path: root/chapter1.md

## Chapter 1

Since the 1980s, the green movement has been on the back foot. In stark contrast
to the legislative successes of the 1960s and 1970s, in the last few decades,
the social-scale demands of the green movement have broadly not been met.

Human beings have burned more oil and gas, and almost as much coal, since the
Kyoto Protocol was signed in 1993 than between 1800 and that time
[@owid-fossil-fuels; @energy-inst-2025; @smil-2017]. Once upon a time,
environmental campaigners declared that 350 parts of carbon dioxide per million
in the atmosphere ought to be an uncrossable red line: last year, the figure
ticked steadily up past 428 [@noaa-co2]. Without changes to government policies,
plastic pollution is set to triple between 2020 and 2040
[@breaking-plastic-wave]. Since 1974, the proportion of the world's fish stocks
deemed by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation to be within sustainable
levels has fallen from 90% to 62% [@unfao-fish-stocks]. The Living Planet Index,
the WWF's measure of wildlife populations, has declined by almost three quarters
since 1970 [@living-planet].

All these failures beg the question: why aren't the green movement's strategies
working? 'Has public attention gone numb?' asks journalist Harrison Stetler. 'Is
the sense of crisis faced with the devastating effects of climate change feeding
passivity — or even the rush to preserve past privileges — rather than
mobilization?' [@stetler-2025]

In order to solve a problem, a rhetor must persuade their audience that taking
action is good for them. For that action to solve the problem, the rhetor must
address an appropriate audience. Furthermore, they must present a credible
solution, and if the solution is to be credible, the rhetor ought to have
accurately identified the root causes of the problem.

There are problems with mainstream green rhetoric from beginning to end of this
process: rhetors mis-diagnose the root causes of the problem, propose incredible
solutions, and mis-identify their audience.

First, green rhetoric mis-diagnoses the problem. Many rhetors imply that the
root cause of green evils is the aggregated consumption choices of all the
world's individuals.

So, when Christiana Figueres, a leading architect of the 2015 Paris Agreement,
co-wrote _The Future We Choose_, addressing the general public on the problems
and solutions to climate change, she overwhelmingly focused on individual
psychology. In her telling, the problem is that 'we' (that is, the universal
human individual) are consuming too much. The solution is to change the
psychology behind over-consumption [@future-we-choose, p. 118].

Figueres is not alone in emphasising individual psychology as a root cause of
climate change. For example, writing about climate change with TV co-host Chris
Packham, Megan McCubbin, discussing 'our human reluctance to change our own
mindsets and behaviours,' writes:

> It is a huge barrier when it comes to conservation and environmental
> protection. I have always assumed that it is because we are somewhat stubborn
> \[…\] why aren't the scientific facts enough to change our opinions and
> practices? [@back-to-nature, p. 31]

Part of the answer, they argue, is that political thought is associated with the
prefrontal cortex, also associated with personal expression: thus, debating with
people about climate change can be perceived as a personal attack, preventing
people from thinking rationally. [@back-to-nature, pp. 32-33]

This analysis identifies a psychological problem – why can't human beings like
you and me act rationally when presented with the facts? Having done so, it's
natural to seek a psychological solution. But identifying the root cause in
psychology only makes sense if, as soon as 'we' start behaving sensibly,
everyone else that matters will follow our lead.

> Remember, you're in the driving seat and the corporations and big companies
> are your wheels. If you turn right, they will turn right too. Eventually.
> [@back-to-nature, p. 95]

'Carbon footprinting' reinforces the focus on individual consumption. Tot up
the carbon emissions produced in the process of producing all the goods and
services consumed by a person, and you've got their 'carbon footprint,' their
personal contribution to global carbon dioxide emissions. WWF publishes a free
carbon calculator on their website and in the Apple and Google app stores
[@wwf-footprint-calculator; wwf-my-footprint]. The concept was first popularised
by an Effie-winning advertising campaign run by British Petroleum [@effies-2007;
@kaufman-2020].

