Greens and climate sceptics: coping with the backlash

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In the contested area of environmental politics, one thing is certain: emissions of hot air are at unsustainable levels and threaten to destroy the atmosphere of constructive debate essential to understanding the issues involved.

As support for green causes has stalled in recent years, accusations of alarmism from their opponents have risen. In Britain, the peak of popular concern for the environment was as long ago as 1989, when the Green party won 14.9% of the vote in the European parliamentary elections.

But the public found it hard to sustain high levels of worry about threats to the environment when things just seem to be carrying on as usual, only a bit warmer. By the next European election, in 1994, the Green vote was down to 0.56%. The political climate was cooling and now it is more fashionable to accuse the wider green movement of exaggeration and hysteria than to raise the alarm about climate change itself.

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Bjørn Lomborg found himself the hero of the anti-green backlash with the publication of his The Skeptical Environmentalist in 2001. Lomborg wished only to challenge the excesses of the green movement, not debunk it entirely. But while analysts like Tom Burke paid careful attention to his arguments, many commentators pounced on his book as evidence of the intellectual bankruptcy of the entire green case.

Since then, commentators have been queuing up to point the finger at green boys crying wolf. The latest addition to the mounting pile of pulped trees devoted to the theme is Robert R. Bradley’s Climate Alarmism Reconsidered, which itself closely follows the similar A Poverty of Reason by Wilfred Beckerman, an emeritus fellow of Balliol College, Oxford.

Bradley’s book is published by the free-market think-tank the Institute of Economic Affairs(IEA), and its basic claims could be deduced a priori from its publisher’s ideology. Bradley’s basic case is that the environment is getting better, not worse; that man-made global warming, although real, is not the terrible threat it is usually claimed to be; and that interventionist green measures are likely to make things worse than leaving things more or less entirely to the operations of the market.

The argument offers no surprises. But it would be as wrong to dismiss Bradley’s claims because of their provenance as it would be to accept them because of a prior commitment to free trade. Bradley backs up his claims with plenty of evidence, and some of his recommendations are as eco-friendly as any green could wish. He wants an end to subsidies that encourage greater use of carbon energies; ‘congestions’ charges for energy and transport use; air pollutants to be sharply reduced; and the tax system to encourage upgrading to more energy-efficient equipment.

But there is little chance of Bradley or Beckerman getting a sympathetic hearing from greens or their leftist allies. This isn’t just because of willful narrow-mindedness. The problem is that there is a wider ideological war going on and in war, propaganda is more valuable than the truth. What people say is not as important as how their words will be used.

Rhetoric against reason

Wilfred Beckerman, for example, argues that the idea of ‘sustainable development’ is largely incoherent or empty. He does not argue that the problem of man-made global warming is unreal. Examined intellectually, his case is balanced and unprejudiced. But in the maelstrom of public debate, all subtleties will be blown away and his words will be used to advance the cause of the unhindered free market and to discredit environmentalists of all stripes.

The baleful result is that greens and progressives will be reluctant to accept that much of what Beckerman says is true – which it surely is – because to do so would be to cede ground to the enemy; while business will use the discrediting of notions such as sustainable development as a means of resisting any attempts to constrain their behaviour on environmental grounds.

Beckerman may be scrupulously careful in his claims, but his own subtle dissections metamorphosise into brutal body blows when the rhetorical impact of an attack on sustainable development is assessed.

Constructive dialogue is thus impossible because positions on the environment have become too firmly associated with wider political commitments. Our ideological enemy’s enemy is our ideological friend; loyalty to a position, deserved or not, blinds us to the merits of our opponent’s case.

Many kinds of logical tricks are available to help confirm these prejudices. A tract like Bradley’s can be readily dismissed – since it emanates from a free-marketeer, ‘he would say that’. But this game can be played on both sides: when greens dismiss Bradley’s thesis, the neo-liberals can just as easily say ‘they would say that’. Yet we should judge arguments on the basis of their premises and reasoning, not on the predictability of their conclusions.

This problem is typical of what happens when a debate evolves and reveals itself to be more complex than at first appeared. Instead of engaging with complexity, most people entrench or retreat. In the case of the environment, the public seems to have opted for retreat, becoming agitated only about such issues as genetically-modified (GM) crops which are erroneously seen to pose a direct threat to their own health. This sadly leaves the ideological battlefield free for the zealots, who have an inherent tendency to entrench.

This is not what we need. Bjørn Lomborg’s book should have heralded the start of a more mature debate about the environment, one that looked at the issues in their own right and refused to make assumptions about what broader political approach has the best environmental outcome. Instead, it merely signaled the turning of the tide, the moment when growing indifference to green thinking flipped over into straight hostility.

Scepticism about environmental dangers should not be the preserve of the right and the free-marketeers. Rather, greens and their sympathisers need to engage with the kind of well-argued critiques offered by Lomborg, Bradley and Beckerman – and be prepared to give them credit where it is due. Greens above all need to demonstrate that their concern to preserve the world we share is greater than any prior ideological commitments.