I came across this today in the course of some research…
Lords Science Committee expand Behaviour Change Inquiry to consider interventions to reduce car usage in towns and cities
The House of Lords Science and Technology Committee have launched a new call for evidence as part of their inquiry into the use of behaviour change interventions in delivering Government policy. The Committee, who have been investigating behaviour change since July, have so far focused on Government efforts to promote healthy eating and reduce obesity. With the publication today of a second call for evidence, they are now turning their attention to policies designed to reduce car usage in towns and cities.
The Committee are inviting written evidence on the issue from any interested parties by Friday 21 January 2011. Some of the questions they are seeking answers to include:
What are the most influential drivers of behaviour affecting an individual’s choice of travel?
What role does infrastructure play in encouraging and facilitating changes in travel-mode choice?
What are the most appropriate type and level of delivery of behaviour change interventions to change travel-mode choice?
Are current policy interventions addressing both psychological and environmental barriers to change?
Are policy interventions appropriately designed and evaluated? What lessons have been learnt as a result of these evaluations?
What lessons can be learnt from interventions in other countries?
Baroness Neuberger, Chairman of the Inquiry on Behaviour Change, said in comment:
“We have had some very interesting evidence sessions in this inquiry, which has so far focused on efforts to reduce obesity. However, Government programmes to change behaviour go much wider than personal health alone.
“We will now focus on programmes designed to reduce car usage in towns and cities. Reducing the number of journeys made by private car is likely to be a big part of a successful programme to reduce the level of carbon emissions in the UK.
“We will look at examples of where successful schemes have been implemented and examine what lessons can be learnt and applied elsewhere.”
I haven’t got much to say about this right now — nor the time — but a couple of points should stick out.
First… That there are Government programmes to change behaviour should worry us immensely. Aren’t they supposed to ‘work for you’?
Second. It’s interesting that climate change is the legitimising basis of this proposed intervention.
Third. There seems to be no call for evidence regarding the rightness or wrongness of intervening in this way, whether or not climate change is happening.
Perhaps it is incumbent on us to take the initiative. If you have any time this Christmas holidays, consider responding to the “Science Committee’s” social engineering project.
Brain Cox is a great science communicator. That is to say, he makes very effective TV programmes, which do not condescend, and do much to encourage an interest in science. But there is surely science as process, and there’s ‘science’ as an institution. It’s not clear which one Cox – who gave this year’s Royal Television Society Huw Wheldon Lecture – was speaking for. His lecture, given the title, ‘Science: a challenge to TV Orthodoxy’ was disappointing given his previous arguments for scientific research, and didn’t challenge orthodoxy as much as it reproduced it, almost entirely uncritically.
To people who follow the climate debate, the interesting things would seem to be Brian’s treatment of Martin Durkin’s film, The Great Global Warming Swindle, which was ‘bollocks’, in Cox’s view; and Iain Stewart’s Climate Wars series, which was held up as a model of good science documentary making. (More on those points shortly.)
But what Brian’s lecture really demonstrates is very much the problem in the background to the climate debate, not merely the problem within it. As we’ve argued here, environmentalism is a symptom, not a cause of the problems experienced in today’s society. Some interesting contradictions in Brian’s thesis reveal the context of the climate debate.
Take, for instance, these two statements, one made at the opening and the other further into his presentation.
Science is enjoying a renaissance in its political and cultural visibility. It was largely protected in the recent government spending review, which speaks not only to its economic value, but also to its increasing public profile.
[...]
So since the continuing health of our science programming depends on the public and therefore government support, and the steady flow of excited young people who want to become scientists and engineers, television clearly has a big responsibility to get its science programming right.
At the same time as Cox celebrates the apparent scientific renaissance, he seems to be concerned that television isn’t getting science right. This appears to be something of a contradiction. What kind of cultural renaissance misconceives the very substance that drives it?
To demonstrate the problem of broadcasters’ approach to science, Cox turns to the treatment of two scientific arguments. The first is the BBC’s handling of complaints about his (correct) claim that ‘astrology is a load of rubbish’ in his film, the Wonders of the Solar System. It had drawn the following complaint:
His careless assertion was unreserved, unsubstantiated and unscientific. Has he done any empirical studies? Has he explored his birth chart? … I have certainly never seen him at an astrology conference or read anything written by him about astrology… This bad science is an abuse of a position of trust in an educational scientific programme funded by BBC licence payers. BBC guidelines state that astrology must be presented in a balanced way.
When the BBC asked Cox for a response, he simply put his argument more forcefully. The BBC instead released a statement explaining that Cox’s views on astrology were his own, and not necessarily a reflection of the BBC’s views. The issue Cox takes here is with the supposition that broadcasters should be ‘neutral’ in their coverage of ‘controversies’.
Cox says that this is a trivial case, but that there are much more serious problems caused by the imperative of impartiality. The next case he explores concerns criticism of the the media’s coverage of the MMR-autism scare from Dr. Ben Goldacre. Goldacre says:
Now debate’s good. But this was conspiracy theory and ignorance. The pharmaceutical industry have certainly been guilty of cover-ups. But MMR just isn’t one of them. And it’s not as if scientists have ignored the question. Researchers in Denmark looked at half a million children. 400,000 had MMR. 100,000 didn’t. And yet the rates of autism was the same in both groups. You’ve not heard about research like this, because the media chose not to cover the evidence that goes against their scare story. I can’t blame parents for being terrified. Evidence-based medicine — the science of how we know if something is good for us, or bad for us — is fascinating. It’s easy to understand. And I think the public deserve the chance to hear about these ideas.
Just as the BBC had sought to distance itself from Cox’s statements about astrology, the ITN news programme featuring Goldacre’s authored piece also emphasised that the opinions reflected belonged to the author, not the broadcaster.
These two cases indeed seem to point to a problem, though it’s worth asking how representative they are. And Cox’s reflection on them is not deep. Astrology is, as Cox claims, a mystical view of the universe. But its adherents no longer express their ideas in supernatural terms. The complainant’s criticism of Cox is expressed in scientific terms. It accused him of bad science. However much nonsense it is, the complainant’s reformulation of a supernatural idea in scientific terms speaks volumes about science’s ‘cultural and political renaissance’.
And to the MMR scare, we might want to say that, although the media’s appetite for controversy certainly raised the profile of the issue, scientists were at the heart of the story. Surrounding the coverage of Andrew Wakefield — the now disgraced researcher — who gave the story seemingly scientific credibility, were the angry parents of autistic children. A strange mix of high emotions and cold scientific language dominated the coverage, obscuring the substance of the matter. Cox and Goldacre both promise that science had the answer. But what does this promise say to the suspicion of the pharmaceutical industry — and by extension, medicine — that Goldacre seems to share? What can it do about the media’s need for ‘scare stories’? It seems, after all, less that science is enjoying a renaissance, but that ‘science’ is simultaneously the expression of a weakening of public discourse and trust, and is given as its remedy. To what extent is the use or abuse of science in the MMR scare or astrology really about science?
Moreover, climate sceptics would recognise Goldacre’s criticism of the media’s use of ‘scare stories’. And this makes Cox’s use of the Great Global Warming Swindle and BBC’s Climate Wars series all the more odd. If the media are drawn to scare stories such as MMR, is it not fair to ask if this phenomenon extends to the media’s coverage of the climate?
To illustrate the expression of bad documentary film-making, Cox points to the Swindle film, to make the argument that a viewer might not have the substance behind the eyes necessary to understand that Durkin’s film was a ‘polemic’. He acknowledges that the film was advertised and introduced as a polemic, but that this is not enough. He seems to want the words ‘POLEMIC’ in flashing red letters, throughout the broadcast.
Durkin’s film was polemic, of course. But Cox doesn’t ever explain what the fault of the film’s polemic was. Was it the solar / cosmic ray theory of cloud-formation? Or was it the argument that climate change is the product of this natural variation? Cox’s objection to TGGWS appears to be that it broke with what he calls the ‘peer-reviewed scientific consensus’, misleading the audience who may not be sufficiently well informed to understand that the film was a polemic. Broadcasters and film makers should stick to the peer-reviewed scientific consensus.
But if Cox doesn’t identify precisely what the object of the ‘peer-reviewed scientific consensus’ actually is, how can he criticise a ‘polemic’ which seems to contradict it? This blog has, over the past 4 years attracted criticism for the same thing, yet we’ve rarely ever ventured into matters of science. Indeed, our principal argument is that the ‘consensus’ seems to stand for whatever those who wield it claim it stands for. More to the point, we can see as much confusion about what the consensus is from climate scientists, world leaders, and activists as we can see from any group of sceptics. Yet it is only ‘sceptics’ and ‘deniers’ who are taken to task for taking liberties with the consensus.
