Many valued readers advised against wading more deeply into Unlearn CO2, that doubtful and ridiculous tome of climate lunacy that first came to my notice a week-and-a-half ago. Why should we waste our attention on the ravings of crazy people, they asked? Surely, our time is better spent pondering what the well-informed, the measured and the mature have to say.
I understand the objection, but I must reluctantly disagree. Climatism is a political programme bound to a broad social movement. Most of its momentum comes not from The Science or The Experts, but from diffuse cultural forces that we should probably try to understand, if only because they are driving our entire civilisation straight into the ground. Against all advice, I will therefore steer the plague chronicle into this ridiculous quagmire of leftoid green babble, with a look at our first lesson in Unlearnings, namely ‘Unlearn Repression’.
This superficial and disorganised essay is the work of an infuriating young woman named Katharina van Bronswijk. She’s a psychotherapist best known for her 2022 book, Climate in Our Heads. Fear, Anger, Hope: What the Ecological Crisis is Doing to Us. It belongs to that genre of inevitably unreadable monographs in which the author herself appears on the cover, looking windswept, pioneering and undaunted:
“Climate feelings” are van Bronswijk’s niche in the extremely crowded enterprise of CO2-bothering. In ‘Unlearn Repression’ she argues that we should not suppress our negative feelings about climate change, but rather embrace them in constructive ways on behalf of the planet.
Now, van Bronswijk is the kind of deeply unoriginal person who just says the same things over and over. Everything she writes in ‘Unlearn Repression’ flows directly from Climate in our Heads; she’s been digesting, reheating and reworking this same overboiled intellectual artichoke for almost two years now, through various media interviews and even in this English-language TEDx Talk. Throughout this woman’s work is the vague anxiety that the climatists have perhaps overdone it with doom and gloom, and that a lot of people have had enough of hearing about a climate apocalypse that never quite happens.
Van Bronswijk is naturally very dumb, but more than that she is painfully condescending, oblivious, verbose and just awash in litres of estrogen. I defy anyone to read her work and not come away from it a raging misogynist. This odious overpromoted schoolmarm belongs out of sight in a childcare centre teaching young children the alphabet. Perhaps she should also be in a choir, or part of a local environmental club dedicated to collecting litter in parks. That our society has denied van Bronswijk and so many others like her these proper outlets for their instincts and instead pushed them into public activism and intellectual production itself explains a great deal of what is wrong with the world.
‘Unlearn Repression’ opens with some autobiographical details, because of course everything van Bronswijk talks about is all about van Bronswijk. Like so many Germans of her generation, she was radicalised by school climate propaganda – specifically, by her teacher’s fateful screening of that classic propaganda film, An Inconvenient Truth:
Back then… I was happy for the welcome distraction of watching a film instead of doing normal lessons. But afterwards I was shocked and asked my mum for answers to all the questions and challenges. She didn’t have any solutions for me, how could she? I was alarmed and started to think about the impending consequences of climate change and what could be done about it. I found approaches in newsletters from NGOs and by reading up on animal and environmental protection… That was when my dream bubble burst and I realised: the world is unfair and, unlike all the Disney stories of my childhood, there will be no single heroine who saves the world. And there is no magical or technical miracle solution either.
Al Gore’s film so terrified the young van Bronswijk, that for a while she retreated into conspiratorial theories about why climate change is not happening, which qualifies our crayon psychotherapist to pronounce upon the psychology of those who deny the climate. This deeply evil and irrational movement is driven primarily by “white men” because they “still enjoy most of the privileges in our society, and therefore have the most to lose”.
The necessary change in our way of life and the upheavals of recent decades are threatening these privileges. We’re questioning the role of “men”, we’re questioning social narratives of superiority through gender, through academic attainment, through professional success, through the burning of fossil fuels… through the over-consumption of luxury goods. This is understandably unsettling and can trigger feelings ranging from anger to a sense of threat… for those who will have to give up their privileges in the future.
We are only on the third page of this abomination and already van Bronswijk is laying bare her ulterior motives. At first, she thought climate change was terrifying and she sought after reasons to doubt it was happening, but then she realised it was just great for sticking it to old white men, and so once again she was fully on board. Before even mentioning one single, concrete negative consequence of carbon emissions, van Bronswijk is deploring male “privilege,” and those advantages of the wealthy and the well-educated that climatism must sooner or later spell the end of. All of these villains will have to give up their “fancy cars”, they will have to go without their precious “status symbols” and those things they “consider especially masculine”. It is the standard, shopworn ressentiment of leftism in general, presenting merely a different matrix of justification.
