SUNDAY, 20 APRIL 2025

When I was teaching in Vietnam, I remember the subject of climate change came up in the staffroom one day. It’s embarrassing when I recall it now because I strongly disagreed with the other teachers in being what environmentalists call a ‘denier’ (although I hate this word because of its connotations with people who say the Holocaust never happened, and therefore I much prefer ‘sceptic’). I argued that the idea that human beings could change the climate of the entire globe was typical of the arrogance of our species, believing that we’re so special that we can alter the future of the whole planet. What makes the memory rather shaming is the confidence with which I said this after having read a few articles about things like the medieval warm period. I was shooting off my mouth with very little evidence, like the worst type of YouTube pseudo-intellectual pontificating about a Marxism he has never even bothered to study in any depth. One of my fellow teachers accused me of being contrarian, and in retrospect he was almost certainly right.

OK, confession over. I’m no longer a sceptic: I’m now convinced that climate change is real and homo sapiens is almost surely the main cause. But if I’m honest, I still can’t say that I get all that worked up about it and I share little of the terrified concern that many people feel. Ironically, if we’re talking carbon footprint, I’m probably on the side of the angels these days in that I don’t drive a car, I hardly ever buy consumer goods unless the ones I have are broken, I wear clothes until they are faded and falling apart, I haven’t been on a plane for almost five years, I rarely eat meat, I use a fan rather than AC, and I put all my trash into the designated bags. But I can’t claim I do this to save the planet: my actions are simply the result of my personal lifestyle preferences. Any pretence that this is noble sacrifice on my part would be a self-promoting lie.

And that’s often the problem: we do what we want to do and dress it up in noble motives afterwards. The truth is that I don’t really care very much about the future of the planet. I will soon be dead, I have no children or grandkids to worry about, and most of my close friends are more or less my age, so they won’t suffer if or when the planet cooks. I know this sounds selfish and short-sighted, but I think Hume was right to say that we feel the pain of a splinter in our finger more than we do the destruction of a whole world if it doesn’t personally affect us. It’s easy to parade our moral virtue when it doesn’t really cost us, and I’ve known lots of people who lectured me about climate change, patted themselves on the back for being ethical consumers, buying eco-produce and saving the globe, and yet took three or four foreign holidays a year on long-haul flights, the latter morally justified by the dubious practice of carbon offset. At heart we all say one thing and do another (and the tragic thing is that those who don’t share this hypocrisy are often the most monstrous of us all).

A second reason that I can’t get very worked up about climate change is a sense of helplessness. In the modern world, we have a surfeit of information from a range of different media but generally all this does is create anxiety because it traps us in an atomised system in which it becomes extremely difficult for individuals to take meaningful action on a collective level. We just sit in front of our screens and either fret or fume. As a result, we have little option but to look after our own interests, but what makes sense for an individual (owning a private car) does not necessarily make sense for the collective (who all end up stuck in traffic jams in polluted, hellish cities). This leads to widepsread cynicism, as politicians who fly around the globe in private jets advise us to minimise our more limited use of finite resources. They urge us not to buy SUVs and to turn off our air-conditioning, to make everyday sacrifices to save the planet, while the governments of which they are part – especially those which should take the strongest action because their countries are the biggest consumers of fossil fuels – do little except trot out hollow, self-serving exhortation.     

Another reason I don’t focus much on climate change is that I think there are more pressing worries, specifically the emergence of a world in which the divine right of billionaires is taking chunks out of democracy and doing all it can to remove the human rights we have clawed back over the centuries from the monkeys on top of the tree. If surviving climate change means living in a neo-fascist globe where decency and the rule of impartial law no longer exist, the game isn’t worth the candle in my opinion, and the vast majority of human beings will be better off never being born. Frankly, I get a kind of pleasure from knowing that the oligarchs will fry just like the rest of us if the planet goes up in flames (unless their fantasies of a colony on Mars or their consciousness being downloaded onto software ever become more than fantasies). I know this sounds vengeful and self-defeating, and people will argue that saving the planet trumps even the fight against the oligarchs, but, as the sacrifices of the generation before mine against Nazism show, and despite the claims of evolutionary biologists, sometimes there are things that are even more important than survival.

Will humanity survive if the earth heats up by six degrees? Probably, in a few isolated places, like the jungles of New Guinea or the frozen fringes of the Arctic. But what we like to call advanced civilisation, possibly not. Does that really matter? From our human perspective, of course it does, but from the perspective of a Martian observer, not in the slightest. Even if our species becomes extinct, this is merely what has happened to 99.9% of all the species that have ever existed (according to my extensive research: i.e. Wikipedia). What would make us so tragically special if we go the way of the dodo?

This is where environmentalism falls prey to double standards and questionable logic in my opinion. One of its favourite arguments is that homo sapiens is just another species, no more relevant or important than a warthog or a worm, and therefore even if we have the power to dominate the planet we should refrain from doing so, since unlike other creatures at the top of the food chain such as the tiger or shark, we have this special quality of moral agency. This turns us into custodians of the earth and imposes on us a responsibility to take care of the globe, including plants and non-human animals. In short, we should cease to be anthropocentric and embrace posthuman thinking, although the idea that we are a uniquely moral species is anthropocentric in itself. Why should we be the only species which can choose to act against our nature in this way if we are nothing more than a vehicle for our genes? The reality is that whatever happens to us, even if we are wiped out as a species, the planet will be fine. It will go on spinning. In many ways, I suspect it may thrive as it shakes off this cancer that is destroying it, and our absence will almost certainly be beneficial for biodiversity.

I must admit that I’m far from comfortable with the arguments I make in the previous paragraph. The truth is that we have to believe we matter even if cool, objective thinking suggests that we don’t, if only for a variation on the famous argument that if there is no God, all is permitted, which in this case would definitely include the slide into worldwide fascism. There are lies, or at least empty platitudes, that are necessary if we want to lead a life that is bearable, but that doesn’t stop them being platitudes. A stronger argument against much of what I wrote in the previous paragraph is that I’m creating a false binary between the struggle to reverse climate change and the fight against fascism, when in truth they are interrelated: we live in this fractured world in which we are destroying the planet because of the attraction of the strong leader and the lure of populist demagoguery that this will always entail, so we can never reverse climate change without silencing the poisonous lorelei of neo-fascism. I’m not sure I totally buy into this idea that the two struggles are actually just one, but the argument is definitely worth debating.

To conclude, I know this essay opens me up to the charge of nihilism, but I really believe we need to stop pretending that we care so deeply about climate change because the evidence suggests that most of us don’t. Or, if we do care, it’s only up to the point where it negatively impacts on our own wishes and desires. Or perhaps it’s simply a lack of imagination, our habituation to the reality around us right now, our inability to think beyond this. Whatever the reason, we must stop saying what we believe sounds like the right thing to say and begin to genuinely care if anything is ever going to change. But even if this personal epiphany takes place and we start to genuinely push to try to force substantive action by our governments, this needs to be global and systemic or very little will actually alter. The problem is that it’s almost impossible to imagine this happening in a world of competing nations run by leaders drunk on their power over a population that remains so stubbornly tribal. In that sense the evolutionists are probably right: for all our much-vaunted intelligence as a species, we can never transcend both our basic biology and our inability to organise smartly as a collective.