My new book, The Grip of Culture, shows, through an analysis of the (outwardly) contradictory public attitudes to global warming, that our society is now dominated by what amounts to a new religion of climate catastrophism. Our civilisation is therefore under threat. This extract looks at what we might do with that knowledge.
The decline of established religions, particularly Christianity, has left other cultural entities – from age-old nationalism, to elderly communism and fascism, to adolescent climate catastrophism and the unruly children of Critical Race Theory and Extreme Trans Rights – to fill the gap. It seems that we are unable to live without cultural entities; the group identity they enable is too deeply etched into our brain architecture to be simply set aside, to say nothing of the benefits that group behaviours can bring.
If we cannot live without cultures then, given the risks, it would seem prudent to encourage them to become more benign; to tame them, so to speak. That is better than destroying them entirely; if we managed to do so, we would have no idea what might spring up instead, and whether it would be better or worse.
But understanding how to tame a culture is not straightforward. We need to work towards an end in which the culture continues to bind society together, with all the benefits that brings, while avoiding most of the potential costs. Examples from history may guide us, but measuring net benefits and even determining the requisite timescales is very difficult. For instance, how do we weigh up the huge death tolls of communism against its lifting of hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and illiteracy?
Climate catastrophism is no easier to assess. It seems harmful at present. The irrational policies and squandering of resources it demands are increasing humanity’s vulnerability to real disasters: tsunamis or wars or pandemics, and the damage to vital supply chains that result. Still, if it were tamed, the instinctive sense of stewardship that it fosters could conceivably deliver far better care for nature than rational institutions have done, no small gain in an age of huge technological power and minimal public understanding of complex environmental impacts. First though, the culture and its adherents would have to concede, just as the mainstream faiths once did, that sackcloth and ashes for everyone is not an approach that has much of a future.
Whether we attempt to break the culture of climate catastrophism or tame it, how would we go about it anyway? The first step to putting science and public policy back on a rational path is simply to recognise that the culture of climate catastrophism exists. This ought in principle to be easy, now that my book has shown that its dominant influence on public attitudes and policy can be measured. However, the beliefs and biases that the culture has engendered in people’s minds will be hard to overcome. The false idea of global climate catastrophe is now so entrenched in the lives and worldviews of members of the public they will find it hard to give up. They will believe – honestly but unfortunately not rationally – that any attempt to point out that the ‘catastrophe’ is cultural, not real, must be some kind of denialist ruse. In short, climate catastrophism has a tight grip on society; in the near term, reason is unlikely to prevail.
So, if straightforward rationality is unlikely to make an impact on climate catastrophism, what else might work? The belief in eugenics and the wider culture of which it formed a part were doomed once films of the Nazi concentration camps began to circulate widely. Although it took a generation to fizzle out, the culture was essentially shamed to death. So, could climate catastrophism be shamed to death too? Or at least shamed into tamer modes of operation? Its negative impacts on humanity and the environment provide plenty of shameful material, if not on the same emotive scale as the heaps of dead bodies in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.
Currently, much of the support for the culture seems impervious to shame; critics, whether internal or external, are censored or smeared, or simply waved aside. Michael Moore’s heretical film Planet of the Humans is a case in point. Soon after its release, there were widespread calls for it to be banned and these were almost entirely effective; it ended up having little effect on the culture or the narrative of salvation through renewable energy.
But if some adherents of the climate culture are shameless, others may not be. Climate catastrophism globally is hugely dependent on its relationship with the mainstream faiths: the majority of belief across nations comes from this relationship, although it is only shallow virtue-signalling. However, as the harms associated with the headlong pursuit of Net Zero become more apparent, the relationship with climate catastrophism could become damaging to religious leaderships and a source of much discontent in their flocks. Hence, although it seems unlikely at the moment, it is at least possible that the unpleasant results, along with resultant embarrassment and shame, could permanently collapse the support of religious publics.
However, the best hope that climate catastrophism will be tamed comes, unhappily, in the shape of adversity. My book shows that cultural entities yield in proportion to increasingly hard realities. The crash Net Zero programme has already created plenty of those, and they will only become more numerous and onerous in future. Meanwhile, the war in the Ukraine and the energy crisis have, in the space of just a few short months, exacerbated this situation dramatically. Rationality is not yet in charge, but the culture is giving a little ground, and will almost certainly give more as these crises continue. We do not want more adversity, self-imposed or otherwise, but it could be the only thing that will relax the grip of this culture.
