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The ‘Climate Emergency’ Is A Threat To Democracy

by Tim Black
January 24, 2020, 11:59 AM
in News and Opinion
Reading Time: 5 mins read
A A
13

climate protest rising seasOne week, it’s that old Malthusian David Attenborough telling us ‘the moment of crisis has come’. The next it’s that young Malthusian Greta Thunberg telling us ‘our house is still on fire’ and ‘inaction is fuelling the flames’.

Both express the key elements of today’s environmentalist script. The shrill tone. The end-is-nigh urgency. The act-now-or-else command.

And underwriting this script, as ever, is the core idea of contemporary environmentalism — namely, the climate emergency.

This is the idea that so imminent and ‘existential’ is the threat of climate change that world leaders need to act as if they are at war.

They need to declare a state of emergency. There’s no time for deliberation or debate anymore, because, well, ‘our house is on fire’.

In this state of emergency, all civil liberties and democratic freedoms can be suspended. All dissent and debate silenced.

Only then will the authorities, using all force necessary, be able to do what needs to be done to protect us from the enemy. It just so happens that this enemy happens to be us, and our all-consuming passions.

This wartime analogy has long lurked on the deep-ecological fringes of the environmentalist movement.

It crops up, for instance, in James Lovelock’s 2009 broadside, The Vanishing Face of Gaia. He writes that surviving climate change ‘may require, as in war, the suspension of democratic government for the duration of the survival emergency’.

But only now has it entered the mainstream. So, in May last year, the Guardian revised its style guide, stating that ‘instead of “climate change”, the preferred terms are “climate emergency, crisis or breakdown”’.

That same month, the UK became the first nation-state to declare a climate emergency, days after similar declarations from Scotland and Wales.

In June, New York City became the world’s largest city to declare a climate emergency.

And then, in November, the European Parliament, with new Commission president Ursula von der Leyen leading the charge, did likewise, for the EU. Little wonder Oxford Dictionaries made ‘climate emergency’ its word of the year.

Not everyone has been quite as keen to embrace the ’emergency’ rhetoric.

In November, a few MEPs from the European Parliament’s largest bloc, the European People’s Party, struck a note of caution amid the EU’s clamor for a declaration of climate emergency.

They were worried that the language was just a little too redolent of Nazi-era Germany.

Which is understandable.

The Emergency Decree for the Protection of the German People, issued on 28 February 1933, permitted the suspension of the democratic aspects of the soon-to-disappear Weimar Republic, and legally sanctioned the Nazis’ suppression and persecution of political opponents.

That, after all, is what states of emergency tend to entail: a clampdown on civil and democratic freedom in the interests of preserving the state against a perceived existential threat. And that is what the climate emergency entails, too.

It raises a few questions.

Given the unpleasant, brown-shirted whiff steaming off the idea of a climate emergency, why are political and cultural elites in the EU, the UK, and the US so willing to embrace it? And, more pertinently, why now?

It cannot be fully explained by reference to the state of the environment, no matter how devastating the Australian bushfires, or destructive the floods in northern England.

For there is always more to environmentalism than environmental challenges. And the ‘more’ in this case is the seismic shift in the post-2016 political landscape.

It is a landscape in which Western elites find themselves mortally threatened, not so much by climate change, but by those they can blame for it – the people.

And this is precisely why climate change has resurged as an issue over the past few years, and why the profoundly anti-democratic idea of a climate emergency lies at its heart. Because it is being mobilized against the populist threat.

The shift in the tone of the climate-change issue is marked. When environmentalism last enjoyed its moment in the blazing Sun, in the mid-2000s, it was still, of course, a catastrophist narrative.

It could hardly have been otherwise, given its anti-Enlightenment, Malthusian origins. But the approach was condescendingly scientistic rather than shrill and panic-stricken.

The truth was ‘inconvenient’, rather than compelling. An IPCC report would offer a ‘very likely’ range of future scenarios, rather than offer a singularly ‘scary’ warning.

But then environmentalism preached to estranged, often understandably bored electorates, rather than recalcitrant, restive ones.

This patronizing, scientistic tone reflected environmentalism’s political, ideological function, as a legitimizing gloss painted on to Western political elites’ administration of things.

It was the handmaiden of technocracy and managerialism. It allowed post-Cold War elites to disavow modernity, justify long-term economic stagnation, and provide their Third Way governance with a semblance of purpose.

The financial crash and subsequent economic crisis were to sideline environmentalism. From 2008 onwards, justifying economic stagnation no longer needed a green dressing.

It could become, as ‘austerity’, a policy and ideology in its own right. Hence, from the UK to the crisis-ridden eurozone, politicians of all stripes now talked of fiscal responsibility, of cutting back and consuming less.

2016 changed everything. The populist challenge to the political classes of Europe and the US, which had been stirring for a while, erupted in the form of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump as US president.

And environmentalism resurged in response. It had always served as a way of managing the public, of justifying the political class’s mode of governance.

Now it could serve as a way of quelling the populist challenge. Of diminishing people’s democratic aspirations. Of suppressing the rejection of technocracy and managerialism.

After all, what is politics – or ‘taxes or Brexit’ – besides the climate emergency?

Climate activists, a uniformly bourgeois bunch as opposed to Brexit as they are to Trump voters, have rallied.

Rising Up!, the group that was to launch Extinction Rebellion in 2018, staged its first ‘action’ in November 2016. And the teachers’ pets of the Climate Strike movement began theirs in the summer of 2018.

Sometimes they have positioned themselves explicitly against Brexit, or Trump. But often they don’t need to.

