Many friends who are part of the sustainability movement love the cartoon ‘but what if it’s a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?’. I don’t. Basically, if you think climate denialists shouldn’t lie to get the world they want, and/or if you think we shouldn’t imply we’d lie to get what we want, then you shouldn’t use this cartoon.
Earlier today a friend shared the cartoon above, saying it gets sharper every year. I object to the cartoon, and think environmentalists using it is part of the problem, for reasons I’ll explain below.
I’m something of a lone voice here. The cartoon is so widely used that it has its own wikipedia page. Joel Pett created it for USA Today in December of 2009, and says that he regularly gets asked by environmental groups to use it.
The concept is simple, as Pett himself says: “I was thinking, you know, ‘It doesn’t matter if global warming were a hoax, if the scientists made it up, we still have to do all that shit.'”
it is popular with environmentalists because it encapsulates a view which is dominant in the movement: creating all these green and social outcomes is inevitable, obvious and necessary. Not everyone thinks that or behaves that way. But many do, with the implication that ‘we are right, and everyone else will come round to us when they really think about it.’
But I think the premise of the cartoon — and the beliefs of many environmentalists that it expresses — are flawed in several ways.
We are not creating a better world for ‘nothing’. We all know, there is a lot of effort to create the particular ‘better world’ described. That’s effort which could have been avoided or directed differently. The justification for the extra effort is that doing nothing differently brings huge risks and costs. If it’s just a hoax, then that justification for the extra effort goes.
Who are we to define what a better world is for everyone else? We think the list on the presentation slide is an obviously ‘better world’ (certainly I do), But other people have other values and preferences. Many people feel like they have had things imposed on them from powerful elites (there’s a reason why the Leave campaign slogan was ‘take back control’). This cartoon says “we environmentalists are happy to act as elites that just impose our version of a better world on you.”
Evidence matters. It is a sense that lefty tree huggers always say the world is ending that undermines people respecting the latest scientific evidence. If you want people to follow the evidence, then we should care if it is a big hoax (or the evidence is being spun beyond the max).
Most important: being willing to use a big hoax is an atrocious way to influence society. There is a history of using a Big Lie to manipulate populations, and it is a pretty terrible one. The idea is “the use of a lie so ‘colossal’ that no one would believe that someone ‘could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously'” is from…Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
Of course, climate science isn’t a Big Lie. I say this as someone who was taught climate change as settled science in 1997 as part of my physics degree. The evidence that humans are causing climate change is as strong, if not stronger, than smoking causes cancer.
But the cartoon is saying that environmentalists would be willing to use a Big Lie to get what they want.
If you’re happy with using a hoax to change the course of civilisation in the direction you prefer, then, for instance, you can’t criticise Trump for saying the recent US Presidential election was fixed. Or various American industrialists for being Merchants of Doubt on climate science, and so deliberately slowing change to prolong profitable but unsustainable status quo (what Alex Steffen calls ‘predatory delay‘).
You might be thinking: but the environmentalists are acting for a better future for everyone, and those industrialists are just protecting themselves. Yes, there are differences of degree.
But if you act as if ‘the ends justify the means’, then don’t be surprised if others do too. Other people believe they are acting for a better world, just a different one from yours. That’s what diversity means. If you value diversity — and most sustainability folk claim they do — then that needs to be demonstrated in your end goals and the means to achieve them.
If you say that you are fine with having a hoax deliver the world you want, then why should others trust you? Why shouldn’t they create hoaxes of their own to protect what they value?
If you’ve shown you are willing to conspire against the existing order to get your better future, why shouldn’t people turn to those figures who promise to protect the existing order? (There’s some evidence that the rise nationalists in the US and elsewhere comes from a significant portion of people turning to authoritarians who will return the country to the natural social order.)
When I said this, the response was that I had sucked all the joy out of that. Well, yes. I read it as having unconscious proto-fascist undertones.
As a rule, I don’t want to go around removing joy. But that those acting for global transformation away from a hell of runaway climate change really need to be careful about the messages we use. We won’t succeed if we feed a spectre of ecofascism.
So, let’s stop using the cartoon. Please.
David Bent 
I agree, if we lie and play loose with the facts we lose the right to object when others do likewise.
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Over & over & over & over & over & over & over & over & over & over & over for 40 years it has turned out the ONLY people telling the truth were—& are—progressives. The bipartisan right wing lies every time there are 2 people in a room, & the Republicans are so stark raving bonkers at this point even farts need to come with an automatic rating from the truth meter every member of The Party should wear around his or her neck.
As a conservative ninny it’s no wonder you’ve egregiously disinterpreted the cartoon. We know climate change is real, happening & dangerous. There is absolutely no question about that. The cartoon is ridiculing the conservative belief that it’s not, which started out completely, flabbergastingly, astoundingly absurd & has become more ludicrous every year.
If as it seems, you’re arguing that it’s even infinitesimally possible that a world with abundant, benign, cheap energy supplied by clean safe fast cheap reliable renewable sources, is worse than the one with 7 million dead & tens of millions of ill people every single year, devastating damage to every species on Earth, & with the war, oppression, & autocracy that comes with the fossil resource curse, then being conservative should come with such great shame it would have an LD50 number.
To even mention the phrase “natural order” with the tiniest hint that it involves dictatorial rule by white men is so offensive I have no words. You went way beyond tiny & hints. Fascism is an entirely right wing phenomenon. Every impulse toward a philosophy of nurturing parenting, democracy, equality, involves the vast progressive majority; every impulse toward autocracy and “freedom” as license for the rich to plunder everyone & everything is the impulse of the conservative elite. We are almost there now, the fundamentalist oligarchy of the US has come very very close to utter iron fascism. We all need to do everything we can to prevent both fascism & climate catastrophe; they’re inextricably linked.
Don’t Think of a Elephant, by George Lakoff
A Paradise Built in Hell, by Rebecca Solnit
Bent’s post, when you look at it, prioritizes the resentment he feels from being confronted about his denialism over and above the needs of the planet. He portrays environmentalists as dictatorial in their unwillingness to defer to the corporatist minority. Mr. Bent plainly identifies with the man speaking in the cartoon, and makes the case for his rhetorical opponents just as abundantly. This week new data were presented to the world in which we learned that global ice melt is proceeding far faster than known in 2009 when this cartoon was first published. Quoting from Heather Cox Richardson’s column of today, 4-22-23, here are some words from president Richard M. Nixon in February 1970: “[W]e…have too casually and too long abused our natural environment,” he wrote. “The time has come when we can wait no longer to repair the damage already done, and to establish new criteria to guide us in the future.”
“The tasks that need doing require money, resolve and ingenuity,” Nixon said, “and they are too big to be done by government alone. They call for fundamentally new philosophies of land, air and water use, for stricter regulation, for expanded government action, for greater citizen involvement, and for new programs to ensure that government, industry and individuals all are called on to do their share of the job and to pay their share of the cost.”
So, basically you say:
Anything goes, because “a better world” is in the eye of the beholder. While babbling about the danger of climate change.
And especially people who promote (=lie about) sustainability are subject to “unconscious proto-fascist undertones” and take their cues from Adolf Hitler.
Well, it seems, that you at least got a grasp of you own intellectual predisposition. But don’t project that onto other people.