Andy A. West’s The Grip of Culture is published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation. He can be found on Twitter at @AndyWest_tweets.
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Haven’t a clue regarding the question posed ATL but seems that Natural England have jumped onto the destruction of farming & food production bandwagon in Cornwall using a more subtle approach than that of the Dutch government to force the farmers off the land.
https://www.itv.com/news/westcountry/2023-07-03/cornwall-farmers-feeling-rejected-neglected-and-ignored-by-new-rules
I posted a similar article about a week ago from Farming UK. The moors are significant precisely because they have been farmed for hundreds of years. Sheer bloody evil at play here.
Coming soon no doubt to a Saddleworth Moor near me.
https://www.farminguk.com/news/farmers-to-take-part-in-one-of-uk-s-largest-landscape-programmes_62960.html
And here’s more bloody interference which is doubtless causing misery for many farmers.
Ultimately, the only thing that can end this is the dismantling of the giant organisations we’ve allowed to control our lives: the UN, the EU, the ECHR, BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, the Open Society Foundations and the breaking up of giant corporations. The bigger and more controlling these organisations become, the less they recognise the rights of the individual and the small group.
“For instance, how do we weigh up the huge death tolls of communism against its lifting of hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and illiteracy?”
Sorry, what? When did that happen?
It’s a popular Chinese Communist Party claim that disregards the hundreds of millions it murdered, imprisoned, tortured and enslaved.
Selectively focussing on fascism/Nazi atrocities for decades results in Communism not looking so bad despite the body count. Benefits anyone who wants to try again with Communusm.
Yes I was going to say exactly the same thing. Preposterous claim.
Well for a start, Capitalism also lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty – without causing millions of deaths.
The communists had to adopt a form of capitalism.
I recall hearing that it was like ice cream. There are 92 flavours, but all made by one company. You have choice, but it is an illusion. If you want ice cream theres only one place you can go.
I think that the more extreme the ‘solution to climate change’, the greater the push back. There will be a ‘snap’ point, probably airports or digital currency when the masses stir.
When all but three airports close, then air travel is banned, will likely be the snapping point. But we’ve got another 25 years of diminishing liberty at the behest of giant organisations to get through.
Or more likely, only available for the rich, as it was in the past.
It is a religion. Millenarian, doom, end of the world, self loathing, self flagellation, a cult of end times. Humans need a religion. Corona Fascism and Gaia Fascism provide the irreligious with their gospels, rituals and rites of faith. Yes both are idiotic, but we never said that the average IQ was that high. People will succumb to endless propaganda. Look at the quackcines, not 1 in 100 can name 3 ingredients or how they are made, but they were on the verge of shooting unstabbeds like myself.
I think you are right about the need for a religion, although I was born an atheist and stayed that way. I recently saw a short video of David Icke speaking in 1994 and I found a free copy of his book The Robots’ Revenge. I haven’t finished it yet but he describes it as being about a conspiracy to control the human race. His answer is to turn to spiritualism for a meaning to life and he has suffered because of it, but it is harmless compared to the new religions which are effectively corrupting scientific knowledge.
“What Will End the Grip of the Net Zero Cult?”
Expose cui bono.
Follow the money.
Covid demonstrated that people will put up with all sorts of nonsense if you can get the messaging right. So my gut feel is that the grip will not be ended until it is too late and our civilisation has been irrevocably destroyed.
I think our civilisation already is dead. The maggots are only just starting to devour the corpse. The key thing is that enough people start to look for a bolthole to take our learning and our history with us to ride out the coming dark ages, so there can be a second Renaissance in the future.
I don’t like admitting this but I agree tof.
We shall see. The next thing that’s going to happen is the irrevocable death of all remaining boom babies and how true their children stay to the silly partylines once the parents who invented them 1970s are gone remains to be seen. It is – after all – about ruining their own future.
Has to be people power.
The politicians, MSM, police, corporations are all on board to climatism, but there’s more of us than them.
