Are Climate Doomers for Real?

By Maarten Boudry

Monday, March 18, 2024

 

A few weeks ago, I received a long email from a psychiatrist colleague about a patient of his who’s absolutely convinced that our society is on the verge of total collapse and that humanity is heading for mass extinction as a result of global warming. In my colleague’s opinion, his patient is very intelligent and well read on the topic and doesn’t display the incorrigibility, resistance to evidence, and fallacious reasoning that are typical of clinical delusions. Worryingly, his belief has been taking a serious emotional toll on him. (Well, how would you feel if you believed that the world was about to end?) After a series of long discussions and having read some of the doomer literature the patient recommended, my colleague no longer knew how to assuage his climate worries and began to harbor some doubts himself. So, who’s really in denial about reality: the patient or his doctor? And what about the rest of us?

 

If you were to ask the tens of thousands of activists who have been protesting on the streets, throwing tomato soup on paintings, disrupting classical concerts, gluing themselves to highways, blocking roads, and staging die-ins, their answer would be crystal clear: the patient is right; the rest of us are deluded. According to Roger Hallam, the founder of Extinction Rebellion, climate change will lead to the “slaughter, death, and starvation of six billion people this century,” and humanity faces total annihilation unless we get to net zero emissions “in a matter of months or a few years.” (That last statement dates from two and a half years ago.) Any further exploration for oil and gas, says the official website of Just Stop Oil, amounts to “genocide” and will lead to the “starvation and the slaughter of billions” and “condemn humanity to oblivion.” Such views are not confined to the fringes but have also been voiced by mainstream institutions and leaders. António Guterres, the Secretary-General of the UN, claimed in 2022 that humanity is committing “collective suicide” over the climate crisis, a remark that echoes Pope Francis’s pronouncement that our species is “at the limits of suicide.” All this apocalyptic rhetoric has started trickling down to the public at large. Four in 10 Americans now agree that global warming will probably lead to human extinction, and a quarter of childless adults cite climate change as part of their motivation for not having children. 

 

It's depressing to think that so many young people today believe that they or their children don’t have a future and that billions will die. But whenever I hear such apocalyptic rhetoric, I can’t help but wonder: are all of these people for real? How many of them sincerely believe in the coming climate apocalypse? It seems undeniable that at least some of them do. As far as we can tell, climate depression is a real phenomenon and is on the rise. A 2017 report published by the American Psychological Association and ecoAmerica defines “ecoanxiety” as “a chronic fear of environmental doom.” Millions of young people today question whether it is ethically responsible to bring children into a world that is destined to become uninhabitable. If you are so certain the planet is doomed that you decide to get yourself sterilized, this seems to signal a pretty sincere conviction. As one young man told the Guardian after his vasectomy, “I don’t want to bring a life into this world, because it’s pretty shitty as it is and it’s only going to get worse.” But how can we be sure that this is not a high-minded rationalization for people who never had any interest in children in the first place? Besides, as Ezra Klein has pointed out, plenty of climate scientists have children of their own, which suggests that they don’t believe their offspring are destined for misery. Likewise, we don’t know how often conditions like climate depression or eco-anxiety arise from underlying mental issues that have attached themselves to the climate issue.

 

As I have argued elsewhere, the predictions about “billions of deaths” and “collective suicide” have no basis in actual science. Still, that millions of people believe them anyway is highly concerning—but do they? I’ve come to believe that, as a social movement, climate doomerism is as much about ideological posturing, virtue-signalling and political tribalism as about honest convictions. Climate hucksters and leaders of large organizations, in particular, rarely get high on their own supply. They don’t really believe in the apocalypse they’re preaching about; they have other ideological (or even personal) agendas. The bad news is that all this ideological posturing is hurting our efforts to tackle actual climate change.

 

In philosophy of mind, the most important sign of belief is behaviour (in economics this is known as “revealed preferences.”) Beliefs are signposts used to navigate the world, and if there’s a glaring contradiction between what you say you believe and how you actually behave when no one’s looking, there’s good reason to doubt your sincerity. If you tell your million followers that Covid vaccines are killing people in droves but secretly get a jab yourself, that’s a bit suspicious. If you proclaim that the world will end next Tuesday but go on to discuss your vacation plans, how seriously should we take you?

 

For the sake of argument, I’ll gloss over various forms of petty hypocrisy, such as that exhibited by a Dutch woman who rushed back from a family vacation in Thailand to join Just Stop Oil’s highway roadblock in Amsterdam, or the conscientious objector to flying who enjoys his juicy grass-fed steak every day. That would be too cheap. We are all fallible creatures with a marvellous talent for self-serving rationalizations. I’m already a vegan; surely I deserve my yearly vacation to Thailand? Or, conversely, I never fly because of the climate, surely I can enjoy my hamburger?

