The Pseudo-Environmentalism of Useful Idiots

For a very long time mainstream commentators on the matter of climate change, even when their own inclinations have been toward ecological concern, have indulged the pretension that there was actually a "debate" among climate scientists over whether or not anthropogenic climate change was a reality, and whether it was actually severe enough to demand redress--all of which was false, this a matter of the appearance of controversy manufactured by opponents of action (often by interests fully aware that the problem was real for a very long time before the issue came to public attention).

Those interests continue to do this today--and commentators continue to respectfully call their denial of scientific facts "skepticism"--but less often and less credibly than before, such that, as Michael Mann has remarked, those opposing discussion and redress of the issue are playing a more complex game. Two aspects of that game seem to me to merit particular attention. One is the idea that we should emphasize the consumption choices of individuals (personal "carbon footprint") rather than large-scale action and the programs necessary to bring it about (like the portfolios of utility companies). The other is that the situation has got so bad that there is not much to be done about it now--making calls for action pointless.

Making this issue a matter of individual choices--individual choices on the part of people who mostly can't even pay their bills!--is a strategy that can't work, and was never intended to work. Indeed, assigning all the responsibility to those who have least power (for a start, consumers can only buy what they are offered, within the slight means most of them possess)--railing at them for their alleged crimes as they ignore far, far worse on the part of the powerful, before whom they bow and scrape (by all means, don't say a word about what the CEOs of Big Coal, Oil and Gas are doing, but scream at working people for eating a burger)--was intended to make working people think of talk about climate change as an attack on their own meager living standards, already battered by decades of economic stagnation, austerity and falling incomes. Defeatism is worse still, turning people's attention away from the matter of solving the problem altogether--as with the pernicious sniveling about "grief" (to which the sort who take a Jonathan Franzen seriously so readily incline); to fantasies of "adaptation" (as with the notion that anyone who lives anywhere near a body of water or the tropics can simply relocate themselves somewhere more comfortable with the ease of a billionaire deciding which home they'd like to go to on their private jet today); or given how depressing a world where the defeat has already happened has to be to anyone with the cranial capacity to comprehend the fact, tune the issue out (if only for the sake of their own psychological survival).

In both cases the promulgators of such strategies can say "Mission accomplished!"--again, with the help of people who may have had perfectly good intentions but were simply too unsophisticated to avoid becoming "useful idiots" to those pushing the very agenda they think they are fighting.

If one is at all serious about writing about an issue like climate change, a little self-awareness, a little knowledge, is called for. And if I may make a suggestion--if you speak or write about these matters you should take a good look at yourself, think about whether you are making any positive contribution at all, and if you find that you don't make the cut, either take a break and study up, or get out of the way of those who can do a better job.