By calling on people to reduce their 'carbon footprint,' rhetors suggest that
global carbon dioxide emissions are determined by the aggregation of every
individual's consumption choices, plus a bit extra for whatever can't be
directly linked to consumption. This analysis acknowledges inequality, but only
insofar as people have unequal spending power.

Thus Oxfam, in a report released in the midst of their lobbying at the 2015
Paris COP, stated that 'individual consumption is responsible for 64% of global
emissions, with the remaining 36% attributed to consumption by governments,
investments (e.g. in infrastructure) and international transport,' before
showing that the the poorest half of the world's people only account for 10% of
the world's 'lifestyle emissions.' [@oxfam-extreme-carbon-inequality]

However, this analysis overstates the degree of control people have over the
their own consumption. As Matthew Huber puts it:

> Carbon footprint analysis is more deeply rooted in neoclassical economics with
> its particular theory of power in the economy known as "consumer sovereignty."
> Essentially, it assumes consumers drive the economy and production with their
> choices. \[…\] Since consumers have the power to drive production decisions,
> so the analysis goes, we must focus on shaping consumer choices. This is the
> only conceivable rationale for suggesting, as the Oxfam report does, that
> individuals have their own distinct "share" of emissions.
> [@climate-change-class-war, pp. 12-13]

But in reality, consumers are often at the mercy of production decisions. To
borrow Huber's illustration, the villain of the 'carbon footprint' narrative is
a rich consumer, say, someone who drives a over-sized diesel SUV to work. But
imagine that one day, that hypothetical rich consumer drives their SUV to their
senior manager's office in a fertiliser plant, where they are presented with the
option of switching their hydrogen source from coal to electrolysis of water. In
carbon footprint analysis, if he sticks with coal, the resulting extra carbon
emissions, which might be equivalent to tens of thousands of individual
consumers, won't be attributed to the manager of the factory, nor the factory's
owners, but thousands of end-product consumers, even though they have to eat to
live, and are practically powerless over the manager's decisions.

Taking an alternative approach, many green rhetors advocate for a simple
programme: listen to the science, then act rationally. This call to action
suggests that the root cause of the relevant problems is that some relevant
actors are not responding rationally to the scientific evidence.

This is a dialectic favoured by the star climate campaigner, Greta Thunberg. In
February 2019, she spoke to a gathering of EU civil servants in Brussels:

> We know that most politicians don't want to talk to us. Good, we don't want to
> talk to them either. We want them to talk to the scientists instead.
> [@no-one-is-too-small, pp. 53-54]

She spoke at the US Congress in September of the same year. Having repeatedly
referenced Martin Luther King Junior's 'I have a dream' speech, she pleaded with
legislators:

> Perhaps it is impossible. But looking at those numbers – looking at the
> current best available science signed by every nation – then I think that is
> precisely what we are up against. But you must not spend all of your time
> dreaming, or see this as some political fight to win. And you must not gamble
> your children's future on the flip of a coin. Instead, you must unite behind
> the science. [@no-one-is-too-small, pp. 122-123]

In their 1996 _Betrayal of Science and Reason_, Paul and Anne Ehrlich explained
their rationalist account of how science ought to drive government policy:

> In short, people should have faith in their own judgment when they've taken
> the time to examine different views of an issue and taken into account their
> own predispositions and prejudices. Then they can become activists—devote as
> much of their time as possible to improving the human condition. The
> scientific community needs help in re-plotting humanity's trajectory toward a
> sustainable future. [@betrayal-science-reason, p. 212]

For such rhetors, the bogeyman is the 'science denier' or 'science fraudster'.
Much of _Betrayal and Science and Reason_ is dedicated to rebutting
'brownlashes.' In Thunberg's speeches, she repeatedly proclaims that 'we spoke
the science and demanded that the people in power would listen to and act on the
science, but our political leaders didn't listen' [@no-one-is-too-small, p. 134].