 

Instead, I want to talk about glaring inconsistencies in what doomers collectively propose in the way of climate action. One good litmus test for the sincerity of climate catastrophists is their attitude towards nuclear energy. Nuclear is the most important and reliable CO₂-free energy source on the planet and, thus, our most powerful weapon against climate change. Nuclear energy is still credited with the fastest decarbonizations in history (in France and Sweden in the 1970s and 1980s). It’s also the safest and least deadly energy source, even when we include occasional and highly publicised accidents. Nuclear “waste,” which climate activists portray as an unacceptable burden to future generations, is nothing of the kind. It is extremely compact (all the high-level nuclear waste ever produced on Earth would fit comfortably inside a football stadium), it is always safely contained, and it naturally becomes harmless over time—unlike most other types of waste. If anything, future generations might blame us for not leaving them enough nuclear waste, since this would indicate that we had burned fossil fuels for too long, and perhaps also for burying such an excellent energy-dense fuel deep underground (advanced reactors can turn what was previously considered “waste” into nuclear energy that could sustain human civilization for centuries).

 

If you claim that carbon emissions are destroying the planet, but doggedly oppose our most powerful source of carbon-free energy, how seriously should we take you? When the leaders of Just Stop Oil thunder about the “genocide” of our future children, they conveniently ignore the fact that the Green parties and environmental NGOs they are allied with have championed nuclear phase-out laws in many rich countries—laws that have caused billions of tons of additional CO₂ emissions because the energy from nuclear plants had to be replaced by gas and coal. According to one study in the journal Energies, the decade-long effort to sabotage and strangle the nuclear industry has caused about 174 billion tons of avoidable CO₂ emissions. Using the “1000-tonne rule” on which activists’ genocide claims are typically based (1,000 tonnes of CO₂ = 1 future fatality), that amounts to 174 million future deaths. Even today, Germany could prevent a billion tons of CO₂ emissions just by keeping its remaining nuclear power plants open. But Extinction Rebellion, Greenpeace, and their ilk would never dream of accusing the German government of “genocide” for that reason. Instead, many climate doomers have been applauding the premature closure of nuclear power plants that could have continued to operate for decades—while claiming that we’re in the midst of a climate emergency that threatens the future of our children.

 

Perhaps many of the young street protesters marching under the banners of Greenpeace and Just Stop Oil are genuinely terrified of nuclear accidents (“Whole countries becoming uninhabitable!”) or of nuclear pollution. In a public survey a few years ago in my home country of Belgium, 60 percent of youngsters believed that the “smoke” billowing out of nuclear cooling towers was carbon dioxide (it’s actually pure water vapor). Surely, those ominous-looking towers must be spewing dangerous greenhouse gases and pollutants into the atmosphere, or why would the good people at Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund want to shut them down? I’m sure that some people also sincerely believe (against all the evidence) that nuclear waste is an unacceptable burden to future generations (“Deadly for a million years!”).

 

Still, at some point we have to start suspecting wilful ignorance. The yawning gap in CO₂ emissions between nuclear-powered France and renewable-powered Germany has been known for years, and yet the German Energiewende is still celebrated by groups like Greenpeace. The people at the heads of such organizations are very well educated and have known about the climate benefits of nuclear energy for decades.

 

Not all influential climate catastrophists fail the nuclear litmus test. The climatologist James Hansen, who famously testified before the US Senate in 1988 about the impending climate disaster, is an avid defender of nuclear energy, which he thinks is pretty much the only thing that can save us. The climate writer and activist Mark Lynas, author of the extremely bleak tome Our Final Warning, also unites a belief in climate catastrophism with strong pro-nuclear advocacy. Other examples include the late environmentalist James Lovelock and Guardian columnist George Monbiot. If you are serious about the climate problem, supporting nuclear power is the only sensible position to take.

 

But there are other puzzling incongruences in climate doomerism. It is somewhat bizarre, as Rebecca Solnit has pointed out in the Guardian, that climate doomers feel the urge to spread their defeatist message in the first place, since it seems almost designed to discourage people who might otherwise be motivated to act. “You would expect them to be quietly unmotivated, but a lot of them seem to have an evangelical passion for recruiting others to their views.” By actively contributing to general inaction, their fatalistic discourse will surely work “toward the worst outcomes they claim to dread.” Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil are driving a small minority of ideologically like-minded people (who were already worried in the first place) to despair or depression while leaving the majority of people indifferent. What’s worse, many ordinary citizens are so thoroughly repelled by the aggressive disruptions of public life in museums, concerts, and subways that they have become sick of the entire subject and end up voting for right-wing populists who don’t give a damn about the climate. Do the climate activists want to rescue the planet, then, or just piss off as many people as possible?

