Discerning Greenwash from Planet Love: Bafflement Essay #9

A spring fete in England. Photo by Simon Ingram

This month’s piece very much reflects the confusions of my own journey through these strange times. Thanks to a sense of increasingly clarity about what’s going on and what to do about it, it’s been a while since I titled a piece a Bafflement Essay. But in truth no subject has baffled me more than this one, so here we go again.

In a previous Substack, I touched on the rise of eco-authoritarianism from the viewpoint of Little Green Alex, who has lived in me since childhood. Little Green Alex is an instinctual, inconsistent, non-ideological kind of Green: she gets upset about plastic, detests waste in general and talks to animals and plants. As an adult she’s uninterested in metrics and is largely immune to corporate jargon such as ‘sustainability’. In recent years, observing the environmental movement’s growing predilection for top-down measures that cost ordinary people dear but benefit the powerful, she has undergone something of a loss of innocence.

The Conundrum

The first red flag came with talk of a ‘health passport’ from the World Economic Forum which would make the screening of blood a condition of crossing borders and attending large public events. You could almost miss how the video, published in July 2020, moves seamlessly from infectious disease to ‘mandatory carbon offsetting for each of its passengers … to preserve the environmental benefits of reduced air travel’.

What?

Returning to Britain this year after a two-year absence, I was baffled to find the authorities imposing a raft of new restrictions on movement that would stifle local businesses, increase social isolation and impoverish the poorest. Councils were using the planters they’d installed to ‘protect’ residents from Covid-19 to create Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, permanent roadblocks which they claimed were a traffic-calming measure demanded by locals. In fact, the idea of LTNs came from central government. On 27th March 2020, as Britain was entering its first-ever lockdown, the Transport Minister announced a surprising new approach. ‘We will use our cars less and be able to rely on a convenient, cost-effective and coherent public transport network,’ said Grant Shapps. It was followed by the launch of the Active Travel programme, which gave councils the funding to trial LTNs, penalising them if they stopped the trial ‘too soon’.

Same planters, different reason. An LTN in London.

Three years on, councils are attributing the need to restrict the movement of vehicles to Net Zero as well as congestion and pollution. It’s important to understand that Net Zero is very new, a mere baby of an idea that has risen from the backwaters of academic science to become a mainstay of government policy in less than a decade. (You can find a short history of Net Zero here.) In 2019, the UK became the first G7 country to legislate for Net Zero by 2050 and its domestic strategy, launched in October 2021, committed the country to banning the sale of petrol and diesel vehicles by 2030, with restrictions on what energy sources homes can use by 2035.

On the back of this came all sorts of horrors for a population struggling with Long Lockdown: talk of banning wood stoves amid rapidly escalating energy bills and the promise of prison sentences for having the wrong kind of Energy Performance Certificate. I barely recognised a country whose government, without any public debate, felt entitled to impose measures that could bankrupt households. What was going on in my formerly reasonable homeland?

Meanwhile, influenced by thinkers such as Charles Eisenstein and direct experience with the non-human world, my own perspective on the world had undergone a profound shift. I’d become convinced that a deeper relationship with nature was the way – the only happy way – forward for humanity. The growing authoritarianism of Western nations which transferred even more wealth and power to governments and corporations while creating poverty and isolation for ordinary people, was taking us in the opposite direction. It seemed to me that the measures being imposed in the name of Climate were, far from being solutions to the environmental crisis, symptoms of the problem that had created it.

So when I heard about the Local Futures conference in Bristol, I signed up straight away. I had read Helena Norberg-Hodge’s book Ancient Futures and found entirely its depiction of life in a Tibetan community with a critique of global economy entirely in keeping with Little Green Alex’s way of seeing the world. But conferences comprised largely of the Green Movement were another matter. From what I had seen, British Greens seemed to be split between a local, nature-based approach that focused on self-sufficiency and a climate-led agenda that took away more power from people. Sometimes it seemed as if that split coexisted within the same individuals who wanted the first thing while supporting the second. Worse, the movement did not even seem to be aware of this tension: some people seemed not to know about the digitally-controlled existence on the horizon, and others clamoured for life-stifling restrictions on their fellow humans. In the wider world, meanwhile, it was clear that the public was getting increasingly angry about government impositions and that charges for using their cars and talk of compulsory heat pumps was turning them off environmentalism entirely.

Was the Green Movement divided or confused? A couple of attempts to discuss the issue with longstanding Greens, including a leading figure in British environmentalism who I happen to have known thirty years, foundered before they even got going. My concerns were dismissed as irrelevant or as a matter of conspiracy. (1) And, as more and more mobility restrictions sprang up around the country, I was shocked to hear Green Party politicians and local activists repeat the new mantra: everyone, regardless of health, circumstances or the distance to be travelled, must now give up their cars and CYCLE.