Their climate-emergency message does the job implicitly, functioning, as it does, as an all-purpose means to diminish and even suppress the democratic ambitions of the revolting masses.

Little wonder, then, that environmentalism is so central to the preservation of the status quo today.

The climate emergency is the elites’ response to the populist challenge. It represents the suspension of people’s democratic aspirations. The suspension of politics.

But, as has been demonstrated ever since 2016, the populist challenge resists suspension.

Read more at Spiked Online

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Comments 13

  1. Spurwing Plover says:
    6 years ago

    Greta needs to go after China and India their the worlds biggist polluters America is far cleaner then China and India

    • JayPee says:
      6 years ago

      India, China , Indonesia

      Have been using the western pacific
      and northern indian oceans as garbage dumps
      for centuries and even millennia

      It is part of their culture
      They are never going to stop

      Climate jerks like Gore are going to
      make billions, but

      Nothing will ever change

  2. Sonnyhill says:
    6 years ago

    Hitler got his way because the war reparations Germany had to pay were doing the job, too well.
    The ’emergency’ was palpable.
    Today, America, China and India are carrying on, business as usual, apparently oblivious to humanity’s imminent demise. Why hit the brakes when the horizon is clear?
    Peer pressure? Hardly.
    I believe that President Trump cracked some skulls in Davos. He’s willing to leave the EU behind .
    How are they going to look, ten years down the road, hunkered in their socialist bunker, clinging to Gaia’s Bible? Poor and none the wiser.

  3. Brian James says:
    6 years ago

    Jan 23, 2020 Banksters Warn of Green Swan Collapse Unless They Get A Carbon Tax

    Welcome to New World Next Week — the video series from Corbett Report and Media Monarchy that covers some of the most important developments in open source intelligence news.

    https://youtu.be/V2h27ud3Oks

  4. Roger Payne says:
    6 years ago

    The return of the archetype of coming apocalypse and doom for our sins always recurs when there is a hunge shift in the collective human psyche. Methods are then used, as in Medieval Church history, to make the people panic,pay money for redemption (“carbon taxes” currently). Christianity arose at such a time of huge transition, within Israel, the Roman world and Europe. As Jung expressed it, the collective Shadow arises. this is then manipulated. Loss of vision and purpose leads to such movements as Extinction Rebellion. Banners, slogans, ideology, “saving the planet” (which means us). “What rough beast, awakened to nightmare from twenty centuries of stony sleep, slouches to Bethlehem to be born?” asked Yeats the poet. Wat indeed?

  5. Amber says:
    6 years ago

    Someone needs to tell little Greta’s handlers that the easy money has already been made . Too late .

  6. David Lewis says:
    6 years ago

    The article did a good job of telling how the climate change movement is a threat to democracy. I would like to add that the panic this movement is promoting is also a threat. Panic is obviously the goal with terms like climate emergency, climate crisis, and our house is on fire. When people panic, decisions are made without proper thought. That is how Hitler gained total power. Those pushing the climate hysteria are working to get their agenda though without considering its consequences or if it is needed.

    • David Lewis says:
      6 years ago

      I would like to say more about panic. History of bad decisions driven by panic isn’t limited to Germany in 1933, but has happen right here in the US. The internment of the Japanese during World War II is a dark part of our history. My mother did a good job of describing what the environment was like at the time. It was one of sheer panic. That is the type of thing the environmental movement wants to use to implement their agenda.

  7. JayPee says:
    6 years ago

    This is why 2A is so important and necessary
    because without it these ideologue jerks would
    be able to suppress all logic and dialogue and
    ram through their idiocy.

    Jimmy Carter openly admitted when retired
    that he would have surrendered to the Soviet Union
    rather than be the president responsible for the
    most bloodshed ever.

    Brezhnev knew that because there were so many Soviet
    spies in the State Dept.

    But Brezhnev rejected the idea of invading the USA
    and its consequent surrender because

    AMERICA HAS AN ARMED CITIZENRY

    and the probable cost of Soviet military lives
    would be so high that the conquering of America
    would be a

    Pyrrhic victory at best

    Naturally, of course, the smellocratic party
    wants to relieve us of these silly defenses
    and lead us to the New World Order
    were everybody can do anything and
    the USA must apologize every time
    for not accommodating them previously.

    • David Lewis says:
      6 years ago

      One of the World War II Japanese admirals had attended Yale, I can’t remember his name. At Yale he learned how well armed Americans are. In an interview after the war he said that the only reason Japan didn’t invade the US was the American people had so many guns. He didn’t want his troops to be fighting a well armed general population in addition to the American army.

      My family is a good example of how this would have played out. My father and uncles on both sides fought in the war. Both grandfathers and other uncles didn’t because they were either too young or too old. Had the Japanese invaded, those who stayed at home would have been fighting them with their privately owned guns. This is a case where a “well regulated militia” successfully defended this country without firing a shot.

      I also need to note that the guns that are best suited for defending this country are the exact same guns that the liberals want to outlaw.

  8. Dave O says:
    6 years ago

    The best way to grab totalitarian power is to conjure up a crisis.
    Shut down anyone who has any contrary information, data, facts, science. For instance, make the science “settled”. Whip up those easily influenced such as uninformed youth into riotous violent mobs.
    Then issue emergency decrees seizing power.

    • Stan Wilde says:
      6 years ago

      This is how the Hitler Youth started. Be warned, this is a very serious situation!
      Do not believe the #ClimateScam or the #ClimateCrackpots!

    • Charles Higley says:
      6 years ago

      Why is it that the cure for a threat to democracy is to eliminate it and impose Communism? Economic disaster and social upheaval is the breeding ground for the people to accept, in desperation, Communism.

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