There is a further problem here, in that the climate debate divides on another axis, between the argument about whether or not ‘anthropogenic climate change is happening’, and what its consequences are. Within each side of this axis there are competing and contradicting claims, and questions of degree, rather than binary, true-or-false calculations. If, just over a year ago, had you proposed a film to Brian Cox, which took issue with the claims that climate change would massively reduce crop yields in Africa, or that the hundreds of millions of people living beneath the Himalayas face chronic water shortages as a result of glacial recession, you would, in his view, be a ‘maverick’. You would be outside the ‘peer-reviewed scientific consensus’. Yet those are the things that this and other blogs have discovered to be false. The implication of Cox’s argument is that such claims should be ignored by broadcasters.
So the notion of a ‘peer-reviewed scientific consensus’ serves to polarise the political and scientific debates. And the unfortunate implication for Cox is that, as long as what you say apparently ‘fits’ the ‘peer-reviewed scientific consensus’, you can whittle out any nonsense you wish without incurring the wrath of the ‘scientists’. (And it should be asked again at this point, exactly how representative TGGWS was — as we’ve pointed out before, this bogeyman sticks out of many tens of thousands of hours of programming. It’s hardly typical of contemporary programming, and sits amongst many many hours of green trash.) You can, for instance, claim that a billion people will starve or face drought. You can claim that 150,000 people a year die of climate change. You can then, for no good reason double the estimate to say that 300,000 die of climate change. You can claim that there are just ‘50 days to save the planet’, or you can claim that ‘Obama has just 4 years to save the planet’, or you can claim that there are only ‘100 months to save the planet’.
In other words, you can use the ambiguous ‘peer reviewed scientific consensus’ to construct dramatic stories about catastrophe, and you can use this urgency to develop political arguments with the blessing of ‘science’. And that is precisely what Iain Stewart did for in his series, Climate Wars, which Cox holds up as an example of ‘drawing a clear distinction in the viewers mind, between the peer-reviewed science and his opinion’. In the clip Cox showed, Stewart said:
It would have been lovely to have made a programme about how science had got it all wrong. That actually we’ve got nothing to worry about. But unfortunately it’s the opposite. Most of the climate scientists I talked to are actually genuinely scared by the future. They’re worried that it’s in the nature of the climate to change far faster than we once thought possible. And my feeling is, if they’re scared, so should we be. Because whatever the uncertainties surrounding climate prediction, the fundamental science is pretty clear. We may not know exactly what global warming will bring, but we sure as hell know it’s happening. There’s just no hiding place from that simple fact. And of course what it means for us an our families, well, that’s a different matter. But if I’ve learned one thing in this series, it’s that the stakes are so high, doing nothing simply isn’t an option.
But as we showed here (and here), Stewart’s films took massive liberties with the facts of the climate debate, and even greater liberties with his treatment of the arguments of the ‘sceptics’. For instance, he presented the last 20+ years of debate as one between ‘scientists’ representing an unchanging ‘scientific consensus’ and the usual deniers. This re-wrote history, not only from the perspective of just one side, but also from the present. This ahistoric perspective was owed to the fact that the film is nothing more than a verbatim replication of Naomi Oreskes’s ‘Tobacco Strategy’ thesis. Indeed, Oreskes gets a credit on the film. But it’s nothing more than a conspiracy theory. As we pointed out:
To find support for her Tobacco Strategy theory, Oreskes simply takes debates about acid rain, secondhand smoke and CFCs, and divides each into two positions such that, with the benefit of hindsight, one is necessarily false, and the other is necessarily true; she polarises the debate so that it can be cast as a reasonable position versus a ridiculous one. From this vantage point, she can claim that a strategy has been in place throughout. But what debate with a scientific element to it wouldn’t be about how well understood the science is? Which one of these debates hasn’t involved exaggerated claims from alarmists? And what demands for regulation have not been met by opponents that it is not necessary. The Tobacco Strategy is a rather mundane observation about the nature of arguments. Yet Oreskes gives it enough significance to paint a picture of a conspiracy. As we have argued before, this search for geometric congruence between ‘denialist’ arguments comes at the expense of meaningful moral or political analysis. And by the same token, it could be argued just as easily that demands for acting on the best scientific evidence and scientific opinion makes bedfellows of greens and the eugenicists of the early-mid 20th century.
Brian Cox cannot have looked too deeply at the Climate Wars series, because Stewart routinely confuses ‘science’ with opinion. It was, in the words Cox might use, ‘factually total bollocks’, both in its treatment of the scientific arguments, and matters of history and politics. And it’s Cox’s surprisingly fragile understanding of the climate debate and his failure to subject claims about the ‘scientific consensus’ to criticism which causes him to reproduce the same old orthodoxy:
As Iain Stewart says, the consensus is clear. The real controversy is political, and centers on the question ‘what is to be done’. Should we increase tax on oil? Should we not build a third runway at Heathrow? Should we build more nuclear power stations? Or wind turbines? Should we risk damaging our economy in the short term by reducing CO2 emissions quickly? Or should we continue to pursue economic growth at all costs, and seek a more market-oriented solution to climate change? These are complex questions, the answers to which often divide down political lines. But I think Iain Stewart navigates these treacherous waters well, because he remains true to the science, and true to television.
Here, Cox is simply naive. For him, the political debate emerges after the ‘science’, but as this blog argues, there’s plenty of politics prior to the science.
In one sense, the politics is prior in determining what the consequences of climate change are likely to be. In order to understand the material consequences, environmentalists presuppose a fragile nature in ‘balance’. And to understand the human, social consequences of climate change, environmentalists need to presuppose that social phenomena are ‘natural’, such that nothing could ever be done, for instance, to abolish poverty. These points are discussed at length elsewhere on this blog. But there is another sense in which the politics is prior that could do with some exploration here.
As discussed above, science’s ‘political and cultural renaissance’ is coincident with moral disorientation at the newsdesk, and a collapse of trust between the public and medicine. Cox identifies that there’s a problem with TV makers responding to the controversies that its audience wants answers to, but appears to say nothing of what this phenomenon arose from. Just as newsdesks can only see the world in terms of scare stories and controversies, so too do today’s political arguments ground themselves on matters of catastrophe.
Cox does this himself:
This means that the most objective and impartial presentation of the so-called contentious story, such as MMR, climate change, astrology, or even the so-called evolution debate should be given significantly more weight to the scientifically peer-reviewed position. Because this will leave the audience with the more truthful view of the current thinking. Now you may see there that I’m redefining what impartiality means. But the peer-reviewed consensus is by definition impartial. To leave the audience with this particular kind of impartial view is desperately important. We’re dealing with the issues of the life and death of our children and the future of our climate. And the way to deal with this is not to be fair and balanced, to borrow a phrase from a famous news outlet, but to report and explain the peer-reviewed scientific consensus accurately.
Cox makes an argument for science, not on the basis of its positive potential for us, but on the same old basis: that we face crises. This is not an argument for science. It’s an appeal for authority.
… the grand challenges of our age such as climate change, and the ever-increasing appetite of our planet’s rapidly expanding population for clean water and energy require scientific and engineering solutions as well as political ones.
Cox is kidding himself. The peer-review process is not, by definition ‘impartial’. For instance, the peer-review process can’t necessarily exclude the possibility that the peer-reviewers are victims of the thinking that Cox is victim to. Does the peer-review process reject claims about the consequences of climate change which don’t give consideration to the degree to which social factors — i.e. poverty — determine the human outcome far more than weather? Or are scientists, just as journalists and politicians are, vulnerable to the idea that catastrophes are merely material events, devoid of any social or historical context? It strikes me that you can do perfectly good science on a flimsy social premise that ‘poverty is natural’, to conclude that climate change will make it worse. But why should this premise have more weight in the debate about climate change than the argument that we could do more by abolishing poverty? Moreover, the view of the climate debate that Cox seems to have is that it simply divides on the question about whether or not ‘climate change is happening’. And the fundamental problem here is that the ensuing arguments confuse the sensitivity of the climate to CO2 and the sensitivity of human society to climate.
My argument on this blog is that this confusion is the presupposition of much climate science that constitutes the ‘peer-reviewed scientific consensus’. This is at best a kind of soft-environmentalism, and it’s passed off as the conclusion of climate science. But really, it’s the premise of political environmentalism. The conclusion and premise of much climate research is identical, and never interrogated. This is the major fault not only of environmentalism, but also of science’s ‘political and cultural renaissance’.
Scientists, journalists and politicians are all vulnerable to the view that debates about science consist merely of arming the argument about ‘What is to be Done’ with the imperative: ‘Something Must be Done about…’. That is the extent of science’s ‘cultural and political renaissance’. In the process, a great number of presuppositions are smuggled in, consciously or not.
To this, Cox might respond (indeed he says it),
Science is simply the process by which we seek to understand nature. It is utterly a-populist. Its findings reflect no social or political norms or religious beliefs. In other words, when it comes to the practice of science, the scientists must never have an eye on the audience. For that would be to fatally compromise the process.
