Climate activism is dead, long live climate activism

If Daily Maverick columnist Steven Boykey Sidley’s reading of things is anything to go by, climate activism is dead, societal exhaustion from activists’ hysteria helped kill a key bit of US climate policy, and the climate crisis isn’t a crisis at all.

At least, that’s Sidley’s genuflection to British author, libertarian and former banking baron Matt Ridley, who has a thing or two to say about wealth.

He is uniquely qualified to pen The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves. Although the tagline should be How Prosperity Evolves For Those Born Into Obscene Amounts of Wealth and Influence.

Ridley is the love child of the 0.1 percenters of the world, and the Scandi libertarian and “sceptical” environmentalist Bjørn Lomborg. They sing from the same hymn book: things aren’t nearly as bad as climate alarmists would have us believe; keep government out of business; let the markets run free.

If, like Ridley, you’ve inherited a British peerage and had your hand on the tiller of a major UK bank for a chunk of time, you’re unlikely to have breathed the same air as the lowly commoner. Ridley got his all-access-pass into the most elite members-by-inheritance-only club – the UK House of Lords – back in 2017. Viscount, nogal. A rung above “baron”, not quite as snazzy as “earl”, whatever that actually means.

Herewith: Sidley-quoting-Ridley in the recent Crossed Wires – and my responses.

Sidley-quoting-Ridley: “(t)he social and economic cost of alarmism has become too high to bear”, and something about a “climate climbdown”.

Response: Is this an actual trend, or just a swashbuckling line from someone living so far from the grassroots that he can’t smell the animal dung (dung in the good, soil nitrifying sense)?

If it’s a “thing”, by what measure? What study or studies is he drawing on to show that there’s been a quantifiable disengagement on climate matters?

There’s been some reflection on whether Extinction Rebellion’s tactics have harmed the cause or not. But that’s one small group in a vast network of organisations and movements who are using a range of theories of change to awaken climate awareness.

More convincingly, and quoting some peer-reviewed evidence, is The 89 Project, a collaboration between The Guardian, Covering Climate Now and many other participating newsrooms around the world, including Daily Maverick. The initiative is based on research that finds that “between 80 and 89% of the world’s people want their governments to be doing more to address climate change”. This is a silent majority that’s becoming more vocal. Even here in Africa, according to Afrobarometer.

Sidley-quoting-Ridley: The scrapping by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of its 2009 consensus that greenhouse gas pollution is a danger to public health, Sidley-quoting-Ridley argues, is proof that the “climate scare is running out of steam” and that the EPA’s “ruling is the institutional embodiment of this exhaustion”.

Response: Repealing this “Endangerment Finding” allows for the roll-back of air pollution regulations, starting with the car industry, that will green-flag businesses to, well, return to business-as-usual.

You’ll be hard-pressed to find a single clear-eyed analyst who doesn’t call this EPA move out for what it is: ideological, driven by a climate-denying president playing into the hands of oligarchs who own the polluting industries. The very industries that have profited from having free access to the atmospheric commons where they’ve been able to dump their air pollution for decades, and not pay the price for the clean-up. The EPA move is about the powerful elite clinging to power and profit, not a few rowdy activists calling them out.

Sidley-quoting-Ridley: Killing the endangerment finding “marks the death of climate alarmism as the dominant lens through which we view our future”.

Response: Buckle up, because the news headlines of the extreme weather events already pummelling the globe are only going to pick up pace, and be an accelerant to the very “alarmism” that’s curling Sidley-quoting-Ridley’s toes.

Sidley-quoting-Ridley: “Predicted catastrophes have failed to materialise at the rate and severity promised.”

Response: You’ll find several hundred scientists from around the globe who disagree, and have evidence to back it up. Recommended reading: the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s most recent scientific assessment report. It’ll take a bit longer to wade through than Ridley’s “think”-piece, but is a slightly more credible compendium of sources, evidence and analysis.

Climate collapse isn’t a single-impact event, like the asteroid strike in the movie Don’t Look Up where we can work out the precise time and date of impact. A better metaphor is this: think of the planet as spinning into a dense cloud of much smaller space rocks. When each individual rock smashes through the atmosphere and hits the ground, it has its own localised impact, its own blast radius. It’s much trickier to predict exactly where it’ll hit, or the extent of damage.

Cape Town’s Day Zero was a meteor strike.

The Mozambican east coast being pummelled by two record-breaking cyclones in 2019 – tropical storms never before seen this far south along that coastline – was a double-tap meteor strike.

