path: root/chapter1.md

## Chapter 1

Since the 1990s, the green movement has been on the back foot. There have of
course been many green successes on the local scale. But, in stark contrast to
the 1960s and 1970s, when the green lobby succeeded in delivering strong
government legislation to protect clean air, water, and establish nature
reserves, in the last thirty years, most of the key social-scale demands of the
green movement have not been met, and even some of those earlier successes have
been partially rolled back.

- Tropical deforestation is accelerating
- Plastic pollution is increasing at an accelerating rate
- Public infrastructure is more, not less, car-dependent
- Overfishing is intensifying
- Green New Deal is nowhere to be seen
- Water pollution has gone backwards (in the UK at least)
- Energy transition shows few signs of starting (though consider obvious
  objections: falling coal consumption in China, increasing renewable energy
  production, car electrification)
- Greenhouse gas emissions are increasing at an accelerating rate

All these failures beg the question: why aren't the green movement's strategies
working? \[EXAMPLE OF GREEN LEADER ASKING THIS QUESTION\] In particular, I want
to focus on green rhetoric.

Rhetoric, as I'm using the term, refers to an utterance with an agenda. When
green rhetoric works well, it solves a problem relevant to green concerns. In
order to solve the problem, the rhetor must persuade their audience that taking
action is good for them. For that action to be effective in solving the problem,
the rhetor must also address an appropriate audience: that is, an audience that
has or could have the means, motive, and opportunity to solve the relevant
problem. Furthermore, they must present their audience with a credible solution,
and if the solution is to be credible, the rhetor will be best placed if they
have accurately identified the root causes of the problem.

There are problems with dominant green rhetoric from beginning to end of this
process. First, green rhetoric mis-diagnoses the problem. Rhetors imply that the
root cause of green evils is the combined choices, and particularly the
consumption choices, of all the world's individuals.

So, when Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac come to recommend ten actions
for their readers to take to fight climate change, coming in at number 4 (after
'Let Go of the Old World,' 'Face Your Grief but Hold a Vision of the Future,'
and 'Defend the Truth') is 'See Yourself as a Citizen – Not as a Consumer.' The
problem is that we're consuming too much. The solution is to change the
psychology which causes over-consumption.

> Much of what we buy is intended to enhance our sense of identity. Particular
> brands of clothes, soap, cookies, televisions, and cars and designed with a
> _tribe_ in mind, their attributes carefully cultivated by the consumer goods
> companies that sell the products. Identity and consumption keep moving closer
> together. In the UK, for example, the average person consumes more than 65
> pounds of clothes every year, equivalent to about five loads of laundry. These
> purchases are driven mainly by the fact that fashion trends change every
> season. [@future-we-choose, p. 118]

They're not alone in emphasising individual psychology as a root cause of
climate change. For example, writing about climate change, Chris Packham and
Megan McCubbin ask:

> \[FIND QUOTE\] Why is it that 'our human reluctance to change our mindsets and
> behaviours' resists the scientific evidence? Why isn't the science enough?

Part of the answer, they argue, is that political thought is associated with the
prefrontal cortex, which is also associated with personal expression: thus,
inviting people to think differently about a political issue like climate change
can be perceived as a personal attack, preventing people from thinking
rationally. \[FIND PAGE NUMBERS\]

This analysis assumes that the problem is one for the universal individual
human. It is 'our human reluctance' that has to be addressed. Having identified
a psychological problem – why can't human beings like you and me act rationally
when presented with the facts? – it's natural to seek a psychological solution.
This only makes sense if, as soon as 'we' (whoever that is) 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.
> \[FIND PAGE NUMBER\] [@back-to-nature]

Fellow nature writer Benedict Macdonald extends this idea, that green harms are
driven by consumption, into a sweeping grand history of the human race from
primeval time:

> \[…] we became systematic, methodical and determined in our eradication of
> some cornerstone species \[…] By the Middle Ages, our desire to tame the
> natural world around us grew in intensity and purpose \[…] As we began to
> industrialise, the Great Fens would be drained and our conquest of the
> land-at-scale, beginning with our deforestation in the Bronze Age, grew almost
> complete \[…] By the early twentieth century, we had for the first time the
> ability to create total order in the world around us; order that made way for
> just one species’ progress and stability: ourselves. \[…] By the late 1950s
> and early 1960s came a critical moment in human awareness. We began to notice,
> at last, the growing silence around us. By this stage, the environmental
> movement was nascent \[…] it would take further decades before, at last, the
> Ape Aware would emerge. [@cornerstones, pp. 200-202]

In Macdonald's account, the reason 'we' – as if all humans have always had the
same powers and interests – caused so much harm to the non-human world is
because 'we' stole stuff to make 'us' richer: land, trees, food, water. Thus
'our' consumption is what drives ecological catastrophe.

