How Pop Culture Scammed Climate People Into Being Nice

When Gavin Newsom stuttering at Trump about science counts as a heroic confrontation, something really awful has happened

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I personally do not care about convincing Republicans like Donald Trump that climate change is real. The vast majority of these holdouts know and simply don’t care that climate change is real. People who are obstacles must be driven from power, not won over. So while Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, for instance, has been won over—he acknowledges that climate change is real and a problem—he is nonetheless an obstacle because he has rejected even modest attempts to do anything about it. So it would give me great joy to see my fellow climate change believer Lindsey Graham vanquished this November, which might happen.

And I also don’t think Democrats like California Governor Gavin Newsom are any better than Lindsey Graham if they won’t exercise powers available to them that would reduce the supply of fossil fuels, which Newsom refuses to do.

But it struck me the other day that Newsom apparently felt compelled to confront President Trump about climate change when the big man visited my state to look at the smoke in the sky and pretend that he cares or is doing something about it.

The exchange is idiotic. The president sits there with his arms folded, frowning, while Newsom issues a halting, dry-mouthed appeal to make Trump acknowledge a “difference of opinion,” to which Trump mutters “sure.” It’s laughable. There’s no content to it at all. But I’ll concede that it qualifies as a confrontation (that’s how it’s being marketed anyway) so the style is new, or at least unusual.

This is a surprise because pop culture has been successfully dictating the terms environmentalists are allowed to operate under since the 80s—my whole lifetime. The basic message has been this: You may care about the environment, and in fact it is good to do so, but it is urgent that you not disturb ordinary, decent people who do not care. Insanely enough, environmentalists accepted this deal somehow until 2019.

I’ve been thinking about this change in attitude ever since I saw Greta Thunberg yell “how dare you?” at the collection of thumb-twiddling elites at the UN Climate Change Summit last year. It’s always been so normal to “lead by example,” and so alien to get in anyone’s face. It’s no mystery how Greta Thunberg works her magic (the secret is “yelling”), but I’ve been fixated on how we all got scammed into not talking like Greta Thunberg for the past four decades, particularly in the US.

The climate views of most people my age solidified around 2006, the year Al Gore’s TED Talk called An Inconvenient Truth became a blockbuster documentary (for reasons I’ll never quite fathom), and certain liberal elites started to make caring about climate change into their thing. But it was crucial not to be like the smug Jew from this 2006 episode of South Park:

Bill McKibben, who is always ahead of the curve, wrote about this in a 2006 article for Grist. One of the purposes of the article was to lay out his functional definition of “those who truly get global warming”:

By get, I don’t mean understanding the chemistry of carbon dioxide, or the importance of the Kyoto Protocol, or something like that—pretty much everyone who thinks of themselves as an environmentalist has reached that point. By get, I mean understanding that the question is of transcending urgency, that it represents the one overarching global civilizational challenge that humans have ever faced. That it’s as big as the Bomb.

McKibben is making a very important distinction here, and it’s a point that’s been communicated very poorly ever since global warming activism started. Sounding the alarm about warming is different from other forms of environmentalism because of its extraordinarily urgent implications for near-term material reality. There will always be patchouli-stinking treehuggers who prefer flowers to buildings. Climate change has nothing to do with this preference. A hotter earth imperils both the flower and the building.

The second purpose of McKibben’s article was to relay to the reader a little problem McKibben was having at the time, which was that he was having a hard time being nice lately. But as someone who “gets” global warming, he was “willing to be a bit of a jerk” in order to do something about it, he wrote.

The news item that inspired this article is pretty appalling in retrospect, and it goes to show how feeble the climate movement was at the time: In Massachusetts in 2006, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is now known as an infamous non-understander of science, was using his platform as a senior lawyer for the National Resources Defense Council, not to mention a member of a famous American political dynasty, to write a New York Times op-ed opposing a wind farm off the coast of Cape Cod.

His reasons were a big salad of treehugger cliches: fishermen would get confused and somehow get tangled in the cables, sea birds would be slaughtered en masse, and natural beauty would be desecrated. In short, he was being a flowers-over-buildings environmentalist, and disregarding what McKibben calls the “transcending urgency” of climate change.

“[T]he project will damage the views from 16 historic sites and lighthouses on the cape and nearby islands,” RFK, Jr. wrote. Cape Cod might be able to spend the majority of its year fully-powered without its energy grid generating any greenhouse gases, but the view from Cape Cod would look all windmill-y, which would be awful.

