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authorJoe Carstairs <s1806931@ed.ac.uk>2026-07-28 17:55:57 +0100
committerJoe Carstairs <s1806931@ed.ac.uk>2026-07-28 17:55:57 +0100
commit4b3a773ca5399b7c39c7d77903beb115a5ff6407 (patch)
treea993a16d6b71b5c8dfb5c53d2307d6a88be7140b
parent445ce4c8418b9b939ea697c2239468fd13d03bca (diff)
fill-ins in chp0, chp1
-rw-r--r--bibliography.bib28
-rw-r--r--chapter0.md14
-rw-r--r--chapter1.md43
3 files changed, 66 insertions, 19 deletions
diff --git a/bibliography.bib b/bibliography.bib
index 2fa3943..62758b1 100644
--- a/bibliography.bib
+++ b/bibliography.bib
@@ -1,3 +1,31 @@
+@book{or-something-worse,
+ author={Beuret, Nicholas},
+ title={Or Something Worse},
+ subtitle={Why We Need to Disrupt the Climate Transition},
+ publisher={Verso},
+ address={New York},
+ date={2025},
+}
+
+@article{harvey-2025-12-13,
+ author={Harvey, Fiona},
+ title={‘A shift no country can ignore’: where global emissions stand, 10 years after the Paris climate agreement},
+ date={2025-12-13},
+ journal={The Guardian},
+ address={London},
+ url={https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/dec/13/a-shift-no-country-can-ignore-where-global-emissions-stand-10-years-after-the-paris-climate-agreement},
+ urldate={2026-07-28},
+}
+
+@book{sutton-environment,
+ author={Sutton, Philip W.},
+ date={2007},
+ title={The Environment},
+ subtitle={A Sociological Introduction},
+ address={Cambridge},
+ publisher={Polity Press},
+}
+
@inbook{helm-2009,
title={Climate-change Policy},
subtitle={Why has so Little been Achieved?},
diff --git a/chapter0.md b/chapter0.md
index 424ad57..c31f9fe 100644
--- a/chapter0.md
+++ b/chapter0.md
@@ -31,13 +31,13 @@ cluster of issues which these names represent.].
The green movement began in the 1960s. Major institutions rapidly gained mass
membership, especially among the urban professional middle classes, in many
-Western nations \[EVIDENCE\]. Rachel Carson's _Silent Spring_ helped to kick
-green rhetoric up to the highest level of politics in the US and other countries
-\[EVIDENCE\]. Carson made use of well-established forms of language which
-distinguished between 'nature' and 'civilisation', and called on her audience to
-protect pristine nature from the clutches of corrupting civilisation
-\[EVIDENCE\]. This kind of rhetoric proliferated, and in its wake followed wave
-upon wave of legislation \[EVIDENCE\].
+Western nations [@sutton-environment, p. 103]. Rachel Carson's _Silent Spring_
+helped to kick green rhetoric up to the highest level of politics in the US and
+other countries \[EVIDENCE\]. Carson made use of well-established forms of
+language which distinguished between 'nature' and 'civilisation', and called on
+her audience to protect pristine nature from the clutches of corrupting
+civilisation \[EVIDENCE\]. This kind of rhetoric proliferated, and in its wake
+followed wave upon wave of legislation \[EVIDENCE\].
From the beginning, one of the central issues of the green movement was nuclear
power. Throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, nuclear power functioned as the
diff --git a/chapter1.md b/chapter1.md
index d16ea24..239979c 100644
--- a/chapter1.md
+++ b/chapter1.md
@@ -479,7 +479,16 @@ as I've already discussed, is not a proposal with legs – green rhetors have a
tendency to propose actions which cannot be achieved by this audience, if they
can be achieved by anyone at all.
-Example 1: legally binding emissions targets. (Who's going to enforce them?)
+One possibility is an international agreement. Greta Thunberg has spent a great
+deal of her considerable campaigning energy attending international diplomatic
+summits, such as UN Climate Change Conferences of the Parties (COPs) and the
+World Economic Forum. _An Inconvenient Truth_, Al Gore's influential campaign
+film, was primarily motivated by the desire to see the US get back on board with
+the Kyoto agreement. Only in December, Fiona Harvey wrote a 10-year
+retrospective of the Paris Agreement for the Guardian, in which she lauded its
+achievements and declared, 'the question now is: can countries learn from the
+mistakes of the past decade, in order to keep the Paris agreement alive in the
+next?' [@harvey-2025-12-13]
The economist Dieter Helm has brilliantly summarised his scepticism of any
global agreement on reducing greenhouse gas emissions:
@@ -496,17 +505,27 @@ global agreement on reducing greenhouse gas emissions:
> robust and comprehensive general agreement. To put it in perspective, limiting
> nuclear proliferation is trivial by comparison. [@helm-2009]
-Example 2: give free stuff to developing countries. (Who's going to pay for it?
-Who are you going to give it to?)
-
-Example 3: stop chopping down rainforests. (How will you convince the loggers,
-ranchers and miners to leave potential profits unexploited?)
-
-The action that PMC people have taken so far (alternative consumption, political
-protests, banning plastic straws, holding COPs, setting targets) have not been
-effective. \[EVIDENCE\]
-
-The result is that PMC people feel powerless. \[EVIDENCE\]
+Regardless of whether international government action is feasible in theory,
+there remains an enormous gap between that action and any action within
+the grasp of the Western middle classes whom green rhetors typically address.
+When it comes to concrete action for their actual audience, environmentalists tend
+to default to activism, but this has no route to political success:
+
+> Climate movements, especially those capable of bringing people into the street
+> to protest, mobilise the fear of catastrophe, tapping into a general sense of
+> dread, but they do so for what seem like quite inconsequential ends. Although
+> leaflets and emails talk up famine and rising seas, the call to act is always
+> a call for street-level protests, invariably demanding that governments 'do
+> something' about climate change. [@or-something-worse, p. 111]
+
+The net result is little political change and feelings of betrayal, demonstrated,
+as eloquently as ever, by Thunberg:
+
+> You have taken away my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet
+> I'm one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire
+> ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction. And
+> all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth.
+> How dare you! [@no-one-is-too-small, p. 127]
In summary, green rhetoric is not working. I've explored some reasons why this
is so. Green rhetoric mis-diagnoses the root causes of the relevant problems by