The idea that green harms are driven by consumption is further reinforced with
the language of 'carbon footprinting.' The idea seems innocuous enough: 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-UK offers a popular carbon footprint calculator on their website
[@wwf-footprint-calculator]. I'm promised that although 'our world is in crisis
\[…\] it's up to us to fix it' and I'm encouraged to 'take your first step with
our UK based environmental footprint calculator.' With each question, it ekes on
a little more guilt: how many flights did you take this year? How much did you
spend in your car last week? When's the last time you bought large electricals?
How much do you spend on clothes, or beauty products, in an average month? I did
my best to max out on every question. At the end, I'd chocked up over 39 tonnes
of CO~2~. I was duly informed that I was just under four times more evil than
the UK average. Not to worry, I can install their My Footprint App.

> We’ve seen the devastating impact that human activity can have on the natural
> world, but it doesn’t have to be this way. We can build a better world by all
> making small changes in our everyday lives. \[…\] WWF-UK’s My Footprint app is
> your hub for positive change. Using this app is a step in the right direction
> to help our planet and keep you motivated to make sustainable choices.
> [@wwf-my-footprint]

This rhetoric is clear: human beings (that's me) are wreaking havoc, and I am
contributing more than my fair share to the mayhem. But if we all play our part,
by following simple tips to change how we choose to consume goods and services,
together we'll make a big difference. I just need to do my bit.

By calling on people to reduce their 'carbon footprint,' the rhetor suggests
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 downplays the degree to which consumption is constrained
by production decisions over which most people have no control. 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 has the air conditioning on all day in their
spacious suburban house and drives a over-sized diesel SUV to work. But imagine
that hypothetical rich consumer works in the manager's office of a fertiliser
plant, where one day he is presented with the option of sourcing low-carbon
hydrogen from electrolysis of water instead of extracting the hydrogen from
coal. He decides that the low-carbon alternative is too expensive and will make
his factory uncompetitive, so sticks with the coal. The carbon emissions of the
factory, which might be equivalent to 100,000 American consumers, are not
attributed to the manager of the factory, nor even the factory's owners, but to
the 'carbon footprint' of the thousands of consumers eating the food produced at
the ultimate end of the process, even though they are unlikely to have any power
or even knowledge over the manager's decisions. 'This person spends eight hours
a day managing this industrial capitalist enterprise and only perhaps forty
minutes commuting to work—so why do we only pay attention to the latter?'
[@climate-change-class-war, p. 16]

The idea that carbon footprinting shifts blame from producers to consumers isn't
just a left-wing conspiracy theory. The fossil fuel industry thinks so, too, and
has bet huge amounts of money on this very strategy. In the early 2000s, BP
Petroleum spent hundreds of millions of dollars on their 'Beyond Petroleum' ad
campaign, for which Madison Avenue moguls Ogilvie & Mathers won a gold Effie
award. [@effies-2007] As part of this effort, they popularised the carbon
footprint calculator, which had previously been an obscure concept.
[@bp-carbon-calculator; @don-miller-bp; @safire-2008; @solman-2008;
@supran-2021; @kaufman-2020]

Thus, green rhetors, in targeting individual consumption, mis-diagnose the root
cause of the problems they're trying to address.

Having mis-diagnosed the root causes of the problem, green rhetors too often go
on to propose politically impossible solutions. The worst is simply to cut
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 or 'de-growth,' echoing the austerity rhetoric which dominated the
cost-of-living discourse in the 1970s and since that time
[@climate-change-class-war, pp. 158-159].

So, 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. \[WHICH?\]]

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. \[WHICH?\]]

Two fans, Sharon Astyk and Miranda Edel, inspired by the book, set out in 2007
to reduce their household consumption 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]

'How will a working class that often struggles to pay for basic services like
heat and electricity respond to such demands?' asks Matt Huber
[@climate-change-class-war, p. 170]. According to the Trussel Trust, in 2024,
10.4 million adults and 3.8 million children in the UK skimped on food or had no
way to re-stock an empty cupboard [@hunger-uk-2024]. National Energy Action
estimated that in 2023, 15.2% of UK households were setting their thermostat
dangerously cold, more than double the rate from the year before
[@nea-nov-2024].

Millions more stand on the precipice of hardship. Citizens Advice reports that
the mean UK household can only afford to set 5% of their income aside for
savings – and that's the mean. The result is that since the advent of austerity
in the early 2010s, households have been draining their savings, leaving them
exposed to financial shocks, like not getting as many shifts as they hoped, or
having to call the plumber out [@ca-thin-ice]. The Financial Conduct Authority
classifies as quarter of UK households as having 'low financial resilience' and
estimates that barely half have enough cash to make it 3 months without
borrowing if their main source of income were cut off [@financial-lives-2024].

