Why People Are Suspicious of Climate Activism

I should preface this with a half disclaimer: I actually do believe in climate change and think that it is a real problem which needs solving. From a purely engineering-based point of view, fossil fuels are a finite resource which is destined to run out at an increasingly exponential rate. As demand increases, the amount of these fuels we would have to burn would also increase, leading to their exhaustion at an increased rate, making it next to impossible for us to replenish them. Therefore, I do think that moving away from fossil fuels is important and will be required in the near future. However, I am much more optimistic than many climate activists. This will just be one other small blip of a problem on the journey of human progress that we will solve and that won’t set us back very far.

However

There are a lot of people who are very suspicious of environmental activism in general who would heavily disagree with me. These people like to cite evidence such as previous “climate scares”, such as cooling in the 70s and previous conditions of climate CO2 content in relation to climate state. In my opinion, these reservations are misled, as the evidence we must look at must be in relation to current states, as looking at previous statuses ignores a wide array of external stimuli which could have affected the correlation. We must consider present evidence. Unlike many “climate believers” of my generation, however, I am much more understanding of those who “deny” - or who have reservations about - the idea of climate change. Everything in this movement seems to have aligned in order to make certain kinds of people very suspicious of this movement in general. In this summary, I would like to summarise many of the reasons why people are suspicious of this movement, and, ultimately, why it leads them to the substandard conclusion that climate change is not real.

First and foremost, it is important to consider wider political state in the current era. I would like you to consider the following images.

Notice the conflation of “climate” and “social” justice

Notice the pride and USSR flags

More conflation of goals and clear influences

Try to spot how many political affiliations there are. Notable mentions “Socialist change” being wielded by a child; and “Scottish Labour” wielded prominently.

A CHILD wielding a sign from the Socialist Workers’ Party which reads “The Solution: Revolution”. To reiterate: A CHILD

A substantial block of protesters claim to “decolonize the planet” and to “rally against capitalism”, having signs endorsed again by the Socialist Workers Party

The Red Banner of the former Soviet Union flies over a protest in Glasgow

Can you spot the pattern? Climate protesters are almost always overwhelmingly left-wing intellectuals of the kind Orwell described in The Road to Wigan Pier: flabby, middle-class hippies with radical ideas which reach beyond the ideas they claim to simply be proponents of. There are two commonalities with the events described in these photographs. I will discuss them each in turn.

Political Biases

Climate activists are not as they seem. As I outlined above, climate protesters are overwhelmingly left-wing and with radical agendas which completely disregard any other, even moderate, parts of politics. To the average person as it is to the political activist, this appears as though a cause has been co-opted with those with a wider political agenda to steer it as a bargaining chip for their aims. Upon realising that the average proletarian in the United Kingdon is not really big on revolutions and overthrowing their happy jobs (I know this from wide-ranging experience), they have shifted their focus. This shift forked into two different camps: the intersectionals, who focus on intersectionality and the “opression” of individual classes in society (such as race, gender etc.); and the greenfingers, who instead claim that capitalism is inherently exploitative of the environment and needs to be overthrown for this reason. This is clearly a distortion of the true aims behind the movement. If these people truly cared about this cause and were’t just muscling in with the aim of distorting its true goals, they would attempt to unite everybody on the political spectrum on this issue. Instead of marching around with prominent signs reading “Socialists unite”, they would instead point out the hard facts on what is going on and why it needs fixing. Instead of openly admitting to being radicals, they would instead attempt to reason with the general populus and fix this problem in a calm, orderly fashion. More on fear will be discussed later.

Let’s take for one moment one of the most famously immovable political groups in the world: libertarians. Libertarians believe in freedom and little more. They believe in hard limits on government power and will fight the government when it oversteps these boundaries. These people make up a substantial part of the voter base in the United States and many other locations - particularly places such as Switzerland. The climate protesters have completely ignored these people’s concerns and left them in the gutter as they march forwards demanding the complete antithesis of what these people wish. They call them “climate deniers” because of real concerns about the methods they are using. I myself am not a libertarian for a variety of reasons, but I can understand their viewpoint as completely valid. So, I find myself wondering: why have the climate protesters completely ignored the concerns of an entire unrelated group inthis way, while being eager to take onboard the collective wisdom of socialist economists? It is clear to me that something wider is going on here. Certain political groups are being particularly excluded. These groups are not random and are not by chance, and that is why these particulary groups will be particularly suspicious of any kind of climate activism.

Use of Children

I said earlier that these images have a twofold commonalities. The primary is the left-wing nature of their biases. The second is their usage of children.