So the Local Futures conference would be a kind of testing ground, a fertile territory in which I could explore where Greens’ true allegiances lay and how much potential there was for what Little Green Alex wanted to support when she grew up: a pro-human environmentalism.

The Conference

The tension surfaced in an early session. A member of the audience pointed out that Patrick Holden’s confidence in lobbying Bill Gates and the Davos crowd to tone down the industrial agriculture might be misplaced. He was greeted with loud applause. ‘We have to engage with these people because they are running the world,’ responded Holden. ‘I’ve met Bill Gates. He needs to be influenced, as do all these people.’

A gale of laughter came from the floor. Reassuring. Not everyone was falling for a WEF-style solution to the world’s problems then.

Less reassuring was a suggestion from the audience that all funding for environmentalism should be channelled via the state, because it alone had the power and infrastructure to oversee things properly. Later, mention of the UK government’s intention to water down Net Zero targets was greeted by loud lamenting. Little Green Alex experienced some dissonance at this. As one of those upended by the Covid restrictions and still not recovered, she had been alarmed by the prospect of a ban on selling or renting property without installing wall insulation or whatever the authorities prescribed. She didn’t think she’d be able to live in a Britain like that and, even if she could manage financially, didn’t want to live in a country where only the affluent could move around freely.

Over the three days of the conference, an extraordinary range of speakers and performers illustrated the idea that localism is a global movement. They came from across the world, veteran thinkers and youthful activists, an elder from Ladakh and a rapper-activist from America. Many of the speakers went to the roots of the problem, which they were able to trace back decades, if not centuries. One such was John Perkins, the American author whose best-selling The Economic Hitman claimed that a cabal of corporations, banks and government were colonising the world by what he calls the ‘death economy’ based on short term profits regardless of social and environmental consequences.

‘All of us come from societies that knew that we are a part of nature not apart from nature,’ said Perkins. ‘So perhaps the greatest evil of human beings at this time is to believe in human supremacy, that we are the gods, that we can do anything we want with this planet.’

Camila Moreno, a self-described early critic of carbon offsetting gave a compelling account of how carbon metrics have gained traction in the Western world despite being recognised as greenwash within the environmental movement: ‘As we transit out of a Christian sense of history providing a common goal to humanity, decarbonisation becomes equal to salvation. All of us want to become “carbon neutral”’.

Carbon offsetting works like an accounting practice, she pointed out, and Net Zero is an equation involving a trade-off based, not on the natural world, but global economic models and the algorithms that run them. ‘Those people who come from the real roots of the environmental movement know that we cannot offset one life for another,’ she said. ‘Every form of life lives in a singular form that is irreducible … The entire ecological and environmental movement has been hijacked by this carbon narrative.’ (2)

Her contribution, which was greeted with applause, made complete sense to Newly Awakened Green Alex. Doing some of her own research into carbon offsetting, she hadn’t had to look for long to see why it was being so warmly embraced by financial and political institutions. Carbon could be used as a currency, allowing corporations to charge people for access to natural resources. ‘We start putting prices on water, on trees, on biodiversity. How do we start tokenizing?’ former Bank of England adviser Michael Sheren had asked at COP27.

The co-founder of Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil also got lots of applause. The session with Roger Hallam was more an act than a talk; Hallam made humorous play of not answering the questions put to him. But his message couldn’t have been gloomier: global warming will potentially exceed two degrees in February, making us richer humans responsible for the deaths of one billion mainly poorer humans. ‘If we don’t get organised, we’re going to have fascism,’ he said. His take on the change of British political wind on Net Zero was similarly hyperbolic: ‘Only in the last fortnight we’ve suffered the astronomical humiliation of a Prime Minister committing himself to genocide on our watch.’

A pertinent question from the moderator about whether he was concerned that the unpopularity of environmental policies would affect voting, as ULEZ seemed to have done in Uxbridge, did not get addressed.

The Connection

As I was reviewing some of the conference material for this piece, a YouTube advert popped up below the Local Futures channel bearing a definition of climate change. This is an extension of a trend – part of a censorship policy, to be exact – that started with Covid, when any video deemed to present a perspective not in keeping with the official public health narrative was, if not banned, accompanied by a banner explaining the ‘correct’ position:

More and more of these nudges, corrections, suggestions, suppressions – deciding what to call them is a baffling task – are popping up with respect to climate, and they all lead in the same direction. The UK bank NatWest has just launched a ‘carbon footprint tracker’ which uses customers’ transaction data to make recommendations as how they might mend their ways. Literally: customers are advised to mend clothes instead of buying new ones, replace dairy milk with plant-based alternatives and share car journeys.