For many, the call to 'buy less' is not 'liberating,' because it's the call of
the bailiff. It's hardly surprising that the de-growth movement has
remained largely academic, with little impact on politics, and indeed a vague
grasp on what de-growth policy would actually mean in practice or who you could
possibly convince to make it happen. [@vansintjan-2019; @cosme-2017]

Another favourite of green rhetors is to propose smart market-based policies
like carbon taxes, aimed at tweaking the incentives for private capital to nudge
the market into financing economic transformation. \[EXAMPLE\]

Admittedly, this is a little better than proposing austerity, and has made a
little political inroad. The US, EU, and UK have all implemented carbon markets
and carbon taxes, although the carbon markets have widely been recognised to be
distorting and counter-productive, and the carbon prices so far have been set
too low to have any noticeable impact. Making this approach work still has some
very tall obstacles to climb. As soon as carbon prices are set high enough to
bite, without state intervention to redistribute investment, the cost of carbon
pricing is likely to fall hardest on the poorest. This is not politically
sustainable.

This was decisively demonstrated in 2018 \[ALSO GORDON BROWN'S FUEL PRICE
ESCALATOR?\], after French President Emmanuel Macron attempted to raise fuel
taxes, purportedly in an attempt to curb greenhouse gas emissions \[EVIDENCE\].
This move triggered an enormous wave of protests across France, symbolised by
the protester's uniform, the _gilet jaune_. Despite Macron's strong political
position at the beginning of the protests, he was forced to roll back the tax
increases alongside other concessions to the protesters \[EVIDENCE\].

So, while smart market fixes might work in theory, we're still waiting for a
credible vision for how they might be politically sustainable. Thus, here too,
green rhetoric has failed to demonstrate to their audience that the change they
advocate will be good for them, and thus their proposals are politically
impossible.

Taking another 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. \[EXAMPLE\].

The spectre of the 'science denier' or 'science fraudster' has traditionally
served as the main scapegoat of green rhetoric. For example, \[EXAMPLE\].

However, there's no particular reason to think that the fossil fuel industry is
scientifically incompetent or unable to act rationally. In fact, fossil fuel
companies are if anything astonishingly capable of mustering scientific and
technological resources to act rationally. \[EVIDENCE\] \[NB. RATIONAL !=
PLANNING FOR PEAK OIL!\]

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.
\[EVIDENCE\] As has been pointed out time and time again \[EVIDENCE\], the
fossil fuel industry is following a path well-trodden by the tobacco industry,
who have long since proven that science is up for sale \[EVIDENCE\] \[SEE
DAVID'S COMMENTS, log#2026-06-09\].

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 poisoning the world, and powerful means of ensuring their interests
are met.

\[TODO: how does 'listen to the science' lead to a practical call to action?\]

So again, the 'listen to the science' line mis-diagnoses the root causes of
green issues, and thus fails to bring about change.

Finally, having mis-diagnosed the root causes of the issues and proposed
solutions their audience cannot support, green rhetors fail to properly identify
an audience that can make a difference.

As I've already shown, green rhetors have a tendency to address an unspecified
'we', suggesting a universal human citizen, implying that for all relevant
purposes, everyone has the same interests and powers. Thus Chris Packham and
Megan McCubbin can talk about 'Ape Aware,' explicitly describing the
environmental movement as the up-and-coming stage in human evolution
[@cornerstones, p. 202]. Similarly, the word 'Anthropocene,' coined by \[WHO?\]
in \[WHEN?\], describes the present time as one characterised by human dominion
over the earth, as if the anti-green actions of some humans represents the
interests of everyone \[DEMONSTRATE SOMEONE ELSE HAS SAID THIS BEFORE\]. \[NEED
TO SHOW CURRENCY OF 'ANTHROPOCENE'? NATURE ANTHROPOCENE BRIEFING?\]

In reality, green rhetoric is primarily addressed 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,
often struggle to mobilise their members on the rare occasions they try to do so
\[CITE CHRIS ROOTES\]. Their business model is one of raising funds from mass
membership and corporate partnerships, even in more activist organisations like
Greenpeace, which largely function as 'protest businesses' \[CITE ROOTES
AGAIN\]. Thus, these NGOs are dominated by the Western middle classes who
provide them with money by taking out membership subscriptions and signing off
corporate partnerships. \[STATISTICAL EVIDENCE WOULD BE NICE\]

But what change is it that Western professional middle classes are capable of
bringing about? If it's not reducing your individual 'carbon footprint' – which,
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?)

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. \[EVIDENCE\]

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, may be much more significant. A mis-diagnosis of the problem leads to
false solutions: austerity or 'de-growth', or 'smart' market fixes, neither of
which are not politically sustainable. This in turn is due to green rhetors
failing to take account of the powers and interests of their audience. Rhetors
speak as if they are addressing a universal human collective capable of acting
rationally in the universal human interest, asking them to take actions such as
setting binding emissions targets or transferring wealth from 'rich nations' to
'poor nations.' But in fact, green rhetors do not address the universal human
collective, 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? In
what follows, I will not be proposing a practical manifesto for transforming the
green movement, but I will be engaging in blue-sky thinking, imagining what a
more successful green rhetoric might look like.

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 Flannery's argument 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 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.