Children should never be moral legislators. I know this from, technically, being one myself. Children are always, without fail, the most radical in their youthful feelings. Let’s again examine one of the best historical records of socialism in the 1920s: The Road To Wigan Pier to find out why. Orwell outlines how, in his youth, he was very clearly a Bolshevik communist - and so were all of his classmates in a middle class school in London. As he grew, he saw many of them mature into simple socialists, unionists and less extreme idiologies. However, he believed that these people, had they been moral legislators in their youth, would have ushered in communism as a child. This is a repeating pattern throughout history. In the 1960s, young hippie communists were largely responsible for revolutionary social change (and arguably communist implantation) in the United States. Some of their changes were good. Some of them still haunt us to this day. In 2021, young children with very little understanding of how the world works and what it feels like to work a real job are now being looked to to morally legislate the actions of the old and wise. “It’s our future!”, they say. Well, it’s the adults’ world. “So what if the price of food goes up? We’re saving the world!”, they say. “So what” may not be the question on the lips of the struggling joiner in a working class town.

I can propose a theory for this. Children are, without fail, the most extreme in their opinions because of lack of exposure to the opposing sides of a debate. In their understandable youthful ignorance, they have been exposed to a carefully prepared slice of the world’s perspectives on a matter. And so, seeing only a small part of a big picture, they tend towards the most extreme and “hippy” opinions of their time. I have seen this in myself. In past years, I saw people in poverty and saw people being evicted due to failing to pay bills. This led me down the ever-present communist road. I hated landlords with a passion, despite having never met one. However, I am now slightly more pleased to say that my viewpoint has changed back to being non-revolutionary in any way. Today I am probably more economically conservative. The wider picture of the things I witnessed were eye-opening. An eviction may, at first, appear like a disgusting show of power. Once I learned that the lady acting as the landlord had three children to feed and worked in the local newsagents, my dislike of her immediately dissolved. Had that man been allowed to stay, she would likely be the homeless one, all because the tennant was refusing to pay their rightly due rent for using her property which she maintained.

As for the rest of the children involved, I can only assume they are being used as talking heads for their parent intellectuals. As a general rule, it is a red flag (somewhat literally) when a child is being fed responses by a team. It almost seems like they are being used as a pawn for the change adults want. This will undoubtably promote suspicion of those of us priviledged enough to have read enough history to realise what the encouragement of the indoctrination of children leads to. Bearing in mind, I am talking about a cause I agree with, but this should simply not be happening. Children are not props. They should be allowed to think freely without being used to promote social pressure and whip up hysteria (again, more on this in a moment).

In summary, children should never be moral legislators. That is not to say that the adults in the room should not consider the interests and the futures of children when making decisions; that is, of course, the moral thing to do. But most children are like I was, and I was in no fit state to be making decisions.

Use of Fear

I recently had to perform the sad task of going through the belongings of my dead father. This was mostly a sad task, until a little ray of sunshine shone through: I found his old, signed Elbow CDs in his school satchel. However, what I found underneath this was the most interesting. Underneath this was a poster from his chemistry lab when he taught as a science teacher. This was clearly printed in the early to mid nineties, as it claimed that “acid rain will have completely destroyed all forests on earth by the early 2000s”. Among other dire predictions, it also claimed that we had “until the end of the decade to reverse the greenhouse effect before mass food shortages began”. I don’t know if you know the nineties and early two-thousands, but “mass food shortages” would not be how I would describe them. Economic stability and surplus goods tend to characterise the nineties, with political stability being another important feature.

But, this speaks to a wider issue, which is that this movement has clearly capitalised on existential fear of the nth degree. When you study any kind of social engineering (my field being particularly related to computer security and “hacking the human”), one of the first things they teach you is that fear is the most powerful emotion. It overpowers both love and greed, happiness and grief. Fear clouds the senses and dulls the mind’s eye to the point where the skull is so thin anything which wishes to lodge itself in there is completely welcomed. There is a reason that most phone scams start out with alarms blaring and a warning message about financial compromise or legal threats. It makes you more likely to fall for a scam. I think it should be evident why, then, people are very suspicious of any activist group which capicalises upon fear.

Not only have the activists themselves capitalised on fear, the media has a large part to play in this too. The media has realised in the modern day that, as they are now making revenue based on advertisement clicks, they need to pump out as much content as possible which people will click on and remember. To do this, they have called upon the commonly cited psychological trait known as the “negativity bias”. Simply put, a negative experience or report will weight much more heavily and consciously on the mind of the average man than a positive one. The media, therefore, pumps out as much panic-inducing, depression-sparking, doom-and-gloom nonsense as they can. There has been not a single report by ITV, BBC or Channel 4 News which reports the giant leaps forward we are making and have made. Please see here for a nice summary of some of the highlights you have missed, many of which spark my optimism about this subject. But, if you were to listen to the mainstream media on this topic, you would likely believe that we are still in the 1920s, burning hundreds of tonnes of coal every day to power a single working town. The media have radicalised a section of the population. Those sceptical are well aware of this, yet were simply radicalised in the opposite direction.

