It's Not the Science I'm Sceptical Of

Today, I awoke to the news that little climate scold Greta Thunberg is Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year.” I can’t say I’m surprised.

It’s important to remember that this distinction is not necessarily a value judgement. Adolf Hitler, after all, won the title in 1938. But, given the hagiographic cover photo accompanying the article, it’s a safe bet Saint Greta has some admirers at the former news magazine. Again, I’m not really surprised.

Greta’s fashionable outrage at the world she lives in, coupled with her disdain for earlier generations, is catnip for today’s “woke” journalists.

She’s the perfect role model for an age of “truthiness” and feelings-based policy. But this essay is not really about her. I’ve already written that one. This essay is about the movement she represents. Specifically, it’s about why the modern environmental movement is its own worst enemy.

It’s about why the movement has little or no appeal to people like me, regardless of the fact that I agree with its central premise: It’s time we cleaned up our act.

I am not a climate change “denier.” I have a great deal of trouble with that term (more on that later), but I accept the idea that humans pumping large amounts of greenhouse gases into our atmosphere, wasting our fresh water, and spewing plastic everywhere, are not good things. It certainly wouldn’t hurt, regardless of what one thinks about whether or not the science is “settled” (another term I dislike), to change our ways.

So, it’s not the science that I’m sceptical of. It’s the approach to the next question: what do we do about it? That’s what I’m sceptical of. I suspect, particularly since the leader of the movement has a Grade Eight education, that there really is no plan, beyond protest. For this, we’ll be expected to shut down entire industries, limit our horizons, and fundamentally alter our economy? That’s the part that gives me pause.

What’s the problem with modern environmentalism? Well, I can think of a few issues, so here you go:

Modern Environmentalism is Steeped in Hypocrisy.

Marshall McLuhan did say, “The medium is the message.” I’m sure the response of the modern eco-warrior would be “OK, Boomer.” Wrong, on so many counts. Who presents your message, and how they do it, is a powerful factor in whether or not people accept the message. On this front, the eco-warriors shoot themselves in the feet on a daily basis.

There’s nothing quite so infuriating as being told by people who have more homes than you have pairs of shoes that your carbon footprint is too big. The modern environmental movement relies on jet-setting celebrities to sell its message. These are people who fly into Davos on their private jets, in between their twelfth and thirteenth vacation of the year, to tell me I’m an asshole if I take my kids to Disneyland.

Go to hell, Prince Harry. And take Leo DiCaprio with you.

Our betters are people who have carbon footprints the size of a Sasquatch, if that Sasquatch owned nine homes, seven Ferraris, and a G5. Yet it never strikes them as being a tad bold to criticize the lifestyles of people with one car, one home, and one vacation a year, if they’re lucky? Frankly, I don’t want to hear it. These people might be interesting to watch on TV, but they’re not scientists, and they can’t even lead the lifestyle they want me to emulate.

In this regard, Greta does a bit better than her Hollywood pals. But she’s not immune to criticism on this score. Sure, she doesn’t fly around the world to scold people, but takes a yacht instead. Is this really a realistic alternative for most people? Can we all borrow Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Electric Hummer? Of course not.

Eco-warriors, your message is crippled by the people you choose to deliver it. If anyone still knew who Ed Begley was, now that’d be your guy. He actually rides a bike to work…in LA. Now that’s dedication to Mother Earth.

Modern Environmentalism is Divisive

I know I said this essay wasn’t about Greta, but I can’t think of anyone who exemplifies this problem better than she does. She hectors older generations for having betrayed her, seemingly oblivious to the fact that the much-despised “Boomers” were the people who invented environmentalism in the first place.

Remember, the first Earth Day was in 1968. Silent Spring was published in 1962. Much of the ground-breaking work on greenhouse gases was done in the 1970s, as a result of comparative planetology, attempting to understand why two nearby worlds like Earth and Venus were so different.

Yes, before the Boomers, not much was done or said about the environment, save creating national parks and regulating hunting. However, as I listened to Greta berating past generations, I couldn’t help but think that these generations had a lot going on, too. Like trying to ensure their kids lived to the age of one, and stopping Hitler from ruling the world. Those are important things also.