‘Science’ as a process may well have no agenda to speak of. But the same cannot be said of science as an institution. Science does not do science; people do science. And as much as the aim may be to produce a value-free investigation of the material world, we see in the climate debate that the issue is muddied. Climate science is no longer merely engaged in an attempt to understand material processes, but becomes the substance of an understanding of how humans relate, and the basis on which far-reaching political institutions are being established. The claim that 150,000 people die each year from climate change, for instance, to form the basis of a projection and a call for action, must presuppose that there is nothing that can be done to abolish poverty. In other words, climate science begins to explain the existence of poverty in the world: it’s the result of a degraded environment. The more general expression of this problem is the ‘naturalisation’ of social problems and phenomena.
The problem becomes clearer in a statement Cox makes near the start of his presentation:
I think the best way to illustrate these occasional incompatibilities is to first define what science is. Now this is not easy in a historical context, because to put it bluntly, vast amounts of drivel have been written about the subject by armies of postmodernist philosophers and journalists. But I’m going to ignore all this, because I concur absolutely with the quote attributed to the Nobel-prizewinning physicist, Richard Feynman. He said the philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornothology is to birds. To my mind, science is very simple indeed. Science is the best framework we have for understanding the universe. Now as long as you accept that evidence is more important than opinion, then this is a statement of the obvious. See everything we take for granted in the modern world, from atoms to electricity, from our understanding of the stars to medical imaging, is down to somebody being curious about the universe and using the scientific method to investigate it.
‘Science is the best framework we have for understanding the universe.’ Of course it is, with two important caveats. First, that material science is the framework for understanding the material world. Second, that this first caveat must imply some method which makes it possible to identify whether science is attempting to study something material, or something that is better understood or studied through social science.
Cox is nearly onto something when he says that postmodern philosophy confounds the definition of ‘science’. But he perhaps forgets what it also did to the study of the human realm. If we take ‘postmodernism’ to mean some radical form of relativism, which reduces ‘science’ to nothing more than ‘just another belief system’, this also reduces the social sciences and humanities to meaningless narratives. The effect of postmodernism on the understanding of the human world was far more devastating. The escape from postmodern relativism has been to locate authority not in human-centric ideas, values, or principles, but to ground it in what appears to be objectivity… ‘Science says…’ This really does turn ‘science’ into ‘just another narrative’, because it now starts to become an encompassing framework, from which claims are made about the non-material world. It starts to explain poverty as a natural phenomenon. It starts to explain the right and the wrong in material terms of ‘true and false’. It starts to connect humans through material phenomena. ‘Climate change’ begins to explain social phenomena; it measures the ‘ethics’ of our behaviour; it determines what form of social organisation is best, and how people should relate…
That is the reality of ‘science’s cultural and political renaissance’. Science becomes far more than a value free investigation of the material world, and starts, in Cox’s own words,
…to draw profound conclusions about our responsibility to ourselves, our planet, and ultimately the cosmos itself.
This is no longer ‘objectivity’. And when it turns out that the institutions of science don’t engender the respect and authority that Cox believes they deserve, he has only one answer: more scientism. The reality is that people are suspicious of the MMR jab and people believe in astrology, not because they are mislead, but because it takes more than sheer wonder at the universe to create trust in political, social, and scientific institutions.
I have a story on Spiked today, about the pre-Cancun messages from the Met Office. In retrospect, I wish I’d called it “Some of our Global Warming is Missing”, but I expect it’s been said before.
Conventional climate wisdom has it that once ‘the science’ is put before politics, politicians will respond to the imperative to save us from Gaia’s revenge. So each year, representatives from each country that has signed up to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) assemble to turn it into an agreement to limit CO2 emissions.
But science is a slow process; politics happens much faster. In the rush to get the most recent research under the noses of policymakers, those engaged in the climate debate show that climate politics exists before climate science has even got its thermometer out.
I don’t normally ‘do’ science, but it seems that the MO are getting less coherent and more involved with the politics.
It would have been good to also have had a look at the stuff from the Tyndall Centre / RS Phil Trans A and their panic about 4 degrees, but there wasn’t room.
While you’re over at Spiked, check out Eero Iloniemi’s article on land prices in places that are about to be washed away by climate change and sea-level rise.
I’ve been too busy for blogging recently. To break the silence, I thought I’d post this presentation I gave at a debate at York University this time last year. The discussion was about the view often expressed by environmentalists that there is no need for any further scientific debate. Needless to say, our side won the vote about the motion.
One of the most striking characteristics of the climate debate is the almost routine confusion of politics and science.
“Climate change is happening”, we’re told, time and time again, therefore “we need strong, radical, international frameworks on climate change”, laws, regulation, and maybe even rationing in order to prevent a disaster.
In this view, we need to fundamentally change our economies, our industry, and our lifestyles. And we need institutions to be put in place to make sure this happens.
This has even become an argument against democracy itself. This argument holds that the public are too stupid to understand the gravity of the situation we face. Democracy therefore becomes no more than a means to satisfy individual greed and indulgence in the face of catastrophe.
“We are fiddling with our ipods and plasma widescreen TVs while Rome burns.”
My argument here is that to forbid the discussion of the science of climate change is therefore to forbid the discussion of the organising principle of today’s political institutions.
We cannot challenge it because it exists behind closed doors. It exists on computer simulations, guarded by today’s priests: a holy order of climate scientists.
The scientific proposition that CO2 causes or will cause catastrophe has formed the basis of a system of ethics and a system of politics. This system is environmentalism, and it exists in contrast to human-centric systems of thought and politics. It informs the creation of supra-national political organisations, such as the UNFCCC and treaties that follow in its wake. It informs our industrial transport and the energy policies and strategies of our government. It establishes the relationship between individuals and the state.
We take it for granted that this proposition, or set of propositions, is true, because science is, in today’s world, the last seat of authority.
The question I have is about whether that desire for political authority exists before or after climate science. I believe that the politics is prior.
The unstated premise of environmentalism is that politics is impotent to face the challenges of development.
Once this view has been established, once we decide that politics is pointless, catastrophe becomes a given.
As I argued on Tuesday, catastrophe is inevitable, only if we take it for granted that we cannot organise the world to combat poverty through development, i.e. through the creation of wealth.
We hear so often that climate change will be worse for the poor, but we never interrogate this claim to ask whether it might be better to address the issue of poverty than to attempt to make other people’s lives better by driving less.
So we hear that the 300,000 deaths attributed to climate change are a bigger concern than 40 million deaths — and the rest — from poverty, throughout the world.
This dysnumeric moral calculus is owed to our politicians’ inability to generate authority for their political ideas in political terms: by asking you to engage with them, for instance. It is owed to their inability to connect with the public. This has driven politicians to search for another basis for their authority. Contemporary politics cannot conceive of a way of making life better for the millions or billions of people living in poverty in this world, never mind finding a way of improving life for the rest of us. There is no science which could serve as the basis for such an idea.
Accordingly, we are forced to accept a form of politics that is limited by the ethical imperatives seemingly issued by climate and environmental science
This, it is argued, is evidence-based policy-making.”The science is in”, and the continued debate about climate change impedes the possibility of “rising to the challenge” we are faced with. Instead, I would argue, we can see policy-based evidence making.
The catastrophes that we are confronted by, are instead the products of today’s vapid political imaginations. They confused their own impotence for material reality. No wonder the other ‘side’ does not want there to be a debate.
A continued debate might reveal just how hollow today’s political discourse actually is: what is passed off as climate science is a fig leaf. It hides our politicians shame: an embarrassment of bad faith, bad politics, and bad science.
Read my article about Ch4′s What the Green Movement Got Wrong at Spiked-Online.
Environmentalists have long claimed that their desire to save the world has been thwarted by conspiracies of Big Oil and right-wing think-tanks. Channel 4’s What the Green Movement Got Wrong (watch it here) showed signs that some environmentalists are at last beginning to take responsibility for their failures. But does it tell us anything we didn’t already know, and will the new environmentalists be so different from the old?
Are we facing an existential environmental problem?
Yes. I hope we agree that the global environment is already in bad trouble, and getting worse. (If spiked is in denial over that, then there’s not much hope for this debate). The increasing rate of extinctions, the rising number of species suffering population declines in the order of 90 per cent (not just tigers, but sparrows and voles, too), the destruction of rainforests, the pollution of the oceans – the evidence is plain to see.
It’s plain to see that neomalthusians don’t really understand their own argument, nor the criticism of it, in spite of its historic failures.
It’s too early to say much about the film — I haven’t seen it yet — but it appears to feature prominent environmentalist, Mark Lynas saying that environmentalists were wrong to oppose GM and nuclear energy. The thinking being that these are two ways we could prevent global warming.
“My view”, says Lynas, “as one of the contributors to the film, is simple: the greens can dish it out, but they can’t take it.”
You what, Mark?
This is a real debate and the environment movement needs to tackle it head-on rather than asserting that all challenges must be part of some imagined evil conspiracy.
