On Green Politics this week
I have been a professional scholar for more than two decades with a lengthy CV full of publications on a wide diversity of topics. In addition, I have blogged, almost daily, for more than a decade. But I rarely write about environmental issues or environmental politics at all, although I have had a some interest in topics pertaining to extinction and social change. I am not embarrassed by my silence; a scholarly life is constituted by self-limitation even among intellectual omnivores (as historians of philosophy and social theorists are permitted to be).
It’s not for a lack of opportunity. Some of the topics I do write about — novel externalities, Knightian uncertainty, the ethics and epistemology of AI, financial crises etc. — are in the vicinity of topics that one may well extend to the philosophy of the environment. But I have never been asked or felt the urgency to voluntarily switch into environmental ethics or the political philosophy of environmental science. I have always left it to others.
I am not especially proud of this. But because I have spent most of my adult life working in academia, I personally know lots of people who are actively engaged in tackling issues pertaining to climate change intellectually. Even amongst those that do not make intellectual contributions to, say, the new transition economy and environmental policy, many of my academic acquaintances and students are politically engaged on green topics. I am not.
Before you blame my upbring…my mom was a volunteer leader in her community to help public institutions transition to green energy, to create recycling programs, and to green the neighborhood. I am very proud of her! My lack of engagement with green issues is solely on me.
In this narrow respect, I am actually much like the median voter and unlike the others in my natural habitus (in Bourdieu’s sense).
This gap in my attitude has been on my mind because here in the UK — where I spend my Summers —five Just Stop Oil activists have received enormously lengthy jail-terms of four to five years for non-violent protests or (what used to be known as) civil disobedience. According to a recent open letter they received “the highest sentences for nonviolent protest this country has ever seen.” According to the BBC, they were “found guilty of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance.” As the BBC notes, this “relates to a protest that disrupted the M25 in London for more than four days in November 2022.” [The M25 is the main ring road of London.]
You may think that this lengthy jailing is only the effect of the outgoing Tories’ desire to clamp down on protests against their deeply unpopular polices. But as the BBC notes (near the end of its report) the new government is not planning to intervene, “Decisions to prosecute, convict and sentence are, rightly, made independently of government by the CPS, juries and judges respectively.” In fact, it claims "The Attorney General has no power to intervene in these cases.” Hurray for the separation of powers in a system of parliamentary sovereignty!
More subtly, going forward the government does not seem to plan to change the (fairly recent) law on “Offences during Protests, Demonstrations or Campaigns” which has the provisions on conspiracy to cause a public a public nuisance. To the best of my knowledge the incoming Labour government campaigned on better enforcement of British’ laws not on a major change to them. In fact, Starmer’s Labour party, which has an overwhelming majority in parliament now, is not especially keen on defending civil liberties or reforms that might promote them. (Starmer himself is a lawyer with a past in defending civil liberties, but the campaign overwhelmngly ignored civil liberties.)
In addition, even before the election campaign started, Labor ditched its £28bn green investment pledge. And while it undoubtedly proposed a somewhat more ambitious climate program than the outgoing Tories (and perhaps will pursue it), the election itself did not center on their climate policy differences. (That was, in fact, the point of ditching the pledge.)
Now, the Open letter in defense of the five Just Stop Oil activists states the following:
Let’s stipulate that 74% number is true. Judging by their voting behavior most of these people want other people to pay for any costs of that urgent action and, even among them, few are willing to vote for parties that make action on the climate crisis their main priority. The British green party had its best result ever, with 4 seats (out of 575). This is undoubtedly impressive in some sense, but it is does not reflect a gigantic electoral mandate to prioritize urgent action on the climate crisis.
Despite Brixit/Gomeansgo, the British are not that different from their European counterparts who vote in systems of proportional representation. This can be best illustrated by the most recent elections for the European parliament. By European standards these tend to be relatively low turn-out events that tend to have higher participation by the educated and politically informed. That might be thought to favor Europe’s greens, especially because a lot of climate change policies fit the technocratic sensibility of the EU. But during the most recent election Europe’s greens lost ground and, as European faction, they received less than 10% of Europe’s votes. While the ‘rise of the anti-democratic far right’ as a European phenomenon was overdone, the electoral plateau even retreat of Europe’s greens is a real phenomenon.
