Eco-fundamentalists compare themselves to Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King and suffragette martyrs.
The ink had hardly dried on my latest column, on apocalyptic sensationalism in the media based on exaggeration, deception or outright lies, when Leonie Joubert, a contributor to Daily Maverick’s Our Burning Planet climate desk, penned a heart-rending missive about the plight of climate activists and martyrs for the cause.
I referenced Joubert in that column as the virtue-signalling, self-professed eco-socialist who, despite enjoying a high-profile platform with the heavily editorialised name Our Burning Planet, still complains that climate stories take a backseat to ‘apex beats’ like ‘politics, business, health, even sports’, and that the beat ‘doesn’t have cash or cachet’.
This is, of course, a preposterous claim. The section for which she writes was created because giving climate reporting a high profile made commercial sense, especially at a publication that relies heavily on reader funding. That’s ‘cachet’. It also attracted generous corporate funding. That’s ‘cash’.
In her latest contribution to humanity’s collected wisdom, Joubert discusses ‘going overboard’ in the name of climate activism.
She compares activists to Martin Luther King, who fought (and died) for civil rights in the United States, Nelson Mandela, who spent 27 years in prison for sabotage in the liberation struggle for South Africa, and Emily Davison, a suffragette who died by walking out onto the racetrack in front of a horse belonging to King George V. (The horse was okay. The jockey was hospitalised.)
She describes these three idols as not ‘doing it to one day be on the right side of history’, but ‘doing what is right, at that moment in time, so that we can have a world less cruel and exploitative’.
She glosses over what, exactly, is ‘right’, implying that the ends justified the means.
Was Davison’s participation in bombing and arson campaigns ‘right’? Was Mandela’s support of an armed struggle that included civilian targets ‘right’? Were the more than 20 000 lives lost in the People’s War ‘right’?
Would King, who persisted with peaceful civil disobedience and never turned to violence, appreciate being named in the same breath as Mandela and Davison?
Self-immolation
Joubert’s peace opens with a paean to David Buckel, a human rights lawyer and an environmental activist focusing on composting, who died by setting himself on fire in 2018 in protest against the use of hydrocarbon fuels.
He, Joubert writes, went ‘too far’, ‘[j]udging by the reception of the rising wave of climate demonstrations around the world’.
What she means to say is that he went too far in the opinion of the media and the general public, but not in Joubert’s own opinion. In her opinion, he’s a courageous martyr for the cause.
She writes that the same is true for throwing soup at irreplaceable artworks, a rant from an anxiety-ridden schoolgirl from one of the wealthiest countries on Earth at the United Nations, or protesters blocking public roads. She disdains what she believes to be the popular view that these actions were too radical, too angry, or too inconvenient.
(I’m not convinced that this is the popular view. Greta Thunberg, for example, seems to be mighty popular with both the public and the press. In fact, Joubert’s own editor once refused to publish a column of mine because I was critical of her, which he thought amounted to bullying a defenceless little girl.)
‘Civil disobedience is already here, where activists are breaking the law peacefully in the interests of the common good, like the Extinction Rebellion sit-in at Standard Bank’s Johannesburg head offices this month…’ she writes (my italics).
The point of her story is to lament the treatment of climate activists, who are ‘spat on, insulted, and even charged with terrorism’ when they… let’s see… trespass on private property, forcibly disrupt commuter traffic, and commit ‘arson, using home-made fire-bombs to torch buildings and equipment’.
Poor little activists!
Entitled
Writing about an unspecified incident during a ‘road sit-in’ in Europe somewhere (perhaps this one), Joubert says, ‘Drivers feel it is their right to physically assault protesters, an act of harmful criminality, in response to a non-violent act of civil disobedience’.
The only entitled people at that sit-in were the protesters, who ‘feel it is their right’ to physically prevent people from going about their business. Such coercive behaviour is neither legal nor non-violent.
Dismissing the blocking of roads as a mere ‘inconvenience’, Joubert slyly omits the statement of one of the drivers: ‘I have to go to hospital… stop interfering with us.’
Activists have a right to protest. They do not have the right to detain innocent bystanders and prevent them from going where they need to be.
Doing so has consequences. Employers might not look kindly on latecomers. Workers on shifts are denied relief. Deadlines are missed, with potentially expensive consequences. Drivers or their passengers might need to go to hospital. Police might need to get through the congestion to attend to crime, failing which there might be deadly consequences.
Yet the protesters think only of their own supposed rights to impose their will and opinion upon the general public.
If they choose to break the law and disrupt public order, or to firebomb their corporate enemies, they should expect to be ‘spat on, insulted, and even charged with terrorism’. This isn’t persecution. That is merely justice.
Extinction
Joubert asks, rhetorically: ‘How far is too far when the endpoint is extinction?’
Well, that’s a very, very big assumption.
If, indeed, that were the endpoint, perhaps armed struggle and coercive protest might be warranted. But is it?
According to climate activists, perhaps, but not according to real climate scientists.