Pie-man Mark Lynas said he was unable to ignore Lomborg’s comments on climate change. “I wanted to put a Baked Alaska in his smug face,” said Lynas, “in solidarity with the native Indian and Eskimo people in Alaska who are reporting rising temperatures, shrinking sea ice and worsening effects on animal and bird life.” Many countries in the Third World are also experiencing the effects of climate change. In Africa, Lake Chad is now a twentieth of the size it was in the 1950s, leaving millions potentially without water. The Pacific island nation of Tuvalu is planning the evacuation of its entire population as sea levels continue to rise. “And yet despite all this evidence,” comments Lynas, “Lomborg somehow contrives to argue that it is cheaper to go on burning fossil fuels than to switch to clean energy to prevent runaway global warming. This feeds right into the agenda of profiteering multinationals like Esso.”He continued: “I don’t see why the environment should suffer every time some bored, obscure academic fancies an ego trip. This book is full of dangerous nonsense.
Lynas’s views on nuclear power has got him into trouble with the green movement before, of course. Back in 2008, he wrote,
Just a month ago I had a Damascene conversion: the Green case against nuclear power is based largely on myth and dogma. [...] The backlash to my first magazine article on the subject prompted my inbox to collapse, the blogs to drip with venom, the dirty looks to multiply.
Just imagine! Venomous attacks from environmentalists! Poor, poor, Lynas. Still, at least it’s provided a moment of self reflection, even if it is own backside he’s disappearing into.
But was Lynas’s conversion a Road to an Atomic Damascus or the Green Reformation, we asked, as Lynas battled with another favourite of ours, Green Party leader, Caroline Lucas. Lynas, like Luther, has nailed his theses to Ch4’s door. It will be interesting to see just how deep a reflection on the problems of the environmental movement Lynas has been able to commit himself to. I have my doubts.
It’s all well and good to propose nuclear power as a technical solution to an objectively-defined problem of climate change, and to point out that the greens have been the ones doing most to prevent progress in this regard. But this misses the point that environmentalism — Lynas included — doesn’t begin with objectively-defined crises. For instance, Lynas now finds himself accused of the kind of attack on his integrity he was once proud to be involved in. Silly consumer ethics guru, Leo Hickman in Tuesday’s Guardian points out that
An environmental documentary due to be broadcast on Channel 4 on Thursday evening has come under attack from a leading American environmentalist who was interviewed for the programme, as well as a coalition of anti-GM campaigners based in the developing world. [... ] In a letter sent today to Channel 4′s head of news and current affairs, Dorothy Byrne, a coalition of anti-GM campaigners based in the developing world led by India’s Vandana Shiva accused the filmmakers of using only two “southern-based commentators”, both of whom are “funded by major GMO [genetically modified organisms] companies”.
Friends of the Earth, who are angry that they have been named in the film, have issued a statement and a film:
And it is here that we can really see what the environmental movement gets wrong. Kirtana Chandrasekaran’s vision for the future is one in which we ‘build on the knowledge’ that small farmers throughout the world have. The irony here being that, just a moment previously, she had complained that GM technology locks poorer people into debt and poverty. She can’t see beyond this form of existence, to consider the possibility of small farmers becoming big farmers, and of leaving subsistence existences — and possibly rural life — far behind them. For Chandrasekaran, subsistence existences are the expression of pure eco-virtue. And this is what the environmental movement gets terribly, terribly wrong.
This announcement appeared to follow in the wake of a series of episodes that challenged the scientific basis of the arguments for political action on climate change. Email hacking, questions about the provenance of IPCC claims and the virtues of its chair seemed to make climate scepticism more respectable than it had been. This was in many respects grotesque. As I argued here, climate orthodoxy had not actually been challenged by an open public, technical debate about the conclusions of climate science, and neither had it been challenged by a debate about the premises of political environmentalism. Instead, it was the media’s desire for stories about sleaze and scandal which drove this issue into the limelight. Nonetheless, events at least allowed for climate orthodoxy to be challenged. Even the president of the Royal Society, Martin Rees, now seemed to acknowledge that climate change anxiety had been over-egged.
Climate change is a hugely important issue but the public debate has all too often been clouded by exaggeration and misleading information. We aim to provide the public with a clear indication of what is known about the climate system, what we think we know about it and, just as importantly, the aspects we still do not understand very well.
If the Royal Society aimed to clarify the issue for the public, by pointing out that the debate was ‘clouded by exaggeration and misleading information’, it had already failed. You can’t clarify a complex situation merely by pointing at the mess, and issuing ‘the facts’ about what it pertains to, especially since it had been the Royal Society under the stewardship of Martin Rees’s predecessor, Bob May, who had done much to add heat – rather than light – to the public debate.
For instance, in 2005, the Royal Society published ‘A guide to the facts and fictions about climate change’, which is now offline. (We have a copy of it if you’d like to see it.) This is what it said about climate scepticism.
There are some individuals and organisations, some of which are funded by the US oil industry, that seek to undermine the science of climate change and the work of the IPCC. They appear motivated in their arguments by opposition to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol, which seek urgent action to tackle climate change through a reduction in greenhouse gas emission. Often all these individuals and organisations have in common is their opposition to the growing consensus of the scientific community that urgent action is required through a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. But the opponents are well-organised and well-funded.
The Royal Society in 2005 was not working from scientific facts but was propagating conspiracy theories, none of which it could substantiate. We pointed out for example, that the claims about ‘well-funded’ attempts to challenge to climate politics didn’t pass a test of basic arithmetic. In fact, what characterised the climate sceptics was their lack of funding, especially when seen in contrast to the astronomical sums available to the panic industry.
Bob May epitomised the angry, intolerant and censorious character of the environmental movement further when he offered his own unique translation of the Royal Society’s motto in 2007. Nullius in Verba had long been translated as ‘on the word of no one’, but May had decided a better translation was ‘respect the facts’. As self-appointed custodian of the facts, however, he didn’t appear to be against making them up himself.
May had accused Martin Durkin, the director of the Great Global Warming Swindle of being a HIV-AIDS denier, as well as a climate change denier. And this must speak most loudly about the desperation of high profile and influential climate change alarmists even while they were enjoying almost entirely favourable media coverage, and the sympathy of governments. Even when ‘the science was settled’, it wasn’t settled enough for those who wielded it to make political arguments. They needed to make stuff up, whether it be about the effects of climate change, or about those who were sceptical of their claims, to win the political debate.
Under the stewardship of Rees, the Royal Society’s commentary on climate change was torned down somewhat. In June 2007, it published a ‘simple guide’ to ‘climate change controversies’. This consisted of a number of answers to what the RS had understood as ‘misleading arguments’ that characterised the sceptic’s arguments.
Misleading argument 1: The Earth’s climate is always changing and this is nothing to do with humans.
Misleading argument 2: Carbon dioxide only makes up a small part of the atmosphere and so cannot be responsible for global warming.
Misleading argument 3: Rises in the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are the result of increased temperatures, not the other way round.
Misleading argument 4: Observations of temperatures taken by weather balloons and satellites do not support the theory of global warming.
Misleading argument 5: Computer models which predict the future climate are unreliable and based on a series of assumptions.
Misleading argument 6: It’s all to do with the Sun – for example, there is a strong link between increased temperatures on Earth and the number of sunspots on the Sun.
Misleading argument 7: The climate is actually affected by cosmic rays.
Misleading argument 8: The scale of the negative effects of climate change is oftenoverstated and there is no need for urgent action.
Each of these ‘misleading statements’ was outlined, and followed by the words, ‘What does the science say?’ These were followed again in each case by an account of what science had apparently said to the report’s authors. Science’s words, however, retold through the mediums at the Royal Society, became bland, condescending, and failed to raise the level of the debate. The approach of the report was typical of the establishment’s mode of engaging with the public on scientific matters at that time. A belief existed that all you needed to do to convince the public was to present the opposite case as ‘myths’ and to counter them with ‘simple’ ‘facts’, and public would obediently defer to scientific authority. The irony here being, of course, that the RS had been involved in its own myth-making, not only by presenting ‘simple’ accounts of the climate debate (which is actually complex), but also by having made unequivocal and unreasonable statements about the climate debate and its politics. It wanted now to retreat to ‘simple’ scientific facts. Too late.
The public, not being as simple as the RS understood them to be, recognised that the reduction of the debate to ‘simple’ facts was typical of those making political arguments on the basis of the over-stretched claims about climate change. The idea that ‘myths’ and ‘facts’ characterise the debate is the corollary of the idea that the debate divides into two camps: scientists and deniers, who deal in facts and myths respectively. The report spoke only to the myths and to the deniers, whereas the public by now knew that the debate was far more complex. The ‘simple guide’ delivered precisely this over-simple message in its introduction:
This is not intended to provide exhaustive answers to every contentious argument that has been put forward by those who seek to distort and undermine the science of climate change and deny the seriousness of the potential consequences of global warming.
