Why Environmentalists Pose a Bigger Obstacle to Effective Climate Policy than Denialists
Maarten Boudry Quillette 27 Jan 2022
In the recent Netflix smash hit Don’t Look Up, scientists try to warn the world about a comet hurtling towards Earth that is going to wipe out human civilization and possibly life itself. Except, no-one wants to hear the bad news: the US president is too busy with the midterm elections and wants to silence the scientific Cassandras, a psychopathic tech mogul comes up with a cockamamie scheme to mine the precious minerals in the comet, and everyone else is just too distracted by the latest celebrity shenanigans to pay any attention to the impending disaster. When the despairing scientists urge people to “Just look up,” the defiant answer “Don’t look up!” becomes the rallying cry of the comet denialists, whipped up by the populist US presidential administration.
All of this, of course, is a rather obvious and heavy-handed allegory for our current climate predicament. Reviews of the movie have been mixed, although many critics have praised the film for being a “spot-on” indictment of our culture, an “on-the-nose assessment” of our dealings with the climate crisis, or even “so-sharp-it-hurts.” One climate scientist writing in the Guardian opined that the movie “captures the madness I see every day.” In the same newspaper, long-time climate activist George Monbiot wrote that the movie felt like “my whole life of campaigning flash before me.”
It would be silly to take apart a work of satire, but as these glowing reviews attest, Don’t Look Up offers an—admittedly grotesque—version of a narrative about climate change that has been promulgated seriously by many people. In this story, solving climate change is mostly a matter of facing reality, breaking the power of fossil-fuel interests, and mustering the political courage to do what needs to be done. We already have the technological solutions to climate change, writes Naomi Klein in her influential book This Changes Everything, but they are sabotaged by a ruthless “elite minority that has a stranglehold over our economy, our political process, and most of our major media outlets.”
By taking that very narrative to such ludicrous extremes, Don’t Look Up has also helped me realize what exactly is wrong with it: it is a self-serving myth told by well-off Western progressives that scapegoats easy villains, distracts from genuine solutions, and stands in the way of some long-overdue soul-searching.
Don’t get me wrong: fossil fuel companies deserve all the blame they can get for their decades-long campaign of truth-obfuscation and intentionally confusing the public about the reality of man-made climate change. In some countries, most notably the US, climate skepticism has significantly delayed the actions that are needed to tackle climate change. But outright denialism of the sort skewered in Don’t Look Up has been on the wane for some time. In the United States, nine out of 10 people now agree that the consequences of climate change will be felt by current and future generations. In a survey of 10 Western countries released just before the COP26 conference in Glasgow last year, 62 percent of participants agreed that climate change is the main environmental crisis the world is facing, ahead of concerns about pollution and new diseases. Even fossil fuel companies have now finally and grudgingly come to accept that their products are heating the planet.
If you buy into the Don’t Look Up narrative, however, it is easy to gloss over one inconvenient fact: fossil fuels have been fantastic engines of progress