However, there's no particular reason to think that the fossil fuel industry is
irrational or unscientific. In fact, fossil fuel companies are some of the
world's most scientifically capable organisations. Fossil fuel extraction makes
intensive use of technological and scientific resources, from the geological
surveying needed to identify reserves to the hydraulic engineering needed to
pump gas and oil from underground or subsea reservoirs. Despite these
technological and scientific challenges, fossil fuel companies rank among the world's
profitable. Adding together the most recent annual profits from the five largest
state-owned fossil fuel companies and the five largest public fossil fuel
companies produces a number well over $500 billion [@energy-profits-jun-25].

Even the production of so-called 'fake science' can be seen as the result of the
fossil fuel industry acting rationally on the basis of the scientific evidence.
As I'll explore in more detail in chapter 4, the fossil fuel industry is
following the tobacco industry's strategies in their campaign to use science to
influence public opinion. The problem for the world is not that people aren't
listening to the science, but rather that fossil fuel companies, and other
business lobbies, have an interest in allowing climate catastrophe to continue
unabated, and powerful means of ensuring their interests are met.

Rhetors who target individual consumption or 'science denial' mis-diagnose the
root causes of green issues. Having mis-diagnosed the root causes of the
problem, they too often go on to propose politically impossible solutions.

Perhaps the worst proposal is to cut individual consumption. Since _The Limits
to Growth_ was published for the Club of Rome in 1972 [@limits-to-growth],
bolstered by eco-classics such as _Small Is Beautiful_ (1973)
[@small-is-beautiful] and _The Population Bomb_ (1968) [@population-bomb], the
green movement has frequently emphasised a message of austerity, echoing the
austerity rhetoric which has dominated the cost-of-living discourse since the
1970s [@climate-change-class-war, pp. 158-159].

In 2006, George Monbiot set out his manifesto for putting the UK through a
90% cut in greenhouse gas emissions. While Monbiot acknowledged that austerity
rhetoric was a hard sell, repent did he not:

> I have one purpose in writing this book: to persuade you that climate change
> is worth fighting. Failing that, I have one last hope: that I might make
> people so depressed about the state of the planet that they stay in bed all
> day, thereby reducing their consumption of fossil fuels.
> [@heat, p. xxix]

More appealing still, Monbiot suggests cutting yourselves off from your loved
ones to save the climate:

> Perhaps the most intractable cause of global warming is ‘love miles’: the
> distance you must travel to visit friends and partners and relatives on the
> other side of the planet. The world could be destroyed by love.
> [@heat, p. 22]

Two fans, Sharon Astyk and Miranda Edel, inspired by the book, set out in 2007
to reduce their household carbon footprint to 10% of the US average. In response
to Monbiot's observation that 'people don't riot for austerity,' they called
their personal austerity campaign a 'Riot for Austerity' and blogged about their
efforts online, finding hundreds of people from around the world joining them in
their 'riot.' As Chris Rootes observed, in spite of their impressive efforts,
the movement had very little impact.

> This action, interesting though it is, scarcely resembled a riot, or, indeed,
> any other form of collective action. It was a series of individual efforts to
> minimize carbon emissions for a limited period of time. \[…\] insofar as
> knowledge of the experiment was shared, the take away message was how hard it
> was to drastically reduce consumption whilst living in mainstream society.
> [@rootes-2016]

As hard as it is for relatively affluent people to cut back on their carbon
emissions, it is harder still for the overwhelming majority of the world's
people, who have very little discretion in what or how they consume goods and
services. Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac implore their readers:

> Reduce daily energy use, bike instead of driving a car, switch your energy
> supplier to 100 per cent clean \[…\] Challenge your consumerism. Look at what
> you have bought, and ask yourself whether it brings you joy. Question your
> impulses to buy more, and begin to see how liberating it is to buy less.
> [@future-we-choose, pp. 171-172]

With Matt Huber, I ask, 'how will a working class that often struggles to pay
for basic services like heat and electricity respond to such demands
[@climate-change-class-war, p. 170]?' Most consumption for most people is not
discretionary even in the Global North, and this is even more true in the Global
South. There is no feasible route to mass voluntary austerity.

