The GWPF gets into Culture Wars

 ‘Climate catastrophism has triumphed’, says Andy West in ‘The Grip of Culture,’ a new contrarian book published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF). He says that this is terrible news since ‘its hi-jacking of the authority of science has enabled it to corrupt the entire policy arena,’ including energy policy. It’s bad enough that the idea of a global catastrophe, which he says is ‘unsupported by climate science’, is being spread widely, but it has also ‘overridden rational discourse, replacing technical justifications for renewables with social (moral and subjective) ones, which technical authors are ill-equipped to analyse’. 

However, he says some are fighting back, for example in the renewables area. Thus he notes that geologist, climate scientist & energy analyst David Archibald, who sees renewables motivation as ‘religious’, says ‘the only reason solar & wind get a look-in is because solar panels & wind turbines are made using energy from coal at $0.04 per kWh and turn out power at $0.20 per kWh…You can’t use solar & wind power to make solar & wind power equipment; as such they are neither renewable nor sustainable. And they certainly won’t be replacing fossil fuels when the fossil fuels run out’.

In similar vein West quotes Michael Shellenberger (a devout nuclear believer!) saying ‘for me the question now is, now that we know that renewables can’t save the planet, are we going to keep letting them destroy it?’ And, perhaps a little oddly, West also says that ‘many countries with lower annual sunshine hours tend to deploy more solar capacity per capita than sunnier places. The overall effect is that much more solar power is installed in those geographies where it is least useful!’

West clearly thinks that all sort of problems and allegedly poor choices can be traced back to the climate catastrophe view. He says it has ‘a huge influence upon society overall’ and ‘it is the dominant factor in shaping public attitudes to climate change’. And he looks at some examples of what he sees as problematic views and orientations with what he calls the Catastrophe Narrative, with coverage of, amongst other things, climate action proselytising by Greta Thunberg and some of the wilder extremes of climate paranoia. He complains about ‘inappropriately scaring millions of children’. 

Certainly the threat can at times be overstated- using worst cases as if they were inevitable. While some do have apocalyptic views, we need to keep things in perspective- it’s a matter of balance. West says that climate cataclysm is ‘not supported by mainstream science, and owes its success only to emotive engagement’. Well, there are scenarios in which things get very bad fast, and the impacts can still be horrendous even in milder variants. So it’s not surprising that there is widespread belief amongst both young and old that some degree of climate change is real and that action is urgent. 

In response, West goes beyond simple critical commentary on the extreme climate narrative, and on to a complicated analysis of culture theory and the deeper causality of wider climate belief and associated ideas of ecological morality. For example, he tries to test correlations between religiosity, support for green ideas and other millennial and cultural factors. 

However, at least for someone not too familiar with social science methods and culture theory, and the mechanics of constrained choice statistical analysis, it’s hard going and the correlations sometimes seem confusing. But he seem convinced from the results that religion is the main factor shaping climate change belief patterns in all countries. That’s hard to accept. What about politics - with there often being a correlation between them, as well as other cultural factors? Surely it’s going to be a complex social and cultural interaction? 

Maybe it’s just semantics though –and perhaps we can all agree it’s about ideology!  Thus  when West comes down to specifics, he says ‘although wind turbines and solar panels do actually produce some electricity, they are nevertheless essentially cultural icons; their electricity is a by-product’. That’s as a big jump. And not a big step then from saying they are the ‘work of the devil’, and the product of an evil culture. And there was me thinking that it was nuclear power that was the demon! 

I leave it to you to decide where, as he claims, it’s all explained in his ‘straightforward model of cultural causation’ and ‘the ambivalent relationship between climate catastrophism and religion’. I’m not convinced. Nevertheless, there are some interesting ideas in here, for example on critical scepticism, which, we can all agree, is vital for good science, even if its twin, denialism, can be a problem. 

So, even if climate denialism can be annoying at times, delaying progress, GWPF’s efforts to open up doubts about views and policies arguably do have some value. It’s important that rival views are heard and not cancelled. And that applies to all sides of the debate, and, for example, to the common right wing/contrarian view that there is a monolithic ‘green blob’ driving us in ever more 'wokish' ways. We need to avoid tribal thinking.

It’s interesting, in this context, to look at the UKERC’s new Public Engagement Observatory report on how citizen-led movements are in fact driving growing public engagement with the net zero transition in a variety of ways. And it says that recent rises in activism, citizen assemblies, technology demonstrations, and digital engagement, ‘highlight the different plural publics engaging in these processes’. Indeed it should be obvious that there can be conflicts and divergences amongst the various strands of what’s called wokeness. All very pluralistic.  Unless you think that really it’s all a covert elite conspiracy…or, alternatively, just a set of crazy ideas destined to fail, maybe painfully, but then to go away.

Faced with continuing climate change denial and hostility to renewable solutions, it is easy for green progressives to get cynical and disengage from debates over wider climate issues and policy conflicts. There is, after all, plenty of urgent and generally agreed practical stuff to get on with, and it’s already looking quite good in relation to renewables.  As Amory Lovins has noted, ‘renewables have already taken around 95% of the world market for net capacity additions, versus nuclear’s less than 1% (and in seven of the past 13 years, less than 0%). PV [photovoltaic] and wind power are the cheapest bulk power source in over 91% of the world and rising (says BloombergNEF), with three to eight times (Lazard) or 5-13 times (BloombergNEF) lower LCOE than nuclear. IPCC [the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] also says the demand side can provide 40%–70% of global decarbonization.’ 

However, it’s also true that fossil fuel use globally is rising, as are emissions from industry.  We are not really confronting the issue of uncontrolled economic growth. But neither are the likes of GWPF. Indeed, when greens do try to do that, they get even more hostility from contrarians, often replete with images of us having return to cave-dwelling frugality. As some more hopeful green analysts and strategists have suggested, it does not have to be like that, but there’s surely no denying that things have got to change. That’s maybe just what GWPF are afraid of!