At the start of the year, the world’s plutocrats gathered alongside their political allies in Davos for the World Economic Forum and listened excitedly while special guest Greta Thunberg berated them for not going far enough in the fight to save the planet.
It was a telling moment, capturing just how central environmentalism – especially today’s self-flagellating, end-of-days version – now is to the worldview of the West’s political, business, and cultural elites.
It has been quite a rise. For much of environmentalism’s history, it was largely on the fringes of elite discourse, not at the center.
It was the counter-enlightenment preserve of landed aristocrats, disillusioned Tories (the origins of the Green Party), and the New Left. Not the mission statement of prime ministers, multinationals, and the very institutions of globalist rule, from the EU to the UN.
But that is what it has become in recent decades: the hug-a-husky purpose of governments; the corporate social responsibility of international conglomerates; the cause to unite nations.
Two key factors account for its ascendency: the long-standing demoralization of capitalism, and the emergence of essentially technocratic governments after the end of the Cold War.
In the anti-modern narrative of environmentalism, these managerial elites found their raison d’etre: to manage the risks and the threats produced by industrial modernity. It even provided them with an ultimate aim: to manage us out of environmental disaster.
But environmentalism has always been more than just a story appended to ‘third way’ governing. It is itself essentially technocratic. It invests authority in ‘the science’ and the expert at the expense of the demos.
And it did so successfully until 2016. Until Brexit and Trump. Until that is, so many across the West, disenfranchised for so long under this technocratic consensus, seized back some degree of control.
And this has had a tremendous effect on environmentalism. Ever since 2016, the tone has become shriller, the threat supposedly more urgent, the narrative more apocalyptic.
Climate change is now a climate emergency. Al Gore’s merely inconvenient truth is now XR’s truth that must be told. And the future towards which we are forever tipping is catastrophic.
This is because environmentalism is no longer the handmaiden of technocratic rule; it is now a weapon in the fight to restore technocratic rule. Hence the presentation of climate change is now so aggressive, so hyperbolic, so threatening.
Because it is being used to fight populism, frighten citizens back into obeisance and roll back the democratic gains of recent years.
And that is what we have witnessed over the past 12 months, from the wilfully apocalyptic framing of Australia’s wildfires in January to the UN secretary-general’s December demand that all nations declare a climate emergency: namely, the further elite turbocharging of environmentalism as a justification for the restoration of the pre-2016 consensus.
Admittedly, some environmentalists have been concerned that climate change would be pushed down the political agenda by Covid this year, just as it was after 2008 by the financial crisis.
After all, some of XR’s planned stunts were shelved and the UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) was postponed.
They needn’t have worried. The pandemic emergency has been treated as a climate emergency in miniature. A dress rehearsal, even.
This is because it has largely been interpreted through the same risk-conscious prism as broader environmental problems have. Thus Covid has been conjured up as a by-product of baleful modernity, a symptom of our unsustainable lifestyles, a message from vengeful Gaia.
As early as March, tireless green twerp George Monbiot was celebrating Covid as ‘nature’s wake-up call to complacent civilization’. Prince Harry agreed, declaring ‘it’s almost as though Mother Nature has sent us to our rooms for bad behavior, to really take a moment and think about what we’ve done.’
What’s more, Covid, like climate change in general, has also been relentlessly mobilized on behalf of the technocratic restoration against the populist revolt.
Hence the death tolls in Britain and America have been deliberately attributed to their populist governments – proof, so the restorationist attack goes, that not listening to the experts, not heeding the warnings of science, is a fatal mistake. And vice versa.
Listening to the science and locking down is proof of the merits of technocracy and the wisdom of its restoration. As Greta Thunberg put it, ‘It is possible to treat a crisis like a crisis, it is possible to put people’s health above economic interests, and it is possible to listen to the science.’
The implication of the pandemic is as clear to Thunberg as it is to the political, media, and business elites who treat her as their outsourced conscience: climate alarmism builds on the pandemic, and further justifies the technocratic restoration.
In other words, the short-term expert-led governance during the pandemic emergency now justifies the restoration of long-term expert-led governance during the climate emergency. And to hell with freedom, democracy, and the rest of it.
Read rest at Spiked
Here’s a challenge for the Green Tyranny
https://tambonthongchai.com/2021/01/04/a-montreal-protocol-for-the-climate/
My property was burnt last Australian summer. The fire was partly the result of drought. The drought, however, was not the result of climate change and climate change, such as it is, is not the result of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions.
Fire is part of the Australian landscape. Most Australians are not. They are urban-dwellers. In typing this, I saw a goverment televsion advertisement asking, “Do you know fire?”
The actress asking this was in the role of a young surfer. Exactly what youth surfing has to do with bushfire preparation has eluded my skills of comprehension. However, the idea of the hoi polloi being preached to by a young female obviously has wide appeal to technocrats, given their support for Saint Greta.
I just saw another Australian fire preparation advert. This one featured a middle-aged male European-looking farmer fixing a fence and ignoring the worsening weather, when some dry grass appears to spontaneously combust nearby, possibly caused by cow burps.
I’m not sure that the direction of the fire and wind were the same, but it was enough for me. I’ll do what they say and leave or stay according to the daily bushfire danger level. On bad days, I’ll stop work, leave the cattle to their fate and go somewhere ‘safer’.
If the place burns up (and mine would have been far, far, far more charcoal-like if I and my family had not stayed and faced the fire last time – yes, that was not the only time) one can always blame ‘climate change’.
the Eco-Nzis/Watermelons want us all to live in caves or grass huts and to sacrifice Virgins and Children to their pagan deities they worship during their Earth Day Celebrations
The major difference from today, compared to the past, is the total sellout of self-styled ‘progressives’ to Malthusian doom-mongering. To read extreme doom one need not join a loony climate forum on Facebook; instead, join the mainstream climate science discussion forum on reddit, ClimateChange: reddit/r/climatechange It describes itself as “place for the rational discussion of the science of climate change” Articles posted there are full of loony model projections. Some of the future they project is the opposite of what a warmer climate might bring. It’s a forum where no one will criticise the most idiotic doom-mongering. One big problem is the difficulty of understanding such a complex thing as the climate limits the number of us able to respond to the superstition and fear-mongering driving so-called progressives.