There is a distinct religious element to it all. ——They speak of “apocalypse” and “armageddon”. If you don’t subscribe to their secular religion you are a heretic. Those who don’t live by the Green Commandments are “sinners”. ———–Irrational fear of climate change relies mainly on the will to believe rather than on any evidence. It’s disciples base their world view on faith and emotion rather than fact and reason. Todays “environmentalism” is all about attracting followers and is mostly an incoherent jumble of people who know next to nothing about climate or energy, and who think all we need to do is get rid of coal oil and gas and replace it with wind and sun and everything will tick along just fine with the added bonus that we will be “saved”. ———Nope.
Nobody ever found heaps of dead bodies in Auschwitz because Auschwitz was blown up and evacuated by the SS before the Red Army reached it.
https://www.upday.com/uk/uk-needs-to-adapt-buildings-to-rising-temperatures-most-radically-study-finds?preview=true&utm_source=upday&utm_medium=referral
Now our buildings are too warm so we have to cool them down.
Pseudo-science and stupidity rolled in to one great big fraud ball.
My house is so warm it costs me several hundred pounds a month to heat it
Hotter summers are our new normal: we must learn to adapt to them and to mitigate the harms that extreme hot weather will bring.
I would greatly appreciate a bit of hot summer because I could then hang out the washing in the garden and actually expect it to dry. In the current climate, where it’s usually overcast and showering and rather cool even when clear, there’s no chance in hell for this to work.
Someone really needs to tell these people that 2018 is over. They should have noticed that because of the so-called pandemic which occured since then but apparently, the year is hard-coded in the AIs they’ve been implanted instead of brains. That’s also the cause for them being so repitive.
We had three or four decent weeks of sunshine, but I only had to use my electric fan once at night to keep the temperature down. At the moment it keeps on raining and we’ve had a good three weeks of mediocre summer. I see the Daily Mail is running a heat apocalypse story, pretty saying the UK will boil in the next few weeks. It’s be nice if it does, because we’ll be heading straight into autumn afterwards!
It’s actually Spain, Italy and Greece and temperatures don’t look out of the ordinary for summer in either country.
I find it strange how anything that allows the expression of a saviour complex and regressive taxation is supported by our political class.
I like the idea that the climate change thing is a culture. Maybe one could also omit the last three letters and call it a cult. One way to tame it is to discredit it, and the Daily Sceptic has done a good job in dismantling the models by questioning their validity.
My take is simple; the climate is changing, but it always has and always will – the question is why. If, every time someone bats on about fossil fuels one asks what percentage of warming is attributable to them, against other climate-altering things such as El Niño, underwater volcanic eruptions in the Antarctic, deforestation in the Amazon and Himalayas, water diversion from the Aral Sea, even hardened believers will start to question their belief. Oh, and don’t forget lower atmospheric turbulence from wind farms. Then ask what the carbon footprint of lithium ion batteries is – not in their use, but in their manufacture. The economics can be discussed once they have satisfactorily answered those.
I suspect many who have previously been believers, like me, may falter once confronted with such questions. Like me!
“how do we weigh up the huge death tolls of communism against its lifting of hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and illiteracy?”
Seriously? You actually think that communism lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty and illiteracy? Commuism didn’t just kill millions. It also destroyed the culture and economic progress of a huge country (Russia) and wrecked the economies of many others. Basically, far from lifting people out of poverty and illiteracy, it caused poverty and illiteracy.
And then we have this gem:
“Climate catastrophism globally is hugely dependent on its relationship with the mainstream faiths”
That really is total nonsense. The Church teaches salvation through Jesus Christ, not through climate action. The Church of England may be gripped by the green cult, but that isn’t true of more mainstream churches, and it certainly isn’t true of Islam.
And the claim that “climate catastrophism has a tight grip on society” is unduly pessimistic in my view. I believe there are clear signs of weakening commitment to it amongst the public, and opinion polls show steadily reducing support for it internationally.
Overall then the article is bunk. Sorry.
It does seem to be based on some form of religion or cult needs of humans. I tend to think it is a form of self-punishment or self flagellation found in religion. I have heard many times the comment that ” we have been burning fossil fuels for many years, it’s time we paid for that”, as if it has been totally destructive and we have all benefitted too much. There have been over 50 years of high level propaganda by the enviro activists pushing their radical and false messages , enough to make us all feel guilty for our successes.
Those complaining about the burning of fossil fuels should consider that without that there would be a tree left anywhere.