Calling out the left's self-loathing climate narcissism

...and the right's denialist knee-jerk reaction to it, too.

Here’s a fun experiment you can do in your own time: walk up to a few people in your life and ask them, just off the top of their heads —no googling— to guess what share of greenhouse gas emissions come from developed countries vs. developing countries. 

Try it!

If your experience is like mine, your people will tend to guess that around two-thirds of emissions come from developed countries, and a third from the developing world. Which was last true…in 1970. 

In 2022, the latest year for which the EU has published statistics, those proportions had swapped, with developing countries now accounting for two thirds of emissions, and rich countries for about a third. Emissions from developing countries are growing quickly, while those from developed countries are falling slowly.

This has to be one of the top 3 most important facts in our climate debate. It implies the future of climate doesn’t really depend on what happens in rich countries anymore: the horse left the barn long ago. It’s impossible to have a serious conversation on climate strategy that doesn’t take account of this fact.

And yet pretty much nobody knows it. 

We just ignore it. In my experience, climate people simply refuse to acknowledge it, much less its implications. 

On the contrary, the one thing almost every climate activist seems to agree on is that the climate crisis is caused by people like us: people in rich countries consuming voraciously, voting mindlessly, and behaving atrociously. By fossil fuel companies in the countries where we live acting irresponsibly. By our political leaders making bad choices.

By our blinkered choices, our greed, our irresponsibility. 

I’ve come to think of this mindset as self-loathing narcissism: the blame narratives that suffuse our climate debate must be targeted inward. This dovetails naturally into a broader left critique of a West seen as racist, exploitative, voracious, evil. Plenty of climate activism ends up functioning as just the environmental branch of a broader rejection of the West. 

The determination to keep a critical eye pointed steadfastly at our own navels gives the game away: this not even an environmental critique, as such, but just the environmental branch of a broader left critique. Climate interests Left activists only as long as the focus is narrowly trained on the West, its dysfunctions, its excesses, its insanities. But then, this is true of left discourse in general: name a social ill, you’ll find it interests the left mostly so long as it remains an occasion to practice the arts of self-loathing narcissism.

Not surprisingly, those outside the left see this kind of talk with extreme skepticism. Amid runaway political polarization, plenty of people on the right see this dynamic and conclude “ah-ha, it’s all a giant hoax! I knew it, climate change just more woke nonsense!”

But that’s another mistake — possibly worse than the first. Just because the left can’t pass up the temptation to roll climate into its broader self-loathing denunciations of the west doesn’t mean altering the composition of the atmosphere carries no risks. It carries grave risks, and won’t stop carrying them just because the people telling you so are mostly interested in saying so in the context of their denunciation of the West.

The challenge —and it’s a huge challenge— is to step outside not just the self-loathing narcissism of the left but also outside the self-satisfied denialism of the right. Getting any sort of handle on the climate crisis requires chucking the entire polarized framework. The challenge is to check political ideology at the door and look at the climate crisis the way a climatologist from Mars would look at it. 

This is difficult work. Impossible, some will tell you. We’re so used to processing reality through our chosen ideological lenses, it can feel quite disorienting to try to take them off and look at our reality afresh — without prejudging solutions, without automatic loyalties and making a conscious effort to keep motivated reasoning at bay. 

None of this comes naturally to us. 

But it’s worth a try. 

Because the scientists aren’t wrong: what we’re doing to the atmosphere really is incredibly risky. If we don’t put a realistic climate strategy in place very soon, the climate is likely to become extremely hazardous to human flourishing. 

The stakes are too high to just roll the climate into the same idiotized right-left polarized narrative we reserve for everything else.