Establishment Support

Throughout history, ideas which strongly challenge the status quo were margainalised and surpressed by the establishment. The media would quell their movements, the parliaments would shun them and the politicians would pretend they don’t exist. Is this happening to Greta Thunberg and her supposed anti-establishment rallying cries? No, of course not. Every time she demands something increasingly outlandish and extreme, the extablishment rushes to calm her and make peace with her mob of protesters. Why could this be? It is almost like these people are, in fact, the establishment, not what they fight against. Their message is echoed by every large media corporation, politician and corporate body. Simply questioning their motives and goals gets you labelled as a “conspiracy theorist” or a “hopeless contrarian”. These people hold a tremendous amount of power, and yet they still maintain that they are in a position of “fighting the system” and “rallying against the establishment”. You need only glance at the images above to see that many of them truly believe it. They have likely come to this conclusion based on the fact that many of their extreme goals are simply logistically impossible. Take, for instance, the average Extinction Rebellion member, who believes we should outright ban fossil fuels, cars, planes, some foods and fun (but not the last one - maybe). When they demand that we completely axe a lot of core economic principles, which keep people afloat and stops mass human suffering, the politicians refuse. Then, despite the groveling attempts of the politicians to apologize to them, they think they are being surpressed when their message is not dictated straight into law.

Meanwhile, people with certain opinions literally forbidden under law; people being constantly demonised and hated for simply wishing to live their lives; and people who are dealing with big problems in their own lives are called opressors and “The Avont Garde” because some climate protester across the country didn’t get to write the letter of the law. That is why establishment support stokes such suspicion, particularly in some counter-cultural departments.

There are some communities on the internet which, despite being completely related to saving the planet and living a more sustainable future, completely reject these climate protesters and, often get led down the path of outright climate nihlism. Why? Because their opinions of how to solve this crisis are not mainstream, and so they are called “the opressive establishment” and the “business as usual bregade”, by protesters like Thunberg. Groups like the followers of former-naturalist John Seymore (who advocated for a return to traditional, small-scale and distributed farming, in place of low-quality, industrial, centralised farming) have been pushed to the extremes of the climate debate by the supposed counter-cultural movement, which really contains the purest forms of the establishment. If this fact alone does not push these groups towards deep suspicion, if not complete nihlism as mentioned before, I don’t know what does.

Worship of Idols

It is my fear, and the fear of many “deniers”, that climate protesting has become less about critical thinking, wanting concrete solutions and change, and more about worshipping a certain group of key idols which dictate to us our goals and wishes. There is no better example of this than Greta Thunberg. Greta has no scientific qualifications. She has no experience in the field of geological engineering or power production. She is a child. However, she is a child whoose power stems from the herd (more accurately mob) of people behind her. This kind of mob seems to have formed a kind of religious cult of personality around this random child engaged in activism. Even completely ignoring all of the factors around children I outlined above, this is a single person who is dictating the wishes and policy of all those below her. Essentially, a neo-atheistic religion has been formed around Our Lady Thunberg and her army of climate protesters.

Although I would consider myself Christian, I am not blind to the downsides and the history of ignorance and blind faith which has followed religions around. My faith and belief in Christian values does not come from a blind reading of the Bible, but more from an appreciation of traditional values and the upsides which come with them. When I say “God bless you” when somebody sneezes, it is not (as it was for the original use of that phrase) because I actually believe that God may save this person from ills; it is because this traditional phrase represents much more than this. It is a representation of saying “I wish the greatest power in the universe to do you well”: the ultimate wellwish. Traditional religion, however, seems to be plagued with arbitrary dictation of ideas. In particular, religions which focus less around moral stances and more around faith in a single, fallable person tend towards this end. This perfectly describes many of the tendencies of modern day climate protesters.

With traditional religions having been largely removed from a large prat of public life, people instead turn to other idols for worship, replacing the traditional idea of “God” (a representation of all that is good and right) and towards some arbitrary person. Some people worship comic book heroes. Some worship politicians. In this case, they worship Greta Thunberg and her goals. Now, I am sure she has good intentions, but I am also sure she is perfectly aware of what is going on. People are rallying around her, treating her like a godess who is all knowing and all good (notice the parallels with the traditional idea of God, again). Once again, another movement falls on its own fictitious sword of pride as it worships an arbitrary nineteen-year-old girl - one who may or may not be under the influence of adults (as mentioned above), at that. I think it is self-evident the effect this will have.

Conclusion

So what can we do about this? As I said earlier in the preface, I am “one of you guys”. I think that the earth is in danger and needs saving. But, our current movement has been taken over by communists, socialists, anarchists and revolutionaries from every corner of politics. Our movement is completely alien to the average man in our country, and, indeed, around the world. Something needs to change, but the most important change to happen first is to ourselves. Orwell advocated something similar with socialists in The Road To Wigan Pier. Socialists of his day were, what he called, “flabby, middle-class vegitarians”. Effectively, he was describing the 1920s wave of hippies. In order to save ourselves, we must be more reasonable, less reliant upon fear and more upon realistic solutions. “Just ban carbon, bro”, is not going to be listened to - by the electorate or by the politicians. Why should Joe Bloggs, the joiner from Bolton town center listen to a bunch of yoga enthusiasts about what fuel he is allowed to use in his car? Because we must ensure that he realises we really do have his best interests at heart. Currently, my suspicion is growing that part of my movement, unfortunately, does not.