Reports published at the time revealed that the thinking public, even if they believed that climate change was happening, also understood that it had been exaggerated by cynical politicians and scientists who had become giddy with hyperbole and their new-found celebrity status. The failure to treat the arguments made from its own ‘side’ to scientific scrutiny revealed the continued partial treatment of the issue by the RS, and moreover, demonstrated the inability to reflect on its own position that characterises environmentalism. For an institution established with the purpose of promoting the role of science in the public sphere, the Royal Society had perhaps become its own worst enemy.
The events of the last year, which undermined the credibility of climate science in the public’s mind still further, need no retelling here. We can see now that each successive report that the Royal Society has issued has not been amended or improved by developments in climate science, but by the problems generated for it by the attitude of the previous report. As Rees says in the press release attached to the current report:
It is three years since the Society published a document specifically designed to help the general public get a full understanding of climate change. Nothing in recent developments has changed or weakened the underpinning science of climate change. In the current environment we believe this new guide will be very timely. Lots of people are asking questions, indeed even within the Fellowship of the Society there are differing views. Our guide will be based on expert views backed up by sound scientific evidence.”
So if the ‘underpinning science of climate change’ has not changed, what has given rise, then, to the people who ‘are asking questions’. Who are they, and what are their questions? The report doesn’t say. Rees continues,
It has been suggested that the Society holds the view that anyone challenging the consensus on climate change is malicious – this is ridiculous. Science is organised scepticism and the consensus must shift in light of the evidence. The Society has always encouraged debate particularly through our discussion meetings and our journals. The Society has held two recent discussion meetings relevant to this area. One on Greenhouse gases in the earth system: setting the agenda for 2030 and one on Handling uncertainty in science. The debate must be open and it must also be based on sound science rather than dogma.
Rees’s claim here is umitigated nonsense. The RS refused to allow complexity, uncertainty or dissent into the debate, and indeed dismissed as malicious those who had a different perspective on climate change. The 2005 report accused sceptics of ‘undermining science’ for financial ends and private interests. The 2007 report was directed at ‘those who seek to distort and undermine the science of climate change and deny the seriousness of the potential consequences of global warming’. The RS actively discouraged debate, its presidents and their staff claimed that there was no debate to be had, and that those who wanted one were ‘deniers’.
The new report does not say much at all. It is a restatement of the science, divided into three categories of certainty, ‘Aspects of climate change on which there is wide agreement’, ‘Aspects of climate change where there is a wide consensus but continuing debate and discussion’, and ‘Aspects that are not well understood’. These are intended, it seems, to delimit areas of permissible discussion. As a document which is concerned with the physical science of climate change, by itself, it seems very limited indeed. This blog is concerned more with the political and moral arguments which putatively emerge from climate science. And it is the inability of the RS to recognise the sheer weight of expectations that are hung on climate science that make this new report almost completely pointless.
The implication of the report is still that if we can establish what the effect of CO2 on the climate system and natural processes is, the answer to the question ‘what is to be done?’ will come to us. Instead, the claims in the climate debate are far more complex than can be substantiated by establishing that ‘climate change is [or is not] happening’. For instance, it is perfectly feasible that some degree of climate change is happening, and that this may cause problems for some people, particularly people in the poorer parts of the world, as the RS have pointed out in the past. And it is on this fact that much of the moral argument for political action on climate change rests. This perspective is captured in the introduction to the new report
Changes in climate have significant implications for present lives, for future generations and for ecosystems on which humanity depends.
However, as we have pointed out, the fundamental issue for such people is not the climate, but their lack of wealth. The further implication of this approach is that such poverty as exists to make people vulnerable to climate is inevitable, or even ‘natural’. But can ‘science’ really determine the extent to which human societies and future generations really depend on ecosystems? Or is the claim merely a political presupposition that exists in the perspectives of the authors of the RS report, prior to any data or scientific facts? What if we were to suggest instead that the fundamental dependency that humans have is not on ecosystems, but between themselves? After all, what determines people’s vulnerability to climate in today’s world is not the climatic conditions of their location, but their ability to cope with it. Here in the UK, where we enjoy central heating, a car, and food, we do not have better access to ‘ecosystems’ than people living elsewhere in the world. Poorer people in the world could be richer. Much richer. And this wealth would afford them better protection from a changing, or not changing, climate. The problem of climate change, therefore, is not principally determined by climatic conditions, but by social, economic, and technological development. It is not climate science we should be looking to in order to establish the immediate problems of climate change, but instead social science.
Some have welcomed the Royal Society’s apparent repositioning, believing it to represent a tacit acknowledgement of the extent to which climate change has been exaggerated. But even if the RS are now treating the climate issue with slightly more caution, it is not after any reflection on what took it to its own extremes. The same eco-centric precepts persist in this report, and out of this new position something far more sinister is emerging.
Climate change science has comprehensively failed to produce a basis from which climate politics can proceed. In the first place, it is too abstract a set of ideas to act as a narrative to explain the human world. In the second, and because of the first, it has been wildly exaggerated. People – rightly – simply did not believe that their lives were so dependent on natural processes. Politicians’ and environmentalists’ ambitions to produce moral authority from terrifying stories about catastrophe were shattered by the force with which their messages were thrust upon the public. The stories grew less credible.
As we’ve been arguing here for a long time, climate politics are prior to climate science. As explained above, the premise of human dependence on ecosystems exists before any consideration of material facts or theories about the state of the planet. Accordingly, changes to natural processes count in this perspective as damage to human society. The way out of that framework for those of a human-centric persuasion is to emphasise the degree to which human society makes itself, and depends on its own creativity – not ecosystems – for more than mere survival.
That understanding was once the principle that science promised to unleash, so that humans could progress towards their own future rather than one dictated by the weather. It liberated individuals and society from illegitimate rule and mystical and superstitious ideas. Now science instead is used to find ways to contain that creativity by denying it. In the climate debate, moral authority was sought by claiming that our incautious progress had altered the weather. Now, that same authority is being sought on the basis that we are not sufficiently creative to invent faster than we consume. We are going to run out of stuff. There are too many people.
Shortly after the Royal Society announced it was to revise its advice on climate change, it announced [PDF]:
The Royal Society is undertaking a major study to investigate how population variables will affect and be affected by economies, environments, societies and cultures over the next forty years and beyond. The aims of the study are to provide policy guidance to decision makers and inform interested members of the public based on a dispassionate assessment of the best available evidence. The scope of the study will be global but it will explicitly acknowledge regional variations in population dynamics and the impact of policy interventions. We aim to complete the project by early 2012.
The timing is no accident. The character of the public discussion of environmental issues is changing. While it is welcome that there has been a marginally more sober reflection on the climate, there is little to celebrate. The scientific academy has sensed that it in today’s world, it wields political power. As the call for evidence suggests, the Royal Society has already decided that population is a problem, and the size of the population ought to be managed by political power, not by the individuals it consists of.
We invite feedback on the following questions. [... ]
What scientific evidence is available to show how fertility, mortality, migration, ageing and urbanisation will affect or be affected by population levels and rates of change, at both regional and global levels, over the next forty years and beyond?
How fertility, mortality, migration, ageing and urbanisation are influenced by and influence environments, economies, societies and cultures?
What are the strengths and weaknesses of different population modelling methodologies?
What are the key interconnections among population change, environments, economies, societies and cultures? How do these relate to any of the examples listed in the second bullet point of the terms of reference above?
What are the key linkages among population, technology and consumption.
What are the best (or worst) examples of how policy has been effective in managing population changes?
What other issues should our study addresses?
The implication of these question is the same idea that operated at the core of the RS’s climate perspective. The idea of our dependence on ecosystems is still the premise of its neomalthusianism. The climate story emphasised the damage that climate change would do to these systems, resulting in calamity. A weaker form of the same climate story serves as an adjunct to the population story. Neomalthusians can now acknowledge the uncertainty of the climate science, but make the claim that the degree to which climate change is certain is a function of population. The more people, the greater the possibility that climate change is a problem. Climate change has been the principal narrative which connected human society to the natural world, but now population has become the ‘master’ issue. It connects fears about biodiversity, climate change, resource-depletion, pollution, and so on. We can jump up and down with joy when climate science is shown to have been exaggerated by politicians, or is embarrassed by the excesses of a researcher. But it won’t have been the result of attempts to understand the phenomenon of environmentalism, and environmentalists will simply regroup under the population issue, as we predicted they would.
The main problem with this perspective, is as we’ve argued here, that it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we start from the premise of environmental-determinism — that our futures are dependent on ‘ecosystems’ — then we preclude the possibility of development that would allow us to exceed ‘natural limits’. The notion of human dependence looks like an objective claim with a scientific basis, but it is in fact a moral argument. Of course, it is possible to find instances of human dependence on natural processes. But these are contingent facts not universal truths, and the point of emphasising natural limits is to create for society an organising principle.
