A petit-bourgeois re-enactment of meaningless ritual that passes for serious politics. Street marches today are to real politics what street mime is to Shakespeare. This was an ersatz event: no laws will change, no political balance will tip, no UN delegate will have a change of heart. The world will roll on as if this march had never happened.
In anticipation of the UN climate summit taking place in Manhattan this week, New York’s streets filled with what pro-movement sources claimed to be 300,000 ‘activists’ from all across the country. A coordinated thunderous din went up at 1PM sharp and lasted for over a minute, as protesters shouted, banged drums and blew horns in an attempt to communicate their displeasure at the lack of progress towards a comprehensive global climate treaty. The New York Times has a taste of the rhetoric being bandied about on the ground today:
“I’m here because I really feel that every major social movement in this country has come when people get together,” said Carol Sutton of Norwalk, Conn., the president of a teachers’ union. “It begins in the streets.” […]
“The climate is changing,” said Otis Daniels, 58, of the Bronx. “Everyone knows it; everyone feels it. But no one is doing anything about it.” […]
“Climate change is no longer an environmental issue; it’s an everybody issue,” Sam Barratt, a campaign director for the online advocacy group Avaaz, which helped plan the march, said on Friday.
“The number of natural disasters has increased and the science is so much more clear,” he added. “This march has many messages, but the one that we’re seeing and hearing is the call for a renewable revolution.”
It was the usual post-communist leftie march. That is, it was a petit-bourgeois re-enactment of meaningless ritual that passes for serious politics among those too inexperienced, too emotionally excited or too poorly read and too unpracticed at self-reflection or political analysis to know or perhaps care how futile and tired the conventional march has become. Crazed grouplets of anti-capitalist movements trying to fan the embers of Marxism back to life, gender and transgender groups with their own spin on climate, earnest eco-warriors, publicity-seeking hucksters, adrenalin junkies, college kids wanting a taste of the venerable tradition of public protest, and, as always, a great many people who don’t think that burning marijuana adds to the world’s CO2 load, marched down Manhattan’s streets. The chants echoed through the skyscraper canyons, the drums rolled, participants were caught up in a sense of unity and togetherness that some of them had never known. It was almost like politics, almost like the epochal marches that have toppled governments and changed history ever since the Paris mob stormed the Bastille.
Almost. Except street marches today are to real politics what street mime is to Shakespeare. This was an ersatz event: no laws will change, no political balance will tip, no UN delegate will have a change of heart. The world will roll on as if this march had never happened. And the marchers would have emitted less carbon and done more good for the world if they had all stayed home and studied books on economics, politics, science, religion and law. Marches like this create an illusion of politics and an illusion of meaningful activity to fill the void of postmodern life; the tribal ritual matters more than the political result.
Even the New York Times ruefully concedes that this week’s climate summit is unlikely to create the kind of breakthrough climate framework agreement that the protesters in Manhattan were agitating for today. After all, Germany’s Angela Merkel has taken a pass on attending the meeting, as have China’s Xi Jinping and India’s Narendra Modi.
In the annals of serious climate policy, however, an explosive essay landed in the Wall Street Journal this past Friday. Titled “Climate Science is Not Settled“, it will have more impact than anything said or chanted by the misguided marchers. Its author, Dr. Steven A. Koonin, was the undersecretary for science in the Energy Department during President Barack Obama’s first term. Dr. Koonin argues that while certain things about the climate are in fact settled science, there is much that is still disputed among climate researchers. […]
All of this is so very spot on—and so refreshing coming from a former Obama Administration official. We can’t encourage you enough to read the whole thing.