On Cockroaches, the Climate Movement, and Democracy

Why the Escalating Rhetoric and Tactics of the Climate Movement, Sooner or Later, Is Likely to End in Political Violence

By Ted Nordhaus

When former President Donald Trump promised at a rally late last year to root out his political enemies, “the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country,” reaction was swift. The New York Times described his language as “incendiary and dehumanizing.” The Washington Post’s headline noted that Trump’s words had “echoed Hitler and Mussolini.” It wasn’t the first time Trump had used this sort of language. As President in 2018, Trump tweeted that illegal immigrants “infest” our country. On that occasion, New York Magazine’s Ed Kilgore described Trump’s words as “the language of extermination,” describing it as, “a rhetorical line that should never be crossed,” and noting the similarity with Rwandan genocidaires who “routinely called their victims cockroaches.” The well-known liberal blogger Josh Marshall observed that “the verb ‘to infest’ is one generally used to describe insects or vermin (rats), creatures which are literally exterminated when they become present in a house or building or neighborhood.”

Trump’s critics were right. Dehumanizing rhetoric of this sort has no place in a democracy. Once you define your political opponents as sub-human, it is just a short hop, skip, and jump to condoning violence against them. But those sensibilities do not appear to apply when prominent environmentalists use similar language. When the celebrated and highly partisan climate scientist Michael Mann posted a tweet last month branding me, along with Yglesias, and the climate scientist Judith Curry “vampires and cockroaches” who “don’t like it when people shine a light on them,” there was no similar reaction. Condemnations from prominent journalists and newspapers were not forthcoming. Nor was there any acknowledgement from prominent climate advocates that Mann had “crossed a rhetorical line that should never be crossed.” 

Instead, the online climate activist community, much as Trump’s MAGA acolytes have done to justify his incendiary rhetoric, have tied themselves in knots rationalizing Mann’s indefensible language. Vampires are better than vermin, one online commenter observed. Others insisted it wasn’t fair to compare Mann’s language to Trump’s because Mann hasn’t threatened to jail his opponents. Because Mann is on the right side in the eyes of the climate movement, and Yglesias, Curry, and myself are not, there has been no outcry from either journalists or prominent climate leaders.

What were the specific offenses that rendered us subhuman? Mine was publishing a factcheck of a book that has become popular with climate activists, showing that the author had made numerous egregious factual errors and misrepresentations. Yglesias’ was that he publicly agreed with it. Curry’s was that she retweeted it. This led Mann to label us climate deniers and fossil fuel apologists and assign us subhuman status. 

I won’t speak for Yglesias and Curry. But my twenty year record on the issue is clear. I believe that climate change is real and is caused by fossil fuels. I’ve spent my career advocating for practical approaches to climate and environmental problems. But in doing so, I have also taken positions on issues that are bitterly contested by many in the climate movement, including advocating in favor of nuclear energy and intensive, technological agriculture, arguing that natural gas has an important role to play in both the global energy transition and efforts to end poverty, and pushing back against inaccurate and irresponsible claims about the role that climate change is playing in current day extreme weather events. 

Increasingly, in recent years, it is no longer enough to recognize that climate change is happening, that it is the result of fossil fuels, and that the world should do something about it. Many climate activists now insist that anyone who challenges any of the movement’s claims, not only about the reality of climate change but its impacts, its solutions, and its costs and tradeoffs, is a science denier. That’s how people like me get branded as climate deniers and, ultimately, cockroaches. 

Mann’s language was, without question, extreme, at least for the mainstream leadership of the climate movement. And while he may not be in a position to personally prosecute his political enemies (although he has sued them), the climate movement does, in fact, propose to criminalize and jail its opponents. Activist groups have formally filed a petition against senior executives of British Petroleum with the International Criminal Court in the Hague alleging that they have engaged in crimes against humanity for “knowingly causing and perpetuating climate change while pursuing activities in the oil and gas industry.” Other activist groups have called for prosecutors in the United States to charge fossil fuel executives with homicide. And prominent Congressional Democrats have called upon the Attorney General to criminally investigate fossil fuel companies. It seems only a matter of time before some ambitious federal, state, or local prosecutor brings homicide charges against fossil fuel executives. 

To many liberal readers, comparing Mann and other climate leaders to Trump will no doubt seem like a false equivalence. Fossil fuel executives are rich, powerful, and only in it for the money. Trump’’s victims, by contrast, are the most vulnerable among us, immigrants, refugees, and public minded activists trying to build a more equitable world and save humanity from the existential threat of climate change. 

Yet anyone familiar with the history of the environmental movement will know that it has frequently branded people as sub-human, particularly the poor and non-white. Early environmentalists kicked indigenous people off their land, walled off parks, suburbs, and game reserves from the masses, and were prominent advocates for eugenics. Garrett Hardin, the mid-century ecologist who coined the term “tragedy of the commons” compared humans to cattle and was a strident nativist and opponent of immigration. Lynn Margulis, the evolutionary biologist who developed the Gaia Hypothesis with ecologist James Lovelock, described our species as a kind of endlessly greedy bacteria. And Paul Ehrlich, in the opening pages of his infamous book, The Population Bomb, described people he saw on a family trip to India with much the same language one would describe cockroaches. Ehrlich, notably, is still widely esteemed within the environmental movement, despite the fact that his work inspired policies of enormous cruelty, including forced sterilization of millions of women and efforts to withhold food aid from poor countries. Mann, himself, named Ehrlich as one of his greatest intellectual influences just last year.

So the comfortable, Manichean assumption that environmentalists are always right and well intentioned and that corporations, and anyone who seems to side with them, are wrong is a dangerous one. No, Mann is not a demagogic former president pursuing another term in office. But he has a big platform, with over 200,000 followers on Twitter. He regularly features on the opinion pages of the nation’s leading newspapers. And his demagoguery and scorched earth approach to his putative enemies, far from drawing any public rebuke from his colleagues, has won him nothing but praise for his achievements as a science communicator, including by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Geophysical Union.  