Turning saving the planet into a generational war is one sure way to ensure your crusade will achieve only limited support. Environmentalism is built on decades of understanding human effects on the world we live in, not tearing down the people who came before us to make ourselves feel superior.

“Accepting the Science” Should Not be a Religious Act

These days, we hear a lot of talk from the eco-warriors about “accepting the science,” as if it were Holy Communion. The science is “settled,” so we are told, and there’s no time to debate “deniers.” While I do understand what they mean, I think we’d do well to remember what science is, and how it differs from religion. Because I think there’s a certain amount of religious certitude creeping into the climate change crowd, and that’s not really compatible with science.

Science is a fact-based, methodical system for observing and understanding the Universe, in which theories are tested by experiment. Climate and weather are among the most chaotic and difficult to understand systems in all of nature. While there is no doubt that global temperatures are rising, and very little doubt that man has something to do with this, to suggest that the science is “settled” overstates the case.

Very little is “settled” in science. Newton and Einstein notwithstanding, we still do not fully understand gravity, for instance. If the basic forces are not completely understood, is a complex system of interactions between them “settled?” No, it is not.

Yet eco-warriors shout down those who question the science as “deniers.” This is an odd term to use, considering that it is most commonly used against those who “deny” a historical fact, such as the Holocaust. As what we are talking about are predictions of the future, how can they be denied? They haven’t bloody well happened yet, have they?

But “denier” sounds more sinister than “sceptic,” doesn’t it? Perhaps that’s why the term is used so often. Ah ha.

Scientists do get it wrong sometimes, it’s important to remember. I recall the many dire predictions of “nuclear winter” in 1991, following Saddam Hussein’s setting alight the Kuwaiti oilfields at the end of the Gulf War. Many of the people who were predicting this are still making dire climate forecasts today. Of course, there was no “nuclear winter.”

A seven-day weather forecast is still tough for science, let alone a fifty-year climate forecast. Again, I believe the science behind climate change is credible enough that we best pay careful attention. Just don’t call it “settled,” and ask for my “belief.” Belief belongs in church.

Doomsday Cult, Or Rational Movement? You Can’t Be Both

Apparently, the world is ending in twelve years. Or is it twenty? It depends who you ask. Eco-warriors like to talk about “tipping points,” beyond which the greenhouse effect will run away, and our chance to stop it will disappear forever.

This is terminology borrowed from the planetologists and their study of Venus, which now broils under oven-heat and ocean-bottom pressure. But Venus, despite superficial similarities with Earth, is a very different animal. For one thing, it has no plate tectonics. This means a handful of super volcanoes were free to sit over the same fissures in the crust, pumping vast amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, for eons. This cannot happen on Earth. Volcanoes drift away from vents, and go quiet. The “tipping point,” when it comes to manmade climate change, is much harder to define.

But that hasn’t stopped eco-warriors from making one “The End is Nigh” pronouncement after another. Coupled with the religious certainty of the movement, the messianic impulse can be a dangerous one to resist. Just ask the Vancouver Island zoologist and polar bear expert who dared to point out that polar bear populations were not actually in decline, as was being claimed by environmentalists, and their pals in the Trudeau government. No “believing the science” there. I think this lady is now asking “would you like fries with that” somewhere.

The more dire predictions are made, and not met, the more the environmentalists look like a millennial cult of Reebok-wearing flying saucer nuts. That’s not a good look if you want people to change the way they live.

And, as we’re always being asked, “Won’t somebody think of the kids?” I lived through a time in which many of us thought there was no future, this time because of nuclear war. It was very hard to be optimistic about the future, and very hard to focus on getting an education that might not be useful while we all lived in bomb shelters. What’s the point of doing that to another generation of kids?

Modern Environmentalism is Big on Rhetoric, Short on Solutions

I accept that things need to change. But where is the impetus for alternatives? It certainly isn’t coming from Greta and her fellow eco-warriors. To me, they seem much like their Boomer predecessors in the counter-culture movements of the 1960s and 70s. Once the Vietnam War was over, they drifted into dust. They had defined themselves in a completely oppositional way. They stood against, not for, something.