This is a political programme that naturally inspires anger in people, and in this way we come to our first Climate Emotion. Sometimes, van Bronswijk writes, “our biographical background means that we tend to repress certain emotions and overcompensate with others”. Those “angry citizens” (“Wutbürger”) who vote for AfD are in fact dealing with feelings of “fear” or “insecurity”, which they repress by expressing “Anger at the Greens, at people who eat a vegan diet, who live in big cities, who are young, who have a refugee background, and so on and so forth”.
While this airtight pop-psychological analysis shows that the anger of the climate denialists is illegitimate, there is another kind of anger that we must embrace, if reluctantly. This is Climate Anger:
Climate anger makes us aware of the injustices of the world out there and our own limitations. For many, fairness and justice are extremely important values – and when there is a lack of inter-generational, social or global justice, this makes many people angry. A large part of the local population sees climate change as a threat and also the need for a transformation of our lives, and many want this transformation to be fair.
The problem, as van Bronswijk sees it, is that nobody can agree on what amounts to “fairness”, which opens “a great potential for conflict…. if people can’t regulate their anger and channel it constructively”. A lot of leftists really, really love anger; Antifa are some of the most murderously enraged people I’ve ever encountered. Alas, van Bronswijk’s schoolmarmery warns her against this more entertaining approach. She would prefer to “regulate our anger” and use it as a motivation to “sign up for projects in social justice, go to protests and support petitions”. That’s right, you might be angry that the earth is melting before your eyes, but the best thing to do about that is to self-soothe by… attending Friday lunch hour demonstrations, volunteering and signing things. It’s at least some comfort that if the climatists are ever out of power, their crack schoolmarm brigades will fight rearguard actions in favour of destroying the economy and our lives in the most tepid and ineffectual ways imaginable.
What are the other Climate Emotions, you ask?
Well, there are the boring ones, like Climate Guilt and Climate Shame, which help us to “take responsibility” but should be properly managed lest the climatists become “too missionary” in their bearing and start berating everybody about their climate guilt. Here again, we encounter a quiet, half-acknowledged fear that the climatists have perhaps overreached, but of course it is nothing that van Bronswijk’s psychological expertise cannot solve.
More ridiculous is Climate Fear, which “warns us that extreme weather events are potentially life-threatening, that we can lose our possessions and that our children’s future looks ever bleaker”. Here it is important “not to be afraid of fear”, because being freaked out about imaginary horror scenarios is a great motivation, and it will “hopefully give us enough bumblebees up our arses to get off the sofa, spit on our hands, look for allies and get going together”.
Next up are Climate Disgust and Climate Contempt. These are “helpful feelings” that “protect us from coming into contact with things or associating with people who could harm us (or our reputation)”.
So the next time you turn up your nose in disdain at your neighbour’s Caribbean cruise or weekend trip to Mallorca or [insert climate sin of your choice], it’s disgust at work here, telling us clearly that (in our opinion) this is simply no longer the thing to do.
Just imagine living next to van Bronswijk. In any era and under any kind of political regime, she’d always be a wretched harpy peering through her blinds at passersby and cataloguing the misdeeds of her fellow man. Climatism, however, provides this woman with an entire moral system to justify her petty exercises in self-superiority. She gets to look down her nose at her cultural inferiors and save the climate at the same time.
After all of this, we finally get to our next Climate Emotion, which is Climate Mourning – specifically, “solastalgia”. This is a retarded and linguistically incoherent neologism coined by the “environmental philosopher” Glenn Albrecht, which describes feelings of “existential distress” provoked by environmental change. Van Bronswijk reports that she feels particularly intense solastalgia when contemplating all the dead spruce trees in the Harz forest, which she believes have been “killed by heat”. The way van Bronswijk deals with Climate Mourning is the same way one suspects that she deals with most everything else: she talks and talks and talks and talks and talks about it.
During the mourning process, it helps to talk to other people about your feelings and to be understood… I need to find someone around me who is willing to address these feelings. Someone who can tolerate them and has the emotional capacity to create a space for these feelings with me. When we empathise, when the other person listens, agrees and mourns with us, it helps us to digest the situation emotionally. It’s like heartbreak – you just have to get through it.
