The strange death of climate activism

The Omnicause has devoured and diminished climate activists.

The Lutzerath mud wizard, in happier times

You’d be forgiven for not noticing that Europe’s green ambition took a great leap backwards last week. Faced with a new electoral reality, in which Green parties have lost out to those sceptical of sweeping decarbonisation policies, the European Commission diluted climate regulations that it had adopted just a few years earlier.

The world has changed a lot since 2019, when EU elections returned a ‘Green wave’ and politicians from across the spectrum passed legislation to decarbonise our economies – or at the very least paid lip service to the idea.

Since then a pandemic, a war, an energy crisis and a sharp bout of inflation have made voters reconsider. As green policies take effect, the narrative of a smooth path to net zero without reducing energy consumption – remember sustainable aviation fuel? – has been exposed as science fiction.

The backlash against green policies is not new, but rather a reversion to the norm. The modern history of democracy is of voters consistently backing the party that they think will allow them to consume the most stuff as cheaply as possible.

It takes a lot to break this pattern. Western democracies tolerated conscription and rationing to fight Hitler, but only after trying and failing for several years to appease him – a delay that made the eventual fight much harder. The Covid-19 pandemic briefly brought unthinkable restrictions on civil liberties, made possible only by intense fear.

There was a moment when the climate movement looked like it could also break the consumerist pattern. But for now it seems that the scale of the action required – in extent, duration, and international cooperation – and the relative remoteness of the destructive effects have pushed it back down the agenda.

Losing focus

Much of the impetus to decarbonise in the late 2010s was inspired by young activists in their teens and early 20s, most famously Greta Thunberg. Their message was a simple one: Our lifestyles are unsustainable, and both individuals and governments need to take rapid measures to reduce our consumption of fossil fuels.

The notion of personal as well as political responsibility struck a chord with many. The flygskam (‘flight shame’) movement, which identifies most commercial flying as an ecologically catastrophic luxury, spread from Sweden across Europe and the US, resulting in significantly reduced air traffic and an increase in train use[1] in many countries. I myself gave up flying entirely from 2019 to 2023, and still now fly no more than once a year.

These young activists, alongside more established outfits such as Greenpeace, had a real impact. They changed people’s perceptions and behaviour for the better and, crucially, reached large numbers of people outside the usual left-activist circles, myself included.

It is therefore a tragedy of historic significance that they have lost focus, and with it their influence over this broad swathe of society. Future historians may identify the emergence of the term ‘climate and social justice activist’ as the moment our efforts to fight climate change were doomed.

I first noticed the drift at the COP27 climate conference in 2022, where youth activists called on their Egyptian hosts to release political prisoners. That’s a good cause – few people are in favour of political prisoners – but it marked the end of their laser focus on climate and the start of their absorption into the blob of left-activist issues that has been amusingly derided as the ‘Omnicause’.

It only got worse from there. From the unrelated but unobjectionable issue of political prisoners, climate activists began to adopt positions that are rejected by most Europeans including colonial reparations, radical gender ideology and, with tedious inevitability, hatred of Israel.

Thunberg herself made the link explicit in late 2023 in a speech to some 85,000 people who had, presumably, come to a climate rally to listen to a leading climate activist talk about climate activism. Instead, wearing a keffiyeh, she rambled about the Middle East, a subject on which she has no particular expertise.

She’s not the only one. Just Stop Oil, a British activist group known for its disruptive actions targeting fossil fuel projects, held a sit-in at a busy London station in November 2023 demanding an end to the “genocide” in Gaza. An environmental pressure group in the publishing industry last year broadened its divestment campaign from fossil fuel companies to Israel because, apparently, “solidarity with Palestine and climate justice are inextricably linked.”

The culture war intrudes

The idea of ‘climate justice’ is a slippery one. It’s true that rich countries have caused the great majority of harmful emissions, while poor countries are the worst placed to mitigate the effects of climate change. There’s a case to be made for some kind of aid payments to address this – though I’d rather Western countries spent that money trying to create new technologies or social policies to reduce future emissions.

The problem with ‘climate justice’ is that it brings divisive culture war issues into play, preventing the formation of a broad coalition to decarbonise. Climate change is our biggest existential threat because it will eventually destroy modern civilisation even in the ‘business as usual’ scenario. Your favourite issue, whatever it is, is irrelevant in comparison.

Sometimes the intrusion of post-colonial ideology leads climate activists to actively oppose measures that would help decarbonisation. Last month Greenpeace opposed a plan to generate renewable electricity in Morocco and transmit it to the UK because of the “neocolonial dynamics” of extracting resources – even unlimited wind and sunlight – from an African country.

Harvesting renewable energy resources, you see, requires “vast terrestrial and maritime areas, leading to conflicts with local livelihood activities.” Keep those coal plants running, lads, a Moroccan shepherd is grazing his flock in the solar park!

It’s easy to laugh at these people, but that doesn’t make climate change any less urgent. If the current crop of activists is determined to alienate the rest of us, we need to form an alternative coalition for decarbonisation – one built on inclusivity and progress, not the futile politics of grievance.

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[1] Governments missed an opportunity to invest in rail networks, particularly across borders in Europe, which might have led to a further reduction in flying.