Further, it is hard to make a counter-argument in scientific terms. How do you quantify the potential of human creativity in the scientific terms that neomalthusianism appears to demand? This was the conundrum that led Martin Rees to his conclusion that human understanding is limited in his Reith lectures earlier this year.
Rees couldn’t quantify the extent of human possibility, but claimed that it must exist somewhere. His argument was that we should act as though we are limited now. Just as with the neomalthusian perspective, this seems to demand a seemingly scientific answer to its claims, but neither the extent of human potential, nor the actual limits imposed by nature are given. And so, the benefit of the doubt is given to environmentalism’s political project. As I pointed out, the result is toxic: “it’s only when you take a narrow, limited, and negative view of humanity that you can make stories about our imminent demise, and the necessity of creating special forms of politics to prevent catastrophe from occurring.”
Rees and the Royal Society are seeking ever greater roles for science in the political sphere. Politicians, who are suffering from a historic inability to define their purpose, take the authority this lends them with ever more enthusiasm. But this has resulted in a qualitative shift in the character of science. Where once it provided the means to liberate human potential, it now exists to regulate it. Instead of ‘speaking truth to power’, science increasingly speaks official truth for official power. The result is bad politics and bad science.
The previous post on this blog looked at the bizarre relationship between former Labour government minister (now Labour Party leader) Ed Miliband, and the 10:10 founder and Age of Stupid director, Franny Armstrong. One of the most curious things that this uneasy love-in produced was the escalation of the phenomenon we call pastiche politics – politicians and activists dress up as history-defining players of the past in an effort to conceal the vacuity of their perspective on the world. The ‘splattergate’ video produced by the 10:10 campaign epitomised the tendency of today’s wooden political actors to do nothing other than alienate themselves from those they intend to persuade.
After the bloodbath – an ill-conceived effort to use self-deprecating humour, apparently – The Guardian seems to have found a new film-maker and film to serve as (ahem) damage limitation following Richard Curtis’s video nasty. It’s a trailer for a documentary glorifying the achievements of activist groups Climate Rush, Climate Camp, and Plane Stupid. But it’s no less revolting than the 10:10 bloodbath.
It’s a classic case of pastiche politics. The big-hitting point they close with is made by a ‘domestic extremist’, who ‘puts her body in the way’ of business as usual in an effort to change the world.
You know, Rosa Parks sat down on a bus; the law changed, because lots of people agreed with her. So that’s what we have to do.
Rosa Parks didn’t have a self-congratulating, white, middle-class, privileged production team with private incomes following her every move, though. The Domestic Extremist compares herself favourably to Parks, but convinces only herself of the virtue of her activism. Rosa Parks bravery in the face of the possibility of brutal treatment by the police, physical attack and murder, and institutional injustice simply does not compare to the actions of the pastiche protester. She ‘doesn’t mind getting arrested’, because it will make little difference to her. Sure, she’ll get man-handled by some policemen, she’ll be arrested, and charged with some public order offence. That’s uncomfortable, but it is child’s play compared to the treatment suffered by genuine civil rights protesters throughout the world and throughout history. She’ll continue her comparatively privileged life, which will only be troubled – if it is at all troubled – by the consequences of her own actions, not by the colour of her skin. What is more, she’ll enjoy the support of whichever politicians are asking for her support, such as Miliband, and now the UK Prime Minister, David ‘vote-blue-go-green’ Cameron.
The trailer ends with the following plea for funds to finish the film:
This project won’t happen without your support
But it could equally be a mission statement for the environmental movement as a whole. Because, contrary to what our Domestic Extremist says, this is no popular movement. That’s why these protesters have to resort to pastiche politics – masquerading as popular protests of the past.
Ed Miliband — the previous government’s Secretary of State for the Department of Energy and Climate Change — has been elected leader of the Labour Party. Hmm.
This is unusual. Not only is Miliband relatively young for someone hoping to convince the voting public that he’s the best man for the job of running the country, before 2005, nobody had heard of him. It was in that year’s general election that Ed first stood as an MP. Just one election cycle later, he has the party’s top job, and in another, he could in theory be the UK’s number 1. He’d have to turn the party’s fortunes around, however, and that would be harder to achieve than his apparently meteoric rise from obscurity. After all, the reality is not so much that Ed has risen through the Labour Party than it is that the party has sunk to his level. This dynamic reflects what we’ve been saying for most of his career as an MP: environmentalism’s ascendancy is not explained by its own force, but has instead been driven by a vacuum at the heart of UK politics. And Ed is every bit the environmentalist.
There is a lot to say about the phenomenon of Ed. For instance, it is interesting that it was the vote of the unions that gave him a narrow edge over his brother, David, who also stood in the race. What did Ed have that the Unions wanted? In what sense does Ed Miliband best represent the unions? And for that matter, in what sense do the unions, in 2010, represent the interests of their membership? The conservative press have made — and no doubt will continue to make — much of this, calling him ‘Red Ed’, but in doing so, they make far too much of it. Politics, the unions, and the public are not what they were in the 1970s, ‘60s, ‘50s… It’s hard to imagine the masses — or put more strongly: the industrial working class — being moved by Ed Miliband’s desire for a low-carbon economy, for wind farms, for strong international legally-binding treaties on climate change, and for the substantial changes to lifestyles, opportunities, living standards and to society that these things necessarily entail. As we have argued here, environmentalism and climate change politics simply are not popular, but are elitist. Indeed, we have argued that the elitist character of environmentalism is no accident, but represents the political establishment’s clumsy attempt to find a source of legitimacy in lieu of something — anything — with which to achieve a democratic mandate. That is to say that climate change is convenient to indistinct, hollow, shallow, and narrow political parties — saving the planet is a stand in for vision and ideas about how to argue for and achieve positive change.
To be fair — ish — to Ed, he recognised the unpopular character of environmentalism. We are fond of quoting Ed on this, because it is perhaps the most revealing comment about climate change politics ever made by a UK politician:
When you think about all the big historic movements, from the suffragettes, to anti-apartheid, to sexual equality in the 1960s, all the big political movements had popular mobilization. Maybe it’s an odd thing for someone in government to say, but I just think there’s a real opportunity and a need here.
As we pointed out at the time, many were claiming that ‘climate change is the defining issue of our era’. But it coincided with the another defining issue of our time: a dearth of historically-defining political movements and ideas. This is why, we have argued here, politicians accordingly cast themselves as the Roosevelt, Churchill, Kennedy of climate change, offering ‘green new deals’, and demanded we got ourselves on a ‘(world) war (II) footing’ if we wanted to save ourselves from Thermageddon. Solving the climate crisis would be our ‘moon landing’.
But this was all ‘pastiche politics’, we argued: lacking a popular movement, environmentalism is unable to make its own history, and so recycles heroes and pivotal moments from the past to elevate its players. Ed’s reflection on environmentalism’s failure was not all that deep after all. He was sharp enough to realise that environmentalism was unpopular, but not bright enough to remember that it was not the political establishment who were demanding the vote for women. It was not those in power who were demanding civil rights and sexual equality. Ed had gotten the whole point of radical politics upside down. It was pressure from below which forced a change above in each of those instances. What Ed was asking for, then, was not unlike asking the rioting serfs of 18th centruy France to demand ‘less cake’. It should be no surprise, then, that those to whom he turned to create the popular environmental movement were really quite posh. It was Tamsin Osmond, grand-daughter of Baronet Sir Thomas Lees, who styled herself and her chums as ‘climate suffragettes’, just as Ed Miliband had asked. Osmond’s group, Climate Rush, descended on Parliament, demanding as their namesakes had a century prior: “deeds not words”. The ladies in fancy dress found themselves arrested. Already, the protesters who had done the bidding of the government minister found themselves on the wrong side of the law. In today’s political world, it is hard to tell the establishment from the revolutionaries.
The Climate Rush movement, so easily parodied, soon lost its momentum. Miliband’s desire for a credible One to organise the masses turned him towards Franny Armstrong, who, although being nearly as posh as Osmond, had dropped the plummy, public school accent for an estuarine whinge. Armstrong, you will remember, was the director of the abysmal film, Age of Stupid, an angry shout at the world, released last year. Off the back of the publicity generated by the film, Armstrong established the 10:10 campaign, intended to get us all to reduce our CO2 emissions by 10% in 2010. In other words, Armstrong had created what might pass as a movement that could help Ed Miliband realise his government’s carbon emissions-reduction targets. Ed took the initiative, and made appearances alongside Armstrong at the launch of her films and campaigns.
Ed, for all his faults, was a politician with a mandate, seeking a greater basis from which to support the policies he was seeking to create. Franny, however, was frequently rude, scolding him for not creating sufficiently far-reaching climate policies, and urging him to ‘stop being a politician’. The self appointed zealot would reproach the democratically-elected politician for heeding public will. She was pure… She wanted to save the planet… But all politicians — especially those who are sensitive to the public mood — are bent. Miliband would take the flak, hoping that such martyrdom and sycophancy would demonstrate his commitment to the cause, and get the climate protesters behind him. Here is one such exchange.