Since we’ve extended our sympathy to van Bronswijk’s neighbours, we’d be remiss if we didn’t also spare a thought for her long-suffering friends. Arguably, their lot is orders of magnitude worse. Imagine having to put up with ridiculous hours-long conversations in which this silly logorrhoeic woman details her profound sadness over dead plants. There are few people alive who could stand it, which would be why our heroine finally admits that: “Finding someone like that to talk to can… be difficult.”
‘Unlearn Repression’ closes with an appeal to “Unlearn Crisis Exhaustion”. From Covid to Ukraine to Gaza, there have just been too many crises and a lot of people don’t want to hear about climate change anymore. They must therefore unlearn their crisis exhaustion so they can worry about van Bronswijk’s pet issues once again. One way to overcome crisis exhaustion, is to join activist group and go to protests, sign petitions, and do all manner of other activist-y things, which (as van Bronswijk tacitly recognises) are of course really about fulfilling social and emotional needs and not actually about changing anything. We also need to cultivate “joy for the future” by talking about “how great our life will be when we’ve unlearned CO2”.
There are still spaces in our society where we can be creative together and dream of a beautiful, colourful future within the limits of our planet. These can be existing initiatives or model projects in which we can already partially experience the new reality and the beautiful future right now. Or maybe it’s a group of enthusiastic colleagues with whom we spend our lunch break thinking about how we can shape the transformation for the benefit of the company. No longer burning fossil fuels is not only important for the climate, it also leads to many co-benefits that we rarely talk about: clean air, clean water, healthy soil, delicious food and better health.
There are also of course the co-drawbacks of “no longer burning fossil fuels” – for example, the inevitable deaths of billions of people. We can only hope that the “delicious food” of our carbon-free future utopia will be delectable enough to compensate. It will certainly be very scarce.
I don’t know how to conclude this, except to say that I absolutely loathe this woman. Presently, we are sparing no effort to destroy our economies, our societies and our everyday lives, and that is bad enough. What is almost too much to bear, is the additional humiliating fact that the most vocal advocates for the engineered destruction of our civilisation turn out to be such empty-headed nitwits. The cartoonish banality of this idiot woman’s thought is an absolute disgrace. It is like being lectured on the necessity of an impending mass slaughter in saccharine tones by a pink Sesame Street muppet.
This article originally appeared on Eugyppius’s Substack newsletter. You can subscribe here.
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It is hardly any wonder that these people are empowered to write their drivel.
The world of sciences is supposedly based on scientifically proven facts and is not supposed to be a democracy.
The reality is – it is one of the earliest forms of cancel culture.
NASA’s contribution to the debate focuses on the existence of ‘scientific consensus’ and not on any specific scientific evidence of ‘climate change’.
What do we know is wrong with this approach?
Herding.
These supposed independent objective and unbiased ‘scientists’ know to butter their bread on one side only.
Examples:
The supposed consensus amongst modern physicists is that the 1887 Michelson and Morley experiment proved there is no aether. The issue is not settled but any physicist who says so is shunned.
There are discrepancies in the results. The results appear to show approximately 25% of the expected 30m/s speed of an “aether wind”. The aether theory was abandoned primarily following Einstein’s Special Relativity Theory. Despite that Einstein eventually accepted a revised version to explain parts of his theory of General Relativity.
And a more recent example are the supposed Covid ‘vaccines’.
Despite official statements eventually confirming when it was no longer possible to deny it, that these injections do not prevent you being infected or passing on infection but supposedly reduced the risk of you dying, the consensus amongst those who had the injections was they stopped the ‘pandemic’ and saved the planet.
You are referring to Einsteins Biggest Blunder I believe, —Lambda. If you are, then it maybe that his blunder was not a blunder at all, and that some version of lambda might be required to explain why the Universe is accelerating outward.
——-Of course on the consensus nonsense you are correct and most people cannot tell the difference between “science” and “official science” (or consensus science). The first being a genuine search for truth based on observations, and the second being the search for excuses to support preferred government policies.
Einstein’s ‘Biggest Blunder’ Turns Out to Be Right By Clara Moskowitz November 24, 2010
It is believed gravitational waves propagate through space at the speed of light.
Light of course propagates through space at the speed of light.
Einstein proposed the speed of light is invariant and so a constant regardless of the speed of the frame of reference it is measured in.
There is an assumption that if there is an aether it is something different from space.
But surely, space is the aether.
Space is not nothing. It cannot be nothing as it is deformed by anything with the property we call mass. Space bends so it also cannot be nothing.
Light traveling through space travels along the curvature of the bends in space.
Good take down.