 

Even activists who stress that it’s not yet too late to avert disaster seem to be more interested in riding their own ideological hobby horses—such as railing against capitalism and neoliberalism—than in actually proposing effective solutions. Influential climate activists like Naomi Klein and Jason Hickel treat the issue of climate change mostly as a cudgel with which to beat “the system” and an excuse to push a laundry list of left-wing demands that they would’ve favoured anyway (wealth redistribution, universal basic income, participatory democracy, death to neoliberalism) and that won’t affect the climate at all—as they should know if they have even a modicum of economic knowledge. This might also explain their disdain for—or even active sabotage of—ambitious technological solutions to climate change, which they often haughtily dismiss as mere “techno-fixes,” because such solutions would obviate the need for their longed-for “system change.” Environmentalists have even opposed their own preferred clean-energy solutions, by leading public protests and litigation against wind turbines, solar parks, and transmission lines. As reporter Jerusalem Demsas recently asked, “Isn’t there a tension between pushing for a fast transition to a green economy and giving local objectors so much power to block renewable-energy projects?” There’s some high-voltage tension there, indeed.

 

Another litmus test to distinguish real concern from posturing is provided by geoengineering, specifically solar radiation management in the stratosphere. This technology, which mimics volcanic action, could significantly reduce the temperature on Earth almost instantly, though it wouldn’t solve those problems directly caused by CO₂ levels, such as ocean acidification, and could lead to undesirable side-effects (not unlike volcanoes themselves). I am not in favour of such drastic remedies—at least for the time being—precisely because I’m reasonably confident that humanity will adapt its way out of our self-inflicted global warming and that we are not barrelling down a path towards collective suicide. But if you believe that billions are about to be roasted to death, and yet you don’t even want to hear about artificial cooling technology for fear of “possible side-effects,” how seriously do you expect me to take your position? You sound like a doctor withholding a promising cancer drug to a terminal patient because of “possible side-effects.” If you seriously believe that runaway global warming poses an existential threat to humanity, you should at least advocate for more research into solar radiation management.

 

Perhaps we should be relieved that few climate doomers really believe what they’re telling us. In a 2007 essay, novelist and journalist John Lanchester wonders why climate activists have committed so few terrorist attacks. After all, he reasons, terrorism is one of the most effective forms of political action, and activists feel very strongly about the looming threat of climate change. It would be trivially easy, he reasons, for a few dozen activists to, say, trash thousands of SUVs in a month, and to blow up some petrol stations while they’re at it. Could it be, Lanchester muses, that “even the people who feel most strongly about climate change on some level can’t quite bring themselves to believe in it?” More recently, Andreas Malm has published a manifesto with the unsettling title How to Blow Up a Pipeline. The title is a bit of a misnomer; as Ezra Klein has pointed out, the book should have been called Why Have So Few Pipelines Been Blown Up? After all, pipelines are vulnerable pieces of infrastructure and easy to destroy, since they stretch for thousands of kilometres. Why not blow up a couple of them just to shake the world out of its complacency, asks Malm? Even Malm seems incapable of bringing himself to believe in the catastrophe he preaches. When journalist David Marchese reminded him that he has children of his own, Malm responded: “Yes, but I have to admit to some kind of cognitive dissonance, because, rationally, when you think about children and their future, you have to be dismal.” Could it be that Malm’s decision to have children reveals his true belief better than the message of doom he professes?

 

In Kim Stanley Robinson's celebrated 2020 novel The Ministry for the Future, climate terrorists start shooting down first private jets and then any commercial plane that isn’t powered by clean electricity or sustainable aviation fuel. In Robinson’s book, the eco-warriors finally force the world to get its act together and take drastic action, ushering in a new dawn for humanity. (In real life, it seems more likely that there would be a huge crackdown on climate terrorists and a massive public backlash against climate policies.) So, shouldn’t we be glad that so few people are heeding Malm’s advice and unleashing their inner Ted Kaczynski? Sure, in recent years a few SUV tires have been deflated by eco-activists, but that’s nothing compared to the gruesome terrorist attacks portrayed in Robinson’s novel.

 

It’s impossible to know how many climate doomers harbor deeply held convictions and how many are merely virtue signalling. Some, like the psychiatric patient described above, seem genuinely terrified. But not all climate doomers are like him. I have debated several leading activists from Extinction Rebellion and proponents of degrowth who seem to be—there’s no way to put this politely— full of shit. All they seem to care about is ideological posturing, blindly raging against “the system,” and feeling morally superior to everyone else. Climate change provides ample opportunities for such empty posturing, precisely because its long-range effects are so remote, diffuse, and hard to pinpoint. It’s the ideal playground for people who like to revel in inconsequential, self-satisfied, no-skin-in-the-game tribalism.

 

Activists of all stripes will continue to take to the streets to preach that the end of the world is nigh, but that doesn’t mean that we should take them seriously. Perhaps they don’t even take themselves seriously. It’s incredibly frustrating that those who express the greatest concern about climate change are often also the staunchest opponents of effective climate solutions. But perhaps we should be grateful that so few of these people genuinely believe what they profess to believe. You wouldn’t want to live in a society in which millions of people really think that the planet will go to hell in a handbasket unless we start blowing up pipelines and shooting down planes.