“I haven’t seen a convincing argument yet about why the climate crisis must be named as such….”
“The climate movement has been led by people who look and think and talk the same for a very long time. If time is short, isn’t this precisely the time to try everything? To broaden out, seek fresh ideas, build a larger, stronger and more connected movement?” (- Amy Westervelt, DRILLED)
Drilled founder and editor Amy Westervelt, like other climate extremists attuned to the real world, is confused and perplexed. She wants to legalize vandalism and whatever else is necessary to wake up the world to what she sees. But reality is reality, from public opinion to CO2 science to climate-model exaggeration to the eco-sins of wind, solar, and batteries.
“Over the past two years, there’s been a sudden and severe backlash to climate protest, both legally and socially,” she recently lamented.
I have to say, the social bit surprised me. Not that people on the street might start to get annoyed with protestors and harass them, as they have been, but that so many in the climate movement itself would turn on protestors in lock step with the state.
It’s been shocking in recent weeks, for example, to see so many climate advocates so callously shrug off the extreme sentences received by Just Stop Oil protestors in the U.K. as something expected and, worse, deserved. We’ve of course been covering the increased criminalization of climate protest at Drilled for going on two years now, but let me re-state for the record: none of the art protests have caused any actual damage.
So Westervelt is mad at the police, the courts, the public, and fellow climate alarmists? Does she have any friends left? Does climate cultism have limits? She continues:
We’re talking about soup and water-based finger paint being smeared on or thrown at glass, which requires about $15 and 20 minutes to clean. The protests are shocking, yes, they make people think a priceless work of art is at risk, yes, and that is the point: everything is at risk, shouldn’t we be shocked? But these protests are not causing damage. Nor are they particularly radical in the context of social movements and civil disobedience (follow and read Dana Fisher for more, including her excellent book Saving Ourselves). So why are they making climate people so mad?
Maybe because the exaggeration is decades old. Maybe because the kids and their leaders look and act more like zombies than normal people. Maybe because deprecating art is like industrial wind and solar scarring the living space…. You decide.
She continues with the latest disturbance:
Last week, the group Climate Defiance interrupted an event held by the Breakthrough Institute to yell at pundit Matt Yglesias over his support of fracking. Now…was this strategically brilliant? I am neither a strategist nor an organizer, so it’s genuinely unimportant what I think, but I will say it certainly seemed to give Yglesias what he is dying for: relevance, attention, and an excuse to criticize the youth climate movement….
She gets personal against many (and perhaps her own) demons:
Perhaps when one is so used to comfort, having a conference panel interrupted for a few minutes feels like violence. What’s more concerning is how much that rather dramatic view seems to echo a mainstream opinion of the climate movement: that protest ought to be civil if it hopes to be effective. Which can’t help but make me think of everything I know about Arthur Brooks who … ran the American Enterprise Institute for years and talked about calls to civility as a way to paint social justice demands as radical. Or of the many ways that calls for civility have always been used as a cudgel against those who confront racism.
False flag, false cause. Green environmentalism can make a better case for carbon dioxide (CO2) than for industrial wind, solar, batteries. She then gets into her defensive crouch.
Amidst all the twitter spats and blog posts arguing whether this or that type of protest “turns people off,” whether it “works,” whether it’s “cringe” is a very big problem that is going largely ignored: Kids are being locked up for years for non-damaging, non-violent protest.
People are being accused of “conspiring against the United States” for smearing fingerpaint on glass, as Joanna Oltman Smith and Tim Martin were. In Germany, the youth activists Last Generation had their homes raided, computers seized, and bank accounts frozen for organizing protests that…sometimes cause traffic jams. That should scare anyone who doesn’t love fascism, whether they think the protests are rude or not. It should certainly concern those who feel as panicked as the climate activists do about the climate crisis that the tools of the state are being used to silence and jail those willing to act in a way that reflects that panic.
Yes, come down hard! The climate nuts must either cease-and-desist–or they will get more violent. The police and courts are proactively doing their job.
Westervelt realizes that the climate message is a tired, old one–and it smacks of elitism.
The unfortunate reality is that climate change has been painted with the “elite liberal” brush since long before it got pulled into recent culture war conversations…. People get too hung up sometimes on hearing their preferred message, on people “believing science,” but if a different route gets us to the same destination …. I haven’t seen a convincing argument yet about why the climate crisis must be named as such (although if you have, or you want to send me yours, please do! As always, I am very open to being wrong.)
The climate movement has been led by people who look and think and talk the same for a very long time. If time is short, isn’t this precisely the time to try everything? To broaden out, seek fresh ideas, build a larger, stronger and more connected movement?
Final Comment
Yes, a whole new strategy is needed by the Deep Ecologists who put a Garden of Eden ahead of human betterment. Job #1 is to end the exaggeration and trash talk against “deniers.” “In Climate Debate, Exaggeration Is a Pitfall,” Fred Krupp of Environmental Defense Fund cautioned:
There has to be a lot of shrillness taken out of our language. In the environmental community, we have to be more humble. We can’t take the attitude that we have all the answers.” – Fred Krupp, Environmental Defense Fund.
Michael Mann, breaking with Extinction Rebellion and with Scientist Rebellion (“performative attention whores”) warned:
hot takes, hyperbole, and polarizing commentary best generate clicks, shares, and retweets. I often encounter, especially on social media, individuals who are convinced that the latest extreme weather event is confirmation that the climate crisis is far worse than we thought…. increasingly today we see it with climate doomists…. This is not true, or at best partly true.
Mann also warned against
the damage done by deeply misguided individuals who in principle would seem to be on the side of climate action but are instead dividing the community and playing right in the agenda of the forces of inaction.
It’s hard being green; and it’s harder being a climate alarmism in a rational world.
Michael “Piltdown” Mann and his infamous Hockey Stick have zero (as in zip, zilch, none, nada) credibility.
Predictions of imminent Thermageddon are now three decades old and the “settled science” of climastrology is laughable.