The Maxime Bernier-Greta Thunberg debacle is just further evidence for how impossible it is to have a rational debate on climate change
“When politicians get down and dirty in an election campaign they usually target their opponents’ policies. If they really want to get into the mud they sink to personal attacks.” So begins an editorial in the Toronto Star yesterday. Well, anyone who has been paying even moderate attention to politics would agree that there is a lack of substantive conversation, while business for the enthusiastic smear merchant is booming. (The Star knows something about this.) Continuing with this rather banal analysis, it says: “But one would think that verbally assaulting a teenager for her beliefs and her medical condition would be out of bounds.”
The target of this editorial is the People’s Party of Canada leader Maxime Bernier, and his not so subtle denouncements of the work of the saintly climate change activist, Greta Thunberg. In his initial outbursts, Bernier was not taciturn about how he thought of her and her views, saying that Thunberg was “mentally unstable,” “obsessive-compulsive,” and one with the movement of climate doomsday-mongers who “don’t care about democracy and say there is no time left for debate.” The tone provoked paroxysms of scorn. In ways rightly so, and Bernier has since acknowledged this and dialled it down. But the entire debacle is further indication that, due to the reactionary style of our current debate, discoursing rationally on this issue is not doable.
Climate change is one of the issues in which an almost religious-like schism between “greedy” capitalists and “virtuous” redistributionists always prevails, and any attempt at nuance fails in spectacular fashion.
Causing this Manichean arrangement are a few things that have only gotten worse over the last decade. And the responsibility for this might be, in some ways, a bipartisan affair.
I don’t think any sober-minded citizen would disagree that climate change is something with which we’ll have to contend in the decades ahead. Nor would they with the contention that it’s an anthropogenic phenomenon.
But it’s a habit of the climate change religionists to cry heresy whenever someone is skeptical of the policies (the carbon tax or the Green New Deal) or grand multilateral initiatives (Paris Agreement and much of what the UN recommends) that are put forth — -especially the cocksure manner in which they are put forth. Bernier was at least right when he berated climate change advocates for not allowing time for debate. This is because, to them, there is none since the ostensibly apocalyptic forecasts don’t allow for deliberation. There is no chewing gum and walking at the same time. One can’t acknowledge the existence of the broader problem but disagree on the methods by which to solve it. Disagreeing on policy and being a “climate denier” has long been inextricable in the minds of the faithful environmentalists.
And so, the false binary has done much to smash any discussions on balancing free enterprise with the implementation of the necessary measures. With more radical representatives for the cause, those who would like to achieve the goal of balance are depicted as rapacious and indifferent towards the crisis, while the radicals themselves remain insouciant to any evidence that runs contrary to their views. This is, of course, unhealthy.
Those considered heathens on the environment question do have among them extreme contrarians who will see climate change as an illusion. This is an issue, but the radicalization on the other side doesn’t help in palliating it. In fact, it comes off as odorous and opportunistic, therefore eliciting more intense reactions. Some of which may include the spread of theories that climate change is a creation of the Chinese, or that it’s merely a front for the interests of a socialist cabal. There are many reasons these days to cast the environmentalist movement as a destructive one, but the polarization has brought about some tendencies that aren’t good for the body politic as the two sides work themselves up into hysterics. This, in turn, reduces the debate to being framed around two extremes: doing absolutely nothing and dismissing it all as a leftist delusion, or advocating for the abolishment of industry and transforming societies.
The result is a sort of paranoid politics that indulges conspiratorial thinking and moulds an environment in which discussions can’t move beyond dogmatizing over the other’s motives. Richard Hofstadter, the American historian, wrote about this in his essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” The observations he made in the 1960s can surely be applied to those in the contemporary political scene:
The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms — he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millennialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date for the apocalypse.
Indeed, climate change is an issue that has caused some of us to lose our sanity, which is why it’s a dangerous thing to have an innocent girl like Greta Thunberg as the face of it. Criticism, which can sometimes be vicious, is part of being in the public eye but is needed to further dialogue. The emotional appeal of having someone like her at the forefront might be delectable, but it’s divisive if any criticism of her — -someone who has chosen to pursue activism adamantly — — is immediately silenced because she happens to be young. If an issue of this magnitude is to be addressed earnestly, maybe climate change activists should reconsider enlisting what Noah Rothman has called “child soldiers in the culture wars.” There is, after all, another side in this battle that is empowered by such lapses in judgment.