McKibben writes that he nonetheless considers RFK, Jr. a “great environmentalist.” Nevermind that, like Lindsey Graham, he’s really an obstruction disguised as an ally. McKibben’s willingness “to be a bit of a jerk” in 2006 takes the following form: McKibben signs an open letter to RFK, Jr. from a group of environmentalists, saying, in part, “We are now writing to respectfully request that you reconsider your position against the vitally important Cape Wind project.”

McKibben isn’t enough of a jerk to write something like “RFK, Jr. is a fucking maniac,” which he demonstrably is. He doesn’t speculate—as I’m willing to—that some Nantucket real estate developers may have gotten to him. (To be fair, The Daily Kos blogged suspiciously about RFK, Jr.’s crooked motives at the time).

And you can probably guess what happened next: the wind farm project went down in flames. Then for more than a decade it kept getting resurrected as a possibility, and RFK, Jr. kept on standing athwart the project, popping up in public yet again in 2011 to voice his opposition. Then the project died again, probably for the last time, in 2017. Just one wind project of many that never happened.

And by the way, in 2019 Cape Cod got a brand new gas and diesel-powered generating station (it replaces an older, similar gas and diesel-powered station that was slightly more obsolete than the new one). That’s what makes the sinking of a wind farm, or a desert solar array, or whatever, so enervating: they’re viewed as optional. We can just get our energy from fossil fuels. Wind farms and solar arrays have pros and cons. Never mind that fossil fuels just simply have to stop existing.

This is because the cart and horse of the energy formula are chronically reversed in the world of climate activism. The nice thing to do is innovate new energy options and make them economically appealing. It’s too much to demand that the power plants destroying the earth be shut off, which is the only way to begin to solve this problem. Instead, the free market must coax them off with better options, like wind, and only when its cheap, and doesn’t bum out beach house owners in Massachusetts.

It’s insane how long it’s taken us to come to a coherent plan that is appropriately dickish to the institutions and stakeholders that are holding us back from a long-term livable world. It’s like we’re just now realizing in the past year or so that the offending power plants have to die. Coal and natural gas and everything else that emits greenhouse gases is going away, and that’s the irreversible, non-negotiable program from now on. You’d better get on board with things like wind and solar because they’re the only game in town. Oh, widdle diaper baby misses coal? Here’s a pacifier you little fucking poopy-pants baby. Coal is dead, but feel free to cry about it.

These would be nasty things to say, yes. Appropriately nasty. It’s amazing that we’re just now getting here.

In retrospect, this was an immensely powerful scam perpetrated at least in part by pop culture, and climate people made themselves complicit by playing along. I’m sure Ed Begley Jr., for instance, was just being a good sport about this when he played himself on a 1999 episode of The Simpsons that parodied him as a smug, rich environmentalist who bragged about driving “a go-kart powered by my own sense of self-satisfaction.” But Begley’s public persona has involved living in a private, environmentalist utopia of his own making since the 80s, so the parody fits.

But the environmental cause presented in that episode of The Simpsons (which is, like South Park, a cartoon TV show) is a patch of trees facing deforestation. In other words it’s the classic, Lorax-style, broad-strokes outline for an environmentalist TV show plot. In our simplest fiction, old-timey knights fight _______ (answer: dragons); charismatic thieves steal _______ (answer: big, honking diamonds); and annoying do-gooders protest ________ (pretty forests that are about to be bulldozed). Why mess with plots that work just because global warming is about a million times as urgent as the local patch of woodlands being turned into a mall that—let’s face it—most Americans will enjoy more than a bunch of trees anyway?

With the benefit of hindsight, this trope is part of how the planet got so fucked, and in the US context, Reaganism is a big culprit. As far as I can tell, it was easy and fun to ride the ascendant political wave back then and identify as someone who saw through the bullshit of these kinds of touchy-feely TV plots and got things done, regardless of how it made liberals feel. This meant lumping everything with a whiff of environmentalism—conservation, recycling, litter-reduction—into one big bucket, and tossing it out. “Haha, we just tore the solar panels off the White House. Screw you, Iron Eyes Cody.” Once Carter was gone and the gas crisis was over, this was the overt strategy, according to a 1987 AP story. Reagan and his acolytes were perceived as getting the economy back online, and compulsory conservation "can impose substantial unnecessary costs on the economy," the administration wrote in a 1985 energy report.