Environmentalists are against coal and oil, we know that for sure. How do they feel about hydro power? Well, their usual response is to lie down in front of bulldozers. Nuclear? Heavens, no!

That leaves us with wind, tidal, and solar. To reach anything approaching our current power grid’s needs with this Holy Trinity would take decades of development and tens of thousands of square kilometres of real estate. This is essentially the same conclusion reached by Patrick Moore, formerly of Greenpeace, who is now a representative of the nuclear industry. He loves the planet too. He just wants the lights to stay on, and knows that everybody else does, too. Nuclear and hydro are two great ways to do that, with technology we already understand.

But if you don’t like the nuclear waste problem, or the flooded lands left by hydro, there’s always the future prospects of fusion power, and satellite solar power arrays. But where’s the agitation from the eco-warriors here? Their main focus seems to be on destroying current industry and jobs they define as “dirty,” before any replacement for the energy and jobs is available.

In Canada, our eco-obsessed government clearly wants to destroy our oil and gas industry, with little or no consideration for what will replace it. This is a recipe for explosive social problems and energy starvation. But perhaps, that’s the whole point.

Eco-warriors perhaps don’t get too worked up by the prospect of struggling families in the oilpatch, precisely because they despise the people who will suffer. Alberta oil workers? They drive big trucks, vote Conservative, eat meat, and own guns. Let them eat cake.

But ask anyone who manages change in organizations, and they’ll tell you “buy-in” is critical. Good luck selling the concept of voluntary scarcity, anywhere in this world. People might put up with this in the short-term, to win a war, perhaps, but asking anyone on this planet to accept that the future will not be better for their kids is the toughest of all tough sells.

China recently stopped riding bicycles in order to drive cars. They aren’t going back. Environmentalism must provide solutions, like making sure as many of those cars are electric as possible, and making sure that electricity comes from a clean alternative to coal. These goals cannot be accomplished simply by oppositional thinking. They require accepting some less than perfect alternatives to greenhouse gas emitting power, like nuclear, until something better comes along.

Modern Environmentalism is a Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing

I’ve been trying to help here, suggesting how the environmental movement could, perhaps, reach people like me with a simple change in tone and emphasis. Maybe then, we’d all buy in, if there were more solutions, and less finger-wagging.

But a recent speech by Greta suggests that I’m wrong. The eco-warriors know exactly what they want. The target is not climate change. It is the system they believe caused the problem in the first place.

The target is Capitalism.

Of course, this ignores the ecological destruction rampant in the Soviet Bloc, far worse than anything the market economies produced. Anyone seen the Aral Sea lately? Anyone?

But Greta hasn’t been to history class in a while. To her, and her fellow eco-warriors, the whole rotten system, economic, sexual, and racial, must be upended. So, of course the rhetoric will be divisive. It’s meant to be. This is class warfare, after all. Of course, scarcity is all this new order has to offer. The elites will be allowed their prerogatives, which will not greatly upset the climate, provided my kids never see Disneyland. This is exactly the way Communist countries are run. So, the hypocrisy issue is no biggie, either.

Alternatives for the oilpatch workers? Screw them. Like the kulaks, they are class enemies, to be liquidated, figuratively, if not literally. The whole package must be consumed, in the name of the true faith. Sound extreme? It is, isn’t it? So why is everyone buying into it so enthusiastically? Because it’s an emotional age. Facts are changeable and malleable. Identity is what counts. Which is precisely why the movement now comes to us in the form of a teenage girl. Surely you wouldn’t pick on her?

For a movement which ought to be convincing us we’re all in the same boat, modern environmentalism is not doing a very good job. For a movement that talks about the one world we all share, modern environmentalism is curiously quick to accept Saudi oil over Alberta oil; Chinese coal plants over German ones.

But perhaps the environment isn’t the point. Perhaps it never was. Climate change could be just another front in the ongoing attempt to retrofit and rehabilitate the ideas of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao, and Stalin. Much as identity politics has replaced class struggle, so environmentalism has replaced redistribution of wealth as the promise of a utopian future.

But it won’t work as advertised. It never does. Until we stop treating climate change as another political battlefront in the culture wars, and start truly working together to find practical solutions, ones that allow us to keep our trees and cities both, then our chance to make things right will never be realized.