Five reasons Brendan O’Neill is wrong

Articles decrying environmental practice as “a tyranny of environmentalism” which is leaving people with more “fear, self-loathing and a religious-style sense of meekness than any piece of anti-terror legislation ever could” are interesting cultural artefacts to examine.

Like fossils, they help us understand how previous cultures and the people that lived in them went about their business; how they were able to internalise huge global inequities by focusing on impossibly narrow elements of societies and their rare incidents of rhetorical argument. E.g., such as the work of newspaper columnists.

This is the type of fossil that turned up in my RSS feed this morning, from Brendan O’Neill, editor of Spiked, writing today in The Guardian. I felt like one of the actors in Bonekickers, faced with the same quality of writing.

Firstly, comment is free–up to a point. That’s why we have things such as the 1976 Race Relations Act to ensure socially-accepted parameters on the treatment of individuals are upheld, whatever you want to think about freedom of speech. (By the way, I worked unpaid for Index On Censorship, and I’ve led editorial projects in the Balkans, so I have some pedigee). Second, I have no problem with O’Neill bringing issues to the table in this way, and a national newspaper is probably the best place to debate them.

The problem is that journalism, even opinion, is meant to say something new, be interesting, and be accurate.

This article is none of these things: it’s a rehash of something O’Neill did back in 2006, when he was already late to the party on assessing the rhetoric of climate change debates. In that sense, the article is predictable and disappointing in a number of ways, adding nothing to the debate. So, why else is it so bad?

ONE: As I’ve said, it’s mainly rehashed journalism.
There’s almost nothing new here. Which is why O’Neill tries to bring it up-to-date with words such as “recent” and “insistence” (present tense). Looking at the comments to which O’Neill is responding:

• American eco-magazine Grist recently published an article on deniers (actually a book review, 1 year, 9 months, 26 days ago. Recent? Not accurate, O’Neill)
• Mark Lynas’s insistence that… (a link to ‘Global Warming: the chiling effect on free speech’, O’Neill’s own article, 1 year, 7 months, 9 days ago)
• ‘In the word of The Ecologist‘ (yes, from 1 year, 7 months and 15 days ago)

Point is, he’s said all this–exactly this–back in 2006. And…

• “columnists [actually, singular, Johann Hari, but I realise that's pedantic] felt no qualms about demanding government legislation to force us to change our behaviour” (Johann Hari, 4 months, 24 days ago)

In particular, the Ecologist article above, written by Pat Thomas, is saying many of the same things about the media that O’Neill is saying in the way it looks for the dramatic in the crescive. But saying it in a productive, and yes impassioned, way, to help address what is EITHER a socially constructed myth OR a real environmental crisis. Either way, whatever you believe, it needs constructive thoughtful address, not dusty polemic.

(And the headline isn’t t particularly original. Check out O’Neill’s other Tyranny... and Tyrannical articles)

TWO: There’s nothing on the science.
One of the more concise comments on the Guardian site is from Mike Small, who says:

Readers will note there is not a whiff of science, fact or detail in O’Neill’s spurious degenerate rant. and far from quashing ‘dissenting’ voices he and his ilk are represented across the media where our impending omnicide is treated at best glibly and at worst as a marginal concern.

This is important, because you can only assess whether these writers (Monbiot, Lynas, Hari etc) can be accurately called ‘alarmist’ if they are out of step with the science.

O’Neill could have read James Risbey’s recent article in the peer-reviewed journal Global Environmental Change that assesses just this. His argument shows that the notion of ‘sober/serious alarm’ (not alarmism) is totally in line with the science. O’Neill is debunked. Lynas’s book Six Degrees just won the Royal Society Award for environmental writing. In this introduction to that book, Lynas said: “I am not a climatologist; I am merely the interpreter”. The important thing to note is this: Monbiot, Lynas and Hari are all developing opinions in line with the peer-reviewed science.