So what’s this all about? You will no doubt be aware that Armstrong has also been in the news recently. An advert for her 10:10 campaign called ‘No Pressure’ has caused controversy by depicting the summary executions of children and others who refuse to be moved by their teacher’s and boss’s instructions. The intensely patronising teacher and the equally intensely patronising boss, upon sensing their underlings’ recalcitrance, casually press buttons which cause the climate delinquents’ bodies to explode all over their obedient class and work mates. The teacher and boss press on with business as though nothing, let alone the murder of their subordinates, had happened. “No pressure”, they had said. But afterwards, no regret in their voice either.
This has been nothing less than a spectacular own goal for the campaign. As has been widely pointed out, It epitomises in dramatic form the overbearing and self-important character of environmentalists. They will brook no dissent. There is no debate. There can be no negotiation. And anyone who feels differently can go hang.
It would be hard to parody the green movement as efficiently as the writer of this film, Richard Curtis — who also wrote the nauseatingly insipid ‘rom-coms’, Notting Hill and Four Weddings and a Funeral — has. There must be many people asking him, ‘whose side are you on, Richard?’
However, Deputy Environment Editor of the Guardian, Adam Vaughan, rather than seeing the film as one which betrays the greens’ true colours, believes that the film was ‘intended as a tongue-in-cheek spoof of hectoring greens’. The self-mocking intention was simply poorly expressed, he says. In order to explain this, Vaughan quotes environmental psychologist, Adam Corner,
At the most general level, the video fails to address basic principles of communication. What is the message? Who are the audience? The video literally doesn’t make any sense – if it is aimed at supporters, what are we supposed to take from it? And if it is aimed at those who oppose the 10:10 campaign – or more pertinently, are not yet aware of or interested in it – then what is the video hoping to achieve?
It takes an ‘expert’ in ‘communicating climate change’ to point this out, apparently. What Corner and Vaughan can’t explain, however, is why the 10:10 campaign produce such a confused message in the first place. Just as Miliband was sensitive to the fact that his policies lacked popular support, not even Franny is so stupid that she has failed to recognise that people regard her organisation as so many shrill, hectoring, and self-important zealots. But just as Miliband cannot find a movement to share his ambitions, those to whom he turns to for it, can do little but alienate their would-be supporters. Corner, the climate psychologist can only do so much in the aftermath of the film. He turns up to the post-mortem to pronounce the film dead, and offers only ways to avoid the death of such campaigns:
1. Move Beyond Social Marketing.
2. Be honest and forthright about the probable impacts of climate change, and the scale of the challenge we confront in avoiding these. But avoid deliberate attempts to provoke fear or guilt.
3. Be honest and forthright about the impacts of mitigating and adapting to climate change for current lifestyles, and the ‘loss’ — as well as the benefits — that these will entail. Narratives that focus exclusively on the ‘up-side’ of climate solutions are likely to be unconvincing.
3a. Avoid emphasis upon painless, easy steps.
3b. Avoid over-emphasis on the economic opportunities that mitigating, and adapting to, climate change may provide.
3c. Avoid emphasis upon the opportunities of ‘green consumerism’ as a response to climate change.
4. Empathise with the emotional responses that will be engendered by a forthright presentation of the probable impacts of climate change.
5. Promote pro-environmental social norms and harness the power of social networks.
6. Think about the language you use, but don’t rely on language alone.
7. Encourage public demonstrations of frustration at the limited pace of government action.
So many buzz-words, and such little meaning. Corner forgets of course, that each of these recommendations are beyond the means of the 10:10 campaign. For instance, it cannot move ‘beyond social marketing’, because, as has been discussed, it is not a popular campaign and its members — even those with advanced degrees in psychology — have no idea to communicate with those outside of the movement. As such, then, climate campaigners are limited to ‘attempts to provoke fear or guilt’ (#2), and have to overstate the likely outcomes of climate change and the benefits that any political solution to it might offer (#3), and overstate the ease at which these solutions may be implemented (#3a, b & c).
It gets worse. Corner’s advice is from the Climate Change Communication Advisory Group — a ‘a diverse range of individuals from academia and the third sector, with expertise in climate change communication and engagement — which he organises. The group produced a report, where the principles above are given more detail. Point 4 is expanded,
We should expect people to be sad or angry, to feel guilt or shame, to yearn for that which is lost or to search for more comforting answers (Randall, 2009). Providing support and empathy in working through the painful emotions of ‘grief’ for a society that must undergo changes is a prerequisite for subsequent adaptation to new circumstances.
Denial and scepticism are simply ‘maladaptive’ emotional strategies — coping mechanisms to deal with the horror of climate change, says Corner. Yet might we turn this around, and wonder if climate change anxiety may well be a much more a clear expression of an emotional problem of those who have failed to adapt to changes in society? After all, it is Miliband, for instance, who is anxious that he is struggling to connect with a base, and it is the 10:10 campaign whose advert looks for all the world like an infantile tantrum after the group failed to get its way, as the campaign’s director, Eugenie Harvey reveals in her apology for the film:
With climate change becoming increasingly threatening, and decreasingly talked about in the media, we wanted to find a way to bring this critical issue back into the headlines whilst making people laugh.
Furthermore, as we’ve argued on this blog many, many times, it is those with the most limited view of humanity — not simply those who would like to blow them up — who make the most out of climate change. For instance, Armstrong, who co-wrote the film with Curtis, argued in its defence that,
We ‘killed’ five people to make No Pressure – a mere blip compared to the 300,000 real people who now die each year from climate change.
The 300,000 people she refers to are those counted by a report from the now defunct Global Humanitarian Forum as having been killed by climate change. But as we pointed out, these deaths from malaria, diarrhea and malnutrition, even if they are Nth-order effects of climate change, are far lower-order effects of poverty. The only way that the claim that these are deaths caused by climate change can be sustained, therefore, is by arguing that it would not be possible to address the problem of poverty. If we abolished poverty, in fact, there would many more millions of lives saved — and what is more, much improved — but that fact is inconvenient to Armstrong, Corner, and their ilk, who make so much capital out of the idea of looming catastrophe. 300,000 theoretical deaths count more to her and her ambitions than the ambitions of millions who die for the want of clean water, civil infrastructure, industrial agriculture, medicine, and so on. The promise that Armstrong makes to these people is that she will make the weather better for them, and in doing so, she displaces from the pages of the Guardian and the academic departments at Cardiff University the idea that development is fundamental to transforming the conditions experienced by people throughout the world.
The 10:10 campaign really is a tantrum, and not by some stretched metaphor or analogy. Franny and her chums really don’t understand the world and the people who inhabit it, and really are not very pleasant people when they find their will obstructed.
Back to Corner’s guide, and point 5 — ‘Promote pro-environmental social norms and harness the power of social networks’ — which, just 4 points later, has contradicted point 1, ‘Move Beyond Social Marketing’. This contradiction is inevitable, because Corner’s expert psychological advice does not explain to the environmental movement how to move beyond it, limited, as it is by a half-baked pathological understanding of how social movements develop. Corner, like Franny — both seemingly experts in communicating the climate change message — has trouble reaching beyond his own mates. Says Corner in the 7 Principles,
One way of bridging the gap between private-sphere behaviour changes and collective action is the promotion of pro-environmental social norms. Pictures and videos of ordinary people (‘like me’) engaging in significant proenvironmental actions are a simple and effective way of generating a sense of social normality around pro-environmental behaviour.
Can you imagine… ‘Here’s me sorting my rubbish for the recycling’… ‘Here’s me not using my car’… ‘Here I am buying over-priced sustainably-sourced millet’… Any ordinary people ‘like me’, exchanging holiday and family snaps for pictures of the most mundane of day-to-day chores in an effort to get them to ‘think like me’ are likely to find themselves lonely and sad. Corner fails to recognise what Franny and the others at 10:10 have realised: they simply aren’t able to put things nicely, or to cultivate ‘social norms’ deliberately in a way that is useful to their campaign. As high-profile as they are, the climate change movement is tiny, and their success in cultivating social norms has been limited to this movement. Accordingly, the creation of eco-social-norms has done nothing more than alienate those who hold with them further, so out-of-kilter with wider social norms are they, as this silly film is surely testament to. And hence, skipping past the almost meaningless point #6, point number 7 — to encourage ‘public demonstrations of frustration at the limited pace of government action’ — only serves, at every turn, as a visible reminder of just how little public support there is for climate politics.
