The Futility of Post-Truth Climate Activism
by Sophia Hlavaty
From the 20th to the 27th of September this year, millions of people across 185 countries on all seven continents took to the streets to galvanize their respective governments into overcoming the inertia of the status quo and actualizing international action to mitigate climate change. The Global Youth Climate Strike was the biggest climate mobilization effort in history. Although various news sources put the number of participants at 4 million, the official webpage reported the number at 7.6 million. Participants carried handmade signs that read “Planet Over Profit” or “No More Excuses” and chanted slogans like “Sea levels are rising and so are we!” Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish girl who helped catalyze adolescent environmental activism, made an appearance in New York City and told demonstrators to demand a safe future.
The impatience of these protestors and their inability to understand the effects of climate regulation on corporate reality and developing nations inhibit rational dialogue to reach potential solutions.
The Achilles Heel of worldwide climate regulation agreement is that different regions and populations will experience divergent impacts of global warming and differ in their ability to withstand such changes depending on their monetary power, leadership, and training. Hence, the areas vary in the immediacy of their response. For developing nations, such as China and India, reducing carbon emissions is a zero-sum situation; they have an insatiable need for energy, mostly carbon-based fuels, in order to expand in all industrial domains. Thus, it is hard for developing nations to actively commit to policies like the Paris Agreement when those very policies hinder their short-term and long-term economic growth. After all, according to Charles Wheelan, Senior Lecturer in Economics at Dartmouth College and author of the New York Times bestselling book Naked Economics, “the case for keeping people poor because it’s good for the planet is economically and morally bankrupt.”
The protestors’ juvenile finger-pointing endeavors to indict fossil-fuel corporations, Republicans, and Donald Trump for the degradation of the environment are inadequate because they place the blame on the symptoms and not the cause of ambivalence towards climate change. Capitalism relies on cheap oil to maintain its practices. The widespread proliferation of fossil fuels in our daily lives indicates that people have to recognize that the climate change problem extends beyond the traditional villains under media spotlights. While we should not exonerate those antagonists entirely, we should target our efforts towards interrogating the political, social, ethical, and economic institutions that endow them with the necessary sustenance needed to thrive in the contemporary world. These include, but are not limited to: the profit incentive, lack of education in certain regions, globalization, capitalism, and economic inequality.
Through the targeted signs and slogans, and the rhetoric that the planet is approaching a form of doomsday, the protesters also encroach past the realm of a scientifically-motivated demonstration; instead, their actions emphasize how the climate is becoming a polarizing issue. This is detrimental for the movement because for international climate action to be realized, the populace and world leaders need to reach across party lines and lean into the movement, uniting in a shared vision for the planet. Partisan politics present a barrier to the amalgamation, for they encourage a divisive mindset from the get-go that stifles progress in discussions. The polarization also trivializes the importance of scientific data; science becomes seen as another way to advocate for a certain policy stance instead of a general search to discover the truth.
Humankind is defined by the way we acclimate to various challenges that are thrown our way. Climate change is an obstacle that impacts our present and future, and how we deal with it will affect the global order for generations. World leaders must create policies that acknowledge the disparities in the resources that countries have to avert to deal with climate change. We must prevent engagement in hostile post-truth advocacy and politics that further prevent productive solution-generating efforts.