“Perennially Errant Climate Activist, Losing Badly, Asks "Why, Why, Why Is Our Side So … Senseless???" Guest Post from Robert Bradley, Jr.

“Dear Joe: consumers matter, taxpayers matter, fiscal deficits matter. Despoiling the living space with machinery that operates at a fraction of capacity is the ultimate inefficiency.”

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Perennially Errant Climate Activist, Losing Badly, Asks "Why, Why, Why Is Our Side So … Senseless???"

DEC 6

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Guest Post from Robert Bradley, Jr. at Master Resource.

Yesterday’s post highlighted the civil war within the climate activist camp on the usefulness of civil disobedience in revving up the public into climate action. Michael Mann warned, “the damage done by deeply misguided individuals who in principle would seem to be on the side of climate action but are instead dividing the community and playing right in the agenda of the forces of inaction.”

Joseph Romm, the perennially errant climate intellectual, similarly warned.

JUST STOP ALREADY! Why, why, why is our side so … senseless???

In case it wasn’t obvious, this tactic is self-defeating and senseless. We actually did polling research at UPenn on activist attacks on famous paintings.

From the 2022 AP article: “Republicans, Democrats, independents: In every case, people reported that these actions made them less likely to support climate action,” Michael Mann, a professor of earth and environmental science at Penn and a co-author of [Public Disapproval of Disruptive Climate Change Protests, November 13, 2022], told Yahoo News. “People are turned off by it, and as a result they’re less likely to support the cause of the people doing the protests.”

Yes, these counterproductive tactics do get media attention. And that gets the activists’ message in a news article. But, sadly, nobody actually reads articles much past the headline as I learned from blogging at Climate Progress. Indeed, I quickly realized that blog are mainly “headline delivery systems” (something the right wing figured out a long time ago). Typically, 20 times as many people read the headline as read the article, And those that “read” the article don’t read very much of it.

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Romm continued:

Worse, no amount of words can match the memory imprint of the visual image. When they say a picture is worth 1000 words, they are wrong. Because you can’t remember 1000 words and you can’t even remember 100 words that you just read. But you can remember a picture you saw for a few seconds–particularly one that is already linked to one of the most famous and memorable images in the world: Stonehenge.

So all you are left with days later is people remembering what a shocking and senseless thing somebody did who is associated with the climate movement.

And it is senseless because what exactly does Stonehenge have to do with climate change? It is modern humans who are the ones destroying the climate. Not the people who built Stonehenge. Or the people who created famous works of art.

The activists appear to be in the school of “all press is good press.” This is Donald Trump’s strategy, but it has (mostly) worked for him is because he has been positioning himself as the reality show villain. As he learned at the Apprentice, they are a major reason people watch reality shows….

And, you know, those of us who care about climate change are not the reality show villain. The deniers are! And climate change isn’t a reality show. It’s reality. And in the real world, the data shows what common sense tells you — this is a terrible messaging strategy.

Joe Romm is losing–badly. The data does not support his exaggerated doom-and-gloom. The natural, effortless, self-interested “energy transformation” to dilute, intermittent, fragile wind/solar has resulted in wounded grids, rate inflation, and spawl. And now all the bullying that Romm did for his many years at Climate Progress has gone to naught.

Dear Joe: consumers matter, taxpayers matter, fiscal deficits matter. Despoiling the living space with machinery that operates at a fraction of capacity is the ultimate inefficiency. The benefits of CO2 deserve a second look.