MILESFORTIS

Climate Activism Isn’t About the Planet. It’s About the Boredom of the Bourgeoisie.

The downfall of capitalism will not come from the uprising of an impoverished working class but from the sabotage of a bored upper class. This was the view of the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter in 1942. Schumpeter believed that at some point in the future, an educated elite would have nothing left to struggle for and will instead start to struggle against the very system that they themselves live in.

Nothing makes me think Schumpeter was right like the contemporary climate movement and its acolytes. The Green movement is not a reflection of planetary crisis as so many in media and culture like to depict it, but rather, a crisis of meaning for the affluent.

Take for example a recent interview with Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich on CBS‘s 60 Minutes. Ehrlich is most famous for his career as a professional doom monger. His first major book, The Population Bomb, gave us timelessly wrong predictions, including that by the 1980s, hundreds of millions of people would starve to death and it went downhill from there. Ehrlich assured us that England would no longer exist in the year 2000, that even modern fertilizers would not enable us to feed the world, and that thermonuclear power was just around the corner.

Ehrlich, who recently turned 90, is in the lucky position to have witnessed the complete failure of all his predictions—only to double down on them in his 60 Minutes interview Ehrlich has been wrong on every public policy issue he pontificated on for almost 60 years, yet the mainstream media still treat him like a modern oracle.

Why?

The best answer to this question comes courtesy of New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who in 2019 famously said that, “I think that there’s a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually and semantically correct than about being morally right.” In other words, no matter what nonsense one spews, as long as it is “morally right,” it does not matter what the facts show.

Like the prophet of any religion, Ehrlich is not there to explain the world but to reinforce the upper class’s favorite worldview of the imminent end of the world, something that can only be prevented if we fundamentally change the way we live. Of course, by “we,” they actually mean “you.” It’s not the Tesla driving AOC or the jet-setting Stanford professor Ehrlich who will adapt their lifestyles, but the rubes of the working- and middle-class who supposedly eat too much meat, drive too many miles on gas-guzzling cars, or even book the occasional flight to go on vacation.

This was perfectly embodied by climate czar and millionaire John Kerry who took his family’s private jet to attend a climate change conference in Iceland in 2019. Asked by journalists how to square his climate activism with the use of private planes, he seemed befuddled; after all, Kerry explained, “it is the only choice for somebody like me who is traveling the world to win this battle” against climate change.

Even supposed grass-roots movements like “Just Stop Oil” or “Last Generation” (of “tomato soup on paintings” fame) are in fact funded by millionaires, like Aileen Getty, the granddaughter of legendary oil-tycoon Jean Paul Getty, and the Climate Emergency Fund.

Just like Kerry, Ehrlich, and these other groups are not really interested in solving the problem of climate change—for example, promoting research in technologies like nuclear energy, carbon capture technologies, and means of adaptation. Instead, they with to elevate their struggle to an ersatz-religion that allows them to simultaneously enjoy their wealth and lecture the rest of the world from a position of moral superiority.

They are pouring money into those efforts, as the German journalist Axel Bojanowski pointed out, to a degree that would make the oil lobby blush. At the “Climate Action Summit” in 2018, two dozen billionaire-backed foundations pledged 4 billion dollars for climate-change lobbying. Some of them, like the Hewlett Foundation, are directly funding journalists at the Associated Press for “climate reporting,” while foundations associated with the Packard and Rockefeller families have been backing the journalistic endeavor “Covering Climate Now,” which “collaborates with journalists and newsrooms to produce more informed and urgent climate stories” and is financing hundreds of media outlets.

One would assume that a journalistic class that constantly prides itself on speaking truth to power would object to talking money from billionaires to promote their peculiar interests, but the opposite is the case. And it makes perfect sense, since the contemporary media is ideologically in the same camp as the billionaire class; they enjoy lecturing the rest of society just as much as Ehrlich and his acolytes.

Contrary to the climate extremists and their virtue signals, the world they are trying to create would be devastating for the poorest people on the planet. The elimination of poverty and the improvement of living conditions is only made possible through access to energy in all forms and the petrochemical processes enabled by fossil fuels—the production of fertilizers for food and plastics needed in medical equipment.

“Just stopping oil” wouldn’t stop climate change as swiftly as it would human life. To add insult to injury, this activism seems to have no shred of compassion for all the human suffering caused by their pet projects, from child-labor in cobalt mines (needed for batteries) in the Congo to forced labor in the PV production process in China, to the environmental damage caused by lithium mining in Chile.

This isn’t about the planet. It’s about the boredom of the bourgeoisie. And they don’t care who has to pay to alleviate it.

Ralph Schoellhammer is an assistant professor in economics and political science at Webster University Vienna.