This and many other counter narrative stories leave me wondering how we can get young people to hear the counter narratives
At the end of the day, the young and influenceable are the people being constantly targeted by the woke, climate warriorrs and those are rhe people most in need of hearing the counter narrative.
Here at the DS it’s obviously preaching to the choir.
I do my best with my kids, grown up now. Mixed success. Better than nothing hopefully. In general the politically “aware” and active ones tend to be lefties, and other young people like my kids are just getting on with their lives, buying houses, getting jobs, getting married and let “politics” wash over them – leaving the activist loons as the only ones shouting.
Last sentence nailed it for me. Classic!
“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenceless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed – in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Nitwit! Love it. The new cult is strong with this one.
IF she is really concerned about dead plants, maybe she should stop campaigning to reduce CO2 the food of plants, and something they would prefer higher concentrations of in the atmosphere.
This simple biological fact should be the undoing of the whole narrative, but no, the madness continues apace. Mind blowing stupidity
Sort-of amusing read. But it does comes accross a bit like taking potshots at a large, stranded jellyfish that’s slowly drying and dying on a sunny beach. Find a foe worthier of your steel, Eugyppius!
An immensely philosophical lament I once overheard in the boy’s locker room in a public pool ran like this: “Nowadays, there simply aren’t ugly girls anymore. The pretty ones have a few grams of makeup on their faces and the others, a few kilos!”
In line with this, I challenge Katharina van Bronswijk to dare to appear in public unvarnished to prove that she isn’t an AI-controlled mannequin.
Why can’t these people just go off to establish a net zero utopia somewhere and stop blabbing. Meanwhile in the real world we had 700 migrants arrive yesterday to feed and house and the money is running out to pay for them.
Don’t worry Two Tier Kier is going ‘to smash the gangs’. And after only 5 weeks in power, inflation is already up under Labour but strangely Robot Reeves is missing from the airwaves to answer for this. Unreasonable of me? Well, just imagine the wailing if the other main Uniparty was in power and just shows everything is Two Tier.
You are right and those paying for tier one will soon be overwhelmed by the costs. I think it will collapse in the colder months once the blackouts start. Hope you have your candles and tinned food on order.
It’ll go up even more before long …. since they’re spraying money at the public sector in the form of salary increase with no improvement to productivity.
Welcome to the 1970s and spiralling inflation. They’ll try a price control policy next.
Great article but this?
“…Perhaps she should also be in a choir, or part of a local environmental club “
How can the worldly and intelligent Eugyppius equate choirs with environmentalism? Of course there are many in the arts that are pathologically sentimental about everything woke but there is a massive difference in that there is almost nothing of any value from a environmental club.
The link is to a legendary recording of the Allegri Miserere.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDOENZediM8
The activists always talk about “science deniers” and “climate deniers”, but actually this issue isn’t just about science, it is political, economic and social one as well. Much of the so called science is actually just an excuse for the other stuff. The UN and WEF talk of social equity and climate justice. ——Climate Change is not about the climate. It is about creating a global centralised government controlling all the wealth and resources. Or as John Kerry puts it “Lets make Climate Change the Central organising Principle of Civilisation”.—— A quick look at the absurd plans the technocrats have reveals that this is simply a war on the capitalist system that seeks to create global governance eg Ban all fossil fuel energy production. Get rid of Nuclear Energy. Get rid of cars. Retrofit every building. Get rid or air travel. All will be provided with employment, a house, an education etc etc…….Can you see where this is going? Does anyone want to live in this? In a world where the government decides everything you need and what is good for you? To get away with all of this you need a very good and plausible excuse and that excuse is “Climate Change”
Perhaps she and Greta could be sent to live in a cave somewhere cold, where they can live in splendid isolation from the rest of humanity … but keep each other company so they have someone to talk to. I guarantee it will be 24 hours before they’re arguing over the minutiae of climate propaganda.
And 48 hours before they’re demanding some “creature comforts.”
The sky is falling. The sky is falling. The sky is falling.
Yep, that made a furious fire shoot out of my arse but a brilliant article. These pampered cake brained morons are our greatest threat as they are being paid by the predator class global elites as tools for getting armies of blue haired bovine tik-tokkers on board.
The ‘climate emergency’ wouldn’t have quite the same brand power to the young if it was being narrated by a nappy wearing George Soros or handbag head John Kerry.
Although I doubt it’s working as well as they like to think. The super-volcano of climate bullshit they’ve create over the years can now be viewed from space probes and other planets.