Another favourite of green rhetors is to propose 'smart' market-based policies,
such as taxing carbon, aimed at nudging the market into financing economic
transformation through private capital. It's hard to disagree with eloquent
experts like Sir Dieter Helm [@legacy] who argues that a sustainable economy
must observe what he calls the 'polluter-pays principle.' However, too often,
rhetors propose solutions which exacerbate market injustice, effectively levying
the cost of change on those already squeezed by markets.

In March 1993, for example, Norman Lamont, then Chancellor of the Exchequer,
announced a fuel price 'escalator', promising to gradually increase fuel duty,
partly in order to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. A tobacco escalator followed
in November. However, amidst criticism that the fuel duty was regressive and
ineffective and protests from lorry drivers, Gordon Brown was forced in March
2000 to rescind the escalator and reduce fuel duty [@parl-fuel-escalator;
@bbc-fuel-duty-cut]. In 2018, Emmanuel Macron suffered a huge loss to his
political authority after a similar fuel duty policy bequeathed to him by a
previous government sparked the 'gilets jaunes' civil disobedience movement
[@bbc-gilets-jaunes].

So, while smart market fixes might work on paper, they are too often divorced
from any politically sustainable programme.

Finally, having mis-diagnosed the root causes of the issues and proposed
solutions their audience cannot support, green rhetors fail to identify an
appropriate audience.

As I've already shown, green rhetors tend to address an unspecified
'we,' suggesting a universal human individual, implying that for all relevant
purposes, everyone has the same interests and powers. Thus Chris Packham and
Megan McCubbin can announce the arrival of 'Ape Aware' [@cornerstones, p. 202],
and Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac of 'the next phase of human
evolution' [@future-we-choose, p. 62].

The word 'Anthropocene' tells a similar story. The word was coined by Paul
Crutzen in 2000 in order to propose that the International Geosphere-Biosphere
Programme, an international scientific society, recognise a new geological
epoch, usually dated some time shortly after the Second World War. After an
extended discussion, the IGBP rejected Crutzen's proposal, but the word has
nevertheless obtained currency far beyond the discipline of geology
[@meaning-of-anthropocene].

For many scholars, in the world beyond the technical debates of geological
technocrats, the term 'Anthropocene' describes the present time as one
characterised by human domination over the Earth. The choice of 'anthropos,' or
'human,' as the focus point, rather than 'mammal' or 'management consultant,'
implies that responsibility for recent changes to Earth's ecosystems are shared
roughly equally amongst all and only humans.

Some critics have proposed alternative terms such as 'Capitalocene' or
'Oligarchocene' so as to more fairly reflect the social texture of the changing
relationship of human beings within Earth ecosystems [see e.g.
@anthropocene-or-capitalocene; @blaser-2018]. But 'Anthropocene,' by describing
the shaping power over Earth's ecosystems as the undifferentiated 'anthropos',
downplays the importance of the different powers and interests between different
humans.

For example, Mike Berners-Lee uses the word 'Anthropocene' liberally in his
public appearances. In his popular book, _There Is No Planet B_, he describes
the 'Anthropocene' as the time when ever-expanding human power comes to dominate
Earth's systems [@no-planet-b, pp. 2-3]. Notice how seamlessly Berners-Lee slips
from talking about systems far larger than individuals into talking about
individual psychology:

> Some people I meet say energy has always gone up so it always must. Some say
> it will come to a natural halt on its own. Some say our species will wipe
> itself out because we are so unfit for the situation we are in. Some say we
> will be fine because we always have been. (By the way, the dinosaurs could
> also have said that before they died off.) Some wishfully tell me that solar
> power will replace fossil fuels because the market will simply make it happen.
> Some say the transition to clean energy has to take a long time because all
> transitions always have done. Some say global cooperation is beyond the
> capacity of humankind. Some say levels of inequality are determined by ‘human
> nature’. Some say humans wake up only when they have a nasty experience, so we
> may as well wait until the inevitable nasty experience happens to us (and they
> are generally talking about exceptionally nasty experiences).
>
> All this strikes me as determinism. I am not a determinist. I reject any
> scientist telling me they can prove the absence of free will.