THREE: The argument has moved on.
I’ve just had a fascinating chat with the Business Editor of a leading UK publication. What they said made nonsense of O’Neill’s claims. For example: Environmentalism isn’t just for the environmentalists any more. Business want to act on climate change. They are not particularly emotional about it–it’s about profit. But it’s also about real world facts of changing climates and people’s lives.

In 2005 (before O’Neill first wrote this article) the perceptions of big business switched, and quite dramatically. People such as Jeff Immelt, head of US Corp GE, were already beginning planning for a cap-and-trade system. Big businesses were seeing the reality of climate change. Immelt was held up by Time magazine as a ‘hero of environmentalism’. Now, does this sound to you like alarmist, anti-freedom rhetoric?

By spearheading the formation of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, a consortium of companies and NGOs that earlier this year asked the Bush Administration to take action against the buildup of greenhouse gases, Immelt has paved the way for hundreds of other business leaders to commit themselves to finding climate-change solutions. But his environmental focus does not derive from an overweening sense of corporate social responsibility. Immelt believes that GE’s eco-leadership will position it for success in a range of high-growth and high-margin markets. “Green is green,” he declares.

The crux of O’Neill’s argument (that we are kept in hock by guilt-inducing rhetoric to illiberal and regressive practices) is undone by big business also thinking climate change is the key issue we have to address.

FOUR: Too many links to his own articles.
One is enough (as I’ve just done above). Using the opportunity for Guardian exposure to plug Spiked is ok, but not to old news, please. New stuff.

FIVE: This is the worst one for me. Enforced localism
O’Neill writes:

The environmentalist ethos is hostile to free movement, too. Behind the greens’ attacks on road-building and cheap flights there lurks an agenda of enforced localism. What most of us experience as a liberty – the ability to drive great distances or to travel overseas, something our forebears only dreamt of as they spent their entire lives in the same town – has been relabelled under the tyranny of environmentalism as a “threat to the planet”.

Enforced localism? Why would there be an agenda for this other than the fact that the ‘experience of liberty as driving or travelling great distances’ is a liberty of inequity. The fact is, there is no ‘free’ movement. First, the full costs, the externalities, are not included in the price we pay for these freedoms. Those costs are generally paid elsewhere–by the people of Niger and Iraqis who lose the wealth of their country’s natural resources, for example.

This can be rectified by market forces as well as by O’Neill’s environment police. I would welcome the inclusion of all externalities in the full price of our liberties in driving and travelling: this would mean somewhere in the region of a tripling of the price of travel to reflect the true global, social and environmental impacts of fossil-fuel based activities. Then people will be at liberty to continue to do these things. Well, those who can afford to will be able to.

SIX: I know, I said five, but I’m not done on the guilt thing…
O’Neill says “But perhaps the main way that environmentalism undermines the culture of freedom is by its ceaseless promotion of guilt.”

Wrong again. Firstly, there are a huge number of clean tech and green busines organisations and sites that promote guilt-free, entrpreneurial and progressive living through environmentally-aware, and happy, practices. Grist magazine, that O’Neill berates, are purposefully witty and upbeat. PWC released recently a report asserting that action would be possible and afforable: no limits to freedom there. The key UK report on the economics, the Stern Report, promotes action as possible and profitable. Etc, etc, etc…

Last word
If O’Neill had rewritten a new piece for 2008 and taken into account how things have moved on, then fine. But O’Neill has let himself and his magazine down, and the Guardian should have far more robust selection processes for the quality of the journalism. Not the opinion, but whether it is new, interesting, accurate. That’s where this article fails most. I teach magazine journalism. If one of my students had written this opinion piece, each of these inaccuracies would have been edited out and it probably wouldn’t have made the paper as written.

And yes, I think he’s totally wrong in his opinion. Anyone who runs a site that can publish this…

Jeremy Clarkson: because he’s worth it: He may caricature greens as cabbage-eating lesbians, but Clarkson says what people think. And the Beeb is right to pay him handsomely.

Is always going to be at the other end of the spectrum to what I think. But as you will understand, comment is free on this site too. Let me know if you think differently.

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Tagged as: climate change, comment, environmentalism, rhetoric