And it’s easy enough to swallow Reagan’s environmental profligacy when environmentalists are just sensitive people who prefer that things be greener in a vague sort of way. Convincing 80s liberals to be nice about the environment was as simple as convincing Americans the economy is material reality, and the environment is a fuzzy parallel dimension that doesn’t actually matter.

Yes, this was—overtly and literally—the actual idea that liberals were taught to accept. I found something very close to a smoking gun for this in my deep dive: a 1989 episode of Family Ties called “Rain Forests Keep Fallin’ On My Head” that uses all of these tropes, and before I give you the plot details, keep in mind that this was a show watched by 1/3 of all US households. Here’s a brief report on this fascinating vintage TV artifact:

Jennifer, the over-earnest liberal who takes after her ex-hippie parents gets home from school after being converted to radical environmentalism by a science unit on ecology. She introduces her new mission by unfolding a map of the “world’s most endangered areas.” Alex, the witty Reaganite right-winger of the family inspects the map and says “Alright, I’m safe. What’s for dinner?”

Jennifer has turned into the type of delusional person a nice environmentalist must not be: someone who can’t cope with reality because of a preference for purity, someone with a free-floating paranoia about health, and then also someone who is worried about the world coming to an end. As the episode unfolds, Jennifer becomes overwhelmed, and then depressed, because environmental havoc is everywhere.

She makes the family throw out cleaners and hair products. She’s afraid of computers. She’s worried about carcinogenic radon gas in the basement. She wears a N-95-style mask indoors, funnily enough:

She’s worried about the whales. She insists on not using the stove because it emits dangerous gases into the house. She’s alarmed by styrofoam takeout containers. She’s worried about UV rays from the sun (I don’t know any environmentalists who are anti-sun). She makes people stop emitting ozone layer-destroying fluorocarbons with hairspray. And yes, she also opposes the use of fossil fuels, although her reason is hilariously inaccurate: she thinks warming will happen when carbon emissions cause a cloud of CO2 that surrounds the rest of the atmosphere.

The family is so greatly inconvenienced that Jennifer is finally coaxed into visiting her school counsellor, but he’s no help. In the funniest twist in the episode, Jennifer shatters his psyche and he ends up worse off than her. “Let’s face it; it’s over!” he says.

When Jennifer says she doesn’t agree that it’s over, he demands proof. “What could we possibly do to change anything?” he says.

What happens after he asks this question is the smoking gun I’m talking about: the camera just holds on Jennifer’s face and fades to the next scene, as if he’s made a great point. We, the audience, are left with the impression that there was not an incredibly succinct answer, provided moments earlier in that very scene when Jennifer talks about ceasing the use of fossil fuels.

Then there’s a well-intentioned scene where she has a nice talk with her parents and they encourage her to not lose faith, and hey maybe try and become the head of Greenpeace someday. The end. It’s a sitcom, so in the next episode everything goes back to normal. Again, 1/3 of American households were watching this when it aired.

I’m not sure which came first: delusional Cassandras who absolutely must be taught to keep it to themselves, or characters on TV who embody those delusional Cassandras, whom the public can point to as cautionary tales. In either case, the argument for acting on climate got lost in the shuffle. That’s environmentalist stuff, and in this economy there simply is no time to deal with it, but here’s a head pat, keep up the good work, champ, as long as you’re quiet about it.

The Alex P. Keatons of the world are now into QAnon, and would never read this newsletter, because it is Soros-funded Antifa propaganda. But if they were reading, I would point them to this map the failing New York Times just published, which is similar to the one Jennifer shows Alex in “Rain Forests Keep Fallin’ On My Head,” except it lets no one off the hook. The climate has now changed, and it is continuing to change, for the worse. Ecological disaster is now material reality, and it’s Alex’s precious economy that exists in a fuzzy alternate dimension. Climate people really fucked up by not shouting this from the rooftops a long time ago.

The hairsprays Jennifer didn’t want the Keatons to buy because of the hole in the ozone layer? She was right about that. But the good news is that it didn’t matter whether or not the Keatons bought it. It got banned. And the ban worked. Fuck your free market, Alex. Now we need to do the same thing with fossil fuels. Cry about it. I don’t care.

Protesters now regularly get arrested trespassing at coal power plants. Bill McKibben got himself arrested last year too because he was being “a bit of a jerk” at a protest. This sort of thing works. It’s probably the only thing that works. TV writers should take note.

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