Why can’t they adopt a more positive message? That might go over a lot better.
Personally I absolutely reject the notion that I’m nothing more than a walking “carbon footprint” and that human beings basically shouldn’t be on the planet at all - that we’ve ruined nature merely by existing. When anyone talks at me like that I immediately switch off and I imagine many other people do the same. It’s a disgraceful way to think about the incredible luxuries of modern western living and the privilege we have that many people in developing counties now, and across the whole world throughout history, couldn’t even have imagined in their wildest dreams.
What’s missing in all this is any sense of gratitude for the lives we live today, awareness of the incredibly technological achievements and human creativity that have made our lives possible, or sense of historical perspective. For all those except the very wealthy, human existence throughout the centuries has been a miserable struggle to survive.
It was a constant battle to keep yourself and your family fed, clothed and warm enough to last another year. The thing that made that struggle so very difficult WAS the environment. It is our very ability to tame that environment that has made our lives possible.
We have completely forgotten this. Our lives today are a miracle but everything is taken for granted. None of us would be here today - or if we were most of us would be eking our the most fucking miserable existences - without fossil fuels, industrialisation, capitalism and the ability of human beings to solve problems.
And human ingenuity continues. Things are never perfect but these problems ARE being solved. There are huge advancements in green technologies. Governments have introduced environmental legislation. The market is responding to a shift in consumer attitudes.
So why do hard-core environmentalists always act as if they are the first people to come up with these ideas and that nothing has been done at all until this point? And why can’t they even acknowledge that there are some controversies around the science? And why can’t they even acknowledge the potentially horrendous economic impact of radical green policies on the lives of ordinary working people? There was a discussion on the previous thread about shutting down the meat industry in which nobody seemed remotely concerned about what would happen to the people working in the industry if their livelihoods were taken away. The answer is always “oh well, poor people will suffer much more in the climate crisis” - as if poor people are too unimportant and too stupid to understand what’s in their own best interests.
These extreme positions and the lack of willingness to compromise - as exemplified by GT - force people like me to take much more hard-core positions on the other side than I would like to, because that’s what happens when someone is screaming in your face.
It doesn’t work, and it doesn’t result in real change. As I type this, I’m sitting in a University cafe watching a massive queue of very young people buy their takeaway coffees and croissants in throwaway packaging. They won’t change their behaviour, and they shouldn’t be forced to by a government because that’s an authoritarian regime. What will happen is that the marketplace will produce completely biodegradable packaging and people will flock to invest in it. And another problem will be solved.