Climate activist Greta Thunberg entered a not guilty plea on Wednesday to charges she violated a public offense order after she was arrested in a protest in London on Oct. 17 during a meeting of oil executives.
In Westminster Magistrates' Court on Wednesday, Thunberg, 20, entered her plea to breaking Section 14 of the Public Order Act 1986 for not leaving the highway. She faces a maximum fine of $3,116 if she is found guilty.
There are a lot of different ways that climate denialism can manifest, and I think one danger is overlooking the more subtle ways. I think a lot of people recognize the following types of climate denialism:
* climate change isn't real
* climate change isn't caused by human activity
* more carbon emissions are a good thing because it will just cause more plants to grow (if you've never heard of this one, it's one of the many arguments against climate change Freeman Dyson made)
There are, however, much more subtle strains of climate denialism that have gained much wider traction. A lot of these are in regards to what needs to be done in regards to climate change, and who needs to do it. I think they can be summarized as:
* only a few huge megacorps are responsible, and the problem could be solved if they alone changed their behavior (the '100 companies produce 71% of emissions' statistic, which is only true from a certain point of view and ignores the vast number of people purchasing the products of those emissions and the products that generate those emissions to begin with).
* conversely, adopting an individualized approach (eg. carbon footprint) is adequate to solve the problem. Political action is an absolute necessity here. That doesn't mean that most of us aren't going to have to change our behavior. In fact, the only question is which of the following will change our behavior--ourselves, others, or climate change itself rendering our current behavior impossible. But there's no fair or reasonable solution where this can be put all on individuals.
* animal agriculture is not causing climate change, or increased meat production can be made not to cause climate change, because it would be inconvenient if it was, impossible to address, or be inherently socially unjust to address. These objections are just as true or untrue of any other major driver of climate change. Climate change is going to be very inconvenient to address. It is also going to be very inconvenient if we don't address it. But this issue is not by any means impossible to address. And of course we are not obliged to address this issue, nor can it be addressed, by placing the burden of addressing it on a small number of the most disadvantaged people. This rationalization allows disadvantaged people to be used as a shield to benefit the people and industries most responsible for both their oppression and climate change. Of course this type of argument is equally harmful when applied to other major drivers of climate change, this is just the one I've seen it applied most often (though not exclusively) to.
Of course it remains sadly necessary to deal with blatant climate denialism, but the damage the more subtle form can do is, I think, just as bad if not worse, affecting as it does even the people most motivated to do something about this pressing issue. I don't think this is a comprehensive list of the types of climate denialism, but I do think it illustrates the varied and insidious nature of the problem.
The problem with buying 'locally grown' food is that the bulk of the resources that go into growing food are used before that food ever gets shipped to consumers. This is true for many other consumer goods as well. This is not a solution to the environmental crisis agriculture is causing, and it is exactly the kind of not-solution that says solving the environmental crisis equates to consumers simply buying the right products, and the way those products are produced doesn't have to change at all. But our entire system of animal and plant agriculture, not just factory farms, is built out of monocultures on private property that perpetuate ecocide and require vast amounts of oil inputs before ever leaving the farm. Here's a graph that shows the source of emissions for different foods:
From this Our World in Data page.
This is not to say that there's no good reason to buy food locally, because there absolutely is, and that reason is that that food will generally taste way, way better than non-local food. It's just usually not going to significantly reduce the emissions required to produce the food, because for most food produced today the bulk of those emissions are baked in before anything ever leaves the farm. So buying local only typically makes any difference at all if we're comparing it to the exact same foods bought non-locally, and even then the difference is often negligible.
This shows that it typically matters far more what we buy, if we're going to focus on buying things, than where we buy it from, because different foods take extremely different amounts of resources to produce.
Why is our food system like this, when animals and plants in the natural world don't have this problem? Part of it are the vast imputs to farms that depend on oil, but that is not the only significant factor. The answer is, I think, that this system of industrialized monocultures that agriculture consists of is about as far from natural ecosystems as you can get. All animals emit carbon via CO2 and methane while alive, and all plants and animals release it when they die. But in natural ecosystems, the carbon of dead plants and animals is cycled into other plants and animals in an incredibly efficient recycling system, and this carbon is made available to a wide array of trees and other plant life capable of sequestering it. In the system of modern agriculture, it ends up in landfills and our municipal waste systems. This is not something we see in the graph above, which only focuses on agricultural foods. And there are no easy shortcuts for us to turn our incredibly wasteful system into something resembling the efficiency of a natural one. But if we are to address the climate crisis, that is something we will need to do.
I hate the term carbon footprint with a burning passion. Like can you imagine any other complicated process where there's problems throughout the entire process but people laser focus on the last step of the process like 'if I just keep tweaking this last step enough that will surely fix all the rest of the problems that happen beforehand, too'.
It's just completely wrongheaded.
A quick note on my politics: I'm a leftist who believes conservatives must be removed from power for justice and even just survival for most of us to be possible. I'm not interested in collaborating with them to continue their oppression of most of the world for the benefit of the few. A critical component of this is being anti-war (eg. America's wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, and others, as well as Russia's war against the Ukraine--I do not view any of these as morally justifiable). I also don't believe it's possible to be 'socially progressive and fiscally conservative' as the economic system is one of the largest frameworks through which social oppression is enacted.
I don't necessarily discuss politics all the time, but I also think it's an important topic in a world being killed by war and climate change (which also go hand-in-hand in exacerbating each other).
One sentiment that I see often regarding things like the climate crisis is that we have to have hope to fight against denialism and that hopelessness is a form of denialism itself.
And while hopelessness is, I think, certainly one of the weapons employed against us, it is not, by far, the only one. The people who have a vested interest against fixing these problems know that hopelessness will only be adopted by certain people. They have no compunction about employing both hopelessness and false hope in order to reach the widest audience possible. Hope is no more immunity against deception than despair.
In fact a hopeful person who believes an industry lie about how things can be fixed can be much more useful to that industry than a hopeless person who believes that nothing can be done. The hopeful person can be induced to work with great enthusiasm towards efforts they are made to believe will help save the Earth, but that actually only obtain industry profits while further despoiling our world. The hopeful person can be induced to spread the industry's lies for free in the hopeful belief that they are a source for good in the world. Greenwashing is a thing not because it appeals to the hopeless, but because it appeals for the deep human desire for hope.
False hope can even be as much a source of inaction as despair is. If one believes things are particularly hopeful, they may even feel they don't need to do anything themselves at all. Electric cars will fix the problem. My purchase helps save the Earth. Carbon offsets will fix it. All of these beliefs can give people hope that the problem will be addressed, but it is a false hope generated by the very industries creating the problem to begin with.
Ultimately it is inaction that must be addressed, as well as action in the wrong direction. Hope alone cannot make us a force for good.
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