No less so than in Trump’s case, the greatest risk of dehumanizing rhetoric and efforts to delegitimize, deplatform, and criminalize dissent is not formal legal action but rather extrajudicial violence. Recent years have already witnessed mass shootings in the name of the climate in El Paso and New Zealand, ironically at the intersection of left-wing ecological catastrophism and right-wing xenophobia. 

Meanwhile, the popular new genre of CliFi is rife with fantasies of extrajudicial killings and attacks upon civilians in the name of the Earth. Kim Stanley Robinson’s widely praised Ministry of the Future, for instance, valorizes assassinations of fossil fuel executives and terrorist attacks on commercial aircraft. Far from being read as dark, dystopian, and misanthropic, the book was typically described as both realistic and optimistic. The New York Times’ Ezra Klein called it “the most important book I read this year,” adding that it raises important questions about “the morality of violence.” Reviewing Ministry of the Future in the New York Review of Books, in an essay titled “It’s Not Science Fiction,” the activist and journalist Bill McKibben describes Robinson’s ecoterrorists as “clever,” explaining to his readers that while “the deaths of innocent people are real, if limited,” the result was that “far fewer people are willing to fly, except in the growing fleet of solar-powered dirigibles and airships that slowly circle the Earth.”

It is hard to witness the escalating tactics of the radical fringe of climate activists in recent years and not conclude both that they are the result of the dehumanizing language, apocalyptic claims, and manichean framing that prominent climate leaders and their supporters in the media condone, if not endorse, and are likely to end in violence. Today, those actions are limited to protests designed to shame and silence public figures like Yglesias, actions to create spectacle and nuisance, like the recent vandalization of Stonehenge and blockades of rush hour traffic, and efforts to destroy pipelines and other fossil fuel infrastructure. 

But sooner or later, it seems likely that those tactics will escalate to violence targeting human lives. Some unhinged activist will attempt to assassinate a fossil fuel executive or a Republican politician, shoot up a mining convention or shoot down a corporate jet. When that happens, the climate movement and commentariat will uniformly condemn the attack, insisting as one that the actions of one or a few deranged individuals do not reflect the values and strategy of the movement. But you can’t have it both ways, insisting that violent individuals on the Right are taking their cues from the rhetoric of demagogues like Trump while giving prominent spokespeople on the Left like Mann a free pass when they use virtually identical language and rhetorical tactics. Because whether the objective is to turn political differences into a culture war or a climate war, when you demonize your opponents, insist that the fate of civilization hangs in the balance, and reject political pluralism, violence is more likely than not to follow.

An afternote:

Back in 2015, after I coauthored the Ecomodernist Manifesto, we invited the late french philosopher Bruno Latour to the Breakthrough Dialogue to respond to it. Latour had been a fan of The Death of Environmentalism and the book Break Through and was a senior fellow at the Breakthrough Institute for a number of years. But towards the end of his life, he had become increasingly catastrophic about climate change and, as the author of a book called We Have Never Been Modern, he took the entire idea of ecomodernism as an affront. Latour offered a thoughtful but deeply critical talk. And he ended it with a demand. “Tell me who your enemies are?” 

What he meant by that was that political movements always define themselves as much by who their enemies are as who their allies are and it is a question that is as relevant to the nascent Abundance movement as it is to ecomodernism. But after I gave a speech last week to the Abundance Movement in which I shared my view that environmentalism, ideologically, institutionally, and temperamentally, is antithetical to any recognizable notion of abundance, Tyler Norris, a one-time Breakthrough Institute employee, former Department of Energy staffer, and solar developer, has gone on a public and private cancellation campaign. Norris has seized upon remarks that I made not at the conference but in a short introductory note to the version of the speech I posted here, saying that environmentalists were enemies of the Abundance movement, claiming that the use of the word “enemies” is illiberal and out of bounds. 

The charge is absurd. I have not suggested that environmentalists are enemies of the state, nor that they are subhuman. I have not incited violence against them, called for them to be arrested, jailed, deplatformed, or attempted to shout them down—as we saw from Climate Defiance shortly after I finished my remarks last week. What I did say is that there are deep ideological commitments shared broadly by the environmental movement, and literally reflected in the placement of the environment at the center of environmentalism’s “ism,” that are antithetical to core commitments that I believed most people involved with the Abundance movement hold.

To be clear, I don’t speak for the Abundance movement. There is a healthy spectrum of opinion within the Abundance community about environmentalism and the role that the institutional environmental movement has played in opposing policies, technologies, and initiatives that are central to the Abundance agenda. My views are my own and reflect the priorities of the Breakthrough Institute, which are to build an alternative ecological politics to environmentalism. Others in the movement will have to decide for themselves what sort of peace they can make with environmentalism and the climate movement. 

There is a lot of talk in Abundance circles these days about political factions. A successful Abundance movement, in my view, will feature Abundance factions in both parties, with the Abundance faction in the Democratic party competing with environmentalists for influence and the Abundance faction in the Republican party competing with paleoconservatives for influence. These competing factions will define an upwinger/downwinger fault line that cuts across the partisan divide. The Democratic and Republican abundance factions will often work together, across party lines. But they will also make common cause with their downwing partisan brethren to win elections. 

Nonetheless, there is no doubt a reasonable case to be made that environmentalism is the wrong enemy. I would welcome Tyler or anyone else from the environmental or Abundance movements to publish a guest post here if they wish to make that case. But make no mistake, all political movements have enemies, whether they say so explicitly or not. And even those with a big tent must, unavoidably, make decisions about who is in the tent and who is not.