In fact, one of the oddities of our age — for those living in liberal democracies — is the inability of environmentalists and those friendly to the environmental movement to politicize climate change in such a way such that any national or federal election seems a decisive referendum on, say, the fate of the Paris accords or a path toward sustainability. Even in Germany, where they have been part of ruling coalitions on a number of occasions (including at present), the Greens have never polled above 15% in federal elections. (The story is more dismal in France. At present, the greens (Les Écologistes) are very much the junior element in the new suddenly influential, popular front.)
Now, back in the day (2020), when Kamala Harris made her first run for president, she identified rather closely with environmental issues and opposition to big oil. She was, in fact, an early co-sponsor of the Green new deal and an opponent of fracking amongst other signature stances.
Stateside, there is solid evidence that partisan polarization on the environment is wide and growing. These days there are, in fact, rather meaningful policy differences between Democrats and Republicans on environmental issues. And Harris is quite representative of those differences. So, in principle, a vote for her could be a vote for an ambitious green policy.
However, it doesn’t follow that the Democrats want to make climate change a salient issue during a presidential election. Their path to victory still goes through the (revived) Rust Belt. And in a close election, it’s a risky strategy to focus on radical environmental change. At her first rally, in Milwaukee, Vice President Harris didn’t mention green themes at all.
In fact, how she mentioned ‘Big Oil’ during her first campaign speech, clearly reflects her awareness of the pitfalls involved. Basically, she attacked ‘Big Oil’ as an especially influential and sinister special interest group that is exemplary of corruption: “a couple months ago at Mar-a-Lago, he literally promised Big Oil companies — Big Oil lobbyists he would do their bidding for $1 billion in campaign donations.”
This may be smart politics — I honestly don’t know — because it may seem to block one of Trump’s favorite political jujutsu moves (he understands the corruption in DC and he will take advantage of it in your favor and simultaneously drain the swamp), but it is not itself a rousing defense of a bold new climate policy. Her future-oriented slogans in Milwaukee studiously avoided anything Green. And this suggests, for now, she will try to avoid fighting the election on the urgency to tackle climate change.* Stay tuned.
Let me wrap up. The open letter in defense of five Just Stop Oil activists writes, “These five brave, defiant people, like all nonviolent protestors, are fulfilling a necessary service by alerting the nation to the grave risk we all face, as scientists in their droves express their fear that many of the Earth’s systems are already at breaking point.”
This letter presupposes something incredible: that we the public really don’t know that there is a grave risk that we are not responding to. In fact, the letter contradicts itself on this this very point because (recall) “74% of people in the UK” already “want urgent action on the climate crisis.”
Lurking here is a kind of ideal of proper public deliberation more appropriate to scientific seminar rooms than great political authority that once properly informed of a risk to a public good (‘many of Earth’s systems’'), the public will prioritize defense of that public good. I won’t remind regular readers of my usual criticism of this faith because it’s in bad taste here.
In fact, much of the activism by Just Stop Oil itself has turned the public against Just Stop Oil (despite, in principle, disapproving of the lengthy jail sentences)! Just Stop Oil may be familiar to you because of their deplorable tendency to vandalize or pretend to vandalize famous paintings as PR stunts.** The government punishes these public-spirited activists outrageously, and the public doesn’t riot in their defense, but shrugs collectively.
The public’s indifference to the fate of these environmental activists is, in fact, another bit of suggestive evidence for the low priority accorded to ‘saving the planet’ or to ‘keep the rise in global surface temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels’ as a collective agency problem. It gives me no satisfaction to observe our (ahh to be pompous) social akrasia between what the ‘scientists in droves’ think we ought to do and the wider electorates’ and the political class’s joint lack of policy urgency. This growing divergence is unhealthy, and worth taking more seriously than I have.
*This may also reflect the dilemma that she is a member of the current administration.
**Some other time more about this topic, promise.