Even the most persistent alarmists among them, like Michael E. Mann, a leading climatologist at the University of Pennsylvania and inventor of the infamous ‘hockey stick’ chart, say: ‘There is no evidence of climate change scenarios that would render human beings extinct.’
‘No evidence.’
That phrase should make a journalist’s blood run cold, but then, Joubert is an activist journalist. For activist journalists, the truth doesn’t really matter. All that matters is to spur action in support of their personal beliefs. They’re little more than glorified public relations agents for Big Green and environmental lobby groups.
And they are beliefs, not facts.
Libyan floods
‘What would Derna say,’ asks Joubert, rhetorically. ‘I wonder what the people of Derna have to say about all of this bluff and bluster around soup and famous paintings and a few hours of traffic bottlenecks?’
Derna is a city in Libya that was hit hard by floods earlier this month. Well over 10 000 people lost their lives.
Of course, Joubert didn’t bother to investigate why there were deadly floods in Derna. Activist journalists are like talking toys, with a button labelled ‘Why?’, that only ever chant, ‘Climate change!’
There was an unusually strong storm in the Mediterranean at the time, and it brought with it heavy rainfall. But it caused only 28 deaths in Greece, Turkey and Bulgaria combined, where the storm struck before turning towards Libya.
So why was the latter so much harder hit? And why was the flooding in Derna so catastrophic, but not so in Benghazi, where the storm first made landfall?
Such questions are very complicated, and require extensive research. By which I mean doing an internet search and reading a few news articles.
‘The huge deaths and destruction in Derna have been, initially at least, attributed to the failure of Derna’s two dams,’ reported the Libya Herald. ‘The dams had needed maintenance but were overlooked.’
‘I’m shocked,’ as Cyril Ramaphosa would say.
Most casualties could have been avoided, according to Petteri Taalas, head of the World Meteorological Organisation, if only Libya had a ‘normal operating meteorological service’ to issue warnings.
‘Derna is prone to flooding,’ reported CNN, ‘and its dam reservoirs have caused at least five deadly floods since 1942, the latest of which was in 2011, according to a research paper published by Libya’s Sebha University last year. The two dams that burst on Monday were built around half a century ago, between 1973 and 1977… Those dams haven’t undergone maintenance since 2002, the city’s deputy mayor Ahmed Madroud told Al Jazeera. But the problems with the dams were known. The Sebha University paper warned that the dams in Derna had a “high potential for flood risk” and that periodic maintenance is needed to avoid “catastrophic” flooding.’
So, the cause of the catastrophe wasn’t climate change. It was poor maintenance and bad governance. It was entirely predictable.
Perhaps we can attribute it, instead, to Hillary Clinton’s violent overthrow of Muammar al’Qadaffi’s regime in 2011. ‘Protecting civilians,’ she called it.
No evidence
Joubert also points to cyclones in northern Mozambique and flooding in KwaZulu-Natal to justify mocking the ‘inconvenience’ of law-breaking climate protests.
Again, however, she’s making claims with no evidence.
Here is how Working Group I of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in its Sixth Assessment Report (UN IPCC 6AR WGI, for those who speak bureaucratese) summarised the scientific evidence.
This is a table of climate impact drivers (things that have negative consequences, like storms, floods, droughts and so on), along with the evidence for a perceptible signal in the data that changes have already emerged above the natural variability of the past.
The first column indicates signals about the present, while the second and third prognosticate about anticipated signals in the future. Orange cells indicate increases, and blue cells indicate decreases.
Pay attention to the white cells, however. White cells indicate where evidence is lacking or the signal is not present, leading to overall low confidence of an emerging signal.
You’ll notice that alongside tropical cyclones, severe wind storms, floods and heavy precipitation, there are white cells, indicating that there is no evidence of a signal that anything other than natural variability is in play.
The same is true for fires, droughts, sea-level change, and most other ‘extreme weather’ phenomena other than simple changes in temperature extremes.
That table supports the scientific evidence I cited in my previous column, on heatwaves, on wildfires, on droughts, and on floods. (Hat tip to Tsholofelo Pooe who posted an adapted version of that table on X.)
And there’s that term, again: ‘no evidence’.
On the basis of ‘no evidence’, Joubert is defending the commission of crimes to protest against whatever doomsday scenario the activists have cooked up in their feverish imaginations.
Religion
Twenty years ago, the late Michael Crichton gave a speech at the Commonwealth Club, in which he likened environmentalism to religion.
In sanctifying martyrs for the cause, in the persecution complex that Joubert appears to harbour, and in the faith-based claims she makes, her climate activism certainly does have parallels with religious fundamentalism.
It isn’t a good look. As Crichton said: ‘Environmentalism needs to be absolutely based in objective and verifiable science, it needs to be rational, and it needs to be flexible. And it needs to be apolitical.’
Coercive and unlawful ‘direct action’, or worse, choosing to die for the cause, go much too far, especially since ‘the endpoint’, contra Joubert, is not human extinction.
[Image: Children enlighten their elders at a FridaysForFuture school strike in Berlin, 2019. Photo by Leonhard Lenz]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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