns called sanctimonious religious prigs, have had their moment.  In a very real sense, the fate of the planet depends on their moving beyond recrimination, beyond moral posturing and, above all, kicking their addiction to catastrophism. As the bard put it:

O ye wha are sae guid yoursel',
Sae pious and sae holy,
Ye've nought to do but mark and tell
Your neibours' fauts and folly!

Happy New Year