Last month saw the publication of new research confidently predicting that, in future, every purchase and journey a person makes will be tracked and our movements rationed accordingly:

‘By 2040, we can expect to see limitations imposed on the amount of travel that is permitted each year,’ claimed the authors of the report. ‘It will be unusual to see members of Generation Alpha without a carbon-footprint tracker on their smartphones. Every Uber ride, plane journey, and trip to the supermarket will be logged in their devices, noting their carbon footprint in real time.’

Democratic Alex was dumbfounded by this prediction. Was the future already decided? Who had decided it? And why did it involve a social credit system which would put an end to personal agency and freedom of movement? She took a look at who was behind the report. One was a right-on travel agency called Intrepid Travel and the other a ‘forecasting agency’ with a clientele of global businesses. The Future Laboratory’s list of clients reminded her of the World Economic Forum ‘partners’, a diverse group of companies united by their shared interest in making the world a more profitable place. And the idea of a citizen’s activities being authorised by a smart phone bore a close resemblance to the EU digital ID wallet being created by Thales.

More connections were now forming in Democratic Alex’s mind. In 2020, when the British government began imposing travel restrictions in the name of Covid, it was clear to her that ministers were relishing their newfound power to open and close borders but she didn’t think they were motivated by much other than megalomania. By 2021, having fled to Portugal, it became even clearer that an abuse of power was taking place. People in continental Europe were getting on with their lives and moving between countries, while Britain remained shut off from the world, its population convinced that travel was dangerous and immoral. But it had not occurred to her that climate change lobbying could be behind the UK’s harsh travel restrictions. Now she wondered, as Ross Clark had wondered in June 2021: had the government used Covid as a way of conditioning people against travel in order to meet their Net Zero targets?

As I’ve written about previously, the UK government, along with 193 other nations, is currently in behind-the-scenes negotiations to give the World Health Organization greatly increased powers. One of the most radical proposals is to extend the right of the WHO Director-General to declare a Public Health Emergency of International Concern to crises believed to be climate-related. In a recent article, that same Director-General warns that health systems could be overwhelmed by extreme weather.

Nudge nudge. Herd herd.

The Choice

Charles Eisenstein was (I think) the only speaker at the conference to make the connection between the measures imposed in the name of Covid and the hydra-headed technocracy forming around us. Eisenstein, the author of a seminal book about the environmental crisis, used his session to talk about many things apart from climate. ‘Everything that was happening under the Covid regime was already gathering beforehand,’ he said. ‘The migration of life onto the internet, that was not a new trend, work, meetings, dating, shopping, entertainment, education – all of these basic functions of life were migrating online, the tendency to stay indoors, censorship, the control of information, the fear of other people, the decline of public space.

‘What Covid did was show us a snapshot of the future to which we were headed,’ he went on. ‘When you get a clear vision of where you’re going, then you know what you’re choosing. You have a choice point. The path that we had been blindly following as a society had become visible and we’re asked “is this where we really want to go?” Because that’s what the future will be if we do not choose otherwise.’

We – Greens of all shades – need to get clear about this, the insidious way in which environmentalism and the path towards a technocratic, less-than-human future are becoming intertwined. We need to recognise the repetition of a now-familiar pattern in which the desire of people to do the right thing is manipulated to give others power and fear is used to foster compliance. It’s a process that involves facing some hard truths. But it’s time that Little Green Alex grew up.

Wising up is particularly important in Britain. As the world leader in Net Zero, the UK has become an experiment in the use of environmentalism for technocratic ends. The game’s already up for many, where it’s obvious to the least ideologically-driven sections of society that being charged to go about your daily business has nothing to do with saving nature. But the rise of eco-authoritarianism is little-discussed in the Green Movement and where it is acknowledged, is often treated as a minor issue. The times have brought out the shadow side of Western environmentalism, revealing an anti-human face.

Can a movement have self-awareness? I think it can. That’s the first step, as with all self-development. Then comes the task of discerning what is genuinely in the interests of people and planet from what serves the rich and powerful, and being prepared to look critically at institutions such as the United Nations. Then we need to start articulating a pro-human environmentalism in positive terms, making it clear that we are talking about life in all its fullness, all species and ways of being beyond that which can be measured in metrics. Finally, with the public losing faith in the Green Movement, there’s a huge communication job to be done.

If, on the other hand, we allow the technocratic future to come into being, global gatherings such as Local Futures and other forms of cultural coming-together will no longer be possible. I’ll end with the warning issued by Helena Norbert-Hodge against espousing an environmentalism that becomes anti-human by ‘raising the status of nature and trashing humans’.

‘No,’ she said. ‘This is about reconnecting to life, all of life, human and non-human.’

Notes

1. I understand that former sustainability professor Jem Bendell addresses some of these issues in his book Breaking Together, which I have yet to read.

2. Some academics do buck the institutional orthodoxy and publicly recognise carbon offsetting as an accounting trick which allows business as usual. See here.