Australia’s Black Summer fires and the three billion or so animals that burned to death or died afterwards from injuries, thirst or hunger, or were displaced – another bastard of a meteor strike.

The list is long and crushingly depressing.

The slow-burn events that Sidley-quoting-Ridley refers to as evidence that the apocalypse hasn’t arrived on schedule – various glaciers melting, the shutdown of the heat-transferring mega-current in the northern Atlantic (Google: AMOC) – these forecasts were not from hysterical activists. These came directly from actual scientists. The events might not have arrived to the anticipated second, but the models aren’t far off. We’re talking timescales that span decades, centuries or more, so predicting their arrival is a bit different to forecasting tomorrow’s weather.

Improvements in modelling, along with the past few decades of measured observable environmental changes, are helping fine-tune the projections.

Sidley-quoting-Ridley: “The public eventually notices when the promised apocalypse fails to arrive.”

Response: Um, it’s arriving. Ahead of schedule. See above comment. Not seeing it – wilfully or otherwise – doesn’t protect us from it.

Sidley-quoting-Ridley: “For the better part of two decades, the Western world was gripped by a form of eco-anxiety that paralysed progress.”

Response: Paralysed, yes, but not by eco-anxiety.

The West has been in a coma of denial, lulled to sleep by a fossil fuel-driven disinformation campaign and a desperate need to believe that the wealthy or middle class among us don’t have to give up our consumer-driven dopamine hits and creature comforts. We certainly don’t want to consider a future where we might die in a heatwave or hunger-driven mob violence, rather than from old age or natural causes.

This explains the societal inertia that’s led to us missing the window to stabilise the climate at 1.5°C of warming above the pre-industrial average.

The reading list for this is long, but start with Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway.

Sidley-quoting-Ridley: “calls for degrowth… (etc)… demanded that we impoverish ourselves to save the planet.” And something about how activists’ call for an energy (etc) reboot is “economic suicide”.

Response: When we factor into our balance sheets the health and environmental costs of the pollution causing climate collapse, we’ll see that we’re already impoverishing ourselves and the planet. It’s not a one-or-the-other zero-sum game – either our impoverishment, or the planet’s. Our health is entangled with planetary health, just as our inhale is as life-giving as our exhale.

The only economic suicide is the one we’re already headed towards, one ton of grizzly carbon pollution at a time. Hashtag: true cost accounting.

Tons of reading material here, starting with Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics and Jason Hickel’s Degrowth.

Sidley-quoting-Ridley: “… wealthy, resilient societies are far better equipped to handle environmental shifts than poor, fragile ones.”

Response: The very fact that wealthy societies are more resilient to environmental disruptions is because they’ve been able to amass incredible wealth, developmental momentum and infrastructure, often at the cost of the countries left most vulnerable.

As we’re seeing, though, even the rich can’t buy their way into a safe bunker when the heat energy in Earth’s atmosphere-ocean tips us outside of the climate safe-zone we’ve been coddled in for the past 12,000 years.

The reading list for this is so long it’s hard to know where to start.

Sidley-quoting-Ridley: The EPA ruling is a “bookend to a period of irrational exuberance regarding worst-case scenarios”.

Response: Sidley-quoting-Ridley’s biggest blindspot? The warnings that he attributes to hysterical activists are warnings coming directly from the climate scientists themselves. These are not fanciful delusions of enviro-preachers, ginning up crazy ideas. The activists are merely amplifying the very messages coming through with increasing clarity from the IPCC assessment reports.

You’ll be hard pressed to find a climate scientist who will say we’re going to avoid the worst-case scenarios if we carry on as is.

Although, if you’re someone living in a tin home during a heatwave when the inside temperature tops out at a life-threatening 50°C and there’s nowhere to go for respite, you aren’t really going to have time to quibble about how a bunch of climate “wonks” or their detractors are messaging these warnings.

Recommended reading: The next investigation from Story Ark goes inside the homes of people in south Durban to show just how unbearable life can be during a heatwave when your only shelter is made from materials better suited for a working oven. DM

Leonie Joubert is on a multi-year mobile journalism project that’s investigating how the climate crisis is unfolding on our doorstep, in our lifetime. Story Ark - tales from southern Africa’s climate tipping points is an award-winning collaboration with the Stellenbosch University School for Climate Studies and the Henry Nxumalo Foundation, which supports investigative journalism.