This must be something for Miliband to reflect on. Those to whom he has turned have failed to provide the base he needs to drive his politics forward. This spectacular joke at their own expense leaves gore on not just 10:10’s face, but all over Miliband too. He and they have been hoist by their own petard. However, the point is not simply about environmentalism and climate policies. The point is that environmentalism is more a symptom than a cause. See how far the crisis Miliband’s suffers from extends. Conscious of the dearth of public support for his climate politics, he attempted to circumvent the democratic processes that could not satisfy his ambitions, and sought new ways to connect with an uninterested public. So desperate to connect with people are the members of the establishment, there has even been a recruitment of special climate change psychologists, who invent ways to explain the failure of the message makers. Now the exploding children only echo the sound of the collapse of the hope that climate politics could generate a new social movement. That sound is in turn an echo of the noises that the likes of Miliband generate, as he tries desperately to turn his own political ambitions into reality, but fails. This failure, five years in the making, spans Ed Miliband’s career as an elected politician. This failure is what sold Ed Miliband to the Labour Party. He didn’t do anything else. The words of Ed’s father, Ralph, seem appropriate here.
The Labour Party does not now stand at the crossroads. It made a choice, or rather it accepted the choice that was made for it. Electoral defeat has now forced it, as a Party, to pause and ask itself whether the road leads anywhere. It does—to the political graveyard. And it is by no means certain that, as a Party, it will not continue to travel along that road.” – Ralph Miliband. The Sickness of Labourism. The New Left Review, 1961.
———-
As an after thought. I don’t find the No Pressure video to be the worst produce by climate alarmism. The following videos are far more chilling.
It does not surprise me that politicians who struggle to share their political ambitions with the public use ideas such as these:
During my very busy spring and summer, one of the things I didn’t have time to do was look more closely at the UK’s General Election results. This post comes a bit late, but it’s worth saying, nonetheless.
The election was perhaps the dullest and least inspiring in Britain’s history (certainly in my history), which means that anything remotely unusual appeared as some kind of phenomenon. And so it was with the first ever seat in the House of Commons for Caroline Lucas, one of our favourite subjects here on Climate Resistance. Lucas won the seat for Brighton Pavilion.
Caroline Lucas’s prominence in the media has always intrigued us. As a Member of the European Parliament, Lucas always got far more attention than most of her counterparts, more even than her fellow Green MEPs. As pointed out in previous posts here, Lucas has hardly scored well in European elections. In 1999, the Green Party in Lucas’s constituency — the South East of England — only took 7.42% of the vote which only had a 24.73% turnout, i.e. they only earned the votes of 1.8% of the electorate. In the 2004 elections, they only performed slightly better, taking 7.9% of the vote with a 36.78% turnout — 2.9% of the electorate. In 2009, the Green Party took 11.6% of the vote with a 37.45% turnout, meaning 4.35% of the electorate — 271,506 out of 6,231,875 people. That’s an improvement, of course — possibly largely due to the attention given to Lucas by the media — but it’s an improvement only from virtually nothing to minor fringe in an era of mass cynicism of politics.
Clearly, Lucas’s prominence in the media has been not only due to sympathy amongst TV and radio producers for her agenda, there’s also the fact that her breathless and shameless doom-mongering and designer wardrobe helped to spice up otherwise dull current affairs programming. Her senior role as co-principle speaker (alongside Derek Wall) of the Green Party also helped boost her profile, but only marginally. When the party abandoned its commitment to flat hierarchy, Lucas was elected leader. With the slow decline of the mainstream parties support amongst the voting population, the possibility of a Green Party candidate in Westminster has grown. The Green Party faced the prospect of having its star performer locked away in the EU parliement at Brussels or Strasbourg, rather than in the UK, meaning that some scruffy hippy or eco-socialist might take the limelight from the party’s leader. Lucas was parachuted into Brighton — arguably Britain’s capital city for alternative lifestyles. You can get reiki with your mung bean salad and humous to go, in Brighton.
The media — especially the Guardian — hailed the Green Party’s success as ‘historic’. But was it? After nearly half a century of political campaigning as PEOPLE, the Ecology Party, and latterly as the Green Party, it is surprising that it has taken so long for the Greens to achieve what independent candidates have managed without a party — never mind 200 election workers for a single constituency — behind them. The results reveal a close race in a relatively high turnout of around 70%.
Lucas, Caroline
Green
16,238 (31.33% / 21.93%)
Platts, Nancy
Labour
14,986 (28.91% / 20.24%)
Vere, Charlotte
Conservative
12,275 (23.68% / 16.6%)
Millam, Bernadette
Liberal Democrats
7,159 (13.81% / 9.7%)
For each of the 200 party workers working on her election campaign locally, Lucas won 81 votes. Of the 74,000 people eligible to vote for Caroline Lucas, only 16,238 of them did. Her majority is is just 1,252. Nonetheless, she won…
(An interesting aside… the man holding Lucas’s hand aloft — her partner, Richard Savage — ‘taught’ me English at upper school. So any comments about the abuse of commas, poor spelling and grammar on this site, you can address to him.)
So does this victory represent the electoral tide turning in the Green’s favour, or was Lucas the lucky beneficiary of undeserved media attention, 200 party activists, and the sympathies of the most radical and alternative constituency? A view of the Green Party’s performance across the UK suggests that the country is not turning green.
In fact, the party didn’t even perform as well as it did in the 2005 General Election, losing 0.08% of the vote, but gained slightly in real numbers. In 2005, the party scored 257,695 votes nationwide, against a turnout of 61.2%. This year, the Green Party only improved this result to 285,616 votes, in a turnout of 65.1%, in which 29,594,978 were cast — the Green Party earned less than 1% of the vote. To put this into context alongside other non-mainstream parties, the British National Party got 563,555 votes, and the UK Independence Party — which mainly stands on an anti-EU platform — took 914,154, yet in spite of winning nearly 2 and four times as many votes as the Green Party respectively, neither party won a seat.
A closer look at the performance of other Green Candidates demonstrates that Lucas’s result is an outlier.
The Green Party put forward 334 candidates. Of these, just 7 — SEVEN! in a party that has nearly 40 years of history — kept their deposits.
Seat
Candidate
votes
%vote
Brighton Pavilion
Lucas, Caroline
16238
31.33
Norwich South
Ramsay, Adrian
7095
14.92
Cambridge
Juniper, Tony
3804
7.59
Lewisham Deptford
Johnson, Darren
2772
6.72
Brighton Kemptown
Duncan, Ben
2330
5.46
Hove
Davey, Ian
2568
5.15
Edinburgh East
Harper, Robin
2035
5.1
It’s worth pointing out, too, that these poor results include the seats right next to Caroline Lucas’s: Brighton Kempton, and Hove. It would take you just minutes to walk between these constituencies, and you’d barely notice the difference between them. It’s likely that these Green Party candidates benefited from the attention Lucas had from the local and national media, though reflects the ambivalence felt towards the party when there isn’t a celebrity standing.
Even the next most successful Green Party candidate — Adrian Ramsay in Norwich South — failed to collect even half as many votes as Lucas. And the next most successful candidate again — former director of Friends of the Earth, Tony Juniper — barely got half as many votes as Ramsay.
The loss of 328 deposits would have cost the Green Party £170,000. But it gets worse for the poverty-stricken party of doom and gloom. 47 Green Party candidates polled less than 1% of the vote in their constituency. 258 Greens polled less than 2%. 310 Green Candidates polled less than 3%. 322 polled less than 4%. Her fame and success has not worn off on Caroline Lucas’s brother, Eric Lucas, who only got 1,120 votes — 2.38% — in Bath. My old home constituency of Oxford East only gave GP candidate Sushila Dhall 1,238 votes – a loss of 2.1% of the previous election’s Green vote. This is very surprising because Oxford East, like Norwich and Brighton, is a centre of more radical politics and culture, and has been home to the likes of George Monbiot, Mark Lynas, Crispin Tickell’s son, Oliver, the author of Kyoto 2, and George Marshall, and was the place where Lucas began her career in politics. You would expect at least a challenge to the mainstream parties to have come from at least one other constituency in the entire country. But none came.
Here is the announcement of the result for Lucas’s constituency, and her victory speech, as seen on the BBC’s election coverage.
Thank you. Tonight the people of Brighton Pavilion have made history by electing Britain’s first Green MP to Westminster.
Thank you so much for putting your faith in me and in the Green Party. Thank you so much for putting the politics of hope above the politics of fear.
Caroline Lucas rose to prominence in an era of political malaise. Her natty attire, earnest eyebrows, and in debate her shameless doom-mongery combined gave her an edge in the media that few other greens could ever hope to match. She has no other ‘redeeming’ qualities. She is an intellectual lightweight — a cipher — with only parrot-like grasp of the facts she uses in political argument. Her party is no less vapid, and her success has not been matched by its other candidates. Britain is no Greener for her election. Most surprisingly of all, she lacks sufficient self-awareness to cause her to feel any shame in thanking her voters for ‘putting the politics of hope above the politics of fear’. For someone with a PhD in English Literature, and who is married to an English teacher, she appears to have a particularly fragile understanding of the words and expressions she uses.
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