The radical Green movement embodies the worst aspects of modern culture

Whether it is climate change, Covid, racism, or many of the other challenges we face, the public conversation has become absurdly hyperbolic

The modern environmental movement is built on a doomladen, apocalyptic vision of the future; a resentment of the past; a fetishisation of youth; and an antidemocratic contempt for anyone who dares to question the favoured projects of the political, cultural and scientific elites. None of this is coincidence, or particularly special to the green agenda.

Pessimism has become our default position. Whether it is climate change, Covid, racism, or many of the other challenges we face, the public conversation has become absurdly hyperbolic. From “one minute to midnight” to “we are living in a racism pandemic”, these extreme narratives reveal more about our own sense of existential angst than they do the real scale of these problems.

Climate change has now been designated a “climate emergency”, language which helps to justify the view that we must take urgent, drastic action to reduce our carbon emissions, with renewable energy sources, wind and solar, positioned as the only responsible solution.

Of course, we all know that this is an imperfect answer. Many of the sources are intermittent; when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing, they are not producing energy. When it comes to storage, the process involved in mining lithium for batteries hardly deserves to be called renewable, carbon-neutral or cheap.

Technological developments may resolve these challenges in time, but to suggest they are the only possible answer just isn’t true. However, in the face of an all-consuming “emergency”, anything other than total capitulation is seen as immoral. Technologies such as fracking for gas are simply beyond the pale, for they fail to conform to the absolutist standards the emergency demands. Fracking has been effectively quashed in England by local interest groups. Yet it could, if it were allowed, help the situation. It emits half the CO2 of coal and has helped reduce emissions in the US.

For the most extreme environmentalists, even nuclear is unacceptable, even though it is reliable, has a small land footprint and does not contribute to climate change or air pollution. For an “emergency”, we seem awfully reluctant to find genuine solutions.

The problem is that the climate discourse is embedded in a wider cultural disorientation. The collapse of confidence in the West and its foundations has led to an inability to defend the gains of the past and to individuals, institutions and elites scrambling for a sense of purpose.

The past is increasingly seen as something from which we must radically distance ourselves. In the context of climate change, that means disavowing the Industrial Revolution. This period of advancement is framed as a form of original sin for which Britain – a nation of “climate villains”, in the words of Greta Thunberg – bears a special responsibility to atone.

The obvious parallel is with the increasingly popular self-flagellating view of the British Empire, which, rather than a historical fact entailing both some good things and some terrible things, is now seen as the source of all social evil in the present. In both cases, total social transformation – helped by the elevation of youth as “the innocent” – is the only route to progress. Ushering in a new era has become the moral mission of political and cultural elites.

Presenting things in such stark terms allows the advocates of alarmist thinking to argue that some problems are too big for public involvement; to suggest that climate policy is not a realm for political contestation but rather an area where only those across “the science” may have their say.

The shutting out of dissenting voices builds a manufactured momentum towards action as even mild, healthy scepticism is treated as an unacceptable barrier to progress. In an emergency, as we saw with Covid management, democracy is seen as an obstacle to urgent and necessary action, rather than a guarantor of good policy and social renewal.

One of the tragedies is that the West’s cultural dominance means that our views are increasingly projected on to the developing world, too. Thus, rather than prioritising rapid economic and political development for their citizens, they are caught up in the West’s own psychodrama even if they cannot afford the luxury of such indulgence.

History shows that finding the best solutions to problems is done through democratic engagement, a free and open conversation, an honest approach and a rejection of selfdefeating pessimism. At present, on climate change as on so much else, we are embracing the polar opposite.