If the relevant problems are at the scale of global co-operation, energy
systems, and the human species, it's not obvious that individual psychology is
directly relevant. But in the 'Anthropocene' discourse, because it is the human
that is at fault, it is easy to elide super-human social structures with the
human individual.

In reality, green rhetoric is primarily addressed not to an imaginary universal
human 'we,' but to the Western middle classes. This makes sense, since the
green movement has historically been heavily dominated by large non-governmental
organisations such as the RSPB, National Audubon Society, Friends of the Earth,
Greenpeace, and WWF, to name but a few. Typically, such NGOs don't depend on
grassroots mass mobilisation, and indeed, struggle to mobilise their
members when they try. Their business model is one of
raising funds from mass membership, even in more activist organisations like
Greenpeace, which largely function as 'protest businesses' [@rootes-2012, pp.
47-53]. Thus, these NGOs are dominated by the Western middle classes who provide
them with money by taking out membership subscriptions. Meanwhile, working-class
concerns are often seen as less important or relevant to environmentalism by the
dominant NGOs [@working-class-env, p. 13].

But what change is it that Western professional middle classes are capable of
bringing about? If it's not reducing your individual 'carbon footprint',
green rhetors have a tendency
to propose actions achievable only by the imaginary universal human 'we,' not
their actual audience.

One common rallying cry is for 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 get the US
back on board with the Kyoto agreement. Last December, Fiona Harvey wrote
a 10-year retrospective of the Paris Agreement for the Guardian. 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:

> To name but a few of the problems: the allocation of responsibility for the
> existing stock of carbon in the atmosphere \[…\] is complex; carbon emissions
> per head are low in those countries most rapidly increasing their emissions;
> some countries (and, particularly, some countries' political élites) may
> actually benefit from climate change, and generally the effects vary greatly
> between countries; there are powerful—multidimensional—free-rider incentives;
> the measurement of emissions \[…\] is at best weak; and there are, at present,
> no serious enforcement mechanisms. It is hard to think of an international
> problem which lends itself less to a coherent, credible, and sufficiently
> robust and comprehensive general agreement. To put it in perspective, limiting
> nuclear proliferation is trivial by comparison. [@helm-2009]

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]

Sadly, despite the great excitement protests often generate, they typically have
limited material impacts on governments. It is therefore easy for governments to
pay lip service to the protesters' cause and move on. 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
putting harms down to individual consumption choices and science denial, whereas
in fact, these factors play a relatively small role in explaining ecological
harm, and other factors, such as industrial production decisions shaped by
markets, are much more significant. A mis-diagnosis of the problem leads to
false solutions such as voluntary austerity or 'smart' market fixes. Moreover,
green rhetors fail to take account of the powers and interests of their
audience. Rhetors speak as if they are addressing an imaginary universal human
'we' capable of acting rationally in the universal human interest, asking them
to take actions such as creating international agreements to reduce greenhouse
gas emissions. But in fact, green rhetors do not address that imaginary 'we,'
but rather the Western middle classes, who may not have the right powers and
interests for such exhortations to be feasible.

This begs the question: if green rhetoric is failing, how might it be fixed? One
common suggestion is that green rhetoric needs to be less catastrophic. Since
apocalyptic language is often assumed to be more or less equivalent to
catastrophic language, it is easy for commentators such as Frances Flannery to
infer that successful green rhetoric should avoid apocalyptic language. In
chapter 3, I'll argue that such a conclusion ignores the possibilities of
apocalyptic language, including, and going well beyond, its catastrophic
aspects. Then, in chapter 4, I'll argue that green rhetors today must use John's
apocalyptic rhetorical techniques in order to make change happen. But first, in
the following chapter, I'll explore how catastrophism appears in contemporary
green rhetoric, and why critics allege that catastrophic language is
counter-productive in this context.