path: root/chapter1.md

## Chapter 1

Thesis: contemporary green rhetoric is a failure because it mis-diagnoses the
root causes of the problems, fails to identify credible routes to credible
solutions, and fails to identify an appropriate audience.

1. Contemporary green rhetoric (R) is a failure
2. R mis-diagnoses the problem
3. R fails to identify credible routes to credible solutions
4. R fails to identify an audience that can be persuaded to make a difference
5. The material results of R have been dismal

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 no signs of starting
- Greenhouse gas emissions are increasing at an accelerating rate

All these failures beg the question: why aren't the green movement's strategies
working? 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'? 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 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]

Having mis-diagnosed the root causes of the problem, green rhetors too often go
on to propose incredible 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], 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 prospect of 'buying less' is not 'liberating,' it's the gaping
fear of an empty stomach or the knock of the debt collector. 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]

A little better is proposing market-based policies like carbon taxes. But there
is no credible route to implementing and sustaining an effective carbon tax,
because it is against the interests of almost everyone.

The route green rhetors almost universally promote is: listen to the science,
then act rationally.

This denies the evident fact that society is driven by the private interests of
those who have power, not collective interests; and this is also true of science
itself, which, as we have proven time and time again, is up for sale to the
highest bidder.

The spectre of the 'science denier' or 'science fraudster' as the bogeyman
behind all resistance to the collective interest serves only to hide the real
enemy: the powerful private interests that pay him.

Then, the rhetoric fails to properly identify an audience that can make a
difference.

In line with its scientistic ideology, it pretends to speak to the universal
human citizen, as if we all have shared interests. But in fact, it speaks only
to the professional-managerial class (PMC).

The whole point of the rhetoric is to fight the interests of capitalists, so of
course it doesn't speak to them. Nor does the condemnation of indulgent
over-consumption and the demand for cutbacks have any way of resonating with the
working class.

Yet this rhetoric doesn't even work for the PMC, because it has already failed
to identify a credible route change.

The exhortations are addressed to the universal human collective, or nebulous
imaginary entities like 'countries': cut carbon emissions! Give 'developing
countries' money to stop chopping down rainforests! Fund research! But these
recommendations don't come with a credible route to making them happen. It fails
to diagnose why these things are hard to do, i.e. identify the vested interests
that are preventing change, and show how to fight these vested interests and
win.

The action that PMC people have taken so far (alternative consumption, political
protests, banning plastic straws, holding COPs, setting targets) have not been
effective.

The result is that PMC people feel powerless.

In summary,